In this single galaxy of ours there are eighty-seven thousand million suns. [...] In challenging it, you would be like ants attempting to label and c… - Arthur C. Clarke

It is a bitter thought, but you must face it. The planets you may one day possess. But the stars are not for man.

But most of the time, with a contented resignation that comes normally to a man only at the end of a long and busy life, he sat before the keyboard and filled the air with his beloved Bach.
Perhaps he was deceiving himself, perhaps this was some merciful trick of the mind but now it seemed to Jan that this what he had always wished to do. His secret ambition had at last dared to emerge into the full light of consciousness.

Jan had always been a good pianist, and now he was the finest in the world.

To obtain a mental picture of the distance to the nearest star, compared to the nearest planet, you must imagine a world in which the closest object to you is only five feet away — and there is nothing else to see until you have travelled a thousand miles.

2001 was written in an age which now lies beyond one of the great divides in human history; we are sundered from it forever by the moment when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out on to the Sea of Tranquility. Now history and fiction have become inexorably intertwined.