 Okay fellas, it's time for me to stop fooling around and get this next part done. I'm talking about 2001's Space Odyssey, the book. I'm also going to spend a great deal of time talking about the movie because the book and the movie were developed together. Arthur C. Clark and Stanley Kubrick spent three years working together. But really, this is every bit as much a product of Kubrick's work as it is Clark's. This is very unusual for an Arthur C. Clark novel. I have to start by saying that I'm more familiar with Arthur C. Clark's short stories than I am with his novels. I've read countless Clark short stories and only a few of his novels. And his approach to novels is a bit different than his short stories. His short stories are classic hard sci-fi. They're short so he doesn't dwell on characters or world building or character development and he concentrates on the science and the grand cosmic ideas. In his novels, he takes time to give his characters backgrounds and to give them more personality or to try to give them more personality and he's not good at it. I have to tell you that. The reason this is unusual for a Clark novel is that like the movie, it's very spartan. It's very brief. It reads very quickly. The chapters are very short and it doesn't dwell on characters. It's not about the characters at all. Again, it's about the grand cosmic ideas. As I said in the introduction in the first video in this series, this book explains everything about the movie. Every question that you have about what you saw in the movie or what you experienced in the movie or whatever you thought was being communicated to you in the movie is covered in this book. One of my viewers didn't respond positively to that. He felt like if the book deprives one of the sense of mystery about the movie, then why read it? What's worth reading? This book doesn't deprive you of anything. It is a different experience of the same story and being a written novel it is not simply unexplained sensory experiences. It is, although it's different for an Arthur C. Clark novel, it is definitely Arthur C. Clark's style in that he tells you what's happening. He tells you what the characters are experiencing. He tells you why things are happening while at the same time preserving this sense of cosmic scale and cosmic mystery. So don't take it the wrong way when I tell you that this book will answer every question that you have about the movie. I recommend that you read it. If you've experienced the movie, if you've enjoyed the movie, if you have good feelings about the sensory overload and the mystery of the movie, then go ahead and read the book. It's not going to take anything away from you. You're going to have a different experience of this particular story. Now this book also has Kubrick's influence all over it because as I said before it is very spare compared to other Arthur C. Clark books. It's not as wordy as Clark's books tend to be and if you've read Arthur C. Clark's short stories and his novels you can tell that this has been influenced by Kubrick's ideas about the movie. You can tell that Kubrick has cut it back and cut it back and cut it back and Clark has responded. The question comes up, what would this novel be like if Clark had simply written it himself and it hadn't been a Kubrick movie? Well, we don't have to wonder because Clark had already done it. In 1953 he published a book called Childhood's End which covers the same subject about the human race encountering a superior alien race and superior alien technology with very different circumstances and very different results but the same subject and he did it again in 1973 with a book called Rendezvous with Rama which I think is a better book than Childhood's End. I've talked to people who feel the other way around. Childhood's End by the way is a good example of Arthur C. Clark's failure I think to understand human behavior. If you have read Childhood's End or if you plan to take notice I think you'll agree that the human race in Childhood's End does not behave like real human beings actually would. Clark had some very naive ideas about human behavior since this book really doesn't include human behavior I think it's the better for it. Back to the subject of what would this book be like without Kubrick's influence there's another answer to that question. This book The Lost Worlds of 2001 published in 1972. Some of you may remember when I got this book and one of my monthly roundups I showed it and I was kind of confused as to what it actually was. I thought it was going to be a collection of anecdotes about developing 2001 Space Odyssey and it is and I also noticed as I was thumbing through it that there appeared to be fiction. There appeared to be prose stories in here and there are and do you know what they are? There are alternate versions of the 2001 Space Odyssey novel that were ultimately rejected by Kubrick in favor of cutting out everything that was unnecessary and making the book more like Kubrick's idea of a movie story. It's fascinating and if you can find a copy of this give it a look. I have to tell you though the stories are really bad. The choices to leave out all the excess junk and to leave us with the book that we ultimately got was good choices all good choices. These alternate versions include extensive details about David Bowman's life and his career all of which is unnecessary. Many details about the history and development of Hal 9000 which was originally going to be a humanoid robot. There are scenes in here of teaching it to walk again stuff that's not necessary in hindsight when we look at what we ended up with. Arthur C. Clark's ideas about the scenes with the cavemen or the ape men I should call them. Clark actually wrote an entire alternate novel in which an alien a tall gray skinned alien with a big bald head lands on earth among the ape men. He brings camping equipment and a gun and he lives among the ape men and teaches them how to hunt and it's really bad it's really laughable. Do you know what it reminded me of it was Prometheus and Bob do you remember the Prometheus and Bob cartoons on Nickelodeon in the 