[In the following essay, Strick traces the origins and development of Kubrick's 2001.]

In March 1964, Arthur C. Clarke was contacted at his home in Sri Lanka by Stanley Kubrick, who wanted to make “the proverbial good science fiction movie” and was looking for stories. Kubrick already had his own idea of what such a project would have to contain: “(1) The reasons for believing in the existence of intelligent extra-terrestrial life. (2) The impact (perhaps even the lack of impact in some quarters) such a discovery would have on Earth in the near future”.

Clarke suggested “The Sentinel”, a short piece he had written in 1948 about the finding of an alien signalling device on the Moon. The story met the first of Kubrick's requirements, but not the second. Although Clarke had tackled the possible reactions to alien encounter a number of times (most notably in 1954 with Childhood's End, which had already been optioned and scripted by Abraham Polonsky, but remains unfilmed), “The Sentinel” simply builds up to a we-are-not-alone punch-line and leaves the reader to consider what kind of response the lunar ‘fire alarm’ might summon.

Kubrick's parallel interest in the response on Earth to hard evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligence seems to suggest an entirely different purpose, at the outset, from what finally became 2001: A Space Odyssey (his own title). But in fact only two thematic choices look to have been open to him at this point in his career. His previous films had dealt with adventures of increasingly epic ambition and equivalently disastrous failure. From the wreckage, Kubrick could emerge to offer with his new film either the blueprint for a more stable society (which, as became apparent from A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon, would have been a cynical betrayal of his misanthropy) or, having abandoned the hope of a sane planet, an exploration elsewhere for the prospects of universal enlightenment and reform.

Earthly considerations were accordingly discarded in favour of “The Sentinel”'s promise of vaguely apocalyptic guidance from afar, and Kubrick bought it as the finale for his production. He also bought five other Clarke stories that were to provide incidents leading up to the revelations on the Moon (they were largely unused, and Clarke bought them back from him a year later). Not until the Peter Hyams version of 2010 was the question of international behaviour on the home planet (“that naive and simple-minded nationalism”, as Clarke has called it, “which has brought so much misery to the world”) reintroduced to the saga of Dave Bowman.

Many months of abortive story-telling followed in the genesis of 2001. Unlike, say, the stormy partnership of Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler, who fought bitterly over their elaborate two-layer text for Double Indemnity, the Kubrick-Clarke problems were conceptual. Clarke could produce vivid, technically accurate and unambiguous prose to describe anything in the solar system or beyond, but Kubrick, translating this into images, found other unforeseen messages among the interplay of sets, gadgets, artwork and photography.

“In the novel”, says Clarke, who vowed after the experience that he would never write another screenplay, “I was able to give the intellectual background, the explanation of what was happening, but this wasn't possible in the film without destroying the momentum. At one time we planned to add narration, but Stanley realised this would be a grave mistake. The film itself was able to convey an impact that was literally beyond words”. And Kubrick confirms: “I intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does”.

If this meant that the film inevitably became Kubrick's statement and the novel Clarke's, the most remarkable paradox of their relationship was that 2001 brought two precociously gifted hermits together to define a more or less shared vision. The messages of their story contrived to combine Kubrick's fatalism with Clarke's certainty that man's future lies in the stars, and Kubrick's distrust of the machine with Clarke's confidence that the natural and the artificial are destined for harmonious integration. Similarly, the Kubrick obsession with traps and labyrinths was echoed by much of Clarke's writing (for example, A Fall of Moondust) where within a narrative of general emergency every chapter ends with a minor crisis, either physical or intellectual, from which—often with a single bound—his characters recover in the next.

Above all, both men are fascinated by the processes of education; where Kubrick, given his own upbringing, clearly regards learning as a personal discipline, a means of driving back the darkness of the ordinary, Clarke has devoted much of his career to strenuous encouragement of a global educational broadcasting system which, he claims, could drag this whole planet out of ignorance. “Starvation of the mind”, he told UNESCO in 1969, “will one day be regarded as an evil no less great than starvation of the body. All men deserve to be educated to the limit of their capabilities—and if this opportunity is denied them, basic human rights are violated”. With the vision of the Star Child, Kubrick and Clarke both reached the same goal, but where Kubrick sees the floating embryo as a cyclical return to a fresh start (a step backwards, or at best a frozen state of suspension, as with the ending of The Shining), Clarke sees it as the next rung of the evolutionary ladder (a step forwards).

With 2010, which Clarke was tempted to write by his agent in 1981 after a couple of other ‘final’ novels, it is the evolutionary aspect of the story that at last takes over. The instructional monolith is still in orbit around Jupiter (as in the film 2001, although the first novel stuck to the original idea of setting the action around Saturn), and is the magnet for a fresh quest for knowledge. The trip is both emotionally and scientifically instructive for the “Leonov”'s crew—indeed their journey is useless except for its fact-gathering aspects. They reactivate HAL before being packed off back to Earth, and the ‘soul’ of the computer joins that of Bowman to await fresh tasks from the unknown gods.

Flying freely through space, Bowman becomes a figure straight from the writings of Olaf Stapledon, whose vast books of the 1930s, Last and First Men and Star Maker, have often been acknowledged by Clarke as a profound influence on his work. Stapledon was also fascinated by the ‘super-being’, which he examined closely in his novels Odd John and Sirius. His ‘narrator’ in Star Maker swoops into the heavens to study an intergalactic community of worlds so immense that human references cease to have any meaning. But where Stapledon's ultimate melancholy is that in the end it will all collapse anyway (the dying landscape described by Wells' time traveller has cast a long shadow), Clarke isn't interested in futility. In 2010, he creates a brand new sun, which he calls Lucifer, and adds an impishly Stapledonian Epilogue: 20,001 in which the Europans worship a black monolith …

Peter Hyams was reluctant to be Kubrick's successor (“I think Kubrick makes a movie and most of us who direct films go with a pad and pencil, not to criticise but to see what we can steal”), but on being persuaded to undertake 2010 was given eighteen months in which to do it. Although a lot of the technical tricks that weren't available to Kubrick could be brought in to speed up production, the mellow, elegiac tone of Clarke's story found itself briskly streamlined.

A daily guru at the Sri Lanka end of a computer link-up, Clarke sat well back from the screenplay ordeal, contributed state-of-the-science technical advice, and let Hyams bounce ideas off him. In February 1984, as shooting on the finished screenplay was about to begin, Clarke sent a message by computer: “It's a splendid job and you have brilliantly chiselled out the basic elements of the novel, besides adding quite a few of your own. I laughed and cried in all the right places”. Film-makers have seldom been fortunate enough to find this kind of tact and resilience among novelists. But then Clarke knows that it is to his work that the audiences for 2001 have perpetually turned for a lexicon of elusive explanations. And there has been no reason to complain about the highly prosperous outcome. It's helping to finance a scheme for the education of the Third World.