Arthur C. Clarke

You are currently browsing articles tagged Arthur C. Clarke.

The future often happens sooner than seems possible but not as soon as we might hope, and I think nano-engineering fits into that category. I wouldn’t expect to see “living” architecture that morphs and modifies in my lifetime, not in any profound way, but there’s nothing theoretically impossible to prevent it happening at some indeterminate point. In 1956, Arthur C. Clarke, working from the theories of Richard Feynman, imagined a future full of buildings built and endlessly rebuilt by molecular engineering. From Darran Anderson’s excellent essay on the topic at Aeon:

Let’s elaborate Arthur C Clarke’s prophecy a little. Nanobots would create a programmable architecture that would change shape, function and style at command, in anticipation or even independently. Imagine an apartment where furniture fluidly morphs from the walls and floor, adapting to the inhabitants, an apartment that physically mutates into a Sukiya-zukuri tea-room or an Ottoman pleasure palace or something as yet unseen, while outside the entire skyline is continually rearranging itself. Architecture might become an art available to all.

The advantages of nanomaterials are already becoming apparent; consider the strength of graphene, the insulation of aerogel. The idea of a self-repairing, pollutant-neutralising, climate-adapting ‘living’ architecture no longer seems the preserve of fiction. Resistance to the idea of buildings that could grow (as in John Johansen’s forms) or liquefy (like William Katavolos’s designs) is almost as much a question of our conservatism as of technical limitations. But as the materials scientist Rachel Armstrong has observed, this vision of the city as a biological or ecological manifestation is not so much a leap into the unknown as a maturation of ancient Vitruvian ideals.

Every advance will have repercussions. The idea of walking through walls that simultaneously scan us for illnesses might sound promising – but what else will they monitor? Who will they answer to? What will it mean for human creativity, let alone employment, when there are buildings that can build themselves?•

Tags: , ,

Here’s a real rarity: Walter Cronkite and Bill Stout of CBS News interviewing authors Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke about the future of space exploration on the day of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The two writers (and Cronkite) were inebriated by the excitement of the moment, believing we would in short shrift colonize the universe. Clarke thought travel to other planets would end war on Earth, which, of course, has not yet come close to occurring. Heinlein called for female astronauts, saying “it does not take a man to run a spaceship.” Both believed the first baby born in space would be delivered before the end of the twentieth century, and Heinlein was sure there would be retirement communities established on the moon in that same time frame. Go here to view the video

Tags: , , ,

Arthur C. Clarke cribbed elements of gestating, early ’60s Bell Labs projects (e.g., picturephones) for 2001: A Space Odyssey. In 1976, he was interviewed by AT&T about the future of communications. He knew the world would soon be interconnected, social and mobile on a grand scale.

Tags:

As long as there are movies, I think we’ll watch Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which boldly aimed to journey beyond the stars, to second-guess the future, and remarkably pulled it all off. Keir Dullea, the actor who portrayed astronaut Dave Bowman, just did a HAL-centric AMA at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

_________________________________

Question:

What is something people misunderstand or misinterpret about Kubrick?

Keir Dullea:

I’m often asked: Was Kubrick a task master? The answer is no; anything but. He never raised his voice, he had a quiet droll sense of humor and was a man with great curiosity.

_________________________________

Question:

What preparation or research did you do before filming 2001? Did Kubrick give you any insight into how the character should be portrayed, or did he give you freedom to explore that?

Keir Dullea:

Not a lot. Don’t forget, Arthur C. Clarke, who, aside from being the great writer that he was, was a scientist in his own right and was able to portray the future in such a specific way that the script in itself gave us everything we needed.

The only suggestion Kubrick gave overall was that he did not want us to portrayal scientists in the way they had been portrayed in grade B science fiction movies of the past, that is, men with goatees and outlandish clothes, speaking in some kind of pseudo babble.

One of the definitions I think of a great director is that they cast greatly. If you cast very well, and Stanley being the genius that he was did that in all his films, you don’t need to do a lot of direction, just give the actors the relaxation and space that they need and they will come through.

_________________________________

Question:

What was your favorite scene you participated in?

