3001: The Final Odyssey

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3001: The Final Odyssey

Cover of the English edition (1997) of 3001: The Final Odyssey.
Author Arthur C. Clarke
Country United Kingdom
Language English
Genre(s) Science fiction novel
Publisher Ballantine Books
Publication date 1997
Media type Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages 237 pp (US hardback edition)
ISBN ISBN 0-345-31522-7 (US hardback edition)
Preceded by 2061: Odyssey Three

3001: The Final Odyssey (1997) is a science fiction novel by Arthur C. Clarke. It is the fourth and final book in the Space Odyssey series.

Contents

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[edit] Plot summary

3001 follows the adventures of Frank Poole, an astronaut who was murdered by HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey. His body is discovered after drifting in space for a millennium and brought back to life, exposure to vacuum having preserved him sufficiently for the advanced medical technology of the time to be able to revive him. He then explores the Earth of 3001, notable features of which are the BrainCap, a technology which interfaces computers directly with the human brain, genetically engineered dinosaur servants, and four huge space elevators spaced around the Earth's Equator connected by a spaceport ring in geostationary orbit. Humanity has also colonized Jupiter's moons Ganymede and Callisto, and performed manned missions to Neptune. Many readers have surmised that this future is intended to represent (at least in part) Clarke's personal vision of Utopia.

In the 26th century, the monolith in Africa (dubbed TMA-0) that kickstarted human intellectual evolution, has been discovered. TMA-1, the monolith found on the moon, had earlier been brought to Earth in 2006 and erected in front of the United Nations Building in New York City.

In the course of the novel, it is determined that following the events of 2010: Odyssey Two the Jupiter monolith sent a report back to its "superior" 450 light years away and is about to receive its orders on how to deal with humanity (since the report would take 450 years to reach the superior, and the orders 450 years to come back). Presumably, the monolith was empowered to obliterate the nascent biosphere of Jupiter but needed a higher authority's approval to obliterate the technological civilization on Earth. There is considerable worry that the judgment, which was based on the monolith's observations of humanity up to 2001, will be negative. The entire human race, then, may be in danger of being obliterated by the aliens, just as the Jovian life-forms discovered by David Bowman were deliberately destroyed. Frank manages to conscript Bowman and HAL, who have fused into a new entity—'Halman'—and now reside in the monolith's computational matrix, to infect the monolith with a computer virus in an attempt to avert the potential apocalypse.

Just as the humans feared, the Monolith does indeed receive orders to exterminate mankind, and it begins to duplicate itself many hundreds of millions of times over. These millions of monoliths assemble themselves into two separate screens in front of Sol and Lucifer to prevent all vital light and heat from reaching Earth and its colonies. The intent is to shut down the entire terran biological life-cycle. However, the Monolith was already infected with Halman's virus at the time it began duplicating itself, and fifteen minutes after the screens are formed, all the Monoliths disintegrate, including TMA-0 and TMA-1.

Halman manages to download its combined personalities into a petabyte-capacity holographic 3D storage medium and thus survives the disintegration of the monoliths. However, it is infected in the process with the virus it itself created and is subsequently sealed by human scientists within a special containment facility used to house various chemical, biological, and cybernetic weapons, where it will presumably be stored until such time as humans (or others) choose to release it.

Apparently, the creators of the Monoliths, who had long since evolved into incorporeal beings, had been watching humanity. They decided that they should not decide humanity's fate until "the Last Days".

At the close of the story, Poole and the other humans land on Europa and attempt to start peaceful relations with the primitive native Europans.

[edit] Differences between 3001: The Final Odyssey and earlier books

This portrayal of the monoliths is notably different from that in the earlier novels. In particular, the 2001 monolith was capable of faster-than-light transmission, and was generally portrayed as both less malevolent and more of a thinking entity than the one seen in this novel (in particular, Dave Bowman's transcendence as a star child is explained as a mundane case of being uploaded into a computer).

The very end of 2010, entitled simply "20,001", could not have happened as portrayed because of the disappearance of the monoliths at the end of 3001.

Additionally, some of the dates are changed. The USSR is acknowledged as having crumbled in 1991, whereas in the earlier three books it lasts well into the 21st century. Frank Poole's birth date is set at 1996; the Discovery mission is pushed forward to the 2030s and the Leonov mission to the 2040s, when in the earlier three books, they were in 2001 and 2010, respectively. Finally, Poole remarks that by the 2020s his world had learned to tap unlimited vacuum energy, when the previous books had established only cold fusion as the highest source of power by 2061; indeed, vacuum energy would have made the plasma drive and fission reactor on the Discovery obsolete a decade prior to the ship's construction (under the new 3001 dates).

However, since 2010: Odyssey Two Clarke has consistently stated that each of the Odyssey novels takes place in its own separate parallel universe[citation needed] — this is demonstrated by the facts that the monoliths are still in existence in the year 20,001 at the end of 2010: Odyssey Two and that Floyd is no longer part of the trinity formed at the end of 2061: Odyssey Three. These parallel universes are a part of Clarke's retroactive continuity.

[edit] Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

It was reported on Yahoo Entertainment in 2000 that MGM was in discussions regarding turning 3001 The Final Odyssey into a movie. An update in 2001 states that there has been no further development on the project. [1]

[edit] Similarities with other works of Clarke

  • The story features a ring-shaped habitat in geostationary orbit around Earth, connected by four "towers" (space elevators) equally spaced around the equator. This sort of habitat first appeared in Clarke's work at the end of The Fountains of Paradise, though the Fountains' version is connected to earth's surface with six space elevators rather than four.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Greg Dean Schmitz. 3001: The Final Odyssey - Greg's Preview - Yahoo! Movies. Archived from the original on 2007-06-27. Retrieved on 2008-05-13.

Clarke, Arthur C. (1997). "Valediction", in Del Rey: 3001: The Final Odyssey. Random House Publishing Group, 272. ISBN 0-345-42349-6.