The Sentinel

Blurb

"The Sentinel" is a short story written by Arthur C. Clarke in 1948 and first published in 1951, which was used as a starting point for the novel and movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, where it was modified and fused with other ideas. Clarke expressed impatience with its common description as the story the novel and movie is based on. He explained: "I am continually annoyed by careless references to 'The Sentinel' as 'the story on which 2001 is based'; it bears about as much relation to the movie as an acorn to the resultant full-grown oak. Even the elements that Stanley Kubrick and I did actually use were considerably modified. Thus the 'glittering, roughly pyramidal structure... set in the rock like a gigantic, many-faceted jewel' became—after several modifications—the famous black monolith. And the locale was moved from the Mare Crisium to the most spectacular of all lunar craters, Tycho—easily visible to the naked eye from Earth at Full Moon."