2008 books
60) Arthur C. Clarke & Frederik Pohl, The Last Theorem, 2008
Post-hype, no one will be hailing The Last Theorem as the great publishing event we were perhaps led to anticipate. As it stands, it's undistilled wish-fulfillment, a 'Bohemian Rhapsody' of disjointed ideas that Clarke had already visited with far greater success, like a grand tour of his better stories and therefore rather lacking in novelty: solar sailing, space elevators, first contact, peace through technology, transcendence, all threaded into the life of one young Sri Lankan mathematician who also happens to have solved Fermat's Last Theorem (Andrew Wiles's proof is dismissed as inconclusive). With a little reworking it would do rather well as a YA novel. It has one good thing in its favour: a very deft beginning, in which Clarke's and Pohl's introductions segue smoothly into the story itself, like stepping from the shore into the shallow waters of the start of the story with the promise of far greater depth to come, but by the time half the book has gone by you realise that knee-deep is just about the depth it's going to stay. Disappointingly, one for the completists.