posted on 12 Jun 2023

2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke

I had always assumed that Clarke’s book was a ‘novelisation’ (dreadful word) of the seminal science fiction movie directed by Stanley Kubrick and, as such, I’d not really taken much notice of it. However, I picked up a copy of the Folio Society edition of the book that contains a foreword by Michael Moorcock and a lengthy additional reminiscence of the origins of book and film by Clarke which makes it clear that the story behind the creation of both incarnations of 2001: A Space Odyssey was much more interesting than the word ‘novelisation’ suggests and that the two are oddly symbiotic.

Back in 1964, Kubrick wrote to Clarke asking the author if he had anything suitable for adaptation as a science fiction movie but despite the common belief that the resulting film was built around Clarke’s short story, The Sentinel, the author dismisses this as an over-simplification of a much more complex process. What these two creative giants decided to do was to start from scratch and together collaborate on a new novel that would then be adapted for the film.

The process of Clarke writing chunks of text and sharing it with Kubrick while the great film-maker was busy on other projects too was, according to Clarke’s memories, an increasingly fraught endeavour and, it seems, one which didn’t quite hold together. Ultimately, the movie was being made and the script adapted before Clarke had finally completed his version.

Of course, the film went on to be enormously successful and is regularly cited as one of the greats, almost single-handedly creating a new genre. Along with plenty of other people I went along to the cinema to see it and came out astonished by the spectacle but more than a little mystified by the ending. Plenty of student time has been wasted trying to interpret what exactly happens to Dave Bowman when his spaceship enters the stargate at the film’s denouement and the rogue computer HAL 9000 seems to prefigure the current debates humanity is having about the role of artificial intelligence (AI).

The plot of the book pretty much follows the way the film is structured. We start at the dawn of time where humans are struggling to survive in a hostile world and it looks as if the species is doomed to extinction. That is until the appearance of a mysterious obelisk that suddenly appears in the landscape and interacts with some of the humanoids, sparking an evolutionary change that will result in what we recognise as modern humanity.

The scene then shifts to a time when humans are beginning to colonise the moon and a strange discovery has been made. A black slab of some unidentified material has been discovered that has clearly been buried deliberately and when it is unearthed it releases a single pulse of information into the solar system, towards Saturn. The only conclusion that can be made is that a past advanced civilisation must have visited Earth and its moon millions of years ago and left this to be discovered. 

In the book’s third section, we join a deep space mission, ostensibly on its way to Jupiter. The ship has crew in deep stasis and two men, Dave Bowman and Frank Poole, to maintain the ship in conjunction with the powerful HAL9000 computer. When it becomes clear that the mission isn’t in fact a trip to Jupiter but a much more secret mission to trace the destination of the signal sent by the monolith found on the moon, things start to go wrong.

The enigmatic ending of the film is actually made a little more intelligible in the book but what the novel does cast much more light on is why HAL goes rogue.

I don’t want to uncover that here because I think that would be a spoiler. Those familiar with the film will find the novel rounds out quite a lot of what is only hinted at by Kubrick and the uncovering of the limits of HAL’s capabilities will add further fuel to the debates about the wisdom of pushing on too quickly with the development of AI.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book even though I went to it quite sceptically. Clarke is a great writer and he handles complex story lines very adroitly – although you could argue, a bit technocratically. Characterisation isn’t a strongpoint of this novel - but then again, it’s not meant to be. I’m a bit of a refusenik when it comes to space-based science fiction but this is really a novel of ideas and, as such, its got plenty to say to us today.

 

Terry Potter

June 2023