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 artifact 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 the Author
Sir Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008) wrote a hundred books and more than a thousand short stories and essays covering science fiction and science fact in a career spanning more than six decades. Among his bestselling novels are Childhood’s End, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Rendezvous with Rama.
In 1945, he proposed global broadcasting via communication satellites in geostationary orbit. One of his short stories inspired the World Wide Web, while another was expanded into 2001: A Space Odyssey, which he cowrote with Stanley Kubrick.
Born in Somerset, England, Clarke was educated at King’s College, London. He worked in the British civil service and the Royal Air Force before turning full-time author in 1950. The recipient of dozens of awards, fellowships, and honorary doctorates, Clarke had both an asteroid and dinosaur species named after him. Queen Elizabeth II gave him a knighthood in 1998.
Clarke lived in Sri Lanka since 1956, engaged in diving, astronomical observations, and underwater tourism.
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