Book Bearings
2001
Book 1 of Space Odyssey
- 237 pages · about 4 hours
- First published 1968
- 117 editions
Bookshop.org links may earn us a commission. It supports independent bookstores and costs you nothing.
1 About this book
Three million years ago, a strange crystalline monolith appears among a band of starving man-apes in Africa, and they begin to use tools. In the age of space travel, a discovery on the Moon leads to a mission toward the outer planets aboard the spaceship Discovery, with the astronaut Dave Bowman among its crew and the computer HAL 9000 in control of the ship. Arthur C. Clarke developed the novel alongside Stanley Kubrick's film of the same name, drawing on some of his own earlier short stories, and it was published in 1968, after the film's release.
- Computers
- Science fiction
- Interplanetary voyages
- Human-computer interaction
- Twenty-first century
- Space vehicles
- Space travel
- High interest-low vocabulary books
2 What to expect
The novel written alongside Kubrick's film: an alien artifact left for humanity leads to a voyage toward the outer planets in a spaceship run by the computer HAL. It explains much that the film leaves mysterious, in clear, cool prose with careful attention to how space travel would work. It is a book of ideas about human evolution and intelligence, with thin characters and a measured pace.
Good for readers who want: classic hard science fiction, big ideas about human evolution, and a short read.
3 About Arthur C. Clarke
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
4 More by Arthur C. Clarke
5 Similar books
- The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
- Contact by Carl Sagan
- Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott
- The Island of Dr. Moreau by H. G. Wells
- The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams
- Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card
- The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
- The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov