3001: The Final Odyssey (1997)

Author: Arthur C. Clarke | Page Count: 272

'Finding TMA ONE on the Moon was a big enough shock, but five hundred years later there was a worse one. And it was much nearer home…'

3001 is the fourth and, like it says in the title, final entry in the Space Odyssey series. It's a kind of semi-return to form after the abominable 2061 (1987).

Clarke seems to have enjoyed speculating about future technology and society almost as much as he enjoyed detailing the minutia of space dust and comet trajectories in previous books. His enthusiasm translates into reader interest. We came for science fiction and we got it. It does eventually give way to droll lecturing, but it's broken up by some interesting letters to home that comment on developments and give an insight into people's thoughts.

The main protagonist is someone we've encountered before, but I'm not gong to reveal who it is even though the blurb on the back does.

There's a secondary character introduced about halfway through that I suspect functions as the voice of the author undiluted. He comes into the story, says some poignant things and then gets shuffled aside like the others.

That's illustrative of the main problem with the book. The characters are interesting but mostly they feel like nothing more than conduits to enable events to move from point A to point B. It's point B that we all want to know about, so it's some consolation that when we do get there it references the previous adventures and uses our feelings of what transpired to enhance it.

Once again, there's some acknowledged minor inconsistencies in continuity due to real life science and space exploration catching up with or shedding new light on Clarke's educated guesses. In that respect, the entire series can be viewed as both a product of its time and a fixed record of how real science influenced the fiction writer. It does that more successfully than it does most everything else.

2½ long-distance deliveries out of 5

2061: Odyssey Three (1987)

Author: Arthur C. Clarke | Page Count: 256

'He found it both sad and fascinating that only through an artificial universe of video images could she establish contact with the real world.'

The third instalment in Clarke's Space Odyssey series isn't a direct sequel to either the previous novel or the film and should instead be considered a 'variation on a theme' so that he can incorporate actual scientific discoveries into the work without compromising any kind of set-in-stone history.

The first third of the book follows Heywood Floyd, now aged 103, as he returns to space after an extended stay of recovery in hospital. When put into context, neither the journey nor the destination has anything to do with the remainder of the novel. It exists solely for Clarke to speculate and postulate about the aforementioned scientific discoveries made by NASA prior to writing.

Once he's finished that (about 100 pages in) he gets back to the story he should’ve written from the outset, but even then the writing is as cold and empty as the space he sets out to document.  Ironically, his enthusiasm for doing just that, for describing space and celestial bodies, is much better realised than his characters.

It's only in the last 50+ pages of the book that I felt like I'd set aside the science journal and was now reading science fiction, but it's all too brief.

There's almost no advancement of the Monolith story; it even manages to make a mockery of what came before. There's an infuriating conspiracy that goes nowhere and is never fully exposed. There's no sense of danger. There's no heart. The boredom that the crew feel was similarly felt by me.

The final chapter, all one page of it, sets up events for the next book in the series and was the only part of the novel that felt like it deserved to be there.

1½ rotten eggs out of 5

2010: Odyssey Two (1982)

Author: Arthur C. Clarke | Page Count: 297

"Moods and emotions were leaking into his own consciousness, though he could not identify any specific concepts or ideas. It was as if he were listening, outside a closed door, to a debate in progress, and in a language he could not understand."

2010: Odyssey Two is a direct sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) but it's not that simple. Stanley Kubrick's filmed version of 2001 had some minor but significant differences from the novel. The second book mostly follows on from the film, not the novel, so we're returning to Jupiter and Io, not to Saturn and Iapetus. If you bypass the film and come direct from the first book, then you'll be confused and perhaps angry at the discrepancies and apparent lack of continuity.

Dr. Heywood Floyd, a scientist mentioned previously in 2001, is determined to understand the fate of the Spaceship Discovery and its crew, so a second mission is launched in order to intercept the Discovery, which has remained dead in Jupiter's orbit for the past nine years. Along for the ride is Dr. Chandra, the creator of the H.A.L 9000 computer. In Kubrick's film he was called Mr. Langley.

Clarke isn't very good at characterisation this time. When he breaks from hard sci-fi in an attempt to offer some insight into the crew it feels forced, and there's a lot more crew aboard this time. They offer ample opportunity for tension and drama but he never fully avails of it. Most of the time he uses an expositive cold narrative in place of proper dialogue that keeps the characters two dimensional. Some of the lesser characters have no function other than to fill a necessary scientific role so that Clarke can extrapolate about scientific principles that may or may not be wholly relevant to the plot. In retrospect, the absence of dialogue is what helped make the first half of the 2001 novel so successful.

While critical of his ability to develop characters, I can't fault his passion for detailing new worlds and forms of life. His brain seemed more attuned to receiving creative input from a scientific perspective than from a dramatic one. If you accept that and embrace the science-head aspect of it, at the expense of a satisfactory human element, you can get sucked into Clarke's vision more easily.

Personally, I didn't want to know what became of Dave, I liked the uncertainty, but I was eager for more of H.A.L.

3 problematic epilogues out of 5

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Author: Arthur C. Clarke | Page Count: 252

"Bowman had time for one glimpse of the racing chaos when the main lights flickered and died, and he was surrounded by screaming darkness."

I've found Arthur C. Clarke to be occasionally long-winded and overly techy at times, but not in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's a novel that's so beautifully refined and free from filler that I was amazed it was Clarke I was reading. There's still science, but it's at an acceptable level (it's not head 'splode tech manual stuff) and it's fun. You may even learn a thing or two about the universe you inhabit.

The story is one of intervention. It's a history of the birth of mankind and a prediction of where we may yet end up. I can't say much more or risk spoiling key events, events that act as a catalyst for significant change.

Written by Clarke at the same time as he collaborated on the film script for the Stanley Kubrick feature, the prose both complements and occasionally deviates from the story presented in the film. Neither one is the gospel text; they both have a part to play. Interestingly, what I consider to be the most powerful scene in the film feels hurried and less emotional when written down. Conversely, the 'monkey bit' in the film that elicits laughs from naysayers is a thing of beauty herein. Clarke makes the millions of years transition as flawless as Kubrick made his.

I would normally recommend reading a text before viewing any kind of adaptation, but in this instance I think seeing the film before reading the book makes more sense. Kubrick creates the world and presents impersonal protagonists to inhabit it. Clarke creates more rounded characters but places them in a world that is in a state of constant flux. To fully understand the themes of 2001 it's important to assimilate both film and novel. I don’t think I've ever had cause to say that before. I'd call that a success.

4 primates that don't fling shit out of 5