A friend of mine once described Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey an "experience" We're not just looking at the story (or lack thereof) or the magnificent art direction, but also how it evolves from a conventional story-telling sci-fi film to an abstract-psychedelic-surrealistic piece of visual treatment. One of the many intriguing factors of the movie (beside the awesome rotating jogging scene), are the monoliths. With it's square, sleek and jet black appearance, it seems to bestow intelligence or terror to whomever encountered it.
Stanley Kubrick wanted the viewers to interpret the whole film for themselves, he wanted to grip the audience at a deeper level, to let them embrace their own theories, eventually reaching their subconsciousness. So he minimized and even eliminated the conventional explanation of the monoliths (and practically the rest of the movies). But what about according to Arthur C. Clarke's novel version of the film? Since he opted for a clearer and traditional storytelling? Kubrick and Clarke met in 1964, to discuss a project that eventually became 2001. Both of them co-wrote the screenplay, but while Kubrick focused on the director's chair, Clarke wrote the novel version. It was done silmutaneously, but varied in style and interpretation, with feedback on both directions.
According to Clarke's Space Odyssey series of novels, the monoliths are able to awake some sort of intelligence and bring people to a higher order, and was made by a race of intellectual beings called the 'Firstborn'. They were an immortal creature that explores the galaxy in order acquire knowledge. They created machineries to oversee and carry their projects over a long period of time, and whenever they found a living world that was expected to have an evolution of intelligence, they left behind a monolith. And one of the 'lucky' planets, was Earth.
The Firstborn evolved and becoming a race called the thinking machines. They have found the way to ingrain their subconsciousness into computers. Eventually, they even surpassed this achievement and became the Lord of The Galaxy (this slightly explains the fate of David Bowman at the end of the film, he became a fetus-like creature to watch over the earth called a starchild, ruler of the galaxy) The Firstborn might've abandoned their physicalities, but their creations, the monoliths, remains.
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