Arthur C. Clarke - Following 2001 in The Series

Following 2001 in The Series

2001: A Space Odyssey, Clarke's most famous work, was extended well beyond the 1968 movie as the Space Odyssey series. In 1982, Clarke wrote a sequel to 2001 titled 2010: Odyssey Two, which itself was made into a film in 1984. Clarke has written two further sequels that have not been adapted into motion pictures: 2061: Odyssey Three (published in 1987) and 3001: The Final Odyssey (published in 1997). In 2010, we find out that the original home of the astronaut Dave Bowman was in Florida, the location of the John F. Kennedy Space Center and that was a source of his interest in spaceflight.

In the year 2061, Halley's Comet will make its next plunge through the Inner Solar System. Clarke used that for the event of an expedition that takes Dr. Heywood Floyd, kept in hibernation for decades, and scores of others to visit this comet before landing on the jovian moon Europa. There, Floyd and the others discover the whereabouts of astronaut Dave Bowman (the "Star Child"), the artificial intelligence HAL 9000, and the native life of Europa that had been protected by the alien Monolith in orbit around Jupiter.

Finally, in 3001: The Final Odyssey, Clarke returned to Solar System of one millenium after 2001. It turns out that the astronaut Frank Poole, had not been killed outside the spaceship Discovery One after all. Instead, his body had been freeze-dried in the vacuum of outer space, and then it had made a close fly-by of Jupiter. It was cast into deep space by the gravitational interaction with that huge planet, and over a period of 1,000 years, it has flown beyond the orbit of Neptune.

Poole's body is found by another (human) spaceship in about the year 3001, and by that time medical science had advanced enough that he could be revived. Poole is returned to the Earth, and then most of the rest of the novel is about his experiences in finding out about the Planet Earth of 3001. We also find out that Poole is a native of the city of Flagstaff, Arizona, and that he became interested in astronautics and outer space because of his boyhood visits to the Lowell Observatory there.