2001: A Space Odyssey

Oh man, what a fun, fun read. This tickled all my love for theoretical astrophysics, philosophy about the human condition, and just pushed all of those to the extremity of imagination.

I've not watched the movie myself, but it was also interesting to note that Clarke co-wrote the screenplay with Kubrick on the film, while also working on the novel. Most books and films come one after the other, I think this is my first time coming across a book that is tied so closely to its filmic counterpart.

It's not difficult to see how much the movie Interstellar was inspired by 2001. The story beats are almost identical, although it diverges in its ending. It is the story of a human being who tumbles his way through space towards Saturn, where he finds something beyond all human imagination. The film 2001 has become so iconic that it's hard to know what would constitute a spoiler or not, since so many of its scenes have been widely reproduced and paid homage to by big name directors of today.

This isn't so much what I pictured for a sci-fi novel because it's very much us in our modern world, and perhaps even more realistic today than it was back in 1968 when it was first written, because we've achieved some of the technology Clarke envisioned in this book (in fact, the iPod was named after a line from the movie when it was released in 2001), and have gotten several steps closer to the wilder bits of Clarke's imagination. This book/movie was released in the age of the Space Race, and a year before humans landed on the Moon), a momentous time in human history but also in a time before a lot of technological advancement that we are familiar with today. Some of the things that Clarke envisioned turned out pretty accurate (he correctly predicted that the global population would hit about 6 billion in 2001), and things like the NewsPad devices in this book might have been the inspiration for our ubiquitous iPads today. Some things surpassed even Clarke's imagination - he described the tally of Jupiter's moons as being unbelievably past 30, but we've now discovered 79. He also thought of Jupiter having a surface at all, when it is now common knowledge that Jupiter is a gas giant that doesn't have any kind of rocky surface.

This book was fairly short and goes by really quick, but manages to concisely explore the astrophysical theories that it sets forth. It's engaging enough that I blazed through it in a couple of days. It mixes some beautiful descriptive passages of space travel through our Solar System (entirely from Clarke's imagination since we would only have had very basic and rudimentary photographs of the planets at the time, which makes it all the more amazing), and an absorbing mystery through time and space with several twists and turns.

Because it's so short, I'd really recommend it to just about anyone, but especially those who love theoretical astrophysics, philosophy, and just a good ol' sci-fi mystery. The movie might be polarising in the way it was shot, but I feel that the book is more universally appealing in its storytelling and conveying its ideas.