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** spoiler alert ** They told me - don't bother reading 3001, it's not worth it. I knew they were right. But partially from a need to complete the series, and partially out of morbid curiosity, I read it anyway.

It's awful. It's only saving grace is being just 112 pages. There are a few beautiful passages - all lifted directly from the other novels in the series. He makes some interesting social commentary, but that's overwhelmed by his diatribes against religion.

Again, instead of ending it just frays away. What plot there is ends, but it's an unsatisfying end.

I will say this much for it - he does a nice job of handling a man sent 1000 years in the future. It's not an easy task, and he did it well. I also enjoyed the references to other SF works, and possibly seeing the origin on things in more recent SF stories. Did this inspire John Scalzi's "Brain Pal" in his Old Man's War series?

To save you the trouble, here's my synopsis of 3001: The Final Odyssey












SPOILERS AFTER THIS POINT!!! (which I'm only hiding out of politeness. I'd much rather tell you about this book than have you suffer through reading it.)

















So, it's the year 3001. In an amazing coincidence, a ship finds the body of Frank Poole, the astronaut HAL knocked into space in 2001. Becuase of the advances in medical science, he can be brought back to life. Can we say Mary Sue boys and girls? I knew you could. And why write a knew character, when you can just bring one back from the dead. But I digress.

He gets used to living 1000 in the future, and the author gets to hold forth on what's wrong with humanity in the second millinium.

For poorly explained reasons, Frank decided to try and contact Dave Bowman, by landing on Europa. In this process he meets a philosopher who holds forth at lenght about the insanity of religion. Somehow this is related to landing on Europa, although I do not at all understand how. The landing works! Frank is now the only being in conact with the only being who can contact the Monolith. Whee.

Frank goes back home, and goes on with his life. At some point, Dave gets in touch with him, basically pointing out that, based on 20th century information about humanity, the makers of the monolith have decided that Humanity has gone completely wrong and should be wiped out. Frank passes along that information, and watches as the great minds of the day figure out a way to stop their destruction. They gather the worst computer viruses they can find, send Frank back to Europa, and as him to ask Dave to be the Trojan Horse who delivers the computer viruses. They also give him a memory device to download himself to, to try and save him from the same fate as the monoliths.

It works, humanity is just barely saved from destruction, but Dave's consciousness is still infected with the viruses he delivered and so cannot be contacted. Frank goes on with his life, missing his old friend.

No, really. That's how it ends.

In 2061, the Dave/Hal/Monolith entity thing downloaded a copy of Heywood Floyd. There's no hint of him in this book - nothing. ARG!