>>>>>http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/11/Galactic_Cntr_full_cropped.jpg
>>>>
>>>>"My God ... it's full of stars!" ;0)
>>>
>>>Doesn't anyone recognize the quote?
>>
>>Of course. But the reference didn't provoke any continuation in that direction.
>>
>>BTW, we're already in the year of Part II.
>
>So which version do you prefer? Arthur C Clarke or Stanley Kubrick ?

Kubrick. Clarke is a special case in SF, his plot rarely comes from humans, it's usually either a force of nature, an accident, or something coming from the rest of the universe. Odyssey is really an exception - HAL being otherwise perfect, but became psychotic because of the contradictory orders it was given - by the higher ranks in the human hierarchy.

I've read Clarke's leftovers, the "Lost worlds of 2001", the descriptions of places that would have been visited but weren't easy to film, so they were scrapped and replaced with those minutes of acid trip. Most of it highly imaginative, but also not promising much of a plot. IOW, Clarke is an important figure, and certainly one of the top 100 SF writers of all time, yet his lack of dramatic development somehow leaves him nowhere in the top 20 on my list. Kubrick, OTOH, made an extraordinary movie. It's not by accident that for a full decade after the Odyssey nothing big was made. And when it finally was, it wasn't SF, it was a SF fairy tale with hidden agendas (slavery of robots was OK all of a sudden, mysticism was back, and yes can we have all the Errol Flynn style swashbuckling again?).