3001: The Final Odyssey

3001: The Final Odyssey is a science fiction novel by British author Arthur C. Clarke. It is the fourth and final installment in the "Space Odyssey" book series. It was originally published by Voyager Books in the United Kingdom in 1997. The mass-market paperback edition was published in the United States by Del Rey on January 28th, 1998.

The First Born
The First-Born are a race of mysterious and ancient bio-forms. Having evolved over the course of millions of years, the First-Born became a space-faring race and set upon prompting evolutionary jump-starts of various alien races with the potential for great intelligence. To this end, they created the Monolith artifacts.

After visiting Earth, the First-Born found a way to impress themselves into the fabric of space and time, becoming effectively immortal. The monoliths continued to observe and monitor alien races, causing a catalyst effect in their evolutionary development, even though the First-Born had long since disregarded these tools of their mission.

The Return of Poole
In 2001, an astronaut named Frank Poole was murdered and left in outer space by a rogue artificial intelligence aboard the Discovery One spacecraft dubbed HAL 9000. A millennium later, Poole's freeze-dried body is discovered in the Kuiper belt by a comet-collecting space tug named the Goliath, and revived. Poole is taken home to learn about the Earth in the year 3001. Some of its notable features include the BrainCap, a brain–computer interface technology; genetically engineered dinosaur servants; a space drive; and four gigantic space elevators located evenly around the Equator. Humans have also colonised the Jovian moons Ganymede and Callisto. TMA-1, the black monolith found on the Moon in 1999, has been brought to Earth in 2006 and installed in front of the United Nations Building in New York City.

The Jovian monolith had sent a report to its superior monolith 450 light years away, and was expected to receive its orders toward humanity after the nine-century round-trip. Presumably, the monolith was empowered to obliterate the nascent biosphere of Jupiter, but needed a higher authority's approval to do the same with the technological civilization on Earth. There is considerable worry that the judgment, based on the monolith's observations of humanity up to 2061, will be negative, and the human race thus destroyed as the Jovian bioforms discovered by David Bowman were wiped out (while making Jupiter a small sun to assist intelligence on Europa).

Halman
Frank conscripts Dave Bowman and HAL, who have now become a single entity, Halman, residing in the monolith's computational matrix, to infect the monolith with a computer virus. The monolith does receive orders to exterminate humanity, and duplicates itself; whereupon millions of monoliths form two screens to prevent Solar light and heat from reaching Earth and its colonies. Due to Halman having already infected the first monolith, all the monoliths disintegrate.

Halman uploads itself into a petabyte-capacity holographic 3D storage medium and thus survives the disintegration of the monoliths, but is infected with the virus and is subsequently sealed by scientists in the Pico Vault. At the close of the story, Poole and other humans land on Europa to start peaceful relations with the primitive native Europans. A statement is made that the monolith's makers will not determine humanity's fate until "the Last Days".

Appearances

 * Frank Poole
 * Dave Bowman

Locales

 * Earth
 * New York
 * New York City
 * United Nations building


 * Jupiter
 * Europa

Items

 * Monolith artifact
 * TMA-1
 * TMA-2


 * HAL 9000

Notes & Trivia

 * In November, 2014 the Syfy television network optioned the rights to produce 3001: The Final Odyssey as a television miniseries. Ridley Scott was named as an executive producer on the project. Although plans had been in the works for such a project since the early 2000s, nothing materialized in that time. By February, 2016, the television project was still in the developmental stage. A projected release was set for sometime in 2017.


 * 3001: The Final Odyssey placed number 10 at the 1998 Locus Awards for the category of Best SF novel.