3001: The Final Odyssey

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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. Corpse-food was on the way out even in your time,” Anderson explained. “Raising animals to—ugh—eat them became economically impossible. Yes, the plot is thin. Yes, the characterization is feeble at best. Yes, his philosophical and social commentary is hardly argued. I can deal with all that. Too many hours of television can lower anyone's standards. But the reason I read books (especially science fiction) is to be lost and believe in a grand mysterious worlds. I want to see the monoliths. I want to hear the conversations between Poole and Hall/Dave. I want feel it once as if I'm there. And that, above all it's faults is where this book has gone tragically wrong. 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. It appears that the monolith in this book cannot communicate faster than the speed of light, either!

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.So. It's still a decent read, but far from a 5-star effort. Sir Arthur's windup of his Space Odyssey series is still fun, decent SF, and worth reading. Reread rating: 3.5 stars, rounded up. Curiously, his thesis is that mankind isn’t responsible for our aggressive tendencies; we were programmed that way by interfering aliens. Millions of years ago. The Final Odyssey is ultimately a flawed book, written to end a series which has sadly become increasingly redundant. Sad? Yes, because Arthur C. Clarke was a phenomenally good scientist with a lively imagination and the ability to craft very readable novels. Frank conscripts Bowman and HAL, who have now become a single entity—Halman—residing in the monolith's computational matrix, to infect the monolith with a computer virus.

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. 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?). 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.As the final story opens we are a thousand years into the future from where the failed Discovery mission ended with Frank Poole being ejected from the spacecraft by Hal and the transformation of Dave Bowman into the star child. Heywood Floyd, Dr. Chandra and the Russian crew of the Leonov are also long gone. The earth and our small galaxy are different places…almost unrecognizable. Jupiter has been transformed into Lucifer, a dimmer version of our own sun, and it shines down on the evolving Europa. 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. 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. Some of its notable features include the BrainCap, a brain–computer interface technology; genetically engineered dinosaur servants; and four gigantic space elevators located evenly around the Equator.

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 Space Odyssey Series is a series of novels written by Arthur C. Clarke, which takes a philosophical look at many Speculative Fiction Tropes, such as Precursors, Intelligent Computers, space travel and humankind's place in the universe.

Then ending of 2001 indicates that the Monolith can act as a wormhole and it transports Bowman to another solar system, apparently that of its builders. The sequels do not include any form of faster-than-light travel or communication and Bowman is said to have been "absorbed" by the monolith rather than transported anywhere.

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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" Then there are the difficulties in projecting future civilization. Clarke honestly admits "A writer who sets out to describe a civilization superior to his own is obviously attempting the impossible. (" The Lost Worlds of 2001Ch. 34). Well, "physician, heal thyself." The cloned dinosaurs and kongs, the brain-computer interface, and using a computer virus to crash the Cosmic Server were science-fiction clichés known to every John Q. Popcorn (P. 265). Perhaps the most amazing thing about this book is not the author's descriptions or ideas of how things will be in one thousand years, but it is how Clarke forces the reader into thought. The fact that this Poole comes from 1000 years before when he now lives begins a thought-provoking discovery. It is great that Clarke is showing the future through the eyes of a twenty-first century man, someone who the reader can relate to because of the time-connection. As the reader sees it through Poole's eye, the reader can feel as thought they were Poole. The specific question raised in the book is how it would be to have someone who lived in the 1000s to suddenly appear in the 2000s. Think of all the changes humans have gone through it just the last 100 years. Considering that, now how will our world look in the year 3000. Will people be: brighter or dumber, taller or shorter, more dependent or less dependent on technology? Clarke does a good job of answering questions like that and making his prophecy of one thousand years from now seem at least somewhat correct in its logic and technological theories. The reader is drawn to consider all of mankind and how we have grown in search for God, education and brainpower, and how we will continue (or not continue to grow). Civilization for humans can be seen as a large exponential function. At the beginning of man it took quite a while for our first ancestors to greatly contribute to the rest of mankind. As time went on more and more each civilization came up with more and more inventions to help the world. Yet in just the last 100 years, the advances we have made have been "astronomical" toward every person's life and items. Yet Clarke has a weird take on religions (Ch. 9), which is hilarious, since the franchise is essentially Christian: Replace aliens with God, the monolith with Christ, and evolution with salvation, then you have the core Christian message. As Athanasius said, "God became man so that man might be god." ( On the Incarnation (De Incarnatione Verbi Dei)) What C. S. Lewis wrote about Christ applies to Dave Bowman: "In Christ a new kind of man appeared; and the new kind of life which began in Him is to be put into us." ( Mere Christianity). The Romeo of the Cosmos little, big, Pluto... But I digress after waking up the astronaut discovers he's living in a space elevator. One of four on Earth and towering above it a dizzy 22,000 miles high, looking from above seeing the planet changed immensely as he is astonished.