2001: odissea nello spazio (1968)

Það er með ólíkindum að þessi saga hafi verið skrifuð 1968 því þekking og forspá Clarkes er svo mikil að mikið af því sem hann skrifaði í þessari sögu um geimferðir hefur ræst. Þetta er vel skrifuð saga sem hann vann í upphafi með leikstjóranum Stanley Kubrick við gerð samnefndar kvikmyndar. Bókin var síðar gefin út en er örlítið breytt og hún byggist þar að auki á nokkrum smásögum Clarkes sem hann hafði áður ritað. Hann er því alfarið talinn höfundur sögunnar.
Það helsta sem má finna að sögunni er að hún verður á stundum hæg og langdregin þegar Clarke lýsir einstökum búnaði og aðstæðum af nákvæmni en á móti kemur að geysilega viðamikil þekking hans nýtist vel og hann sér mikið fyrir sér marga hluti sem átti eftir að þróa í áratugi áður en þeir urðu að veruleika. ( )

Most Science Fiction contains a leap of imagination, a projection about things or events that may or may not be possible at some time in the future.

2001 's most remarkable attribute is the accuracy of the projections the novel casts upon the year 2001, still 33 years into the future of the publication of the book. The movie upon which it is based also set new horizons for what cinema could achieve.

Consider, for example, this excerpt: " When he tired of official reports and memoranda and minutes, he would plug in his fools-cap-sized information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth. One by one, he could conjure up the world's major electronic newspapers...Switching to the display unit's short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him."

Recall that in 1968, computers with minimal and memory capacities still fill entire rooms to achieve their work. The laptop, much less the tablet computer, could only be envisioned as the stuff of Sci-Fi, and few Sci-Fi writers were visionary enough to create such marvels.

The book dazzles the aware reader who must constantly recall that virtually every "sci-fi" imaginings in the book later became realities.

In the book, Clarke also develops two themes related to the use of technology. He creates a computer, the HAL 9000, which monitors hundreds of operations at once and works through the oral commands of the astronauts. Thus, in 1968, Clarke projects the wonders of the technology that had yet to be conceived. At the same time, he projects the dystopian ruin that can come from an over-reliance on the power of machine intelligence: HAL turns dangerous, the direct result of artificial intelligence being applied without the benefits of conscience.

The novel does not end in this dystopian view of our future, however. Instead, it carries a warning about humankind's own limitation: its belief that it has discovered and defined the limits of the Universe. In 2001Clarke asserts that humanity has a very great deal still to learn and even more to understand.

It is now twenty years beyond the time setting of the novel. Because of this, Clarke's marvelous novel is unlikely to attract many new readers (and this review is probably in vain). That is unfortunate because 2001: A Space Odysseyis a masterpiece. Like the works of H.G.Wells, George Orwell, Jules Verne, Edger Rice Burroughs, Mary Shelley, and numerous others, this novel is not about some future event; it is about the human mind and soul coping with the realities of Man's future.

It is as good a read today as it was in 1968, a classic by any definition of the word.

( )

Ciencia Ficción

This read of 2001: A Space Odyssey was my first, and I last watched the film over thirty years ago. The edition in hand is the 1999 "millennium" pocket paperback, with retrospective front matter by Arthur C. Clarke discussing the authorial process. In light of that introduction, I'm a little surprised that Stanley Kubrick didn't get a byline on the novel as a co-author. The book was plotted as a stage of the development of the screenplay, drawing on earlier stories by Clarke and incorporating Kubrick's ideas and ambitions for the film. Then the two parallel media products were completed in dialog with each other. In the end there are some significant differences between the novel and the movie, but the book certainly exposes and clarifies many of the ideas behind the film.

Clarke wrote "hard" sf, with an effort to maintain scientific and social plausibility. So, with the passage of time, his projected world of "2001" now set a generation in our past has come to represent an alternate history, and it's one that makes me nostalgic for turns not taken in our cultural and technological paths. Clarke's 2001 has a manned moon base, and in general space exploration has progressed in preference to the technologies of simulation and social control that have come to dominate our 21st century to this point. He imagined a better diversion of the military-industrial complex into the work of peaceful extraterrestrial inquiry than we have been able to achieve. His geopolitical scenario failed to foresee the collapse of the USSR, but credibly made the USA and USSR allies in tension with China, as the USA and Russia arguably were in our actual 2001.

It was interesting to reflect that one of the conceits of this novel has come to dominate a lot of 21st-century sf: a "first contact" with extra-solar intelligence that is mediated by some sort of archaeological remains. I see this trope in a lot of recent space opera, including MacLeod's Newton's Wake, Harrison's Kefahuchi Tract books, the Expanse series, and even Wells' Murderbot books. I wonder if my library catalog needs an "exo-archaeology" tag to tie these works together.

Another notable feature was the epistemological feint in Chapter 15, where Dave Bowman recovers from a earthbound training simulation thinking at first he is being awoken from hibernation in space. This passage stands as a foil for the protagonist's later alien-curated experiences in the final section of the book, and together they offer a sfnal interrogation of human subjectivity that is not quite phildickian but still savory.

2001 has very short chapters; I usually read three or more in a sitting. These in turn are grouped into six parts: Primeval Night, TMA-1, Between Planets, Abyss, The Moons of Saturn, and Through the Star Gate. The structure suggests an initiatory ascent according to the symbol systems of modern Hermetic Kabbala: Malkuth/Earth (Neophyte), path of tav to Yesod/Luna (Zelator), path of samekh to Tiphareth/Sol (Adeptus Minor), path of gimel and Da'ath (Babe of the Abyss), Binah/Saturn (Magister Templi), and Chokmah/Zodiac (Magus). The initiand in this case would be humanity as a whole, and the viewpoint characters differ from section to section in the first half of the book.

The relationship of Clarke and Kubrick's 2001 to Homer's original Odyssey is not fully obvious. It seems to have been widely understood merely in the sense of episodic adventure over a journey, but my reading of the novel reassured me that the more specific sense of a homeward journey was intended, and this gist is consistent with the mystical progression that I inferred from the divisions of the text. "With eyes that already held more than human intentness, the baby stared into the depths of the crystal monolith, seeing--but not yet understanding--the mysteries that lay beyond. It knew that it had come home, that here was the origin of many races beyond its own; but it also knew that it could not stay" (293, emphasis added). I plan to read further in Clarke's "Odyssey Sequence," and I am curious to see whether the esoteric themes are perpetuated in the later books.

It's a slow book. But the experience was amazing. ( )