What do You think about The Lost Worlds Of 2001 (1979)?
Aficionados of the film can eat this book like a good meal. I certainly did, over the course of a Seattle-Bay Area flight, trumping any of the edible cardboard on the airplane menu. Clarke offers his experience of working and re-working and re-working and endlessly finetuning 2001's script, lacing his narrative with succulent details of the many blind alleys and comic possibilities he brainstormed with Stanley Kubrick. If you're like me, seeing HAL as the end-all, be-all of the film's lasting greatness (it has several peerless qualities, to be sure, but HAL, in the greater context of science fiction, is for the ages) -if you are a HAL fan, it may amuse to learn the different names s/he could have alternately borne; Athena, for instance, or Socrates, both of which are interestingly Greek, but.... As well as tasty movie bits, there is plentiful prose here, special because it is unpublishable sections of the 2001 novel that had to be ejected because A) they contradict the final screenplay, or B) they slow things down. Unpublishable but fun to read to see how things could have gone had the film been skewed more to Clarke's rather than Kubrick's sensibilities.
—James Wayne Proctor
