2001: A Space Odyssey (Space Odyssey, #1)

by Arthur C. Clarke

It was a slow, tedious business, but the crystal monolith was patient. Neither it, nor its replicas scattered across half the globe, expected to succeed with all the scores of groups involved in the experiment. A hundred failures would not matter when a single success could change the destiny of the world.

As long as he could remember it had been not a ‘situation’ so much as a permanent crisis. Since the 1970s the world had been dominated by two problems which, ironically, tended to cancel each other out. Though birth control was cheap, reliable and endorsed by all the main religions, it had come too late; the population of the world was now six billion - a third of them in the Chinese Empire.

Every time Floyd took off from Earth he wondered if it would still be there when the time came to return.

He leaned back into his seat and relaxed. This trip, he calculated, would cost the tax-payers slightly over a million dollars.

Now I’m a scientific expert; that means I know nothing about absolutely everything.’

Someone had once said that you could be terrified in space, but you could not be worried there.

The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry or depressing its contents seemed to be.

Couldn't be more actual in 2019

His decision had been right; that very refusal to specialise had made him uniquely qualified for his present task.