RIP Arthur C Clarke
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This novel introduced me to the wonders of sci-fi and opened my mind in so many ways.
Rest in Peace - Arthur C Clarke
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The film upon which the book is based looks so much like a remake of the 1960 Italian film, Assignment: Outer Space, I even have to wonder about the title; 2001: Space Oddyssey is even formulated the same way - word, colon, two words.
Pretty much all of the "ground breaking" ideas in 2001, are already there in Assignment; from hybernation to make it through a long journey to a force to be reckoned with exacerbated by an out-of-control computer that kills a pilot. In Assignment, top secret military information is kept from a reporter. In the 2001 movies, the information is kept from HAL's inventor. Both characters end up solving the problem in the end.
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The book of the film... of the book....
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Interestingly the book was written specifically to create a film from and in turn filming changed the book.
The film itself is 2.5 hours of classical music, long shots, little dialogue or exposition. Very much an enigma.
The book is absolutly opposite. Far more dialogue, far more plot, far easier to understand. The book will help lovers of the film to comprehend what their watching.
It's a good story, well told and scientifically accurate... mostly.
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2001
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'2001 A Space Odyssey' is a strange beast, in that neither the novel or the film can really claim to be the definitive story, with both being worked on simultaneously by Clarke and Kubrick, but despite the odd differences between the pair they really do work best complimenting each other. Certainly the book scores over the film in terms of clarity of storytelling, and where Kubrick had to rely solely on (gorgeous) visuals only for both the 'dawn of man' and 'through the star-gate' sequences that begin and end the film the novel can give far greater depth to both, so if you are one of those people who has only seen the movie and is slightly confused as to what actually happens at the end this spells it out clearly. Without reading the novel you really have no way of knowing exactly why HAL malfunctioned, or that device seen orbiting the Earth in the film is a nuclear weapons platform, so this book is really essential for a full understanding of the movie. On other points however the novel is less successful - the rejigged sequence leading to the disconnection of HAL completely loses the drama of Dave Bowman's helmet-less re-entry of the Discovery, and the clever revelation of HAL's lip-reading ability. In fact the book as a whole, while full of brilliant ideas, is entirely lacking any warm characters, and lacks any of the emotional content of the film - even HAL's 'death scene' is unmoving here.
Still, while it may not succeed 100% as a novel in it's own right this makes the greatest science fiction film ever even better, so that can't be bad...
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HAL is just one letter earlier in each instance from IBM
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Another life forming, perspective changing tale. Okay - so you've seen the film but this is a different, more comprehensive medium. It explained much of the film to me and I like Arthur C's easy to read style of writing. The isolation of man when meeting his destiny - the fear, the anticpation and the realisation. But really, all the fun is in getting there and this book is that journey across a million years or so
If and when you've read this a good companion read is "Lost Worlds" ISBN-10: 0283986115 if you can get hold of it - the unpublished reworked chapters from the original draft - a brilliant insight in to how it was conceived and some of the twists introduced. Behind every man there stands a thousand ghosts.
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