3001: The Final Odyssey

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A fitting close to the story that electrified America fifty years ago. (Well, the movie based on the story.) Clark closes the loop opened by the stirring overture music. Published in 1997, this story anticipates the ubiquity of computers, jihadist terrorism, and pandemics. It was generally agreed that Communism was the most perfect form of government; unfortunately, it had been demonstrated—at the cost of some hundreds of millions of lives—that it was only applicable to social insects, Robots Class II, and similar restricted categories. For imperfect human beings, the least-worse answer was Democracy, frequently defined as “Individual greed, moderated by an efficient but not too zealous government"

More disturbing yet is the peculiar Professor Theodore Khan of Ganymede whose field of interest is the "psychopathology known as religion." His--and obviously Clarke's--ravings against religion and reveal a profound ignorance of religious feeling. He describes some of the cruelties perpetrated in the name of relgion, failing to mention many of the worst. But, he completely ignores the murders of atheism. Let's see--Lenin and Stalin, 40-50 million, Adolph Hitler, 20 million, Mao Zedong, 100-120 million, Pol Pot, a trivial 3 million. Just counting these we a have a total of 173-193 miilion people. That is far more than fell to all the Inquisitions, Crusades, and Jihads combined. Millions slaughtered to produce a world free of God. 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 series of novels contain examples of:

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.

HAL is probably the most famous example of all time. His erratic behavior in 2001 is explained in 2010 as the result of a programming conflict. Essentially, HAL was programmed to 'be truthful', then told to hide the actual goal of the mission from the astronauts that were awake; something of a lie by omission. HAL eventually decided that since it could largely run the ship through automation, and already knew everything anyway, getting rid of all of the astronauts meant no one to lie to. Not being clear on the idea that "being shut down to troubleshoot HAL's increasingly contradictory reports" doesn't equal death (and risking the mission) didn't help.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.