W a y m a r k s ~: The Singularity of Arthur C. Clarke

Life under “Lockdown” – A London Diary #5

There was a moment, when I was about halfway through, when I realised that reading Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) whilst living alone during the lockdown might not have been such a good idea. Clarke’s writing is often sublime, but, I think it is particularly so in 2001. His descriptions of the solitude encountered in space are perhaps the most evocative of all science-fiction writers. He manages to capture all facets of solitude – the isolation balanced with the banality; the ‘aloneness’ balanced with the reassuring comforts of routine; stasis counterbalanced by imperceptible velocity; claustrophobia with the crushing vacuum of the infinite; and, of course, the paranoia which so easily overrides rationality. It’s not hard to see why so many people think 2001 is possibly the perfect science-fiction novel.

There are two elements to any novel or short story written by Clarke which frequently combine in such a uniquely, well-crafted way to make his work unlike that of any other writer. Firstly, as is widely known, his science writing is meticulously grounded in reality. Reading reissues of some of his earliest works is always interesting, as they usually come with a later introduction written by Clarke with his characteristic dry wit, explaining what he got wrong and why he got it wrong. But largely he got it right, and this was because he was so fascinated with real, verifiable facts. Yet even in the earlier texts you’ll still find the ‘so-far-as-we-know’ caveats – Clarke, it seems, was always ready to be proved wrong. And that was possibly his greatest strength, the very broad aperture of his open, but simultaneously focussed and exacting mind. Secondly, that openness of mind tended him towards something rather unusual in a purely scientific writer, and that was the fact he had a deeply curious spiritual side as well. Naturally, some critics have leapt upon this element of his writing and his imagination as Clarke’s Achilles’ heel. And I can well see why. For instance, vide: the final few chapters of his novel Childhood’s End (1953), with its bizarre tableaus of human beings swaying like sunflowers caught in a kind of rapture. But after you’ve read a few of Clarke’s novels and short stories you begin to see the uniformity of a pattern emerging. He writes in 2001: “The surface of this star was not formless chaos; there was a pattern here, as in everything that nature creates.” – And the pattern hard-wired into Clarke’s questing imagination seems to be a striving to marry science and philosophy. The mysticism of deep space-time merges David Bowman with the infinite, hence the vision of the baby in embryo, the star child, hanging over the Earth at the end of Stanley Kubrick’s film of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Stanley Kubrick, directing a scene on the film set of 2001

Kubrick’s film and Clarke’s book are two quite different, or diverging entities. In many ways it’s not enough to simply watch one or read the other if you really want to explore the deeper meanings or implications hinted at in each. I read one comment on 2001 which said: “Kubrick touched the Monolith, but Clarke goes inside it.” – This is very true, prose can articulate thoughts and ideas in a way which the eidetics of cinema perhaps can’t, and vice versa. 2001 was the result of a fascinating intellectual collaboration between Clarke and Kubrick, with the book and the film being written and made in tandem; the creativity of one simultaneously feeding off and back into the other.

Arthur C. Clarke, on the film set of 2001

For me, it is that marriage of mysticism and science which makes Clarke one of my favourite writers. I can lose myself in his books like no one else’s. Sometimes reading his novels or stories feels akin to inhaling air or drinking water – it’s effortless, natural, and refreshing. Generally, his words don’t hang around, the stories shift at a reasonable and reasoned pace, and his ideas set the cogs in the back of my mind whirring in a way which results in an unexpected teletype print-out spooling back, unwonted into my mind at a later point, usually when I least expect it.

Looking back, I’m not sure what the first work of Clarke’s was that I read. It was either a short story about racing space ‘yachts’ using enormous sails which acted as solar-arrays in an English class at school. Or it was his novel The Fountains of Paradise (1979). Both of which I read at around the same time, when I was either 13 or 14. I was already reading John Christopher’s Tripods Trilogy and Isaac Asimov’s Lucky Starr novels, but Fountains of Paradise was a bit of graduated step-upwards in some senses. The grandeur of this story and its vast timespan was something I distinctly recall I found totally mind-blowing. It begins in 4^th Century Ceylon and ends aeons into the future when the Voyager space probe returns to Earth, but looking unrecognisable for all the bits of different alien technologies which have been bolted to it during its countless centuries of voyaging across space and time.

