3001: The Final Odyssey Mass Market Paperback – January 28, 1998

Great book!

Overall this was a very good book. It was able to reanimate one of the characters, presumed dead and forever lost, from the original 2001: A Space Odyssey. Frank Poole was found floating out by Neptune, brought back and then brought back to life. This story revolves around his character and also brings back HAL and Dave Bowman. The story is original for it's time and again shows Clarke's uncanny ability to see the future. This was the perfect ending for the series. I really enjoyed the book for the most part. I took off a star because Clarke, again, chose to copy paste two complete chapters from earlier books. This was the second time that he did this. I also felt compelled to re-read these chapters because I didn't want it miss something that he might have changed, so I was a little annoyed that the chapters were verbatim from the earlier works. I still highly recommend this book and this series.

This was my first (and probably only) time in reading Clarke's four book series. Clarke had an imagination that demonstrated over the years how prescient he was. In this case, life really did imitate art. That being said, I must describe my extreme disappointment in his literary skills. Clarke might best be described as a serial self-plagiarist. Throughout the four books, he often, very annoyingly, dropped sentences, paragraphs, even whole stories into his storyline, making me think that he did so not to inform the reader so much as to serve was filler so his books would not seem so short. It became so annoying that it got to the point where I would stop and ask myself, "well, how much am I going to have to skip over THIS time to get on with the story?" Arthur C. Clarke should be renowned for his vivid imagination, but not for great writing. The books would have ended up shorter, but he was greatly in need of a good editor, back when something other than Spellcheck actually existed to help authors put their works into good shape for publishing.

An end to a series which has sparked many toward writing their own stories and scientific discoveries. This story to me is a let down based on how it ends because it felt rushed. The story was otherwise good and interesting.

Frank Poole, or rather, the body of Frank Poole, has been floating through space for a long time. After nearly 1000 years, he's picked up by a comet mining ship and his vacuum preserved body returned to life via medical technology available in 3001. Poole spends the first half of the novel examining and adjust to a future 1000 years beyond the time in which he live, before embarking on a flight to Ganymede with the crew that rescued him. Upon arrival, he's able to "hijack" a shuttle and set down on Europa, which has been denied to mankind since the warning from the Starchild (Dave Bowman) in 2010. Poole, however, is allowed to land and overjoyed to find that his old crew mate, Bowman, and the ship AI, HAL, are both still "alive" (and linked to the Europan Monolith) and despite their combined persona and 1000 years of incorporeal existence, remember him. However, the happy reunion is disturbed years later when "Halman" again communicates with Poole, informing him that the "supervisor" monolith 450 light years away has sent new information to the local (Europan) monolith, and the information it has sent does not bode well for humanity. Poole and "Halman" find themselves the only hope to save humanity from what may be a malfunctioning monolith.There are a lot of negative reviews for this novel and honestly I can understand why. I was in the same boat about halfway through but had a bit of a revelation. 3001: The Final Odyssey isn't so much a short novel as it is a really long prologue for the entire 20xx series. At first, 3001 felt like it was written by an author lost in the universe he'd created. Clarke isn't the first and wont be the last author to fall into that trap. As a fan of many sci-fi and fantasy authors, I've seen it happen before. Robert Jordan, Terry Goodkind...it happens to quite a few good authors, even the occasional master like Clarke. After thinking about it for awhile though, 3001 grew on me. It doesn't tie up all the loose ends, and it treats some of them in a manner that doesn't make a lot of people very happy, but ultimately I was okay with that. Sometimes things don't work out how we want them to and that seems to be the road Clarke took - this many not be what you wanted, but it's what happened.For sure, a lot of the novel is spent as a political and religious outlet for Clarke in his later years. Yes, the conclusion can be seen as unsatisfactory and one can almost hear Jeff Goldblum in the background repeating his line from Independence Day; "we'll give it a virus...a computer virus..." but in the end, 3001 brings the 20xx line of stories to a conclusion that may not satisfy everyone, but really should be seen as a ray of hope - Humanity, given freedom to develop as it will.

I almost didn't buy this book (even on sale for $1.99) because the reviews were so bad. But since I really liked the other 2 sequels, I figured I'd give it a shot. Having read it, this book is now right behind "2001" as one of my favorites of Arthur C. Clarke! It actually has a little character development (a rarity for Mr. Clarke) and completely follows the events of "2001". I think it nearly makes "2010" and "2061" completely irrelevant, partly due to retreading of the main plots points from each book, and because it maintains focus on the elements of the original. "2010" and "2061" are certainly worth reading, but they only follow "2001" in sequential time. The character focus shifts and there's not much added to the Monolith discoveries in either book. "2010" has a fairly major event involving the Monoliths, but "3001" sums that up in a chapter or two without leaving anything important out.As far as the ending "ruining the series", I disagree. This book (as with most of Mr. Clarke's novels) does not wrap everything up in a tight bow. Rather, it ends the immediate worry of what the Monoliths are "really up to", and gives the human race some breathing room. I also really enjoyed the ride of this book in discovering human life in the 31st century. My only real leap in logic is the fact that Frank Poole could have ever existed to tell his story. But he is a nice central figure to have around, so I can let that go :)

Great bookDelivered on timeExactly as advertised

Just reading bits of it again, a beautiful ending to the saga and lots to learn from it as a human being :)

Worth reading

2001: Odisea en el espacio es un merecido clásico de la ciencia ficción, una obra auto-conclusiva.Las posteriores entregas, si bien pudieron ser necesarias para el desarrollo narrativo, no cumplieron con los estándares que generó la obra de Stanley Kubrick, cuya influencia se ve claramente marcada en el primer tomo de la saga.La conclusión de dicha saga es todo cuanto pudo ser: el final discreto de una trama casi inexistente.

Great reading