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2001 : A Space Odyssey Paperback – January 1, 1990

by Arthur C Clarke (Author)

4.6 9,366 ratings

Book 1 of 4: Space Odyssey

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Arthur C. Clarke has been the presiding genius of science fiction for almost fifty years. His works include the ground-breaking and profound CHILDHOOD'S END, RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA and EXPEDITION TO EARTH. Written when landing on the moon was still a dream, made into one of the most influential films of our century, brilliant, compulsive, prophetic, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY tackles the enduring theme of man's place in the universe. On the moon an enigma is uncovered. So great are the implications that, for the first time, men are sent out deep into the solar system. But, before they can reach their destination, things begin to go wrong, horribly wrong...Look out for more information on this book and others on the Orbit website at www.orbitbooks.co.uk

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 1857236645
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Orbit & Abacus; Special Edition (January 1, 1990)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9781857236644
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1857236644
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 5.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.01 x 0.71 x 4.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #4,747,219 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #56,187 in Science Fiction Adventures

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4.6 9,366 ratings

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Arthur C. Clarke
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SIR ARTHUR C. CLARKE (1917-2008) wrote the novel and co-authored the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey. He has been knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, and he is the only science-fiction writer to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. His fiction and nonfiction have sold more than one hundred million copies in print worldwide.
Photo by en:User:Mamyjomarash (Amy Marash) (en:Image:Clarke sm.jpg) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
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Stanley Kubrick
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Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999) was an American director, writer, producer, and photographer of motion pictures, including the classics Spartacus, Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The SHining, Full Metal Jacket, and others.
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Jesse Evans

One of the best.

Reviewed in the United States on April 17, 2024

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I'm not a fan of the "aliens make ape-men evolve into humans" idea. Sounds too much like Ancient Aliens, though I understand this book was written long before the farcical History Channel TV show. Despite that, I do really like the way the aliens are presented in this book. They aren't guides, they're curious scientists conducting very long-running experiments.
The characters (especially HAL) are good, the plot is interesting, and the pacing is fantastic. This book is an absolute page turner.
Arthur C. Clarke is in good form here. Sometimes his writing is pretty dry, but in this book the writing is exceptional. Just pretend it takes place in an alternate universe where humans didn't stop developing manned spaceflight tech in the 1970's.

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John Cook

Stands the Test of Time

Reviewed in the United States on August 30, 2015

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The Kindle version of this book was cleanly formatted without any noticeable typos, making this a pleasant reading experience in portrait mode. I did notice there were some issues with not allowing for columns for reading in landscape mode on my iPad, but I prefer portrait mode to reading and it was fine with that.

Onto the actual book:

Having seen the film 2001: A Space Odyssey many years ago and being blown away by how powerful it was, and also a bit scared by it. I loved the way it told a story without necessarily explaining everything, and really allowing one's own imagination to fill in some of the gaps. Knowing that there was also a novel, I had always wanted to read it, but never got around to it...upon seeing this Kindle version on sale, I decided to give it a go.

First of all, it was very interesting reading Arthur C. Clarke's introduction at the beginning. Sometimes I don't like reading such introductions because they either somewhat spoil the book you're about to read or don't add a whole lot, but this one was an interesting read for someone who had seen the film but not yet read the novel. I didn't realize that both the screenplay and book were written at the same time...making this a very unique pair as typically one comes before the other...so although this isn't a novel that simply came before a film like many are, or a novelization of a film that had been made (which is typically not worth the time of day to read), it is a novel written by a fantastic science fiction writer inspired by the collaboration of writing the screenplay with Stanley Kubrick.

Much of the book is very similar to the movie, but the way it is written adds many details without being bogged down...this is a very fast-paced read. The writing is focused on the big picture more so than the characters, but the main characters involved in each individual section get fleshed out well enough that it is very gripping to read.

Being written before we'd ever even landed on the moon, it's amazing how well this story stands the test of time. I enjoy stories involving space travel and a lot of times the era something is written can occasionally take you out of the story by laughable concepts or dated science. The feeling I got from this reading was that it explained things in a way that don't date the technology being discussed in any way that ruins the overall story. Although 2001 is 14 years before the writing of this review and clearly many of the breakthroughs and events leading up to this specific story haven't taken place yet or are different than actual history, it is fascinating on some of the things that are part of our reality now...beyond that, this is full of what ifs related to our own existence within a vast universe.

