Rama Revealed, by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee

All right, so I hate to say it but...mistakes were made. I probably should have just stuck with the first Rama book. Maybe the second one. But I should not have gone into this insane tedium that is the rest of the series. I know that sounds like hyperbole on my part, and I am exaggerating but not by a whole lot. Finishing this book felt like a chore more than anything else and I highly recommend everyone avoid this book at all costs.

Plot wise...this book suffers a lot and I think part of it is because it's so goddamn long. This book weighs in at about six hundred pages, definitely the longest book in the series so far, and there's just not a lot going on through the book to keep me interested. Basically the main characters we've been following, Nicole, Richard, and their friends and family, escape from the growing tyranny of the police state of New Eden. Eventually they meet up with the octospiders, who have been in the background for most of the series as a spooky ''other'' that we didn't quite understand. Except now they're all super ethical and nice and a truly advanced species that just wants to be friends with the humans. Which doesn't quite line up with what we've seen them do in previous books, but that's explained away as being a different group of octospiders.

The book then spends a lot of time following the humans as they experience octospider society with all its crazy technology and quaint customs and talking through colors. Sort of typical science-fiction ''hey look, it's the future and it's different, how weird is that?'' It just gets really boring after the first hundred pages or so and I found myself wishing it would end. Also, much to nobody's surprise the humans eventually declare war on the octospiders because humans are xenophobic killing machines. The war continues for a while, then the octospiders unleash a plague as a warning, and then the machines step in and end the fighting by knocking everyone out with crazy sleep gas.

No seriously, that's the resolution. Both sides are made to go to sleep and then the computers resegregate them on another space station until they figure out which pens to put humans and octospiders into. After that there's more humans being asshole xenophobes and then the revelation that this is all part of some lab experiment God's running to create a harmonious universe. Which honestly, after everything we've gone through and how boring it's been, it comes across as a facile answer that wasn't worth the effort. And yes, I'm using a word I went to the dictionary for, but if the author can start throwing phthisic around at the end of the book I can use one slightly easier to pronounce.

It just feels like a lot of wasted effort because there are some questions or issues that the authors raise which could have been good storylines, but instead they decide to make one of the more tedious books I've ever read. For example, Benjy's mental disabilities are brought up a couple of times and it's vaguely mentioned he seems to be struggling with the fact that he can see children younger than him learning more quickly than he is, and it's discouraging. And that could have been a really heartfelt and meaningful story. But instead we need to talk about octospider society some more. Oh, speaking of octospiders. So there's all this emphasis that they're a moral and far more developed society than us psychotic apes. (I mean, yes, we are psychotic apes but I feel they take it out on our species too much.) So would someone care to explain to me why they're keeping humans in their zoo? Not even kidding, they keep a human family in their zoo. And when Nicole finds this out she's like, ''I'm going to have some serious questions for the octospiders about this''. And then...she never gets around to asking about it. It's almost like there was this whole plot set up for the octospiders to actually be less good than they initially appeared to us humans, but it got abandoned at the last minute because it was too much work or something.

This is to say nothing about Katie's drug addiction, which is played for drama like so many other serious issues in this book. Whole books have been written about drug addiction, but in this book it's just there to make the book more serious and show how far a character's fallen, rather than making her a more three dimensional character. The feeling more is that it's just there, along with almost everything else that isn't ''Oh man, how great are the octospiders?'' to create something resembling drama. But it's so watered down that the book feels like an uphill slog more than anything else.

So yes, I regret reading this book and pursuing this series. The last book was pretty bad and this one was just incredibly boring interspersed with doses of unnecessary drama or straight up crazy. I might wish this book on my worst enemy, but I'd probably feel bad afterwards.

- Kalpar

The Garden of Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee

All right I'm going to just flat out say it from the start: I seriously considered dropping the series because of this book. If I hadn't been stuck somewhere for three hours with nothing better to do with my time, I probably would have abandoned this book entirely and just bailed. This book is...infuriating. At least it starts out so and while it gets more tolerable to read later on, it definitely fails to redeem itself by the end. As I'm this far I'll probably force myself through the last book and then wash my hands of the whole affair.

