Table of Contents
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
T.M.A.-1. Dr Michaels declared, almost reverently. It looks brand new, doesnt it? I can hardly blame those who thought it was just a few years old, and tried to connect it with the third Chinese Expedition, back in 98. But I never believed that - and now weve been able to date it positively, from local geological evidence.
My colleagues and I, Dr Floyd, will stake our reputations on this. T.M.A.-1 has nothing to do with the Chinese. Indeed, it has nothing to do with the human race - for when it was buried, there were no humans.
You see, it is approximately three million years old. What you are now looking at is the first evidence of intelligent life beyond the Earth.
2001: A Space Odyssey
ARTHUR C CLARKE
www.littlebrown.co.uk
COPYRIGHT
Published by Orbit
ISBN: 978-0-7481-2078-9
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright Arthur C. Clarke and Polaris Productions Inc. 1968
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Back to 2001 Arthur C. Clarke 1990
The Sentinel Avon Periodicals Inc. 1951
Encounter in the Dawn Ziff-Davis Publishing Company 1953
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Foreword
Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth.
Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this universe, there shines a star.
But every one of those stars is a sun, often far more brilliant and glorious than the small, nearby star we call the Sun. And many - perhaps most - of those alien suns have planets circling them. So almost certainly there is enough land in the sky to give every member of the human species, back to the first ape-man, his own private, world-sized heaven - or hell.
How many of those potential heavens and hells are now inhabited, and by what manner of creatures, we have no way of guessing; the very nearest is a million times further away than Mars or Venus, those still remote goals of the next generation. But the barriers of distance are crumbling; one day we shall meet our equals, or our masters, among the stars.
Men have been slow to face this prospect; some still hope that it may never become reality. Increasing numbers, however, are asking: Why have such meetings not occurred already, since we ourselves are about to venture into space?
Why not, indeed? Here is one possible answer to that very reasonable question. But please remember: this is only a work of fiction.
The truth, as always, will be far stranger.
A.C.C.
S.K.
Back to 2001
It is just over a quarter of a century since Stanley Kubrick wrote to me in the spring of 1964, asking if I had any ideas that would enable him to make the proverbial good science fiction movie. And now that 2001 is less than a dozen years away, its almost impossible to recapture the spirit of that distant age - when most people alive today had not even been born...
To give some sense of perspective, let me quote from the (mostly) non-fictional account of our enterprise, The Lost Worlds of 2001, which I wrote in 1971 when everything was still fresh in my mind.
In the Spring of 64 ... the lunar landing still seemed psychologically a dream of the far future. Intellectually, we knew it was inevitable; emotionally, we could not really believe it... The first two-man Gemini flight (Grissom and Young) would not take place for another year, and argument was still raging about the nature of the lunar surface... Though NASA was spending the entire budget of our movie (over $10,000,000) every day, space exploration seemed to be marking time. But the portents were clear; I often remarked to Stanley that the film would be still on its first run when men were actually walking on the Moon... Our main problem, therefore, was creating a story which would not be made obsolete - or even worse, ridiculous - by the events of the next few years. We had to outguess the future; one way of doing that was to be so far ahead of the present that there was no danger of the facts overtaking us. On the other hand, if we got too far ahead, there was grave risk of losing contact with our audience...
Well, the success of 2001: A Space Odyssey is now history; it has been called one of the most influential movies ever made, and almost invariably turns up in the list of the all-time top ten. If you want the definitive version, I refer you to the superb Voyager-Criterion video disc, which contains not only the full movie, but also a vast amount of archival material relating to its production. There are glimpses of the film being shot, and discussions with the artists, scientists and technicians who made it possible. It also shows a youthful Arthur C. Clarke being interviewed in the Lunar Module assembly room at Grumman Aircraft, surrounded by the hardware which a few years later was resting on the surface of the Moon. The sequence ends with a fascinating comparison between the movie and the later realities of Apollo, Skylab and Shuttle flights - some of which do not look anything like as convincing as Stanleys pre-visions.
It is therefore hardly surprising that, even in my own mind, book and movie tend to be confused with each other - and with reality; the various sequels (see below) make the situation even more complicated. So Id like to go back to the beginning, and recall how the whole thing started...
In April 1964 I left Ceylon, as it was then called, and went to New York to complete my editorial work on the TIME/LIFE book,
Man and Space. I cannot resist quoting from my reminiscences of this time:
It was strange, being back in New York after several years of living in the tropical paradise of Ceylon. Commuting - even if only for three stations on the IRT - was an exotic novelty, after my humdrum existence among elephants, coral reefs, monsoons and sunken treasure ships. The strange cries, cheerful smiling faces, and unfailingly courteous manners of the Manhattanites as they went about their mysterious affairs were a continual source of fascination; so were the comfortable trains whispering quietly through the spotless subway stations, the advertisements (often charmingly adorned by amateur artists) for such outlandish products as Levys bread, the New York Post, Piels beer, and a dozen competing brands of oral carcinogens. But you can get used to anything in time, and after a while (about fifteen minutes) the glamour faded. (From Report on Planet Three: Son of Dr Strangelove.)
My work on Men and Space progressed very smoothly, because whenever one of TIME/LIFEs zealous researchers asked me, What is your authority for this statement? I would fix her with a basilisk stare and answer, Youre looking at him. So I had ample energy for moonlighting with Stanley, and our first encounter was in Trader Vics on 23 April. (They should put up a plaque to mark the spot.) Stanley was still basking in the success of his last movie,
