Arthur C. Clarke

"Skeleton Key" to 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY for a college-level course in SF print literature and/or film, taking the match-cut of the bone turning into a space-craft — possibly a nuclear weapon in the antepenultimate cut of the film — as a metaphor for "the predatory transition from ape to man" in the Dart/Ardrey hypothesis.

Mémoire de maîtrise en Études littéraires, UQAM, année 1999

À noter qu'il s'agit de la version 1, celle qui a été déposée à la fin de mes études, et qu'une version corrigée est en cours de préparation. (2022)

Le simulacre, mettant à l'épreuve les frontières entre réalité et fiction, est le faux qui se fait passer pour vrai, qui prend la place du réel. Ce que nous observons dans les romans 2001 : L'Odyssée de l'espace d'Arthur C. Clarke, Solaris de Stanislaw Lem et Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep de Philip K. Dick, c'est la mise en scène de personnages secondaires qui sont des simulacres d'êtres humains. Cette analyse s’applique à suivre le parcours identitaire du personnage principal de chacun des récits, déterminé par la relation avec les êtres factices. Deux types de simulacres interagissent dans les textes, désignés par les termes "anima" et "automata". L’être humain, bouleversé dans cette relation à l’automata par le biais du simulacre qui lui sert de miroir, subit les effets d'une scission, suivant un processus par lequel les personnages principaux vont renouveler leur rapport au réel et recréer leur identité. À noter que certaines citations sont en anglais.

Copyright: © 2010 Julie Martineau Standard Copyright License
Version : 2 (non définitive)

My original undergraduate thesis, “What About Hal?”, is comprised of three core segments, titled “What,” “About,”and “Hal,” respectively. I used this question to structure my Queer phenomenological approach to 2001. In the first section, “What,” I identify the presence and use of physicality in 2001; “what” is in 2001 and “what” else interacts
with it? In “About,” I articulate 2001’s use and treatment of potentiality, using “about” as a spatial term that relates to imminence and anticipation of a particular action or moment. In the third and final section, “Hal,” I examine the specific interplay between physicality and potentiality in which 2001, specifically Hal, indulges, which ultimately
allows for a Queer amalgamation of the two.

SE HACE UN ANÁLISIS PROFUNDO DE 2001: ODISEA DEL ESPACIO, PELÍCULA DE CIENCIA-FICCIÓN PARADIGMÁTICA, CON UN INICIO CASI DOCUMENTAL Y UNA SEGUNDA PARTE ARGUMENTAL QUE NARRA LA EVOLUCIÓN DE LA HUMANIDAD DEL AUSTRALOPITECUS sp. AL GERMEN DEL SUPERHOMBRE, EN EL MEJOR SENTIDO DE LA PALABRA.

How has European astrofuturism developed into a central element of Western modernity? Focusing on the activities of the early spaceflight movement, in particular key protagonists Willy Ley (1906–1969) and Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008), this article analzyes the making of a cosmopolitan space international before and after the Second World War. While transnational networks of small amateur groups were well established in the 1930s, it was only in the 1950s that the authority of the space expert was publically acknowledged, laying the foundation of the 'rocket scientist'-myth in popular culture. To increase societal acceptability activists had undergone a self-imposed process of intellectual streamlining. However, that their success in writing fiction out of science had come at a price became obvious when they proved unable to respond to the epistemological challenge presented by the first waves of UFO sightings. Such questions of agency deserve a much more radical and comprehensive treatment than they have hitherto received if the societal impact of outer space is to be adequately historicized and integrated into mainstream cultural historiography.

How has European astrofuturism developed into a central element of Western modernity? Focusing on the activities of the early spaceflight movement, in particular key protagonists Willy Ley (1906-1969) and Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008), this article analzyes the making of a cosmopolitan space international before and after the Second World War. While transnational networks of small amateur groups were well established in the 1930s, it was only in the 1950s that the authority of the space expert was publically acknowledged, laying the foundation of the 'rocket scientist'-myth in popular culture. To increase societal acceptability activists had undergone a self-imposed process of intellectual streamlining. However, that their success in writing fiction out of science had come at a price became obvious when they proved unable to respond to the epistemological challenge presented by the first waves of UFO sightings. Such questions of agency deserve a much more radical and comprehensive treatment than they have hitherto received if the societal impact of outer space is to be adequately historicized and integrated into mainstream cultural historiography.


