Ooo…I hadn’t thought of that. That’s a good one.

I’ve seen it 3 times, I’ve read the book twice (probably 20 years apart).

Meh. If I need a nap I’ll just turn down the lights.

Not to say your opinion is wrong, at all. Visually it’s a stunning movie. Clearly you see something I don’t.

But story? As I said I’ve read it, twice (maybe 3 times, and the second book too), and never found the story to be very compelling.

I really wanted to get what people like you see (which explains why I’ve seen/read it so much). Frankly, there’s little there in the story other than a semi- sentient computer having a breakdown from being given conflicting orders.

Then the whole star-child thing comes across as Clark needing a McGuffin.

Edit: Had to go find a paper I wrote a long, long time ago on the impact of 2001:

Within the SF community of the 1950s and 60s, nothing in 2001 was new. Not non-anthropocentrism. Not guided evolution. Not cosmic indifference. Not the idea that intelligence is instrumental rather than sacred. Stapledon, Lem, Hoyle, Blish, even earlier pulp had already explored all of this, often with far more intellectual honesty. So when people later claim 2001 was “ahead of its time,” that only works if you pretend the genre’s own internal conversation did not exist.

That is where the post-hoc rationalization creeps in. The book’s reputation was inflated retroactively, largely because of the film’s cultural impact and the aura of “seriousness” that surrounded it. The novel inherited that gravity without actually earning it on the page.

Clarke does not eliminate meaning. He relocates it. Meaning still exists, but only for minds capable of having it - reiterating that sentient meaning is the only meaning. The universe itself is mechanical and purposeless, and the Overlords, monolith builders, whatever name you give them, are not bearers of cosmic wisdom. They are engineers optimizing a process. That is not profound; it is almost banal. The universe as an inexorable mechanism was already a default assumption for scientifically literate SF readers.

Even the Star Child reinforces this. It is not a revelation of higher truth. It is a termination condition. Bowman ceases to be a locus of meaning because he ceases to be human. The book ends not because something meaningful has happened, but because meaning has exited the narrative. That is a perfectly coherent move, but it is not insightful. It is just stopping the story when the author no longer wants to engage with subjectivity.

This is why 2001 often feels hollow rather than challenging. Clarke refuses to anthropomorphize the cosmos, but he also refuses to examine what that refusal costs.

There is no tragedy, no tension, no ethical residue. Compare that to Lem, who insists on showing how the collapse of human-centered meaning destabilizes language, science, and selfhood. Clarke simply shrugs and moves on.

2001 wants the authority of hard materialism without doing the philosophical work of materialism. It gestures at cosmic mechanism but does not interrogate consciousness, value, or epistemology in any serious way.