Book details of '3001: The Final Odyssey'

Title	3001: The Final Odyssey
Author(s)	Arthur C. Clarke
ISBN	0345423496
Language	English
Published	February 1998
Publisher	Ballantine Books

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Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
"You know those Rama books? The ones he did with somebody else?" he asked. "Yes." I said. "Well, they were really terrible. Not much of Clarke at all." "True." "But he's put out a new one. `3001.' Another in the `2001' series. It's vintage Clarke. You'll have to get it." So I looked forward to it with great anticipation. We all enjoy Clarke a lot. I mean Heinlein is OK for adventure junkies and Ayn Rand fans, and Niven has a few interesting astrophysics tricks, but Clarke is the only one for techies when they want to avoid gnashing their teeth every three pages over some egregious scientific error. He was right. This is vintage Clarke. And that is not altogether good. For one thing, those familiar with the Clarke corpus will know that Clarke is at his best in the short story. His novels, and particularly the more recent, tend to have story lines that zig, and zag, and wander up blind alleys and cul de sacs. At times Clarke seems to get bored and will fast forward thirty years over a chapter break. (Of course, some may object that many of the more recent Clarke books are collaborations, but this tendency is also noticeable in the 2001 series, the original "Rendezvous with Rama," and others stretching back a ways.) Therefore, "3001" bears less resemblance to a novel than to a collection of short stories with a few common characters. Another problem is that Clarke is good with technology, but he is not as good with people, and particularly society. Yes, it is true that we could not communicate with an English-speaker of a thousand years ago, but that was because there *was* no English that long ago: it was basically Saxon, and was about to get an infusion of French. Even without sound recordings we can still understand English of four centuries back with little difficulty. (I know: I've been to Newfoundland.) What would be difficult is not only idiom (and reasonable marks to Clarke for that) but also concepts. How would you explain "clockwise motion," "running like clockwork," and "weekend" to King Harold? Clarke has a very optimistic view of society. I will agree with Feynman's assessment, in "The Meaning of it All" (see reviews), that psychology is only just starting, and that current theories will no doubt seem as quaint as phlogiston and a periodic table with four elements in the several hundred years that it has taken physics to come up with some reasonably useful laws. However, the world of 3001 seems to have no social problems at all, aside from minor and isolated aberrations. The poor, or any other social strata, are no longer with us. I assume that Clarke would dismiss that objection out of hand, since he is so adamant (and patronizingly so, in the valediction) that mankind will have finally outgrown religion. (Odd, though, that the evils of the Inquisition, the Crusades, female genital circumcision, and the Indian subcontinent have nothing to do with politics or other sociological pathologies.) I am not sure how the death of "religion" fits in with a tremendous push for, oh, shall we call it "spirituality?" The science is reasonably strong, though spotty. Clarke seems to be very conservative in many areas, given the vast gulf he has to play with. If information storage has grown through nine orders of magnitude in forty years, a mere handful in a millennium seems pikerish. Nanotechnology is non-existent. Medicine, and particularly microbiology, seems to have had a very lucky time of it. While there is a nod to Mad Cow disease (and the obligatory sermon on vegetarianism), virulent new diseases seem to have stopped happening and antibiotic (and whatever follows antibiotics) resistance is a non- issue. I can handle vacuum energy and inertia drives, although I don't see why an inertia drive can't run a shuttle on earth, as it does in other places. However, I would have kept my big keyboard shut, had Clarke not dropped one heck of a clanger in *my* field: computer viruses. I don't care whether ID4 or 3001 had the idea first (and did either of you thank Fred Cohen? No, I didn't think so) but the concepts are still equally invalid. Turing, and his machines, proved that whatever algorithm one machine can compute another can compute: he didn't say that any machine can run another machine's programs. (The creation of this super virus/trojan reminds one of Monty Python's military use of The Perfect Joke.) Alright, I can accept that there will be all kinds of wonderful, and not so wonderful, developments in computing over the next millennia, but for the same reason that you cannot have a perfect virus defence, you can't have an undetectable virus. (There's never an AV that'll always recover: there's never a virus that can't be discovered.) The tricks that Clarke proposes are all the mathematical equivalents of asking the super-deluxe-really-smart computer the well- beloved trick question "why?" (Didn't Clarke use that one once already?) And I don't care if you do have an agent inside the machine; the "Firstborn" seem to be just a tad older and smarter than you, and MonolithOS 3.14159... probably has a thread killing daemon that will keep the machine from chasing its CPU up its own multiplicity. (Nice parallelism, mind. Bit hard on the desktop models, maybe.) copyright Robert M. Slade, 1998
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