 Cover of the first American edition | |
| Author | Arthur C. Clarke |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Robert McCall |
| Language | English |
| Series | Space Odyssey |
| Genre | Science fiction |
| Publisher | Hutchinson (UK) New American Library (US) |
Publication date | June 1968 (1968-06)[1] |
| Publication place | United Kingdom |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover, Paperback) |
| Pages | 221 (US) 224 (UK) |
| ISBN | 978-0-453-00269-1 |
| Followed by | 2010: Odyssey Two |
2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968science fiction novel by English writerArthur C. Clarke. It was developed concurrently withStanley Kubrick'sfilm 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, including "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.[2] An elaboration of Clarke and Kubrick's collaborative work on this project was made in the 1972 bookThe 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 Clarke's 1953 short story "Encounter in the Dawn".
A mysterious alien civilization uses a tool with the appearance of a large crystallinemonolith to investigate worlds across the galaxy and, if possible, to encourage the development of intelligent life. The book shows one such monolith appearing inprehistoric Africa, three million years ago, where it inspires a starving group ofhominids to develop tools. The hominids use their tools to kill animals and eat meat, ending their starvation. They then use the tools to kill aleopard preying on them; the next day, the main ape character, Moon-Watcher, uses aclub to kill the leader of a rival tribe.
In AD 1999, Dr.Heywood Floyd travels to the Moon'sClavius Base, where a scientist explains that they have found an electromagnetic disturbance, designatedTycho Magnetic Anomaly One (or TMA-1), near the craterTycho. Excavation has revealed a large black slab, precisely fashioned to a ratio of 1:4:9 (or 12:22:32) and therefore believed the work of intelligence. Visiting TMA-1, Floyd and others arrive just as sunlight falls upon it for the first time since it was uncovered; it emits a piercing radio transmission which the scientists determine is directed atIapetus, a moon ofSaturn.
A mission,Discovery One, is sent to Iapetus. En route, Dr.David Bowman and Dr.Frank Poole are the only conscious humans aboard; their three colleagues are insuspended animation, to be awakened near Jupiter. TheHAL 9000, anartificially intelligent computer addressed as "Hal", maintains the ship. The first stages of the mission are achieved as planned and on schedule.
While Poole is receiving a birthday message from his family on Earth, Hal tells Bowman that the AE-35 communication unit of the ship is going to malfunction. Poole takes one of theextra-vehicular pods and swaps the AE-35 unit; but when Bowman conducts tests on the removed AE-35 unit, he determines that there was never anything wrong with it. Poole and Bowman become suspicious at Hal's refusal to admit that his diagnosis was mistaken.
As Poole is replacing the unit, he is killed when his pod accelerates into him, crushing him. Bowman, uncertain of Hal's role therein, decides to wake the other three astronauts, and therefore quarrels with Hal, with Hal refusing to obey his orders. Bowman threatens to disconnect him if his orders are not obeyed, and Hal relents. As Bowman begins to awaken his colleagues, he hears Hal open both airlocks into space, releasing the ship's internal atmosphere. From a sealedemergency shelter, Bowman gains a spacesuit and re-enters the ship, where he shuts down Hal's consciousness, leaving intact only his autonomic functions, and manually re-establishes contact with Earth. He then learns that his mission is to exploreIapetus,[3] in the hope of contacting the society that buried the monolith on the Moon. Bowman learns that Hal had begun to feel guilty at keeping the purpose of the mission from him and Poole, against his stated mission of gathering information and reporting it fully; and when threatened with disconnection, he panicked anddefended himself out of a belief that his very existence was at stake, having no concept of sleep and that one may waken from it. Hal had feared that his disconnection meant death.
Bowman spends months on the ship alone, slowly approaching Iapetus. During his approach, he gradually notices a small black spot on the surface of Iapetus, and later finds it identical in shape to TMA-1, only much larger. The scientists on Earth name this monolith "TMA-2", which Bowman identifies as a double misnomer because it is not in the Tycho crater and gives off no magnetic anomaly. When Bowman approaches the monolith, it opens and pulls in Bowman's pod. Before he vanishes,Mission Control hears him proclaim: "The thing's hollow – it goes on forever – and – oh my God! –it's full of stars!"[4]
Bowman is transported via the monolith to an unknown star system, through a large interstellar switching station, and sees other species' spaceships going on other routes. Bowman is given a wide variety of sights, from the wreckage of ancient civilizations to what appear to be life-forms, living on the surfaces of abinary star system's planet. He is brought to what appears a pleasant hotel suite, carefully designed to make him feel at ease, and falls asleep, whereupon he becomes animmortal "Star-Child" that can live and travel in space. The Star Child then returns to Earth, where he is attacked by an atomic device aimed at him by the people on Earth to which he is impervious. And then he thinks what else he might do.
Over the course of the novel, several minor characters either appear very briefly or are named only in passing, including other man-apes, spaceflight staff, lunar station security, andDiscovery crew members. Among the novel's minor characters, some of the more consequential are listed below (often having direct film equivalents, or else being recurring characters in theOdyssey novel series).
2010: Odyssey Two, a 1982 sequel to the book, was adapted asa motion picture in 1984. Clarke went on to write two more sequel novels:2061: Odyssey Three (1987) and3001: The Final Odyssey (1997). To date,[update] the last two novels have yet to be adapted as films.
