Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey

Lately I re-read a couple of influential novels for me: Arthur C. Clarke's novel version of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Stanisław Lem's His Master's Voice. They are both meditations on the theme of contact with an unseen, offscreen extraterrestrial intelligence of nearly godlike capability, and what this means for humanity and its flawed institutions. I thought it might be interesting to review and compare them. First, the Clarke. Inevitably, I'm going to be comparing this one to its film version too.

I first read 2001 when I was a kid, actually years before I saw Stanley Kubrick's epochal movie. Oceans of ink have been spilled on the mysteries of that movie and what it might mean--it's a little odd in that Clarke's novel, while it tells the same story in broad outline, is not enigmatic at all. Clarke, like his friend Isaac Asimov, tended to aim for clarity of exposition and here he seems almost to be deliberately writing on a young reading level, as if it's a YA novel. He tells you a lot about what's supposed to be going on and the motives of the major players (including the unseen aliens), and doesn't leave any major unanswered questions about what the plot is supposed to be. There are still a lot of unexplained mysteries, since we're dealing with Clarkean technology-indistinguishable-from-magic that mere humans likely can't understand, but they're more in background. If you like, you can take this novel as an easy cheat code to understanding the movie. But since the novel (which is neither a novelization, nor the basis for the film, but was written in parallel during its chaotic production) differs from the movie on many points of detail, you can equally well take it as an independent story and reinterpret Kubrick's movie any way you like. It's not one of Clarke's best novels, but it has its moments and in any event, it's a very quick read.

The basic outline is familiar by now (but I'm going to spoil much of the plot of both book and movie, and mostly assume you know the movie, so turn away if you don't want that).

The Dawn of People

Millions of years ago, a tribe of ape-people, depicted through a protagonist Clarke calls Moon-Watcher, encounter an alien artifact like a rectangular slab (in the book, it's transparent and is a kind of video display) that manipulates their minds, teaches them both simple technology and organized aggression. This puts humanity on a path to conquering space and creating artificial intelligence, but also makes us enthusiastic killers. This is described as a necessity for the world the proto-humans live in, if the aliens' general program of uplifting Mind is going to succeed here, but not necessarily the healthiest mix for the long term.

We proceed (not as abruptly as in the film) to the near future of Clarke's time, in which Dr. Heywood Floyd travels on specially chartered spaceliners to a rotating wheel station, then to the US moonbase in crater Clavius. Much as in the film, this part is all just futuristic scene-setting and exposition. In the absence of bravura miniature effects, Strauss and Ligeti, the book doesn't dwell on it for all that long. US moonbase workers, on the trail of a magnetic anomaly, have dug up another monolithic slab at crater Tycho, this one completely black and unresponsive. During a lighthearted photo op at the monolith site, the Sun comes up and the monolith suddenly emits an eldritch radio screech, a signal aimed at the planet Saturn. Apparently it's a kind of burglar alarm, designed to start some process in motion when a civilization appears that is capable of going to the Moon and digging it up. But what process, who knows? Presumably we need to go to Saturn to find out.

(This section of the book did evolve directly from "The Sentinel", the short story that was the seed of the whole book and movie project. In that story, the "alarm" is a featureless black pyramid.)

Saturn Mission, Some Time Later

The longest and most conventionally exciting part of the book is what follows, the story of the Discovery mission to Saturn (in the film, it's Jupiter, but we can spend longer on the travelogue detail here--they pass Jupiter along the way and drop a probe into its atmosphere, much like the uncrewed Galileo spacecraft in real life). As in the film, Dave Bowman and Frank Poole make up the crew along with three hibernating crew members and an artificial intelligence named HAL 9000 with full control of the ship's systems. Hal reports a bogus failure in the antenna-pointing unit, goes berserk and manages to kill everybody but Dave, who survives his attack, shuts him down, and has to proceed solo with a hobbled spaceship and no clear way home.

The differences from the movie are particularly interesting here--not only does Clarke tell us exactly what's wrong with Hal, the characters in the book figure it out too! Mission Control even manages quite rapidly to induce the same psychosis in a duplicate Earthbound HAL 9000. As with real-life programming bugs, it's much easier to diagnose after the fact than to prevent. It turns out to be a very Asimovian-robot sort of dilemma: Hal has badly dealt with conflicting directives to share and to conceal information (since Dave and Frank have, for purposes of secrecy, not been told anything about the Tycho monolith or Discovery's true mission, but Hal knows everything). Clarke explains that only the hibernating crewmembers had been briefed on all this. (This is a subtle difference from the film: I read the film's dialogue as implying that not even they knew, just Hal.)

In a way, Clarke was prescient here. Our stabs at artificial intelligence don't go around the bend in quite this way, but the difficult tension between security and free access to information in computer systems is after all a huge problem in our society today, and in fact is the basis of my current job. I suppose Murray Leinster's even more prescient "A Logic Named Joe" already dealt with some of the same conflicts in 1946.

