2001

At first blush, this looks like a review of a book 50 years after it's publication date. It looks like that at second blush, and every subsequent blush too. I didn't read it 50 years ago so give me a break. So what is there to say about a book that everyone has heard because it is the basis of one of the most important science fiction movies of all time? Turns out, a lot. Clarke really shows why he's earned his place on the Mount Rushmore of sci-fi writers. He's not just a phenomenal writer, he is a phenomenal thinker. In the first few chapters, one of the characters embarks on a routine flight to the moon. He has a tablet that he connects to the information network of the spaceship he's on and 'dials up' a few different newspapers to read. After a few minutes of flipping through pages, he laments that he has such an amazing device in his hand and nothing to read but local news stories about burglaries. Many sci-fi writers try to predict the future. Some sci-fi is just future fantasy and space swashbuckling, but of those few hard sci-fi gurus who are willing to commit their predictions to the page, none are so good at it as Clarke. He not only predicted the technological elements of being a passenger on a very international flight (having an iPad to browse the news), but he also had the wisdom to predict our relationship to that almost magical level of technology. In his imagination was a future that had some very exciting things, but he didn't let that excitement contaminate his story. Of course iPads and the internet would be exciting when the book was written (a year before we landed on the moon), but he knew it wouldn't be exciting to the passenger who just had to wait out that long, long flight. Any of the rest of us would've come up with a technology that was 1/10th as cool, laughably outdated within a decade, and we would've written it to be the shining grail of that chapter. But I guess that's why it's fair to say that Clarke was a better writer than all of us. Which brings us to HAL.

What's the opposite of a humble brag? Instead of subtly boasting about myself by making thinly veiled statements of humility, I want to subtly denigrate someone else by making thinly veiled statements of praise. Whatever it's called, here goes: I think Clarke's writing is so good, that it gets in the way of me enjoying the story. Specifically, the sequence in the book where HAL turns rogue and murderous is so well done that I completely forgot that the book isn't about artificial intelligence that is to hubristic to admit that it made a mistake so it tries to kill the protagonist, and is instead about humans accidentally setting off an alien alarm and ultimately being transformed into a star child. [Spoilers, I guess]. Every other scene in that book should be an iconic touchstone of midcentury sci-fi, but they all get overshadowed by murderbot 9000. The description of the dwarf star pulling a column of starfire off it's binary giant twin as it speeds past in it's orbit, and the energy beings migrating up the star fire would be more than enough of an idea for most writers to make a whole trilogy out of. A goddamn alien crystal mind controls apes into starting down the path to becoming human, and ultimately space faring, and that part of the book is forgotten in the dust bin by the time you finish. Nope. Clarke has too many good ideas and too many amazing scenes in this book. It's easy to read and not very long so in the few hours that you spend reading it, you've got to compress six months worth of wonder and reflection on these amazing new ideas. Clarke was clearly hoarding all of the good ideas from all of the other sci-fi writers, but had such a stockpile of them that he had to cram a dozen or more into each novel. It just isn't fair to us readers.

Now I've got to tackle the other books in the series, but I think I'll let my brain cool off a bit first.