 here we are at part five of my space odyssey franchise overview i'm going to be talking about the book 2061 published in 1987 while the soviet union was still a thing my last two videos were over 20 minutes long and i i have to stop doing that i was going to talk about the the plot but i'm not going to do that i'm going to skip straight ahead to the problems again arthur c-clark picked the year 2061 because that's when hallie's comet is going to come back and he wanted to write a story where people visit hallie's comet and walk around on the surface of it so he did that it's got nothing to do with any plot it has nothing to do with contributing to or advancing the odyssey verse ideas there's a diamond the size amount ever is that crashes into europea again it means nothing i mean and like the previous book there's chapter after chapter after chapter of bad writing it's really long clark attempting to to to write characters having social interactions and it's just not good but then at the end of the book when all the action is over and in an epilogue basically the ghost of david bowman shows up along with the ghost of howl nine thousand the the the star child of david bowman and they explain that uh they are in fact just simulations that uh david bowman has been dead all this time and howl nine thousand has been destroyed all this time and these star children so-called star children super beings are just simulations that the big monolith on europea is running inside its internal computer so arthur c clark is is basically just saying fuck all you and he just tosses this in at the end after you've read this whole book this whole story that has some interesting parts and some interesting ideas but has nothing to do with space odyssey or monoliths or or the advancement of the human race are anything and then right at the very end he just tosses this in like it's nothing and then david bowman says that um lucifer the the jupiter star is going to burn out in about a thousand years so what's the point why did the monoliths bother to do what they did in the last book and the the epilogue from the last book the 20 000 one epilogue is impossible now so what's the point there's not much else to say about this book actually one other thing this is the first time that arthur c clark introduces a woman character who actually is a plot point who actually contributes a plot point and does something that that advances the story the the captain of the leonard in the previous book she was just set dressing she did nothing in this book there's a woman named roxy she's a black woman from south africa so it's it's a woman and a person of color this is absolutely the first person of color in in the odyssey verse she is a terrorist who hijacks a spacecraft and then commits suicide when the hijacking fails and that's it that's it for women and people of color in the odyssey verse arthur c clark had a problem with women he did we have to admit that so that's it for 2061 i'm i'm just gonna end it right there and not say anything more and i'm i'm gonna go straight into recording my comments about 3001 which are going to be much much worse much worse you can support 30 second sci-fi and my other projects by becoming a patron there's a link in the description below and visit the 30 second sci-fi tumblr that's my headquarters in addition to my videos i publish links and updates there every day