3001: The Final Odyssey - Arthur C. Clarke

For the last book, Clarke brings back Frank Poole, Dave Bowman's crewmate, supposedly murdered by HAL, but apparently just floating preserved in the void for 1000 years, until the space pod was found by comet wranglers out near Neptune. So Frank Poole awakens in a new age (the nurses sadly do not greet him with, 'Welcome, to the world of tomorrow!', or by pretending the world is run by giant, sentient ants), have sadly missed almost the entirety of the Willenium.

Frank may have been found just in time, because whatever's left of Dave Bowman and HAL within the Monolith on Europa have some bad news, and a familiar face may have the best chance of actually being allowed to land on the surface of the world and get the news. It seems the beings who created the Monoliths may not have been terribly impressed with what they saw of humanity during Bowman's initial return to Earth in 2010: Odyssey Two. The question then becomes, what exactly can humanity do about it?

I was going to say the Clarke apparently thinking that we're just about as awful as we could get as a species right now is rather naive, but maybe he figured if we got any crazier or more reckless we'd wipe ourselves out. I could agree with that.

In the future, there's also a Braincap which people get fitted with that allows telepathic communication among other gifts, but also allows your mental state to be monitored. So if you're determined to have some sort of dangerous urges or mental condition, you can be treated. The book does raise the argument briefly about the potential for abuse, but it comes down on the side that it's worth sacrificing some of the sanctity of your own mind on the off chance you are deemed a threat to society.

It doesn't really address who is making these decisions, what the regulatory authority over them is, the obvious potential for abuse that would exist. "You don't like our current leaders? Sounds like you're dangerously psychopathic!" But I'm sure the physicians are entirely independent of anything like that. Yeah, and those doctors monitoring the players for concussions in the NFL aren't being pressured by the multi-billion franchises employing them. Pull the other one. Heck, they do something to people that committed crimes to turn them into basically docile servants of sorts until their "treatment" is finished and then they're reintroduced into society.

If you refuse to be fitted with a Braincap, besides the difficulties this presents in day-to-day life, that in itself apparently gets you marked as someone to keep an eye on. So the old, 'if you have nothing to hide, then what's the problem?' argument hasn't vanished a thousand years from now. 

It may not be fair of me to fixate on this relatively small part of the book, which is probably just in there as a shorthand for scientific advances over the course of time*, but Clarke put it in there and it stuck in my craw. Especially when the argument the characters seem to be making is that humanity's progressed so far from where it was 1,000 years ago, they shouldn't get wiped out because of what they were back then. Kind of depends on what the aliens judge by, though, doesn't it? They might not be any more impressed with Mankind of 3001 than they were by the 2010 version. We don't know; we aren't privy to what equation they're using.

There's still that lack of suspense I noted with the last book. A problem is raised, but there isn't much tension in the writing about whether humanity is going to manage to survive this. They have enough prep time that by the time the problem actually starts to happen they have their solution ready to go. There aren't any tense pages of waiting, people panicking, things sliding into catastrophe. Which is an optimistic view, that if we recognize or are alerted to a problem with sufficient time, we can figure out a solution, even against powers seemingly far beyond us.

'The Grand Ganymede Hotel - inevitably known throughout the Solar System as "Hotel Grannymede - was certainly not grand, and would be lucky to get a rating of one and a half stars on Earth. As the nearest competition was several hundred million kilometers away, the management felt little need to exert itself unduly.'

* In the book, it's mentioned Communism is considered the optimal form of government in 3001, but was determined to not be applicable to humans. So democracy is the best they can do otherwise. A thousand years later, and it's still the worst option, except for all the others we've tried. Looking online, it appears Churchill was quoting some other, unknown source, when he said that. Learn something everyday.