2010 A Space Odyssey: Read an excerpt on the day the new issue is released
The novel was published today by Rebis Publishing House Arthur C. Clarke fri A Space Odyssey 2010. This is, of course, a continuation of the book A Space Odyssey 2001. A Space Odyssey 2010 appeared as part of the series A time machine.
A time machine is a series of Rebis Publishing House presenting classic science fiction works. The series already includes over twenty titles by authors such as Roger Zelazny, Alfred Bester, Philip K. Dick and Robert A. Heinlein.
Arthur C. Clarke, who died in 2008, is the author of over 60 books, a classic of SF literature and a visionary who predicted, among others, the creation of communication satellites and space stations. He has won all major science fiction awards: Hugo, Nebula, Campbell, Locus and Jupiter, and was knighted in 1998. His prose has been filmed several times, the most famous being the film 2001: A Space Odyssey Stanley Kubrick.
2010 A SPACE ODYSSEY – book description
Nine years after the disastrous Discovery mission, a joint US-Russian expedition heads to Jupiter to reach the ship and the memory resources of the onboard computer. There may be clues to what went wrong earlier and what happened to David Bowman. Unexpectedly, the Americans and Russians enter the Chinese parade. A kind of race begins.
Meanwhile, the being who was David Bowman, the only man capable of unraveling the mystery of the monolith orbiting Jupiter, sets out for Earth on a mission of his own…
ARTHUR C. CLARKE, A SPACE ODYSSEY 2010 – BOOK EXCERPT
Rebis Publishing House provided an excerpt (prefaces, first two chapters) A Space Odyssey 2010 translated by Radosław Kot. Enjoy reading!
Preface
Fourteen years have passed – 2010 from the perspective of 1996
Once again, I am about to look at something the beginning of which is more than thirty years away, and these were years filled with scientific and technological discoveries that changed our world almost beyond recognition. When I started writing a novel A Space Odyssey 2001 (and I typed it, do you still see them?), we were five years from Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon, Jupiter’s moons were just bright spots in the glasses of telescopes, and we knew as much about their surface relief as the pre-Columbian cartographers knew about America . But now, as I write these words, we have images of these globes provided by the Galileo space probe, showing details only a few meters across. Stranger still, I can recall these images at any time on the monitor screen in my office with just a few keystrokes (when I press something it doesn’t
yes, which happens quite often, I hear a familiar voice saying, “I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t do that”).
Therefore, it cannot be hidden that certain elements of the “Space Odyssey” trilogy, with volumes planned in 1964, 1982 and 1987, have drifted away from the present day like Jane Austen’s novels. And no amount of corrections or revisions of the original editions could change that, you might as well try to “modernize” The first men on the moon Herbert George Wells.
So I decided to leave the text (as well as the dedication, introduction, and acknowledgments) unchanged for the reissue, with only a brief commentary at the end of the remarkable technological and political changes that have occurred since I first sat down with Stanley Kubrick to work on the script of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. And it was on July 22, 1964 in one of the premises of the Trader Vics chain.
And I hope that’s enough. At least temporarily – until 2010. Or rather 2001…
