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Todd's Reviews > 3001: The Final Odyssey
3001: The Final Odyssey
by
by
** spoiler alert **
This is one of my favorite books of all time because of its brutal and humbling honesty. I couldn't have chosen a better coda for the 2001 storyline, it left me absolutely breathless.
-- warning, serious spoilers --
After reading the ending of the Rendezvous with Rama series I was expecting Clarke to pretty much end things the same way, on a magnanimous upnote. With 2001 we learn that there is a vastly superior alien intelligence that has intervened in the natural evolution of apes to accelerate a group of them toward sentience. They use the monolith as their all-purpose tool to carry out the upgrades, then they leave one under the dirt on the moon so that some day, millions of years later, the creatures they engineered will find it and give the makers a status update. In 2001 we find it, uncover it, and activate it, and it sends off its data. In 2010 we discover that the monolith, operating independently from its makers, has started the process anew for some creatures evolving on Europa.
The monolith gives humanity a warning about its warring ways, and then goes on to advance and protect this new life. All the while the monolith is just running its default program, gathering data, and sending it off somewhere at the speed of light to some headquarters 1000 light years away. That's the kicker that makes this story so compelling, in 3001 we learn the maker's response to the data on us they received a thousand years earlier.
And what is that response? Do we get a magnanimous pat on the back from our alien parents? Do we get a stern but loving chiding?
No
The monolith is instructed to block out the sun from Earth....
After millions of years of waiting... after all the effort it took to create and monitor humanity, the alien race decides we're a failed experiment. The prognosis is death. God I LOVE Arthur C Clarke! No magnanimity for the poor bastard reader, no tying off his masterpiece in lovely little bows for our amusement, no forgiveness, no mercy, just DIE you degenerate earth scum!!! :D
I've read alot of the other reviews about how the ending just seemed like a ripoff of independance day, the whole virus thing, but that was just a one shot silly 2 hour movie! This series is a science fiction legend! The apollo astronauts were even quoted as joking that they hope they find a monolith when they land! This story is a part of our 20th century cultural identity and it ends with DIE YOU DEGENERATE EARTH SCUM!!! :D
Brilliant, biting, painful, and wonderful.
The only thing I suppose I would change about this book would be to just completely remove all hope. In the end the monolith is destroyed with a virus, but sends off a last scream to the makers before it fizzles offline, so humanity knows it's got a thousand more years before the makers realize the first attempt to kill us failed, so there's some unspoken hope that maybe we can organize a defense in the interim, or bake them a planet-sized "please don't kill us" cake, or suck up to the europans so they'll give us a recommendation or something.
If it was me sitting next to Arthur C Clarke in his den as he wrote this, bouncing up and down and chanting "you da man!!!", I would have tried to convince him to have the virus *fail* to stop the monolith. I would have had the monolith trip into some secondary killbot protocol where it just finished off the human race old school style, with a violent bloodbath, but that's just me ;)
-- warning, serious spoilers --
After reading the ending of the Rendezvous with Rama series I was expecting Clarke to pretty much end things the same way, on a magnanimous upnote. With 2001 we learn that there is a vastly superior alien intelligence that has intervened in the natural evolution of apes to accelerate a group of them toward sentience. They use the monolith as their all-purpose tool to carry out the upgrades, then they leave one under the dirt on the moon so that some day, millions of years later, the creatures they engineered will find it and give the makers a status update. In 2001 we find it, uncover it, and activate it, and it sends off its data. In 2010 we discover that the monolith, operating independently from its makers, has started the process anew for some creatures evolving on Europa.
The monolith gives humanity a warning about its warring ways, and then goes on to advance and protect this new life. All the while the monolith is just running its default program, gathering data, and sending it off somewhere at the speed of light to some headquarters 1000 light years away. That's the kicker that makes this story so compelling, in 3001 we learn the maker's response to the data on us they received a thousand years earlier.
And what is that response? Do we get a magnanimous pat on the back from our alien parents? Do we get a stern but loving chiding?
No
The monolith is instructed to block out the sun from Earth....
After millions of years of waiting... after all the effort it took to create and monitor humanity, the alien race decides we're a failed experiment. The prognosis is death. God I LOVE Arthur C Clarke! No magnanimity for the poor bastard reader, no tying off his masterpiece in lovely little bows for our amusement, no forgiveness, no mercy, just DIE you degenerate earth scum!!! :D
I've read alot of the other reviews about how the ending just seemed like a ripoff of independance day, the whole virus thing, but that was just a one shot silly 2 hour movie! This series is a science fiction legend! The apollo astronauts were even quoted as joking that they hope they find a monolith when they land! This story is a part of our 20th century cultural identity and it ends with DIE YOU DEGENERATE EARTH SCUM!!! :D
Brilliant, biting, painful, and wonderful.
The only thing I suppose I would change about this book would be to just completely remove all hope. In the end the monolith is destroyed with a virus, but sends off a last scream to the makers before it fizzles offline, so humanity knows it's got a thousand more years before the makers realize the first attempt to kill us failed, so there's some unspoken hope that maybe we can organize a defense in the interim, or bake them a planet-sized "please don't kill us" cake, or suck up to the europans so they'll give us a recommendation or something.
If it was me sitting next to Arthur C Clarke in his den as he wrote this, bouncing up and down and chanting "you da man!!!", I would have tried to convince him to have the virus *fail* to stop the monolith. I would have had the monolith trip into some secondary killbot protocol where it just finished off the human race old school style, with a violent bloodbath, but that's just me ;)
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Reading Progress
Finished Reading
Finished Reading
Finished Reading
September 7, 2009
– Shelved
