2001: A Space Odyssey... A summary by me...

I recently got this book from the library and loved it quite a bit. I kept thinking I'd watched the movie at some point, but apparently not... Or perhaps I'd attempted to watch it and got bored and abandoned it. I've now watched the whole movie after reading the book. Of course I like the book better. Someone asked me to explain what the story is about. So, I'll summarize the book, because the movie... does not explain itself well. Here there be spoilers.

300,000 years ago, the man-ape ancestor of humans were on the brink of extinction; not doing well, not great at hunting or fending off predators, not great at community, etc. Then one day, in the middle of the African savannah, one small pack of these ancestors awoke to find a perfectly rectangular MONOLITH of some strange material just sitting there near their cave homes. They were wary of it at first, but it seemed harmless and eventually they ignored it, as they had other problems; food scarcity, nearby predators, territory dispute with a neighboring pack.

Unbeknownst to them, it was... watching them and while they slept it was minutely modifying their brains. One day, the leader of this pack looked at some blades of grass and realized he had an idea to "tie" them together. And the first knot was born. Then he later saw a discarded animal thigh bone sitting there and picked it up and realized it could be an extension of his arm. And the first weapon was born. And there were other things he was realizing (learning), like cooperation. His pack used his knowledge to hunt, defend themselves and drive off competition. The MONOLITH disappeared, but they barely noticed. Humanity was on it's way...

Fast forward to the year 2001. There are several moon bases for various space agencies. One of the science groups discovers buried deep in the lunar soil evidence of extraterrestrials. It was a MONOLITH of clearly extraterrestrial origin. It was buried on the moon purposefully at least 300,000 years ago. While studying it, the MONOLITH sort of activates, sending a radio signal outwards, apparently towards Saturn.

Fast forward 18 months. A manned mission was sent for the first time to Saturn, with a secret plan to search for and find MORE evidence. On the way, due to the secret nature of the mission and it's importance, the onboard AI computer (named HAL 9000) sort of goes crazy, because it knows the real mission and the two humans don't. It tries to cut off communication with Earth, one of the astronauts goes outside to fix the antenna and the HAL kills him remotely with a space pod. Then the other human onboard, David fights the machine, attempts to awaken other crewmembers that were in hibernation this whole time. HAL vents all oxygen into space and kills the hibernating crew, and attempts to kill Dave. Our hero manages to get his helmet on and not get blown out the airlock. He fights his way through the ship and destroys HAL's processors and hard drives.

David then restores communication with Earth. They apologetically tell him about the real secret mission. They tell him about the MONOLITH found on the moon, it's age and that he needs to get to one of Saturn's moons, Japetus where they think another MONOLITH (or something) will be. He manually flies the ship there with help from computers on Earth, then gets in orbit around Japetus. He gets in a space pod and flies down to the surface where he finds a MONOLITH and attempts to land on it... Except...

He is instead sucked into a wormhole transit system, and travels some ridiculously humongous distance to an unknown galaxy. There he witnesses stellar wonders, dual star systems, gets pulled into an unimaginably old but alien space building of some kind and then... is put into a weird simulation of a nondescript hotel room. It's sort of real, but simulated for his comfort. Then, he gets tired, has a weird meal on his own, and then goes to sleep. After he falls asleep, his room disappears and a MONOLITH is there hovering near his bed. Then David, while sort of sleeping, is regressed backwards from his adult self, through all his memories of life back to being a baby. This STARCHILD awakens and realizes it has special powers, like the ability to travel anywhere in the galaxy and do wondrous things. And it has a new mission to guide humanity. So it travels almost instantly back home to Earth, where humanity freaks out about this GIANT space baby that suddenly appeared and fires nukes at it. The STARCHILD is apparently not bothered, detonates them harmlessly without being hurt and then descends upon the Earth, where the real work will now begin.

THE END.