Before I get into how messed up this book is, I want to detail the plot. So if you've been following the story you know that two separate capsules, referred to as the Rama vehicles, have visited our solar system. At the end of Rama II three cosmonauts: Nicole des Jardines, Richard Wakefield, and Michael O'Toole, were hurtling out of our solar system at relativistic speeds. The three develop a complicated relationship and eventually manage to produce five children before arriving at a facility referred to as The Node. Apparently the Rama capsules are one of countless projects launched by a mysterious race of aliens to catalog the various forms of intelligent space-faring life in the galaxy. Eventually the main characters are included in a plan to send the Rama capsule back to our solar system once again to collect two thousand humans for an ''observational habitat''. The characters manage to return and meet the two thousand humans who have been selected, a significant percentage of them being former convicts. The humans then establish a society in the environment contained within Rama, and then things rapidly go to shit from there because human beings are awful and we kill everything we don't understand. I'm not sure where the series can go other than whoever built the Rama structures deciding to kill all humans as a safety measure.

So where to start? The thing I noticed first was in the Acknowledgements where the authors said this book was about women, especially their thoughts and feelings. And yes, it kind of is that because the first section of the book is Nicole's journal. But it's pretty much entirely about babies. Like, on the one hand I feel I shouldn't feel surprised because the writers were older gentlemen by the time they were writing this in the late 80's. On the other hand it's almost patronizing in assuming the most important thing in a woman's life is her children and her role as a mother. Nicole is supposed to be this super-accomplished scientist, Olympic gold medalist, brilliant doctor, and all this other stuff, but the only thing that matters to her is her children. And this is why feminists are so annoyed. Obviously being a parent is a life-changing event and I have plenty of friends who are going through that adventure right now. But my friends who are moms don't stop having identities outside of being a mom once they had babies. In this case we really only get to see Nicole as a mom and her identity as a mom and while I understand it's meant to be a lovely tribute, it dramatically limits women into one role for their entire lives and nothing else has any meaning.

The book also brings up a bunch of other serious issues, but instead of focusing on just one and developing it, they bring up a whole host of issues and don't really talk about them. Which is almost more insulting because it feels like the authors were trying to be super serious by talking about human issues but couldn't be bothered to do more than just shove them in. And there are a couple of good examples. For example, one of Nicole's children, Benjamin, has a form of mental retardation. This is a very sensitive topic and it can be hard to talk about but people who have various forms of mental disabilities deserve to be treated with respect. But Benjamin's disability is played more for drama than anything else and we never take time to talk about it.

If it wasn't enough for them to try to tackle mental disabilities, they also decide to tackle AIDS. Like, no, I'm not even kidding, they bring in Space AIDS. It's a virus that is transmitted through blood or semen, attacks the immune system, and is ultimately fatal. And humans being humans, there's an immediate panic among the population and an attempt to quarantine the people afflicted by Space AIDS and make them social outcasts. Now, the book kind of sort of talks about how this ostracization is bad and how hard it can be for people suffering from diseases such as AIDS, but it's very truncated because the story jumps forward so much and we end up seeing things happening after the fact rather than watching them develop over time.

On top of this we have a prominent rape case, an attempt at lynching, racism, and actual xenophobia as humans discover aliens in an adjoining habitat and then launch a war to kill off the aliens and take their resources. The result is there are four or five subjects that could be talked about for an entire book, but instead we sort of get to see them and the ultimate impression is, ''Humans. They're downright terrible, aren't they?''

I didn't want to throw the book against the wall at any point, but I definitely think this falls into the wallbanger category considering how many times I put it down and sighed to myself or said, ''That's seriously not okay.'' I think this was a very ambitious attempt by the authors to talk about a lot of serious subjects, but I think they either weren't prepared or just should have spent all their time talking about one or two subjects instead of kind of sort of mentioning a bunch of subjects not very well. We'll just have to see what happens in Rama Revealed, although I don't have a good feeling.

- Kalpar

Rama II, by Arthur C. Clarke & Gentry Lee

So this week we're continuing our delve into the Rama collection and I want to begin by stating I was wrong. According to Arthur C. Clarke's introduction to Rama II, he never meant the last line of the first book to be a sequel hook. However when he met Gentry Lee, one of the chief engineers involved in real-life space exploration, and started collaborating with him on science-fiction novels, Rama II and the following two books were the result. I will say that this book seems to start moving more into softer science-fiction territory rather than the fairly hard science that Rendezvous with Rama was made up of. But when you're dealing with extraterrestrial creatures I think things are allowed to get a little soft.

