[In the review below, Easton argues that the ending of 3001: The Final Odyssey is contrived.]

Is this the end of the saga that began with 2001: A Space Odyssey? If so, it seems fitting for it to appear just before the eponymous year rolls up on the calendar for real.

Arthur C. Clarke's 3001: The Final Odyssey begins when the frozen body of Frank Poole, killed and left to drift away in 2001, is found in the Kuiper Belt. Retrieved, he is awakened to discover that the world has changed drastically while he napped. Yet despite Jupiter as a sun, vacuum power, space elevators, and brain caps, much remains recognizable. For instance, the famous Monoliths are still there, including the giant that blockades Europa and its native species.

When Poole learns that Dave Bowman apparently survived the 2001 debacle, merged with the Monoliths, and may yet remain in some sense, he leaps to the conclusion that he must visit Europa despite the very effective barrier. He succeeds, he finds Dave, and he learns that there may be a very serious threat to humanity, based on the distance to the nearest of the Monoliths’ “supervisors”—just about 500 light-years.

So far the tale is a fairly conventional “Sleeper Wakes” story that shines by virtue of the master who wrote it and of the decades of history that give the overall saga an air almost of history （though note that Clarke insists that he has made changes to keep up with the advance of scientific knowledge; the various Odyssey books are not quite consistent with each other）. However, to my mind much of that shine is tarnished by a contrived ending that insists the omnipotent Monoliths are really no better than the supercomputers of 1930s SF that could be stymied by recursive conundrums along the lines of “Whatever I say is false.”

Oh, well. The Clarkean imagination is still a wondrous thing, and it has left its mark on an age of science fiction, film, and even science （see below）.

To mark the birthday of HAL, the computer Arthur C. Clarke created for 2001 （January 12, 1997）, computer scientist David G. Stork has assembled a beautiful package of essays on just how close computers have come to Clarke's vision over the last three decades.

Hal’s Legacy: 2001’s Computer as Dream and Reality considers artificial intelligence and the ethical questions it arouses, computer emotions and common sense, progress in computer chess, speech synthesis, and vision （including lip-reading）, reliability, and more. It all comes out as something of a paean to the power of science fiction to imagine and even shape the future, and certainly as a paean to one of SF’s most towering imaginations.

MIT Press has also set up an “unusually informative as well as elegant” Internet site that offers text, graphics, and links related to the text （eight of the book’s chapters are there in full.