2001: A Space Odyssey
Ratings568
Average rating4.1
A timeless masterpiece. What's not to love about classic science fiction like this? The beginning of the story is very strong and surprising. The buildup to the science fiction world is a masterclass. And the way the characterization is done, the reader can feel the broken, depressed psyche of each character, be it an AI. The ending is also very strong and surprising. I want to read the next books in the series, but it is not easy to pass such an epic saga.
A 4.5 for me. I found Clarke's insight into technology, written decades ago, profound. Without a doubt a classic - its influence on other more modern works of science fiction is immediately apparent.
Fascinante!
No meio do livro - numa cena descrevendo as cápsulas da nave- percebi que o filme estava perfeitamente igual ao livro que fiquei muito fascinado com a adaptação. Só então fui pesquisar a história do livro e descobri que foi escrito em paralelo com o roteiro de Kubrick.
O filme é bem quieto e muito visual. O livro também é muito “visual”, com longas descrições dos movimentos e equipamentos das naves. É como ler um relatório técnico científico do filme. Pra quem gosta de ciência é incrível.
As mudanças entre as obras são sutis, mas o suficiente para deixar a leitura refrescante. A grande diferença de fato é que o livro é bem mais científico, com exceção de um ponto: Hal-9000 me soou um pouco mais “humano” no livro e mais robótico no filme.
Where the book feels self indulgent, the film offers various ways for modern science and audience to adapt to this story. The book prides itself and struts its knowledge as if it has the answers. I believe that it's impossible for this story and that interpretation should be its best friend when it doesn't seem to be. I prefer the film, but I can't deny that the story at hand is the same and it is one of the best to be told. I don't know if I prefer the ape sequence in this or if I just admire the additional depth, but it's extremely effective. High 8/10
Going into this book, I never would have thought that reading it would be such a chore. But, at the same time, I can see why it was so influential when it was first published. The prehistoric section was an interesting intro to the whole book. And then pace takes a dip. It picks back up when Hal starts doing his thing. And then the last section was interesting and boring at the same time. The main thing that I didn't care for was the exposition, even though Bowman found himself in an extraordinary situation. It was a roller coaster of a read and I really had to concentrate in order to not lose interest in some sections. I don't know if I'll continue on with this series.
I was very disappointed in this, the hype was high, the story was adequate.
This was spectacular!
I don't know whether I can find a better word to describe it, nor whether I need to.
This is hands down the best sci-fi book I have read so far, with the most beautiful ending.
There was not a moment of this book that I didn't enjoy.
If you haven't yet read it, please do yourself a favour and pick it up.
Hmm. I'm not sure what to think about this one. I probably did it a disservice using this book as my “read while falling asleep if I go to bed before my wife” book. That means it was read occasionally, in small pieces, sometimes while struggling to keep my eyes open, until I finished it one day while waiting to apply for a passport and reading the final 80 pages or so.
I've probably seen the movie, but don't remember much about it except the iconic scenes. I do want to have the voice of HAL for a GPS and for my voice mail. Perhaps the most enjoyable part of the book for me was the Forward to the Millennial Edition. That was pretty riveting.
As for the book itself, although I only rated it three stars, it will likely go up over time. I appreciate the seminal nature of the book, the unique process by which it came to be, and the impact on society. I feel I missed a lot by not giving it the attention I think it needs, because I missed a lot. I am, however, now spending a lot of time watching reviews, videos on the difference between the book and the movie, and generally picking up many of the things I missed. I'll definitely be rereading it.
Knowing the great swaths of information that was left out of the movie I have little desire to try to see it again as a way to understand the book better, but I am interested in watching it for its artistic merit and the amount of controversy it spawns from people who “just don't get it.”
I don't think Arthur C. Clarke is just destined to disappoint me. I did quite enjoy Rendezvous with Rama, and I do look forward to reading Childhood's End, but I don't have a driving desire to read more of the Rama series or the Space Odyssey series. Am I missing out? Am I not “getting” Clarke and his writing? Perhaps I need to focus more on the ideas than the execution. In the meantime, when I put a book down and I'm spending my time thinking about it instead of running to grab the next one, then there is definitely something to be said for the book. Perhaps that reread will be sooner rather than later.
One more proof of the fact, that the classic sci-fi books (Asimov, Herbert, Clarke) are worlds apart from modern soap operas. Even though they can sometimes be naive and technological progress has already proved some of their assumptions wrong, there's something in them that modern sci-fi books lack, even with all their AI grandeur.
I still love space operas, but reading books like 2001 from time to time is a special kind of pleasure
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.
Ar fi fost culmea sa nu iubesc cartea dupa care a fost realizat filmul meu preferat (cartea si filmul s-au facut in acelasi timp, dar nu stiu cum sa formulez frumos -_-)
Vor einigen Jahren habe ich Kubricks Verfilmung zu 2001 gesehen. Was davon hängen geblieben ist waren die Popkultur Einflüsse und eine nicht endende Lightshow am Ende. Den Film habe ich für mich als overhyped und als nicht vereinbar mit meinen 2010er Jahren Sehverhalten abgelegt.
