why is it always a male character going mad avenging his dead wife and never a female character cradling her dying pure of heart husband in her arms then dragging the whole world down with her
a short review for all the space odyssey books (with slight spoilers):
2001: A Space Odyssey - given how much the book permeates modern sci-fi it felt a bit stale, in a way it wouldn't have had I read it when it was released. I still have yet to watch the movie, but through cultural osmosis I was still a bit confused how different it was from the movie version as I thought they were created alongside each other.
2010: A Space Odyssey - my favourite from the trilogy of four, Heywood is my favourite of the protagonists in the books and honestly I think the sci-fi aspects introduced here are the most interesting. The first thing I need to get out of the way is Clarke's lose approach to canon - every book following 2001 technically does not happen in the same universe, it is an alternate version with similarity to the ones which happened before. The changes range from small to ones to ones which honestly kinda ruin the book for me, this one thankfully only really has the former. The book as far as I am aware follows the movie canon instead of the book, which is mostly just an aesthetic change. Going into the more spoiler heavy territory: I loved the alien life forms especially the biosphere of Jupiter, genuinely a beautiful image. And it worked really well story wise showing that the mysterious but vaguely benevolent creators of the monolith are a way more complex, morally grey and to a point slightly terrifying.
2061: A Space Odyssey - mostly forgettable, the big plot twist about the mountain on Europa was very predictable and underwhelming and it was so artificially stretched out in time by characters refusing to share information about it even when it would make perfect sense for it to happen. Some fun character interactions, some attempts at being progressive (2010 had a bisexual guy but that felt very underwhelming), this one has a gay couple, who barely appear in the story and it all felt a bit like an excuse to include a scene where the MC lists off Bad People from history that were gay, to the gay couple to dispel their preconceived notion that all gays are peaceful perfect people. Unfortunately this book also starts two annoying habits that detract from this one: reusing old chapters whole cloth and disregarding rules set by the books before.
3001: A Space Odyssey - the book set the furthest in the future yet the one most stuck with the hang-ups of the past. It really feels like it downright refuses any introspection. It has my least favourite type of protagonist A Man From the Good Old Days who faces the Terrible and Soft modern world. It's definitely a more bearable version of the trope but it still feels mostly like Clarke venting random frustrations into the text. Thoroughly unimaginative when it comes to the setting, the only interesting part of the world building for me was the inertia engine and maybe Pico. Also the whole plot of the book ignores a ton from the other books and also ruins the makers of the Monolith. I get into more specifics under read more, heavy spoilers ahead if you want to read the books (although I wouldn't really recommend the last two).
This book is still very fresh in my memory so I want to just rant about all the inconsistencies and weird unexamined world building ideas. Let's start with the inconsistencies:
HAL and Dave Bowman are both in the monolith, but Heywood isn't despite HAL and Bowman being shown to be fully separate entities at one point it is implied they are one now. This is almost interesting as a hive mind as a system of alters which exist both separately and as one whole seems interesting, but its never really explored as HAL and Bowman both "die"
The makers of the monolith instead of being this morally grey force who only want to kindle the spark of intelligence no matter what, with almost infinite patience, now for some reason judge humanity as unworthy. It is implied this is because humanity was terrible at the beginning of the 3rd millennium and early human history before that (but they improved now) and/or their stagnation in tech. It could be that the monolith is malfunctioning too but idk. This is bullshit for a couple reasons. First, they already knew about some of the biggest atrocities from human history from Bowman's mind, so they deemed those fine. But then they would judge humanity unworthy because what? It is implied there's acts of terrorism but no war from like middle of the millennium. So either they: ignored what they learned from Bowman; waited for millions of years for human intelligence to evolve, only then to wait for less than a millennium for humanity to meet some sort of standard that they didn't meet when Bowman was absorbed. They also gave human intelligence millions of years from their first intervention in human evolution. But they couldn't wait more than a thousand for life on Europa?
The makers of the monolith cannot travel faster than light, despite one of the few functions of the monolith shown is to teleport Dave to a different galaxy
Now for the weird and unexamined ideas:
prison abolition, okay based what did they replace the prisons with. Oh they turn prisoners into brain dead servants for other people while their brain computer interface technology fixes the deviant part of their brain. And this is supposed to be an utopia?
Everyone in the world is an atheist or a deist, religion is classified as a delusion. Idk i can buy a more secular world, but the whole of humanity rejecting every religion is far fetched
Using intelligent animals as workforce. Apparently all work is done by cloned animals for absolutely no reason since robots exist.
The future utopia society couldn't be communists bc they couldn't make it work so they had to settle for democracy. Cool so are they capitalist? bc democracy and communism are not interchangeable one is a type of government the other is an economic framework.
dailybridgerton
romaincrisis
2087
dededos
