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Originally Posted by bill_mchale
Ummm, the short story was The Sentinal and I would say that it more suggested 2001 than was expanded into 2001. It wholly deals with the finding of an Alien Artifact on the Moon... and IIRC, the artifact did send a signal out, but not necessarily to anything in the Solar System.
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The genesis of the movie was in Kubrick wanting to make his own science fiction movie (he originally intended to make a "conquest of the solar system" film something like "How the West Was Won"), and contacting Arthur C Clarke and asking him to collaborate on a script. Calrke suggested they read through his short stories for ideas, and of course found "The Sentinel", but perhaps more significant was a short story called "Encounter in the Dawn", about an alien biologist who lands on Earth in the African grasslands, discovers a small group of hominids with rudimentary intelligence in danger of being driven into extinction by centuries-long drought and evolutionary forces and decides to intervene.
For anyone interested in how the film itself evolved, "The Lost Worlds of 2001" reprints both those stories, plus several chapters that were originally written for the novel but were cut when Kubrick and Clarke decided not to include those ideas in the final screenplay.