2010: Odyssey Two - Arthur C. Clarke

   1982; 285 pages.  Book 2 (out of 4) in the “Space Odyssey” series.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Space Exploration; Hard Science Fiction; Movie Tie-In.  Overall Rating: 9½*/10.

 

    It’s 2010, and it’s been almost a decade since the first manned space mission to Jupiter.  That one was a disaster, due to a computer malfunction.  Everyone but Dave Bowman perished, and no one knows what happened to him.  The space vehicle Discovery was abandoned, and presumably is still orbiting around Jupiter.

 

    That ship is still American property though, and now US Intelligence has just learned that the Russians are building a spaceship to go to Jupiter and claim the Discovery as "salvage".  The USA has started a crash program (no pun intended) to build a spaceship, but there’s no way we can beat the Russians’ projected launch date.

 

    But aha!, we’ve got a trump card: Dr. Sivasubramanian Chandrasegarampillai (called ‘Dr. Chandra’ for short), who programmed HAL-9000, the computer on Discovery that caused all the trouble.  He works for us, and he will be a great asset to anyone trying to get Discovery up and running again.

 

    So let's do something unexpected—call the Russians and propose the venture to Jupiter be a joint American-Russian mission, with Dr. Chandra as one of the American guests.

 

    Those Russkis are probably dumb enough to accept the offer.

 

What’s To Like...

    2010 – Odyssey Two is the sequel to 2001- A Space Odyssey, both in movie and book format.  I’ve seen the 2001 movie three times, a record for my cinematic attendance.  I haven’t seen the 2010 movie.

 

    I liked the book’s premise of Russian and American scientists cooperating with each other.  2010 – Odyssey Two was written in 1982, when the Cold War was still very much a reality.  To portray a group of Russians as normal human beings, and not the usual brainwashed Communist stereotypes, was a pleasant change.  Arthur C. Clarke also inserts a number of Russian phrases into the text, usually without translations into English.  Thank goodness for Google.

 

    There’s a multitude of plotlines to keep track of.  It’s not a spoiler to say that HAL-9000 is successfully reactivated, but how trustworthy will he be?  Will they find out what happened to David Bowman?  Is there life of Jupiter’s moons?  What’s with those monoliths?  And why is a cryptic deadline given for them to leave and return to Earth?

 

    I loved the attention to scientific details.  Arthur C. Clarke writes in a “hard science fiction genre” style.  I’m proud to say I knew what “Lagrange points” were, but had to look up “von Neumann machines”.  The “1:4:9 Ratio” twist was sheer genius, and I was amazed to learn that the name of the “EPCOT center” is actually an acronym.

 

    The pacing was similar to the 2001 storyline.  There’s not a lot of action in the first 2/3 of the book, but the reader’s interest is kept by the interactions of the multinational and mixed-gender crew, plus the reawakened HAL.  Then comes an extended and exciting ending, which resolves some questions about the mysterious monolith-building extraterrestrials, while posing new ones.  Presumably those will be addressed in the remaining two books in the series.  Things close with an altered solar system, one that is both hopeful and scary. 

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.5*/5, based on 3,323 ratings and 410 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.95*/5, based on 58,208 ratings and 1,601 reviews

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Perijove (n.) : the point in a spacecraft’s orbit around Jupiter when it is closest to the planet.

Others: Posmotri (v., Russian).; Lingam (n.).

 

Excerpts...

    “You naïve Americans! We’re more realistic; we have to be.  All your grandparents died of old age, Heywood.  Three of mine were killed in the Great Patriotic War.”

    When they were alone together, Tanya always called him Woody, never Heywood.  She must be serious.  Or was she merely testing his reactions?

    “Anyway, Discovery is merely a few billion dollars’ worth of hardware.  The ship’s not important—only the information it carries.”

    “Exactly.  Information that could be copied and then erased.”

    “You do get some cheerful ideas, Tanya.  Sometimes I think that all Russians are a little paranoiac.”

    “Thanks to Napoleon and Hitler, we’ve earned every right to be.”  (loc. 922)

 

    “It’s all very well to feel grateful to Bowman—or whatever gave that warning.  But that’s all they did.  We could still have been killed.”

    “But we weren’t,” answered Tanya.  “We saved ourselves—by our own efforts.  And perhaps that was the whole idea.  If we hadn’t—we wouldn’t have been worth saving.  You know, survival of the fittest.  Darwinian selection.  Eliminating the genes for stupidity.”  (loc. 3821)

 

Kindle Details…

    2010 – Odyssey Two sells for $7.59 at Amazon, the same price as Books 3 and 4.  Book 1, 2001 – A Space Odyssey, costs $9.99.

