2001 a space odyssey

It feels almost sacrilegious not to be totally blown away by what is considered to be a milestone in speculative fiction.  Since both the movie and the book were created in tandem, it's a little like the chicken and the egg to say which came first or which was better.  It was a very good book, in many ways better and weaker than it visual cousin.  The HAL sequences in the movie were superior to those in the novel.  I enjoyed the depth and texture of the book and found my imagination more vivid than the images found in the movie. 

2010: odyssey two

By reading both novels back to back I can honestly say that I truly liked 2010 better than its celebrated predecessor.  I suppose what kind of bothered me about 2001 was the disjointed narrative.  However, it should be noted that this book would be nothing without the depth provided by the first one.  This really is a good read.

2061: odyssey three

Dr. Haywood Floyd is now an old man. He heads off into space to be among the first to land on Halley's comet. Meanwhile a ship is high jacked, and crashes on Europa. So Haywood is off to the forbidden planet to rescue those who are trapped on the surface. Not really much happens in this novel, and any mention of the Monolith, or Bowman, HAL or any of that good stuff is left to the last couple of pages. On the whole an okay book, that didn't have much to do with the Odyssey series.

3001: Final Odyssey

Sniff, sniff, what's that smell? Oh it's the last in the Odyssey series by Clarke. Before I start let me mention the good points. This is a fun, and often times hard to put down book. Has some nifty ideas, solid characters, and all of the ingredients that make for a good read. The book opens with a space tug finding Frank Poole. He was the guy that HAL snuffed back in 2001. So we get to see Frank as the proverbial fish out of water a thousand years out of his element.

At one point this passage appears, "Over the centuries, it had accumulated a vast amount of information, going all the way back to the Voyager flybys of 1979 and the first detailed surveys from the orbiting Galileo spacecraft of 1996 - the very year Poole had been born." Cool, that would make him five, when he and Dave were goofing around with HAL on the way to Jupiter for 2001.

The "answers" to the questions about the Monolith never really materialize. Dr. Floyd who was featured at the end of 2061 is nowhere to be seen. The whole computer virus climax thing is lame. Oh well. Arthur is an old man, and should be given some slack. It was an enjoyable story, just not up to speed.