What Clarke lacks in linguistic and "literary" depth, he makes up for in mind-boggling creativity, insight, and foresight into the human mind and our expansive potential as a species.

"Classic, and pretty cool."

It's amazing how well this story aged! The cosmic desolation at the end really reminded me of Liu Cixin's Death's End

Hm. Clarke is one of the masters (I enjoyed the Space Odyssey series), but I didn't really enjoy this book. At times, it dragged a bit and I didn't enjoy where it ended up.

I was motivated to read this story by its acclaim as groundbreaking in the genre. It's an epic portrayal of a potential future for the human race. It's one of many imagined scenarios for our first visitation by beings from another planet, a scenario that contains both a fatalism and a measure of hope for humanity.

The story itself was told with a distance that I suppose was required for its scope. It was sort of in between omniscient POV and a distant third POV, with a more limited third coming into play at times. It kept me from getting attached to any particular character. In a way, it kept me focused on the broader tale.

The story is also sixty years old, and the differences from how stories are written today are clear. The close of the story wasn't at all what I'd expected, and rather anti-climactic. The end comes… and goes. In fact we're not even there to witness it. But we've traveled to another planet, so I can accept the tradeoff.

Overall, an intriguing tale. Though a breakthrough when written, from the perspective of sixty years later, I realize I've become accumstomed to the changes in the genre that followed this publication. Clarke may have changed science fiction with this book, but it continued to evolve afterward, and I'm afraid my appreciation is diminished because of that.

I was struck, however, by the author's vision of the future. His vision included concepts and machinations that no longer exist or are no longer necessary. At the same time, he failed to predict others that have already been created. Clarke's vision of the future included cameras with film, tape recorders, even flourishing newspapers and journalists (now a dying breed). Perhaps he was not as concerned with the technological advances that might come. But I still found it amusing that his future had no advancement of information technology, which in reality has shaped our present world.

He also failed to predict that male dominance of most spheres would wane. Men still rule and make the decisions in his future. Perhaps it was a concept beyond his imagination. But one who is envisioning a future should consider the future for our social interactions and cultural development.

The most amusing anachronism was when a character bemoaned the fact that, after the Overlords had brought world peace and expanded the leisure time of all humanity, TV watching had grown to a shocking three hours per night in the twenty-first century. If only.

It seems to me that many science fiction writers (including of movies and television), in their envisioning and creating of a potential future for us, are limited to what sort of future they can imagine. Star Trek is one example. They were a little bit more on target, as they saw the potential for handheld devices and technology beyond the capability of the day, as well as the idea that a world that had eliminated war and hunger would have also expanded equality for all. And yet, their computers were nearly as large and lumbering as the computers of the day. The relatively tiny computers we use today were beyond what they thought possible.

These days, we feel like we have a better idea of the future because we consider nearly all things possible. We have a continuous evolution of technology that regularly outperforms our expectations and--if not exceeding our imaginations--outdoes what we consider "normal."

But if we are limited by what we can imagine, by the knowledge we now possess, and we now consider so many things possible that once were science fiction, what sort of future are we in store for? What unimaginable things are in our future?

That's a future I'd like to see.