Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets Sticker Book

Advantages: Adventurous, romantic, beaustifully written
Disadvantages: Really annoying hero, really bad ending

...and getting disguised by Athene a lot. The only real action comes towards the end of the poem, when he faces the men of Ithaka who had been living in his house and hoping to marry his wife, and during his wanderings of books 9-12. Books 9-12 are the adventurous part of the Odyssey, and it’s in them that most of the famous stuff happens. It’s almost a shame that to view them in any real context you have to read the rest of the poem. These are the books that give us the Cyclops and Circe, and the voyage into the Underworld. The bits people actually bother to put into films. The fun bits. Also, as it happens, the bits where all Odysseus’ men get killed. Odysseus always seems to prevail, but at a cost which for the most part doesn’t seem to affect him much, though he spends most of the time complaining about how much he misses his home, his wife... Read review

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Advantages: Superb SF
Disadvantages: Slightly difficult to follow

...I've always described the Stanley Kubrick film of '2001: A Space Odyssey' as "a great motion picture - but a terrible movie". Fortunately Clarke's novel much more of the former. If you've seen the film, you were probably left thinking "What's that all about?", but many things become much clearer in the course of the book. There are some things left unclarified, of course - otherwise we wouldn't have the next three books in the series - but that's part of the quality writing. The plot follows that of the film very closely - the two were written alongside each other - but differs in detail (in the novel we end up at Saturn, not Jupiter) and is 'fleshed out' so that we can actually follow what is going on! Whilst dialogue - and thus character development - is limited, there is enough descriptive writing to allow a great deal of enjoyment... Read review

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Advantages: Interesting bit of space exploration history
Disadvantages: -

...With recently announced initiatives directing us to space exploration once again, with the space shuttle again in orbit, and with the recent announcement of a tenth planet discovered, it is worthwhile to look back at a piece of history in the first great era of planetary exploration, whose heyday is arguably the journeys of Voyager I and Voyager II, the last great interplanetary probes to make a grand tour of several (in fact, most) of the planets in our solar system. Considering the difference in technology in our daily lives from the 1970s to the present, it is remarkable indeed that people were able to get such results and spectacular findings from spacecraft that by today's technical standards would be considered substandard and behind-the-times. Yet the Voyager spacecraft had more than just a tour of the home worlds in mind... Read review

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