If you've seen my status, you'll know that I'm mourning the death of Arthur C. Clarke. I have a special fondness for his work as an author. Yes he is the guy who wrote that acid trip of a movie that was directed by that psychotic nutjob and or brilliant auteur (Kubrick) that is known as 2001: A Space Odyssey. I remember seeing the movie as a young kid on PBS. It started with apes dancing around a big rectangle, then somehow changes to this space opera with a Pink Floyd-esque light show towards the end. I didn't understand it at all and as a 11 year old, it seriously pissed me off. I wanted to know the secrets of the movie, but alas, I probably became distracted with dinosaurs or maybe it was Amy Jo Johnson.
Fas t forward a few years. I'm a senior in high school and I'm faced with writing a 12 page "thesis" or report if you will, that must be done with penalty of not being able to graduate. The stipulation being that it must analyze at least 2 works by one British author. Of the other students, a squadron spoke of Shakespeare. A troop taskforce took Tolkien. A caravan chose Chaucer. I wanted to do something different. He wrote sci-fi and while I was at the height of my Star Wars geekdom, Clarke's work was several parsecs ahead of anything George Lucas could ever do. His most famous work was 2001, which oddly enough was the current year and the year I was going to graduate. Plus it would be a great opportunity to finally learn what the damn thing meant. It was a hard sell to my teacher, but I got clearance to go ahead.
Whe n I study or work very hard on something, I often get very tired of whatever it is and swear it off once the job is done. I all but abandoned my love for photography when I was a photojournalism major. Unfortunately, I avoid going to the doctor at all costs now because of my toiling away, trying to get into med school. While I was researching my paper on Clarke, I couldn't get enough. Still can't. I love how his books have such cosmically big ideas, yet at the very core point out the simple beauty of being human. Science fiction (not the stuff of Ewoks and Gungans) at its best uses its fantastic settings and circumstances to be a social commentary, or a discussion on the existence of God or to emphasize how fragile it all is. Clarke excelled at that.
Needless to say, I finally got my answers. I just rewatched the film, and plan on reading the book again once I get my hands on my old copy. Long story short, some alien force checks up on Earth from time to time. They send black, rectangular Monoliths as sentinels, yet radiate some unexplained power. The scenes Clarke details to us are mainly the evolutionary leaps in humankind's life. As primitive apes, we realize we can use tools to better our lives. In the space age, our tools have made life so easy that we're all bored, so we decide to go to Jupiter. Our tools (HAL 9000) turn against us, so we must discard them, and are left "naked." Once at Jupiter, another monolith is encountered and we realize that our physical bodies are simply tools as well and can be discarded. We then reach a new stage in evolution in which only our minds can limit what we can do.
The Reader's Digest version. Seriously though, read his stuff. The 4 Odyssey books are just that (an odyssey). The Rama series is just epic and Childhood's End will make you worry about our future (even more so).
RIP ACC
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