[ book tip by Tea Patlejch ] This book is written by sci-fi novelist Arthur Clarke in co-production with film director Stanley Kubrick, because it was released together with the film about it. In its time, in year 1968, it was a very influential science fiction book, one of reasons being that people then still hadn't sent men to the Moon.

The story starts three million years ago, when there still weren't people, only apes. There is one lead ape, named Moon-Watcher, and he's smartest and biggest of all of the apes. One evening he is patrolling the apes' caves as usual. Suddenly, he notices there's some strange power which is pulling him to one place on top of a hill. There, he sees a big stone monolith and soon other apes are coming to the place.

Then something strange and new happens: the apes start to show signs of intelligence, conducting experiments with stones to see how far will they fly and making ribbons and knots from grass blades. But next day, they just forget about everything. There was one nice sentence: 'Monolith wasn't for eating and it couldn't eat them.' For the apes it meant that yesterday's experience was quite useless information, they weren't too smart. But this strange power from monolith continues working on them, slowly transforming the ape population into human civilizations around the world. Then the story jumps to the year 1999.

There are people already living on the moon without big problems and they have many space bases. This might be jumping the gun a bit, but if Clarke could write it again about thirty years later, he would set it much further in future. That's generally problem of these books about the future: they can quickly lose relevance.

But anyway, back to the story. Some problem is announced at one of the moon bases. It has to be some strange disease, but in the end they discover some strange magnetic power under surface, coming from the same monolith we read about at the beginning. When the first rays of sunshine hit a surface of the monolith, signals start to fly into space. They find out that these go to one of Saturn's moons, and decide to make an expedition to see if there is some strange civilization.

In the year 2001, an expedition with five travelers - Frank, David and three frozen scientists - is finally named "Discovery". Many strange things happen. The ship's computer goes mad and kills all travelers except David. Than he has to "kill" the computer and travel on alone. After a few months, he comes to the moon and walks on its surface. At first he doesn't see anything very interesting, but then he finds the same monolith as on Moon, only it is much bigger. There is a "Star gate" so he goes closer to see it better. Then his signal with people on Earth was interrupted, because he falls into a strange space, something like black hole, but it isn't quite black. Every colour is reversed, with the sky white, and the stars becoming dark spots. When he wakes up, he is laying in some room in that world. He is slowly dying after all that happened. His body is saved in this space, but his soul is sent to the Earth. Born again, he becomes a Star Child.

It's sure, that there are some friendly aliens behind all of the stuff. They sent a monolith three million years previously to help human civilization, then they sent on the Moon. They calculated, that humans will one day come to Moon and find the monolith and search for aliens. David alias Star Child is a new help on planet Earth, a new present for it's inhabitants. Who knows how it will help them.