2001: A Space Odyssey
| Author | Arthur C. Clarke |
|---|---|
| Published | 1968 |
| Pages | 237 |
| Recommended | 2 times |
| Buy | Amazon |
| Why it’s on the list | Clarke’s novel, written alongside Kubrick’s film, in which a crewed ship sent after an alien signal is undone by its own computer — HAL 9000 is still the earliest widely read account of a machine failing because the instructions it was given contradicted each other. |
2001: A Space Odyssey
Where I heard about it
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Spotted at Amazon Books at Washington Square, Tigard — November 2017 (Books photo album)
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The a16z infrastructure team — on the a16z Infra Reading List, in the Sci-fi — Classics section (A tier), among Arthur C. Clarke’s selected works.
About this edition
Both the novel and the film grew out of Clarke’s short story “The Sentinel”: an artefact left on the Moon signals something, a ship is sent out after it, and the ship’s computer kills most of the crew — politely, in the voice of a colleague. The a16z list places Clarke with Asimov and Heinlein as the “Big Three” of golden-age science fiction and credits him with grounding his stories in real physics: he had wartime radar experience, degrees in mathematics and physics, and published technical work on geostationary satellites.
Connections
- a16z Infra Reading List — the list this came from.
- Arthur C. Clarke — the author, who already runs through Kyle’s corpus as a forecasting touchstone.
- Artificial Intelligence — HAL as the original misaligned-machine story.
- Rendezvous with Rama and The Fountains of Paradise — the other two Clarke titles the list names.
- Science Fiction — the genre page.
- a16z — the firm whose infra team curates the list.