《2001 - A Space Odyssey 》作者：- Clarke_ Arthur C_【EPUB】

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Title: 2001: A space odyssey Author: Arthur C. Clarke Original copyright year: 1968 Epilogue copyright 1982 Genre: science fiction Comments: to my knowledge this is the only available e-text of this book. Source: scanned andOCR-read from a paperback edition with Xerox TextBridge Pro 9.0 proofread in MS Word 2000. Date of e-text: August 20 1999 Prepared by: Anada Sucka Anticopyright 1999. All rights reversed. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 2001: A Space Odyssey Arthur C. Clarke Foreword Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts for that is the ratio by which the deadoutnumber the living. Since the dawn of time roughly a hundred billion human beings havewalked the planet Earth. Now this is an interesting number for by a curious coincidence there are approximately ahundred billion stars in our local universe the Milky Way. So for every man who has everlived in this Universe there shines a star. But every one of those stars is a sun often far more brilliant and glorious than the smallnearby star we call the Sun. And many - perhaps most - of those alien suns have planetscircling them. So almost certainly there is enough land in the sky to give every member of thehuman species back to the first ape-man his own private world-sized heaven - or hell. How many of those potential heavens and hells are now inhabited and by what manner ofcreatures we have no way of guessing the very nearest is a million times farther away thanMars or Venus those still remote goals of the next generation. But the barriers of distanceare crumbling one day we shall meet our equals or our masters among the stars. Men have been slow to face this prospect some still hope that it may never become reality.Increasing numbers however are asking: quotWhy have such meetings not occurred already since weourselves are about to venture into spacequot Why not indeed Here is one possible answer to that very reasonable question. But pleaseremembert thi sis only a work of fiction. The truth as always will be far stranger. To Stanley I - PRIMEVAL NIGHT 1 - The Road to Extinction The drought had lasted now for ten million years and the reign of the terrible lizards hadlong since ended. Here on the Equator in the continent which would one day be known as Africathe battle for existence