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Arthur C. Clarke, 2010: Odyssey Two
Aug. 12th, 2022 06:41 pmFormer space-agency head Heywood Floyd, enjoying semi-retirement as a university chancellor, gets some unwelcome news and an unexpected invitation: the spacecraft Discovery, a derelict after the tragic and mysterious events of several years previous, is going to crash into Jupiter's moon Io, and only the USSR (as far as he knows) is capable of getting a team there in time to salvage it and maybe find some answers as to what the heck happened back then. But to have any chance of succeeding, they need Dr. Floyd to come along.
Meanwhile, the entity who was once astronaut David Bowman finds out more about the terms of his distant transformation: the beings who did it to him have some work for him to do...
I excitedly read Arthur C. Clarke's sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey soon after it came out in 1982. I loved it at the time, but I was a teenager with nerdish tastes and re-reading it recently, I kind of expected it not to hold up as literature. I was pleasantly surprised: there's some stuff here that didn't age well, but on the whole this is a good novel, maybe Arthur C. Clarke's last really good novel. In fact, I think it might be a better novel than 2001. I was not fond of the subsequent sequels-- 2061 seemed half-finished and 3001, while it was a complete story, just involved a lot of bizarre choices that retroactively made the whole saga less interesting. But 2010 on its own actually brings the story to a fairly satisfying conclusion.
2010 does have some of Clarke's characteristic quirks, such as protagonists who are frequently left as passive spectators to the real action passing human understanding, and who, regardless of background or nationality, all talk like Arthur C. Clarke. The crew of the Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov don't actually end up accomplishing much apart from witnessing epochal events in the history of the Solar System and managing to get away from them alive, but the Starchild and his unseen masters are pretty busy.
Canon geek stuff
One of the several things Clarke is doing here is re-writing a retroactively implied version of 2001. As I mentioned, the events of the novel 2001 are rather different from those of the film in many details. Here, he lifts some flashback material directly from the earlier novel, but some of it, he actually rewrites to be closer to Kubrick's film, since the continuity here mostly follows the movie rather than the novel.
Mostly, but not completely. The biggest of the alien monoliths is in orbit around Jupiter, as in the film, rather than standing on a moon of Saturn. The events of Dave's struggle with HAL 9000 are stated to have mostly followed the film continuity, and the Discovery itself is definitely the film version of the spacecraft. But Clarke keeps a few incidental details that are only in the earlier book: the precise 1:4:9 dimensions of the monoliths (which the filmmakers didn't use at all, since it didn't look good), some of the specifics of the scene in Hal's brain room, and, significantly, the line "My God, it's full of stars!" Clarke definitely wants Dave to have entered the Star Gate by passing into the monolith, which is not what happened in the movie at all.
In the novel of 2001, Hal in the grip of induced dementia mentions that his "instructor" was a "Dr. Chandra". The movie changed the line to "Mr. Langley," but here Clarke sticks with Dr. Chandra and includes him as a character in the story, recruited along with Floyd as guest crew on the Leonov. Reading it now, the portrayal of Chandra, an Indian-American computer scientist, strikes me as a bit stereotypical and exoticist, and it's probably the least successful thing about the book. But at the time, it was a bit unusual even to have such a character in a Western SF novel.
Hal himself is portrayed in a manner that seems more realistic to modern eyes--in 2001, he was written as having a human-level intelligence or greater, but here, if you read between the lines, Clarke implies that these systems aren't quite all that, and in fact they're kind of reminiscent of the highly imperfect "digital assistants" that we have today.
Unlike in the novel of 2001, Hal's murder spree is treated as an unsolved mystery that Chandra has to figure out over the course of the story--but the explanation is basically the same one Clarke gave before: HAL 9000 is a case study in the danger of trying to paste security into a software system after the fact, rather than building it in from square one. (Not to mention the foolishness of making an unpredictable AI system like this central to a life-and-death control system in the first place--a mistake Clarke's Soviets would never make.) Though the characters treat it more as "security is irrational and dumb, what are you gonna do?"
