2001: A Space Odyssey

2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke

July, 1968  Signet Books

If I could see just one movie on the big screen it would be 2001: A Space Odyssey, especially if I could see it on the original Cinerama curved screen setup. Every few years when the movie makes it back into theaters for a special screening I either don’t hear about it or forget about it; the closest I ever came to actually seeing it in a theater was when my wife and I were in London in Fall of 2012 and we were out in the suburbs somewhere, I think the place was called Battlesbridge or something like that, and we passed by a theater that had 2001 listed on the marquee. But the start time was only shown as “Late.” When I asked the snotty British ticket-booth guy when exactly “Late” was, he gave me the snotty British answer that, “It’s generally after the sun goes down and it’s dark out.” I admit, that was very funny, but I was like, “Dude, over in America we have this thing called time.” 

Anyway, I never did see the movie – it had been a long day, and 2001 is a long movie (and not the most snappily-paced one), and the timing just wasn’t right. So I had to be content with my Blu Ray, which I admit I only play every few years, if that. But none of this long preamble has anything to do with the novel at hand, which of course is a well-known book written by one of the more noted science fiction authors of the 20th Century. That said, I’ve never actually read an Arthur C. Clarke novel, even at the height of my sci-fi nerd era as a middle school student in the mid-1980s. Some years ago, in a fit of “vintage space books” collecting, I picked up several of Clarke’s ’60s and ‘70s non-fiction books, like for example The Promise Of Space and Report From Planet Three, but still have not read them – though I have thumbed through them. 

And, judging from this off-hand, casual observation, I want to say that Clarke’s novelization of his own 2001 script reads, for the most part, just like one of Clarke’s non-fiction space books. Whereas Stanley Kubrick’s film leaves much to the viewer’s interpretation, Clarke spends the majority of his novel lecturing the reader on philosophy or explaining how and why this or that happens. In many ways it is a guidebook to a “future” that never happened, same as Arthur Clarke’s non-fiction space books of the era were. For the most part Clarke’s 2001 goes out of its way to leave nothing to the reader’s interpretation, thus cutting out the mystery and esotericism that make Kubrick’s film so fascinating to this very day. 

On the other hand, it is neat to see how this world of 2001 actually works; we’re told how the interstellar craft operate, how HAL 9000 “thinks,” and most notably even what exactly the mysterious Monolith is up to in the Dawn Of Man opening. Again though, this undercuts the drama, and I could imagine Stanley Kubrick (to whom Clarke dedicates the novel) seething at some of Clarke’s “explanations,” mainly because they are rather unimaginative. I mean the Monolith chooses the “Moon Watcher” monkey-man in the Dawn Of Man sequence because he shows the most intelligence of the monkey-men; I mean that’s so much more direct and “duh” than how it’s done in the film, where you wonder if the Monolith itself is directing events (which the novel makes implicit) or if it’s merely the presence of the Monolith that causes the monkey-men to begin thinking. 

This is the line Clarke walks throughout the book. We’ll have a little “narrative material,” where the plot will proceed along, then we’ll have a bunch of expository info-dumping about space exploration. I imagine Clarke must’ve been excited to get this material out to those who wouldn’t be so interested in reading a book about space exploration, but the caveat is there isn’t much “fiction stuff” in his 2001. I mean honestly, if we are looking solely at dramatic thrust and an exciting plot, then the novelization of Moon Zero Two is actually superior. This is of course because there isn’t much plot per se in the film, and Clarke of course follows his own script: the Dawn Of Man sequence, the discovery of the Monolith on the Moon, the flight to Jupiter which climaxes in the psychedelic Dawn Of New Man. While Kubrick follows an absorbing pace (or, conversely, a leisurely pace), letting the visuals tell the story, Clarke must fill pages, gussying up a barebones plot. He does so as if he were writing another of his nonfiction space exploration books; be prepared to learn much of the orbits of asteroids, or what the surface of Jupiter is like. 

That’s another of those little changes to the text – the second half of the film concerns a trip to Jupiter, but here in the novel Jupiter is just the first stop along the way, with Saturn the ultimate goal. That said, there is a sequence – again as if shoehorned in from one of Clarke’s nonfiction books – in which the ship, Discovery, hitches a ride on Jupiter’s orbit to get a boost in speed. This entire sequence is almost lifted from the real-life Apollo 8 mission, which was the first mission in which human occupants of a spacecraft went around the “backside of the moon,” losing contact with Earth. A total “baited breath moment” if ever there was one, but not nearly as dramatic here in the novel – though Clarke does have monosyllabic astronaut heroes Dave Bowman and Frank Poole silently shake hands when the mission completes successfully and they are set on the proper path without any trouble. Curiously this was exactly what real-life monosyllabic astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin did when they landed on the moon over a year after 2001 was published – they silently shook hands. 

All these decades later, 2001 can be seen as its own thing, but it’s clearly intended to be the natural progression of where everyone thought the space race was headed; monosyllabic astronauts Bowman and Poole are terse ciphers, same as their real-world counterparts in the Apollo Program. The Cold War is still on in this 2001, but in the novel it isn’t nearly as pronounced as it is in the film; the only Russian character is a scientist who appears in the brief opening sequence in the Space Station, same as in the movie, but here in the novel we learn he is good friends with Dr. Heywood “Pink” Floyd (not his real nickname, btw). Floyd is our main protagonist after the Dawn Of Man opening (which by the way doesn’t climax with the famous “bone toss” scene of the film), and he too is cut from the same overly-formal and reserved cloth as Bowman and Poole. 

