3001: The Final Odyssey

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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. 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."

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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.

Never Trust a Title: Despite the fourth book being titled 3001: The Final Odyssey, everything that's actually related to wrapping up the story arc of the series takes place in the year 30 31, following a Time Skip. 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's unfortunate that Odyssey ends on such a low point, when the first two were so good and the third passable. It won't go without recommendation - it's still a rather unique take on the future and one of the grandaddies of sci-fi. The good also far outweighs the bad in the series, with space descriptions that make you believe you were standing right there next to them. Overall, 3001 was incredibly disappointing. The climactic confrontation simply is not; it reads like a deus ex machina. Clarke's whole perception of what mankind would be like in 3001 seems terribly amiss and too simple (especially in regards to attitudes concerning weapons of mass destruction). 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)"

The show takes place in the year 3001, a thousand years after the events of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The world has changed dramatically, with advancements in technology that allow humans to explore the galaxy and interact with other intelligent life forms. Frank Poole, a character from the previous novels, is revived from cryogenic suspension after his death in the first book. He finds himself in a world that is beyond his imagination, with flying cities and intelligent machines that run the world. 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?