Character drama!
In place of the detached, Olympian perspective that 2001 mostly has for its entire length, 2010 actually fleshes out its characters a little, and this is the stuff I'd remembered the least from my teenage reading of the book (probably because I didn't have any ear for that stuff at the time). I enjoyed it this time around, for the most part. Dr. Floyd's marriage is in the process of disintegrating, as an understandable byproduct of his suddenly jaunting off on a multi-year space adventure most of which he spends in hibernation. Chandra is so defensive of Hal, his creation, that the other characters try to hide their failsafe shutdown procedures from him. There is an extremely understated, mostly implicit love triangle on the Leonov involving a couple of bisexual guys and a hetero-smitten young woman cosmonaut--it ends conventionally with the dudes both planning to marry women, but this is really adventurous for 1982 in science fiction, not the most avant-garde year.
What I particularly didn't remember is that Clarke fills in a lot of backstory for Dave Bowman, who wasn't a very developed character in 2001. The Bowman entity is being used as a kind of probe and interpreter by the Monolith Builders, in phantasmagoric sequences that are some of Clarke's best writing in the book, but they give Dave some leeway to follow his own intentions once in a while. This bit is, effectively, a ghost story, with Bowman spectrally revisiting figures from his past life and remembering his grief-saturated childhood and young adulthood. Clarke may have wanted to explain why Dave seems to be such a blank and deadpan figure in Kubrick's film, a choice that Kubrick probably just intended as satirical or as a general feature of setting, since all of the humans in the movie acted like that. But Clarke runs with it as a character trait.
The Builders' intentions
Clarke's main motivation for writing 2010 was that the new information about the moons of Jupiter sent back by the Voyager 1 and 2 probes made it an irresistible setting to revisit. And there's a lot there; Jupiter's most interesting moons, Io and Europa, take center stage, with Clarke very much running with the possibility of Europa as an abode of life (which proves a hazard to the Chinese spaceship that makes a sudden appearance early in the story). Clarke seriously underplays the danger that Jupiter's enormous radiation belts would present to any humans operating in this environment, but I figure he was doing that intentionally for the sake of the story.
But in the process of incorporating Voyager data into his setting, he takes the opportunity to make his distant Monolith Builders more interesting as farmers of intelligence. 2001 kind of implied that Dave's transformation into the incorporeal Starchild was in some teleological sense "the next stage in evolution", a parallel to the monolith teaching proto-humans to use tools. 2010 sees it as more transactional and Darwinian. The Builders transformed Dave in order to use him as a tool, and what they're really interested in is nothing less than the possibility of sparking a second source of intelligent life in our Solar System, one having nothing in particular to do with humans. There's an implication that we and they may eventually come into conflict (or perhaps learn to coexist), but how that might play out, the novel leaves open. That's more interesting to me than aliens just pushing us further along a railroad track toward some predetermined destiny.
To my eyes, Clarke's epilogue "20,001" is as good an ending to this saga as I could ask for, and I'm happy leaving it there. Unfortunately Clarke himself decided otherwise, but one doesn't have to read those books.
On screen again
Peter Hyams made a movie of 2010, and most of the reviews of this say similar things: it's a pretty good science-fiction film as long as you can avoid comparing it to its predecessor. I inevitably ended up comparing it to the book instead. Roy Scheider is a pretty good choice to play Heywood Floyd; Helen Mirren played a version of the Soviet commander, though I suppose she's actually a composite of a couple of characters from the book. They whitewashed Chandra and had Bob Balaban play him, which seems silly in hindsight, but maybe it kept them from doing something worse. The gay/bi content is, as usual for the time, completely erased. There are some arcane continuity flubs that would only matter to complete nerds: Hyams doesn't understand or doesn't care which parts of the ship have no gravity; in the very first moments of the movie the Moon monolith is described as having been found in the Sea of Tranquility, which, NO, it wasn't...