Keir Dullea:

I think my favorite scene was where I’m dismantling HAL’s brain. It reminded me a bit of a famous movie and also play called Of Mice and Men when Lenny is speaking with George regarding their plans to start a farm. This is a scene that comes at the end of the film after Lenny has indadvertedly caused the death of a young woman. Now there’s a posse that is looking for him intending possibly to string him up. This discussion of their plans to start a farm has been heard throughout the film, and so with some love and compassion, with a hidden pistol behind his back George reviews their plans with Lenny and half-way through their discussion he shoots him behind his back to avoid him being killed by a posse of men. In some way, emotionally, that scene from Of Mice and Men affected the way I played the scene with HAL.

_________________________________

Question:

Kubrick was a notorious perfectionist. Do you have any interesting anecdotes about that?

Keir Dullea:

On the first day of shooting, Stanley noticed my shoes and felt they weren’t right. We stopped shooting for the rest of the day until they found the right pair. Let’s face it, feet don’t play a huge role in films.

_________________________________

Question:

What is your favorite sci-fi movie?

Keir Dullea:

2001: A Space Odyssey.

Question:

APART FROM 2001 … what is your favorite sci-fi movie?

Do you enjoy the genre apart from being one of its greatest exponents?

Keir Dullea:

Yes, I enjoy sci-fi and Blade Runner is my other favorite of the genre.•

____________________________

“Out here among the stars lies the destiny of mankind”:

Tags: , ,

I’ve recently been reading a lot of the old-school Holiday magazine, that wonderful thing, and one of the most fun pieces centers on far-flung travel indeed, Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 prognostication of Mars as a residential address and as a pleasure destination. An excerpt:

So you’re going to Mars? That’s still quite an adventure—though I suppose that in another ten years no one will think twice about it. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that the first ships reached Mars scarcely more than half a century ago, and that our settlement on the planet is less than thirty years old.

You’ve probably read all the forms and literature they gave you at the Department of Extraterrestrial Affairs. But here are some additional pointers and background information that may make your trip more enjoyable. I won’t say it’s right up to date—things change so rapidly, and it’s a year since I got back from Mars myself—but on the whole you’ll find it pretty reliable.

Presumably you’re going just for curiosity and excitement; you want to see what life is like out on the new frontier. It’s only fair, therefore, to point out that must of your fellow passengers will he engineers, scientists or administrators traveling to Mars— some of them not for the first time—because they have a job to do. So whatever your achievements are here on Earth, it’s advisable not to talk too much about them, for you’ll be among people who’ve had to tackle much tougher problems.

If you haven’t booked your passage yet, remember that the cost of the ticket varies considerably according to the relative positions of Mars and Earth. That’s a complication we don’t have to worry about when we’re traveling from country to country on our own planet, but Mars can be seven times farther away at one time than at another. Oddly enough, the shortest trips are the most expensive, since they involve the greatest changes of speed as you hop from one orbit to the other. And in space, speed, not distance, is what costs money.

The most economical routes go halfway around the Sun and take eight months, but as no one wants to spend that long in space they’re used only by robot-piloted freighters. At the other extreme are the little super-speed mail ships, which sometimes do the trip in a month. The fastest liners take two or three times as long as this.

Whether you’re taking the bargain $30,000 round trip or one of the de luxe passages, I don’t know. But you must be O.S. physically. The physical strain involved in space flight is negligible, but you’ll be spending at least two months on the trip, and it would be a pity if your appendix started to misbehave.•

Tags:

Space-travel enthusiast and labor organizer David Lasser was one of the first Americans to champion a mission to the moon, and one of the most influential. His 1931 book, The Conquest of Space, suggested such a rocket voyage was possible, not fanciful. In Lasser’s 1996 New York Times obituary, Arthur C. Clarke said of the then-65-year-old volume: “[It was] the first book in the English language to explain that space travel wasn’t just fiction…[it was] one of the turning points in my life — and I suspect not only of mine.”

While an article about the book’s publication in the October 6, 1931 Brooklyn Daily Eagle took seriously Lasser’s vision of rocket-powered airline travel–from New York to Paris in one hour!–it gave less credence to his moonshot scenario.

 

Tags: ,

From film blogger Justin Bozung’s interview with mime Dan Richter, a passage about how he came to be cast as “Moon-Watcher” in 2001: A Space Odyssey and how he prepared for the role:

Justin Bozung:

So for those that haven’t read the book, could you tell me how you came to work on the film with Stanley Kubrick?

