BK3001.RVW   980510

"3001: The Final Odyssey", Arthur C. Clarke, 1997, 0-345-42349-6
%A   Arthur C. Clarke
%C   101 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10003
%D   1997
%G   0-345-42349-6
%I   Ballantine/Fawcett/Columbine Books/Del Rey
%O   http://www.randomhouse.com/delrey delrey@randomhouse.com
%P   274 p.
%T   "3001: The Final Odyssey"

"You know those Rama books?  The ones he did with somebody else?" he
asked.

"Yes." I said.

"Well, they were really terrible.  Not much of Clarke at all."

"True."

"But he's put out a new one.  `3001.'  Another in the `2001' series. 
It's vintage Clarke.  You'll have to get it."

So I looked forward to it with great anticipation.  We all enjoy
Clarke a lot.  I mean Heinlein is OK for adventure junkies and Ayn
Rand fans, and Niven has a few interesting astrophysics tricks, but
Clarke is the only one for techies when they want to avoid gnashing
their teeth every three pages over some egregious scientific error.

He was right.  This is vintage Clarke.  And that is not altogether
good.

For one thing, those familiar with the Clarke corpus will know that
Clarke is at his best in the short story.  His novels, and
particularly the more recent, tend to have story lines that zig, and
zag, and wander up blind alleys and cul de sacs.  At times Clarke
seems to get bored and will fast forward thirty years over a chapter
break.  (Of course, some may object that many of the more recent
Clarke books are collaborations, but this tendency is also noticeable
in the 2001 series, the original "Rendezvous with Rama," and others
stretching back a ways.)  Therefore, "3001" bears less resemblance to
a novel than to a collection of short stories with a few common
characters.

Another problem is that Clarke is good with technology, but he is not
as good with people, and particularly society.  Yes, it is true that
we could not communicate with an English-speaker of a thousand years
ago, but that was because there *was* no English that long ago: it was
basically Saxon, and was about to get an infusion of French.  Even
without sound recordings we can still understand English of four
centuries back with little difficulty.  (I know: I've been to
Newfoundland.)  What would be difficult is not only idiom (and
reasonable marks to Clarke for that) but also concepts.  How would you
explain "clockwise motion," "running like clockwork," and "weekend" to
King Harold?

Clarke has a very optimistic view of society.  I will agree with
Feynman's assessment, in "The Meaning of it All" (cf. BKMEANNG.RVW),
that psychology is only just starting, and that current theories will
no doubt seem as quaint as phlogiston and a periodic table with four
elements in the several hundred years that it has taken physics to
come up with some reasonably useful laws.  However, the world of 3001
seems to have no social problems at all, aside from minor and isolated
aberrations.  The poor, or any other social strata, are no longer with
us.  I assume that Clarke would dismiss that objection out of hand,
since he is so adamant (and patronizingly so, in the valediction) that
mankind will have finally outgrown religion.  (Odd, though, that the
evils of the Inquisition, the Crusades, female genital circumcision,
and the Indian subcontinent have nothing to do with politics or other
sociological pathologies.)  I am not sure how the death of "religion"
fits in with a tremendous push for, oh, shall we call it
"spirituality?"

The science is reasonably strong, though spotty.  Clarke seems to be
very conservative in many areas, given the vast gulf he has to play
with.  If information storage has grown through nine orders of
magnitude in forty years, a mere handful in a millennium seems
pikerish.  Nanotechnology is non-existent.  Medicine, and particularly
microbiology, seems to have had a very lucky time of it.  While there
is a nod to Mad Cow disease (and the obligatory sermon on
vegetarianism), virulent new diseases seem to have stopped happening
and antibiotic (and whatever follows antibiotics) resistance is a non-
issue.  I can handle vacuum energy and inertia drives, although I
don't see why an inertia drive can't run a shuttle on earth, as it
does in other places.

However, I would have kept my big keyboard shut, had Clarke not
dropped one heck of a clanger in *my* field: computer viruses.  I
don't care whether ID4 or 3001 had the idea first (and did either of
you thank Fred Cohen?  No, I didn't think so) but the concepts are
still equally invalid.  Turing, and his machines, proved that whatever
algorithm one machine can compute another can compute: he didn't say
that any machine can run another machine's programs.  (The creation of
this super virus/trojan reminds one of Monty Python's military use of
The Perfect Joke.)  Alright, I can accept that there will be all kinds
of wonderful, and not so wonderful, developments in computing over the
next millennia, but for the same reason that you cannot have a perfect
virus defence, you can't have an undetectable virus.  (There's never
an AV that'll always recover: there's never a virus that can't be
discovered.)  The tricks that Clarke proposes are all the mathematical
equivalents of asking the super-deluxe-really-smart computer the well-
beloved trick question "why?"  (Didn't Clarke use that one once
already?)  And I don't care if you do have an agent inside the
machine; the "Firstborn" seem to be just a tad older and smarter than
you, and MonolithOS 3.14159... probably has a thread killing daemon
that will keep the machine from chasing its CPU up its own
multiplicity.  (Nice parallelism, mind.  Bit hard on the desktop
models, maybe.)

copyright Robert M. Slade, 1998   BK3001.RVW   980510