Arthur C. Clarke - 2001 A Space Odyssey
1968
This is one of those classics of science fiction that I have heard everyone should read. Humanity finds extraterrestrial life, there’s an artificial intelligence with questionable morals, tragedy in deep space, and lots of wonderful world-building. That’s the story in a nutshell, the plot is very simple, but marvelously executed.
I really like Arthur C. Clarke’s writing style, and found his writing compelling, and his characters fairly multi-dimensional, which is a major flaw I see in a lot of classic era sci-fi. I have yet to see the film, so I’m unable to compare and contrast, but I have seen the episode of Futurama which is a parody of the film, so it feels like I have. HAL was sufficiently creepy and morally ambiguous to make him a wonderful possible-antagonist. I’m still not 100% certain of what happened in the last chapter and why, as well as pretty much anything that happened once Dave reached Jupiter, but it was certainly quite a trip through the looking glass.
As I said earlier, I quite enjoyed the book, and would pass it on to any of my friends who enjoy a good book with possibly evil computers. Has anyone out there read the rest of the Space Odyssey books? I usually try to finish up a series, but that’s left me feeling a bit underwhelmed as of late (see Empire series).
