2010

Nine years after the disastrous Discovery mission to Jupiter in 2001, a joint U.S.-Soviet expedition sets out to rendezvous with the derelict spacecraft to search the memory banks of the mutinous computer HAL 9000 for clues to what went wrong and what became of Commander Dave Bowman. Without warning, a Chinese expedition targets the same objective, turning the recovery mission into a frenzied race for the precious information Discovery may hold about the enigmatic monolith that orbits Jupiter. Meanwhile, the being that was once Dave Bowman, the only human to unlock the mystery of the monolith, streaks toward Earth on a vital mission of its own.

2010: Odyssey Two, first published in 1982, is Arthur C. Clarke's direct sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey, and an interesting one because it isn't quite the sequel to either of the works most readers think of when they hear "2001". Clarke's 1968 novel and Kubrick's near-simultaneous film differed in several significant respects, the destination among them (Saturn in the novel, Jupiter in the film), and for 2010 Clarke quietly aligned his fiction with Kubrick's, accepting Jupiter as the canonical setting for what came next. It's an unusual move from a novelist of his stature, but the right one. The result is a book that picks up from the version of 2001 most people remember, while being unmistakably a Clarke novel in the way that the film never was. Where Kubrick gave you awe and mystery, Clarke is by temperament an explainer rather than a mystic, and 2010 is more interested in working through the questions every reader of the original was asking. What went wrong with HAL? What did the monolith actually do? Where is Bowman, and what has he become? Some readers prefer the unresolved Kubrick version; some are grateful for the explanation. Both responses are fair.

The plot machinery sets a joint American-Soviet recovery mission aboard the Soviet ship Alexei Leonov, named after the cosmonaut who in 1965 carried out the first spacewalk in history, on a course for the derelict Discovery and the monolith still orbiting Jupiter. Heywood Floyd, who readers will remember from his earlier brush with the monolith on the Moon, is along for the trip. A Chinese ship, the Tsien, has also launched on a parallel mission and reaches the Jovian system first, with consequences that should not be spoiled here but which constitute one of the book's most memorable sequences, and which announce the presence of life in the solar system in a way that genuinely shifts the stakes of the wider series. What makes 2010 distinctive beyond its plot, though, is its science. Clarke wrote it in 1982, after the Voyager probes had returned detailed images of Jupiter and its moons (including the surprising volcanism of Io and the strange icy surfaces of Europa), and he folded those discoveries directly into the novel. The result is the rare sequel that is more scientifically grounded than the original, because Clarke now had a real solar system to write into where he had previously been working with educated guesses. The book's vision of Europa, in particular, has aged extraordinarily well; current speculation about life beneath the moon's icy shell maps far more neatly onto Clarke's 1982 imagination than it has any right to.

The Cold War context is also worth flagging. 2010 was published at the height of one of the more dangerous periods of American-Soviet tension, and Clarke's decision to make the recovery mission a cooperative one between the two superpowers, with the politics of distrust running quietly through the background, was a deliberate gesture rather than an accidental one. The book reads more poignantly in retrospect than it did at the time. The Soviet Union did not, of course, survive to see the year 2010, and yet the book's underlying optimism about cooperation, science, and the value of grown-up institutions acting in concert is among the things that have dated best. The same cannot quite be said of the characters, who in Clarke's usual way tend to function as competent professionals rather than as fully fleshed people, or of the prose, which is more interested in clarity than in beauty. If you came to Clarke for the lyricism of, say, Le Guin, you'll continue to find him brisk. But that briskness is also part of why he works as a writer. He gets out of the way of the ideas, and the ideas in 2010 are large, generous and at points genuinely transcendent.

2010 is a worthy successor to 2001 and a fine sequel by any measure. If you've only seen the films, this is the book where Clarke takes the wheel back from Kubrick and tells you, more or less, what he thinks happened. If you read the original novel, this is the natural and rewarding next stop. And if you've come to Clarke late and want to start with the books, this is a defensible place to begin; he kindly summarises enough of the first novel that the sequel works almost as a standalone. It's old fashioned, in the best sense: the work of a writer who believed that the universe was worth taking seriously and who never stopped trying to share what he found in it.