2001: A Space Odyssey (novel)

Clarke, Arthur C. 2001: A Space Odyssey. New York: NAL, 1968. Based on the filmscript by ACC and Stanley Kubrick. Rpt. NYC and other cities: Penguin-ROC, 1993. For translations, reprints, and other bibliographical information, see the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, as of December 2022, here.[1]

The deep-space ship Discovery is run by the computer HAL 9000. See under Drama, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (film). Clarke's novel is highly useful for explication of the film, but is somewhat different from the film, for one thing, friendlier to the human characters (the most moving death in the film is the lobotomy of HAL 9000; that is significant).

NOTE-1: In Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece, q.v., Michael Benson asserts, "Actually, there's no evidence that Kubrick wrote a word of the novel — though without question he contributed significantly to its contents and was certainly the chief author of the screenplay [...]" (p. 70). See Clarke's The Lost Worlds of 2001 (1972)[2] for the importance of Kubrick's comments and "Notes," driving Clarke to brilliance as well as in the direction, anyway, of a breakdown.

NOTE-2: Whatever the status in anthropology of "the predatory transition" and Robert Ardrey's theory of a weapons transition for human evolution, the idea in its weapons form does appear in 2001 as novel and film,[3][4] and it is repeated as recently as 2023 in The Coming Wave. Writing on the technological waves of stone tools and fire (not necessarily weapons), Suleyman and Bhaskar tell us that "The evolution of Homo sapiens rode these waves. We are not just the creators of our tools. We are, down to the biological, the anatomical level a product of them" (p. 27).

See under Fiction, J. W. Campbell's "Forgetfulness."

RDE, Initial compilation, ed. 6Jul18, expanded 28Mar24