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Rating: 
Summary: God Bless Amazon.Com
Review: I have been looking for this out of print gem for almost 15 years! I placed my first order with Amazon.com eight weeks ago, and, as a lark, placed an order. And here it is in my hot little hands! This is a great service -- I'm *sorry* about the mom and pop bookshopes, but survival of the fittest and all that!
Rating:
Summary: Essential if you loved 2001
Review: I highly reccommend this book to you if you enjoyed the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey (or the movie, for that matter, but read the book version of it before you read this.) It consists of chapters that were originally written for the book, but were not used. Also included are occasional musings by Clarke on the making of the book, and behind-the-scenes glimpses at the making of the movie. He kept a journal during the entire 4-year process of the making of the works, and some of them are excerpted here. It's interesting to see some of the ideas that were thought up, but abandoned. For instance, what became HAL was originally a walking robot; the initial "Dawn of Man" scenes involved an actual alien, and there are numerous alternate endings (all of them every bit as ornate as the one we're all familar with.) This is sort of the literary equivalent of the movie industry's "The Making of Kubrick's 2001" (which I also reccommend.) A highly worthy buy for the fan.
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Summary: insightful look by the author into the movie "2001..."
Review: In this approoximately 200-page paperback you can find interesting details about the making of the movie, and learn about the people behind the ideas presented in "2001." Clarke supplies many interesting anecdotes of the making of the movie, and fills-in the reader on what the origin of some of the ideas and technologies presented in the film. For example, "HAL" was a 'real' acronym (meaning Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer), rather than a one-upsmanship game with IBM (the letters HAL are correspondingly 1 letter ahead of IBM, and many people asked Clarke about that). The historical perspective is interesting, too, since the Apollo Project and 2001 were happening at the same time--Kubrick and Clarke did not want to lose cinematic credibility to events in the so-called "space race."
Rating:
Summary: Sort of good-ish
Review: The literary equivalent of an musical b-sides and rarities compilation, this is a collection of musings on, and extracts from, early versions of the novel of '2001' - Clarke directs the reader to Jerome Agel's then-forthcoming, now-equally-out-of-print 'The Making of Kubrick's 2001' for information on the making of the film. As such, your enjoyment of this is going to depend on your opinion of Clarke's novel (which, without the film, would probably be out-of-print too), and whether you want to read disjointed chapters from early drafts. As glimpses into an alternative '2001', one that Kubrick might have filmed, it's priceless; as entertainment, it's less interesting. Like the other 'hard sci-fi' writers, Clarke is best at the science bits, and a short segment from an alternative finale, one in which the four surviving Discovery crewmembers explore a deep hole in the side of Iapetus (although, oddly, it's only referred to as 'Jupiter V' - perhaps they hadn't named it yet), is fascinating. The talky bits were never his strong point, though, and the pre-flight glimpses at Earth in the year 2001 are full of people not so much conversing, as delivering little scientific monologues at each other. As with everything else Clarke has written, none of the characters have any actual character - although it's possible that this is hyper-realism as, let's face it, most people in the real world are bland, dull and interchangeable, especially when they're at work, and Clarke's characters are always at work. Disappointingly, HAL doesn't appear at all. The other main strand personifies the monolith in the form of Clindar, a tall, noble alien who comes across as an insufferably self-righteous riff on Klaatu from 'The Day the Earth Stood Still'. One shudders to think how camp the film would have been if this had been filmed. And there are a couple of descriptions of alien landscapes and societies which are quite evocative but have a habit of repeating themselves. There's a reprint of 'The Sentinel' as well, but if you're going to the trouble of ordering this from Amazon (it took about a month for them to find and post it to sodden, freezing, miserable London, which wasn't much slower than a normal order) you've probably read that already. In summary, then, if you're reading this you're either buzzing with curiosity or you're me, and if you're a fan of the film, the book, or Clarke it's essential. You'll probably buy it, read it once, and never read it again, though.
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Summary: Much better than the "modified for the movie" 2001.
Review: This is the original version of what most people know as "2001: A space odyssey". The differences are small, but they help make sense out of the cropped version of the story sci fi fans are famillier with.
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