Just like the Kubrick classic movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is not an adaptation of Clarke's book, Clarke's book is not a novelization of the movie. They can be seen as parallel pieces of the same kernel idea, as they were worked simultaneously and the book is based on earlier versions of the script, as some segments in it would have not been feasible to achieve in the movie.
The story if you've seen the movie, follows the same structure. We begin from the dawn of man when a mysterious monolith comes to Earth. Unlike in the movie, we get a more underlined idea of what the Monolith does: it tests and experiments with the early hominids to see if there's a spa,rk of intelligence, or a possibility of higher evolution, in them. In the movie, it's the Monolith, in the book it's just one of the many that have landed all over the area we now know as Africa.
From there, we fast forward to the future, where humans have stepped into space. A discovery has been made from the Moon and Heywood Floyd is on his way to see this world-shattering discovery, a Monolith buried under the Moon's surface over 3 million years ago. As in the movie, the Monolith sends out a message, but not to Jupiter, but to Saturn. This is the first major deviation from the movie, as Jupiter is as far as it goes, as Kubrick was not certain the special effects would have done justice to the rings of Saturn.
Astronauts Bowman and Poole are the only humans awake in the spaceship Discovery, controlled by a HAL 9000 computer. The rest of the crew is sleeping in hibernation and sleep they will forever, as HAL, because of the lies it has been forced to tell to its human partners, makes its logic go haywire and it ends up killing the crew, leaving only Bowman alive, who then proceeds to shut down HAL's higher functions. The movie is, however, a bit more ambiguous about the reasons HAL kills the crew.
The murder of Poole and its aftermath are also different from the movie: Bowman never goes out, so there's no leap through space from the pod and HAL is trying to kill him by draining the whole ship of oxygen. He only survives by closing himself into an emergency hatch. There are other major differences here as well, but the basic gist is the same and more bluntly spelt out.
Alone Bowman arrives to Saturn, to its Moon Japetus, to be more precise. There, in the eye of Japetus, Bowman discovers another Monolith. It's much bigger though and there, now certain, he will never be rescued, he takes a pod and lands on it. The last words humanity heard from him is his claim it's full of stars when the ancient stargate kicks on and sucks him to a voyage through subspace. A journey, that whisks him 20 000 lightyears away from our solar system.
The following star gate journey is again clearer, perhaps because of the difference in the mediums. The pod from Discovery goes through negative space, filled with routes to different locations. There are even crashed spaceships littering the area. Then, through another portal, to a system with a giant red star that has a small white dwarf circling it. There are more signs of ancient alien civilizations in the form of a megastructure in space with abandoned ships docked to it, but the pod, with Bowman inside, continues to the red sun.
Protected by unimaginable powers, the pod lands in the sun. It's surrounded by a mysterious shell and Bowman sees an ordinary hotel room open outside the pod's window. He walks out, explores the place and finally dons clothes left for him by his mysterious hosts. He eats the food left for him and finally falls asleep. And during this sleep, he is taken and transformed into something else, more than a human. The first human to reach the state beyond physical form. He becomes immortal, a being of pure energy, capable of travelling wherever he wants in the world. Once he was David Bowman, now he is something more and then, he finally returns home.
The book, while having the same basic form as the movie, is the one that has aged more of the two. This is, perhaps, because Kubrick was so afraid of dating his story, that he even opted out from filming anything set on Earth beyond the segments of showing the Dawn of Man. Only a handful of things, such as hairstyles and fashion, bring some age to the movie, but all of them can be chalked towards being just a variation of a different future than ours. The book, however, feels more like it had intentions of being more of a logical continuation of how the world would go from the time of its writing. Somehow, the book feels more trapped in its time than the movie does. This might be because the movie is more symbolic and lateral in its approach. They both look at humanity as a whole, from where it began and ask the question of where it is going, but approach it in a different manner. And Clarke does seem to be more interested in answers than Kubrick was.
2001: A Space Odyssey is not a long book. It's barely 200 pages long, which seems short for such a massive idea, but it doesn't feel at all too short nor does it have to be any longer than it is. As a story, it is a short reflection of a grand voyage, that spans centuries. It has pinpoints in different places in time and the ideas of this voyage are far more important than unnecessary exposition. Just like the movie, the book tells everything it needs to and does it reasonably well. Clarke doesn't get stuck in unnecessary things and gives the coverage necessary for the story. Everything else would have been too much.
Out of the two, I'd still recommend the movie over the book. This is not because the book is bad, but because the movie does what the book is trying to do but far better. The book is an interesting entity on its own, so take that however you want.
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