3001: The Final Odyssey Review

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The time has finally come. I finished reading Arthur C. Clarke’s Odyssey series with 3001: The Final Odyssey. Before I begin my review, I included links to all my reviews for the other books in the series. Check them out below!

2001: A Space Odyssey Review, 2010: Odyssey Two Review, and 2061: Odyssey Three Review

Now that you have the other reviews (spoilers ahead!), let’s get into the review.

The book picks up in the year 3001, a thousand years after the events of the first book and several centuries after the third. But before that, we get a little backstory about the mysterious monoliths that have been plaguing the series. Created by an old race known as First-Born, the monoliths ascend to different planets to jumpstart species’ evolutionary development, including Earth. However, the First-Born gradually forget about the monoliths as they become immortal.

The book then pivots to Frank Poole, who turns out to be alive. Specifically, a spaceship called Goliath discovers his body and brings it back to Earth, and he gets revived in a way. Now in the year 3001, Poole needs to adjust to changes humanity went through, including space elevators and colonization of Jupiter’s moons. Poole finds a reason to go to Europa, where he hears the voice of David Bowman. Yes, Bowman is still around as well, but he’s not entirely human.

Did I think this was a fitting ending to this series? In some ways. In other ways, I felt disappointment. This mostly stems from the fact that the story starts off strong, doesn’t really go anywhere in the middle, then ends with something that could have been interesting if it took up more of the story. I honestly felt the same way about the previous book, 2061. In that book, the story picked up on some of the concepts introduced in the previous two books. However, the story didn’t really go anywhere. I felt the same way for this book. For example, we get a couple of cool things in the beginning. We learn about the First Born and Frank Poole comes back. After that, however, the story ends up stagnant without much plot.

The fact is that a lot of the book introduces something that realistically advances the plot only to skip ahead. In 2001 and 2010, the plot developed consequences for the characters, and catastrophic or otherwise interesting events followed. This doesn’t end up being the case for the last two books.

Additionally, the monoliths don’t really make an impact until the very end. Even then, the book summarizes what happens. Humanity defeats the monoliths easily, with a simple solution, and the story ends with a grim warning that they’ll return. However, by then, everything wraps up so quickly that the warning doesn’t feel impactful.

I did find some aspects of the work really good, including a lot of the unique advancements to society and the idea of Poole coming back in general. But this is where we’ll close out the series. Stick around for another writing post this week! Happy reading.

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