3001: The Final Odyssey: Complete & Unabridged

Then it came close enough for visual inspection.

"Goliath here", Chandler radioed Earthwards, his voice tinged with pride as well as solemnity. "We're bringing aboard a 1000-year-old astronaut. And I can guess who it is. "

Thus after drifting to an icy death in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the body of astronaut Frank Poole is recovered in the outer reaches of the Solar System. Preserved at near absolute zero, it is a simple task for medical science a millennium hence to restore Poole to life--though strangely for a novel which pits religion against science, the metaphysical implications of technological resurrection are unexamined --and the first half is devoted to Poole's integration into the society of the future. If anything he adjusts with far too little grief or culture shock: apart from mourning his dog, and learning how the new technology works, he faces no major difficulties. Still, the world of the future is drawn with broad, imaginative strokes and apart from a persistent continuity error which makes Poole 6 years old in 2001, this is fascinating stuff. The plot kicks into gear with the revelation that the famous black monoliths may ultimately not have humanity's interests at heart, leading to a perfunctorily presented struggle for survival. Clarke himself notes that the ending is functionally identical to that of Independence Day, though novel and film were created simultaneously. Not the hoped-for late classic, 3001: the Final Odyssey does provide the satisfaction of closure to Clarke's epic Odyssey Quartet.--Gary S. Dalkin

It's nice to see the re-introduction of a character long thought lost but more than half the novel is nothing more than the efforts of this character to adjust to and understand the world of 3000 AD. This would all be well and good except that, no offence to Clarke, the advances in technology he describes are all ones he and others have explored elsewhere. For the dedicated sci-fi reader/fan there is nothing that is ultimately unfamiliar here then. Add to this the expediant but rather lazy tactic of reproducing, verbatim, entire sections from previous books and stories and a genuine Clarke fan can also feel a little let down.

The monolith is what drives the series and it is this simple but powerful idea of Clarke's that drives the readers interest in the world of the 2001 - 3001 AD. Once again then, I feel slightly cheated to find the monolith, its workings, its origins and its future to be only tenuously expanded upon in this novel. If this really is the Final Odyssey it only feels like an "oh, by the way...this is what happend next.." finale. Still, all that being said, if you have read the first three installments I doubt you'll avoid this.