 

How did one annoy a two-kilometer-long black rectangular slab?  (loc. 1764)

    Profanity is almost nonexistent in 2010 – Odyssey Two, which is what I expected.  I noted only 4 expletives in the whole book, all of which were of the “milder” variety.

 

    The quibbles are minor.  Tame, playful, intelligent dolphins are worked into the storyline several times, and I kept waiting for them to make some sort of impact, presumably of the “goodbye, and thanks for all the fish” ilk.  Alas, it never happened.  Maybe they play more important roles in the remaining two books in the series.

 

    A Chinese space team also enters into the plotline, although it sort of a cameo appearance.  But theirs was an obvious fate since only one of them is even identified by name.  I suspect they'll all be wearing red shirts in the movie version.

 

    That’s all I can gripe about.  If you read 2001 – A Space Odyssey and liked it, you’ll enjoy 2010 – Odyssey Two just as much.  Now I'm wondering how Stanley Kubrick handled the cosmic ending in the movie version.  I'll have to search the Netflix files to see if they carry it.

 

    9½ Stars.  A brief mention of a novella by Leo Tolstoy called The Kreutzer Sonata intrigued me  Wikipedia says it was published in 1889 and promptly censored by the Russian authorities.  Here, it is described as “Russian erotic fiction”.  I never knew such a genre existed.

The Day of the Triffids - John Wyndham

   1951; 241 pages.  New Author? : Yes.  Book 1 (out of 2) in the “Triffids” series.  Genre : Classic Sci-Fi; Post-Apocalyptic Fiction; Movie Tie-In.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

 

    It was a global double whammy.

 

    The first shock was the coming of a new plant species called the triffids.  Some think they came from outer space, but the evidence points to modified seeds of Russian origin.

 

    The triffids are dangerous: they can shuffle around and possess a lethal ten-foot-long stinger.  But triffid oil is a highly prized commodity, much superior to traditional fish oil, so "triffid farms quickly sprang up.  And since triffids had no eyes, the threat they posed to humans was minor.

 

    Then came the second shock.  The earth’s orbit passed through the tail of a comet, and people worldwide were treated to an astral light show, the likes of which had never been seen before.  There was just one drawback: the next morning, every human who had watched the cosmic event was totally blind.  Suddenly triffids and humans couldn’t see each other.

 

    But the triffids had already adapted to that.

 

What’s To Like...

    The Day of the Triffids is a 1951 post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel by John Wyndham.  It was made into a movie 12 years later, which was my introduction to it (black & white version, probably seen on TV), and it scared the bejeezus out of me.

 

    The story is set in the greater London area (John Wyndham is a British author), and we follow our protagonist, Bill Masen, as he tries to come to grips with a world where nearly everyone has been blinded and are desperately trying to survive on a limited food supply, no services (such as phones and electricity), and marauding triffids.  Bill is one of the few lucky humans that can still see; he was recovering from eye surgery on the night of the comet, and missed the light show because his eyes were wrapped up with gauze.

 

    The storyline is basically an examination of how humans would react when they are suddenly threatened with complete annihilation.  Different people respond in different ways.  The majority adopt a “me first” attitude: grab as much food and supplies as you can; and who cares if others starve because of this.  Others counter with a “share and share alike” philosophy; but the trouble with this is that it might mean that everyone just starves to death a little bit sooner.  Some discern “God’s judgment” in what has transpired, and establish religious communes.  And a few decide that “might makes right” applies and are happy to kill anyone who disagrees; less mouths to feed means more food for the those who remain alive.  All of these approaches reminded me of the old saying “Every society is three meals away from chaos.”

 

    The e-book is written in English, not American, which means you get a few weird spellings, such as eying, caldrons, whisky, and payed; but I didn’t find this distracting.  I chortled at the “triffidian amatory exuberance” euphemism, but had to ponder the “enforced polygamy” dictum, a practice whose justification is given in one of the excerpts below.  The Christian commune at Tynsham Manor is an interesting study, and kudos to Wyndham for mentioning the city of Staines: I’ve been there!

