The story begins when men are still in the man-ape stage of evolution. Some strange object comes down to them and helps develop their minds. The story then skips to 2001. A black monolith named TMA-1 has been found on the moon because through maps they could see a magnetic field pinpointing it, as though it wanted to be found. It is perfect geometrically. Its dimensions are 1, 4, and 9, the squares of the first three integers. At the same time, a spaceship is on a trip to Saturn. It has an artificial intelligence on it named Hal. Only Hal knows the true purpose of their trip, and in the end it will be directly connected to the happenings on the moon. David Bowman is part of that crew, and will undergo a great change by the end of the book. But I don’t want to say too much or you won’t get to find out yourself.

The way the book sets up all the clues is very intruiging. As you read it's sort of from one clue to the next. You get to the first exciting thing and then you have to read to find out what's going on, and then you get another exciting thing, and so on. And of course the whole concept of what happens and the strange ideas in the book are interesting, like the idea of humans evolving to the point where they are a mind free of body.

A lot of the scientific jargon didn't appeal to me. There were a lot of mechanical descriptions I couldn't quite grasp and they made the story drag a little in a few places.

I wanted to go on a space adventure! haha. But really-I did! I wanted to go out on a search for intelligent life.

It made me feel very disconnected. As I went outside all I could do was look up at the sky and just wonder about the possibility of other intelligent life. I've always thought it likely. It also made me realize, at the same time, what tiny worlds exist on our own, like how much bigger the earth seems to an ant.

He actually co-wrote a screenplay for this as a movie first, but then he wrote the book based on the screenplay, filling in more details for better explanation.

The thoughts it gives you are very interesting.

I completely recommend this book unless you can't stand to put up with a little scientific jabbering here and there.

Here are some quotes I like from the book:



“So for every man who has ever lived, in this Universe there shines a star.”



“...Moonwatcher would sometimes reach out and try to touch that ghostly face rising above the hills.”



“It was hard to imagine how the system could be improved or made more convenient. But sooner or later,...it would pass away, to be replaced by something as unimaginable as the Newspad itself would have been to Caxton or Gutenberg.”



“...the newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull.”



“...this world had been shaped and molded by other than terrestrial forces, operating over eons of time unknown to the young, verdant Earth, with its fleeting Ice ages, its swiftly rising and falling seas, its mountain ranges dissolving like mists before the dawn. Here was age inconceivable-but not death, for the moon had never lived-until now.”



“The time was fast approaching when Earth, like all mothers, must say farewell to her children.”



“It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand...”



“It was an eerie sound, for it had nothing to do with Man; it was as lonely and as meaningless as the murmur of waves on the beach, or the distant crash of thunder beyond the horizon.”



“...any man, in the right circumstances, could be dehumanized by panic.”



“There might be creatures in the universe to whom a thousand-year voyage would present nothing worse than slight boredom.”



“They speculated...that mind would eventually free itself from matter. The robot body, like the flesh-and-blood one, would be no more than a stepping stone to something which, long ago, men had called “spirit”.”



“On yet another world, intelligence had been born and was escaping from its planetary cradle.”

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Created Nov 27, 2002 at 7:57pm • Submit your own review...