Dan Richter: 

I had a friend at the time, a book publisher named Mike Wilson and he was working with Arthur C. Clarke on a series of books about diving. Arthur and Stanley had been discussing the ‘Dawn Of Man’ sequence because they had almost finished the live action shooting on 2001, but they still didn’t have an opening. They had tried a few different things but nothing seemed to worked right. They decided that maybe they should talk to a mime about some of their ideas. Arthur mentioned this to Mike Wilson, and because Mike and I had been friends, he said ‘I know a mime. His name is Dan Richter, and he’s great.’

So consequently, I was asked to go and meet with Stanley at Borehamwood Studios MGM outside of London. I figured he’d pick my brain, and I’d offer some suggestions. So I drove up to see him and we started to talk. Stanley started to explain to me some of the ideas they had had for the sequence that didn’t work. Thinking about it, I didn’t see his problems as having to do anything with acting, but rather as something to do with movement.

The ‘Dawn Of Man’ was for the opening of the film. The problem with the opening of a film or a play or a book is that you have to go and get your audience. You have a very short amount of time to get the audience involved, literally seconds of minutes. So it was important that we made the man-apes come to life.

Justin Bozung:

So you didn’t really go into the meeting thinking you were going in for a job interview with Kubrick?

Dan Richter: 

I truthfully thought I was just going in to talk to him. I thought Stanley was just going to pick my brain, and I thought I’d just offer up suggestions to him in regards to how a mime could be of assistance to him in terms of solving his problems for the sequence. I didn’t know I was auditioning for him. I went in there acting cocky. I wasn’t worried about saying anything wrong to Stanley, because I wasn’t looking for a job. I was busy with other work in London at the time. I just thought I was there to give Stanley some pointers or whatever. I thought I was meeting with Stanley to explain mime movement to him.

Stanley and I hit it right off, and I think he liked my approach. After I was done talking Stanley asked me to show him what I was talking about. He wanted to see how to move as I had explained it to him. Then he offered me the job. So I told Stanley I’d have to do all of the choreography. I told him I’d help develop all of the man-apes costumes. The costumes initially were completely unworkable. You couldn’t move in them. Then I told Stanley that I’d cast and then train the people myself. I didn’t think he’d actually agree to my terms, but he said ‘yes’ to everything. So suddenly, I found myself with a immense job, and it was a job creating something that had never been done before. I was given an office, a rehearsal studio, assistants, and my name on a door and I was just this cocky kid. I had to deliver.

I mean, I had no ideas or plans to play ‘Moon-Watcher’ in the film. I thought I was there to just help with the research and the choreography of the actor’s movements. I never had any notions that Stanley would want me to play ‘Moon-Watcher’ in 2001.

Justin Bozung:

Then there was the enormous amount of research you did on apes.

Dan Richter:

I spent a great deal of time researching at the London Museum Of Natural History. I was granted access to their back stacks, and got to examine and study various skeletons and bones in their collection and all the early journals and research work the museum had acquired to that point.. I spent a lot of time talking to scientists with specialization in the Australopithecus era. Which of course, was the era that we were planning on setting the opening of the film in.

I also went to various zoo’s around England. With the zoo research I was studying the apes to develop a choreography. So I studied the apes at the zoo, so I could see how they interacted with each other in a tribe. How they moved, how their bodies reacted. So I began to study Gorillas, Chimpanzees, and Gibbons. Before my first trip Stanley had handed me a 8mm Bolex camera and told me to film everything. So I just went and filmed everything I observed. I was looking for the truth of it, I needed to know how they interacted with each other.

As we got closer to shooting, we were having a difficult time figuring out exactly how the man-apes should move. When I was at the zoo I filmed this Gibbon ape in slow motion coming down a tree and once he got down he began to just walk around. When I went back and watched the film I discovered this specific way in which the Gibbon walked. The Gibbon moves with their legs slightly bent with their knees pointing outward. Then, with the Chimps we decided it would be best to move our hands and arms in the same way that they moved theirs, which was at particular angle as well.”

Tags: , , ,

Roger Ebert, as a part of “Cyberfest ’97,” interviewing Arthur C. Clarke via computer.

Tags: ,

Kevin Kelly is probably the most articulate contemporary voice on matters relating to how the rise of the machines will remake the meaning of humanity, but, of course, these hopes and fears have been around for awhile. In Michael Belfiore’s new Guardian article, which I think is way too chipper about what will likely be a very painful transition to an autonomous society, he quotes Arthur C. Clarke from five decades ago on the topic. 