James Blish commented that while Clarke's narrative provided essential elements of the story that Kubrick ignored or glossed over, "The novel has very little of the poetry of the picture" and "lacks most of the picture's strengths", but that "it has to be read before one can understand the picture".[6]
Eliot Fremont-Smith reviewed the book positively in theNew York Times, stating that it was "a fantasy by a master who is as deft at generating accelerating, almost painful suspense as he is knowledgeable and accurate (and fascinating) about the technical and human details of space flight and exploration".[7]
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Although the novel and film were developed simultaneously, the novel follows early drafts of the film, from which the final version of the film deviated.[8] These changes were often for practical reasons relating to what could be filmed economically, and a few were due to differences of opinion between Kubrick and Clarke. The most notable differences are a change in the destination planet fromSaturn toJupiter, and the nature of the sequence of events leading to HAL's demise. Stylistic differences may be more important than content differences.
Stylistically, the novel generally fleshes out and makes concrete many events left somewhat enigmatic in the film, as has been noted by many observers. Vincent LoBrutto has noted that the novel has "strong narrative structure" which fleshes out the story, while the film is a mainly visual experience where much remains "symbolic".[9] Randy Rasmussen has noted that the personality of Heywood Floyd is different; in Clarke's novel, he finds space-travel thrilling, acting almost as a "spokesman for Clarke", whereas in the film, he experiences space travel as "routine" and "tedious".[10]
In the film,Discovery's mission is to Jupiter, not Saturn. Kubrick used Jupiter because he and special effects supervisorDouglas Trumbull could not decide on what they considered to be a convincing model ofSaturn's rings for the film.[11] Clarke went on to replace Saturn with Jupiter in the novel's sequel2010: Odyssey Two. Trumbull later developed a more convincing image of Saturn for his own directorial debutSilent Running.
The general sequence of the showdown with HAL is different in the film from in the book. HAL's initial assertion that the AE-35 unit will fail comes in the film after an extended conversation with David Bowman about the odd and "melodramatic" "mysteries" and "secrecy" surrounding the mission, motivated officially because HAL is required to draw up and send to Earth a crew psychology report.[12] In the novel it is during the birthday-message to Frank Poole.
In the film, Bowman and Poole decide on their own to disconnect HAL in context of a plan to restore the allegedly failing antenna unit. If it does not fail, HAL will be shown to be malfunctioning. HAL discovers the plan by reading their lips through the EVA pod window. In Clarke's novel, Ground-Control orders Bowman and Poole to disconnect HAL, should he prove to be malfunctioning a second time by predicting that the second unit is going to fail.[13]
However, in Clarke's novel, after Poole's death, Bowman tries waking up the other crew members, whereupon HAL opens both the internal and external airlock doors, suffocating these three and almost killing Bowman. The film has Bowman, after Poole's murder, go out to rescue him. HAL denies him reentry and kills the hibernating crew members by turning off their life-support. In the sequel2010: Odyssey Two, however, the recounting of theDiscovery One mission is changed to be in line with the film version.[14]
The film is generally far more enigmatic about the reason for HAL's failure, while the novel spells out that HAL is caught up in an internal conflict because he is ordered to lie about the purpose of the mission.[15]
Because of what photographed well, the appearance of the monolith that guided Moon-watcher and the other 'man-apes' at the beginning of the story was changed from novel to film. In the novel, this monolith is a transparent crystal;[16] in the film, it is solid black. The TMA1 and TMA2 monoliths were unchanged.
In the book, HAL became operational on 12 January 1997, but in the movie the year is given as 1992.[17] It has been thought that Kubrick wanted HAL to be the same age as a young bright child, nine years old.[citation needed]
In the book, Heywood took a ground vehicle for the 200-mile-journey from Clavius Base to TMA-1, a mobile lab "rolling across the crater plain at fifty miles an hour" that resembles "an outsized trailer mounted on eight flex-wheels" and is capable of hopping across obstacles "on its four under-jets". The vehicle is referred to as a "bus". In the film, however, Heywood took a wingless shuttle that flies the entire 200-mile journey. Even at moon-gravity, such flying may not be technically or economically feasible.[citation needed]
In the book, the Discovery spacecraft has large "dragonfly wing like" radiator panels to prevent its high temperature nuclear reactor propulsion system from melting. The film originally also featured radiators but Kubrick removed them since he wanted to avoid the appearance of "wings" on a spacecraft intended for deep space missions only.
The name of the Saturnian moonIapetus is spelledJapetus in the novel. This is an alternative rendering of the name, which derives from the fact that "consonantal I" often stands for "J" in theLatin language (seemodern spelling of Latin).
In his detailed 1970 book on the film,The Making of Kubrick's 2001,[18] author Jerome Agel discusses the point thatIapetus is the most common rendering of the name, according to many sources, including theOxford English Dictionary. He goes on to say that "Clarke, the perfectionist", spells itJapetus. Agel then cites the dictionary that definesjape as "to jest; to joke; to mock or make fun of". He then asks the reader, "Is Clarke trying to tell us something?"
Clarke himself directly addressed the spelling issue in chapter 19 ofThe Lost Worlds of 2001,[19] explaining that he simply (and unconsciously) used the spelling he was familiar with fromThe Conquest of Space (1949) byWilly Ley andChesley Bonestell, presuming that the "J" form is the German rendering of the Greek.
The film2010 was released in 1984 resulting in movietie-in editions of both the2001 and2010 novels. At the timeSignet Books reported that over 2.8 million copies of2001 were in print and that2010 was one of 1983's top sellers with 300,000 hardcover copies and 1.75 million first paperback editions printed.[21][22]
Later this month '2001: A Space Odyssey' will be published as a novel.
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