I tend to be cautious about recent books on older films, simply because the authors tend not to have been alive when those films were originally released. I’ll qualify that even further: the editors probably weren’t either, so mistakes don’t just creep in, they arrive by the avalanche.
In his introduction, author John Flynn reveals he was thirteen years old when he first saw the film. His bibliography does show he’s looked over a lot of the books about the film, so it is clearly well researched. It is a light read compared to those books. This book was originally released in 2018 for ‘2001’s 50th anniversary and this is a second printing, but the mistakes build up.
Moon-Watcher didn’t find a tool amongst the bones, what he found was a femur. The jump forward wasn’t to 2001 either. One has to presume that the Discovery flight was in 2001, so this had to be 1999. On the space station, Floyd didn’t stop to talk to Smyslov but to Elena (actress Margaret Tyzack). Floyd wasn’t sent out to investigate TMA-1 but to see the Clavius Base research team’s investigation up close for his report. The hibernating crew were Hunter, Kimball and Kaminsky, not Whitehead (?), Kimball and Kaminsky. Poole’s body was not crushed in the pod’s arms but held delicately, especially as Bowman thought he might still be alive. Flynn also thought Daniel Richter, who plays Moon-Watcher, was a dancer, when he was in fact an accomplished mime and teacher. Describing the Discovery that Bowman leaves behind as a wreck is wrong as well. Away from the film, he spells Patrick McGoohan’s surname as ‘McGooham’ and ‘The Dam Busters’ as ‘The Damn Busters’. I accept that any author can make one or two mistakes, but when so many pile up you do have to wonder what has gone wrong, let alone how it all got into a second edition.
To be fair, Flynn does make a couple of useful comparisons to the original Odyssey, likening Bowman’s name to the Archer and HAL’s single eye to the Cyclops, even if HAL’s eyes are all over the Discovery.
What is interesting is that the last quarter of the book gets the hibernating crew’s names and Richter’s career right. It felt like different people had written or edited this book. I can see that the selling point here is the interviews with Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood, both of whom are SF fans.
There is some unnecessary padding, like a mock-up interview with Douglas Rain/HAL and a survey of the SF films made in ‘2001’s wake, which could easily have been expanded to go into the ‘2010’ film in more detail. More so, because Kubrick had all the plans and many of the sets and props for ‘2001’ destroyed.
There are a lot of photos from the film inside, of various sizes. No one seems to have noticed that some have been distorted to fit the space available.
So who was making the mistakes? Flynn, his editor, or possibly several editors? Whoever it was, someone should have checked.
GF Willmetts
September 2026
(pub: Galactic Books, 2019. 160 page illustrated enlarged paperback. Price: varies. ISBN: 978-1-69711-400-3)
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