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    2001: A Space Odyssey
    2001: A Space Odyssey
    2001: A Space Odyssey
    Audiobook6 hours

    2001: A Space Odyssey

    Written by Arthur C. Clarke

    Narrated by Dick Hill

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    It has been more than forty years since the publication of this classic science fiction novel that changed the way we look at the stars and ourselves. From the savannas of Africa at the dawn of mankind to the rings of Saturn as man adventures to the outer rim of our solar system, 2001: A Space Odyssey is a journey unlike any other.

    This allegory about humanity's exploration of the universe, and the universe's reaction to humanity, was the basis for director Stanley Kubrick's immortal film, and lives on as a hallmark achievement in storytelling.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateMay 16, 2017
    ISBN9781543610642
    2001: A Space Odyssey
    Author

    Arthur C. Clarke

    Born in Somerset in 1917, Arthur C. Clarke has written over sixty books, among which are the science fiction classics ‘2001, A Space Odyssey’, ‘Childhood’s End’, ‘The City and the Stars’ and ‘Rendezvous With Rama’. He has won all the most prestigious science fiction trophies, and shared an Oscar nomination with Stanley Kubrick for the screenplay of the film of 2001. He was knighted in 1998. He passed away in March 2008.

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    Reviews for 2001

    4/5

    4,532 ratings133 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Great sci-fi, much clearer than the movie.
    • 5/5
      Thoroughly captivating
      Such an innovative story
      A book well ahead of it’s time
    • 5/5
      An excellent piece of art. Enjoyed it thoroughly, watched the movie 3 times. But the book is many a times better.
    • 5/5
      after watching the movie a couple of times and still being amazed by the story, listening to the book added more detail and appreciation to the amazing story that is 2001, a space odyssey! Loved it!
    • 5/5
      A truly enjoyable read and a book that changed history
    • 5/5
      This is so much more than the movie!! Beautiful and stunning.
    • 4/5
      Less ominous than I thought it would be but something about the pacing and the underlying quiet intensity I really enjoyed.
    • 5/5
      Even though this was written in the 60s, this book holds up rather nicely!

      I am a big fan of this book and wish I would of read it earlier in my life!

      If you like Sci-Fim learn it!
    • 5/5
      Incredible. I need 7 more words but , incredible sums it up.
    • 5/5
      One of the best and popular science fiction stories. The section with HAL going rogue is exceptionally written and in this narrated too. The sense of urgency and helplessness could be felt through the words. Wonderful book, a must read for all scifi lovers.
    • 5/5
      This is an amazing book. I can't believe I hadn't read it sooner. Everything flowed from the start of the story to its conclusion marvelously. Truly, this book will forever be a classic in the Science Fiction genre.
    • 4/5
      Weh good book! Way ahead of its time, just splendid. I wish it had some sequels.
    • 5/5
      Stunning! Absolutely stunning.