As I said last week, the biggest problem I had with the last book was the story didn't go much beyond, ''Hey, there's this giant alien spaceship coming into the solar system. That's strange and mysterious!'' And there are elements of that in this story as well. Some seventy years after the first Rama vessel has arrived and since left our corner of the galaxy, a second vessel is detected inbound from parts unknown. Humanity scrambles to get an exploratory mission ready in time so that a proper and more thorough examination of these mysterious vessels can be undertaken.

The thing that kind of bothers me about this book is only partially about the exploration of a mysterious alien vessel and possibly actually learning something about the beings that built interstellar craft and more importantly why they decided to build them. A significant part of the book focuses more on human drama of the cosmonauts who are sent to explore Rama II. And human drama is all well and fine, but there's one character who instigates most of the drama and is quite frankly awful: Francesca Sabatini.

Francesca is a highly intelligent woman, (although all the crew of the Newton, the vessel sent to explore Rama II are extremely intelligent people) and one of two journalists sent along with the Rama expedition. However, Francesca explicitly manipulates people to get what she wants, purposely puts the mission in danger through several actions, and utilizes blackmail to get things she wants from her fellow cosmonauts. An example that really bothered me was forcing an interview from the mission commander by threatening to let information about his schizophrenic daughter loose to the general public. Like...I feel like that should be something that should have expelled her from the mission, regardless of how good she was. Using somebody's family as leverage? That's just super messed up. And this says nothing of David Brown, an astrophysicist who it turns out is an academic fraud regarding some of his most important accomplishments. But by far Francesca was just an incredibly toxic person and it didn't make sense to me as to why she'd be picked to go on this mission.

There was also a comment made by Francesca that literally stated, ''The world doesn't need another half-black baby anyway.'' And I'm just...like okay maybe the authors were trying really hard to make Francesca a despicable character but she had already crossed a line when she was using people's families as leverage to get what she wanted. And this book was written in the 80's by the way. That comment is just inappropriate on so many levels that I really wish the authors hadn't made it at all.

The other thing that I thought was really weird was the detour the book made talking about how the entire world went through a credit and spending binge after Rama which resulted in one of the world's worst economic depressions, called the Great Chaos, that it was still recovering from forty years later. Seriously, there's about two whole chapters that talk in great detail about how the seeds of this crisis are sown and its eventual, traumatic end. On the one hand it's a rehashing of the economic crisis that led into the Great Depression, right down to occurring in the 2130's, and oddly prescient of the crash of 2008, but at the same time it feels really weird to talk about it when it doesn't seem to have terribly much influence on the story. The inclusion of St. Michael of Siena is also kind of weird, although it plays a larger influence on the story than the Great Chaos.

Overall the book's kind of meh. Some of the characters, especially Nicole des Jardins are pretty interesting and at least fun to watch, but Francesca is definitely toxic and causes a ton of unnecessary drama. The exploration of Rama raises more questions than answers, but I guess that's somewhat appropriate as science in the real world often works out the same way. I just wish some of the questions the authors keep bandying about would be answered, but only the next couple of books will reveal if we get a satisfactory resolution.

- Kalpar

Rendezvous with Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke

Well this month we're doing another Arthur C. Clarke month by looking at the four books of the Rama series. ''But Kalpar!'' my readers are probably already shouting. ''All months have at least four Thursdays in them because of how the Gregorian Calendar works! If the Rama series is only four books long, couldn't you have talked about it any month you liked?''

Well, okay, yes, dear and gentle reader you are correct in that regard. However, I like doing a history book the last week of the month so since September has five Thursdays that means I can do four books and then talk about something historical the last week.

Rendezvous with Rama is a somewhat short novel about the sudden appearance of an unidentified object entering the solar system. Initially it's tagged as a comet, asteroid, or other piece of space debris coming in from the outer edges. However radar arrays soon find out that it's much larger than initially anticipated and it's christened Rama, prompting astronomers to start taking notice of it. Which is when things start getting weird. Scientists realize that Rama a natural object at all. It is without a doubt an artificial object coming from outside the solar system. This of course only fans the flames of curiosity and a solar survey ship is sent on an emergency re-route so that at least some humans will be able to investigate Rama before it disappears from the solar system entirely.

