'In fact it's about three million years old.

You are looking at the first proof of intelligent life

beyond the Earth.'
The speaker is Dr Roy Michaels, Chief Scientist at the Clavius Base on the Moon. The audience
has been carefully chosen, because it is too soon to tell the world's population that they are not alone in
the universe. On the screen behind Dr Michaels is a photograph of a black object about three metres high,
of regular shape and with straight edges. It was certainly made by an intelligent form of life, and it was
found buried under the surface of the Moon.
If it is a message from another time, from a distant star, why has it been put there ? A possible
answer comes soon afterwards, when the first light of the sun touches the object. It then sends out a
powerful radio signal, aimed exactly at Saturn. As one of the scientists says,'You hide a sun-powered object
in darkness only if you want to know when it is brought out into the light.' So, far out in space, there
may be intelligent beings who now know that men and women have taken their first steps away from
Earth.
This book is a journey. We watch as people move forward from their early beginnings into the
future, and as one man, on the space ship Discovery, travels a billion kilometres from Earth to make contact
again among the rings of Saturn.
In 1964, before men had even landed on the Moon, the film director Stanley Kubrick was
looking for a story for a science fiction film. He asked Arthur C. Clarke for help, and the two men worked
together on the development of the plot. Clarke wrote the novel (which came out in 1968), while
Kubrick made the film, and both became extremely famous.