Personae des Weltraums: Kosmopolitische Netzwerke peripheren Wissens, 1927–1957

Wie hat sich der europäische Astrofuturismus zu einem Kernelement westlicher Modernität entwickelt? Anhand der Aktivitäten zweier Protagonisten der frühen Raumfahrt-Bewegung, Willy Ley (1906–1969) und Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008), zeichnet der Aufsatz die Genese einer kosmopolitischen Internationale des Weltraums vor und nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg nach. Während transnationale Netzwerke kleinerer Amateurgruppen bereits in den 1930er Jahren existierten, wurde die Autorität des Weltraum-Experten von einer breiteren Öffentlichkeit erst in den 1950er Jahren anerkannt und zugleich die Grundlage des ‹Raketenwissenschaftler-Mythos› in der Populärkultur geschaffen. Indem sie zur Überwindung ihres soziokulturellen Außenseiterstatus ‹fiction› aus ‹science› herauszuschreiben suchten, unterzogen sich diese Experten erfolgreich einem Prozess intellektueller Selbstbeschränkung, erwiesen sich jedoch letztlich nicht in der Lage, eine Antwort auf die epistemologische Herausforderung der ersten UFO-Sichtungen zu formulieren. Wenn es gilt, die Geschichte des Weltraums in den Mainstream der allgemeinen Geschichte zu integrieren, müssen solche Fragen von ‹agency› sehr viel radikaler gestellt werden als dies bislang der Fall ist.


Personae de l’univers:
Des réseaux cosmopolites de savoir périphérique 1927–1957

Comment l’astrofuturisme s’est-il transformé en un élément central de la modernité occidentale ? A partir des activités de deux protagonistes des débuts du mouvement aérospatial, Willy Ley (1906–1969) et Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008), cet article dessine la genèse d’une cosmopolite internationale de l’univers avant et après la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Pendant que des réseaux transnationaux de petits groupes d’amateurs étaient bien établis dans les années 1930, l’autorité d’expert aérospatial n’était reconnu officiellement qu’aux années 1950 et parallèlement la base du mythe du ‹roquette-scientist› était construit dans la culture populaire. Afin d’accroître l’acceptation sociale, les activistes avait entrepris un procès intellectuel de rationalisation, qu’ils s’étaient imposés eux-mêmes, en séparant la ‹fiction› de la ‹science›. Cependant, ce succès n’offrait pas de réponse au défit épistémologique présenté par les premières vues d’ovnis. Pour intégrer l’histoire de l’univers dans l’histoire générale, ces questions d’‹agency› doit être prononcées avec plus de fermeté que c’était le cas jusqu’à présent.

My review of Satyajit Ray's book, "Travails With The Alien: The film that was never made and other adventures with science fiction", first published in print in National Herald On Sunday, 13-May-2018. Link to the online edition: https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/reviews-recommendations/a-case-for-satyajit-ray-a-lesson-for-screenwriters

This project examines the representation of anxiety about technology that humans feel when encountering artificial intelligences in four science fiction novels: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Neuromancer, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Cloud Atlas. By exploring this anxiety, something profound can be revealed about what it means to be a person living in a technologically saturated society. While many critical investigations of these novels focus on the dangerous and negative implications of artificial intelligence, this work uses Martin Heidegger's later writings on technology to argue that AIs might be more usefully read as catalysts for a reawakening of human thought.

Paper and handout for a presentation at Section #234, 8:30-10 a.m., Communitarianism and Utopianism: Configuring Utopia in Film, Literature, and Theory--Friday, 8 April 1994, 24th Annual Meeting of the Popular Culture Association, Chicago.

Argues that Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY both uses and "interrogates" the Nietzschean/masculinist myth of the Superman.

Per commemorare i 50 anni di 2001: Odissea nello Spazio di Stanley Kubrick – uscito il 2 aprile 1968 negli Stati Uniti e l’11 dicembre nel nostro paese – ripercorriamo i quattro intricatissimi anni di lavorazione del film attraverso il più dettagliato calendario di produzione mai compilato.
Intrecciando le informazioni contenute in libri e periodici inglesi e statunitensi con documenti di produzione dell’Archivio Kubrick di Londra si ottiene un diario quasi giornaliero degli anni 1964-1968 che rivela quanto complicata sia stata la realizzazione del film e soprattutto quale sia stato il vero ruolo di Stanley Kubrick nell’immaginare, preparare, sviluppare, dirigere e presentare al pubblico il più grande film di fantascienza di tutti i tempi.