I definitely recommend this reading, whether or not you've seen the film and whether or not you plan to read the rest of the series. I likely will at some point, but this book is great as a stand-alone title.

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Ray F

It helps to read the book to understand the movie.

Reviewed in the United States on October 30, 2015

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I saw the movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey, in 1968 when I was 12 years old. It was as incomprehensible to me as a child, as it was to most adults then. Even so, it was soon considered a classic science fiction film and I have spent most of life not really understanding why. I had heard that the book was much better, but I never got around to reading it until recently. It is, indeed, much better and I think there are several reasons why.

For one thing, the novel was written by Arthur C. Clarke, one of the best SF writers ever. But even so, this novel was written under special circumstances because the story was meant to be a movie from the start--a collaboration between Mr. Clarke and film producer Stanley Kubrick. That collaboration is described by Mr. Clarke in his Foreword to the edition of the novel that I read. He says Mr. Kubrick suggested they start with a novel from which they would derive the screenplay because "...a screenplay has to specify everything in excruciating detail, [and] it is almost as tedious to read as to write."

This is more or less the way it worked out, though toward the end novel and screenplay were being written simultaneously, with feedback in both directions.

That dynamic shows in the book. Though the narrative is engaging, owing to Mr. Clarke's skills, there are sections that seem to be explanatory for the sake of the film. Some of these take the point-of-view of the aliens in general--not of a particular alien character (e.g., chapter 37: "Experiment"). At one point, the narrative even takes the POV of the big monolith Bowman finds on Japetus. And then there are sections that are descriptions of various views in space of suns and moons and planets. They are well-done and intellectually informed, but with only a scant connection to the plot or a character. All these sections seem to be for informing the film producers and for the sake of writing the screenplay. They are informative for the novel reader because they fill in the holes left by the film's ambiguous images, but they lessen the novel's storytelling. They don't lessen it by much, though, mostly because Mr. Clarke was the author.

So the book answers the questions raised by the movie. For instance, it makes clear that the monoliths were tools used by ancient and god-like aliens to influence the evolution of other life-forms. Used on our non-human ancestors of three million years past, it exerted only a small nudge to launch them on the path to the tool-making that promoted the explosion of their intelligence. Understanding that, makes sense of the film's initial scenes of the ape-men and that image of the tossed bone morphing into the space shuttle.

We also better understand why the mission to Jupiter (actually, Saturn in the book) was undertaken. I don't recall whether the movie made it clear that the monolith found on Earth's moon sent a high-powered electromagnetic signal to Jupiter (in the book, it went to Saturn's moon, Japetus) and so prompted the human journey there. It is clear in the book. And the book does contain the sudden shift in narrative from the monolith's signal blasting out into space, to the spaceship, Discovery, as it passes through the asteroid belt. In the book as in the movie, this struck me as too sudden a shift, leaving out a needed bridge. It drops, too suddenly, the POV of Heywood Floyd, whom we had been following since the three million year scene-shift from the group of ape-men. It just doesn't feel right.

Actually, the book did offer a bit of a bridge with chapter Fourteen. There, we see, from the POV of several deep space probes, the flight of the monolith's signal across the solar system. Even a human at the Goddard Space Center is noted, though unnamed, as picking up the signal from the various probes. Then Mr. Clarke sums up the technical observation and dramatic turning point with some smooth, descriptive prose:

...it was as clear and unmistakable as a vapor trail across a cloudless sky, or a single line of footprints over a field of virgin snow. Some immaterial pattern of energy, throwing off a spray of radiation like the wake of a racing speedboat, had leaped from the face of the Moon, and was heading out toward the stars.

