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It is now just over a quarter of a century since Stanley Kubrick wrote to me in the spring of 1964, asking if I had any ideas that would enable him to make the "proverbial good science fiction movie." Well, the success of 2001: A Space Odyssey is now history; it has been called one of the most influential movies ever made, and almost invariably shows up in the list of the all-time top ten. It is therefore hardly suprising that, even in my own mind, the book and movie tend to be confused with each other - and with reality. The various sequels make it all the more complicated. So I'd like to go back to the beginning and recall how the whole thing started. Stanley - who becomes an instant expert in any subject that concerns him - had already devoured several libraries of science fiction. He had also acquired rights to a property with the intriguing title Shadow on the Sun, but instead decided to create something entirely new. I had already given Stanley a list of my shorter pieces, and we had decided that one - "The Sentinel" - contained a basic idea on which we could build. 2001 is often said to be based on "The Sentinel," but that is a gross oversimplification; it needed a lot more material to make a movie. Some of it came from "Encounter in the Dawn" (a.k.a. "Expedition to Earth" and published in the collection of that name) and four other short stories. But most of it was wholly new, and the result of months of brainstorming with Stanley, followed by lonely hours in Room 1008 of the famous Hotel Chelsea in New York. This is where most of the novel was written, and the journal of this often painful process is found in The Lost Worlds of 2001. But why write a novel, you may well ask, when we were aiming to make a movie? It's true that novelizations are often produced afterward, but in this case, Stanley had excellent reasons for reversing the process. Because a screenplay has to specify everything in excruciating detail, it is almost as tedious to read as to write. John Fowles put it very well when he said, "Writing a novel is like swimming through the sea; writing a film script is like thrashing through treacle." So Stanley suggested that before we embarked on the drudgery of the script, we let our imaginations soar freely by writing a complete novel, from which we could devise the script. This is more or less the way it worked out, though toward the end, novel and screenplay were being written simultaneously, with feedback in both directions. Thus, I rewrote some sections after seeing the movie rushes - a rather expensive method of literary creation, which few other authors have enjoyed. Throughout 1965 Stanley was involved in the incredibly complex post-production activities - made even more difficult by the fact that the film would be shot in England while he was still in New York (under no circumstances would he travel by air). While Stanley was making the movie, I was trying to complete the final, final version of the novel, which of course had to receive his blessing before it could be published. This proved extremely difficult to obtain, partly because he was so busy at the studio that he never had time to focus his attention on the many versions of the manuscript. He swore he wasn't dragging his feet, to make certain that the movie appeared before the book. Which it did - by several months - in the spring of 1968. After the first two Odysseys - novels and movies - had been completed, I had a very good excuse for relegating HAL, Bowman, and the Monolith to my subconscious for a while. NASA's most ambitious deep-space project, the Galileo probe, was due to be launched by the space shuttle in May 1986, to start exploring the moons of Jupiter in December 1988. It would have provided a flood of information about Jupiter and its satellites, which might make instantly obsolete anything I had written before that date - and would probably provide stimulus for endless new speculation. Alas, the Challenger tragedy eliminated that scenario. Will there ever be another Odyssey? If I'm still around to enjoy life in 1995, a final Odyssey may well emerge from my word processor. What I'd like to do, of course, is to write in a more leisurely fashion, with a view of publication on January 1st - 2001. |
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