2001

I’m reading 2001 a Space Odyssey again.  It is such a great book, with complex themes and an enthralling story but written in an easy and engaging style.  I had seen the film when it first came out, long before I had read the book and to be honest Stanley Kubrick’s depiction was way beyond my capacity to understand.  I was quite young at the time.  I don’t know which came first, the screen play or the book but I’ve read it now and get the plot and am left thinking could this really be the way that mankind came to be so successful and is this the way that our civilisation is destined to end? 

I’ll never find out as the future it describes, even though 2001 has been and gone, is still too far away.  That is the funny thing about trying to predict the future.  In parts Arthur C Clarke was so right but in many ways his vision of where we would be at the start of the third millennium was so wrong.

In the book he describes how the global population had exceeded 6 billion people and that large parts of the first and second worlds had been suffering from famine but today the world is home to more than 7 billion and starvation, however unfortunate, remains largely a problem of the developing countries.

A senior manager at the base station on the moon was earning the fabulous salary of $50,000, a sum still worth having today but which does not have the wow factor that it would have done when the book was first published.

Human kind has not made the advances in space travel that Clarke describes.  Inter-planetary travel is still a distant dream and as far as I am aware chemical induced hibernation has not yet been developed.  A new rover has just landed on the surface of Mars however. He was right about voice receptive computers, though they still had tape drives, as well as e-newsletters in which he even describes a hyperlink.

In 2001, I don’t think Arthur C Clarke really set out to predict the future, to predict what life would be like at that date but just set out to tell a great story in a time equivalent to our own.  His imagination knew no bounds, he was not even restricted to the confines of our own solar system or perhaps even to the laws of known physics yet his writing was locked in by his and our own experiences.  Perhaps if he was to write too outlandishly or too futuristically he would have truly left his audience behind.  How can an author expect to tell a story which is outside of the comprehension of the recipient?  By setting the book at some point, at the time, in our own future it allowed us as readers to have at least a modicum of a relationship with and a comprehension of the story. 

Anyway, it is a great book and if you haven’t already, you should read it.