The part about the "mutiny" of the HAL 9000 computer in the book is pretty much in sync with what was presented in the movie. The book didn't contain the "lip reading" scene, though, which I thought was a nice touch by Mr. Kubrick. And then HAL's murder of the hibernating crew and attempted murder of Bowman are handled a bit differently, but retains Bowman's surviving for a few minutes in a vacuum without his helmet, and his "lobotomy" of HAL.

The last part of the story, though, is where the book is way easier to follow than the film. This concerns Bowman's investigation of the big monolith he found on the Saturn moon of Japetus and his subsequent capture by it, transport across the galaxy (the monolith is a "star gate"), and finally his transformation into the "Star-Child."

The book makes all this clearer mostly because we have Bowman's inner monologue about what's happening to him, supported by Mr. Clarke's prose exposition. This part contains a lot of those sections where I think Mr. Clarke was explaining things for the sake of the producers, but it still captures the extreme bizarreness of Bowman's evolution/transformation. The reader understands that it is being deliberately done by the aliens. In the movie, that's far less clear. The book notes that Bowman is quickly aware that the "hotel room" he lands in is an artificial construct. He finds proof by examining the objects in the room and from watching the television mounted in the ceiling over the bed. I think the movie would have worked better here for the audience if Mr. Kubrick had incorporated those points.

Finally, because the reader knows that Bowman has been transformed via some speeded-up process of evolution into the Star-Child, the final scene is much less enigmatic. We know that the Star-Child is David Bowman. He has been empowered by being freed from his corporeal body to become a being of energy and taking the form of the Star-Child. He begins to exercise his new power and freedoms and finds he can move across the galaxy at the speed of thought, and so returns to Earth.

All this is depicted in the movie, but not explained. I don't know how many viewers were astute enough to follow that thread.

Now Mr. Kubrick decided to leave his viewers with an artistic image of the Star-Child contemplating Earth. Most viewers were just left in confusion. Mr. Clarke's novel presents a less mysterious ending by keeping the POV with Bowman as the Star-Child and having him save the earth from destruction, making an anti-Cold War statement in the process. And he does this in a final chapter that is less than a page in length. I think it's a much more satisfying an ending.

Overall, I very much enjoyed reading the novel version of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I consider it a better presentation of the story. It contains all the enthusiasm for space age technology that was in the air in the 1960s as a result of all the PR for the "race to the moon." The imagination of that generation was captured by the possibilities of rocket and computer science for enabling space travel and manned missions to the planets. Mr. Clarke's writing reflects that enthusiasm for technology and is amazingly accurate in his extrapolation of it into the future. For instance, he notes the use of personal computers at a time when computers filled rooms. This passage sounds like Dr. Floyd is using an iPad:

When he tired of official reports and memoranda and minutes, he would plug his foolscap-size Newspad into the ship’s information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth.

In this novel, Mr. Clarke not only makes accurate "predictions" as to future technology, but he expresses his love for it, and for its potential of providing humankind a better future. I remember this attitude and it had captured me in my youth, along with the heady desire for humankind's "leap into space." It is a hopeful attitude of the sort that made Star Trek a modern myth and made Carl Sagan's books popular. Today, it has been frustrated by the US "retreat from space" and the convergence of various calamities, but I think maybe it survives in the current escape into video games. But back then, many good people believed in this mythos of space travel and sought careers in technology to be a part of it. Writers wrote about it, as Mr. Clarke does in this book with passages such as:

When Earth was tamed and tranquil, and perhaps a little tired, there would still be scope for those who loved freedom, for the tough pioneers, the restless adventurers. But their tools would not be ax and gun and canoe and wagon; they would be nuclear power plant and plasma drive and hydroponic farm. The time was fast approaching when Earth, like all mothers, must say farewell to her children.

This was the belief and the hope that is all but squashed now by a space agency that is absorbed by a military pushing for constant war rather than space exploration. And it is apparent that Earth will be more than just tamed, she'll be pillaged and raped. And if any humans make it beyond Earth orbit now, they'll likely be soldiers bent on conquest and exploitation, rather than "tough pioneers" or "restless adventurers."

