'2010: Odyssey Two' --A Review
Okay, so my experience with this series is a little odd, because growing up, I had the last two books (2061 and 3001) but not the first two books on the bookshelves, so I've read 2061: Odyssey Three a lot. I knew I had seen both movies (2001 and 2010), but I wasn't sure I had read the first two books, though I think I had read this book at least once before, so I felt like the first two were worth revisiting, as I wasn't entirely sure I had read the first one at all.
My review of the first book also got tied up with my rewatch of the movie and wound up on my Substack instead of here. But I did not watch the movie, so you get just a book review this time.
So, to clear things up: yes, I saw the movie at one point. I think it was years ago, back when Netflix sent you DVDs in those little red envelopes. I'm honestly not a huge fan of remakes, but if there is a movie that I'd be okay with a remake of, it would be 2010: Odyssey Two. (I remember this movie being fairly pedestrian and starring Roy Scheider and that's about it, to be honest.) The book is written in much of the same style as 2001, which means it's heavy on description, especially in the Bowman/Starchild parts of the book, but I do think with the right director-- big, visionary, trying to fill the shoes of what Kubrick did with 2001-- you could remake this and it would work.
The obvious choice is obviously Denis Villeneuve. Dune is fantastic. He's probably the right choice to revive James Bond, and there are rumors and whispers that he wants to adapt Rendezvous with Rama, which would be AMAZING. I'd lean towards Villeneuve tackling Rama first, but I don't know who else you would get to do this who would be on that same level, especially with science fiction experience. It would take someone as big as Kubrick to do this right with modern technology and visual effects, I think.
We start, once more, with Heywood Floyd. He's no longer the man in charge of the Space Agency for the Americans-- he's got a wife, a kid, a pretty cool house in Hawaii that involves dolphins and a cushy job in academia, but he's still bothered by the failure of the Discovery mission and the fact that he sent multiple people to their deaths. When the Russians announce a mission to go check things out (as the big black thing Dave Bowman vanished into is still out at Jupiter-- but not Saturn, as this is a change from the first book), the Americans want someone to go along, and they suggest Floyd. He's reluctant (wife, new kid), but for his conscience, he wants to get answers as to what happened, so he agrees to go.
(Now, spoiler alert: his marriage implodes as a result-- but again, the way Clarke writes, we don't get to see a lot of the marital stress on the page. There are references to his wife, Caroline, being obviously unhappy, and he worries about it throughout the mission, but the end of it happens off-page and feels odd and a bit abstract. He also has a weird moment with one of the crew, Zenia, during their aerobraking maneuver to get into Jupiter's orbit, which is a one-off situation, seems perfectly nice, but she ends up with someone else, so I wasn't entirely sure of the purpose of having a singular interaction between two characters. I do think Zenia sees Floyd as a safe person to confide her fears in, which would be legit-- but we see no prior interaction between them establishing that!)
The Chinese 'space station' suddenly being revealed to be a ship and subsequently crashing on Europa and finding life is awesome. It's a jolt of electricity to the plot that's needed, but after they lose contact with them, we settle back into 'there's a big ass thing in orbit, plus Discovery is here.'
Speaking of: Dave's back! Dave Bowman returns through the gate-- he's both kind of still Dave Bowman and yet not at the same time. We also find out who he's working for-- kind of, anyway, and they reveal both that the core of Jupiter is a gigantic diamond and that there's life in Jupiter, but probably won't go anywhere-- yet the life on Europa could. Dave Bowman visits Earth, sees his Mom and an old girlfriend one last time and eventually pleads with his bosses-- once he understands the plan-- to warn his colleagues. They allow this, but only to a point.
This is another jolt of energy to the book, because the sudden reappearance of Dave to Heywood with a warning to leave Jupiter within 15 days or else provides a new wrinkle, as the big giant monolith isn't doing anything much, and Heywood has to convince everyone that he's not crazy and make a plan to meet the deadline. They do and get out just in time, as the big monolith vanishes and then reappears in Jupiter and, for all intents and purposes, starts to eat and then, boom. Jupiter explodes and is stellarized into a second sun. But a cold one?
The way this would actually work in real life would be insane to think about. Clarke just kind of proclaims 'the effective end of night' and says everyone's happy about it because of productivity reasons, except for the astronomers who can't see shit now. Farmers love it because they can grow more... hold the phone, friends, WHAT? Even if you're assuming an Alaska-type situation, human biology needs that diurnal cycle. What does this do to that? How does this change humanity? Is this more like a second moon, always shining? WHAT? EXPLAIN THIS SHIT TO ME MORE PLEASE.
So frustrating-- similarly, Dr. Chandra should have been way crazier than he was portrayed here. He sort of mentions in passing that he disconnected their emergency shutdown for HAL months ago and wants to stay with HAL, yet in the end doesn't.
I think I'm going to have to finish this series out, because I remember the latter two being much more fleshed out than the first two are, which might be a consequence of Clarke writing more for screen than plot-- that's my hypothesis anyway. We'll see if it's true. In the meantime, My Grade: *** out of ****
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