Word: slabs
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...herd of hairy simians chatters and skirmishes beside a water hole. It is, says the screen, "The Dawn of Man." But is it? From somewhere, a strange rectangular slab appears, gleaming in the primeval sunlight. Its appearance stimulates one of the simians to think for the first time of a bone as a weapon. Now he is man, the killer; the naked ape has arisen, and civilization is on its way. With a burst of animal spirits, the bone is flung into the air, dissolves into an elongated spacecraft, and aeons of evolution fall away. It is 2001, the epoch...
LEFT alone in the space ship, Bowman sees the monolith slab floating in space in Jupiter's atmosphere and takes off in a pod to follow it; knowing by now the properties of the pod, we can conjure images of the mechanical arms controlled by Bowman reaching to touch the monolith as did the australopithicines and the humans. The nine moons of Jupiter are in orbital conjunction (a near-impossible astronomical occurrance) and the monolith floats into that orbit and disappears. Bowman follows it and enters what Clarke calls the time-space warp, a zone "beyond the infinite" conceived cinematically...
...that makes his volumes about the British diplomatic corps such delights. But there is also much over writing. The book is littered with show-off phrases such as "alembicated piety" and "the penetralia of one's self-regard." The mixed metaphors are painful: "I lay on the slab, the mortuary slab of my immortal life-twitching like a skate in a frying pan." And the puns are leaden: a Rolls-Royce is a "flatus symbol," lovemaking is a "deathscapade," and a gourmet ponders whether there is "life beyond the gravy...
...annual capacity of 555,000 tons. When these are completed in four years, work will begin on the next phase-an iron-reduction and steelmaking plant that will be operation al by 1976. The site for the complex will be the southern port of Kaohsiung into which will flow slab and billet for the first stage and, later, iron ore from Australia to produce the finished steel...
Like Galileo. It is probably unfair to quote a slab of his prose to show what is unsatisfactory about his work; to quote anything less is even more unfair because his prose comes in great untrimmed slabs. Sample: "But the mysterious beautiful thing of going to sea occurred that night: just a few hours after all that junk of bars, fighting, streets, subways, boom, there I am standing by the whipping shrouds and snapping lines in the Atlantic Ocean in the night off New Jersey, we're sailing south to Norfolk to load on for Italy, everything is washed...