 

    The ending is okay, but somewhat contrived.  Bill and company are visited by a helicopter from a group of survivors one day, then desperately need them when visited by a less-friendly group 24 hours later.  This creates a situation that can either be viewed as a cliffhanger (a pet peeve of mine), or a teaser for a sequel, but Wyndham never penned one.  The follow-up book finally appeared 50 years later; it was titled The Night of the Triffids and written by Simon Clark.  Better late than never.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Spizzard (n.) : someone who is intoxicated by drugs or alcohol.

Others: Contretemps (n.); Derniers Cris (n., pl.); Cointreau (n.); Shindy (n.); Cenobite (n.);

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.4*/5, based on 5,884 ratings and 756 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.01*/5, based on 109,345 ratings and 5,287 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    “Look at it this way.  Granted that they do have intelligence then that would leave us with one important superiority—sight.  We can see, and they can’t.  Take away our vision, and the superiority is gone.  Worse than that—our position becomes inferior to theirs, because they are adapted to a sightless existence and we are not.”  (loc. 627)

 

    “There is one thing to be made quite clear to you before you decide to join our community.  It is that those of us who start on this task will all have our parts to play.  The men must work—the women must have babies.  Unless you can agree to that, there can be no place for you in our community.

    After an interval of dead silence, he added:

    “We can afford to support a limited number of women who cannot see, because they will have babies who can see.  We cannot afford to support men who cannot see.  In our new world, then, babies become very much more important than husbands.”  (loc. 1668)

 

Kindle Details…

    The Day of the Triffids presently goes for $4.99 at Amazon.  The sequel will run you $8.99.  Amazon carries another eight books or so by John Wyndham, ranging in price for $3.50 to $12.99.

 

And we danced, on the brink of an unknown future, to an echo of a vanished past.  (loc. 1755)

    As would be expected of a 1951 sci-fi novel, the language is very clean.  I noted just six cusswords in the first 25% of the book, all mild entries in the eschatological category.

 

    It should be noted that the 1963 movie adaptation probably sets a record for diverging from the book’s storyline.  The film is an action-horror tale where the triffid invasion is settled on a soggy lighthouse floor.  There’s no such invasion in the book, which is more of a study of human survival in a post-apocalyptic world.  Wyndham would’ve been turning over in his grave if he saw the movie.

 

    The shortcomings if the book’s ending have already been addressed, but the literary bar for a science fiction novel in the early 1950s was set rather low, and The Day of the Triffids easily meets my expectation in that regard.  Plus, there’s a short epilogue on the final page that lets you know how things turn out for Bill, Josella, and Susan.  (Huh? Who?)

 

    8 Stars.  So which is better: the thriller-horror movie or the contemplative book?  I’ll duck that issue by saying both have their merits, and it depends on your mood at the time.  But I do want to find and watch the movie version and see if it still scares me.

Six Days of the Condor - James Grady

   1974; 311 pages.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Espionage; Conspiracy Thriller; Suspense; Movie Tie-in.  Overall Rating : 8½*/10.

 

    Welcome to the Washington D.C. branch of the American Literary Historical Society!  You can tell by its name that its purpose in life is . . . um . . . something literary, I suppose.  Or historical, maybe.  That name seems a bit vague.

 

    Actually, the Society is a CIA front for one of its very unimportant branches.  Its function is to “keep track of all espionage and related acts recorded in literature.”  In other words, its agents sit around and read spy thrillers and murder mysteries, checking to see if any author out there has written a plot with details about espionage that are too close for comfort to how the CIA conducts its business.

 

    All in all, it’s a pretty tame assignment.  Yet today, some person or persons walked in through the front doors of the American Literary Historical Society and shot everybody in the department to death.

 

     Well, not quite everybody.  One member of the group had the good fortune of being out of the office, picking up lunch for the rest of his coworkers.  Ronald Malcolm.  Now all sorts of people, some CIA, others of unknown loyalties, would like to bring Malcom in for questioning.

 

    Or kill him.

 

What’s To Like...

    James Grady’s Six Days of the Condor is the basis for the 1975 blockbuster political-thriller film Three Days of the Condor, although “loosely based” would be a more apt description, as evidenced by the length of the book’s titular chase scene being cut in half.

 

    Malcolm’s chances of staying alive are slim.  The reader may know that Malcolm has had a narrow escape from death, but his employer, the CIA, doesn’t.  They quickly realize they have a turncoat in their midst, and the Number One suspect is that oh-so-lucky employee who just happened to be out of the office when the assassins struck.  Meanwhile, the baddies too learn they’ve overlooked a victim, and are determined to correct that oversight.  Tell me, Malcolm, where do you hide when everybody is after you?

