Here he was, adrift in this great river of suns, halfway between the banked fires of the galactic core and the lonely, scattered sentinel stars of the rim. And here he wished to be, on the far side of this chasm in the sky, this serpentine band of darkness, empty of all stars. He knew that this formless chaos, visible only by the glow that limned its edges from fire-mists far beyond, was the still unused stuff of creation, the raw material of evolutions yet to be. Here, Time had not begun; not until the suns that now burned were long since dead would light and life reshape this void.
Unwittingly, he had crossed it once; now he must cross it again – this time, of his own volition. The thought filled him with a sudden, freezing terror, so that for a moment he was wholly disorientated, and his new vision of the universe trembled and threatened to shatter into a thousand fragments.
It was not fear of the galactic gulfs that chilled his soul, but a more profound disquiet, stemming from the unborn future. For he had left behind the time scales of his human origin; now, as he contemplated that band of starless night, he knew his first intimations of the Eternity that yawned before him.
Then he remembered that he would never be alone, and his panic slowly ebbed. The crystal-clear perception of the universe was restored to him – not, he knew, wholly by his own efforts. When he needed guidance in his first faltering steps, it would be there.
Confident once more, like a high diver who had regained his nerve, he launched himself across the light-years. The galaxy burst forth from the mental frame in which he had enclosed it; stars and nebulae poured past him in an illusion of infinite speed. Phantom suns exploded and fell behind as he slipped like a shadow through their cores; the cold, dark waste of cosmic dust which he had once feared seemed no more than the beat of a raven’s wing across the face of the Sun.
The stars were thinning out; the glare of the Milky Way was dimming into a pale ghost of the glory he had known – and, when he was ready, would know again.
He was back, precisely where he wished to be, in the space that men called real.
47 – Star-Child
There before him, a glittering toy no Star-Child could resist, floated the planet Earth with all its peoples.
He had returned in time. Down there on that crowded globe, the alarms would be flashing across the radar screens, the great tracking telescopes would be searching the skies – and history as men knew it would be drawing to a close.
A thousand miles below, he became aware that a slumbering cargo of death had awoken, and was stirring sluggishly in its orbit. The feeble energies it contained were no possible menace to him; but he preferred a cleaner sky. He put forth his will, and the circling megatons flowered in a silent detonation that brought a brief, false dawn to half the sleeping globe. Then he waited, marshaling his thoughts and brooding over his still untested powers. For though he was master of the world, he was not quite sure what to do next.
But he would think of something.
Epilogue: After 2001
The novel 2001: A Space Odyssey was written during the years 1964-1968 and was published in July 1968, shortly after release of the movie. As I have described in The Lost Worlds of 2001, both projects proceeded simultaneously, with feedback in each direction.
Thus I often had the strange experience of revising the manuscript after viewing rushes based upon an earlier version of the story – a stimulating but rather expensive way of writing a novel.
As a result, there is a much closer parallel between book and movie than is usually the case, but there are also major differences. In the novel, the destination of the spaceship Discovery was Iapetus (or Japetus), most enigmatic of Saturn’s many moons. The Saturnian system was reached via Jupiter: Discovery made a close approach to the giant planet, using its enormous gravitational field to produce a “slingshot” effect and to accelerate it along the second lap of its journey. Exactly the same maneuver was used by the Voyager space-probes in 1979, when they made the first detailed reconnaissance of the outer giants.
In the movie, however, Stanley Kubrick wisely avoided confusion by setting the third confrontation between Man and Monolith among the moons of Jupiter. Saturn was dropped from the script entirely, though Douglas Trumbull later used the expertise he had acquired filming the ringed planet in his own production, Silent Running.
No one could have imagined, back in the mid-sixties, that the exploration of the moons of Jupiter lay not in the next century but only fifteen years ahead. Nor had anyone dreamed of the wonders that would be found there – although we can be quite certain that the discoveries of the twin Voyagers will one day be surpassed by even more unexpected finds. When 2001 was written, Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto were mere pinpoints of light in even the most powerful telescope; now they are worlds, each unique, and one of them – Io – the most volcanically active body in the Solar System.
Yet all things considered, both movie and book stand up quite well in the light of these discoveries. There are no major changes I would wish to make to the text, and it is fascinating to compare the Jupiter sequences in the film with the actual movies from the Voyager cameras.
It must also be remembered that 2001 was written in an age that now lies beyond one of the Great Divides in human history; we are sundered from it forever by the moment when Neil Armstrong set foot upon the Moon. July 20, 1969, was still half a decade in the future when Stanley Kubrick and I started thinking about the “proverbial good science fiction movie” (his phrase). Now history and fiction have become inextricably intertwined.
The Apollo astronauts had already seen the film when they left for the Moon. The crew of Apollo 8, who at Christmas 1968 became the first men ever to set eyes upon the lunar Farside, told me that they had been tempted to radio back the discovery of a large, black monolith: alas, discretion prevailed…
And there were later, almost uncanny, instances of nature imitating art. Strangest of all was the saga of Apollo 13 in 1970.
As a good opening, the Command Module, which houses the crew, had been christened Odyssey. Just before the explosion of the oxygen tank which caused the mission to be aborted, the crew had been playing Richard Strauss’ Zarathustra theme, now universally identified with the movie. Immediately after the loss of power, Jack Swigert radioed back to Mission Control: “Houston, we’ve had a problem.” The words that Hal used to Frank Poole on a similar occasion were: “Sorry to interrupt the festivities, but we have a problem.”
When the report of the Apollo 13 mission was later published, NASA Administrator Tom Paine sent me a copy and noted under Swigert’s words: “Just as you always said it would be, Arthur.” I still get a very strange feeling when I contemplate this whole series of events – almost, indeed, as if I share a certain responsibility…
Another resonance is less serious, but equally striking. One of the most technically brilliant sequences in the movie was that in which astronaut Frank Poole was shown running round and round the circular track of the giant centrifuge, held in place by the “artificial gravity” produced by its spin.
Almost a decade later, the crew of the superbly successful Skylab realized that its designers had provided them with a similar geometry; a ring of storage cabinets formed a smooth, circular band around the space station’s interior. Skylab, however, was not spinning, but this did not deter its ingenious occupants. They discovered that they could run around the track, just like mice in a squirrel cage, to produce a result visually indistinguishable from that shown in 2001. And they televised the whole exercise back to Earth (need I name the accompanying music?) with the comment: “Stanley Kubrick should see this.” As in due course he did, because I sent him the telecine recording. (I never got it back; Stanley uses a tame Black Hole as a filing system.)
There is also the strange case of the “Eye of Japetus,” described in Chapter 35, where Bowman discovers “a brilliant white oval… so sharp-edged that it almost looked… painted on the face of the little moon” with a tiny black dot at the exact center, which turns out to be the Monolith (or one of its avatars).
Well – when Voyager 1 took the first photographs of Iapetus, they did indeed disclose a large, clear-cut white oval with a tiny black dot at the center. Carl Sagan promptly sent me a print from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory with the cryptic annotation “Thinking of you…” I do not know whether to be relieved or disappointed that Voyager 2 has left the matter still open.