2010: Odyssey Two

birbsophone

This post covers Arthur C. Clarke’s second novel on the Space Odyssey Series. For my post on the first book, click here.

Introduction

Although this continuation covers some of the criticisms I’ve commented on the first novel up, it also has many plot holes and irregularities. Although managing to grab my emotions at one point, it has unfortunately not gone much further from that.

The Story

The novel starts between Dr. Dimitri Moisevitch and Heywood Floyd from the previous novel, after Bowman’s disappearance near the mysterious monolith (previously in Iapetus, author decides to switch its location to Io which is a moon of Jupiter), where they talk about the second mission to investigate the massive monolith and its surroundings.

USA and Russia is in a race to rescue Discovery, hanging alone far away from Earth, and Dimitri discusses that it’s quite apparent Russia would be the first to get to Discovery. Dimitri, in this bureaucratic war between the US and Russia, tells Floyd that an American engineer who knows all the ins and outs of Discovery should join the crew that’ll board the Russians’ spacecraft Leonov. Dimitri also says that Discovery might not always follow its supposed orbit around Io, and that there always might be a miscalculation.

After this discussion between the two, the book skips to Floyd’s house, and goes through a small backstory for Floyd, his sadness about his wife which had died in a plane crash, his second wife Caroline, their children from his old wife and Christopher from Caroline.

Here, Floyd gets a phone call from Victor Millson. Millson talks about 2 top-secret documents that’ll soon arrive at Floyd’s house, and how the Russians will reach Discovery before the Americans. 1 hour later, a colonel knocks on Floyd’s door, bringing two sealed envelopes that contain the mentioned documents.

The first document is a short one that contains evidence as to why the Russians will reach Discovery, boarding the Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov. The second document contains evidence pointing to how Discovery could get off of its orbit between Jupiter and Io, which proves Dimitri right on both points. After Floyd is done reading, the colonel talks about Millson’s invitiation to his place which Floyd refuses. The Colonel gives up and leaves. After his leave, Caroline complains about the uninvited guests and how the matter is none of Floyd’s business anymore. But Floyd would already be convinced, with his curiosity and guilt from the accident on Discovery coming ontop.

Then the novel changes the setting again, this time in the lab of Dr. Chandra, who is the creator of HAL 9000. This antisocial Indo-American scientist has dedicated himself to creating artificial intelligence models (genuine ones, mind that). He plans on returning to Discovery, and in the chapter, talks with his other creation, SAL 9000, about how can he revive HAL.

After that, the story skips to the launch time of the spacecraft in Cape, in Floyd’s perspective. This would be Floyd’s first flight since a long time, since his landing on the Moon and the discovery of the Tycho monolith. The crew consists of 7 Russians and 3 Americans (Floyd, Chandra, and Walter Curnow).

In this place, the 3rd American Walter Curnow, throws a small party with drinks and music. Curnow is described to be lively and have a sense of humour, who proves his genius later on. He is one of the engineers of Discovery. A short time later, the spacecraft finally launches. The novel describes, while the ship is going up, the feelings of freedom and forgetting all worldly worries while the spacecraft’s engines loudly thrust the vehicle out of Earth.

Going up, the captain of the crew, Tanya Orlova, describes the outside and their surroundings like a tropical storm, the shining man-made satellites, and more importantly, Tsien, a Chinese “Space Station” orbiting Earth. Floyd, at that moment, thinks to himself, about what they’re after.

Continuing on, at that point everyone unbuckles their seatbelts off to their respective jobs, and soon after, Floyd follows. While thinking about how to traverse the spacecraft packed with food and drinks, Max Brailovski notices and helps out Floyd, and gives him a small, incomplete tour of the spacecraft. Floyd meets the captain, Tanya, and her husband, Vasili, but is interrupted by the doctor of the crew, Katerina Rudenko. She tells Floyd that the time to sleep has come, and that he’ll have plenty of time to explore the small spacecraft. After a few other details unneeded to be covered in this summary, Floyd, Chandra and Curnow go to sleep in their long time sleep capsules.

The novel skips to the time when Floyd is woken up. While normally Floyd is supposed to get woken up when Leonov arrives at Jupiter, he wakes up early, by the order from the Earth.

The reason as to why he was woken up is that Tsien, unexpectedly was built in space and mounted with rockets, which means there’d be a secret third winner in the race between USA and Russia.