Nun habe ich in meiner gerade blühenden SciFi Phase dieses Buch aus dem Schrank geholt, welches ich vor einigen Jahren von einem Arbeitskollegen bekommen hatte und bisher sein Leben als Regaldekoration Fristen musste.
Was soll ich sagen - es war eine Erfahrung. Zum einen ist es kurz. Und es liest sich schnell weg. Auch all die Szenen sie wir aus Kubricks Film kennen sind drin. Aber anstelle der niemals endenden LSD Lichtshow war hier einfach nochmal ein gutes Stück Handlung versteckt. Im Nachhinein sogar die beste im Buch. Clarke hat ein Händchen dafür kosmische Begebenheiten zu beschreiben, die einen direkt ein spannendes Bild geben. Beispielsweise seine Beschreibung von Jupiter und Saturn. (Chefkoch-Zwei-Finger-Kuss GIF hier vorstellen) Und im im letzten Viertel haut er richtig raus. ..
4,5/5 oder so.
Being a classic of the genre of science fiction, this has been on my “to read” list for a very long time. I think I kept postponing it because I always thought the movie was kind of boring (although I need to re-watch it now that I'm older, I think it might have just been too cerebral for me as a younger child when I first watched it).
I listened to the audiobook, which was fantastic. Arthur C. Clarke read the introduction himself, which told how he wrote the book with Stanley Kubrick with the intention of making a movie. Also of note is they were writing this as the “space age” was in it's early infancy, which is cool to think about as you're reading the novel.
In the end, I enjoyed this quite a bit. Now, I'm wondering about reading 2010... What do you think? Is it worth it?
The book was written in parallel with the film, both of them before the first man stepped on the Moon, and they're both dated by this. They survive by being well crafted, but they're period pieces.
The book seems ponderous by modern standards. It tells quite an exciting story, but lingers over every detail: Clarke takes a scientist's interest in everything that's going on, and he assumes that his readers have the same interest.
It's a classic story, the encounter between the human and the superhuman, and Clarke tells it well enough, he deserves credit for it. Each stage of the story is told competently, and yet in the manner of a scientist, without flair. It's all a very odd business, because it comes to us from the late 1960s, a time of hallucinations, from a man born in 1917 who was largely immune to it all, and went his own way regardless.
I saw the film in about 1972, but I'd already read the book by then; I was surprised to discover that I no longer have it. I bought the Kindle version just recently in order to reread it. I don't seem to have read it in the last 30 or 40 years. It's not essential reading, but it seems an interesting part of the history of science fiction.
Fantastic. I was blown away. Very interestingly and scientifically written, without the anachronistic old-scifi elements so much classic scifi has. Can't wait to watch the movie.
Been meaning to read this book for a while since I love speculative fiction, Arthur C. Clarke, and the movie. I was lucky enough to see the movie in 70mm last year, and it really was kind of mind-blowing.
Finally picked up the beautiful Penguin Galaxy edition of this and read it today. It really is great. Complements the movie really well. If the movie is all “show, don't tell”, the book is all “tell, don't show”– and it really works. It's classic big-idea science fiction.
তিন তারা... হুম... পসিবলি এক্সট্রাটেরেস্ট্রিয়াল, এক্সট্রাডাইমেনশনাল বিয়িং ও ট্রাভেল নিয়ে অনেক সায়েন্স ফিকশন পড়া হয়ে গেছে বলে বেশি ভালো লাগেনি (হতে পারে সেসব সায়েন্স ফিকশনের অনেকগুলোই আসলে এই বই থেকে অনুপ্রাণিত)। এমনকি কখনো কখনো কাহিনী অনুমানও করতে পেরেছি।
I never fully understood the movie. There are long scenes without any explanation, chimps jumping up and down, unusual scenes without context. Reading this book added that context in every case. Any places I was confused or had questions have now been answered. The book is actually really good sci fi - a precursor to Interstellar or Contact I'm more ways than one. Great read by itself, or even better if you want to understand more from the movie.
I never fully understood the movie. There are long scenes without any explanation, chimps jumping up and down, unusual scenes without context. Reading this book added that context in every case. Any places I was confused or had questions have now been answered. The book is actually really good sci fi - a precursor to Interstellar or Contact I'm more ways than one. Great read by itself, or even better if you want to understand more from the movie.
This book is truly amazing. I wasn't expecting so much. I was afraid that, as many Sci-Fi classics, it maybe didn't age very well. But fortunately I was proven wrong. I can really say it is Science Fiction, as all the astronomy and astrophysics elements as super accurate (at least for the time when it was first written). And in being scientifically correct it is not pretentious in it. The story is very well written and touches a lot of fundamental questions about who we are, what is consciousness, etc. The title itself gives a hint on what the book is about - a hyperbole of Homer's Odyssey on context of humanity and the vastness of space and time. I will definitely come back to it again. I would put this book easily as the best sci-fi classic I have ever read. Period.
Difficile de se faire un avis sur un livre lié à un film aussi marquant. C'est du Arthur C. Clarke assez classique finalement, avec ses qualités et ses défauts.