(Insert sucking and spitting noises here. It sucks him in and spits him out on the other end of the galaxy. So he space-pods down to the giant slab, which is actually a Star Gate. He figure he might as well check it out since the mission has gotten all messed up and he's going to die anyway before another ship can come out and rescue him. Then it's back to descriptions of starscapes and not much happening.īowman gets to Japaetus, and finds an even bigger slab on the moon. He also kills the folks in suspended animation before Bowman takes him down. Poor Hal…but on the other hand this creates the only real actual plot kind of thing in the book, as Hal murders Poole and tries to kill Bowman. This was supposed to be for security reasons, but unfortunately Hal is a truthful computer, and keeping a secret drives him loony-moons. Bowman and Poole don't know about the aliens for reasons that don't make a lot of sense (other people on Earth definitely know), but then again, we've also got giant slabs on the moon, so what's a plothole or two between friends?Īnyway, Bowman and Poole weren't told about the aliens only their computer Hal was told (and three crewmembers in suspended animation). They're going to the Saturn moon Japaetus, which is where the TMA-1 broadcast signal was directed.
David Bowman and Frank Poole are in the ship Discovery, originally headed for Jupiter, but now diverted to Saturn at the last minute. Floyd.)Ĭut to a few months down the space road. Just as he gets there, the sun's rays hit the slab, and it starts broadcasting a signal. Heywood Floyd (who has less personality than the space slab) goes to the moon to look at a big slab the moon colonists have excavated called TMA-1. Millions of years pass, till 2001 or thereabouts (a year that was thirty years in the future when Clarke wrote the novel). He kills a pig for food, then a leopard, then the head of a rival tribe. Moon-Watcher, our hero man-ape, gets especially smart, and figures out how to use tools. But then a space slab falls to earth and starts tinkering with the man-apes' minds.
Being a man-ape kind of sucks you only eat berries, you're always hungry, you die young. The novel starts millions of years in the past, with a bunch of man-apes. A lot of whoosh, not a whole lot of bang. The result is that 2001 manages to cover a lot of ground without much plot. Another part is that a lot of the book is just description of astronomical niftiness. Yet, despite that, the plot actually isn't all that complicated.Ī big part of that is because there's no real character development to speak of. 2001 covers millions of years of plot, from prehistoric times and on into cosmic timeless space future (or what was the future in 1968, when the book was written).
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