 

    The storytelling is spellbinding.  The reader knows that everything is going to turn out okay, but the bad guys are just as resourceful as the good guys, and logic tells us that a bookish nerd will not fare well against well-armed and highly-trained gunmen.  The technical details felt well-researched, especially when it came to lethal firearms.

 

    Six Days of the Condor was published in 1974, and it was fun to re-experience that era.  At one point, Malcom avails himself to a “battered Corvair”, which I happened to have one of back then, and in battered condition as well.  Later, Malcolm hides out at a “homosexual hangout”, which the author informs us can also be called a “gay” bar.  Soon afterward, he hitches a ride with a driver looking for nubile girls who will do anything, and he means anything for some marijuana.  Even later, the action takes place at an airport, where security is so lax that evidently anyone and everyone can enter with a handgun hidden under their jackets.

 

    The ending is both exciting and twisty.  All the plot threads get tied up, the good guys prevail, and the bad guys are foiled.  There are some sequels, but they appear to be limited to six short stories and a novella.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.2/5 based on 1,853 ratings and 328 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.09/5 based on 16,761 ratings and 448 reviews

 

Things That Sound Dirty, But Aren’t…

    [The man], slightly wounded in the neck, desperately reached for the gun in his back pocket, but his pants were around his ankles.  (loc. 2714)

 

Excerpts...

    That morning at 3:15 Heidegger unlocked his door to the knock of police officers.  When he opened the door he found two men in ordinary clothes smiling at him.  One was very tall and painfully thin.  The other was quite distinguished, but if you looked in his eyes you could tell he wasn’t a banker.

    The two men shut the door behind them.  (loc. 688)

 

    The terminal was beginning to fill with the bustling people who would pass through it during the day.  A wheezing janitor swept cigarette butts off the red rug.  A mother tried to coax a bored infant into submission.  A nervous coed sat wondering if her roommate’s half-fare card would work.  Three young Marines headed home to Michigan wondered if she would work.  A retired wealthy executive and a penniless wino slept in adjoining chairs, both waiting for daughters to fly in from Detroit.  A Fuller Brush executive sat perfectly still, bracing himself for the effects of a jet flight on a gin hangover.  (loc. 2672)

 

Kindle Details…

    Six Days of the Condor sells for $8.99 at Amazon right now.  James Grady has seven other e-books available at Amazon, including two that have tie-ins to Six Days of the Condor.  They range in price from $1.99 to $11.99.

 

“I Imagine there are many who frown on the U.S. government pushing dope.”  (loc. 2560)

    The quibbles are minor.  The cussing, frankly, was a lot less than I expected, just 12 instances in the first 25%.  OTOH, there were also a half dozen rolls-in-the-hay.

 

    Each of the twelve chapters starts out with a quote.  Some are by US presidents about the CIA, and those were quite applicable.  Others were from Fred Reinfeld’s The Complete Chess Course and left me scratching my head, despite the fact that I’m an avid chessplayer.

 

    Last of all, it surprised me that in the one or two gunfights betwixt nerdy Malcolm and the ruthless killers, our hero fares rather well.  Of course, I admit it would’ve been a short, forgettable tale if the Malcolm had been blown away in the first hour of the chase.

 

    But I pick at nits.  For me, Six Days of the Condor was an intense, exciting, fingernails-biting story, and it’s easy to see why it was picked up and developed into a big-budget movie featuring big-budget stars like Faye Dunaway, Robert Redford, Cliff Robertson, and Max von Sydow.  Despite all the changes they made to James Grady’s original story, including renaming most of the characters (Ronald Malcolm becomes Joe Turner) and relocating the setting (Washington DC is replaced by New York City), I may have to see if Netflix carries this movie.

 

    8½ Stars.  At the beginning of the e-book is a “Confession” section wherein James Grady gives the background to his writing Six Days of the Condor, a short biography of his life pre- and post- the book being published, and his experience as a technical adviser on the movie.  This takes up 15% of the e-book.  I suggest reading it after you’ve read the story, not before.

Simple Simon - Ryne Douglas Pearson

   1996; 250 pages.  Book 4 (out of 5) in the “Art Jefferson Thriller” series.  New Author? : Yes.  Technothriller; Movie Tie-In.  Overall Rating : 7*/10.

 

    How do you test a new encryption system?  Well, you could give a coded message to all your geeky IT guys who weren’t part of its development team and challenge them to try to bust it.

