The biggest revelation here is that the book is actually based on the screenplay for the film. Clarke and Kubrick collaborated on this from the start.
And just like the movie, the book almost gets too big for itself. Clarke's other works seem to expand in scope until they reach a point where the mind can't comprehend what is being imagined. I guess that's the point really. To illustrate how really small we are in the vast possibilities of the universe.
Naturally, being married fro the start, the book and the film follow quite closely. I understand the thoughts behind the monolith at the dawn of man. I understand it's prompting of the man-apes to evolve and use the brain.
Then skip the next three million years.
The monolith found on the moon sets in motion the voyage whereon the monolith reaps the bounty of the progress of human intelligence.
Hal is actually not really integral to the overall plot. It is entirely a side story. A good one, but Poole was already going to rendezvous with the monolith, even if Hal didn't wig out.
P xvii
Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet earth.
Now that is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in out local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in the Universe there shines a star.
P107
Sometimes, during lonely hours on the control deck, Bowman would listen to this radiation. He would turn up the gain until the room filled with a crackling, hissing roar; out of this background, at irregular intervals, emerged brief whistles and peeps like the cries of demented birds. It was an eerie sound, for it had nothing to do with man; it was as lonely and as meaningless as the murmur of waves on a beach, or the distant crash of thunder beyond the horizon.
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