| |
 |
Sci-fi master Clarke relishes 2001
|
LEANING forward in his wheelchair, the 83-year-old man Arthur C Clarke speaks deadpan into the tape recorder: “Testing one, two, three. Testing. This is not Arthur Clarke, this is his clone.”
As is so often the case with the grand old man of science fiction, it's a fantasy that might well be a reality in the years to come. A Houston-based company called Encounter 2001 has six strands from his thin gray hair and wants to launch Clarke DNA into space.
“One day, some super civilization may encounter this relic from the vanished species and I may exist in another time,” he muses.
Born in Britain and now living in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Clarke is the novelist whose vision inspired Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and made it synonymous with our deepest fears and hopes for the future.
Thirty-three years later, as humanity lumbers into the new millennium, he believes his visions of aliens, asteroids, paranoid computers and men on Mars may lie just this side of the moon.
Clarke is ever the eccentric soothsayer-scientist-philosopher, besieged by journalists seeking his reflections on 2001, and happy to oblige. 2001 belongs to him and the late Kubrick the way 1984 belongs to George Orwell, and he knows it.
It's hard to name any other author whose stories, essays and more than 50 novels have so adeptly combined futuristic fantasy with hard-nosed science, weaving implausible yarns in outer space that often turned out positively prescient.
In an article in Wireless World in 1945, he imagined satellites one day revolutionizing global communications by relaying messages worldwide. The idea was so compelling that when the first satellites were launched in the 1960s, they could not be patented.
Clarke's writings also foretold cellular phones, space stations, men on the moon and the Internet. There is no Hilton on the moon as there was in “2001”, but there is one in Hanoi, which tells you just how hard it is to predict the future. Appearing at the height of the Cold War and America's involvement in Vietnam, “2001” envisaged something equally improbable: Russian and American astronauts on friendly terms.
As Clarke's famous dictum has it: “When a distinguished but elderly statesman states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”
He became addicted to science-fiction after buying his first copies of the pulp magazine “Amazing Stories” at Woolworth's.
Kubrick was interested in “The Sentinel” a short story Clarke had written in 1948, about discovering an alien object on the moon - “a kind of burglar alarm, waiting to be set off by mankind's arrival.”
From this emerged their jointly written screenplay for “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Clarke simultaneously wrote the novel, fleshing out the story about a tribe of apes, a mysterious black monolith, a moon colony, a mission to the outer solar system and a devilishly soft-spoken computer named Hal 9000.
Hal decides that to fulfill the spacecraft's mission, he must prevent his own demise. So he calmly snuffs out astronauts one by one when he learns they intend to shut him down. This, and the lobotomy performed by Astronaut Dave Bowman on the computer, is one of the most memorable sequences in the acclaimed movie.
The film and the novel came out a year before Neil Armstrong took that giant leap for mankind in 1969; Clarke had years earlier predicted it would happen by 1970.
He believes a space colony on the moon or Mars is not that far out. It's a matter of money and where to start.
Clarke also believes that computers with Hal's consciousness are not far off. “There's a general feeling that computer intelligence will exceed man's at about 2010, 2020 or so,” says Clarke.
After “2001” he wrote “2010: Odyssey Two” and “2061: Odyssey Three.” At age 80 came “3001: The Final Odyssey.”
Clarke says his last ambition is to know whether there is intelligent life out there. “It seems truly incredible if there's not. Nobody knows, but I would guess (the discovery) will happen this century as our technology develops. As our instruments become more and more sensitive, we may detect planets with oxygen.” (SD-Agencies)
|
|
|
|
