I recently picked up a copy of 2001: A Space Odyssey (the novel by Arthur C. Clarke – not the Movie) and the sequel novel 2010: Odyssey Two (the movie had a different title… The Year We Make Contact). It is 2024 and well, I finally got around to reading them for the first time. I’ve seen the films several times but it was great fun to read the novels. In fact, I think I might like the 2001 novel more than the movie (I know… heresy right?)
The books (as is almost always) give a much deeper insight into characters and plot that the movie genre’ just can’t generally match. That can be said of a lot of novel / book combinations, but I think this is especially true of 2001 since the beginning of the novel gives you access to the point of view and internal pre-human thoughts of the character Moon-watcher. Clarke gives him recognizably human-related thoughts but also he has a very alien / animal mentality about things. For instance his father dies in the novel and Moon-watcher basically thinks little of it… he just takes him to the garbage heap. (this is all before he is changed by his encounter with the monolith.)
It was also interesting in the 2001 novel that their destination is Saturn, and they do a flyby of Jupiter. Apparently that was something that was changed in the movie (just to simplify it?) but Clarke left his novel as it was even though he wrote it in parallel with the screen play. His sequel novel 2010 picks up however based on the movie’s premise that the destination was Jupiter. Makes for interesting reading as you need to have seen the 2001 film to understand this discontinuity in the novels.
I wrote up a review of 2001 and 2010 on Goodreads if you would like to check it out. Glenn R. Frankβs review of 2001: A Space Odyssey | Goodreads