And that's, basically the plot. A mysterious obviously artificial object comes from outside the solar system and humans go and investigate said object and it's...well, weird. This is honestly the biggest complaint I have with the book is that it doesn't go much beyond, ''Man, this object from beyond the solar system. It's pretty weird and mysterious, right?'' Like, there are a lot of ways that Clarke makes Rama look strange any mysterious and a lot of things happen that the human characters don't understand. They compare it a couple times to unearthing a tomb from a lost civilization, which is a fairly apt metaphor. But the plot of the book doesn't really go beyond, ''Hey look, this thing is strange and mysterious.'' 

That's okay for starting a book off, I'll admit. People like a good mystery and I was interested myself in finding out what the heck this thing was and why it came to our solar system of all places. But ultimately the adventure ends up raising more questions than answers. And on the one hand, that makes it very good hard science fiction. For my readers who aren't aware, science fiction tends to get classified as ''hard'' or ''soft'' on a scale depending on how closely it hews to what's scientifically possible. So hard science fiction tends to stick with what's known or possible and usually only invents technologies that are possible or probable, but may not have been invented or developed yet. Soft science fiction tends to take an ''anything goes'' approach and technology indistinguishable from magic is the rule of the day. Although this is really a brief and imperfect summary. 

So Rendezvous with Rama is good hard science fiction. People have to worry about light-speed limits on communications, making interplanetary conference calls difficult if not impossible. The Endeavor, the ship sent to investigate Rama, has to worry about having enough fuel to make its orbits and actually has to steal fuel from other ships to match Rama's orbit in time. Clarke tends to stick very close to what's possible in this story. And honestly, an obviously artificial craft coming from outside our solar system which we decide to investigate? That's probably going to leave us with more questions than answers. Pretty much all efforts at scientific research have left us with more questions than answers, which leads us to further research. So in that way, Rendezvous with Rama is very true to life.

However, I don't know if that makes it terribly interesting to read. Yeah, it's neat to see people out in space doing space things and investigating a mysterious ship, but I kind of wish that there had been at least some sort of resolution to the questions that are raised. Who built the ship? Why did they build it? Why did they send it to our solar system? Those are pretty much the first questions anyone's asking and by the end of the book we're left with no conclusive answers. 

The book ends with a very obvious sequel hook and I was honestly kind of annoyed by that. Yes, I have the other three books set up so that I can see if Clarke actually answers the questions I want answered, but it almost feels like he's deliberately teasing the reader by making them wait until the next book, or even the book after that. 

Overall, this book's okay. It's well-written hard science fiction and Rama's definitely strange and mysterious. But the book doesn't seem to move beyond, ''Oh look, it's strange and mysterious!'' I think I'll just have to see where the series goes from here and if it improves. 

- Kalpar

3001: The Final Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke

This week we finish up the month with a review of the final book in the Space Odyssey quartet, 3001: The Final Odyssey. And I have to admit, there are some significant changes in the series from the very first book, written in the 1960's, and the very last book written thirty years later. Not only are there differences in technology, scientific knowledge, and cultural references, but the tone and style are changed significantly to the point they almost sound like they weren't written by the same author. And I'm definitely going to say 3001 almost doesn't fit into the series at all, if only because the monolith, so iconic and central to earlier plots, is reduced to the point of being an afterthought. It doesn't make this book bad, just very different from its siblings.

Our story begins as you probably guessed in the distant year of 3001, as humanity is cleaning up celebrations from the end of the third millennium and entering the fourth. A comet-mining expedition out beyond Neptune is informed there's a strange radar signature and they've been asked to go investigate. This mysterious object turns out to be Frank Poole, one of the two crewmen from the original Discovery expedition a thousand years ago. With a little medical treatment and a quick de-thaw Frank finds himself alive, but further from home than he could ever imagine. And certainly, considering the dates involved I was definitely reminded of Futurama, but it seems Clarke came up with the idea first so this may have been one of the inspirations for the tv show. Although the idea of people somehow surviving through a period of time to wake up in a world they don't recognize is a fairly old one with Rip van Winkle and Looking Backwards serving as just two examples.