Floyd’s actually less relatable in the novel. The bit of him calling his daughter back on Earth (Kubrick’s actual daughter, I seem to recall) is not in the book, but we do get more about him getting a solo ride all the way from Cape Kennedy to the Moon in a little over a day, all at the behest of the President. Nor is the equally-famous bit where Floyd is introduced, napping in zero-gee on his way to the Space Station, here in the novel. And speaking of which, yes the zero-gee toilet is also in the novel; indeed, we get to see it in action, as Floyd uses it (Clarke focused on the the mechanics of the equipment, I should clarify). We also get a lot more pondering on what the Monolith is, and it’s also carefully explained – several times, in fact – that the Monolith was intentionally buried beneath the surface of the moon three million years ago, and let off a “scream” of radio static when the sunlight touched it upon its excavation. 

In other words, as Floyd explains late in the novel, the Monolith is an “alarm,” one set there by some mysterious race of beings. But otherwise there is a lot of pondering throughout 2001, to the point that the narrative often comes to a dead stop. And it’s all space-geek stuff, too. Like a part where Discovery is coming upon its first asteroid – the orbits of which, we are informed, have carefully been laid out in the navigation so the ship will never encounter any of them on the journey to Saturn – and Poole and Bowman geek out about taking photos of it via missile-launched robot. And this goes on and on, a somewhat thrilling scene…with the caveat that the asteroid is thousands of miles away. But again it’s just a chance for Arthur C. Clarke to show off his knowledge of space exploration and how such things are done, and it’s just more stuff that seems to be shoehorned in from a science journal. 

There is no mystery in Clarke’s 2001. Everything is told in a bald, matter of fact style that comes off as insulting, at least when compared to how the film left so much to the viewer’s interpretation. HAL 9000, referred to simply as “Hal” in the book, also suffers – Clarke is at pains to explain away the AI’s responsibility for the events of the final quarter. Again, the movie leaves it vague; did Hal go nuts, or is it the effect of the Monolith? (Notice how when the Monolith appears, it also teaches how to kill – first the man-apes who kill animals and then their fellows, and later in the film HAL 9000 goes on a killspree.) All the events on Discovery are different in the novel: Poole’s fate, the fate of the scientists still in cryo – even Bowman’s fate is different, as after all this happens, including his shutting down of Hal, he’s on the ship for three more months before we get to the Star Child finale. 

This is what I mean about forward momentum being nil in the novelization of 2001. I mean really. We have this huge catastrophe on the ship…then a few pages later we have Bowman walking around the cleaned-up ship and listening to opera. Even here there is endless pondering and info-dumping; all fascinating if you are looking for science fact, but kind of distracting when you are looking for science fiction. But anyway, I was going on about the explanation on Hal. This is where Heywood Floyd returns to the scene; he calls Bowman (rather than the video briefing Bowman accidentally activates in the film) and tells him that Hal had been programmed with the ship’s true mission, and keeping that knowledge secret caused the AI to go haywire. 

The climax is mostly the same, but instead of a psychedelic lightshow it is, once again, a bunch of info-dumping. Bowman, having reached Saturn and knowing he doesn’t have enough oxygen to surive the years until a new ship can be built to come rescue him, gets in a pod and decides to investigate the massive “Big Brother” Monolith that is floating around the planet. Nearly a thousand feet long, this Monolith is “full of stars,” per Bowman’s frantic last call back to Mission Control on Earth – and no, he doesn’t say anything in the film. But even here, while floating through changing worlds with crashed space ships beneath him and strange sights in the varying skies, Bowman still ponders over everything in a factual, reserved, “man of science” style that is impossible for the reader to identify with. And again it just comes off as several pages of Clarke showing off his knowledge of astrology and science. 

It's also kind of goofy – compared to how creepy the finale of the film is. Here there’s no question Bowman is being watched by aliens as he finds himself in a makeshift cottage…complete with even boxes of cereal! And TV shows with “a famous African reporter” on television! All of it, he realizes, stuff from two years ago, when the Moon Monolith was discovered (neither the film nor the book bother to spell out that the stuff with Heywood Floyd is actually in 1999, not 2001). So Bowman theorizes that the aliens used TV broadcasts of that time to create a perfect little cage for him. Then he goes to sleep(!), and we get a sort of psychedelic sequence where he turns into a Star Child advanced human thing with cosmic powers, Clarke calling back to the finale of his Dawn Of Man sequence earlier in the book: “He would think of something.” 

I’m glad I finally got around to reading Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001, but to tell the truth I feel that he took away a lot of the film’s magic. Sure, much of the plot is based around Clarke’s own story ideas and whatnot, but still. His incessant need to explain and exposit just stops the narrative dead at times, and the book has none of the ultramod sixties sci-fi vibe I so love, like the film did…a look which I believe reached it’s apotheosis in Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s UFO. Undeterred, Clarke went on to write 2010 and 2061 and others in the series, but I doubt I’ll ever read them – though I will read some of his nonfiction space books.