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March 18, 2008

2001 redux

Obviously Arthur C. Clarke was a huge influence on anyone who paid real attention to science fiction over the last few decades. I read Clarke for years, but (like many) I was more influenced by Stanley Kubrick's more poetic interpretation of Clarke's 2001. I read about the film as it was in production and made a commitment to see the full-blown Cinerama version when it was released. My friend Pinky Arnold and I hit the road that summer, thinking we would drive to San Francisco for the summer of love, but were waylaid by beer-guzzling pals in Flagstaff, where we had many adventures before returning to Texas, our California dream unfulfilled. One thing we did accomplish, though, was a Sunday drive to Scottsdale, Arizona with our late friend Bill Morton. We saw 2001 at the Cinerama theatre there. In the year 2001, I wrote a remembrance of that trip for ReWired, called "2001 Blues." I just re-read it and made a few corrections. It's not well written - until recently, my approach to writing was casual and undisciplined. It's slightly interesting, at least, as a consideration of 2001's plot and characters. I don't believe an intelligent machine like the Hal 9000 was ever possible, though Clarke was famous for the accuracy of some of his speculations about the future. Not much that Clarke predicted in 2001 came to pass... we still haven't found evidence of advanced extraterrestrial intelligence, and we haven't build machines that truly think and are aware, and we haven't flown to Jupiter, mined the moon, or launched commercial space ventures, though we're close to the latter.

Clarke has a final book in press, co-authored with Frederik Pohl, called The Last Theorem. There's also a film in development of his novel Rendezvous with Rama.

jon posted this at 11:54 PM
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