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

I, Robot (1950)

Author: Isaac Asimov | Page Count: 256

"People say 'It's as plain as the nose on your face.' But how much of the nose on your face can you see, unless someone holds a mirror up to you?"

I, Robot is one of Isaac Asimov's most famous works. If you were to poll a number of dedicated book readers, you'd likely find that a fair percentage of them have heard of it even if they haven't actually read it - especially if they happen to be science-fiction fans also. It's a collection of nine short stories written over a ten year period that are loosely tied together by a frame narrative. It introduced Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, which were designed to be unbreakable:

1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2) A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Making them unbreakable didn't stop him spending the rest of his career bending them, or finding new ways to interpret them. That's where Dr. Susan Calvin comes in. Susan is a robopsychologist. When something goes wrong with a robot that can't be attributed to mechanical error, it's her job to figure out why. Was the order given in conflict with the Three Laws? Or was it open to misinterpretation by the robot? They are thinking machines after all, they need to be able to function autonomously, but are they given too much free will?

The prose style is simple and direct, which is an asset to the story as it lets you engage fully with the concepts without losing the narrative thread.

Albert Einstein reportedly said, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." Even though Asimov's technology is fictional, he understands it completely. He explains complicated scenarios in simple terms, without it ever feeling diluted. Mostly they're puzzles that need to be figured out, sometimes by connecting the dots, and sometimes by creating the dots from scratch. Once the puzzle is solved, there's an abrupt ending each time.

4 positronic brains 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 onset, 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