Dave's subplot gets dumbed down a bit, the best bits not depicted at all, and the Chinese spaceship is gone from the story; but to compensate we get an entirely new subplot about the US and USSR going to the brink of nuclear war back on Earth, imperiling the cooperative space mission. This bit is, sadly, the part that probably is most relevant to real-world events today, despite the USSR not even existing. I have my doubts that any Monolith Builders are going to play a part this time around.
Meanwhile, the entity who was once astronaut David Bowman finds out more about the terms of his distant transformation: the beings who did it to him have some work for him to do...
I excitedly read Arthur C. Clarke's sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey soon after it came out in 1982. I loved it at the time, but I was a teenager with nerdish tastes and re-reading it recently, I kind of expected it not to hold up as literature. I was pleasantly surprised: there's some stuff here that didn't age well, but on the whole this is a good novel, maybe Arthur C. Clarke's last really good novel. In fact, I think it might be a better novel than 2001. I was not fond of the subsequent sequels-- 2061 seemed half-finished and 3001, while it was a complete story, just involved a lot of bizarre choices that retroactively made the whole saga less interesting. But 2010 on its own actually brings the story to a fairly satisfying conclusion.
2010 does have some of Clarke's characteristic quirks, such as protagonists who are frequently left as passive spectators to the real action passing human understanding, and who, regardless of background or nationality, all talk like Arthur C. Clarke. The crew of the Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov don't actually end up accomplishing much apart from witnessing epochal events in the history of the Solar System and managing to get away from them alive, but the Starchild and his unseen masters are pretty busy.
Canon geek stuff
One of the several things Clarke is doing here is re-writing a retroactively implied version of 2001. As I mentioned, the events of the novel 2001 are rather different from those of the film in many details. Here, he lifts some flashback material directly from the earlier novel, but some of it, he actually rewrites to be closer to Kubrick's film, since the continuity here mostly follows the movie rather than the novel.
Mostly, but not completely. The biggest of the alien monoliths is in orbit around Jupiter, as in the film, rather than standing on a moon of Saturn. The events of Dave's struggle with HAL 9000 are stated to have mostly followed the film continuity, and the Discovery itself is definitely the film version of the spacecraft. But Clarke keeps a few incidental details that are only in the earlier book: the precise 1:4:9 dimensions of the monoliths (which the filmmakers didn't use at all, since it didn't look good), some of the specifics of the scene in Hal's brain room, and, significantly, the line "My God, it's full of stars!" Clarke definitely wants Dave to have entered the Star Gate by passing into the monolith, which is not what happened in the movie at all.
In the novel of 2001, Hal in the grip of induced dementia mentions that his "instructor" was a "Dr. Chandra". The movie changed the line to "Mr. Langley," but here Clarke sticks with Dr. Chandra and includes him as a character in the story, recruited along with Floyd as guest crew on the Leonov. Reading it now, the portrayal of Chandra, an Indian-American computer scientist, strikes me as a bit stereotypical and exoticist, and it's probably the least successful thing about the book. But at the time, it was a bit unusual even to have such a character in a Western SF novel.
Hal himself is portrayed in a manner that seems more realistic to modern eyes--in 2001, he was written as having a human-level intelligence or greater, but here, if you read between the lines, Clarke implies that these systems aren't quite all that, and in fact they're kind of reminiscent of the highly imperfect "digital assistants" that we have today.
Unlike in the novel of 2001, Hal's murder spree is treated as an unsolved mystery that Chandra has to figure out over the course of the story--but the explanation is basically the same one Clarke gave before: HAL 9000 is a case study in the danger of trying to paste security into a software system after the fact, rather than building it in from square one. (Not to mention the foolishness of making an unpredictable AI system like this central to a life-and-death control system in the first place--a mistake Clarke's Soviets would never make.) Though the characters treat it more as "security is irrational and dumb, what are you gonna do?"
Character drama!
