2061 is the continuing story of Dr. Haywood Floyd, HAL 9000, David Bowman, and the monolith. It’s been fifty years since Jupiter ignited and turned into Lucifer. Dr. Floyd has the once in a lifetime opportunity to visit Halley’s Comet aboard a brand-new space liner. Everything is going well until their sister ship has an emergency at Europa. What’s worse is Haywood’s grandson, Chris, is part of the crew. Will the monolith let them approach the moon? Will they have time to mount a rescue mission?
The story feels a little like 2010 was rehashed, and Clarke admits parts of it were. I felt like there was a lot more potential for something more original, but we do get to satisfy our curiosity about Europa and the creatures that life there. We also get a tiny bit more information about the monolith and what happened to HAL and Dave. I think it’s an excellent read and certainly fills in more blanks before we get to the conclusion of the series in 3001: The Final Odyssey.
The beginning of the story is a little slow. We learn about Floyd’s divorce and his life aboard the space station in addition to why he can’t go back to Earth. We learn that society has progressed a little more in the intervening years. His friends aboard the station are a nice gay couple. It’s quite progressive for the 1980s when this was written. We meet some of the celebrities of the day and that it’s still a let down to meet them in person.
We’ve known comets are made of ice and rock for generations, so it was no surprise that they used the comet to refuel the ship. The entire first part of the book was just a lead up to going back to Jupiter. I don’t think we really get much more of the story from that standpoint. There’s also not much about their trip between Earth and Jupiter. What we do get, though, is brought up to speed on what happened to Chris Floyd, Haywood’s grandson.
It’s not until the end of the book that we learn that the monolith is nothing more than a machine. We learn the Dave and HAL are both part of it, along with Haywood now. We learn that Jupiter had life that was wiped out. We also learned that the creators of the monolith were wise enough to use Dave and HAL as sort of a moral compass after what happened with Jupiter. (Imagine that the advanced civilization that created the monolith and sought out intelligence across the universe makes mistakes.)
I think it’s interesting how Clarke makes his characters experience the smallest parts of life while aboard the ships. It’s almost like he’s peering into his crystal ball once again and describing what life is like. It is currently 2022 and we are nowhere near making a manned flight to the moon or Mars much less Jupiter. We don’t have hibernation. We don’t have large ships that can use water as propellant. There are no intelligent computers, either. What we do have is video phones.
While this isn’t the best book of the series, I think it’s an important part of the overall story arc. If I were writing it, I might have made it 2510 or something closer to the actual midpoint before jumping all the way to 3001.