I said that 3001 is different from its siblings, and I feel it's because in this story you get the biggest dose of ''Hey, it's the future! Check out all these crazy things people are doing, because it's the future! We've got velociraptor gardeners now!'' I mean, if I'm being completely honest there were elements of that as early as the very first book with its extensive descriptions of what ''routine'' space travel from Earth to the Moon might be like, but there's also the plot with the monoliths. In a strange way, I feel like as you go through the series the monoliths end up playing a smaller and smaller role and the fascination with what the space future could be like becomes a much bigger part.

I think I'm only noticing this because it was pointed out to me once what a big deal science-fiction as a genre sometimes makes of fairly mundane activities that wouldn't even be mentioned in other forms of literature. Things such as how people travel, how people eat, what they wear, how their cities are organized, it all becomes part of a writer's picture for what the future might look like according to their own interpretation and imagination. And there are plenty of books like that, some of which are entertaining because of how wrong they ended up being, but it's one of those things where once you notice it you can't stop noticing it. And to an extent I felt that with this novel, the majority of it was showing off Clarke's ideas for where technology and society could go in a thousand years and Frank Poole being amazed by all of it.

One of the main things that ostensibly ties this entire series together is the presence of the monoliths, the mysterious black slabs which act as a catalyst for the evolution of intelligent life, among other manifold and mysterious tasks at the bidding of their masters. But as I said before, in 3001 the monolith almost feels like an afterthought rather than a major part of the story. I'm not really worried about the story being left open-ended, with humanity's fate left uncertain to the future because that's been done elsewhere in other works and it's seen as a generally acceptable way to end a series. What does frustrate me is the fact that something which drove the plot in the very first novel, something which was an absolute mystery and chillingly answered the question are we alone in the universe, becomes little more than a footnote by the end of the series. It's an interesting idea and I personally wish Clarke had developed it more.

Overall I think I'd say this book was okay. It's neat to see some of Clarke's ideas for the future, such as space elevators, the giant orbital ring of shipyards around the earth, genetically modified animals as servants, and direct brain-to-computer interfaces, but I also get the feeling that by the 90's some of those ideas were hardly groundbreaking either and by 2016 they're practically old hat. I think this series as a whole is okay, but it definitely and unsurprisingly goes through quite a few shifts over the years as Clarke came back to it and expanded upon it.

- Kalpar

2061: Odyssey Three, by Arthur C. Clarke

We continue this week with the third of the Space Odyssey series, 2061: Odyssey Three. The selection of this year by Clarke is chosen to line up with the next return of Halley's Comet to the inner solar system, an event I hope I may be able to witness myself when I'm some seventy-odd years old. Of course, in this rapidly changing timeline from our own, humanity is in a position to launch a manned expedition to visit the surface of the comet. While we have managed to land robotic probes on a comet fairly recently, for right now the possibility of a manned mission remains unlikely. Although I may have the good fortune to be proven wrong in forty years.

I'm not sure if I have as much to say about this book opposed to the other two books. The monoliths and their mysterious creators, with their plan to foster intelligent life through the galaxy, are barely mentioned at all in this book. It's more a case of things happening in the same universe, but at an almost mundane level instead of the fantastic. There is, of course, the issue of Lucifer which I held off talking about because it was a massive spoiler in the last book, but I can't really talk about this book intelligently without mentioning it. So, of course:

 Spoilers Spoilers Spoilers! Skip the following paragraph to avoid!

At the end of 2010 the monolith or perhaps monoliths, it's a little vague because they may have the ability to warp time itself, altered the mass of Jupiter and forced it to implode, creating a small star and turning our solar system into a binary system. The new star is named Lucifer and its moons, especially Europa and perennial favorite Ganymede, become hospitable to life because of their new proximity to a star. Humanity is also given a brief message, stating they are welcome to populate as many worlds as they wish, except for Europa. Ostensibly this is part of the monoliths', or their creators', plans to foster intelligent life in the galaxy, with Europa being identified as another potential cradle of intelligent life. Humans are of course intrigued by this forbidden fruit, but for now all attempts to interact with the planet's surface have been mysteriously intercepted.

The book has two plots which run sort of simultaneously, although the second one ends up taking over the plot and forces the first one to wrap up pretty quickly. The first is the aforementioned manned mission to Halley's Comet, an event of incredible historic, scientific, and cultural interest. Included among these delegates is Heywood Floyd, now just over one hundred years old, one of the handful of men who first examined the monolith on the moon, and now practically the only survivor of the mission to recover Discovery from Jupiter. More importantly, it shows how far humanity has come in the development of space travel, now being able to take a pleasure cruise to a comet.