      The amount of insight and attention to detail are unfathomable. A great companion for the film.
    • 4/5
      The movie 2001 is one of my favorites and I figured it was time to read the book. The first thing I noticed, especially at the beginning, was that you get a much better understanding of what is happening in the movie. I always found the ape-man sequence at the start of the movie a bit confusing, but after reading the book it makes a lot more sense. The end of the movie still is a bit unclear and the book only helps minimally because the ending is a bit different. The book includes more details about various aspects found in the movie, but it also has a major difference; the Discovery crew goes to Saturn and not Jupiter. Perhaps not the most important detail, yet Clarke changes it up in his sequel, 2010, and follows the movie, not the book. In short, if you like the movie, you will like this book.
    • 5/5
      Why did no one make me read 2001: A Space Odyssey before? It's really, really good. I don't know quite what I was expecting, but not a really easy, absorbing read like this. It's so famous now that of course you know some of what happens going in, but the attention to detail and the quality of the guesswork is really great, and some parts of it are gorgeous.It might be a classic now, but it still has power. I was riveted. I was loath to put it down even when I got to the Angry Robot office for my "Robot for a Day" competition prize day, and there was plenty to be interested in there too!So it's not so hot on characters, I guess. That's not the interest value here. It's this whole view of the universe, of life, of how we came to be what we are. It's the little bits of pathos where you pity even a dying machine, or the perfect little details in a scene that make you feel it -- imagining the sound of Dies Irae fading out in the empty spacecraft, or...Definitely, definitely worth a read. Rightfully a classic.
    • 5/5
      So much better than the movie in my opinion. Maybe I will give the movie another go after finally reading this but I was always bored by it. With the book I could not stop reading.
    • 5/5
      Great Book. The Narrator did an excellent job as well.
    • 3/5
      I have never seen the movie on which this book is based. I think I need too. Most of the book was interesting, and the part with HAL was creepy. But the end - I have no idea what happened. The dude became a star child? What the....? Esoteric Sci-fi, while lauded as ground-breaking and "asking the big questions" about humanity, space, aliens and our purpose in life, often leaves me confused and slightly irritated. If the average person can't understand your point, then you have failed in reaching the people most in need of being reached. I'll watch the movie and see if it helps. I'll read the next 3 novels because it's a set and I like things to be tidy. But I don't have much hope for it to actually make sense.
    • 2/5
      Possible spoiler alert:Before I read this book in high school, I'd heard great things about it. The book didn't excite me- I'm more a fantasy person than sci-fi, and, though I guess he's asking all manner of deep and important questions (where did we come from, what will we evolve into, what happens when artificial intelligence evolves, etc.?) I didn't connect to the story, so I didn't care. The movie I liked even less- all that classical music while he floats around- bleh! This one definitely didn't do it for me.
    • 5/5
      While this helps to explain the movie, the last several chapters are almost as confusing.
    • 4/5
      Its better than good. It comes with some great baggage which helps it along. It's obviously difficult to disentangle it from the film. Having seen the film first, like most I suspect, you find the celluloid images and atmospheres informing the text. This is not negative; it was my appreciation of the film that encouraged me to take on the book.It is more intelligible than the film.I'm fascinated by the openess of the ending. There isn't ,as far as I can see, a definite direction the future will go. He's left it hanging. I wasn't expecting that. (But then it wasn't possible to expect anything with the film as a precedent.)
    • 3/5
      Klassieker, vooral door de verfilming; komt minder goed tot zijn recht in de roman
    • 4/5
      Really great book. I will definitely read more by Arthur C Clarke.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this book, although the end was rather difficult to follow. I thought the development of HAL was intriguing. Clarke follows in the footsteps of Asimov as he pushes readers to consider 'what if' with regard to artificial intelligence.
    • 5/5
      The audio keeps cutting out but wow! What a masterpiece!!! Still holds up even now.
    • 4/5
      The ending is weird and fuzzy. What I like about the book is its main premise (the monolith mystery) and Hal 9000 which (or whose?) moral standard was not tested for by the Turing test.
    • 4/5
      As masterfully made as Stanley Kubrick's version of 2001: A Space Odyssey is, it's too slow and too quiet at times for my taste. I like it - and in fact certain scenes in the film are favorites (especially the one where the ape man is going all ape having discovered ape man's first weapon, a piece of bone, smashing it in a pile of other bones so that one bone, a tibia looked like, gets ricocheted end-over-end into the air and just as the flying tibia has reached its flight's apex, the scene seamlessly transitions to a space station likewise rotating end over end: fantastic filmmaking and editing for sure, but I prefer Clarke's novel nevertheless.I prefer the novel mostly because Clarke crafted more meaningful philosophical observations on the page than Kubrick could accomplish with his camera - except for that iconic, Zarathustra-themed tibia-space station segue. And that's why, I think, the movie just plods and plods along - face it, even though it's a classic, it's boring - while the novel builds and builds (and is never boring) towards its monolithic climax, where we witness the birth of the next speculative step in humankind's evolution, the "Star Child," or, the "Fetus In The Bubble-Womb Floating By The Moon Child," assuming you've only seen the film. And the film is fantastic, don't get me wrong; and as revered as the film is, I think the book is even better, arguably the best thing Clarke ever wrote. And don't forget Hal - the neurotic computer given conflicting commands by his programmers who ultimately jettisons the crew - I like how he's characterized more so in the novel than he is in the film as well. In the movie, Hal gets reduced to what amounts to a red dashboard light and a voice sounding like, if it were human, had popped one too many valiums. Not very scary. Certainly no Frankenstein. In the novel, though, Hal comes off a lot creepier, edgier, and more mysterious, because he's not confined to the limits of the filmmaker's finite images, but left alone to however the reader's vivid (and infinite) imaginations envision him.And in the time it would take a person to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey (does that movie ever end?) one could have easily polished off Clarke's novel. Or two, or three, or four of Clarke's slimmer novels even.
    • 4/5
      There are definitely some outdated views and some of the science 'facts' break the flow on occasion, one in particular because the point is made how foolish a scientific belief is, when it is actually the likely case in the real world. But those few bits aside, it was a really good read. Made much more sense in written form and its only twice as long as the movie in audio format lol
    • 4/5
      "Now I'm right above it, hovering five hundred feet up. I don't want to waste any time, since Discovery will soon be out of range. I'm going to land. It's certainly solid enough -- and if it isn't I'll blast off at once."Just a minute -- that's odd..."This classic meditation on human evolution was written alongside the production of the Stanley Kubrick film, and first published in 1968. At times it seems to suffer in comparison to the iconic film; at other times it clearly surpasses it.As with most Clarke books, the story is surrounded and supported by a big theme -- in this case, it's human evolution, and (towards the end) our place in the universe. The science is also fairly detailed and realistic -- much of the length of the book is taken up by the long, slow journey of the Discovery from Earth to Saturn. This serves to build up the suspense rather well, and makes the mission's problems, when they come, all the more sinister.This has aged well, and is fully deserving of its classic status.
    • 2/5
      Well. This was a disappointing read. The novel began with a gripping introduction, progressed with a smooth pace, but ended with a disappointing climax. Having been written by Sir Arthur Clarke, I had expected a lot more.

      The first section dealing with the Moon Watcher was indeed intriguing. The characterization of the Moon Watcher was fascinating. The gradual evolution induced by the monolith on the ape-men, and their resulting actions was what captivated my attention.

      Sir Clarke really knew how to provide details of a space flight without boring the reader. In fact, a significant part of the second section consisted of these details. The subsequent discovery of the TMA-1 and the resulting flight of Discovery was my most favorite part of the novel; especially the conversations with HAL 9000. I would have welcomed a longer role of HAL.

      For me, things started falling apart after Bowman "docked" Discovery to Japetus. I had expected more of a rendezvous with the Creators; kind of a conversation or confrontation with them. Instead, it was a very long and detailed supernatural journey that involved a red giant star, a dwarf star, giant E.T. spaceships, but ended on a setup that looked like an earthly hotel suite! By then, I was already distracted to be able to digest the climax.

      For those who want to bash me with rants, it is entirely possible that the novel was not of my taste; its fame proves that. Nevertheless, I hope more explanations from the sequels.