Arthur C Clarke's Odyssey

SPEAKING VOLUMES

Serendipaceratops arthurcclarkei is a relatively small-horned dinosaur found in Australia. The size of S arthurclarkei does not reflect the reputation of the writer whose name it bears. Arthur C Clarke turned 90 this week; he is the last survivor of the 'Big Three' of science fiction, Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov being the other two.

In less than a month, we'll be celebrating the 40th anniversary of 2001: A Space Odyssey, one of the most famous works in all of science fiction, and the 60th anniversary of The Sentinel, the 1948 short story that carried the seeds of 2001.

Even those who haven't read the book remember Kubrick's film, which featured one of the most famous scenes in cinema history. An ape tosses a bone into the air; the camera tracks it spinning through the skies until it morphs into a black monolith "" a brilliant editing sleight of hand that took the viewer millions of years into the future in just a few seconds.

In The Sentinel, the black monoliths were guardians, watchers of the progress of humanity. The 'sentinel' was "one of millions they have scattered throughout the universe, watching over all the worlds with the promise of life. It was a beacon that down the ages has been patiently signaling the fact that no one had discovered it..."

It was a haunting story, with its warning that the guardians "must be very, very old and the old are often insanely jealous of the young". The writing of 2001 was an intense but often light-hearted collaboration between Kubrick and Clarke that stretched to almost four years. In Lost Worlds of 2001, his account of the collaboration, Clarke revealed that their private, jesting title for the project was How the Solar System Was Won.

Clarke and Kubrick fans have a wistful nostalgia for the storylines the two came up with that were, for fairly obvious reasons, never used. Here's a sampling:

"They" might be machines who regard organic life as a hideous disease. (Clarke)

Seventeen alien, featureless black pyramids riding in open cars down Fifth Avenue, surrounded by Irish cops. (Clarke and Kubrick)

Slightly fag robots who create a Victorian environment to put our heroes at ease. (Kubrick)

After some months of this, Clarke wrote in his diary, "Now we're settling for a Galactic Peace Corps and no blood and thunder."

Thank god they didn't. Behind the fooling around, Clarke held on to the simple but provocative idea that God made man in his own image, and Kubrick held fast to the image of the black monolith "" watcher, guardian, destroyer, symbol of a higher intelligence, emblem of unimaginable age and loneliness.

I loved The Sentinel far more as a literary work; it was the right length and Arthur C Clarke's idea of lonely, almost ageless watchers were the perfect 21st century metaphor for angels as they might really be. 2001, the book, had the feel of science fiction driven by ideas and formed by the screenplay. Like much of genre fiction, too, you got the sense that Clarke didn't really know what to do with his human characters once they'd served their purpose in the plot, and the mystical ending was so ambitious that it translated awkwardly on the page.

But reading the book almost four decades after its birth is still a compelling experience. If 2001 survives on the shelf of science fiction classics, it will be less for Clarke's attempt to grasp the nature of a far older intelligence than we can imagine and far more for his portrayal of a machine intelligence descending into madness. HAL 9000 is an artificial intelligence, the chess-playing computer on board the spaceship Discovery. HAL can lipread, express emotions, recognise faces, kill people and, as astronaut Dave Bowman pulls the plug on the homicidal machine, suffer a breakdown and an affecting regression into a state of childlike insanity. (The actor Anthony Hopkins said that he based part of his performance of Hannibal Lecter, the cold-blooded killer of Silence of the Lambs, on HAL.)

It is still astonishing to readers like me that Arthur C Clarke intuited the potentially complex nature of machine intelligence so many decades before the Internet existed. In the book, Clarke moves further, endowing HAL with some of the human need to find purpose in life as well as with the very human fear of death.

Perhaps that is why 2001 will survive. Its most compelling character shares kinship with Grendel and Frankenstein's monster "" alien and yet disturbingly human, an ageless figure of literature reinvented by one of the most inquiring minds of science fiction.