The second plot involves Dr. van der Berg, a geologist working on the newly founded colony on Ganymede. Van der Berg has been very interested in the mysterious cloud-shrouded Europa and a chance satellite image begins van der Berg on an investigation that reveals Europa may have far more interesting secrets to reveal. And while I won't reveal them here, let's just say I think it's hardly a coincidence that it's a Boer, Afrikaner geologist that happens to discover it. Ultimately this plot ends up taking over the second one and in its own way helps set up the final book in the series.

I'm sort of left with the feeling that Clarke had two ideas for books but couldn't quite flesh them out long enough so he melded them together to create one longer story. Once the excitement of landing on Halley's Comet is over, you kind of come to the realization, ''Oh yeah, it's basically a giant, dirty snowball.'' Which, you know, neat, and I'm sure there's tons of things to learn from it, but after the initial discovery it kind of wears off. I definitely feel that the second story, with the discovery of a massive secret on Europa and the intrigue that's involved could have used further development. We're introduced to shadowy organizations like Der Bund and Shaka, although in the case of Shaka I'm not really sure on whose side they're supposed to be on. But that definitely could have been expanded into its own book with a little bit more corporate intrigue, IN SPACE!! But instead it gets welded to the comet story. Neither of them are bad, it just feels a little awkward.

Overall it's not a bad book. I kind of like the two adventures in space and Clarke's ability to take the utterly fantastical and make it seem commonplace really comes to the fore here. There's almost none of the incredibly dramatic, flowery prose that came with the other books, which I personally don't care for and certainly didn't miss at all. By far this is probably the one that can stand on its own the most and reads as a pretty simple sci-fi adventure. Next week we conclude with 3001: The Final Odyssey.

- Kalpar

2010: Odyssey Two, by Arthur C. Clarke

We continue Space Odyssey month with the second installment of Arthur C. Clarke's series, 2010: Second Odyssey. I will say that these books are going to be a little bit different from the first one because they're written about fifteen to twenty years later than the first. As Clarke himself says, we hadn't even landed on the moon yet when 2001: A Space Odyssey went to print. By the time he began writing sequels in the eighties we had expanded much further into space with probes, but had also fallen back, making manned missions only into orbit. (Which, as of 2016, is the limit of our abilities. Although NASA has high hopes of sending someone to Mars in the future.)

From this point forward, Clarke makes use of the elements of the movie plot rather than the original novel. The chief difference between these is that the mysterious monolith sends a message to Jupiter rather than Saturn, but this is a fairly trivial change in the grand scheme of things. How Dave Bowman reacts to HAL's rebellion is a little different, but the end result is the same. The biggest thing I noticed most about 2010: Odyssey Two is that there are references to real-life events which had helped expand our knowledge of space, as well as shape science-fiction as a genre, which occurred after the 1960's. Specifically Clarke mentions the Galileo and Voyager missions which gave us far more information about Jupiter and revealed that the moons of Io, Callisto, Ganymede, and Europa were far more interesting than we could have imagined. Clarke also slips in a couple references to Alien and Star Wars, which definitely updates the book and as those movies are still science-fiction classics it certainly doesn't date the book. (References to the Soviet Union aside.)

Plot-wise the book picks up a few years after the ill-fated Discovery expedition to Jupiter, in which all the crew except Dave Bowman perish and Dave, after a cryptic final message, appears to vanish. The United States is eager to recover their lost ship, especially before the Soviets or Chinese can claim it as salvage, but the construction of Discovery II is still underway and it looks like the Americans won't be the first to reach Jupiter. More pressingly, Discovery's previously stable orbit is decaying and it is in very real danger of crashing into Io in the next few years, taking all its information with it. Somewhat reluctantly the Soviets and Americans join forces with the agreement to share all information and find out just what the heck happened out at Jupiter with the mysterious monolith.

The thing that I really liked about all of this is the book took on a far less flowery and dramatic tone than the previous novel. In 2001 Clarke tended to lapse into purple prose and speak about the great destinies involved and the unknown but inevitable fates that humanity was moving towards, almost to the point of being melodramatic. Which is fine, but I had a bit of a hard time taking him seriously sometimes. 2010, by contrast, takes a far more pedestrian tone, which is really cool. Characters have discussions about launching a mission to Jupiter like it's something that happens all the time. And if it happened in our lives it would almost certainly be a huge deal, but I find it absolutely amazing that people could talk about this like it was no big thing. That almost makes it more convincing science-fiction for me than all the alien intelligences and mysterious monoliths. At certain points Clarke sort of lapses into his flowery prose once again, but for the most part I just sort of enjoy how mundane it all is.

