3001: The Final Odyssey

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Again, instead of ending it just frays away. What plot there is ends, but it's an unsatisfying end. There is considerable worry that the judgment, based on the monolith's observations of humanity up to 2061, will be negative, and the human race thus destroyed as the Jovian bio-forms discovered by David Bowman were wiped out (while making Jupiter a small sun to assist intelligence on Europa). Poole discovers a world of human minds interfacing directly with computers, genetically engineered dinosaur servants, and massive space elevators built around the equator. He also discovers an impending threat to humanity lurking within the enigmatic monoliths. To fight it, Poole must join forces with Bowman and HAL, now fused into one corporeal consciousness—and the only being with the power to thwart the monoliths’ mysterious creators. Amicably Divorced: Poole's marriage to and eventual divorce from Indra is a form of this. They are said to have managed to stay friends afterwards. I grew up on Clarke. His novels and short stories fuelled my avid interest in science, evolution, and academic pursuits. It used to be that I could not wait to read the latest Clarke edition.

He was searching a world more than a hundred times the area of Earth, and though he saw many wonders, nothing there hinted of intelligence. The radio voices of the great balloons carried only simple messages of warning or of fear. Even the hunters, who might have been expected to develop higher degrees of organization, were like the sharks in Earth’s oceans—mindless automata. And for all its breathtaking size and novelty, the biosphere of Jupiter was a fragile world, a place of mists and foam, of delicate silken threads and paper-thin tissues spun from the continual snowfall of petrochemicals formed by lightning in the upper atmosphere. Few of its constructs were more substantial than soap bubbles; its most awesome predators could be torn to shreds by even the feeblest of terrestrial carnivores. Like Europa on a vastly grander scale, Jupiter was an evolutionary cul-de-sac. Consciousness would never emerge here; even if it did, it would be doomed to a stunted existence. A purely aerial culture might develop, but in an environment where fire was impossible, and solids scarcely existed, it could never even reach the Stone Age." Sadly, most of the poetry and the wonder was missing from his later, collaborative books. And although Clarke's physical difficulties have prevented him from writing more single-author novels in the past few years, I wish he had passed on authorship of 3001 to someone else. Then I would have been able to remember him from his past triumphs. I snorted when I recognized the man who was to be the main character, but went with the idea since it was a way for Clarke to 'prove' a theory he mentioned briefly in 2001 but which I very greatly doubt could really be possible. But truth is stranger than fiction, so who knows, this event might happen. Not sure I would want to be the person to experience it, though. In connecting this story to the previous three novels, Clarke writes in a couple of ‘guest appearances’ by David Bowman and HAL — now a single entity called Halman. They appear, literally and figuratively, as mere shadows of their former selves. Poole’s character, and the smattering of future humans he interacts with, are not nearly enough to carry the story of 3001 itself, however.The secret of the Monolith is revealed in the most pedestrian way and removes all sense of wonder from the series. Additionally, while relevant, some of the 3001 descriptions of technology seem a little, well, obvious, given we are now closer to 2008, and Braincap = Matrix etc. In 2010: Odyssey Two, the Soviet spaceship Alexei Leonov is powered by the "Sakharov Drive", which uses a pulsed thermonuclear reaction to expel its propellant mass (usually liquid methane or ammonia; water can also be used, although it's less efficient). It's implied the Chinese ship Tsien uses a similar system. (Averted by the American Discovery, returning here from 2001, which is also fusion-powered but uses magnetic acceleration, rather than heat, to expel its propellant.) Think of the Monolith Trinity: Floyd is the wise Father, Bowman the son who dies and is a mediator, and Hal is a fine Holy Ghost. Why, then did Clarke feel the need apologize to people of faith in his endless end-matter? He has just started his own religion with the story. A one man literary Big Bang, Clarke has originated his own vast and teeming futuristic universe.” — Sunday Times

