About the Book

2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 science fiction novel by Arthur C. Clarke. It was developed concurrently with Stanley Kubrick’s film 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.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:A_Space_Odyssey(novel))

Review

Science fiction, or Speculative Fiction, is typically about ideas, and can be properly referred to as a “literature of ideas”. The writing is important, just as spices are important to make a food tasty, but the meat is in the idea. While other genres function portray or mirror human lives and society, SF talks about what might happen. The entire genre is built on speculation, and sometimes, the ideas comes true in the future and sometimes not; whether it does or not is never the point.

2001: A Space Odyssey is a classic science fiction book that plays with two ideas. One famous strand explores the occurrence and consequence of an AI (the computer HAL 9000) going astray and behaving erratically due to an internal conflict. This storyline was not very convincing for me. HAL acts as it does due to an internal conflict because it was told to hide information from two of the spacemen. Why was this information to be hidden from the spacemen? The reason for this is quite shallow and detracts from the story. Nevertheless, this idea of a sentient villainous machine is famous and even more relevant now, as we grapple with similar possibilities of adversarial AI behavior. Another strand explores the answer to the Fermi paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox): “But where is everybody?”, everybody referring to extraterrestrial civilization. The Fermi paradox can be asked in two ways.: (1) “Why are no aliens or their artifacts found on Earth, or in the Solar System?” and (2) “Why are there no signs of intelligence elsewhere in the universe?”. Arthur C. Clarke posits one solution in this book.

The other interesting part of the book is about the Odyssey to Saturn itself, where Arthur C. Clarke takes us through all the planets until Saturn almost as if he is a tour guide explaining and showing us the planets, their moons, and their features. This part reads almost like a documentary or an informal pop-space encyclopedia entry, and is a pleasant introduction to the various planets.

This is a good book (written to mirror the famous Stanley Kubrick film) and is a great read for anyone interested in the space around us and Space itself.

Selected Interesting Ideas in the Book