2001: A Space Odyssey

The book

Three million years ago something taught a starving band of man-apes to use a bone as a weapon. In 1999 the same object is dug out of the lunar crust and sends a signal outward when sunlight first touches it. Discovery follows the signal, its computer kills the crew, and the one surviving man goes through a gate that was left for whoever got that far.

Why Ralph McQuarrie

McQuarrie is the hand for scale and silence, and 2001 is a novel with almost nobody in it — long stretches where the subject is a machine in vacuum and the nearest human is asleep or dead.

He is also right about the register. The book refuses spectacle: the monolith does nothing dramatic, the ship is a working object rather than a wonder, and the ending happens quietly. That calm is exactly what he painted, and the opposite of what most SF illustration does with this material.

What to look for

Saturn, not Jupiter. The novel goes to Japetus and the film went to Jupiter, and no scene in this cycle names Jupiter at all — the build refuses to compile if one does. The monolith is also BLANK on all six appearances: no markings, no glow, no interior. Clarke gives it nothing and the temptation to decorate it is the main way an illustrator gets this book wrong.

Plates

The Road to ExtinctionThe TeachingThree Million YearsClavius BaseThe SignalBowmanThe Chess GamePoole OutsideThe Hibernation AlarmsThe Logic Memory CentreThe Briefing He Was Not GivenJapetus