-Arthur C. Clark is obsessed with exposition.
-He loves the idea of first contact with aliens to the point of sickness.
-He thinks that humans (who matter) are essentially rational technocrats, making their behavior both boring and puppet-like.
-The only female characters in this book were ape-men [sic] and two stewardesses.
-There were several pretty problematic passages, like the following:

"Yet already...the warmth and frequency of the conversations with their girls on Earth had begun to diminish. They had expected this; it was one of the penalties of an astronaut's way of life, as it had once been of a mariner's.

It was true---indeed notorious---that seamen had compensations at other ports; unfortunately there were no tropical islands full of dusky maids beyond the orbit of Earth. The space medics, of course, had tackled this problem with their usual enthusiasm; the ship's pharmacopeia provided adequate, though hardly glamorous, substitutes."

Look, I know Larry Niven is always talking about ship's whores and Robert Heinlein would get around it by having the ships fuck each other or having the crew be a bunch of nymphomaniacs or something, but something about the dry, dry pedantry of Clarke's writing makes this stand out as much worse. And I count six (though interrelated) distinct pieces of sexism/misogyny along with the one piece of racism in the four sentences.

I'm glad that I can leave this dude behind now and take a non-fiction break.