 

    But the head of Comsec-Z, the folks that spent the last five years and ten billion dollars of Uncle Sam’s money creating the new system (called KIWI), wants a more robust round of testing.  After all, KIWI is slated to be used throughout the United States federal government for all sensitive communications.

 

    Hey, why not try it out in a puzzle magazine?  Insert an encrypted message into one of the editions, with a secret message.  Have it say something like: “You’ve solved Puzzle 99!  Call this number (insert a private Comsec-Z telephone number here) to claim your prize!”  Then just have someone monitor that phone in case it rings.  It won’t, of course.  But still.

 

    That phone number has been routed to the desk of Leo Pedanski, a cryptographer for Comsec-Z.  As expected, it’s never rang.  So far.

 

    Leo Pedanski is about to have the worst day ever in his long career at Comsec-Z.

 

What’s To Like...

    Simple Simon was my introduction to Ryne Douglas Pearson’s 5-book thriller series featuring a black FBI agent, Art Jefferson, and a 16-year-old autistic boy, Simon Lynch.  It’s not a spoiler to reveal that Simon solves the encrypted message in the puzzle magazine and that Art becomes his de facto bodyguard when Comsec-Z reacts unkindly when Simon calls to claim his prize.

 

    I liked the focus on autism.  We get to hear what Simon hears, see the world as it appears to him, and struggle with his jumbled up thought processes.  Simon’s personal quirks were fascinating.  When writing, he meticulously avoids using the letter “e”, but can’t give you a reason why he does that.  He likes jigsaw puzzles, but only if they have exactly 500 pieces.  Any more or any less, and he ignores them., and he builds those 500-piece ones with all the pieces face down.

 

    To be honest, I know very little about autism, so I can’t say how accurately it is portrayed, but it gives the storyline a unique tone.  The baddies have formidable resources at their disposal when they come looking for whoever “solved Puzzle 99”, including a psycho assassin from overseas, and Art Jefferson’s task of protecting Simon is made even harder because of the boy’s disorder.

 

    The ending is okay.  It’s suitably exciting and has a nice twist that allows Simon to finally shake off his pursuers, but the actual showdown between Jefferson and the baddies seemed a bit predictable to me.  The epilogue felt a bit too convenient, although it does reinforce the maxim that karma is a b*tch.

 

    Simple Simon is a fast, easy read.  Things unfold at a brisk pace, and never bogged down.  The chapters are short, with 26 of them covering 250 pages.  ANAICT, Simon doesn’t appear in the first three books in this series, but Book 5, Simon Sees, is a continuation of Simon's and Art’s relationship.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.2*/5, based on 187 ratings and 106 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.67*/5, based on 352 ratings and 44 reviews

 

Excerpts...

    He set the cup back on the coaster on the lamp table and cast his eyes to The Tinkery.  They danced over the cover, unwilling to remain still.  There were too many colors, and they bled together so that one color was not itself anymore, and then it was another color.  In his mind’s eye, Simon saw pictures as unbalanced, imprecise, and unsettling.  A picture of a chair was not like looking at a real chair.  The world reduced to two dimensions disturbed him.  (loc. 389)

 

    It was difficult to think of the man that way with his tongue torn out and one knee bent forward at an impossible angle.  That this…woman had done that frightened Heiji more than a bit.  If only she were tame his thoughts might be of pleasure.

    “Mitsuo, don’t imagine yourself with me,” Keiko said without looking at him.  “Imagination is the second most dangerous thing a man has.”

    Heiji snickered a bit, nervously.  He had been too obvious in his musings.  “The second, is it?”

    “Yes.”

    “What is the first?”

    “A heartbeat.”  (loc. 932)

 

Kindle Details…

    Currently, Simple Simon sells for $4.99 at Amazon, as do the other four books in the series.  Ryne Douglas Pearson offers more than a dozen other e-books, ranging in price from $1.99 to $4.99, plus two short stories, each costing $0.99.

 

“Under a tree by a house, by a field washed with rain, lies a boy all alone with his thoughts and his dreams.”  (loc. 132)

    There are a couple of things to quibble about, but nothing major.  I counted only 16 cusswords in the first 20% of the book, which is commendably sparse for a Thriller novel, Four of those were f-bombs.  There’s a racial epithet later on, plus a mention of an erection, and a couple of bouts of torture, but, as shown in the second excerpt above, at least these weren’t lurid.  Still, Wikipedia’s labeling of this as a “Young Adult Novel” seems a bit misguided.

