2010: Odyssey Two

The latest book I'm reading is Arthur C. Clarke's 2010: Odyssey Two. I've not ever read any of Clarke before, though of course I'd seen the film made from 2001: A Space Odyssey. What made me decide to read the book was remembering bits on tv from the film version, which starred Roy Scheider, John Lithgow, and Helen Mirren.

Here's the basic plot from Wikipedia ...

The story is set nine years after the failure of the Discovery One mission to Jupiter. A joint Soviet-American crew, including Heywood Floyd from 2001, on the Soviet spaceship Alexei Leonov (named after the famous cosmonaut) arrives to discover what went wrong with the earlier mission, to investigate the monolith in orbit around the planet, and to resolve the disappearance of David Bowman. They hypothesize that much of this information is locked away on the now-abandoned Discovery One. The Soviets have an advanced new "Sakharov" drive which will propel them to Jupiter ahead of the American Discovery Two, so Floyd is assigned to the Leonov crew ...

The book is pretty good so far - Clarke's a good writer :) Here's a a clip from the film version ...