Clarke used this same explanation for Hal's major malfunction in his 1980s sequel 2010: Odyssey Two, but since that is more a sequel to the movie than to the novel, he has it as a mystery that only gets figured out in the course of that story. (The film of 2010 did basically the same thing.)

Dave is considerably smarter here than he is in the movie, but it makes the conflict less cinematic. After Hal murders Frank on an EVA, Dave sees immediately that Frank is dead and doesn't go chasing off after his body; instead, the big argument with Hal is over regaining manual control of the hibernation system to wake up the three hibernating crew. Hal gives in suspiciously easily, but when Dave goes to do it, Hal opens all the pod-bay doors and blows all the air out of the ship. Dave manages to get to an emergency shelter with an oxygen bottle and a spacesuit, and from there, there's nothing for it but to bust into Hal's brain and hear him sing "Daisy, Daisy". I've always liked the book version of this scene, with ripped-out circuit boards bouncing around in zero gravity and Hal getting so addled that his floating-point routines start to deteriorate. But the film version is superb for what was possible with the effects of the time.

Saturn, and Beyond the Negative Zone

There's a lot more detail about what Dave gets up to afterward. It's made very clear that Dave is completely boned at this point: he was never intended to get home on this ship in the first place, and without Hal fully functioning he can't even go into hibernation and await rescue by the next mission, as originally planned. There's nothing to do but press on with the mission as best he can. The real target seems to be Saturn's weird two-toned moon Iapetus (which Clarke spells "Japetus"). Clarke describes the bright hemisphere of Iapetus as a completely smooth oval like an eye, its long axis oriented north-south, with what turns out to be a gigantic monster Monolith standing like a black tower at the exact center.

(Voyager 2's first semi-close-up photos of Iapetus were reminiscent enough of Clarke's description to inspire Carl Sagan to dash off a note to him, but the resemblance is somewhat exaggerated in popular accounts--what Iapetus really has, as Cassini made clearer, is an irregular dark oval splayed out east-west along its equator, with the poles bright; also a bizarre tall ridge along its equator. Some of the first images of all this from Cassini were grabbed by me off of the JPL website and given some quick amateur image processing to make them more legible, whereupon astro-conspiracist Richard Hoagland grabbed my versions and, as is his wont, used the images' blocky, JPEG-artifact-filled nature as evidence that Iapetus is an artificial space station. I'm guessing this level of crank attention would not have been paid were it not for the prominence of Iapetus in Clarke's novel, even though it doesn't figure in the more famous film at all.)

Dave attempts to land one of Discovery's space pods on top of the monolith and instead finds himself dropping into some sort of incomprehensible ancient interstellar transit system, leaving a final message that ends "...oh my God, it's full of stars!" A version of this actually became a famous quote because Peter Hyams' movie of 2010 makes heavy use of it, but it actually doesn't make a lot of sense in the context of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the line never appears and also wouldn't really jibe with the appearance of Doug Trumbull's Star Gate effects. It does make sense in the book, because the Iapetus monolith, when it opens up to Dave Bowman and inverts like a Necker cube, actually does look like it's full of stars.

From here on has always been easily my favorite part of the novel. Clarke was a visual writer (to an under-appreciated degree, I think) and his version of the climactic psychedelic sequences of 2001 is a gem, with, finally, some of the transcendent weirdness of Childhood's End and The City and the Stars--quite different from what Kubrick and Trumbull filmed, but full of evocative imagery in its own right. It would have been difficult or impossible to film as it stood in 1968, but somebody could have a go at it with modern CGI, and it'd be interesting to see. Some of the details, like the Star Gate's resolute defiance of the laws of perspective, would be hard to visualize. Dave passes through an ancient cosmic switching station seemingly located in a bizarre photo-negative space with a white sky and black stars, witnesses all manner of things like jumbled ancient space ruins and living blobs on the surface of a red giant star, then finally ends up in the freaky alien hotel room. Clarke initially describes this in a much more coherently science-fictional manner than Kubrick's depiction, as a room constructed by aliens who imperfectly understand us, on the basis of finite-resolution television images of Earth society. But Dave's subsequent transformation is as odd and mystical as Kubrick's vision, albeit different in detail.

As with Hal, Clarke gives the unseen Monolith Builders clearly explained motives. Their highest value is Mind, their goal uplift of intelligent species, ultimately to some incorporeal form. An interesting detail only in the book, that I only caught on this read, is that the Builders themselves evolve over the course of the story--when they were messing with proto-humanity they were merely cybernetic machine beings who had bodies and spaceships of some sort (though the ape-folk aren't sophisticated enough to register this), but now they're something much more, evolved beyond the machinery they left behind in our solar system. There's no hint of that evolution in the film.

And, at least for now, in this book, we seem to be passing their minimum standards for further processing. The warlike nature of humans, and its capacity to destroy us, is a theme that comes up at the beginning and end of the book, especially in what Dave the transformed Starchild does at the very end. But it's seemingly not a deal-breaker for the uplifters, nor is it a fully-developed through-line to the degree that it is in the Lem novel. More on that later.