2001 a Space Odyssey: 25th Anniversary Edition - Softcover

Clarke, Arthur C

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0451452739 ISBN 13: 9780451452733

Publisher: Penguin, 1993

Synopsis

The classic science fiction novel that changed the way we looked at the stars....and ourselves.

You are invited aboard the spacecraft Discovery on a voyage to the outer edge of the solar system. Within are two increasingly frightened navigators, three frozen hibernauts, and a computer named Hal....

About this title

Review:

When an enigmatic monolith is found buried on the moon, scientists are amazed to discover that it's at least 3 million years old. Even more amazing, after it's unearthed the artefact releases a powerful signal aimed at Saturn. What sort of alarm has been triggered? To find out, a manned spacecraft, the Discovery, is sent to investigate. Its crew is highly trained--the best--and they are assisted by a self- aware computer, the ultra-capable HAL 9000. But HAL's programming has been patterned after the human mind a little too well. He is capable of guilt, neurosis, even murder, and he controls every single one of Discovery's components. The crew must overthrow this digital psychotic if they hope to make their rendezvous with the entities that are responsible not just for the monolith, but maybe even for human civilization.

Clarke wrote this novel while Stanley Kubrick created the film, the two collaborating on both projects. The novel is much more detailed and intimate, and definitely easier to comprehend. Even though history has disproved its "predictions", it's still loaded with exciting and awe-inspiring science fiction. -- Brooks Peck

Review:

"Dazzling...wrenching...a mind bender."--Time

"Brain-boggling."--Life

"Full of poetry, scientific imagination, and typical wry Clarke wit. By standing the universe on its head, he makes us see the ordinary universe in a different light...[This novel becomes] a complex allegory about the history of the world."--The New Yorker

"Clarke has constructed an effective work of fiction...with the meticulous creation of an extraterrestrial environment, the sort of extrapolation of which Mr. Clarke is a master."--Library Journal

"Breathtaking."--Saturday Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0451452739
• ISBN 13: 9780451452733
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240