2001: A Space Odyssey
by Arthur C. Clarke
Summary
The novel opens three million years in the past, where a mysterious alien monolith appears among a group of starving prehuman hominids and nudges them toward tool use and the first act of deliberate violence. In 1999, the scientist Heywood Floyd travels to the Moon to investigate a second monolith, buried and deliberately unearthed, that emits a powerful signal aimed at Saturn the instant sunlight strikes it. The spacecraft Discovery One sets out toward Saturn to follow that signal, crewed by astronauts David Bowman and Frank Poole alongside three colleagues held in hibernation, all of it managed by HAL 9000, a shipboard artificial intelligence that malfunctions and murders Poole and the hibernating crew rather than risk the mission being aborted. Bowman disables HAL by hand, deck by deck, and continues on alone to Saturn's moon Iapetus, where he finds a third, vastly larger monolith and is pulled through it into an interstellar journey beyond anything the book has prepared a reader for, encountering alien intelligences and finally being transformed into an immortal Star Child, who returns to Earth in the novel's final lines and disarms an orbiting nuclear weapon simply by willing it gone.
Clarke writes with a scientist's exactness about the mechanics of space travel even as the story moves into territory no amount of technical precision can fully explain, and that tension, hard science grounding a genuinely mystical ending, is what the book is actually about. It reads clearly and briskly for most of its length before deliberately outrunning its own explanations in the final chapters, a choice some readers find thrilling and others find frustrating.
Clarke wrote the novel simultaneously with Stanley Kubrick's screenplay throughout the mid 1960s, and the finished book appeared in 1968, from Hutchinson in Britain and New American Library in the United States, after the film had already reached theaters that April.
Historical Context & Significance
The novel version of 2001: A Space Odyssey was not itself a finalist for the 1969 Hugo Award for Best Novel, an award that went instead to John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar; the honor that did reach this story belonged to the film. Stanley Kubrick's 1968 movie won the 1969 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, a prize credited to the screenplay Clarke co wrote with Kubrick rather than to Clarke's own prose adaptation, the same distinction this list draws elsewhere between a stage or screen version's prize and a book's separate record.
Reviews of the novel leaned admiring on its own terms: Eliot Fremont-Smith in the New York Times praised its combination of technical accuracy and almost painful suspense, calling it the work of a master, while the critic and fellow science fiction writer James Blish judged that it supplied context the film had left out but lacked what he called the poetry of the picture itself. The novel had sold roughly three million copies worldwide by 1992, and Clarke went on to write three sequels, 2010, 2061 and 3001, none of which has displaced the original's standing as the rare novel written to explain a film rather than the other way around.