The only thing Leonov can do is to stay and watch, and again, unexpectedly, the Chinese launch themselves ahead not to Discovery, but land on Europa, a moon of Jupiter. The crew figures out the possible reason for this, and it is that Europa contains water. Which means there is fuel for Europa.

A short while later Floyd is woken up, this time by his normal, regular, human sleep, when Tsien appears to be in some sort of trouble; it had lost contact with Earth. Leonov tries to communicate with them, and about an hour later of trying, contact is made with a member of Tsien’s crew. The crew member in question directly calls out to Floyd.

The person who’s made contact is named Chang, he introduces himself as someone who met Floyd in a conference years ago, and tells them to send a transmission to Earth that contains the message that there are lifeforms on Europa. He tells what went down in Europa, and how they got attacked by a creature that emerged from the water, and that their ship got destroyed. Unfortunately, there is nothing Leonov can do, aside from sending the transmission.

Leonov then, similar to Discovery, goes into Jupiter’s orbit to slow itself down. And with this orbit, it finally reaches Discovery. It was also time to wake Chandra and Curnow aswell, since they had arrived at Jupiter.

After closing in on Discovery, Walter and Max go outside to explore Discovery and check on its status. Thanks to Discovery using ammonia as fuel, most of it hasn’t evaporated and there is enough fuel to go back home. But some additional repairs to the spacecraft was needed, and because of the constant fluctutations of heat in the spacecraft due to the explosions on Io, the stored food had spoiled and the air in the spaceship had gone foul.

Moving on, the rest of the crew works on the monolith now named Big Brother, or as Russians call it, Zagadka, which means “enigma”, or “mystery”, but they get no results from the still monolith, always standing tall.

Continuing, Nikolai Ternovsky, proficient and cybernetics and a control and guidance officer aboard Leonov, start a therapy on HAL along with Chandra to restore HAL to its mature state again.

Then the novel also describes what the astronauts do in their free time, their small meetings where they express themselves, and games where they tell their own stories they went through. The novel also mentions how Americans would regularly speak Russian; and Russians, English with each other, all without realizing.

Then the story suddenly changes perspectives to David Bowman, which the previous novel had left in an open-to-interpretation ending. Disappointingly, the question as to “What happened to the Earth, what next will happen?” gets answered as “Nothing much.” here, as the “megatons of force” Dave unleashed upon Earth turns out to all get absorbed by its atmosphere.

“Even though he was the conqueror of Earth, he wasn’t sure of what to do with it. He’ll still think of something.” was how the previous book ended, but he seems to do nothing at all and goes on Earth, in a trip down the memory lane.

And then the book suddenly introduced a Jessie Bowman, Dave’s mother, who lives in some sort of nursing home with hologram maids which only Jessie realizes isn’t human. I find this detail rather odd. Why?

Then Dave meets Betty who was Dave’s girlfriend back when he was a teenager, through her TV. They talk. Another unnecessary detail, in my opinion.

Dave continues exploring the Solar System, while trying to figure out his own reason of existence in his current form, which is the superior lifeforms using him as a tool. He observes the sensitive balance of the ecosystem in Europa. Then he moves onto Jupiter and observes new lifeforms which look like clouds. Then he goes into Jupiter’s core, finds out that it’s made out of diamond and also covers it with something I’ll just name a “device”.

For lore reasons I’ll mention here that the book cuts off again and describes Floyd’s sadness on Caroline finally and inevitably growing distant from him, as they hadn’t met for a long time.

Then it switches back to Dave. He somewhat begs the lifeforms to at least warn the Leonov crew, and the lifeforms accept but command him not to reveal their plan.

Dave, knowing he shouldn’t suddenly appear in front of the entire crew, decides to enter Discovery and makes contact with HAL to make it open the door. HAL refuses, Dave forces in.

Then there’s a sudden, confusing flashback to when Dave disassembled HAL’s memory modules. Why?

Moving on. Floyd, who is doing a night shift in Discovery (along with Max who is shifting in Leonov), notices something’s off and goes to investigate, and talks to HAL. HAL says that there’s a message for him, no sender. Floyd thinks it’s one of the jokes the crew had prepared for him again, but it is Dave, who warns that they should go back to Earth in 15 days, before the opening window for when it’s time to go back to Earth. Floyd has a hard time believing, so Dave manipulates the dust in the spacecraft to take form. Dave warns again, now that Floyd believes him, then vanishes.