It is conceivable that the state of real-world technology in 2001 could have approximated what Mr. Clarke and Mr. Kubrick foresaw in their story, but the urge to make profits and subdue and rule the earth took precedence over space exploration. Consequently, there appears little hope for real space odysseys anytime soon. Even if an alien artifact such as the monolith were found, I suspect our rulers' would only be concerned with how to exploit it for profit, or how to militarize it.

Still, I understand now why 2001: A Space Odyssey is considered a classic movie, though I think it takes reading the associated novel to reach that understanding. The novel is a reminder for me of the heady days of the "space age" and the "moon race." I had all but forgotten them in these darker times. It may be that pointing out the gap between human dreams of a bold future, and the reality imposed by rulers motivated only by greed and personal power, is the greatest value of this novel. Sometimes truth-in-fiction comes indirectly.

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Arden C. Burns

Well written and well told story

Reviewed in the United States on January 23, 2024

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But it's not my favourite story of all time. I just think the ending is too fantastic and not a desirable fantastic for me personally. But I'm one of those who thinks heaven sounds really boring.

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Mark Tuzi

One of the greats that is time tested.

Reviewed in the United States on July 9, 2023

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If you are looking for titanic battles, this book is not for you. If you are looking for gratuitous sex with green-skinned aliens, this book is not for you. If you are looking for a thought provoking, well written science fiction novel, then keep reading. Arthur C. Clarke gifts the reader with a time-tested novel that drives the imagination. The characters are well rounded. The science is believable and relatable even after half a century.
I’ve seen the movie and this is the first time that I’ve read the book. It was well worth the wait. I will keep this book and pass it on to the next generation so that they can discover something wonderful.

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Bender

Awesome

Reviewed in the United States on February 26, 2024

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If you have seen the movie, you really need to read the book. And if you haven't seen the film, read the book and then watch the movie! Well worth the money and the time. Both the book and the movie are amazing.

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Raúl Bejarano

Tiene el precio para mi presupuesto

Reviewed in Mexico on December 14, 2023

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Me gustó todo, salvó en la portada y la contraportada está algo baja la calidad de impresión.

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Jefferson Pesenty Cantarim

Recomendo

Reviewed in Brazil on June 25, 2023

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Imperdível para quem curte ficção científica. Um clássico!

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rickp

This is a truly timeless book

Reviewed in Canada on March 1, 2020

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This book was originally published in 1968. I vaguely remember seeing the movie decades ago. Recently, while looking for something to read outside of my normal “thriller” genre, I saw 2001. For some reason I decided to buy, and wow, was I impressed. You would never know this book was written 52 years ago. It never gets into any intense, edge of your chair type of action, but it somehow maintains a constant pull on your attention, and near the end, it becomes consuming. I really liked this story a lot.

Rick P.
Winnipeg, Canada

David Bramley

Maybe one of the best SF books

Reviewed in Japan on November 29, 2023

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I have watched the film maybe 20 or thirty times! Although there are some differences between the book and the film, the book is essential in understanding the film. I would recommend reading the book before watching the film. It's a great book. Well worth a read.

Angela

2001. A Space Odyssey (Penguin Galaxy)

Reviewed in Spain on August 1, 2018

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Primero pedir a Amazon que por favor separe las opiniones. Aquí hay opiniones sobre distintos productos, distintas ediciones de un mismo título que nada tienen que ver. Publico esta opinion junto con unas fotos para que la gente que quiera comprar la edición de Penguin Galaxy en inglés vea cómo es el libro.

Segunda petición a Amazon: protejan mejor los libros. Un libro/cómic/manga no es una batidora. Incluso la batidora lleva su propia caja de protección. Los libros no. Lo menos que podríais hacer es ponerles un plastiquito de burbujas porque, como siempre, los libros que compro en Amazon me llegan dañados.

Muy bonito, de tapa dura, no lleva guardapolvo (sobrecubierta).
Cubierta dura de color negro, al tacto se asemeja al cartón o cartulina. Las guardas son rojas. El resto del libro es de un papel de calidad semejante al formato de bolsillo (no tan malo pero casi). No hay ilustraciones. La típica sinopsis del libro no viene en la contraportada (detrás) sino en las primeras páginas dentro del libro. Detrás hay símbolos del mismo estilo que las letras de la portada.