The excavation of the monolith triggers a signal to the lunar system around Jupiter. The monolith is then buried on the moon, to be awakened when man has reached an evolutionary capacity for successful space travel.

The monolith teaches them how to turn the objects around them into useful tools. They are visited by a seemingly benevolent alien object, a giant black monolith.

It begins with a gang of prehistoric man-apes, too ignorant to employ tools or weapons, facing extinction due to a lack of food. While Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is not a novelization in the traditional sense, it does read like one, albeit, a very well-written one.Ģ001: A Space Odyssey is a journey from the dawn of man to the destruction of man. Ignorantly, I thought that the movie had been based upon the book, however, as the foreword so eloquently explained, the novel was written concurrently with the production of the movie, with suggestions and input given by Kubrick himself. I can’t be the only one who found Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey to be confusing, so I decided to pick up the novel. With the news that Discovery is slowly being pulled out of orbit, and is set to crash, Russia and America join forces, Leonev’s crew allows the three Americans to come aboard, and Leonev sets off for Jupiter. America has the valuable minds of Heywood Floyd, planner of Discovery’s initial flight, Walter Curnow, engineer, and Doctor Sivasubramanian Chandrasegarampillai (aka Dr. Set nine years after astronaut David Bowman’s fateful flight to Jupiter, America and Russia are in a race to reach his craft, Discovery, and recover information from its databanks. While 2001 will always get more attention, don’t be too quick to ignore the sequel it deals with the same grand ideas as its predecessor, but it does so with a lot more style. 2001 lays some solid groundwork for a good story, but 2010 makes that story richer. I found the characters more compelling, the story more interesting, and the writing keeps pace. 2010 will never have the historical importance of 2001, but there’s a lot to love. Clarke’s fantastic follow-up to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Arthur clarke 2010