See the full review on my blogOn my copy of this book, there wasn’t actually a synopsis, so I went into this book not knowing an awful lot about what it was about and what kind of things to expect – a blank canvas per se. The synopsis above makes it sound like an amazing adventure but I do not think that that reflects anything and if anything it exaggerates what really happens.First of all, this book was written before any space travel of any value had actually been accomplished – at the time this was a new and profound outlook on what space may be like as it was seen as futuristic. This was written in the 1960s and I am reading this in 2013, so maybe that hindered my view of this book a little. Had I read it in the 60s, however, I probably would have been a lot more intrigued, but I found this book to be written like a non fiction novel, (or what I’d think a non fiction novel to be like) in the way that everything was described to the most minutest of details, and I found this to be very harrowing.I found it to be very bland – full of figures, suits (pardon the unintentional space pun), and too many ‘facts’ – I wanted there to be adventure, they’re in space for crying out loud. This may make me sound quite naive, but in the 60s, as aforementioned, space wasn’t a well known thing and I thought Clarke could have brought a little more imagination into the mix, there were, and still are, endless possibilities regarding space travel, and a book is the medium in which is take imagination one step further.The sections of the book where things started to get interesting were my favourite, the take over of Hal and the penultimate ending, which is the only part when the overwhelming description became absolutely brilliant and showed a bit of imagination. On second thoughts, these were the only interesting parts of the book.Now I can appreciate that in 1968 when this was written, that it would have been something new, and exciting, and something everyone knew little about, so at the time this would have been an amazing book. If I could time travel and read this book in the past I would, just to appreciate the novelty, but reading this in 2013 is such a let down.
