He doesn't exactly come up with answers more like fun variations. Clarke has a brain also, and like you, he uses it to wonder about these questions. But where does that intelligence come from? Why are you reading a Shmoop guide with big words and killer jokes rather than grunting and muttering (ook!) and picking berries? Right this moment, as you use your brain to Shmoop-how does that happen? What makes you a reading, cogitating Shmooper, rather than a chimpanzee or an eggplant?Īrthur C. Without the kind of special intelligence humans have, you wouldn't be reading this, and Shmoop probably wouldn't exist. Intelligent people read intelligent books about intelligence to feel intelligent together.
You should care about 2001 because you are intelligent. What is 2001: A Space Odyssey About and Why Should I Care? Neither of those last two have been made into films-but still, you've got a lot of Odysseys there for the man-apes to grunt at and ponder over. He published 2061: Odyssey Three in 19: The Final Odyssey in 1997. Clarke published 2010: Odyssey Two in 1982 it was turned into a film in 1984. The film especially, and the book less so, became classics, and so spawned many a metamorphosed offspring. At the same time as the script was being written, Clarke wrote the novel (which maybe explains why this is one time that the film is better than the book. The filmmaker Stanley Kubrick used the story as the inspiration for the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey-with a script written by both Kubrick and Clarke himself. It was originally a short story Clarke published in 1951 called "The Sentinel," which dealt with an alien artifact on the moon. Onwards and upwards, space-baby.Ģ001 has itself progressed swiftly, and in many forms. Human beings are transcending on schedule. 2001 replaces Darwin's blind evolution with a New Age faith in purpose. Progress is planned, and it is (according to the view of those creatures out there) good. Humans didn't just happen by chance some awesome super-intelligent space travelers gave them a boost up the evolutionary ladder, because "in all the galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind." (37.5) Humans are getting smarter and better and further out, not by accident, but because someone else, out there, has decided that it will be good if they do. Clarke doesn't have a God in his book either-instead he has beneficent obelisks. That's why religious people often dislike Darwin his nature doesn't have much room for a God.Īrthur C. Charles Darwin said that human beings evolved by random variation the man-ape (or, hey, why not the woman-ape) with the slightly bigger brain was successful, and reproduced, and had little baby apes with bigger brains, and so forth. In other words, the universe is nutty-but it's a nuttiness with a plan. If 2001 is a nutshell, it's a nutshell that splits open and grows nut tree so big that its nut branches reach way out to the nut stars, where it finds giant black obelisks made of nuts by a superior nut power. 2001: A Space Odyssey is about progress, evolution, and man-apes leaping off the planet and turning into cosmic babies who spread peace and blow up nuclear bombs.
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