90s it was Prometheus and Bob it was laughable but not funny it was just just bad. Ubrich had the right idea. Okay now I'm going to talk about what's in the book and how it compares to the movie and I'm going to spoil the hell out of the book and I'm going to explain the movie. No seriously I'm going to use what's in the book to explain the entirety of the movie to you and if you don't want spoilers and if you're not interested then just stop watching at this point because that's what I'm going to do from now on. Now the differences between the book and the movie. Number one chapter 37 in this book is called the experiment and I'm going to include a link to the complete text of chapter 37 in the description below. That chapter which is just a few paragraphs it explains what the monoliths are and where they come from. And here's the deal. The monoliths are space probes they are machines. They are highly intelligent but they are not alive they are not even sentient like how 9000 is but they are autonomous and they have very specific instructions. And chapter 37 explains that they were built by a race of ancient super beings who were ancient millions and millions of years before life even started on earth. So by the time we came along their science had progressed so far that we would consider them gods. They had the same kind of idea that we would have is that we want to find other intelligence in the universe and they weren't finding it. So they built these amazing probes called the monoliths and sent them out all across the universe to find planets to find planets with life on them to examine that life to find life that had promise of intelligence and to help it along. So by the time the monoliths came to earth and the book makes it clear that many monoliths came to earth not just one I'm having trouble saying monoliths. There was not just one monolith that came to earth to talk to the ape men. There were many monoliths. They didn't just talk to the ape men it it says that they were talking to other creatures on earth. It doesn't it's not specific it leaves it up to you what what were they talking to were they talking to birds were they talking to dogs and bears were they in the oceans talking to dolphins and porpoises or octopuses. There's no mention of what the other monoliths were doing. He also points out by the time the monoliths found life on earth they had been in space for many millions of years and in the course of those millions of years the civilization that built the monoliths had progressed even further much much further. They had abandoned physical bodies all together. They had learned to store information using the fabric of space itself and became bodyless intelligences that roaming the universe on their own however they never forgot about the experiment. Here's a difference with the book and the movie. The monolith that came to the ape men on earth in the book was not a black slab. It was a rectangular slab one by four by nine but it was transparent it was like a computer screen and it displayed images and patterns on it and it taught them target practice and it communicated directly into the eight men's minds. It experimented with different ways of communicating with them. It actually killed one of them accidentally. What it was doing the movie makes it look like if you're not paying close attention it makes it look like the eight men just turned into violent murderers and that that's what resulted in the human race and that's actually a valid interpretation because we are still a very warlike murderous race however the book makes it more clear that what the monolith was doing was teaching the eight men in addition to how to hunt it was teaching them how to manipulate their environment to make use of their environment so they wouldn't starve. This monolith had found this spark of potential intelligence among this small band of eight men in a desert and they were in very real danger of going extinct so it had to very quickly teach them you got to take advantage of what's around you so you and your children don't starve to death and number one you got to hunt so you can eat meat and don't die. The ape man that was the leader of this tribe by the way he has a name his name is Moon Watcher. Another difference the scene where David Bowman has to get back into the discovery without his space helmet it's one of the most striking memorable and most brilliant scenes in the movie and one of the most brilliant scenes in movie history it's not in the book it's not in this book at all. Frank Pool has died outside David Bowman knows Frank Pool is dead but he doesn't know where Frank Pool is he's actually in the process of waking up the other astronauts when he hears the airlocks open and feels the air pressure change so he rushes to a closet an emergency closet with its own air supply and he saves his life that way he there's a space suit in there and then he goes out and dismantles the Hal 9000 brain and here's something that the book makes obvious and it would be obvious if you think about it but we don't think about it in the movie because it's all just skipped over but after David Bowman dismantles Hal he still has months to go in space before he arrives at his destination in the movie that's Jupiter in the book it's Saturn that he has a lot farther to go of course during the months that he's in space alone on his way to Saturn he has manually repaired the antenna and gotten in touch with Earth and explained to them what happened and the scientists on Earth have gotten to the bottom of what happened to Hal the book explains what happened to Hal those of you who have seen 2010 Odyssey 2 the year we make contact there's a scene in that movie where the guy who designed Hal explains that Hal appeared to go crazy because he had been given contradictory orders or what he interpreted as contradictory orders and he didn't know how to deal with them there is no scene like that in the book 2010 that scene is in here it's in the first book Dave Bowman alone arrives in orbit at Saturn the monolith is waiting for him on the moon Iapetus Iapetus is an unusual planet in that one