Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) has invited an army of commentators and probably encouraged the publication of Arthur C. Clarke's more discursive of the same name shortly after the movie release in April 1968. However, the existing critical discourse on 2001 rarely foregrounds the importance of Clarke's as an independent work with inherent differences from the movie. In fact major science fiction film scholars such as Vivian Sobchak (in Screening Space), Scott Bukatman (in Terminal Identity), and J. P Telotte (in Replications) do not even mention Clarke's in their discussions about the film. Both the movie and the originated in Clarke's short story Sentinel (1948), but Sentinel merely foreshadows the complex conceptual scopes of the works that developed from it. The general critical stance regarding 2001 is a somewhat linear one--from Sentinel to Kubrick's film and then to the novelization of the film by Clarke. Early commentators such as Jeremy Bernstein, Stanley Kauffmann, and Jerome Agel even regarded Clarke's as an explanation of the film, a view which is echoed to some extent by critics like Robert Kolker even in 2006. (1) Again, commentators like David Patterson and Zoe Sofia seem to acknowledge the difference between the and the film and yet end up appropriating the to explain the film. (2) However, a close comparative examination of the and the film clearly shows that Clarke's is neither an explanation nor a novelization of the film but a work existing independently. While Clarke's is rooted directly in the tradition of hardcore science fiction, Kubrick's film subverts all the norms of traditional films to create something unique. On the one hand, Clarke exploits the conventional device of science fictional discourse to contemplate the theme of the existence of higher forms of intelligence in the universe. On the other hand, Kubrick employs a method similar to the transcendental style to bring about an ineffable quality that gives the film a quasi-religious air of mystery. This article contends that though they deal with the same theme, the film and the are the products of two completely different media and should be seen as such. Unlike the common screen adaptations or novelizations, the film and the were created simultaneously; they both function independently of one another, each with its own unique structures, themes, and significance. In Novels into Films (1957), George Bluestone observes that novel and film are both organic--in the sense that aesthetic judgments are based on total ensembles which include both formal and thematic conventions (137). But he also points out that and film are two completely different media, with limits and advantages peculiar to their forms. The aim of a successful film adaptation should not be merely to turn a into a moving version of words on the pages; rather, this is precisely the thing that can never be done. A film and a literary text operate in two distinctly different ways. Suparno Banerjee spells out this concern very clearly: A film is a photo text, a text containing both the visual image and the sound, while the latter [literature] works with words [and ideas] which arouse images but not in the cinematic sense. John Hartley [...] uses the term photopoetry to describe the cinema. Through the use of light--photopoetry (light writing)--it creates images. Media like television (far sight), video (I see), and cinema (movement) [...] share the same property of sight or visual quality [...]. Compared to these audio-visual experiences, literature is, in a sense, an extra-sensory experience [...]. (154) The eye here acts as an instrument which sends the optical impressions of the lexical symbols on the paper to the brain where the real experience takes place. The letters which combine into words, which then form paragraphs and so on, are really sequences of significations of objects which form a succession of images denoting actions, characters, and so on and raise connotative significances in the brain that then work out their meanings and suggestions. …