This novel and the film stem from the same original project. Initially, Kubrick and Clarke have been working together on the same story, and while Stanley Kubrick went on to make what is now his masterpiece (and one of the most amazing films in the history of cinema), Arthur C. Clarke wrote one of his most famous novels. The narratives in book and movie run parallel and so closely to one another, that, while re-reading the novel, I have found it almost impossible to dismiss the images from Kubrick’s movie, except when Clarke throws in some rare scene of his own (the ship approaching the rings of Saturn and the satellite Japetus, for instance); so much so that Clarke’s book really feels like a novelisation or literary by-product of Kubrick’s film.

The scope and pace of the story are far-reaching in both cases, especially the section involving the astronauts, the mad computer and the foolish "Mission Control". However, here is probably where the shortcomings of this book reside: compared to the film, Clarke doesn’t find much to expand on, except for technical or scientific trivia (how to restore gravity in space, how many miles are there between Jupiter and Saturn, so forth), which result in rather dull pieces of prose and don’t really add much to the pleasure that this narrative may inspire. This is particularly apparent towards the end of the novel, where the gripping imagerie of Kubrick’s film translates into a few pseudo-explanatory gibberish chapters. Some piece of poetry might have been more fitting.