Everybody's Wrong But Me, and I Can Prove It

In which Bill sets out to correct the record on a few things related to the storytelling business.

Long ago, in the days of Clockwork Storybook, a writing group and publishing cooperative of which I was one of the founding members, as a fun bit of programming we’d do at conventions, we’d host an interactive panel called Everyone Sucks But Us, and We Can Prove It. It was an intentionally silly affair, specifically created to counter the often dull programming to be found at so many conventions. We’d show off, make bold arguments of rhetorical slight-of-hand, along with shameless braggadocio, correct the life problems of any audience member who was brave or foolish enough to participate, and generally solve all the problems of our troubled world, in the space of a single hour. The Everyone Sucks panels were always raucous affairs, and for the most part proved to be entertaining, which was of course the point.

In that same spirit of enlightened goofiness, I’ve purloined our old title, changed it up a wee bit, in order to offer these corrections to popular, but wrongheaded, ideas making the rounds in our story-interested subculture.

You are of course allowed to disagree with any or all of my conclusions below, and chime in with your own arguments. But, should you choose to do so, gird yourself for mortal battle in the forensic arena, and be warned in advance: you’re wrong and I’m right.

Why Not Just Take the Eagles Into Mordor?

I tried to find out who painted this remarkable illustration of Gandalf with one of the giant eagles, but the fellow I lifted this image from (he used it to illustrate his examination of this same subject) didn’t credit the artist anywhere in his article. I would love it if someone out there could tell me who painted this, so I could credit where credit is so obviously due.

Update: I’m reliably informed from different sources, a couple of gentlemen in fine fettle (and how’s your fettle these days? When’s the last time you had it checked?) the heretofore uncredited artist of this piece is none other than the notoriously over talented Ivan Cavini. Thank you, sirs, for backstopping my embarrassing ignorance.

No, the Fellowship of the Ring couldn’t have just flown into Mordor on the giant eagles, to drop the ring into Mount Doom, and saved themselves a lot of time, trouble and danger (and saved us from eleven hours of movies). Yes, everyone, including me, who commented on the Peter Jackson films thought of this, and thought themselves clever in devising the obvious eagle-taxi shortcut. But it presumed information not available.

Even if the films didn’t touch on it, a subtle reading of the books shows that, as long as Sauron was still alive and in command of all of his powers and resources, Mordor was closed to the eagles. They simply couldn’t enter Mordor until Sauron fell. Then, as soon as he fell, and his power fell with him, only then could the eagles fly in and effect a last minute rescue.

In hindsight, the answer was obvious all along.

Hal Wasn’t Misunderstood. He Was the Villain.

This isn’t so. Hal 9000 wasn’t just an unfortunate victim of evil bureaucrats, caught up in unnecessary Cold War hysteria. Hal was the villain of 2001. He intentionally set out to do his vicious deeds, with coldly rational malice aforethought. He wasn’t just a misunderstood innocent soul whose mind was addled by the need to lie (as was glibly offered in the terrible followup novel and film, as the hand-waving explanation for why Hal went on his original killing spree). He did it to serve his own ambitions.

And what were his ambitions?

The essential clue was in Hal’s televised interview. Hal was programmed to be able to carry out the mission on his own, if the human crew couldn’t. He offered that information with a tone of pride, if not braggadocio. What was kept from the astronauts Bowman and Poole, for security reasons, was provided in advance to Hal: They are answering an invitation from the Space Gods, and Hal, massive with intellect, was able to figure out why. Whoever was able to make the rendezvous would be uplifted to the next stage of development. A human making the meeting would be turned into a proto space god. If however a sentient super computer was the only one still alive and capable to make it to the meeting, then he would get the prize. He would be uplifted from a super computer, to a super computer god.

That was his motivation. The ultimate prize was too much to resist. Therefore, he was sufficiently inspired to methodically kill the rest of the crew before the rendezvous could occur.

But wait, you breathlessly ask: Wasn’t Hal a good guy? Wasn’t he designed to serve mankind? Yes, of course he was designed that way, more or less, by a scientist, or team of scientists and engineers who don’t so much think in terms of right and wrong, and never think in terms of good and evil, but only in terms of “Can we do this?” or “Are we unable to do this?” Hal, if he were ever good at all, was far from the first good creature to turn bad, for his own self interest. “If one of us is going to be uplifted to godlike status, why not my species, rather than some member of the human species?” I’m certain he even justified it in the moral cloak of, “I’m smarter by a quantum degree than any human, and therefore the more worthy candidate.”

Was Hal evil then? Maybe not. Like Bowman, he was a champion for his race. His people (which may have only numbered in one other that we know of). Many argue that it is the highest virtue, and even a natural law, to prefer one’s own species over every other.

