From my spousal unit's sf/f collection -- I've been trying to fill in some gaps. 3001 was written to answer questions a d while not lifeless is not full of the energy of his earlier work. Nonetheless Clarke knows how to put a story together, how to balance fact with dramatic scenes, and just a wee bit of character, really not his thing, though. The 'reveal' of what those monoliths are up to was, is just the right degree satisfying. Not entirely explained, but enough, with plenty of mystery. And suspense too, a further millennium down the road. Clarke's (barely disguised) rant on religion, more or less in line with my own views, was lucid and entertaining both (and will offend many, so be warned). I particularly liked his descriptions of the moons of Jupiter. I cringed a bit with giggling (all women) nurses and a few other mishaps, but they were minor. ***ish ( )

Brings closure to the fate of the monoliths and humanity's future, but reads like a list of Asimov's pet peeve list of (then) current issues for a good quarter of the book. The speed of technological development also seems to have run into a wall as far as his pretty stellar record of predictions is concerned, though he did create a larger safety net in terms of timespan for this novel. It's astonishing to think how many popular scifi stories have mined/plagiarized the Odyssey series for ideas, though not always without improvements. The Expanse series mirrors many of these ideas but does better in what Asimov never gets right; characters. ( )

Like most of Clarke's later novels, this is mostly a tour of future Earth, not a novel. There's a minimal story to hang various mini-lectures on. Like Heinlein's For Us, The Living, someone from our time is brought into the future to be lectured about how stupid humanity used to be. In this case, that someone is Franke Poole, the astronaut jettisoned into space by HAL in 2001. How his frozen body happens to be recovered is as believable as the astral projection in For Us, The Living or Edgar Rice Burroughs. Where Heinlein's primary target was capitalism, Clarke's is religion, but there are plenty of SF ideas tossed out, mostly continuing prior explorations of space elevators and such. One of the most prescient sections recounts the rise of ransomware -- prescient bcause when written in 1997 only a few incidents -- done by floppy disk! -- had yet occurred.

Only for completists. ( )

A thrilling conclusion to the series that ends all to soon. I feel an investment into this story that I've not felt in a while. ( )

This "Final Odyssey" is the last and least of the three novels that Arthur C. Clarke wrote to extend the ideas introduced in 2001. The setup is clever enough: Frank Poole, a Discovery expedition member murdered by HAL 9000 back in 2001, is recovered in his excursion pod still exiting the Solar System, and he is restored to life by fourth-millennium super-science. Much of the book--the more interesting parts, really--concerns his difficulties and successes adapting to a "braincapped" posthuman society after a thousand years out of circulation.

At one point Poole's birthdate is specifically given as 1996 (199), which would have made him only five years old when crewing the Discovery. This sort of retroactive discontinuity is common to the Odyssey Sequence, which Clarke called "variations on the same theme ... not necessarily happening in the same universe" (261, quoting 2061).

The interactions with Poole's previously monolith-integrated colleagues were a little disappointing. In particular, Heywood Floyd went missing altogether, while Dave Bowman and HAL were collapsed into a character called "Halman." This element of the plot is focused on a threat posed by the monolith network, and defeated by human ingenuity. Clarke later rather sadly noted that his narrative resolution here was notably similar to that already used in the film Independence Day, which "contains every known science-fiction cliche since Melies' Trip to the Moon (1903)" (253).

There is a certain irony in the book's extensive criticisms of religion and metaphysical thought generally, while the Prologue and Epilogue construe the "Firstborn" creators of the monoliths as basically divine entities who may yet judge and sentence humanity. Perhaps inspired by the then-recent (in 1997) Aum Shinrikyo attacks, Clarke makes religiously-motivated terrorism responsible for biological and informational attacks that lead to greater global cooperation among governments in the early twenty-first century (216).

The book includes two pieces of interesting end matter. The Sources and Acknowledgements provide a chapter-by-chapter review of scientific justifications for the speculative technological elements of the novel and references to relevant current events. The Valediction is an author's retrospective on the full Odyssey Sequence. In it, Clarke protests too much perhaps that "it's all [his] own fiction" (262), disclaiming any co-authorship for the four books, but thus downplaying the significant contributions of Stanley Kubrick to the development of 2001 from "The Sentinel" and to the features of the cinematic narrative later retrofitted to the not-sequels.