Clarke is often described as a visionary. In many senses this is the perfect word to describe what he does, but not who he was. I think describing science-fiction writers as ‘prophets’ who ‘predict’ the future is kind of lazy – it’s a bit too hocus-pocussy, and can be rather misleading. A good example is the claim that Clarke ‘invented’ the ipad. In 2001 – both the book and the film – he describes David Bowman “… settling down to breakfast and the morning’s radio-fax edition of the World Times. On Earth he never read the paper as carefully as he did now; even the smallest items of society gossip, the most fleeting political rumours, seemed of absorbing interest as it flashed across the screen.” – I’m not sure if it was Clarke himself who said something to the effect of: ‘if it can be imagined it will eventually get built.’ – After all, that is exactly the purpose of ‘envisaging’ things – planning, preparing, imagining scenarios, outcomes, contingencies, etc. These are exactly the cognitive processes the Monolith initiates, or more accurately 'helps-along', as it towers over the colony of proto-apes at the start of both the book and the film. It’s often said that humans are only limited by the scope of their imaginations – but even visionaries such as Clarke have their limitations. For instance, he may very famously have proposed the notion of orbital geostationary communications satellites in 1945, which are now a ubiquitous (if unseen) fact of our daily lives, but note the fact that in much of his early works of science-fiction set in the far future: men are scientists and explorers, whereas women are still usually secretaries and air-(or rather space)-hostesses.

On reflection, my first reading of 2001: A Space Odyssey during the Coronavirus lockdown was actually an inspired idea. I’m sure I’ve appreciated it in a manner which would have been all but impossible at any other point in time, or in the trajectory of my life. For I read it whilst I was stuck, limited, confined and alone, and, arguably to some degree, under existential threat. And even though I thought I already knew the story inside-out, having watched the movie version countless times over and over since I was a kid – Kubrick being one of my favourite directors, the book was sufficiently different and so well-written as to be wholly gripping. I often find myself engaged by books, but I rarely get engrossed in them. Early yesterday evening I sat down with a freshly made cup of tea under a reading lamp to read the chapters in which HAL becomes homicidal, and I read and read and read until I eventually re-emerged back into the room, where I now found myself sat cocooned under the lamp, the twilight had turned to proper evening, the room was otherwise totally dark, and my untouched cup of tea was still sitting on the table beside me, now stone cold. The only comparable occasion which I can readily recall was when the very dramatic denouement of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim made me miss my Tube stop by five more stations when I was in my early twenties.

Some people decry science-fiction as silly or simply escapist nonsense, and undoubtedly it is sometimes. But that’s no bad thing. It can be an unfortunate misinterpretation of science-fiction as a genre however, because (if you'll excuse the mixed metaphor) science-fiction is able to cover a lot of ground as it ranges through both space and time. In the best science-fiction you will find examined in great detail subjects as various and varied as: psychology, anthropology, archaeology, philosophy, theology, theosophy, history, politics, geography, as well as the traditional sciences of physics, chemistry, and biology. For a long time I gave up reading science-fiction, not because I had gone off it – I was just busy with other things, and besides, the early X-Files TV series and the perpetual production line of major Hollywood movies provided enough of an output to satisfy my hankerings for science-fiction. But I began to find myself drawn back to science-fiction writings at the same time I was drawn back into academia.

At first I thought this was because I was craving some form of light-relief as a counterbalance to the formality of my MA and then my PhD studies, and that may well have been the case. But in that escapism I found there was an unforeseen benefit. Science-fiction offers not simply an escape, but it enhances our vision by inviting us to look into a two-way mirror. In science-fiction we can see ourselves, but we can also see beyond ourselves as well. Science-fiction is more than a medium for mindless entertainment, the best science-fiction is a medium for the mind. As Clarke always knew best, scientific rationality needn’t rule out awe. The profundity of the unknown can be as equally awe-inspiring as reflecting on what is known or what is inferred from the limitations of what is known, and that can and should be the basis of any genuine sense of mysticism. David Bowman may well become one with God at the end of 2001, but, like the Monolith, who’s to say that God might not be something which we can ever properly or completely comprehend. Whatever we conclude, it’s perhaps best if those conclusions remain open as food for future thoughts …