In this book, much like the previous one, conflict with HAL is fairly minor and Clarke decides to put much more focus on the monoliths and the forces behind them. There is some concern that HAL may rebel once again and human lives will be put in danger, but it's handled very easily. I mean, Clarke may be making a point that most conflict can be avoided if you handle it properly and it doesn't have to be resolved with force, but it's such a minor part of the overall story. It almost feels like it was shoe-horned in because Clarke had to tie up some loose ends so he could get back to talking about monoliths.

And, on some level, I don't find the monoliths terribly interesting. Once the main mystery of what is their purpose is explained, they become kind of boring. It's all part of some vague plan by ancient aliens to promote intelligent life throughout the galaxy because they were lonely. If we got to speak with these ancient aliens and get to understand them a little bit better they'd probably be a bit more interesting, but they're basically described as ineffable beyond that little bit I've already talked about and having vague and mysterious purposes. It's just hard to get interested in characters that aren't described terribly well.

Finally I personally felt like this book was sort of a middle in the series. There's a book that comes before it, and a book Clarke wants to write that comes afterwards, so he has to write something to connect the two. It's okay, but it's serving as a bridge at best. I'll see if my assessment is correct when I read the next book, but by the end I was left with a bit of a mediocre feeling about this one. Next week we jump forward to 2061: Odyssey Three.

- Kalpar

2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke

Amazon, in their never-ending plot to get me to buy more books, some time ago offered a large number of Arthur C. Clarke e-books for the reasonable price of two dollars. Being a man willing to part with large amounts of money two dollars at a time, I ended up with a small collection of various Arthur C. Clarke books to read, him being the one of the three Greats of science-fiction whose work I've definitely read the least of. (I definitely spent far too many of my teenage years reading my mother's collection of Heinlein and Asimov which gave me some interesting insights to life.) So this month I'm reviewing the entirety of the Space Odyssey series which I've been told is a little easier to understand than the very famous film.

Warning to my Readers: As both the book and film 2001: A Space Odyssey have now been out for nearly fifty years, I no longer consider it necessary to avoid ''spoiling'' the story. Especially the more esoteric bits that aren't really explained in the movie. If you have not seen the movie by now, then go borrow it from the library or something, it's not my fault you can't be bothered to watch an old school science-fiction movie every now and then. 

This edition of the book begins with some rather lengthy introductory material from Clarke himself which goes into some of the details about the making of both the book and movie. According to Clarke,  he met with Stanley Kubrick in New York City and they began discussing ideas for a science-fiction movie. Building on a concept from a pre-existing short story of his, The Sentinel (Contained in Expedition to Earth), the duo began developing story ideas for a feature-length movie. 2001 is an odd case where instead of the book being written first and then later adapted to film, or the less common case of a film being created and then later novelized, both the film and book were created in tandem and released at roughly the same time, with Kubrick managing to finish the movie first. There are some slight differences, but they tell roughly the same story. Inevitably, having now gone through both I'm going to be doing a bit of comparison and contrast.

The main difference, though, is the amount of explanation that goes into the novel. The film of 2001: A Space Odyssey is famous for having incredibly little dialog and Kubrick relies heavily on visuals to tell the story. From the monkeys in the beginning of the movie and their encounter with the mysterious black Monolith, he transitions to the scenery porn of space travel in the then still-distant year 2001 and the discovery of a second monolith buried on the moon. There is the tense sequence of events on the ship Discovery as Dave Bowman fights against the incomprehensible mechanical malice of HAL 9000, and then the final bit which...just gets weird. Really, really weird. But the important thing is Kubrick used visuals to tell the story.

Quite simply, unless you're writing a graphic novel, which Clarke was not, you cannot communicate with visuals in a novel. You have to use words. And so while in the film Kubrick leaves a great many things unexplained and up to the viewer's own interpretation, in the novel Clarke goes in the opposite direction and explains perhaps a little bit too much. Intelligent viewers of 2001: A Space Odyssey probably concluded that the Monolith acted as a sort of catalyst for the evolution of our simian ancestors into human beings. Where it comes from, why it's there, what its purpose is, that's all left up to the imagination of the viewer in the film, but in the book Clarke goes into extreme detail.

