Arthur C. Clarke

[McLeodGanja]

He was always writing about the future, so maybe it is fitting that he somehow managed to die in the future...

Yes indeed. Here is an interesting article from the BBC news site about him.

BBC NEWS | UK | Arthur C Clarke: predictions

I liked "2001," the novel, and also liked the movie. In a lot of ways, I felt like I got more out of the book. The movie was visually interesting and Kubrik made a great effort at authenticity, but the pace was a bit slow, and some of the visual special effects that were so revolutionary at the time distracted from the story. The book gave a better understanding for what was going on.

I am also a big fan of 2001, but I personally favour the less descriptive and more abstruse nature of the film. I watched in many many times before I read the book, usually stoned, and derived many interesting sub texts and meanings behind it. It is directed slow for a reason, to capture the isolation of being in deep space.

When I later went on to read the book I was somewhat disappointed to find the ending written so explicitly. It kind of made the final scenes in the film seem less fathomable, if that makes sense.

2010 is also a great film, but I found the book quite dry, and I only read half way through it before I lost my copy. Didn't bother with 2061, but I read 3001 and it was ... alright I suppose...

One of the wierd things about the book and the movie was that they were different in certain details, like in the book the planet was Saturn, but in the movie it was Jupiter. Then when the next book, "2010," came out, Clarke had written it as a sequel to the movie, with all its details consistent with the movie, not the previous book. I thought that was wierd. And then of course when that book was adapted as a movie, it had details that differred from "2010," the book...

Actually the film and the book were co-created by by Kubrick and Clarke together, but the book was based on two short stories written by Clarke decades earlier, one was called The Sentinel I think and the other I can't remember.

The reason that Jupiter was chosen for the film was simply down to limitations in special effect technology back then. I cannot remember why Clarke left it as saturn in the book.

Clarke was a visionary and actuallly invented the concept for some things that were later develioped in real life. I remember reading somewhere that he invented the idea of the communications satellite, long before there was any kind of satellite technology at all, before any kind of spaceflight.

Clarke is far from being the greatest science fiction writer of our time, however he was a great man, and a technological visionary. I will remember him best for his show I used to watch as a young boy, Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World.