Plagued with problems" is how I choose to describe "3001." I echo what J. R. R. Tolkien said about Lewis's conclusion to the Space Trilogy: I think it spoiled it. ( The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 393). In fact, I think this series is a good example of when a good franchise goes bad. "2001" is euphoric, "2010" is idealistic, "2061" is optimistic, but "3001" is sarcastic. The future may have been a let-down, but his books need not be. The story takes place in (duh) the year 3001. Frank Poole's corpse, after bobbing around space for a millenium, gets discovered, defrosted, and woken up. Too bad for Frank, 'cause the world of "3001" is hokey, derivative, and ever so lame. For example, the decorative plants of 3001 are tended by intelligent(ish) gorillas and dinosaurs with computers attached to their heads (my question: where are the sharks with friggin' laser beams attached to their heads??). The reader, I feel needs to take into consideration that the four books in the set do not comprise a single story, as is already put forth by the writer at the beginning of Book II, III, and in the valediction of Book IV. Being written in a span of thirty years, and without planning for any sequels, it isn't easy to maintain proper continuity and consistency within any of the books. I would prefer to be optimistic, that the presence of these books in my life is better than not having the writer to have ever written them. :D In the endless end-matter, Clarke excuses this last item by saying he never saw " Independence Day (Single Disc Widescreen Edition)," and claiming that he came up with it independently. Actually, this was used earlier in Star Trek The Next Generation - The Complete Fifth Season"I, Borg." And the computer virus was really a modification of a natural virus, which was H. G. Wells's deus ex machina in " The War of the Worlds (Modern Library Classics)" Fourth in Clarke's Odyssey series (2061: Odyssey Three, 1987, etc.). Here, at the beginning of the fourth millennium, the vacuum-frozen body of astronaut Frank Poole (murdered by poor mad computer HAL in the original 2001) is recovered and revived. Frank awakens to find he's a celebrity in an age of peace and plenty, with space elevators, inertia-less space drives, and miraculous teaching devices. Frank visits Jupiter (transformed into the mini-sun Lucifer in 2010: Odyssey Two) and ponders its ice-moon Europa, where a giant monolith is attempting to develop intelligence among the native lifeforms. And he meets that strange entity composed of Star Child Dave Bowman fused with a copy of now-sane HAL. Dubbed Halman by Frank, the entity warns of bad news arriving from the monolith's guiding intelligences 450 light-years distant: They've decided to destroy humankind. Europa's monolith, though, is just a supercomputer, not intelligent or self-aware, so Frank's associates decide to use Halman as a Trojan horse to infect the monolith with an irresistible computer virus—whereupon all the monoliths vanish. Clarke, while never uninteresting, long ago abandoned drama; here, he simply reports, with the dispassionate precision of HAL before he went bananas.The elements that make 2001: A Space Odyssey a classic — the pacing, dramatic tension, smartly efficient plot lines — are mostly missing from Arthur C. Clarke‘s Space Odyssey finale, 3001: The Final Odyssey. What it retains is Clarke’s obvious exuberance for biological, technological and cultural evolution. Each book in the series represents an evolution in itself even, of Clarke’s own perspective and thinking on the growth of humanity overtime, while providing a platform for his reflections on extraterrestrial life and evolution. Nine years after the Discovery's mission to Jupiter (changed from Saturn to match the film), a joint Soviet-American crew including Dr. Floyd is heading for the mighty gas-planet to find out what happened to the Discovery and its crew. Meanwhile David Bowman, now reborn as an Energy Being, is helping the race that created the Monoliths with scouting Jupiter and its moons for primitive lifeforms, hopefully finding one that has the potential to develop sentience. Finally, it is very surprising (and frustrating also as relates to how the Monolith communicates with its Source) that light speed is still a major impedance to communications, while seemingly free propulsion is available and terraforming, colonies, robot and bioengineering is all in full swing, there is no real mention, in 3001, for goodness' sake, (for Deus' sake) of missions to nearby stars, say anything within 20 light years which should have had human exploration marked on it by this time. The Final Odyssey brings Arthur C. Clarke's famed series to a merciful end, closing out what was perhaps a misguided effort from the beginning, or at least from 14 years after the first book, when a sequel was written.

It appears that the monolith in this book cannot communicate faster than the speed of light, either!Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: The narrator states that the creators of the Monoliths did this long ago. In story it happens to David Bowman, HAL 9000, and Heywood Floyd, after a fashion.

Exploration and discovery: The show is driven by the desire to explore the galaxy and discover new life forms, and examines the role of curiosity and exploration in the human experience. Imagine the story of Rip Van Winkle set in the year 3001, salted with lots of fancy (sometimes creepy) technology and peppered with the idea of no Being in the entire Universe truly having free will, all the way up the ladder to and including the Big Boss, and that is this book in a nutshell. The book hasn't aged well in the 25 years since I last read it in 1998. No one seems to take vacuum-energy speculations seriously these days. Clarke's speculations about an inertia-less space drive remain an unlikely SF dream. But the space-elevator project should be do-able at some point, perhaps some centuries from now, as the book suggests. And rounding up ice from the outer solar system to (for example) terraform Venus is a solid speculation. And who knows what other scientific and engineering discoveries will be made a few centuries from now? This is one of my favorite books of all time because of its brutal and humbling honesty. I couldn't have chosen a better coda for the 2001 storyline, it left me absolutely breathless. What I've always admired about Arthur C. Clarke's writing is the sheer poetry he managed to meld so successfully with the narrative. The city glowing like a jewel on the desert in "The City and the Stars." The arrival of our primal fears in "Childhood's End." The wonder of the artifact in "Rendevouz with Rama."

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Title by Year: Multiple, following an Idiosyncratic Episode Naming pattern of "[Year]: [Phrase with "Odyssey" in it.]": This was my experience in 1977, nine years after the film’s release, and I had already seen both Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which were special effects wonders in comparison. There was just this weird feeling that something happened. The 11 year old that I used to be had just had the second of only two real theophanies I would ever have…the first one occurred when I was six years old.