3001: The Final Odyssey

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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. Basically, it is a commentary on the society present in 3001 as compared to the 20th and 21st century. Many interesting concepts are explored, including the nature of Solar System space activities. I am even filing this under my science shelf (I know, I know I shouldn't, but still, theoretically, it is all possible, right?) Faster-Than-Light Travel: In the first book, it's shown that one of the monolith's functions is to work as a stargate. Bowman also learns how to travel faster than light on his own after being transformed by the monolith, despite knowing it's supposed to be impossible. Later books drop this. So can Clarke salvage the franchise? They may be a story in-between 2061 and 3001 that would account for Floyd's absence. Another thread would be the nano-reassembly of Dave, hinted at in Chapter 6. The monolith's supervisor is 450 l.y. away, so that gives us a time frame for a response (Ch. 34). Or we would finally me the Firstborn or the powers and entities that are higher than Firstborn, as they send repair crews to fix the malfunctioning monoliths.

The late Arthur C. Clarke is one of my favorite science fiction writers and 2001: A Space Odyssey, based on an earlier short story of his, The Sentinel (1948), has always been something of a spiritual experience for me, even though I am not prone to spiritual experiences. But, given the prescient depiction of the moon and our galaxy in those pre-Apollo mission days, both film and book are breathtaking.

Novelization: Technically, 2001 is a novelization of the film, although being based on an early version of the screenplay it differs in many ways ( Discovery goes to Saturn rather than Jupiter, for example, and the book ends with World War III breaking out on earth.) Maravillosas proyecciones de cómo podría ser la humanidad y sus logros tecnológicos dentro de mil años. Quizá demasiado buenismo y confianza en el hombre, me parece a mi, pero bueno, de ilusiones también se vive. 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. 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)" seemed to have been slapped together in a week. The actual events that do occur in the story seem to have been thrown in as diversions to are long, dull, obsolete essays by Clarke on his perspective on religion and the moral state of the human race. These soapbox asides are clumsy, polemic, and not substantiated adequately. If you want to read a decent gripe about how self-destructive we are, read something by Kurt Vonnegut instead.

Dimitri Chandler: Captain of the Goliath, Chandler mines the outer solar system for ice material which is slowly pushed towards the inner solar system, to make the inner planets habitable through long-term terraforming. 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?). 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.” The only bad thing i found was the mid-book exit of a character named 'Dim.' He just vanishes and his fate is only mentioned in passing. After millions of years of waiting... after all the effort it took to create and monitor humanity, the alien race decides we're a failed experiment. The prognosis is death. God I LOVE Arthur C Clarke! No magnanimity for the poor bastard reader, no tying off his masterpiece in lovely little bows for our amusement, no forgiveness, no mercy, just DIE you degenerate earth scum!!! :Dif any readers of the earlier books feel disoriented by such transmutations, I hope I can dissuade them from sending me angry letters of denunciation by adapting one of the more enduring remarks of a certain U.S. President: 'It's fiction, stupid!' . . . And it's all my own fiction, in case you hadn't noticed." Rating: strong "A" for rigorous extrapolation, by a [then] living monument from the dawn of the Space Age. There's nothing I enjoy more on a Saturday morning than a Friday night pizza. Somehow it manages to satisfy some base need. Maybe it's the nomadic sense that I'm foraging for food. "3001: The Final Odyssey" is the cool leftovers from an intense evening before. Written very vividly, it actually puts the reader in the middle of the situations describing almost everything that is necessary. Some parts of the text were edited repeats from Book 1 and 2. However, I felt they were interesting to read again. 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?