The monoliths, all of them scattered through our solar system, are the result of a race of aliens experimenting with life and trying to push life towards intelligent forms and report on the success of such an experiment. At times Clarke's descriptions and explanations can be a little bit overwhelming and I find myself thinking less is actually more in this case. His descriptions certainly explain the end part of the movie which is famously the most incomprehensible part, but on the other hand it takes away part of the mystique and tries to make up for the visuals with purple prose which I felt didn't carry as well in text form.

One thing that I did notice was the conflict between the crew of Discovery and HAL 9000 is a much smaller part of the book compared to the movie. In the book it's sort of sandwiched between other parts of the story and happens fairly quickly. It's also heavily foreshadowed in the book and, having seen the movie before, it takes quite a lot of tension out of the situation. In the film, the conflict between the crew and HAL is central to the plot and forms an incredibly tense, nerve-wracking, and memorable story. Who doesn't get a chill at the phrase, ''I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.''? And once again, we get far less an explanation why HAL decides to murder the crew in Kubrick's rendition. Which leaves it to the audience's own twisted imagination or in the realm of perhaps the utterly incomprehensible. In the novel, however, it's sort of blandly explained that having been instructed to tell the crew the truth, but to lie to them as well, it creates stress in HAL's psyche that pushes him to murder the crew to remove the apparent conflict. Which, although concerning in its own right, isn't nearly as terrifying as a computer going wrong and not knowing why.

(I will also make the comment that Clarke's explanation of HAL's name totally not being a one letter substitution for IBM leads me to claim he doth protest too much. The fact that HAL supposedly stands for Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer sounds far too much like a backronym to me. And there are certain other elements of evidence which lend credence to the IBM theory.)

If you find yourself a little bit confused and perhaps irritated by the film version of 2001: A Space Odyssey then the novel will definitely help clear things up, although you may get a little tired by the amount of detail that Clarke goes into explaining things. And the book has definitely given me new appreciation for the film. I'd say the book is an important supplement, but I'm left with the feeling the film is possibly the stronger of the two. Next week we'll see how the series continues with 2010: Odyssey Two.

- Kalpar

Expedition to Earth, by Arthur C. Clarke

This review probably isn't going to be terribly long because once again I am reviewing a collection of short stories. And in this case it's a particularly short collection from one of the greats of science-fiction, Arthur C. Clarke. Now for my readers this book was originally published way back in 1953 so there have been many, many, many covers in its numerous reprints. I just decided to show the one for the kindle edition which I read. These short stories don't have an overarching plot like the Foundation short stories, but are simply a collection of Clarke's writings.

For those of you that aren't familiar, Arthur C. Clarke is seen as one of the "Three Greats" in the classic pulp era of science fiction, along with Isaac Asimov, whom I've talked about on this blog before, and Robert Heinlein, whom I have not. As someone who grew up reading a lot of my mom's old pulp sci-fiction novels I have a great amount of fondness for pulp works, especially older ones that may not have aged as well as other stories. In a way there was a relationship readers had with the Three Greats. Clarke was your badass science uncle who hung out in the garage with your badass science grandpa Asimov building robots and shit. Meanwhile, Heinlein was your creepy uncle who lived in a shack out in the woods in constant fear of the men from the government with his AR-15 and....lack of clothing for some reason. Whatever their foibles, and as people they certainly had a lot of those, they were prolific and influential writers.

Expedition to Earth contains a handful of stories from Clarke and in some ways kind of reminds me of The Twilight Zone, where the story leads up to a twist that you might not have been expecting. Of course, sixty years later the twists are easier to see coming in some of the stories, but that doesn't make the stories any less entertaining. And trying to guess the twist sometimes becomes part of the fun. However there were still a couple of stories that I honestly didn't see the twist coming and were pretty entertaining. Although some of the stories definitely have Cold War era fears, namely the threat of atomic war, that doesn't make them any less interesting to read.

Overall if you haven't read this book yet, I'd definitely recommend picking this one up. It's fairly short so if you have a day where you're free and just want to read some short stories you can definitely get this one under your belt.

- Kalpar