By the way, if memory serves, the Clarke essay that’s referenced predicted that by 2001 houses would be able to fly, and communities could migrate south when it was cold. I can’t be mistaking that detail, can I? The excerpt:

As early as the 1960s, Arthur C. Clarke, professional visionary and inventor of the communications satellite, predicted the end of menial labor (mental as well as manual), due to mechanization (and, more disturbingly, bio-engineered apes). In his essay The World of 2001, originally published in Vogue and reprinted in his book The View from Serendip, Clarke wrote: ‘the main result of all these developments will be to eliminate 99 percent of human activity … if we look at humanity as it is constituted today.’

Our salvation, in Clarke’s view, will lie in our looking toward loftier pursuits than all those kinds of jobs that machines will take over:

In the day-after-tomorrow society there will be no place for anyone as ignorant as the average mid-twentieth-century college graduate. If it seems an impossible goal to bring the whole population of the planet up to superuniversity levels, remember that a few centuries ago it would have seemed equally unthinkable that everybody would be able to read. Today we have to set our sights much higher, and it is not unrealistic to do so.”

Tags: , ,

It’s not at all surprising that Stanley Kubrick was an early adopter of home audio recorders and had scads of them back during the 1960s. Last year, I posted two items from the New Yorker of that era (here and here) in which Jeremy Bernstein visited the director during the long gestation of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Via Open Culture, here’s a 1966 audio recording from those interview sessions that were made not by the journalist, who didn’t even work with a tape machine at that point, but by the auteur.

From Bernstein’s notes about how he came to know fellow chess enthusiast Kubrick:

“I met Kubrick soon after Dr. Strangelove opened in 1964. I had just started writing for the New Yorker when its editor William Shawn asked me if I would consider a piece about science fiction. I never much liked science fiction but said I would look into it. My friend and colleague Gerald Feinberg, a physics professor at Columbia and a great science fiction fan, recommended Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke was not very well known then, but I set about reading everything he had written and found that I liked it a great deal. I wrote an enthusiastic article, and soon after it appeared I got a note from Clarke saying he was coming to New York from Ceylon (as it then was), where he lived, and would like to have lunch. In the course of lunch I asked him what he was doing. He said he was working with Kubrick on a ‘son of Strangelove.‘ I had no idea what he was talking about, but he said he would introduce me to Kubrick. So we went to Kubrick’s large apartment on Central Park West. I had never met a film director and had no idea what to expect. When I first saw Kubrick and the apartment, I said to myself: ‘He is one of ours.’ What I meant was that he looked and acted like almost every eccentric physicist I had ever known. The apartment was in chaos. Children and dogs were running all over the place. Papers hid most of the furniture. He said that he and Clarke were doing a science fiction film, an odyssey, a space odyssey. It didn’t have a title.

When I looked at my watch and saw that I had to go, Kubrick asked me why. I explained that I had a date to play chess for money in Washington Square Park, with a Haitian chess hustler named Duval who called himself ‘the master.’ I was absolutely floored when Kubrick said: ‘Duval is a potzer.’ It showed a level of real familiarity with the Washington Square Park chess scene. He and I ought to play, he said, and indeed we did – during the entire filming of 2001: A Space Odyssey.”

 

Tags: , , ,

In 1995, just as the Internet began entering the public consciousness with a fury, Tod Mesirow interviewed Arthur C. Clarke. Part of that discussion has now been posted at the Los Angeles Review of Books. An excerpt about 2001: A Space Odyssey:

Tod Mesirow:

The idea of an intelligent computer, an artificial intelligence like HAL, do you think we’ll achieve that?

Arthur C. Clarke

Oh, I don’t think there’s any question of that. I think that the people that say we will never develop computer intelligence — they merely prove that some biological systems don’t have much intelligence.

Tod Mesirow:

What was it like to create the scene when HAL is dying in 2001?

