2001: A Space Odyssey (film) as a pessimistic account of human nature and humanity's future. The most extreme of these interpretations state that the fetus floating above the Earth will destroy it." Many of the cataclysmic interpretations of the film appeared inspired by Kubrick's direction of the Cold War film "Dr. Strangelove" just before "2001", which resulted in dark speculation about the use of nuclear weapons orbiting the Earth in "2001". These interpretations were challenged by Clarke, who said: "Many readers have interpreted the last paragraph of the book to mean that he (the fetus) destroyed Earth, perhaps for the purpose of creating a new
2001: A Space Odyssey (novel) trying to tell us something?" Clarke himself directly addressed the spelling issue in chapter 19 of "The Lost Worlds of 2001", explaining that he simply (and unconsciously) used the spelling he was familiar with from "The Conquest of Space" (1949) by Willy Ley and Chesley Bonestell, presuming that the "J" form is the German rendering of the Greek. The film "2010" was released in 1984 resulting in movie tie-in editions of both the "2001" and "2010" novels. At the time Signet Books reported that over 2.8 million copies of "2001" were in print and that "2010" was one of 1983's