Halman: a merging of the entities that were once HAL 9000 and Dave Bowman, Halman communicates with Poole at various points throughout the novel, warning Poole of the possibility that the monoliths may issue negative judgment against humanity. Hope we will achieve that society from 31 century. (Clarke seems to think so in other of his books, there is always some kind of Utopia there)

Nine years after the Discovery's mission to Jupiter (changed from Saturn to match the film), a joint Soviet-American crew including Dr. Floyd is heading for the mighty gas-planet to find out what happened to the Discovery and its crew. Meanwhile David Bowman, now reborn as an Energy Being, is helping the race that created the Monoliths with scouting Jupiter and its moons for primitive lifeforms, hopefully finding one that has the potential to develop sentience.The Final Odyssey brings Arthur C. Clarke's famed series to a merciful end, closing out what was perhaps a misguided effort from the beginning, or at least from 14 years after the first book, when a sequel was written. Fourth in Clarke's Odyssey series (2061: Odyssey Three, 1987, etc.). Here, at the beginning of the fourth millennium, the vacuum-frozen body of astronaut Frank Poole (murdered by poor mad computer HAL in the original 2001) is recovered and revived. Frank awakens to find he's a celebrity in an age of peace and plenty, with space elevators, inertia-less space drives, and miraculous teaching devices. Frank visits Jupiter (transformed into the mini-sun Lucifer in 2010: Odyssey Two) and ponders its ice-moon Europa, where a giant monolith is attempting to develop intelligence among the native lifeforms. And he meets that strange entity composed of Star Child Dave Bowman fused with a copy of now-sane HAL. Dubbed Halman by Frank, the entity warns of bad news arriving from the monolith's guiding intelligences 450 light-years distant: They've decided to destroy humankind. Europa's monolith, though, is just a supercomputer, not intelligent or self-aware, so Frank's associates decide to use Halman as a Trojan horse to infect the monolith with an irresistible computer virus—whereupon all the monoliths vanish. Clarke, while never uninteresting, long ago abandoned drama; here, he simply reports, with the dispassionate precision of HAL before he went bananas.

Plagued with problems" is how I choose to describe "3001." I echo what J. R. R. Tolkien said about Lewis's conclusion to the Space Trilogy: I think it spoiled it. ( The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 393). In fact, I think this series is a good example of when a good franchise goes bad. "2001" is euphoric, "2010" is idealistic, "2061" is optimistic, but "3001" is sarcastic. The future may have been a let-down, but his books need not be. Mil años después del comienzo de la odisea con el hallazgo del primer Monolito, los dos protagonistas vuelven a ser los tripulantes originales de la Discovery: Frank Poole y David Bowman. In tying up loose ends, we learn more about the entities that sent the Monoliths to earth. While this novel is not terrific, I’ve enjoyed Clarke’s exploration and vision of these invisible hands seeding the universe and acting as interplanetary farmers. (Note: much of this is speculated in the previous novels so I don’t think they really count as ‘spoilers’.)In his exciting new novel, Clarke reveals the ominous answer about the ultimate purpose of the monoliths.” — Daily Telegraph I snorted when I recognized the man who was to be the main character, but went with the idea since it was a way for Clarke to 'prove' a theory he mentioned briefly in 2001 but which I very greatly doubt could really be possible. But truth is stranger than fiction, so who knows, this event might happen. Not sure I would want to be the person to experience it, though. Then ending of 2001 indicates that the Monolith can act as a wormhole and it transports Bowman to another solar system, apparently that of its builders. The sequels do not include any form of faster-than-light travel or communication and Bowman is said to have been "absorbed" by the monolith rather than transported anywhere. The book hasn't aged well in the 25 years since I last read it in 1998. No one seems to take vacuum-energy speculations seriously these days. Clarke's speculations about an inertia-less space drive remain an unlikely SF dream. But the space-elevator project should be do-able at some point, perhaps some centuries from now, as the book suggests. And rounding up ice from the outer solar system to (for example) terraform Venus is a solid speculation. And who knows what other scientific and engineering discoveries will be made a few centuries from now?