Despite being a hallmark of science fiction since the inception of the genre, narratives that feature first contact scenarios between humans and alien civilizations became particularly popular in the middle of the twentieth century. Critical analyses have long neglected the uniqueness of first contact narratives in this period, especially their clear 'mentorship-like' rather than 'invasion-like' nature and the invariable transformation of humanity that follows the event. This article attempts to fill this gap in the research by comparing how the aftermath of first contact is treated in novels by the 'Big Three' of science fiction: Arthur C. Clarke (Childhood's End, 1953), Robert A. Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land, 1961), and Isaac Asimov (The Gods Themselves, 1972). The article argues that the structure of first contact in these narratives is deliberately crafted to appeal to both contemporary cultural (mainly Cold War related) anxieties, and to hard-wired biological biases. In each of the novels discussed, this transformation sees humanity, through various means, become more like the aliens. This change results in a type of hyper-sociality, which can be viewed in a positive or negative light depending on the narrative context, the conflicting attitudes towards communality and individualism, and the contemporary zeitgeist of the Cold War. In addition to a close reading of the three texts, the article also employs a sentiment analysis, with the help of Matthew Jockers' 'syuzhet' package, in order to uncover the emotional valence of the transformation underlying the trope.

During the last decade of the twentieth century the status of science as well as its relation to society was debated by scientists and scholars, often very publicly, in what is known as the Science Wars. Around the same time as that event hit its peak, Stargate SG-1, currently the longest-running North American science fiction television series, began its prodigious original broadcast. This book critically analyzes the representations of science in SG-1 and the ways in which its narratives work through cultural debates about science and society, using the Science Wars as a discursive and historical context against which to read the series. Remarkably few studies focus on science and science fiction, and those that do heavily privilege print and film. Science Wars through the Stargate contributes to this discourse by specifically analyzing the innovative dimensions that television adds to the genre’s engagements with science. Similarly, SG-1 has received little academic attention relative to its duration, popularity, and significance. Narratives from the series prominently feature scientific study and scientist characters making SG-1 a particularly rich text through which to examine the interrelationship of science and popular culture. With the integral place of science in Western society as well as the current proliferation of science on television and film, it is more important than ever to examine what popular texts are telling us about science, as well as their capacity to illuminate intellectual debates. Studying science in popular culture is essential to understanding how scientific ideas are taken on and utilized, especially in the case of fiction and entertainment programming. It is also necessary to challenge some of the still entrenched views that popular culture largely presents either anti-scientific or naively optimistic portraits of science. SG-1 offers a case study where the role and position of science is subjected to critical interrogation through linked thought experiments made possible by the serialized nature of the show’s narrative, and thus provides an example for understanding how contemporary culture processes and represents science.

Spheres, a video and drawing installation part of the recent Sharjah Biennial is one in a series of works that looks at ways we can re-imagine the planet and our relationship to it. Drawing from Jule’s Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires, (his series of scrupulously researched adventure novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) and From the Earth to the Moon (1865), and his meticulous attention to detail and scientific trivia, the drawing that forms the base for the video work draws from the history of geology, astronomy, and volcanology, when the Earth was still being explored as an entity within space. The drawing brings together various specific moments of the depiction of our planet as a sphere or whole.

"The video of this site specific installation was shot on Mount Aso, Japan’s largest and most active volcano, at the lip of its caldera (the hollow crater formation that resulted from volcanic eruption 30,000 – 90,000 years ago). For Rohini, humanity has spent much resource in creating tools to study outer space from Earth, but here in Spheres, she inverts that gaze, reminding us to journey inwards, to re-assess the cycles and structures of the very world we physically inhabit."