In place of the detached, Olympian perspective that 2001 mostly has for its entire length, 2010 actually fleshes out its characters a little, and this is the stuff I'd remembered the least from my teenage reading of the book (probably because I didn't have any ear for that stuff at the time). I enjoyed it this time around, for the most part. Dr. Floyd's marriage is in the process of disintegrating, as an understandable byproduct of his suddenly jaunting off on a multi-year space adventure most of which he spends in hibernation. Chandra is so defensive of Hal, his creation, that the other characters try to hide their failsafe shutdown procedures from him. There is an extremely understated, mostly implicit love triangle on the Leonov involving a couple of bisexual guys and a hetero-smitten young woman cosmonaut--it ends conventionally with the dudes both planning to marry women, but this is really adventurous for 1982 in science fiction, not the most avant-garde year.
What I particularly didn't remember is that Clarke fills in a lot of backstory for Dave Bowman, who wasn't a very developed character in 2001. The Bowman entity is being used as a kind of probe and interpreter by the Monolith Builders, in phantasmagoric sequences that are some of Clarke's best writing in the book, but they give Dave some leeway to follow his own intentions once in a while. This bit is, effectively, a ghost story, with Bowman spectrally revisiting figures from his past life and remembering his grief-saturated childhood and young adulthood. Clarke may have wanted to explain why Dave seems to be such a blank and deadpan figure in Kubrick's film, a choice that Kubrick probably just intended as satirical or as a general feature of setting, since all of the humans in the movie acted like that. But Clarke runs with it as a character trait.
The Builders' intentions
Clarke's main motivation for writing 2010 was that the new information about the moons of Jupiter sent back by the Voyager 1 and 2 probes made it an irresistible setting to revisit. And there's a lot there; Jupiter's most interesting moons, Io and Europa, take center stage, with Clarke very much running with the possibility of Europa as an abode of life (which proves a hazard to the Chinese spaceship that makes a sudden appearance early in the story). Clarke seriously underplays the danger that Jupiter's enormous radiation belts would present to any humans operating in this environment, but I figure he was doing that intentionally for the sake of the story.
But in the process of incorporating Voyager data into his setting, he takes the opportunity to make his distant Monolith Builders more interesting as farmers of intelligence. 2001 kind of implied that Dave's transformation into the incorporeal Starchild was in some teleological sense "the next stage in evolution", a parallel to the monolith teaching proto-humans to use tools. 2010 sees it as more transactional and Darwinian. The Builders transformed Dave in order to use him as a tool, and what they're really interested in is nothing less than the possibility of sparking a second source of intelligent life in our Solar System, one having nothing in particular to do with humans. There's an implication that we and they may eventually come into conflict (or perhaps learn to coexist), but how that might play out, the novel leaves open. That's more interesting to me than aliens just pushing us further along a railroad track toward some predetermined destiny.
To my eyes, Clarke's epilogue "20,001" is as good an ending to this saga as I could ask for, and I'm happy leaving it there. Unfortunately Clarke himself decided otherwise, but one doesn't have to read those books.
On screen again
Peter Hyams made a movie of 2010, and most of the reviews of this say similar things: it's a pretty good science-fiction film as long as you can avoid comparing it to its predecessor. I inevitably ended up comparing it to the book instead. Roy Scheider is a pretty good choice to play Heywood Floyd; Helen Mirren played a version of the Soviet commander, though I suppose she's actually a composite of a couple of characters from the book. They whitewashed Chandra and had Bob Balaban play him, which seems silly in hindsight, but maybe it kept them from doing something worse. The gay/bi content is, as usual for the time, completely erased. There are some arcane continuity flubs that would only matter to complete nerds: Hyams doesn't understand or doesn't care which parts of the ship have no gravity; in the very first moments of the movie the Moon monolith is described as having been found in the Sea of Tranquility, which, NO, it wasn't...
Dave's subplot gets dumbed down a bit, the best bits not depicted at all, and the Chinese spaceship is gone from the story; but to compensate we get an entirely new subplot about the US and USSR going to the brink of nuclear war back on Earth, imperiling the cooperative space mission. This bit is, sadly, the part that probably is most relevant to real-world events today, despite the USSR not even existing. I have my doubts that any Monolith Builders are going to play a part this time around.