routine flights to the moon, iPads and film processing

I'm thoroughly enjoying this read. I love the film but the medium of film doesn't allow for a lot of explanation, and Kubrick seems to go out of his way to *not* find clever ways to explain things, leaving quite a hallucinogenic experience.

Something I really love about old sci-fi (I recommend Metropolis, Solaris) is seeing the vision of the future from the past.

The film (2001 a space odyssey - 1968) famously contains images of what look like iPads. And just like today, the pads are sitting on the table while people are eating.

I was delighted to read the description of the 'newspad' in the book. It goes well beyond the physical description depicted in the film. Clarke uses far more words to describe the convenience of instant access to the world's news, up-to-the-hour if not the minute than the physical form of the pad.

Much is made of Clarke's accurate predictions, but in this book as well as others, the missed predictions are as delightful. Along with all sci-fi authors, Clarke predicts the future with his own world around him, thus the newspad needs connecting with a wire, and it's necessary to read a reference code on each news article and type the code into a keyboard to read the article, thus no prediction of wireless data, hyperlinks or touch-screens.

The best mis-prediction I've read in this book, is of pictures being taken by the moon colonists - and sent to the lab for processing!