The Space Odyssey Series

When I was a teenager, I went out and saw the groundbreaking, sensational science fiction movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, conceived and written by Arthur C. Clarke and directed by Stanley Kubrick. Like many who saw it, this movie made a lasting impression on me in different ways. For one, it set a timetable for putting up a base on the moon by the late 1990s, which of course we’ve failed miserably to do. By 1999, (in the movie) we already had a huge, sophisticated space station that had Bell Telephone booths to call to Earth from space as well as long hallways with weird red avant garde furniture. It also established that by 1999, we had the technology to build a complex spaceship for a manned expedition to as distant a place as Jupiter. The idea that humanity’s progress was in fact guided by aliens was put forth in this movie as well, a viewpoint that probably didn’t have a resoundingly positive effect on our society. The most striking thing about this movie, to me, though, was the dazzling, puzzling, and ultimately frustrating ending, which seemed to depart somehow from science fiction and enter into obscure mysticism. Arthur C. Clarke wrote the book following the movie and changed some things, including the ultimate destination of the deep space mission. But I enjoyed the book and got a good taste of this great author’s writing. A few years later, 2010 was released as a sequel to 2001. It, as well as its book, lined up with the 2001 movie instead of the book. 2010 had a much more literal interpretation of things than 2001. And whereas in 2001, the U.S. and Soviet Union were characterized as having reached a peaceful accommodation with each other, 2010 portrayed them as being on the precipice of a nuclear war. 2010 was nowhere as popular as 2001, and that may be why the series ended there, at least as far as movies were concerned. Once I realized the scope of 2010 and stopped trying to compare it with 2001, I came to appreciate and like it. It did have an incredibly exciting ending! Clarke followed up these two movie/books with two more books: 2061: Odyssey Three and 3001: The Final Odyssey. I very strongly recommend these two books to anyone who enjoyed either of the movies. There are factual discrepancies between all four books that the reader needs to understand and then “get over”, but they don’t interfere with the overall flow of the stories. Clarke has such a smooth, enjoyable writing style that I whizzed through these books very quickly. Why they weren’t made into movies is beyond me. After all, look at what they did with Battlestar Galactica, resurrecting it from an earlier, failed series! At the very least, they could combine the last two books into a Sci-Fi Channel mini-series. I think there are an awful lot of people out there that would regard something like that as a special event to set aside time to watch!