 

    There were a fair amount of typos.  Hyphen issues, such as “thirty year old”, “mid bite”, “well armed”, and “two handed” were distracting, but maybe this occurs during the document-to-digital conversion.  Others, such as breech/breach, shirt tails/shirttails, and/an, and Arm/arm (twice!), just mean another round of editing ought to be done.

 

    Overall, Simple Simon was an enjoyable read, although for me, it wasn’t a page-turner.  The plotline seemed predictable, at least up until the aforementioned twist in the ending.  I still recommend it though, particularly for the insight into the challenges of coping with autism.

 

    7 Stars.  Simple Simon was the basis for a 1998 movie, Mercury Rising, which featured Bruce Willis as the protagonist FBI agent.  Several changes were made in converting from book to movie.  The most obvious was the racial switch of Art from black white, but his last name also went from Jefferson to Jeffries (why??), and Simon’s age dropped from 16 years old to 9 years.  More alterations are listed in its Wikipedia article.

 

    Mercury Rising grossed $93 million at the box office, but garnered mostly bad reviews, and Bruce Willis “won” the 1999 Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Actor for his performance that year in this and two other films.  I rarely watch movies, but I did watch this one many years ago, and I thought it was quite good, no matter what the critics say.

2001 - A Space Odyssey - Arthur C. Clarke

    1968; 256 pages.  Book 1 (out of 4) in the “Space Odyssey” series.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : First Contact; Hard Science Fiction; Movie Tie-In.  Overall Rating: 9*/10.

 

    The evidence is persuasive: extraterrestrial beings have visited us.

 

    They left behind some sort of marker, and we’re not talking crop circles or spaceships either.  Instead, it’s a giant stone monolith buried 30 feet below ground.  Curiously, it was placed on the moon.  Talk about an out-of-the-way location.

 

    Needless to say, we Earthlings didn’t discover it until we made it to the moon and began to analyze what’s beneath its surface.  The slab's strong gravitational field was what clued us in that it wasn't a naturally-occurring object.

 

    Further testing showed that the monolith has been there quite some time.  About three million years, give or take a few millennia.  If some alien civilization possessed space travel technology that long ago, think of how more advanced they must be now.  Although to be honest, burying a marker underground, and on the moon, doesn't make a lot of sense.

 

    I wonder if they left any other monoliths behind for us.

 

What’s To Like...

    2001 – A Space Odyssey is Arthur C. Clarke’s companion book to Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant, spectacular, and incredibly popular 1968 sci-fi movie of the same name.  The "Introduction" in the front of this book (the “Millennial” Edition) details the extensive collaborative effort by these two geniuses to create a blockbuster sci-fi epic, with plans for the film and the novel to be released at the same time.

 

    I’ve seen the movie (three times!) and decided to now read the book.  I was surprised how much they differ, despite the Kubrick/Clarke partnership.  Some examples: the opening “man-ape” scenario in the book is played out in greater detail, with its monolith, dark and silent in the movie, performing some dazzling pyrotechnics.  Later on, HAL’s demise plays out differently and his/its reason for failure is explained in greater detail.  And perhaps most notably, the main mission’s destination in the book is now Saturn; while the movie’s endpoint is Jupiter.  Wikipedia gives a complete list of the differences; the link to it is here.

 

    The overall sequence of scenes is the pretty much the same.  Things start with the man-apes, then hop on a flight to the moon to look at the monolith.  After that, we join HAL, Dave, and Frank on a spaceflight to Jupiter, the final destination in the movie, and a gravitational booster in the book to save on gas for the trip to Saturn, where, when we arrive, we find a familiar object waiting to greet us.

 

    The book is written in a “hard science fiction” style; while the movie focuses on stunning visual effects.  I enjoyed Clarke's choice of the rarely-used but completely-awesome word “waldoes”, and had to YouTube the music references to “Verdi’s Requiem Mass” and the obscure “Walton’s Violin Concerto”.  In light of the present-day pandemic, the book’s mention of China being accused of initiating a “blackmail by synthetic disease” plot was eerily prescient.  And I appreciated Arthur Clarke addressing the urban legend about how the computer HAL got its name.  Hint: it is not a clever transition from the acronym IBM by moving each letter one spot earlier.

