2010: Odyssey Two (Space Odyssey, #2)

by Arthur C. Clarke

it remains a blank, impenetrable wall of total darkness. And yet—David Bowman had once cried: “My God! It’s full of stars!”

And some were just victims of practical jokes or improbable accidents—like the unlucky amateur archeologists who found the props that a celebrated science-fiction moviemaker had abandoned in the Tunisian desert almost four decades earlier.

George Lucas?

“I always hoped Carl Sagan would be right, and there’d be life on Jupiter.”

…and because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped. And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.