mmcirvin | Arthur C. Clarke, The Lost Worlds of 2001 (Reply)

Having re-read both Arthur C. Clarke's novel of 2001: A Space Odyssey and its 1980s sequel 2010: Odyssey Two last year, I was interested in getting my hands on an odd companion book I remembered from the 1970s, The Lost Worlds of 2001, but it's very out of print and used copies seem to go for extortionate prices. But now there's a Kindle edition, so I was finally able to read it. The scan is a little slapdash--there are a couple of typos and several places where a footnote got absorbed willy-nilly into the text, but it's readable.

This is Clarke's own contribution to the large literature about the tangled creative process that produced Kubrick's epochal film--only it focuses mostly on the creation of Clarke's novel, which was originally envisioned as a kind of book-length story treatment for the movie, but ended up evolving in parallel to the point that they were developed more or less simultaneously with mutual feedback (but still ended up rather different from one another, albeit with more or less the same story in the broadest strokes).

Spoilers ahead, though really there's not a single coherent plot here to spoil, unless it is the story of the development of 2001.

Clarke reproduces some of his notes from the film's production, which have been cited elsewhere, near the beginning of the book. The book also reprints the famous 1948 short story "The Sentinel" (basically the first version of 2001's Moon section, in which the alien artifact is a shiny pyramid) that was the seed of the whole thing. But it mostly consists of large, multi-chapter excerpts from discarded alternate versions of his novel. These are fascinating and often very good, full of vivid and often melancholy-tinged imagery of the sort Clarke was a master at writing, though it seems Clarke often wrote these chapters without a clear idea of where they were going. The story's enigmatic last act was a particularly tough nut to crack.

My one content warning is that there are a couple of fleeting instances of antique homophobia here which now read as peculiar especially given that we know Clarke was gay (and in his later books, he tended to write more liberated societies).

Some interesting roads not taken:

Clindar! The first version of the Dawn of Man sequence is all written from the aliens' POV! The protagonist is a fellow named Clindar, a roughly humanoid extraterrestrial who lands in prehistoric Africa in a prosaically mechanical spaceship, hangs around with a group of australopithecines, befriends them, sedates and medically examines one of them (giving him the nickname Moon-Watcher, which survived into the final novel) and eventually coaches them in tool use like an alien gym teacher. Stanley Kubrick really, really did not like this approach, preferring something much more mysterious and indirect, but it was Clarke's default way of handling things. In any event, this draft seems to have started as a loose adaptation of Clarke's 1953 story "Encounter in the Dawn", which also named one of its meddling aliens Clindar.
Crawling rocks! The book actually opens with a passage Clarke wrote early in production about the state of the fictional world circa 2000, including a vignette in which a robotic rover/lander similar to the ones we've actually got today lands on Mars and immediately discovers life in the form of multilegged Stanley Weinbaumesque rock creatures. It's characteristic of 20th-century science fiction that this is taken not as the scientific bombshell of the century, but as a mild disappointment since there are no civilizations there. When I was in elementary school, a friend of mine who had procured this book described this sequence and I had trouble believing it was in there, since it seemed to bear no relation to 2001: A Space Odyssey whatsoever. But there it is.
The "Getting the band together" sequence. Clarke wrote a lot of background material about the crew of the Discovery, including those guys who, in the final movie, we only ever see in hibernation and then dead. They had personalities and careers and everything. There are multiple chapters about them being summoned to join the mission to Jupiter (and, yes, it was Jupiter, not Saturn, through most of the process--more on that further down). I suppose that to build a believable world it's common to write a lot of this stuff and then throw it away.
Socrates and/or Athena, the helpful AI. Clarke was not an author who naturally gravitated toward hero/villain conflict stories; that was just not how his brain worked, and the struggle between the astronauts and the deranged computer HAL 9000 that animates the central portion of the finished story was a late addition that was not there through most of development. I am not sure but I suspect that without Stanley Kubrick's input he would not have written it that way at all. Instead, the AI character is initially a robot named Socrates and then a disembodied AI named Athena, and the AI is... generally helpful. There's a whole version of the middle section here in which the drama comes from a series of accidents: a space-pod crash ultimately caused by a purely mechanical failure, then a failed revival of another crewmember from hibernation. Some drama involving Athena creeps in when Dave tries to go chasing after some components that have been knocked clean off the ship, but Athena is programmed not to let him leave the ship uncommanded--but she's a machine in the end, and the worst that happens is that he has to waste some precious time hacking her command scripts. The seed of the conflict with HAL is probably there, but it's in embryonic form and Athena is not the tragic character that HAL would become.
Jupiter V! Famously, Clarke put the huge monolith that is the aliens' Star Gate on Saturn's moon Iapetus ("Japetus"), but in the movie, it's in free space orbiting Jupiter. Actually, the target of Discovery was Jupiter through most of the development process; Iapetus was a late addition. Specifically, it was Jupiter's small inner moon now known as Amalthea, which at the time was usually just called Jupiter V. Clarke had used the idea of Amalthea being an alien space station in a 1953 short story called "Jupiter V", in which it was apparently just background for a story about a futuristic art heist. Here, he describes Jupiter V as having one end sheared off by apparently artificial means, with a huge rectangular slot descending into the moon that somehow comes out... somewhere else, and, my God, is full of stars. In this version, Dave isn't the only survivor of the mission, and there are some charming bits about the astronauts camping around the Jupiter V Star Gate methodically examining it with robotic probes before Dave makes the bold decision to jump in. I imagine all this material pleasing Clarke and boring Kubrick to tears. I do wonder if the shape of the slot in Jupiter V was the genesis of making the Monolith a rectangular slab instead of a pyramid or a cube.
Aaaannnd, last but not least... Unfilmably wild and awesome alien worlds!!! Clarke clearly wrote a huge amount of discarded material about what happened to Dave after he fell into the Star Gate. They really didn't know where they were going with it until the very end. The Lost Worlds of 2001 reprints several different versions of the psychedelic journey, none of which I can remotely imagine being feasible as a movie in the late 1960s, unless it was a René Laloux-type cartoon. In some versions, the entire spaceship Discovery goes in with several surviving crewmembers; sometimes it's just Dave in a space pod. In several of them, they fly through a sprawling alien city inhabited by a thousand species of strange intelligent creatures. There are worlds suspended in oceans of supercritical fluid, landscapes where gravity goes every which way, a recurring motif of levitating islands out of Swift or Magritte.
In some versions, the floating island is none other than the private estate of Mr. Clindar, the alien who taught the proto-humans how to use tools a million years ago (Clarke explains that he's had a lot of bodies between then and now). The climax seems to be the reunion between Clindar and the line of intelligent beings he fostered. But Stanley Kubrick was aiming for something much more abstract and cosmic, and aside from the extreme technical difficulty of filming any of these ideas, I think he was the one who steered Clarke away from ultimately telling a much more conventional story, for all the arresting imagery he put into it.

Anyway, this is all great fun to read, though, again, the whole point is that it didn't come together into a final narrative until all this was thrown out.