 

    The movie-vs-book ending is a trade-off.  You can’t reproduce the movie’s fabulous psychedelic climax with words, but Clarke does give a better explanation of it.  Neither version explains the appearance, purpose, and destiny of the Star Child, and the ease with which it destroys a missile-carrying satellite.  Presumably that will be addressed in the sequel, 2010 – Odyssey Two, which exists in both book and film formats.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.7*/5, based on 2,728 ratings.

    Goodreads: 4.15*/5, based on 280,092 ratings and 6,537 reviews

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Quietus (n.) : death, or something that causes death, regarded as a release from life.

Others: Ablative (adj.).

 

 

Excerpts...

    At last, one of Man’s oldest questions had been answered; here was the proof, beyond all shadow of doubt, that his was not the only intelligence that the universe had brought forth.  But with that knowledge there came again an aching awareness of the immensity of Time.  Whatever had passed this way had missed mankind by a hundred thousand generations.  Perhaps, Floyd told himself, it was just as well.  And yet — what we might have learned from creatures who could cross space, while our ancestors were still living in trees!  (loc. 1094)

 

    “Mission Control has just dropped a small bomb on us.”  He lowered his voice, like a doctor discussing an illness in front of the patient.  “We may have a slight case of hypochondria aboard.”

    Perhaps Bowman was not fully awake, after all; it took him several seconds to get the point.  Then he said, “Oh — I see.  What else did they tell you?”

    “That there was no cause for alarm.  They said that twice, which rather spoiled the effect as far as I was concerned.”  (loc. 1878)

 

“The thing’s hollow – it goes on forever – and – oh my God! – it’s full of stars!”  (loc. 2686)

    I don’t really have any quibbles with 2001 – A Space Odyssey, neither with the movie nor the novel.  True, both leave a lot of plot threads unresolved, the movie more so, but the ending in both cases is at a logical point.

 

    The degree of storyline divergence is surprising, particularly in light of the amount of collaboration going on between Clarke and Kubrick, but both of them did a superb job within their respective fields.  We never do meet the monolith-crafting aliens, nor any of the other races of sentient creatures that are implied to exist, but I have no doubt that will be addressed in the rest of the series.

 

    The book version of 2001 – A Space Odyssey was a delight to read, and I was particularly impressed by how closely the hard science fiction proposed in it has matched up with the real-world technological advancements in space travel.  Somehow it seemed fitting that I should read this book in the same week as when Captain James T. Kirk made his ascension into the final frontier.

 

    9 Stars.  I can’t recall any other case of such close collaboration by a movie director and a novelist for the simultaneous development and release of a new movie-&-book combination.  In this age of indie and self-published authors, coupled with TikTok and YouTube video-makers, surely such an alliance should should be common practice.  Authors already co-write novels with other authors.  Why not co-produce your great idea with a movie-maker?

Make Room! Make Room! - Harry Harrison

   1966; 285 pages.  New Author? : No.  Genre : Dystopian Fiction.  Overall Rating : 7½*/10.

 

    New York City in the not-so-distant future is a crowded place.  35 million people are crammed together within its city limits.  That’s a lot of mouths to feed, and that's just one of many problems.

 

    There’s not enough food, especially “real” sustenance such as honest-to-goodness meat.  There’s not enough water, and what is available is of suspect purity.  There’s not enough living space either, but where can the homeless go – the rest of the country is in just as bad shape as the Big Apple.  Nobody drives anymore because gasoline is almost impossible to find.  Even paper is rationed because there are very few trees left to chop down.

 

    So unless you’re very, very rich, you survive by the grace of government-issued ration cards.  Alas, they keep cutting the size of the rations you can obtain this way, and the lines to do so keep getting longer and longer.

 

    There’s one other way of surviving if you’re poor: break into the dwellings of the wealthy and steal their stuff.  If it can’t be eaten, it can always be hocked on the black market.

 

    But that carries an inherent risk: if your breaking-and-entering goes awry, the consequences can only be bad.

 

What’s To Like...

    As the book cover shown above correctly claims, Make Room! Make Room! is the basis for the fantastic Charlton Heston film, Soylent Green.  Let’s be clear though, the movie is not a screen adaptation of this book, the storylines are completely different.  True, some of the book’s characters make the leap to the silver screen: Detective Kulozik, Shirl, Tab Fielding, Judge Santini, and Sol, although the latter gets a different last name.  Noticeably absent from the movie are the book’s two main characters, Detective Andy Rusch and Billy Chung.

