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He gives up listening to recordings of plays because the problems they deal with seem "so remote," "so easily resolved with a little common sense." (. . .) He becomes, without having had to identify completely with a machine, as free of human emotions as a creature of the universe ought to be. (. ..)
The Bowman of the novel re-establishes (. . .) contact with Earth after he disconnects Hal. He broadcasts back everything that happens to him right up to the point when he enters the Star Gate. Clarke does not want even that much of human experience to be lost. He wants somehow to compensate for the "thirty ghosts" that stand behind "every man now alive" (for that is the "ratio," he explains in the novel's Foreword, "by which the dead outnumber the living''). He is even careful to use the popular idea that one's life flashes before one's eyes at the moment of death to insist that "nothing" of Bowman's life is "being lost; all that he had ever been, at every moment of his life, was being transferred to safer keeping. Even as one David Bowman ceased to exist, another became immortal."
2001 the novel, in other words, is not about the revolt of the machines, but about the two things Clarke seems to think we mortals would most like to know in a universe in which we can only hope that the odds are in favor of the race's survival: that we are not alone and that we have not lived in vain.
John Hollow, Against the Night, the Stars: The Science Fiction of Arthur C. Clarke (1983; rev. ed. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987), pp. 14648
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Arthur C. Clarke
I would not like anyone to think that my boyhood reading consisted entirely of pulp magazines, so perhaps it's time to back away a little from Astounding. I devoured "real" books as well; but I must confess that they, too, were almost all science fiction.
My first encounter with the master, H. G. Wells, was slightly discreditable. Browsing through the shelves of W. H. Smith's Taunton branch during my lunch hour I discovered The War of the Worldsbut its price was several shillings beyond me.
No problem: I was (as you may have gathered) a fast reader. Day after day I returned to the shelf, and after a week or so I had finished the now dog-eared volume. ( . .)
At about the same time, I must have discovered Jules Verne; I still have my sixty-year-old copy of A Journey to the Interior of the Eartha much more

 
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