> based pretty loosely on the Clarke short story The Sentinel
The Sentinel provided the idea for the monolith on the moon being an alien 'intelligent life detector' (i.e. to detect when humans had achieved spaceflight). But it has no man-apes, no Jupiter mission, no HAL, no star-gate sequence. The bulk of the plot came from the Clarke-Kubrick collaboration, which had numerous other inputs [0]
