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No doubt 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of the most enigmatic movies ever made, but I find myself going back to the original book by Arthur C. Clarke and wondering about the differences between the movie and the book(s). It's not like the book was written first and then Kubrick adapted it, it was loosely based on Clarke's short story "The Sentinel" but the actual book was written while the filming was on-going! We are told that the special effects required to re-create an orbit around Saturn was beyond their capability, so they switched it to Jupiter. Hmmm...
Then there is the last page of the book which has puzzled me for decades, which made me go look up the final pages of all the other books in the Odyssey series.
Pretty frigging interesting, here they are for your consideration:
2001: A Space Odyssey
There before him, a glittering toy no Star-Child could resist, floated the planet Earth with all its peoples.
He had returned in time. Down there on that crowded globe, the alarms would be flashing across the radar screens, the great tracking telescopes would be searching the skies-- and history as men knew it would be drawing to a close.
A thousand miles below, he became aware that a slumbering cargo of death had awoken, and was stirring sluggishly in its orbit. The feeble energies in contained were no possible menace to him; but he preferred a cleaner sky. He put forth his will, and the circling megatons flowered in a silent detonation that brought a brief, false dawn to half the sleeping globe.
Then he waited, marshaling his thoughts and brooding over his still untested powers. For though he was master of the world, he was not quite sure what to do next.
But he would think of something.
2010: Odyssey Two
The Europans would be surprised to know with what intensity and baffled wonder that black monolith is also studied by the minds behind those moving lights. For centuries now their automatic probe has made a cautious descent from orbit -- always with the same disastrous result. For until the time is ripe, the monolith will permit no contact.
When that time comes -- when, perhaps, the Europans have invented radio and discovered the messages continually bombarding them from so close at hand -- the monolith may change its strategy. It may -- or it may not -- choose to release the entities who slumber within it, so that they can bridge the gulf between the Europans, and the race to which they once held allegiance.
And it may be that no such bridge is possible, and that two such alien forms of consciousness can never coexist. If this is so, then only one of them can inherit the Solar System.
Which it will be, not even the Gods know--yet.
2061: Odyssey Three
The famous building, towering in solitary spendour above the woods of central Manhattan, had changed little in a thousand years. It was part of history, and had been reverently preserved.
Like all historical monuments, it has long ago been coated with a mircrothin layer of diamond, and was now virtually impervious to the ravages of time.
Anyone who had attended early meetings of the General Assembly could never have guessed that more than a thousand years had passed. They might, however, have been intrigued by the featureless black slab standing in the Plaza, almost mimicking the shape of the UN building itself. If -- like everyone else -- they had reached out to touch it -- they would have been puzzled by the strange way in which their fingers skittered over its ebon surface.
But they would have been far more puzzled -- indeed, completely overawed -- by the transformation of the heavens.
The last tourists had left an hour ago, and the Plaza was utterly deserted. The sky was cloudless, and a few of the brighter stars were just visible; all the fainter ones had been routed by the tiny sun that could shine at midnight.
The slight of Lucifer gleamed not only on the black glass of the ancient building, but also upon the narrow, silvery rainbow spanning the southern sky. Other lights moved along and around it, very slowly, as the commerce of the Solar System came and went between all the worlds of both its suns.
And if one looked very carefully, it was just possible to make out the thin thread of the Panama Tower, one of the six umbilical cords of diamond linking Earth and its scattered children, soaring twenty-six thousand miles up from the equator to meet the Ring around the World.
Suddenly, almost as swiftly as if it has been born, Lucifer began to fade. The night that men had not known for thirty generations flooded back into the sky. The banished stars returned.
And for the second time in four million years, the Monolith awoke.
3001: The Final Odyssey
Whatever godlike powers and principalities lurked beyond the stars, Poole reminded himself, for ordinary humans only two things were important -- Love and Death.
His body had not yet aged a hundred years; he still had plenty of time for both.
EPILOGUE
“Their little universe is very young, and its god is still a child. But it is too soon to judge them; when We return in the Last Days, We will consider what should be saved.”
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