Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: The narrator states that the creators of the Monoliths did this long ago. In story it happens to David Bowman, HAL 9000, and Heywood Floyd, after a fashion.

A tightly wound caseworker is pushed out of his comfort zone when he’s sent to observe a remote orphanage for magical children. Too bad Douglas Adams already did this in " Life, the Universe and Everything (Hitchhiker's Trilogy)")

I grew up on Clarke. His novels and short stories fuelled my avid interest in science, evolution, and academic pursuits. It used to be that I could not wait to read the latest Clarke edition. After reading the ending of the Rendezvous with Rama series I was expecting Clarke to pretty much end things the same way, on a magnanimous upnote. With 2001 we learn that there is a vastly superior alien intelligence that has intervened in the natural evolution of apes to accelerate a group of them toward sentience. They use the monolith as their all-purpose tool to carry out the upgrades, then they leave one under the dirt on the moon so that some day, millions of years later, the creatures they engineered will find it and give the makers a status update. In 2001 we find it, uncover it, and activate it, and it sends off its data. In 2010 we discover that the monolith, operating independently from its makers, has started the process anew for some creatures evolving on Europa.

seemed to have been slapped together in a week. The actual events that do occur in the story seem to have been thrown in as diversions to are long, dull, obsolete essays by Clarke on his perspective on religion and the moral state of the human race. These soapbox asides are clumsy, polemic, and not substantiated adequately. If you want to read a decent gripe about how self-destructive we are, read something by Kurt Vonnegut instead. Think of the Monolith Trinity: Floyd is the wise Father, Bowman the son who dies and is a mediator, and Hal is a fine Holy Ghost. Why, then did Clarke feel the need apologize to people of faith in his endless end-matter? He has just started his own religion with the story. Trouble began brewing in the Odyssey series with the release of 2010: Odyssey Two, in which Clarke decided to abandon all differences between the previous book and the movie version, and act as though only the movie events had occurred. As someone who greatly preferred the book, this disturbed me, in much the same way that George Lucas' constant tinkering with the Star Wars universe irks those fans. The third book brought further unexplained changes, and 3001 continues this tradition; including its protagonist, Frank Poole, having been born in 1996--he went on the Jupiter mission at 5 years old?? Regardless, the story within the novel is the important thing, yes? the Final Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke is a science-fiction novel that is ultimately compelling. The story, unlike some science-fiction novels, is not too strange or too creepy to get into or understand. The main reason that 3001 does not seem too strange or unrealistic is because it takes place in the future. When playing with the future, the author can make anything sound as if it could be a real thing and suddenly nothing is out of the range of "normalness" even for a fiction novel. Clarke's style is very simple, (the reading level is probably Junior High) but it is filled with some symbolism, many allusions, and a few too many clichés. While Clark's style is simple, it does not take anything away from the story. In fact, I believe that it assists the author in his descriptions. Describing the human race one thousand years from now would seem like such a hard thing to do, but Clarke truly possesses the mark of a great writer and possibly the greatest science fiction wring of his time. Again, instead of ending it just frays away. What plot there is ends, but it's an unsatisfying end.The Space Odyssey Series is a series of novels written by Arthur C. Clarke, which takes a philosophical look at many Speculative Fiction Tropes, such as Precursors, Intelligent Computers, space travel and humankind's place in the universe. Odyssey Three [Source] 3001: The Final Odyssey is the last installment of the Space Odyssey book series. It centers around the revival of Frank Poole in the year 3001 and his attempts to save humanity from disaster and to readjust to his new futuristic lifestyle, considering the fact that man has made many technological advances. A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

The Final Odyssey is a 1997 science fiction novel by British writer ArthurC. Clarke. It is the fourth and final book in Clarke's Space Odyssey series. This book could have been good. The story is reasonably interesting and the idea that Frank Poole might be woken up from his deep freeze offers some interesting plot possibilities. Hearing the conclusion to the 2001 series....sort of. It definitely leaves the door wide open for the eventual confrontation with the makers of the monoliths in the year 4001 give or take a century or two. That could potentially be much more interesting than the events in 3001. And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped. And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed. There's nothing I enjoy more on a Saturday morning than a Friday night pizza. Somehow it manages to satisfy some base need. Maybe it's the nomadic sense that I'm foraging for food. "3001: The Final Odyssey" is the cool leftovers from an intense evening before.Imagine the story of Rip Van Winkle set in the year 3001, salted with lots of fancy (sometimes creepy) technology and peppered with the idea of no Being in the entire Universe truly having free will, all the way up the ladder to and including the Big Boss, and that is this book in a nutshell.