Arthur C. Clarke:

Well, Danny Curry deserves most of the credit for that, and by the way, when I switch off my computer you hear HAL say, “My mind is going.” It happens every time I switch it off. [laughs]

Tod Mesirow:

Was 2001 an interesting experience? You’re planning what would happen if —

Arthur C. Clarke:

Well, it was, you know, a fascinating experience, for many reasons. I was moonlighting at Time Life where I was doing a book called Man and Space. This was in 1964 when the Apollo Program, you know, had been announced. But, no one really believed we would go to the moon and, still sort of had a skepticism. And also, Stanley and I had to outguess what would happen, I believe — this may not be true, maybe Stanley’s publicity department — he’s supposed to have gone to Lloyd’s, taken an insurance against Martians being discovered before the film was released. [laughs] Well, I don’t think — I don’t know how Lloyd’s would have carried the odds on that one. [laughs] So, anyway, we were writing the film, before we had any close-ups of the moon’s surface. We had to guess what it might be like, and there are all sorts of problems. I — we — I think we did pretty well. One or two mistakes. For instance, we show the moon as more rugged then in fact it turned out to be. It turned out to be sort of smooth and sort of sandblasted.”

Tags: , ,

Before 2001: A Space Odyssey became screen legend in 1968, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke struggled forever to complete the project that was originally entitled, Journey Beyond the Stars. From a 1965 “Talk of the Town” piece by Jeremy Bernstein in the New Yorker (subscription required) about the work-in-progress three years before its release:

Our briefing session took place in the living room of Mr. Kubrick’s apartment. When we got there, Mr. Kubrick was talking on a telephone in the next room, Mr. Clarke had not yet arrived, and three lively Kubrick daughters–the eldest is eleven–were running in and out with several young friends. We settled ourselves in a large chair, and a few minuted later the doorbell rang. One of the little girls went to the door and asked, ‘Who is it?’ A pleasantly English-accented voice answered, through the door, “It’s Clarke,” and the girls began jumping up and down and saying, “It’s Clark Kent!”-a reference to another well-known science-fiction personality. They opened the door, and in walked Mr. Clarke, a cheerful-looking man in his forties. He was carrying several manila envelopes, which, it turned out, contained parts of Journey Beyond the Stars. Mr. Kubrick then came into the room carrying a thick pile of diagrams and charts, and looking like the popular conception of a nuclear physicist who has been interrupted in the middle of some difficult calculations. Mr. Kubrick and Mr. Clarke sat down side by side on a sofa, and we asked them about their joint venture.

Mr. Clarke said that one of the basic problems they’ve had to deal with is how to describe what they are trying to do. “Science-fiction films have always meant monsters and sex, so we have tried to find another term for our film,” said Mr. C.

“About the best we’ve been able to come up with is a space Odyssey–comparable in some ways to Homer’s Odyssey,” said Mr. K. ‘It occurred to us that for the Greeks the vast stretches of the sea must have had the same sort of mystery and remoteness that space has for our generation, and that the far-flung islands Homer’s wonderful characters visited were no less remote to them that the planets our spacemen will soon be landing on are to us. Journey also shares with the Odyssey a concern for wandering, and adventure.”•

Tags: , , ,

In 1974, Arthur C. Clarke described what technology would be like in 2001.

Tags:

A 1988 panel discussion about the origins of our universe and more, with an amazing lineup: Carl Sagan, Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Hawking.

Tags: , ,

I was browsing Ray Kurzweil’s site and found a posting of predictions for the 21st century that the late science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke made back in 2001. Clarke, of course, gave us HAL, the rebellious computer from the 1968 novel, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Clarke made one mistake with his list: He gave specific dates when events would occur. That renders most of his predictions from the first decade of the century incorrect. But it might just mean that he is 20 or 50 or 80 years premature. Some of his predictions:

2009: A city in a third world country is devastated by an atomic bomb explosion.

2009: All nuclear weapons are destroyed.

2010: Despite protests against “big brother,” ubiquitous monitoring eliminates many forms of criminal activity.

2013: Prince Harry flies in space.

2019: There is a meteorite impact on Earth.

2020: Artificial Intelligence reaches human levels. There are now two intelligent species on Earth, one biological, and one nonbiological.

2021: The first human landing on Mars is achieved. There is an unpleasant surprise.

2023: Dinosaurs are cloned from fragments of DNA. A dinosaur zoo opens in Florida.

2040: The concept of human “work” is phased out.

2095: A true “space drive” is developed. The first humans are sent out to nearby star systems already visited by robots.

2100: History begins.

Tags: , , ,