2061

2061: Odyssey Three is the third installment in Arthur C. Clarke's Space Odyssey sequence, published by Del Rey in December 1987, five years after 2010 and nineteen years after the original 2001. By the late 1980s, the Space Odyssey books had become a firm fixture of mainstream science fiction, and the appetite for more was real; 2061 was a New York Times bestseller, and Clarke wrote it knowing he had an audience waiting for whatever he chose to do next.

The circumstances of its writing are unusually well documented, and they rather neatly explain the book's somewhat divided personality. Clarke had originally planned to delay a third Odyssey novel on the grounds that NASA's Galileo probe was due at Jupiter in the late 1980s, and would for the first time give us proper detailed photography and data on the Jovian moons. Clarke being Clarke, he wanted to write into the real solar system rather than a guessed one. Then, in January 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger broke up shortly after launch, and Galileo's mission was delayed by years; it would not eventually launch until October 1989, and would not arrive at Jupiter until December 1995. Clarke decided not to wait. Instead, he took his timing cue from a different astronomical event entirely: Halley's Comet had returned to the inner solar system in 1986, and would return again, on its roughly 75-year orbit, in the year 2061. That cometary return gave him both a title and an anchor point, and the book was duly published the year after the comet's flyby.

The plot is two stories in parallel. Heywood Floyd, now 103 years old and a permanent resident of an orbital hospital because his bones can no longer cope with full Earth gravity, has been invited to join a small group of celebrity guests aboard the privately owned spaceliner Universe, which is to attempt humanity's first crewed landing on Halley's Comet. Meanwhile, on board the Universe's sister ship Galaxy, Floyd's grandson Chris is part of a tour scheduled to make a flyby of Europa. Both ships are part of the same operator's fleet, both are doing the kind of high-budget science-tourism that the book imagines as the natural endpoint of mid-twenty-first-century commercial spaceflight, and both of them, by the time the book is over, will find themselves dealing with far more than their itineraries originally suggested.

The hook that turns the two-strand structure into a single plot is Mount Zeus, a vast new feature that has been seen on Europa since Jupiter's transformation into the second sun Lucifer at the end of 2010. A geologist working out of a base on Ganymede, the second-generation Afrikaner refugee Rolf van der Berg, has come to a startling conclusion about what Mount Zeus actually is, namely a single enormous diamond, forged from the carbon of the gas giant under enormous pressure when Jupiter collapsed and reignited. The economic and political implications are obvious and enormous. When the Galaxy is then hijacked and forced down onto Europa (which has been off-limits to humanity since the alien injunction that ended 2010: ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS, EXCEPT EUROPA), Mount Zeus and the warning collide with each other, and Universe is obliged to abandon its comet expedition to attempt a rescue. The mechanism by which Universe gets to Europa fast enough is one of the book's best ideas, and one I will not spoil here; it leans on a piece of cometary physics that Clarke clearly enjoyed working out.

What 2061 does well, it does very well. The Halley's Comet landing sequence is hard-SF Clarke at full strength, with the comet rendered as a real and slightly terrifying object rather than the romantic streak of light it appears as in the sky. The Mount Zeus revelation is the kind of cosmic-scale geological reveal Clarke had been good at since Childhood's End. And Floyd at 103, irritable, frail, occasionally magnificent, is one of the more touching late-period creations in the sequence; you get the sense that Clarke, by then in his seventies himself, was thinking quite seriously about what it meant to keep on going. The book is also the place where the Lucifer system, that strange second sun in the outer solar system, is most fully imagined, with its consequences for the climate of the Galilean moons, the slow melting of Europa's ice shell, and the still mostly hidden Europans we glimpse only from a distance.

What 2061 does less well is the through-line. The book feels less essential than 2010, in the sense that 2010 felt necessary in a way that 2061 sometimes does not. The Bowman and HAL material, which is what most readers come to this series for, is comparatively thin; the alien intelligences keep their distance for most of the book, and what we do see of them feels like setup for 3001 (which would arrive a decade later, in 1997) rather than a beat in its own right. The pacing has the slightly episodic quality of a writer working without the underlying scaffolding that an arrived-and-analysed Galileo dataset would have given him. None of this makes 2061 a bad book. It does, however, make it the book in the Odyssey sequence I would recommend least to someone coming to Clarke for the first time.

For Odyssey completionists, though, and for those of us who have followed Floyd from his investigation of TMA-1 on the Moon in 2001 through the rescue of Discovery in 2010, this is a perfectly worthwhile next stop. It tightens up some questions about Europa, it gives Floyd a meaningful conclusion that I won't spoil here, and it sets the table for 3001: The Final Odyssey, which would close the sequence ten years later. 2061 is not the strongest book in the Space Odyssey series. It is, however, an absolutely indispensable part of it.