2001

There are some books that arrive into your life early and never quite leave it. Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of those for me. I read it as a teenager, watched the Kubrick film not long afterwards, and have been turning both of them over in my head, in one way or another, ever since. Of the great science fiction novels of the 1960s, it is the one I have come back to most often, and the one whose hold on me has only deepened with re-reading. So this is not a neutral review. It is the review of a fan, written with the kind of affection that I trust readers to factor in.

The book is one of the more unusual artefacts in modern science fiction publishing, because it was not so much written as co-developed alongside its film adaptation. The story properly begins in 1964, when the director Stanley Kubrick approached Clarke with the suggestion that they collaborate on what he called "the proverbial good science fiction movie". Clarke was at that point a respected SF novelist working out of what is know known as Sri Lanka, with a string of major books behind him (most notably Childhood's End and The City and the Stars), and a particular reputation for the kind of patient, scientifically literate fiction that Kubrick was looking for. They met in New York and began to work out what such a film might look like. Their first decision, after a fair amount of poking through Clarke's back catalogue, was to base the project loosely on a short story Clarke had written in 1948 for a BBC competition, The Sentinel, about an alien artefact left on the Moon as a kind of cosmic alarm clock waiting for the species that would one day be capable of finding it.

The original plan had been for Clarke to write a screenplay, but the screenplay form did not really suit him, and the two of them settled on an unusual hybrid approach instead. Clarke would write the novel, working closely with Kubrick on the story and the ideas; Kubrick would write the screenplay, working closely with Clarke on the same. The two pieces of work would develop in parallel, feeding each other, and they would arrive at the end of the process at more or less the same time. In practice the film got there first, premiering in April 1968, with the novel following a few months later in July of the same year. The result is the most fully co-authored book-and-film pair in mainstream science fiction. They are not quite the same story, and the differences are worth noticing, but they share a single creative spine and they were genuinely made together.

The story is well enough known that I will not labour it. In the deep prehistoric past, an alien monolith arrives on Earth and nudges a clan of proto-humans into the first stirrings of intelligence; the famous "Dawn of Man" sequence, which is so completely associated with the film that you forget how vividly it lives on the page, dispatches the prelude in a tightly handled handful of chapters. Cut forward four million years (Kubrick's match cut, from the bone tossed into the air to the orbiting weapons platform, is one of the most famous jumps in cinema) to the year 2001, when Dr Heywood Floyd is dispatched to the Moon to investigate a black slab, designated TMA-1, recently uncovered in the crater Tycho. The slab, exposed to sunlight for the first time in millennia, sends a signal toward the outer solar system, and the Discovery mission is launched in pursuit. On board are astronauts David Bowman and Frank Poole, three hibernating colleagues, and the ship's controlling computer, the HAL 9000.

It is at this point that the book and the film begin to diverge most usefully. In the novel, Discovery is bound for Saturn, with the climactic sequence taking place at the Saturnian moon Iapetus; in the film, Kubrick (constrained by what he could plausibly achieve with the special effects of the day, and particularly by the difficulty his team had with making Saturn's rings look convincing) moved the destination to Jupiter. Clarke himself preferred the Saturn version, and you can feel a slight regret in the way the prose handles the approach to the planet. When he wrote his three subsequent sequels, beginning with 2010: Odyssey Two in 1982, he aligned his fictional universe with Kubrick's, accepting Jupiter as the canonical destination going forward. The novel of 2001 is therefore the only place where the original Saturn version of the story survives, which gives it a particular flavour; the only book in the Odyssey sequence that takes you to a different planet from the films.

The novel explains, where the film deliberately does not. This is, depending on your taste, either a virtue or a vice. Where Kubrick deliberately preserves the strangeness of the monolith, the Star Gate sequence and the Star Child, leaving the audience to make of it what they will, Clarke walks you patiently through the science of what is happening, the intentions of the alien intelligences responsible, and the nature of Bowman's eventual transformation. Some readers prefer the unresolved Kubrick version; some are grateful for Clarke's lucidity. I am, as it happens, grateful, because Clarke's explanations do not flatten the mystery so much as deepen it; he gives you enough information to grasp the shape of what has happened without ever pretending to know its full content. There are pages in the closing chapters that are, line by line, as quietly transcendent as anything in twentieth-century SF. The famous closing image, with Bowman transformed into something new and looking back at the Earth, lands in the book with all the weight Kubrick gives it on screen, but in a different key.

HAL, of course, is the heart of the middle act. Clarke handles the HAL sequence with a melancholy precision that is sometimes lost in the cinematic version. The film leans on Douglas Rain's voice and the slow, deliberate logic of HAL's malfunction; the book gives you a fuller account of why HAL fails, why the contradiction at the heart of his programming (lying to the crew about the mission's true purpose while being designed for absolute honesty) was always going to break him, and why his eventual unravelling is as much a tragedy as it is a horror story. The famous moments are all there: "I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think any conscious entity can ever hope to do", the slow shutdown with the singing of Daisy (a moment Clarke quietly imported from a real demonstration he had witnessed at Bell Labs, where an IBM 7094 had been programmed to sing "Daisy Bell" in 1961, one of the earliest examples of computer-synthesised vocal performance), and the patient awfulness of "I'm sorry, Dave". And they all land harder for being attached, in the book, to a clearer sense of what HAL was and why his death matters.

The most extraordinary thing about 2001, and the thing that keeps me going back, is that more than fifty years after it first appeared, both the book and the film still feel as if they belong to the future rather than the past. The space hardware has dated in obvious ways. The film's Pan Am orbital shuttle is a now-poignant joke twice over (Pan Am went bankrupt in 1991, and commercial spaceflight to orbital stations remains a long way off). The Bell System telephone Floyd uses for his video call to Earth is recognisably 1968. But the bigger ideas, the patient meditation on intelligence and its origins, the recognition that we share a universe with things we are not equipped to fully understand, the suggestion that humanity is not a finished species but a step in something longer, are all as alive on the page now as they were the day Clarke wrote them. The book is the work of a mind genuinely thinking about what it means to be alive in a vast and old universe, and a generous one, in the sense of being willing to let the reader think alongside it.

If you have only ever seen the film, the book is the one experience the film cannot give you; the patient interior journey, the careful working-through of the ideas, Bowman's full perspective in the closing acts. If you have only ever read the book, the film is the one experience the book cannot give you; the awe, the silence, Strauss's Blue Danube drifting through the silent vacuum as ships dock and turn. Both are essential. Together, they are one of the most important things to have happened to science fiction in the twentieth century, and they remain, in my view, the standard against which the rest of the genre's grand cosmic novels are quietly measured. I would recommend 2001: A Space Odyssey to anyone who has not yet read it, with the warm certainty that it will pay back the time you give it many times over. It has done so for me, every time, since I first opened it.