Name: 2001
ISBN: 9781423315469

2001

A novel that proposes an idea about how the human race might have begun and where it might be headed...given a little help from out there. A colaboration of ideas with director Stanley Kubrick in the late 1960's it begins at "the dawn of man" and then leaps to the year 2001 where a mission to Saturn (Jupiter in the film) is mounted to try and answer questions raised by the discovery of an ancient artifact dug up on the moon. Though not particularly fast paced, the science is good, and there are a few hair raising events. There are also interesting speculations about the future, such as the space shuttle, and a device eerily similar to an iPad. Leaving plenty of room for contemplation and the appreciation for the inevitable trials of space travel, this is one of the truly landmark pieces of hard science fiction.

What Hacker News says

kwhitefootMay 2015

Sci-fi seems to mean 'anything that looks vaguely technical in a story'.

SF, especially, hard SF, has always tackled grown up questions.

Here are a few I have recently re-read:

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, Saturn's Children by Charles Stross, Engines Of Light by Ken McLeod, 2001 by Arthur C. Clarke, Robots of Dawn, etc. by Isaac Asimov.

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staplungSep 2023

Well, kinda, eventually. The book of 2001 points Discovery 1 at Iapetus, a moon of Saturn. Evidently, the special effects crew for the movie couldn't do a convincing job of faking Saturn because of the rings so they did Jupiter instead.

Then when Clarke did the book for 2010 he retcon'd it to match the movie.

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twoodfinMar 2017

There is no "canon" explanation for the film, since Kubrick did not provide one, and 2001 was, at heart, his movie, independent in significant respects from Clarke's novelization and later sequels.

That being said, I think the onscreen evidence for Clarke's version is compelling. Most notably, it solves the mystery highlighted by the article as to why HAL didn't kill Bowman on the first EVA: If the computer could have engineered a plausibly innocent loss of contact with Mission Control, he could have acted freely to preserve both the astronauts' ignorance and the success of the mission without worry of being contradicted by the ground-based twin computer (which he surely knew would eventually diverge from his decision-making, having not been informed about the Monolith).

Once the astronauts were told of the divergence and took it seriously enough for their discussion in the pod, HAL had no remaining options.

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