3001: The Final Odyssey [Mass Market Paperback]

Then it came close enough for visual inspection.

"Goliath here", Chandler radioed Earthwards, his voice tinged with pride as well as solemnity. "We're bringing aboard a 1000-year-old astronaut. And I can guess who it is. "

Thus after drifting to an icy death in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the body of astronaut Frank Poole is recovered in the outer reaches of the Solar System. Preserved at near absolute zero, it is a simple task for medical science a millennium hence to restore Poole to life--though strangely for a novel which pits religion against science, the metaphysical implications of technological resurrection are unexamined --and the first half is devoted to Poole's integration into the society of the future. If anything he adjusts with far too little grief or culture shock: apart from mourning his dog, and learning how the new technology works, he faces no major difficulties. Still, the world of the future is drawn with broad, imaginative strokes and apart from a persistent continuity error which makes Poole 6 years old in 2001, this is fascinating stuff. The plot kicks into gear with the revelation that the famous black monoliths may ultimately not have humanity's interests at heart, leading to a perfunctorily presented struggle for survival. Clarke himself notes that the ending is functionally identical to that of Independence Day, though novel and film were created simultaneously. Not the hoped-for late classic, 3001: the Final Odyssey does provide the satisfaction of closure to Clarke's epic Odyssey Quartet.--Gary S. Dalkin --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

One thousand years after the Jupiter mission to explore the mysterious Monolith had been destroyed, after Dave Bowman was transformed into the Star Child, Frank Poole drifted in space, frozen and forgotten, leaving the supercomputer HAL inoperable. But now Poole has returned to life, awakening in a world far different from the one he left behind--and just as the Monolith may be stirring once again. . . .

A Main Selection of the Science Fiction Book Club®
Selected by the Literary Guild® and Doubleday Book Club®

Out beyond the orbit of Saturn, the space tug Goliath nudges the ice core of a comet onto its fifty-year journey sunward. Ice enough to cover the hell fires of Mercury and Venus with oceans kilometres deep, and thus to make those planets habitable. It is the beginning of the work of centuries but is interrupted when the Goliath is ordered to bring in the perfectly preserved body of Frank Poole, the first victim of the rogue computer HAL a thousand years before.

But this is only the beginning of the Final Odyssey, an Odyssey that leads one man to defy the limitless power of an alien technology. An Odyssey that leads to the moons of Jupiter, to Europa, where a Monolith reaching ten kilometres skyward guards a village of ice on the shores of an ocean.

Europa, a frozen world where a new life is being born and the future of Man is weighed in the balance…

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Born in Somerset in 1917, Arthur C. Clarke has written over sixty books, among which are the science fiction classics ‘2001, A Space Odyssey’, ‘Childhood’s End’, ‘The City and the Stars’ and ‘Rendezvous With Rama’. He has won all the most prestigious science fiction trophies, and shared an Oscar nomination with Stanley Kubrick for the screenplay of the film of 2001. He was knighted in 1998. He passed away in March 2008.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.