Chapter Satire, Tool Use and War of 2001: A Space Odyssey - Study Guide by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick

accurate prophecy). Incidentally, when IBM leaned that the plot of the film involved a murderous computer, they ordered their trademark to be removed from many of the sets (it still remains on the console of the Pan-Am space-plane), and they were at first less than amused by the fact that HAL was a letter down in each case from IBM. In fact Clarke has continuously denied that this is anything more than a coincidence (HAL's mentor Dr Chandra even denies it in 2010: Odyssey Two), but IBM are now "quite proud" of the association - all part of HAL's rehabilitation (see later). But IBM or no IBM, it is clear that Floyd exists in a world of government and corporate cover- ups - a slightly sinister and undemocratic rendering of the future - and it is ultimately this secrecy that Clarke reveals as the true culprit of HAL's malfunction. As a contrast, when 2010 was filmed in 1983, it was among the first films to use extensive paid product placement for a range of corporations (including at one point for Pan-Am with a clip from 2001). Kubrick's satirical touch had been co-opted and fed back on itself.

Clarke is less unkind about his people, if not necessarily the acts they end up committing, than the often misanthropic Kubrick. Floyd, Bowman and Poole are all blessed with back-stories to flesh them out as characters, and whilst the dialogue in the book is sparse and mostly matter-of-fact, Bowman, far from what one might expect from an unfeeling 'techie', spends much of his time wandering "at will through the ship's inexhaustible electronic library". Here he allows his mind to be taken on historical adventures through the written (or at least electronically stored) word: "And he began to read the Odyssey," writes Clarke, as if we had not been paying attention to the title, "which of all books spoke to him most vividly across the gulfs of time." But Clarke does convey the capacity for mayhem that tools gain in the hands of humanity. Rather than being more optimistic than the film as many have claimed, the book often elucidates the violent and destructive urges that plague man from his simian ancestry to his stellar future.

Clarke and Kubrick began work on 2001 only two years after the Cuban missile crisis, and fresh on the heels of Kubrick's apocalyptic comedy Dr Strangelove (subtitled, "Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb"). Despite the emergence of some level of détente, there were not many willing to point towards a future of world peace. The two tribes of man-apes facing each other across the waterhole had become two superpowers staring each other out over the world stage. "The spear, the bow, the gun and finally the guided missile had given him weapons of infinite range and all but infinite power. But now, as long as they existed, he was living on borrowed time." Like the man-apes who, before he arrival of the monolith, the superpowers could not dislodge each other as neither groups had an offensive advantage over each other, so it seemed with the superpowers, except stalemate was replaced with Mutually Assured Destruction. "Honour had been satisfied; each group had staked its claim to its own territory." Moreover, by the time that 2001 was released, thousands of American soldiers had been brought home in body- bags from the jungles of Vietnam. By 2001 Clarke writes that, despite a world population topping six billion and facing food shortages ("even the United States had meatless days"), "With the need for international co-operation more urgent than ever, there were still as many frontiers as in any earlier age. In a million years the human race had lost few of its aggressive instincts; along symbolic lines visible only to politicians, the thirty-eight nuclear powers watched each other with belligerent anxiety." Heywood Floyd seems unperturbed by this, concluding that "the newspapers of Utopia... would be terribly dull."

Whilst the film, seen in the glow of psychedelia, New Age philosophy, and the peace and love movement of the late Sixties, appeared to many to broadcast a message of hope in the karmic reincarnation of Bowman, the book allows more room for pessimism, albeit conveyed with a certain ambiguity. An early version of the script had described how Moon-Watcher's thrown bone becomes and orbiting nuclear weapon, and when Bowman (a name derived from the weapon of an archer) returns to earth as a Star- Child, the nuke catches his attention: "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 his orbit. The feeble energies it contained were not 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."