In the book 2010, Clarke states that all monoliths are the same size: however large they need to be to perform the task at hand. He also has one of the characters describe the monoliths as “a cosmic Swiss Army knife”.
Anyone care to spoil 3001 for me (or, if it was really that bad, save me).
Been a while since I read it, but basically, they find Poole floating in space and manage to revive him. He is then given a tour of the Earth. The entire population of the Earth now lives in giant towers located along the equator. These towers reach all the way up to geosynch orbit. Humanity can no longer live on the Earth, for reasons never explained in the book. At some point in the book, people realize that the monolith is breaking down and is planning on wiping out humanity, so they concoct a scheme with the help of Bowman, who is still “alive” inside the monolith in some form, to infect the monolith with a computer virus so it will self destruct and not wipe everyone out. They manage to do this, and then store a copy of the virus (along with Bowman) in a vault on the Moon, so that if they ever need to use it again, they can.I’ve probably missed a few details, but the book is pretty forgettable, IMHO. No real character development, no real plot. It reads to me like Clarke had half a dozen or more ideas that he didn’t think he’d live to get down unless he smashed them altogether into one book.
In 3000, they find Frank Poole’s body floating out in space and resserect him and bring him back to earth. They give him a guided tour of the future, complete with space elevators made of diamond from jupitor’s core. About half the book is Clark talking about how religion and the 20th century are primative and horrible, (which gets really, really annoying after awhile). Towards the end, the plot begins to kick in when they start talking about a star that exploded when it was apparently not supposed to and they believed that the monolith makers were responsible. Apparently to destory some life they had helped create that hadn’t panned out so well. Floyd/Hal/Bowman have all become one entity and help them try to infect the monoliths in the Solar system to prevent the same thing from happen here as well. They do it by using some sort of computer virus, which apparently is so dangerous that it must be stored in an airtight vault, carried through a vaccumm by a robot and then the robot melted down afterwards. The end of the book says that they’ll have to wait another 1000 years to know if it will work.
I read it when it was released and all I recall from it was thinking, over and over again, “This is what happens to writers who move to Southeast Asia in order to engage in pederasty,” and “Here is another spot where he was probably buggering another Thai girlie-boy instead of working on plot and character development.”
Not that I have any real evidence to support thse opinons. It’s just what kept going thru my head when I read the book.
I recall nothing of the story, except quite a lot of proselytizing about the corruption and decadence of 20th century western culture – which was interesting only because that’s the culture he ran away from and chose instead to live in BF Southeast Asia…
(Admittedly, his royalties probably do go much, much further over there…)
Um, bughunter, got anything at all to back that up? I was under the impression that Clarke move to the tropics just because he liked the climate better. He’s said on many occasions that he hates winter. Or is there some other reason to suppose that he’s a pedophile? That’s a pretty serious thing to imply about someone.
It’s been the rumor for a number of years now. The Sri Lankan police have investigated and state that Clarke has been engaged in “nothing illegal.” In checking ageofconsent.com I find that sex between gay males is illegal at any age and that the age of statutory rape has been raised from 12 to 16 in the past few years.
The computer game SimEarth featured a tip of the cap to Clarke by including a monolith feature to help speed along a culture’s development.
I’ve got friends who’ve met Clarke. According to them, he’s gay, but not a pederast. His knighthood was originally held in abeyance due to the charges, but has since been conferred, so he was evidently found innocent. Besides which, he’s not exactly young.
The news accounts I’ve read stated that Clarke asked the Queen to hold off on it until he was cleared of the charges. I do know that he hung around with William S. Burroughs while working on 2001. You can draw your own conclusions from that.
Quoting myself:
Like I said, I have absolutely no evidence whatsoever supporting those rumors. My post was intended to describe how my experience reading 3001 was so immemorable that those thoughts, however inaccurate, were the most memorable events of the ordeal.
In other words, the suckage was so bad, I could hear the slurping from here.
[yes, I’m doing it again. Intentionally this time. 
If this were GQ or even GD, I’d care whether or not I had a cite.]