2001: A Space Odyssey (novel)

""Two years ago, we discovered the first evidence for intelligent life outside the Earth. A slab or monolith of hard, black material, ten feet high, was found buried in the crater Tycho. Here it is.” At his first glimpse of TMA-1, with the space-suited figures clustering around it, Bowman leaned toward the screen in open-mouthed astonishment. In the excitement of this revelation he almost forgot his own desperate predicament."

""But why bury a Sun-powered device thirty feet underground? The favorite theory is the simplest, and the most logical. It is also the most disturbing. You hide a Sun-powered device in darkness - only if you want to know when it is brought out into the light. In other words, the monolith may be some kind of alarm. And we have triggered it."

""At the moment, we do not know whether to hope or fear. We do not know if, out on the moons of Saturn, you will meet with good or with evil — or only with ruins a thousand times older than Troy.”"

"Bowman sometimes wondered if the cultural-shock danger was the only explanation for the mission's extreme secrecy. Some hints that had been dropped during his briefings suggested that the U.S.-U.S.S.R. bloc hoped to derive advantage by being the first to contact intelligent extraterrestrials. From his present viewpoint, looking back on Earth as a dim star almost lost in the Sun, such considerations now seemed ludicrously parochial."

"Could any technology, no matter how advanced, bridge the awful gulf what lay between the Solar System and the nearest alien sun? Many scientists flatly denied the possibility. A vocal minority refused to agree. Even if it took centuries to travel from star to star, they contended, this might be no obstacle to sufficiently determined explorers…In any event, why should one assume that all intelligent species were as short-lived as Man? There might be creatures in the universe to whom a thousand-year voyage would present nothing worse than slight boredom."

"If TMA-1 had indeed sent a signal to the stars…humanity would have a breathing space which could certainly be measured in decades — more probably in centuries. To many people, this was a reassuring thought. But not to all. A few scientists — most of them beachcombers on the wilder shores of theoretical physics — asked the disturbing question: "Are we certain that the speed of light is an unbreakable barrier?" They talked hopefully about shortcuts through higher dimensions, lines that were straighter than straight, and hyper-spatial connectivity. They were fond of using an expressive phrase coined by a Princeton mathematician of the last century: "Wormholes in space.""

"A few mystically inclined biologists speculated, taking their cues from the beliefs of many religions, that mind would eventually free itself from matter. The robot body, like the flesh-and-blood one, would be no more than a steppingstone to something which, long ago, men had called "spirit.” And if there was anything beyond that, its name could only be God."

"Bowman could no longer tolerate silence; except when he was sleeping, or talking over the circuit to Earth, he kept the ship's sound system running at almost painful loudness…He finally found peace, as so many others had done, in the abstract architecture of Bach, occasionally ornamented with Mozart. And so Discovery drove on toward Saturn, as often as not pulsating with the cool music of the harpsichord, the frozen thoughts of a brain that had been dust for twice a hundred years."

"Whatever the origin of the rings of Saturn, the human race was fortunate to have seen such a wonder; it could exist for only a brief moment of time in the history of the Solar System…created a mere two or three million years ago. But no one had ever given the slightest thought to the curious coincidence that the rings of Saturn had been born at the same time as the human race."

"Japetus alone possessed a distinctive geography, and a very strange one indeed. One hemisphere of the satellite was extremely dark, and showed very little surface detail. In complete contrast, the other was dominated by a brilliant white oval, about four hundred miles long and two hundred wide. At the moment, only part of this striking formation was in daylight, but the reason for Japetus's extraordinary variations in brilliance was now quite obvious."

"For three million years, it had circled Saturn, waiting for a moment of destiny that might never come. In its making, a moon had been shattered, and the debris of its creation orbited still. Now the long wait was ending."

"Those who had begun that experiment, so long ago, had not been men — or even remotely human. But they were flesh and blood, and when they looked out across the deeps of space, they had felt awe, and wonder, and loneliness. As soon as they possessed the power, they set forth for the stars. In their explorations, they encountered life in many forms, and watched the workings of evolution on a thousand worlds. They saw how often the first faint sparks of intelligence flickered and died in the cosmic night. And because, in all the galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars."

"The great dinosaurs had long since perished when the survey ship entered the Solar System after a voyage that had already lasted a thousand years. It swept past the frozen outer planets, paused briefly above the deserts of dying Mars, and presently looked down on Earth. Spread out beneath them, the explorers saw a world swarming with life. For years they studied, collected, catalogued. When they had learned all that they could, they began to modify. They tinkered with the destiny of many species, on land and in the ocean. But which of their experiments would succeed they could not know for at least a million years."

"And now, out among the stars, evolution was driving toward new goals. The first explorers of Earth had long since come to the limits of flesh and blood; as soon as their machines were better than their bodies, it was time to move. First their brains, and then their thoughts alone, they transferred into shining new homes of metal and of plastic. In these, they roamed among the stars. They no longer built spaceships. They were spaceships."

"In their ceaseless experimenting, they had learned to store knowledge in the structure of space itself, and to preserve their thoughts for eternity in frozen lattices of light. They could become creatures of radiation, free at last from the tyranny of matter."

"Now they were lords of the galaxy, and beyond the reach of time. They could rove at will among the stars, and sink like a subtle mist through the very interstices of space. But despite their godlike powers, they had not wholly forgotten their origin, in the warm slime of a vanished sea. And they still watched over the experiments their ancestors had started, so long ago."

"He was back, precisely where he wished to be, in the space that men called real."

"There before him, a glittering toy no Star-Child could resist, floated the planet Earth with all its peoples…A thousand miles below, he became aware that a slumbering cargo of death had awoken, and was stirring sluggishly in its orbit…He put forth his will, and the circling megatons flowered in a silent detonation that brought a brief, false dawn to half the sleeping globe. Then he waited, marshaling his thoughts and brooding over his still untested powers. For though he was master of the world, he was not quite sure what to do next. But he would think of something."