Chapter Plot Synopsis of 2001: A Space Odyssey - Study Guide by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick

following the orders that had been given to him in case of the ultimate emergency, he could continue the mission - unhindered, and alone."

The true goal of the mission is told to Bowman as he reaches Saturn: he is told about the discovery of the Tycho monolith, and that the signal it sent out was aimed directly at Saturn [or Jupiter in the film]. Its purpose is still a mystery.

The Moons of Saturn:

Arriving at his destination planet, Bowman encounters a monolith like the one found on the moon, only millions of times larger. Leaving the Discovery in his pod once again, he moves towards the monolith, and then into it. It is a Star Gate: an inter- dimensional doorway. [In the film, the final act (subtitled 'Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite') comprises an almost hallucinogenic light-show and ambiguous final scene where Bowman finds himself in a set of 18th Century rooms where he ages rapidly and encounters another monolith. In the presence of the monolith he is transformed into a foetus-like 'Star-Child' and returns to space to gaze down upon the Earth. The final section of the film has spawned countless interpretation and seems almost wilful in its ambiguity.]

The book, however, provides a clearer explanation of Bowman's experience, as well as the nature of the aliens' purpose:

In the creation of the Star Gate a moon had been shattered - its debris becoming the rings of Saturn - and it had waited for three million years to be activated by the presence of life: "On yet another world, intelligence had been born and was escaping from its planetary cradle." (Hence the monolith being buried on the moon, rather than Earth.) "An ancient experiment was about to reach its climax." Long ago aliens had "looked out across the depths of space, they had felt awe, and wonder, and loneliness. As soon as they possessed the power, they set forth for the stars... 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; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped... And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed." These aliens had begun as flesh and blood, but has progressed through a mechanised stage to their present incarnation as pure energy, "creatures of radiation", storing the essence "in the structure of space itself", preserving their thoughts "for eternity in frozen lattices of light... 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 experiment their ancestors had started, so long ago."

Through the Star Gate

Upon entering the giant monolith, Bowman is catapulted through the fabric of space to distant stars, and he is shown the wonders of the universe. Eventually Bowman finds himself in what resembles "an elegant, anonymous hotel suite that might have been in any large city on Earth," apparently constructed around him above a binary star. The room is in fact a facsimile of a room in a television programme that Bowman recognises as being from around the time the monolith was discovered on the moon: the comforting familiarity has been created for Bowman from images of Earth TV: "His feeling that he was inside a movie set was almost literally true." After investigating the rooms, Bowman lies down on the bed to sleep, where the aliens begin to work on his being. The room dissolves from around him and he is taken inside "some gigantic mind." Bowman's life is unreeled before him, "like a tape- recorder playing back at ever-increasing speed" until he finds himself at his own beginning. "Even as one David Bowman ceased to exist, another became immortal... The timeless instant passed; the pendulum reversed its swing. In an empty room, floating among the fires of a double star twenty thousand light-years from Earth a baby opened its eyes and began to cry."

Another monolith appears and teaches this Star-Child just as it taught the men-apes millions of years ago. He begins to learn the secrets of the monolith and his newly emerging powers: "he had left behind