How would one write the "2001: A Space Odyssey" of literature?

How would one write the "2001: A Space Odyssey" of literature?

Attached: luminous-2013-024-2001-poster.jpg (1000x1983, 572K)

Kubrick and Clarke did

Clarke's book is nothing like the movie though. Kubrick purposely withheld details about the true plot and meaning of the movie from Clarke.

It is almost exactly like the movie but with more details.

In terms of actual plot? Yes. In terms of symbolism and visual endoding? No. The book simply doesn't carry the same value or meaning as the movie.

True. The film's more abstract.

You can't write a genre-defining masterwork out of will. You can only try.

Why would you want that?

Truffaut: Your own works include a great many adaptations, but mostly they are popular or light entertainment novels, which are so freely refashioned in your own manner that they ultimately become a Hitchcock creation. Many of your admirers would like to see you undertake the screen version of such a major classic as Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, for instance.

Hitchcock: Well, I shall never do that, precisely because Crime and Punishment is somebody else’s achievement. There’s been a lot of talk about the way in which Hollywood directors distort literary masterpieces. I’ll have no part of that! What I do is to read a story only once, and if I like the basic idea, I just forget all about the book and start to create cinema. Today I would be unable to tell you the story of Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds. I read it only once, and very quickly at that. An author takes three or four years to write a fine novel; it’s his whole life. Then other people take it over completely. Craftsmen and technicians fiddle around with it and eventually someone winds up as a candidate for an Oscar, while the author is entirely forgotten. I simply can’t see that.

T: I take it then that you’ll never do a screen version of Crime and Punishment.

H: Even if I did, it probably wouldn’t be any good.

T: Why not?

H: Well, in Dostoyevsky’s novel there are many, many words and all of them have a function.

T: That’s right. Theoretically, a masterpiece is something that has already found its perfection of form, its definitive form.

H: Exactly, and to really convey that in cinematic terms, substituting the language of the camera for the written word, one would have to make a six- to ten-hour film. Otherwise, it won’t be any good.

T: I agree. Moreover, your particular style and the very nature of suspense require a constant play with the flux of time, either by compressing it or, more often, by distending it. Your approach to an adaptation is entirely different from that of most directors.

H: The ability to shorten or lengthen time is a primary requirement in filmmaking. As you know, there’s no relation whatsoever between real time and filmic time.

hitchcock is a fucking hack anyway
shitton of exposition, awful dialogue, predictable storylines, wooden acting
his visual storytelling is good, but nothing to place him among the greatest anyways. there is no subtlety about his movies either

Clarke's book is very good. I read it in January but I already feel like rereading it. I'm a huge Kubrick fan but I've never watched his movie about 2001: space odyssey. It seems very boring and overhyped.