half of it is solid black and the other half is solid white it is normally an ice moon so it's white but on one side of it it encounters dust and debris from other moons on Saturn so that side is black that was not known at the time this book was written it was only known that Iapetus had one side that was bright white Arthur C. Clarke used that fact to construct an artificial surface on half of the moon of Iapetus so it looked like a gigantic white eye had been carved eyeball I mean carved into one half of Iapetus and standing right in the center of it was a giant monolith as David Bowman approached it and he's in communication with Earth as this is happening he says the thing is hollow it goes on forever and oh my God it's full of stars and that's the last Earth ever hears of him again in 2010 the movie it starts with that line my God it's full of stars that line is not in the first movie it's in the first book though and Clarke refers to the giant monolith on Iapetus as the Stargate he doesn't call it a monolith he calls it the Stargate chapter 40 which is only a few sentences long here it says the Stargate opened the Stargate closed in a moment of time too short to be measured space turned and twisted upon itself then Iapetus was alone once more as it had been for 3 million years alone except for a deserted but not yet derelict ship sending back to its makers messages which they could neither believe nor understand to see there's there's plenty of explanation in this book but there's also plenty of mystery so don't so don't give up on it now now I'm going to explain the end of the movie to you and this is all made clear in the book remember I read this book when I was in grade school I had seen the movie when I was 3 years old I didn't remember it clearly I read the book when I was in grade school then I saw the movie again when I was in junior high so to me seeing that movie at that time having been familiar with the book and the comic books I didn't consider the movie a mystery I understood it just fine I loved it just the same I felt the sense of awe and mystery that everybody else does but it was all familiar to me so here's what happened after David Bowman is pulled into the Stargate because that's what the monolith is he's taken down a wormhole although the flying lights he's taken down a wormhole he sees distant parts of the universe passing him by he actually sees what appeared to be other spacecraft passing through the wormhole going in other directions he passes through an area that Clark refers to as the Grand Central Station and then he begins to arrive at a massive red giant star with a white dwarf orbiting around it a giant binary star system he passes by a massive abandoned and derelict space ports that are the size of planets and the wormhole takes him directly into the heart of this red star where the monolith has prepared for him a habitat which takes the form of a hotel room something that the monolith took from his memory which would be familiar to him now all of these things I've just described you may feel like those those details aren't in the movie the movie doesn't inform you what's actually happened actually all of the different things that I described are in that acid trip scene it starts off with just the speeding lights and then there are the the distant mysteries of space and then Dave Bowman sees the Grand Central Station there it is and then he begins to make a descent into the binary star system and then he begins to arrive on the home planet surface it's all there and each segment is clearly separated by a close up of David Bowman's eye it's all there now here's another difference with the movie and the book in the movie it's kind of left up to you to decide what David Bowman's experience is in the habitat is he living out the rest of his natural life there maybe not because he he's not just experiencing his life firsthand he's actually seeing it from a third party point of view he sees his older selves aging and the editing of the scene makes that clear so he may not be living the rest of his natural life in the habitat but rather experiencing the rest of what would be a natural life over the course of a moment in the book none of that happens he arrives he explores the room he sees that the the refrigerator and the cabinets have bottles and cereal boxes in them but they don't have food in them they have some kind of putty like paste that that's obviously meant to be his his human chow or whatever the ceiling of the main room is one giant television he watches some movies and then he falls asleep and this is his first night in the habitat and that's and that's where it ends the monoliths as soon as he falls asleep they deconstruct him they literally deconstruct him they they devolve him back to his his earliest origin form which is a fetus and then they rebuild him into a superior being and this is where the book and the movie end the final chapter of the book again it's just a few sentences is called the star child Clark uses the word star child this new being this new creature that was David Bowman that is now the star child he returns to earth as you see him doing in the movie the governments of the earth completely freak out they send nuclear missiles to destroy this new being that's coming and the star child just deletes the nuclear missiles and the last thing here is for though he was master of the world he was not quite sure what to do next but he would think of something so it's the same ending just produced in a different form I could talk about it forever but I know so there you have it my little summary and explanation of 2001 space Odyssey the book and the movie in the next video I will cover 2010 Odyssey to the year we make contact or as I said in the introduction the unnecessary sequel that is not a sequel and I will cover both the movie and the book in the same video see then you can support 30 second sci-fi and my other projects by becoming a patron there's a link in the description below and visit the 30 second sci-fi tumblr that's my headquarters in addition to my videos I publish links and updates there every day