 

    There are three main plotlines to follow: 1.) who killed Big Mike, 2.) who behind the scenes is pushing for a major investigation into the murder (and why?), and 3.) how’s New York, and the rest of the world for that matter, going to deal with hordes of starving citizens that are resorting to protests?

    This is not a whodunit; the reader knows who the murderer is from the start, and Detective Rusch figures it out fairly early on.  But knowing who did it and locating/arresting him are two different things.

 

    I liked the story’s premise: that the underlying problem is overpopulation due to the use of birth control being outlawed.  I was amused that the “near future” setting was 1999, which is old news to some now, but not when Make Room! Make Room! was first published in 1966.  FYI, the population of NYC today (2018, actually) is a mere 8.3 million or so, not the book's 35 million, so at least part of Harry Harrison's scenario didn't play out.  And curiously, sending telegrams was still a common means of communication in Make Room! Make Room!

 

    It was interesting to learn that the term “Soylent” is a portmanteau of “soy (beans)” and “lentils”, the two main components of it.  At least that’s what “they” want you to believe.  There are soylent burgers and soylent steaks, but of course, they’re a poor substitute for the meat-based counterparts.  I laughed at LSD still being a popular (and illicit) drug.  Billy Chung’s first acid trip shows that Harry Harrison did some good research.  Finally, the whole idea of “meatleggers” was hauntingly intriguing.

 

    The ending is okay, but not great.  There are no twists, nor any happy conclusion.  1999 segues into a new millennium, and the world doesn't come to an end.  That may seem trivial in nowadays, but I recall religious zealots and computer programmers being scared to death that 12/31/99 would usher in Armageddon.  Harry Harrison at least got that part right.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Gonif (n.) : a disreputable or dishonest person

Others: Astrakhan (adj.).

 

Excerpts...

    The man in the black uniform stood in an exaggerated position of attention, but there was the slightest edge of rudeness to his words.  “I’m just a messenger, sir, I was told to go to the nearest police station and deliver the following message.  “There has been some trouble.  Send a detective at once.”

    “Do you people in Chelsea Park think you can give orders to the police department?”  The messenger didn’t answer because they both knew that the answer was yes and it was better left unspoken.  (loc. 820)

 

    “Some of our neighbors can be dangerous.”

    “The guards?”

    “No, they are of no importance.  Their work is a sinecure, and they have no more wish to bother us than we have to bother them.  As long as they do not see us we are not here, so just stay away from them.  You’ll find that they don’t look very hard, they can collect their money without putting themselves in any danger – so why should they?  Sensible men.  Anything worth stealing or removing vanished years ago.  The guards remain only because no one has ever decided what to do with this place and the easiest solution is just to forget about it.”  (loc. 2199)

 

Kindle Details…

    Make Room! Make Room! sells for $7.99 right now at Amazon.  Harry Harrison was a very popular science fiction/fantasy writer for many decades, and there are dozens of his novels available for the Kindle.  Individual e-books range in price from $1.99 to $13.99, and you can also get several “bundles” (typically 10-12 books) for  a mere $0.99 to $1.99.  Also, some of his books are now classified as “public domain”, which means you can download them for free.

 

“Men should be spoiled, it makes them easier to live with.”  (loc. 1930 )

    There are a couple of quibbles.

 

    First, there were an above-average amount of typos for a non-self-published book.  This was my second “Rosetta” book, both of which had this problem, so I suspect Rosetta’s to blame, not the Harry Harrison or the original publisher.

 

    OTOH, it should be noted that two of the three main storylines are not resolved, and that's the author's responsibility.  The book screams for a sequel to answer what becomes of Rusch, Shirl, and the world as a whole.  Alas, AFAIK no “Book 2” was ever written, although one might consider the movie as doing that.

 

    Also, Harry Harrison gets a little “preachy” late in the story when it comes to the idiocy of outlawing birth control.  I happen to agree with his views on this, but the “sermon” still slowed things down.

 

    Finally, while there wasn’t a lot of cussing in the story (only 5 instances in the first 20%),  there were several ethnic slurs in the text that made me cringe a bit.  Yet I have to say, dialogue back in 1966 included a lot more of these slurs than our present-day speech patterns do.

 

    7½ Stars.  I enjoyed Make Room! Make Room!, but I wasn’t blown away by it.  Maybe my letdown is a function of how much I enjoyed Soylent Green.  My main beef is with the ending coupled with a lack of a (written) sequel.  Perhaps one of these days someone will pick up the gauntlet and write one.