"3001: The Final Odyssey"... a SyFy Original Miniseries

Well I'm definitely not expecting much given that it's Syfy, I have to admit it is a really cool and bold idea, and I am curious to see the final result. And with Ridley Scott involved, it at least has a chance of being somewhat decent and respectable.

 

Agree. Both 2061 and 3001.

 

Yeah, I honestly think 2061 would make for a better movie or miniseries. 3001 felt more like something he had written for the sake of it being written rather than as a need for it. I felt that 2061 had already wrapped up the overarching story. It was annoying in 3001, how he tried to account for everything, as if he had to explain how or why everything occurred to begin with. And I hated the whole plot device.

I think most people would identify with 2061 more as it deals with the return of Halley's comet, and is more of a soap opera.

What I'm actually really looking forward to is Aldrin's Encounter with Tiber miniseries. I don't think it's been officially announced yet, but from what I can, it's in early pre-production:
http://www.teamtiber.com/

It's still too early to tell, but given Syfy's renewed interest in sci-fi, I wouldn't doubt it if it appeared on there.

 

Not sure if the South African based part of the story would be viable anymore. It was written during the world's stand against apartheid.

 

I had a copy of Encounter with Tiber autographed by Buzz Aldrin. My brother gave it away. :-/

I liked the concept of Tiber, but the execution was lacking. Besides reading like a cross between Erick von Daniken and James P. Hogan's Inherit the Stars, I often found too much narrative distance between the narrators of each section and the events they were describing. It was like all the interesting stuff was happening off-stage.

 

Yeah, I remember you mentioning it. You must hate your brother for that!

Dunno, but I really liked it, and I think perhaps a miniseries adaptation could really bring it to life. It might fill in the blanks, so to speak. I felt it was a particularly touching and awe-inspiring story.

 

...so. 2001 and 2010 are now set in the past.

Kinda makes 3001 tough to take.

 

I suspect if they do allude to the events of the original movies, they'll probably avoid giving the precise year they took place in. And pretend it's still vaguely in our future sometime.

 

Didn't they change the years the first 3 books took place at some point?

 

^ Pretty much every book in the series has rebooted the timeline to some extent.

 

I have a copy of Tiber signed by Buzz while I was interviewing him, just after Chris Morris had failed to scam him into doing an interview for Brass Eye: "Beat that!" (actually, that hardback is currently wrapped in the slipcase advance cover for The Tides of Tiber...)

It's interesting... here and on Facebook (as Allyn will know), there's a lot of good will for the neglected 2061. Far more than for 3001.

 

I don't see why. Did everyone stop watching "Space Seed" when 1996 came and went and there were no Eugenics Wars? And 3001 is still extremely far in the future. Clarke was fond of changing the continuity with each book anyway. No reason 2001 can't be retconned to 2051.

 

I personally liked 3001 more for Clarke's look into the future than it's continuation of the 2001/2010/2061 stories. Bowman/HAL plot was just a minor portion, almost an afterthought.

 

^^ I didn't like the HALman concept. I had been looking forward to the idea of the trinity that he introduced in 2061.

As for who could play Poole, I think that guy who played McCoy in nuTrek would be pretty good.

Yeah, that looks great, too.

Yeah, that was another frustrating thing about 3001. He made specific references that the events of the other books took place much later.

 

Events of 2061 might be referenced or seen in flashback. I don't recall it being an essential instalment.

I hope the makers of the new show don't stick religiously to the 3001 novel - Clarke had an infuriating habit of disregarding or revising previous events or novels entirely and this is a chance to follow the film continuities and disregard the stupidity of '2001 actualy didn't happen in 2001 !'

 

Well, technically, it didn't, at least not entirely. It takes years to travel from Earth to Jupiter (or Saturn), after all. In the book, the Heywood Floyd/Lunar portion of the story happens in 1999.

Anyway, as I said, Clarke made a deliberate choice to make each book a different variation on the theme rather than attempt to maintain a consistent continuity. As he explained in his forewords, this was partly because the advance of science had rendered certain ideas in the earlier books obsolete. It's not "stupid," it's just the creative choice of a writer who valued accuracy over serialization. Remember, as a rule, Clarke never wrote sequels to anything, never built continuous universes. It was his creative choice to start over afresh with every work. That's not stupid, it's just different from the tendency of authors like Asimov and Niven to build large connected universes. Making each work independent had its own benefits, like the freedom to tell stories that totally transformed humanity (e.g. Childhood's End) and couldn't possibly fit together with his other books.

The only reason Clarke ever did sequels to 2001 at all was because there had been so much fan pressure, and because his publisher knew they would sell. But in a sense, he was selling out by doing the sequels at all. I can't blame him for choosing to do them in his own distinctive way and make them each separate takes on the theme. It would've been a worse sellout if he hadn't.

 

I'm cool with this. Clarke's world-building is IMO first-rate, and there are so many ideas in any of the 2011 series that even visualizing a tenth of them alongside a derivation of the plot would make the series worthwhile.

And it doesn't bother me that much how the events happened in the past of our present. It only really afftected Poole anyway, and then Halman, but after Poole wakes up how much time is really spent on dwelling on the past? I'm guessing they'll just brush away how stuff happened in th far past as being just that. If we take the perspective of people living in 3001, would it make that much difference if Discovery One reached Jupiter in 2001 or 2101?

Mark

 

Ugh, that was the worst. Very contrived. I understood why he did though. I mean, two iconic characters , something people would identify from the previous stories, into somewhat of a super-being. It probably sounded good on paper, but I felt it took away from two great characters.

I didn't so much have problems with that. I mean, when you read the original book and then watch the movie, for the most part, even with differences in mind, they contribute to each other as a whole. You get a bunch of insight into Dave's mind as he goes through that journey at the end by reading the book. And taking differences in mind, I kind of tell myself it's the effects of space travel doing weird things to the space-time continuum.

I think the difference here is that he set his hooks deep into 2001 for this story, and so those differences are more noticeable. Essentially what he tried to do was come full-circle to 2001, and so the references are a lot more direct and sometimes awkward.

 

Great news! Funny, I'm actually listening to this audio book, one of my favorites!

 

I loved 2001 (both the movie and the novel) and enjoyed 2010 (again, both the movie and the novel) despite its flaws. But I thought 2061 was disappointing, and 3001 was just horrible. I can't imagine what they would use from it for a miniseries, since the book barely had any plot.