Zoe Butt

This chapter responds to Franke’s comparison of Dante and Duns Scotus, asking the question, how can we conceive of the world Scotus has helped to create. This essay offers Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) as one answer to that question. Romanyshyn’s image of the floating astronaut serves as an entry point to describe the postmodern condition we all inhabit. The contrast of the empty threatening abyss of space for Kubrick’s astronauts versus Dante’s effulgent heavens is palpable. However, Kubrick’s film famously concludes in a radically different place. Thus, comparing Dante’s final encounter with the Ineffable and Kubrick’s psychedelic vision in relationship to the inscrutable monolith provides some hope, albeit potentially apocalyptic, for the ineffable to still irrupt into our post-Scotus world.
Keywords: William Franke, Dante Alighieri, Commedia, Paradiso, Ineffability, John Duns Scotus, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Romanyshyn, postmodernity

Retired from active scholarship, a long-time student of SF presents some final comments  on the set of topics identified in the long title, starting with the high frequency of the hexagon shape, especially in SF visuals. Without getting overtly political or asserting priority, Erlich stakes a claim for himself and Thomas P. Dunn to early consideration of the trope of the mechanical hive and invites debate on arguably masculinist 20th-c. views on some extreme forms of boundary transgression blending vs. more flexible views becoming more powerful in the 21st (suggesting a significant shift).

Erlich, initial compiler of CLOCKWORKS 2, an on-line wiki on "The Human/Machine Interface in SF," brings together briefly often-made points on 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY and "The Machine Stops," stressing the usefulness of the middle part of Kubrick's SPACE ODYSSEY as a ready-made thought experiment on self-sufficiency. Contrasts and balances transcending the flesh and matter in SPACE ODYSSEY with Forster's call to return to the body and "only connect," with glances at Clarke and H. D. Thoreau on humans and our tools.

Starting with Erlich's experience teaching A. C. Clarke's CHILDHOOD'S END and SPACE ODYSSEY — and a discussion on the Science Fiction Research Association ListServ — briefly discusses the mystic leaps at the end of the two novels, with a reference to Kubrick's film, and uses this discussion for (gentle and indirect) commentary on some continuing "Culture Wars" skirmishes in the US.

Genre, in its imbrication with the Latin gens, inevitably presents itself as a family romance. But, as in the Freudian sense, this romance is also "tragic," full of intrigue, violence, and disintegration. Just as we don't know our place in the family, we cannot know genre. It is always exceeding and leaving itself, its members dismembered, then coming back to be remembered in various acts of incest. Jacques Derrida, primarily in his discussions of Hélène Cixous, insists on the possible singularity of the genius, the writer who cannot be brought within the family of genre. Although certain artists may foreground this character more than others, it is indeed the possibility that we encounter whenever presented with the question of bringing the family of genre together. Genre is the family that is impossible, for multitudinous reasons, to keep together. But no matter how far a genius runs, he or she cannot escape genre either, so the concept of genre helps us, as critics, to provisionally map its prodigalities and incestuous events as distortions of what was never possible. We desire genre in the form of its distortions. Northrop Frye, a notable fan of genre criticism famously claims that the genre itself is speaking through the individual text. Steve Neale similarly, but differently offers that the generic expectations condition the reception. We recognize it only via its liminality, for genre exists at the threshold between analogies in form and a recursive version of the proverbial children's game, "one of these things is not like the others."

（本稿は『年報カルチュラル・スタディーズvol.5』に掲載された同名の論文と同じものです）

本稿はアーサー・C・クラーク『幼年期の終わり』(1954)と三島由紀夫『美しい星』(1962) の比較分析を通じて、リベラリズムのイデオロギーによって囲い込まれた私たちのユートピア的想像力の限界とその外部の可能性を省察する。50年代SFを代表する『幼年期の終わり』とそれに対する応答として書かれた『美しい星』は、共にユートピアに対する強い懐疑を特徴とする。本稿は両作品が共有する反ユートピア主義を、自らを脱イデオロギー的なものであると提示する冷戦期リベラリズムの文化的・心理学的ロジックの現れであると位置づけ、これを同時代の文化社会批評、知識人／大衆という感情構造、心理学、第三世界言説、SF作品の文学化＝心理学化という複数の領域の絡み合いから分析する。『幼年期の終わり』においては、冷戦反ユートピア主義はリベラルで安全な反植民地主義として現れる。だが実のところ、植民地主義を構造的搾取ではなく文化の問題に還元することで批判する本書は、アメリカを第三世界が真似すべき健全な成長を遂げた兄と表象するようなリベラルな第三世界言説と共犯関係を取り結んでおり、その意味でリベラリズムのイデオロギーを規範化しその外部の可能性を否定するものである。『美しい星』においてもユートピアの可能性はナラティヴの二重性というテキストの形式によってアイロニー化される。しかしテキストは同時に、「七北田村」という執筆当時既に存在していない地名を用いることで、近代における内的衝突の場としての入会闘争の歴史性を不在の形で刻み込む。これによりテキストは、アメリカによる戦後日本の地政学的再配置を批判すると同時に、私たちが辿った近代化の道のりの内的な裂け目を衝突の形でテキストに差し込み、ある種の未来へと拓かれた「歴史」を私たちに提示する。

Paper delivered at the Session on Approaches to Arthur C. Clarke, 10:30 a.m. to noon, Room 900; Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the Popular Culture Association, Galt House, Louisville, KY, 3 April 1985.