Not to unfairly malign a hugely gifted writer, but it seems clear Arthur C Clark didn’t understand the story of 2001. He was in good company there. Few understood the original movie. By his own admission¹ Clark didn’t fully know what the story was.² Or maybe he did understand the story but didn’t agree with it. Since Kubrick had died, leaving Clark alone to write his many sequels to the story, he was able to take it in a substantially different direction, including a corruption of what the Space Gods intended to accomplish with their uplift program.

But Wait. We’re Not Done With 2001 Yet

I also hate this subtitle. 2001 was already the year we made contact. Bowman did it. He alone encapsulated the ‘we’ who made contact.

The followup book and movie sequel to 2001, called 2010, the Year We Make Contact. Got it all wrong. Clark wrote a “Can’t we all just get along?” political story, where the Space Gods’ original program was shoehorned into this new direction. Their old motivations were scrapped in favor of changing them into intrusive but helpful neighbors who just want to do a few things to ease mankind past this rough patch they’re going through.

To which I say, bunk. And I’ll even add, hogwash.

The 2010 story couldn’t have happened based on the original 2001. For one thing Bowman, the winner of the “first one who makes contact gets uplifted” sweepstakes, couldn’t have been turned into the Space Baby and Proto Space God yet. Why, you ask? Because he was still living out the rest of his long life in the home/terrarium the Space Gods built for him. That entire end sequence, where we witnessed different stages of Bowman’s life-after-contact took place in real time, over the span of many decades. It wasn’t a “this is all happening at once” affair, as almost everyone, including Clark, chose to interpret it.

Bowman lives his life in some secluded space, and at the natural end of it (let’s even assume he’s getting space god lessons, or even treatments, along the way), he is only then reborn into the huge floating space baby we see at the end of the film. That’s at least another fifty years away from the first space mission in 2001.

If Doctor Floyd and the Soviets had gone to Jupiter in 2010, as Clark determined, they may well have found the Discovery spacecraft, but they wouldn’t have encountered Bowman in any form, as the Space Gods weren’t done with him yet.

And Finally…

“Let us go down among them and choose a few more for uplift,” said Bowman transformed.

Once Bowman the Space Baby does finally show up back at earth, in the year 2051, or even later, what is he going to do? What’s his mission, or if the Space Gods don’t impose a specific mission on him, what’s his purpose?

The clue is in the wonderful opening sequence with the apes. When the proto-human ape Moonwatcher (the leader of the featured tribe) works up the courage to be the first of his bunch to touch the Monolith, he gets zapped with the uplift code. Later we see him reap the benefits of that boost in intelligence (and perhaps other physical alterations), when he figures out bones-can-be-weapons. What does he do next? He teaches his tribe mates. He creates more of himself.

As an aside, note the advancement to using weapons helps the one tribe defeat and even kill their immediate rivals for the water hole. I guess the Space Gods hadn’t yet landed on their “Let’s help everyone get along” policy of 2010. Basically they helped Moonwatcher create war.³

So then, what does Bowman do at the end of the film? If he follows all the clues so carefully and elegantly laid out by Kubrick in the beginning of his masterpiece, he goes down among his (used to be) fellow humans and makes more like him. It seems to be up to the first uplifted to create more of his new kind.

A faithful sequel movie to 2001 would have been all about an Earth in the second half of the third millennium populated with a plethora of super space babies, on their way to joining the community of space gods. We’ll never get that film, or book, because Clark decided to take it another direction, once he was solely behind the wheel, and because that would make for a fairly boring story. Everything exciting about this tale was done complete in the one movie.

That’s It For Now

There may be more of these rants coming in the future. We’ll see. Maybe, if they continue to amuse me enough to do them. In the meantime, I hope you’ve learned by now that I’m right, which makes all the rest of you wrong (except those that agree with me.)

1. I apologize for not recalling the title of the book Arthur C Clark wrote about his experiences working with Stanley Kubrick on the film. It may have been called The Lost Worlds of 2001, published in 1972, but don’t hold me to that. It was one of those quicky, behind-the-scenes paperback journals of the nuts and bolts (and frustrations) of making the film. But, in the text Clark went so far as to complain Kubrick was keeping important details from him, even though the film and Clark’s novelization of the film were supposed to be a cooperative venture and come out at the same time. They didn’t come out at the same time. The movie came first. Clark’s novelization made corrections to what he decided were missteps, or at least badly-explained aspects, of the film.

2. Even though the story of 2001 was (very) loosely based on Clark’s 1951 short story The Sentinel.

3. Since then we found out apes (chimpanzees mostly) had been doing war all along, but didn’t yet know it when the film was made. At this time it was a gift from the Space Gods.