2001: A Space Odyssey (novel)
Cover of the first American edition
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| Author | Arthur C. Clarke |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Series | Space Odyssey |
| Genre | Science fiction |
| Publisher |
Hutchinson (UK) New American Library (US) |
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Publication date
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1968 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover, Paperback) |
| Pages | 221 pp (US) 224 pp (UK) |
| ISBN | |
| Followed by | 2010: Odyssey Two |
2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 science fiction novel written by British writer Arthur C. Clarke. It was developed concurrently with Stanley Kubrick's film version and published after the release of the film. Clarke and Kubrick worked on the book together, but eventually only Clarke ended up as the official author. The story is based in part on various short stories by Clarke, most notably, The Sentinel (written in 1948 for a BBC competition, but first published in 1951 under the title Sentinel of Eternity). By 1992, the novel had sold three million copies worldwide. An elaboration of Clarke and Kubrick's collaborative work on this project was made in The Lost Worlds of 2001.
The first part of the novel (in which aliens influence the primitive ancestors of humans) is similar to the plot of an earlier Clarke story, Encounter in the Dawn.
In the background to the story in the book, an ancient and unseen alien race uses a device with the appearance of a large crystalline monolith to investigate worlds all across the galaxy and, if possible, to encourage the development of intelligent life. The book shows one such monolith appearing in ancient Africa, 3 million years B.C. (in the movie, 4 million years), where it inspires a starving group of hominids to develop tools. The ape-men use their tools to kill animals and eat meat, ending their starvation. They then use the tools to kill a leopard preying on them; the next day, the main ape character, Moon-Watcher, uses a club to kill the leader of a rival tribe. The book suggests that the monolith was instrumental in awakening intelligence.
The book then tells of the year C.E. 1999, detailing Dr. Heywood Floyd's travel to Clavius Base on the Moon. Upon his arrival, Floyd attends a meeting, where a lead scientist explains that they have found a magnetic disturbance in Tycho, one of the Moon's craters, designated Tycho Magnetic Anomaly One, or TMA-1. An excavation of the area has revealed a large black slab, precisely fashioned to a ratio of exactly 1:4:9, or 1²:2²:3², and therefore believed the work of intelligence. Floyd and a team of scientists travel across the Moon to view TMA-1, and arrive as sunlight falls upon it for the first time in three million years. It then sends a piercing radio transmission to one of the moons of Saturn, Japetus (Iapetus), where an expedition is then planned to investigate. One feature of the exposed monolith was that it absorbed all the sunlight cast on it. Therefore, no shadows were seen on its jet black surface.
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