At the opening of the third millennium, humanity is spreading throughout the solar system, terraforming Venus, and already settled on the moons of Jupiter. Enter one who is effectively a time traveler--astronaut Frank Poole, frozen in deep space ever since, a thousand years ago, he became HAL 9000's victim (as viewers of the movie 2001 will recall). The revived Poole makes a fine observer, through whom Clarke leads readers on a tour of humanity's future, and he is also the key to contact with David Bowman, last seen encrypted in a giant black monolith on Ganymede. And making contact with Bowman saves humanity, for the monolith was programmed by its creators to destroy humanity, a plan foiled after it is injected with a computer virus. 3001 can stand alone from its predecessors in Clarke's Space Odyssey saga and is an intelligent romp, distinguished by Clarke's usual and inimitable wit and an unusual (perhaps unwelcome) strain of grumpiness about religion. Expect demand for it as the conclusion to perhaps the most influential sf series ever--thanks to the movies--and supply generously. Science Fiction Book Club main selection. (Reviewed January 1 & 15, 1997)

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. (First serial to Playboy; Literary Guild alternate selection)"