Floyd tells what’s happened the other day to the crew. Naturally, the crew approaches with skepticism. Among the astronauts now lies an air of worry.

Leonov also catches news of the anomalies that has happened in Earth, namely Bowman’s mother’s mystic encounters and her death, and Bowman’s girlfriend’s encounter with him. I find that to make little sense as well.

Although captain Orlova refuses to go back before the opening period, she still lets the crew prepare and take measures and make plans just in case as long as it doesn’t interfere with their jobs. At that point only a miracle could convince Tanya Orlova.

The plan the crew had decided on was to mount Leonov on Discovery, expend all of Discovery’s fuel to speed Leonov up, leave Discovery in Jupiter’s orbit and go back to Earth.

The miracle Floyd expectantly waited for happens. While Floyd is watching the explosions on Io, he noticed something missing. To verify its reality on this night shift, he calls Sasha who is watching over the other ship. Quoting Sasha; “Nothing extraordinary for this part of the universe. Io is doing its job. Jupiter. Stars. Oh my God!”.

Three million years later, Zagadka had vanished. The crew makes an emergency meeting in 15 minutes, and captain Orlova is surely convinced.

The previously mentioned plan is conducted. The crew also worries again that HAL might go rogue again with these sudden new issues of commands.

HAL accepts the new plan. There is a countdown, and Discovery conducts its last flight, with Leonov strapped to it. While this happens there’s a request from Earth; which tells them to investigate and take photographs of a massive, black, perfectly circular stain on Jupiter.

This black stain is made of millions of small dots, becoming gray near the edge.

The book continues on HAL, this time commenting on whether AI really thinks or not. So it answers my previous question. Yes, in this novel, AI is sentient. And how HAL would feel loneliness in Jupiter, far away from humanity. Curnow is also holding onto his remote controlled HAL killer.

The black stain turns out to be millions of more Zagakdas. Or Zagadki. The monolith consumes the resources of Jupiter and rapidly multiplies and recreates itself with the expended resources.

As a last scare, HAL tries to convince the crew to stay and investigate what’s going on in Jupiter. Chandra tearfully refuses, and HAL understands. Discovery is unstrapped from Leonov, to collect information from Jupiter in its stay.

Leonov, once again similar to the previous novel, uses Jupiter’s orbit to its advantage to speed up and slingshot off with extra speed, towards Earth.

David, at that moment, visits HAL once again, and sends a message to Earth with its help. Then Dave absorbs HAL’s conscience and becomes one with it. Similar to how the other intelligent creature absorbed David’s conscience.

Then, the now-incredibly-dense Jupiter, collapses on itself and becomes another Sun. Now Europa has its own Sun too.

Now I’ll clarify the message HAL had sent:

“ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS – EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE.”

This new Sun is named by man later on, and it is Lucifer.

Floyd, after witnessing this, finally goes on to his sleep capsule again, to be waken up in the Earth.

The novel finished off with Europans. The Europans gain sentience, explore their world, find reason for their lives, and wonder why the shining lines on the space (which are man’s spacecrafts’ trails), never land on them. And it finishes off there.

Bit long post this time. My hand slipped a little. But now, time for my thoughts on the story:

My Criticism

  1. As spoken before, I don’t like Godhood and mysticism in Sci-Fi. Nitpick, but worth mentioning.

  2. Inconsistent: Suddenly changing the monolith’s location from the first book is unappealing and confusing. And Dave not actually doing anything to Earth with his godly powers is disappointing.

  3. Unnecessary characters that appear once and never again: Dr. Dimitri, Victor, Christopher, and Caroline, whose name I still forget sometimes. It bloats the story and dialogue.

  4. A massive, blatant plot device: Jupiter, now Lucifer (or just Zagadka), has no real contributions to the story aside from advancing the plot. This new sun isn’t too useful either, simply making it more convenient for Europans to survive.

What I Liked

  1. HAL’s nature, and not being as blurry as it was on the first novel.

  2. Once again, technically impressive: Like the Zagadka being a von Neumann machine. A von Neumann machine is a device that obtains resources and reconstructs itself to multiply with what it has gained.

  3. Good descriptions of the surroundings.

Conclusion

I want to like this novel more, but in my opinion, there are some baffling decisions that drag it down. 6/10.