AG Monday!
Tom and Steven talk 2010.
In an earlier episode, we said that 2001: A Space Odyssey was one of the greatest SF movies ever made. Arguably, the greatest. Also one of the greatest films, period. And then in 1984 came the sequel, 2010: The Year We Make Contact.
Was it as good as the original? Definitely not. But was it a good movie? A decent sequel? Good science fiction? An effective adaptation of the book sequel that Arthur C. Clarke wrote? We’ll answer all these questions, and more, in this episode.
Strange happenings near Jupiter! My old buddy HAL! My old gal SAL! Roy Scheider as Heywood U. Lookatthat! Helen Mirren as the serious Soviet superior officer! Spacewalks! Aerobraking! Something wonderful that’s going to happen! Say Bob Balaban three times fast! It’s all here.
Ancient Geeks is a podcast about two geeks of a certain age re-visiting their youth. We were there when things like science fiction, fantasy, Tolkien, Star Trek, Star Wars, D&D, Marvel and DC comics, Doctor Who, and many, many other threads of modern geek culture were still on the fringes of popular culture. We were geeks before it was chic!
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No more space warps? ok.
I read the book when it came out. I don’t recall where I saw the movie. It’s complicated on how movies got to Mexico back then, months after they premiered in the US, and that I was travelling for most of the second half of 1985. I mention this last, because I got a book in England containing the correspondence between Clarke and the movie’s director, Peter Hyams, which took place during development. So, I think I must have seen it on tape late in 1985.
Anyway, as stories, IMO both book and movie are better than 2001. You’re never just shown something strange and unfamiliar and left to figure out what it is you saw.
Of course, there’s the detail that in the book version of 2001 the tragic ship Discovery went to Saturn, and in the sequel it’s in orbit around Jupiter…
As to the USSR still being in existence, 1984 was like the height of Cold War I (after the Cuban Missile Crisis). Gorbachev didn’t get into office until the next year. No one just casually predicts a change in the global paradigm. For that matter, Jupiter’s presented as being so HUGE it’s jusssssssssst short of being a star. Brown dwarf objects were discovered only a few years after the novel came out. And remember all those super-Jovian planets Kepler and other instruments have found around other stars? Jupiter might just be below average in the large gas giant planet distribution.
I checked. The movie came out in Mexico on August 1985, I was in Israel at the time visiting relatives. So, I must have seen it on tape.
About the Clarke and Hyams book, I no longer have it. I recall two things vividly. One was communications issues, as they had set up a proto-email system that allowed them to send written messages using a modem (the time difference between Sri Lanka and LA doesn’t make real time coms easy). The other was what Clarke wrote after reading the final draft of the screenplay (as reconstructed from memory):
“I wanted to leave a message saying ‘Mr. Clarke was last seen on his way to the airport carrying a gun’.”
Actually he liked the script. He also made jokes like that.
Now, coincidentally, the ep of SG-1 I streamed yesterday is called “2010.” 99.9% of it takes place in the show’s future. Not only that, but part of the plot involves igniting Jupiter into a star. I’m sure both title and Jovian star are references to Clarke’s sequel. The plot of the ep is otherwise standard SG-1 saving the world one more time. They could have placed the action in 2012, and come up with some other excuse for Carter to have access to a special computer.
If memory serves, there’s a latter related episode called “2001.” This one takes place in the show’s present, and originally aired in 2001.
BTW, I still have most of the podcast ep left to play. Not coincidentally*, I wanted to finish the last 20 minutes or so of Besters’ “The Stars My Destination.” And that took most of the drive to work.
On related matters, among my old books I found an unread one: Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men. Clarke mentions this book several times in his nonfiction. I got it years ago, maybe in the late 90s or early 2000s, but never seemed to find a time to get started on it. Considering I re-read lost of books for lack of new books, I’m amazed it’s still laying there unread…
* I added it to the queue recently when Tom mentioned it in the AG substack.