[In the following review of 3001: The Final Odyssey, Korn discusses Clarke's importance as a science fiction writer.]

3001 appears to close that door into the future which opened twenty-one years ago, in 2001 （or, if you prefer, when the first hominid threw that first bone skywards and stopped the breath of a million cinemasful）, that door which opened wider in 2010 and 2061; but, if you inspect the text closely, there is a little chink of light around the shining black doorframe, enough for, say, a celebratory or admonitory 4002, in four years time.

According to some canons, Arthur C. Clarke is the paradigm science-fictioneer, the imaginative boost behind the rocket’s red glare. He inspired Buzz Aldrin! He invented the geosynchronous orbit! He has a galaxy named after him! Or if not a galaxy, an asteroid. To others he is just a mechanic who can write, sort of. No one asks whether Conrad or Forester is the better exemplar for sea stories, but I am on the side of those breathless cinema-goers, though who gets the most credit for this defining moment stays moot. Kubrick is the William Webb Ellis of science fiction. He picked up Clarke's ball and ran with it, and it was never the same shape again.

Clarke is now eighty, and his murmurs of gratified protest at this praise have long been audible. In 3001, there is a colourful trip through the outer layers of Jupiter. It serves a narrative purpose, but I think it is also designed to convince us that the dazzling psychodelia of the film was simple astrophysical realism. The fascination of 3001 is observing how Clarke retrofits the earlier episodes so that they blend with the new future and the now ex-future. In 1968, the crew of the USSS Discovery were barely born. This novel recapituates, revisits major themes, gathers up a few loose ends from the previous three episodes, and loosens a few more. If there are no major surprises, none the less, he displays his pre-eminent power to imagine the extraordinary and describe it with conviction: a tower 30,000 miles high, the volcanoes of Io, the boiling ice of Europa.

Clarke has debts of thanks and a few old scores to pay; he uses notes acknowledgements and a “valediction” to do this, and sometimes the text itself. And there should be a rule forbidding the use of quotations from imaginary far-future dictionaries to settle the hash of something you don’t care for. （Psychoanalysis, we learn, is due for History’s down-turned thumb.） But mostly he hands out prizes: Feynman, Buckminster Fuller and Dr Tsien Hsue-shen, a rocket scientist deported in the 1950s （“one of the most stupid, as well as most disgraceful things the United States ever did”） who is remembered in the igloo-city of Tsienville.

Sometimes fiction, or fact, may have overtaken Clarke; which only happens to the true prophet. But he has the unnerving habit of proving that whatever it is, he imagined it first. And even when he has to concede priority, the concession is not unbarbed:

I have been intrigued to learn that the finale of Independence Day which I have not yet seen, also involves—. I am also informed that its opening is identical to that of Childhood’s End （1953）, and that it contains every known science-fiction cliché since Méliès’s Trip to the Moon （1902）.