My God -- it's full of stars.

Any science fiction afficionado worth his salt knows 2001: A Space Odyssey. We know HAL 9000, and his inevitable malfunction. We know the film's trippy ending, though we don't understand it. And we know the monolith, always paired with that mother of all epic music, Also Sprach Zarathustra.

Stanley Kubrick didn't make a whole lot of effort to put narrative coherence in the film, though. It's enjoyable without it, but there are plenty of details that never made it into the final film, and are alluded to only. Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey (the novel) is meant as a sort of manual to the movie. It shows. There are chapters that take us out of the action to explain some scientific concept (the nature of the monolith, or HAL's thought processes) that couldn't come across on screen.

A lot of the rest of the book is visual descriptions of the stars. There are some truly inventive details of the near future from Arthur C. Clarke, too. Additionally, I was impressed by the amount of scientific research that went into this book. Descriptions of how humans move on the Moon were particularly impressive, especially considering that man had not been to the moon when this book was published in 1968.

And that's it. That's pretty much the book. The opening feels like Raptor Red in its pessimistic view on humans; the HAL section is decently horrific. 2001: A Space Odyssey an inventive series of events that comes together rather nicely into an ambiguous ending. Truth be told, this is pretty hardcore science fiction, too (what with the heavy, you know, science stuff in it). But if I have to be honest about the writing, it's not my cup of tea. It's a little slow. And I think (though I haven't seen most of it) that the movie was always intended to be the primary work of art here. This is just background reading. Very high quality background reading, but background nonetheless.

My recommendation, therefore, is to go see the movie first, or read Childhood's End instead (another book by him that's supposed to be narratively superior).