Starts with Ursula K. Le Guin's recommendation of Prince Peter Kropotkin's _Mutual Aid_ (1902) as an antidote to social Darwinism and, more generally, "to all this kind of crap" of Man-the-Hunter and inborn aggressivity -- with Robert Ardrey's popularized anthropology and 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY definitely included among that "crap". Uses primarily Le Guin's THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST as background to make visible the masculinist/macho myth explicit in Robert A. Heinlein's PUPPET MASTERS and STARSHIP TROOPERS, and that set of works to look at subtler uses of such ideology in SPACE ODYSSEY.

The article begins by asking what purpose is served by music in Stanley Kubrick’s later films
- It muses loosely over the role played by music in ‘Full Metal Jacket’ and ‘A Clockwork Orange’, then points out how Kubrick ceased hiring cinema composers after making ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, then introduces some implications of his using classical and contemporary music in that film.
- It briefly recounts how Kubrick came to make the film, his contact with Arthur C. Clarke, what project Clarke was working on, and the then current state of the space race; then speeds quickly over their collaboration in writing the screenplay, and the making of the film, followed by a short summary of the plot.
- It points to the overt influence of Marshall McLuhan’s ideas on key aspects of the film's plot, especially McLuhan’s contemporaneous arguments about evolution and technology, and technology-human interfaces, showing where and how McLuhan's theories connect with issues in the plot.
- It discusses how Kubrick's film presents a vision of the future that is non-military, and space travel and exploration is corporatised.  Clarke rejected this, and gave a very different view in his novel, making the mission a military expedition.
- In light of this, it considers Kubrick’s earlier fatalistic films with military themes, ‘Paths of Glory’ and ‘Dr Strangelove’, suggesting that Kubrick was pressing a significant point in eliminating military involvement in space exploration—by removing the military the film was future-affirming.
- It discusses the ‘killer ape’ theory which became popular across anthropology, psychology and archeology in the 1950s and early 1960s, highlighting the then accepted theories of Konrad Lorenz and Raymond Dart (ideas now discredited); it shows that Kubrick and Clarke learned about Dart’s ideas of violence, human evolution and cognition when researching the ‘Dawn of Man’ sequence (it identifies which book they picked up the theory from), and then built the film around the 'killer ape' theory.
- The article returns to the original puzzle about the purpose served by music.  Going over the music used in certain passages of the film, it shows how Kubrick used music symbolically.  It further concludes that alert intellectually informed audiences of the mid 1960s would perceive the use of Richard Strauss’s music at key points in the film as bringing to the fore the well-known theories about humanity of Nietzsche, McLuhan and Dart.

Arthur C. Clarke was known as a lifelong atheist and rationalist, who claimed to have been a logical futurist from the age of ten, and who was appointed a Humanist Laureate in the International Academy of Humanism. Refutations of organised religion, especially Christianity, as the “most malevolent and persistent of all mind viruses” permeates his work, featuring as a plot device in novels like The Fountains of Paradise and 3001.
However, Clarke's repudiation of religion was not totalising. His reputation for incorporating elements of cosmic transcendence into his fiction led to the scientist JBS Haldane suggesting that Clarke “should receive a prize in theology for being one of the few people to write anything new on the subject”. Specifically, Clarke seemed to exempt Buddhism, especially its Theravada branch, from his repudiations.
A self-described crypto-buddhist, Clarke was fascinated by concepts like God, reincarnation, and the paranormal and incorporated components of transcendence into all of his most significant works of fiction. This paper explores the role Buddhist thinking played in Clarke's cosmology, examining the reasons he distinguished Buddhist concepts from his general repudiation of religion, and the role such concepts played in his narratives of first contact with sentient extraterrestrials, an event for which, Clarke argued, any true theology must await.