Economist （review date 12 April 1997）

[In the following review of 3001: The Final Odyssey, the critic argues that the novel fails next to the high standard Clarke established with 2001: A Space Odyssey.]

Opposite the opening page of Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke's first major novel, there is an odd disclaimer: “The opinions expressed in this book are not those of the author.” That book told of powerful, benign aliens arriving on earth and taking over the planet. Though barred from conquering space, humanity in the novel underwent a vast mystical transformation. A whole generation of children—the last one—coalesced into something immaterial and supremely powerful, so removing all trace of separate humanity from the earth. This was not the first such “coming of age” at which the aliens had assisted—they had supervised many others across the galaxy—but they were still puzzled at the miracle of desubstantiation in which they themselves could never partake.

Huge concepts and huge scale; a deep mysticism; fearlessness of ridicule; an almost sacred sense of the possibilities that science held for man. These are some of the exciting things in Mr Clarke's science fiction, an ambitiousness that goes back to Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men—which the young Clarke borrowed from Minehead town library in the 1930s and which proved a source of lasting inspiration. （The very same copy also had a profound effect on another young borrower, John Maynard Smith, who went on to become one of the great theoretical biologists of the age.）

So why the disclaimer in Childhood’s End? Because its fictional premise was that the stars were not for man, and Mr Clarke passionately believed the opposite. He was a herald of the space age, the author of a breakthrough popular-science book The Exploration of Space, the president of the visionary British Interplanetary Society, a firm believer that man could reach the stars—or at least the planets.

Seventeen years later, in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Mr Clarke first found a way to reconcile his can-do faith in technology and his you-can’t-even-imagine-it spirituality. As was Childhood’s End, the story that he wrote for the screen with Stanley Kubrick was about an inhuman transcendence, but one that requires the exploration of space. After that breakthrough, Mr Clarke found a new ease in reconciling his materialist science and his mystic imagination, producing a string of accomplished novels at a leisurely pace from his beloved home in Colombo. His old friend and sparring partner Isaac Asimov summed up the Idyll charmingly:

Old Arthur C. Clarke of Sri Lanka
Now sits in the sun sipping Sanka
Enjoying his ease
Excepting when he’s
Receiving pleased notes
from his banker.

Unfortunately, the novels have dropped off in recent years. 3001: The Final Odyssey has an enjoyable ease. But it lacks most other positive features. Indeed, it could do with a new disclaimer: “Nothing is expressed in this book except the opinions of the author.” The story is that of Frank Poole, killed off by Hal the computer in 2001, whose body is discovered in the icy cometary regions around the solar system, and revived. This resurrection is something that Mr Kubrick at one point hoped to work into the film 2001. At the time, Mr Clarke hated the idea, saying that “Stanley’s obsession with immortality” had “overcome his artistic instincts”. Sadly, a counterpart concern with mortality seems to have overtaken Mr Clarke.

The world in which the sleeping Dr Poole awakes is a utopia, and so rather dull. Poverty, madness, organised religion, prisons and asteroids on collision course with earth have all disappeared. Much of the population lives in a large cartwheel, its rim in orbit, its spokes reaching down to the earth at the hub. Poole finds it fascinating but not quite for him and lights out for the Jovian satellite Europa, where he finds one of the big black monoliths that first appeared in 2001.

Readers of the two intervening sequels, 2010 and 2061, will know how it got there. A sort of plot then unfolds. The book contains the germ of an idea that might have made it worth writing: what if the monoliths’ part in human evolution were a bad thing, an intervention that created a more violent and nastier race than otherwise? What if there had been a supervisory God and he—or it—had been foolish?

Unfortunately, that intriguing question is not pursued. In 2001, the monoliths were doors of transcendent perception; in 3001 they become banal and easily dealt-with alien threats. Poole’s avenger, David Bowman, is the Odysseus transformed at the end of 2001 into a “star child” of seemingly unlimited potential; in 3001 he is just one more sentient computer program. There is nothing of the grandeur of Mr Clarke's earlier books, and many of his stylistic tics. The ending of paragraphs with an ironic ellipsis or dying fall is a technique which, with the right timing, probably did him well when he was working hard at lecture tours. But in a book it reduces the diction at times to something close to self-parody.

There are many reasons for admiring Mr Clarke and his writing. He is a true visionary and, by all accounts, a very decent man. He has wit and imagination. He can simplify science without distorting it. He has communicated big truths to millions of readers. When on form he can inspire awe and pathos. Against these high standards, most fans will greet this latest book philosophically as a disappointing end to a great tale. Newcomers to Mr Clarke's work would best skip 3001 altogether and turn instead to Rendezvous with Rama or The Fountains of Paradise for a taste of what he can really do.