March 19th, 2008
Listening to the radio, I heard that there would be a discussion about Arthur C. Clarke on Front Row. I made sure I caught the program, but didn’t realise until afterwards that the comments were posthumous.
I discovered 2001 by chance, picking it randomly out of the science-fiction section some years ago in the library. I rarely have become so captivated by the first chapter of a book, reading about Moonwatcher and the dawn of humanity.
Then I watched the film, directed by Stanley Kubrick. I believe Stanley was impressed with some of Clarke’s previous works, such as The Sentinel, so he propositioned Clarke to write a novel that could be filmed and 2001 was born of this collaborative effort. It’s rarely a film completely escapes a book and becomes an art form in its own medium, but 2001 was seminal in its influence of science-fiction films to come.
Certain lines have never left me and oddly this line came to me but a few weeks ago. I don’t know what’s beyond the infinite, but Clarke leant plausibility to everything he wrote. It makes me wonder whether, like Bowman, he stared in wonder at the twinkling lights in the Monolith, the great abyss:
My God, it’s full of stars…
–2001: A Space Odyssey, David Bowman, Beyond the Infinite