3001: The Final Odyssey

Clarke, Arthur C. 3001: The Final Odyssey. UK: Voyager Books / US: Del Rey Books, 1997. The fourth and last book of the Space Odyssey'' series, relevant for a number of issues. Noted in the highly useful Wikipedia entry, there are Clarke's favored space elevators, and "the BrainCap, a brain–computer interface technology." A more radical human/computer interface is the "Halman" meld of Dave Bowman and HAL 9000, although this is less radical than it might be since "Dave Bowman's transcendence as a star child is now explained as a relatively mundane case of being uploaded onto a computer," specifically the Jovian "monolith's computational core." Crucial for the story is the technology that allows Frank Poole, killed in 2001 to be revived in 3001, and the ET technology of the monoliths. That monolithic technology (so to speak) comes to threaten humanity on Earth and its colonies and is destroyed by Halman acting as itself a computer virus and the source of a computer-virus infection. "Halman uploads itself into a petabyte-capacity holographic 3D storage medium and thus survives the disintegration of the monoliths, but is infected with the virus and is subsequently sealed by scientists in the Pico Vault. At the close of the story, Poole and other humans land on Europa to start peaceful relations with the primitive native Europans" evolved from their form in 2010: Odyssey Two. "A statement is made that the monolith's makers will not determine humanity's fate until 'the Last Days.'" Quotations from the Wikipedia entry, greatly aiding Richard Erlich's memory of the novel, with the Wikipedia entry our main source here.[1]