3001: The Final Odyssey

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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. 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. It seems that at every major plot point in the book there is a build up, then it skips over to the aftermath. There is almost no real-time description of events. It became very frustrating after a while. There could have been some really interesting stuff in there but it's just jumped over with maybe a brief summary. A majority of the book was Clarke's meticulous description of the technologies of the era, which is great, but the story suffers. I found the footnotes at the end to be much more entertaining than the book itself. In his notes on 2010, Clarke notes that the novel is in many ways more a sequel to the movie. In particular, it relocates the action of 2001 from Saturn's orbit to Jupiter's (as the film did).

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). Recordemos: Poole fue golpeado por una cápsula espacial manipulada por el rebelde HAL en la primera entrega, cuando realizaba una actividad extravehicular para arreglar una supuesta avería también simulada por HAL. Fue expulsado al espacio exterior y Bowman nada pudo hacer por él. Pues bien, Poole ha sobrevivido en estado de "hibernación" dentro de su traje dando tumbos por el espacio, hasta que, mil años después es recogido por la nave antes mencionada (esto va a ser mucho suponer ¿no?). 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.)Corpse-food was on the way out even in your time,” Anderson explained. “Raising animals to—ugh—eat them became economically impossible. Here we find Frank Poole, that guy in the yellow spacesuit that HAL 9000 murdered in the first book floating out in the Kuiper Belt. His corpse is rescued by a deep space mining ship (nice touch) and revitalized after a thousand years by advanced medicine. Through Poole we see how humanity has advanced and expanded through the solar system. Many things I found interesting, such as superstructure of spaceports surrounding the earth, tethered at the Equator by four space elevators. Most people have a chunky human-brain interface implanted in the scalp which I found rather clunky in light of nanotechnology developments. The best parts of Final Odyssey is when we emphasize with Poole's cognitive vertigo when he comes to grips with being 1,000 years out of touch with his species.

It does have some great scientific ideas being narrated, such as the four massive towers (it was six in Odyssey Three) built along the equator of Earth, leading up to the "sky city" ring in geostationary orbit. Or the palm-implanted data exchange system which tells everyone you meet about yourself (Palmbook?). There are many interesting little tidbits like that in the novel, and perhaps that is the reason for its existence: to inspire technological advances and furtherance of creative ideas in SF literature. Perhaps it succeeds in that manner. I will say this much for it - he does a nice job of handling a man sent 1000 years in the future. It's not an easy task, and he did it well. I also enjoyed the references to other SF works, and possibly seeing the origin on things in more recent SF stories. Did this inspire John Scalzi's "Brain Pal" in his Old Man's War series? It is this future time that the 100 year old body of Frank Poole is found floating out in the outer reaches of the galaxy…frozen, but apparently not dead. He is miraculously revived and comes full circle in an odyssey of his own as he resumes his life in a world and time far removed from the early 21st century. As Frank adjusts to his life in this new world it would seem that the monolith is become active again. Soon Halman – the merged consciousness of Dave Bowman and the computer HAL – is being spotted again in various places. Soon he has an ominous message for his old friend Frank Poole. Circumcision Angst: Inverted. A woman loses interest in Frank because his is circumcised, something that is considered a "mutilation" in 3001. Subverted by Frank, who is bemused to learn why his one-night stand ran out on him, but declines restorative surgery and goes on to date more favourably inclined women instead. At the close of the story, Poole and other humans land on Europa to start peaceful relations with the primitive native Europeans. A statement is made that the monolith's makers will not determine humanity's fate until "The Last Days".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. After reading the ending of the Rendezvous with Rama series I was expecting Clarke to pretty much end things the same way, on a magnanimous upnote. With 2001 we learn that there is a vastly superior alien intelligence that has intervened in the natural evolution of apes to accelerate a group of them toward sentience. They use the monolith as their all-purpose tool to carry out the upgrades, then they leave one under the dirt on the moon so that some day, millions of years later, the creatures they engineered will find it and give the makers a status update. In 2001 we find it, uncover it, and activate it, and it sends off its data. In 2010 we discover that the monolith, operating independently from its makers, has started the process anew for some creatures evolving on Europa. Rating: strong "A" for rigorous extrapolation, by a [then] living monument from the dawn of the Space Age. Hearing the conclusion to the 2001 series....sort of. It definitely leaves the door wide open for the eventual confrontation with the makers of the monoliths in the year 4001 give or take a century or two. That could potentially be much more interesting than the events in 3001. It appears that the monolith in this book cannot communicate faster than the speed of light, either!

Precursors: The mysterious race only know as "The creators of the Monoliths". The prologue of 3001 gave them the name "Firstborn", but it is never used by the characters in-story.

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follows the adventures of Frank Poole, the astronaut killed by the HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the Fourth Millennium, Poole's freeze-dried body is discovered in the Kuiper belt by a comet-collecting space tug named the Goliath, and revived. Poole is taken home to learn about the Earth in the year 3001. The Sentinel (1951): It was originally written for a BBC competition and it failed, it got published in the Ten Story Fantasy magazine as Sentinel Of Eternity. It was used as a starting point for 2001: A Space Odyssey. A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Human evolution: The show imagines a world in which humans have evolved to live in a variety of environments, and explores the challenges and complexities of this new form of humanity. 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.He had to admit that the selection was well done, by someone (Indra?) familiar with the early Twenty-first Century. There was nothing disturbing—no wars or violence, and very little contemporary business or politics, all of which would now be utterly irrelevant.” Mind-Control Device: In 3001 the "braincap" that everyone wears that gives them direct mental access to the future internet can also be used as a mind-control device. In fact there are no prisons in 3001 - criminals are simply mind-controlled through their braincap into menial laborers until they have served their sentence. Indra says it would be very difficult to staff those kinds of jobs if they didn't have a pool of criminals to mind-control into doing them. Poole worries a bit about whether the braincap will allow others to control him when he first has it installed, but when Indra later reveals to him that it certainly can function in this way he is surprisingly accepting of the whole idea. Perhaps he is being influenced through his braincap to accept this as normal and moral? The idea of a Braincap is great. I am not sure how we would manage all that with all the crap that we see on the internet now - but it's such a great concept.