Reconstruction 9.3 (2009)

Return to Contents>>

On the Mediocrity of Arthur C. Clarke's Science Fiction / Jorgensen

<1> Theorists and apologists for science fiction (sf) are persistently defending it from accusations of fantasy and of mediocrity. Take the opening sentence of a recent edited collection on the genre:

For most of the eighty years since science fiction (SF) was identified and named as a distinct genre, it has typically been dismissed as the infantile excrescence of a stultifying mass culture, a literature doubly debased by its fantastic elements and mediocre prose (Bould 1).

Whether sf remains marginalized by high literary culture remains a matter for debate. Yet Bould's claim for the genre's denigration is a typical strategy by which critical work on sf positions itself. The most influential theorist of sf, Darko Suvin, wants to elevate sf from its status both as marginal and as popular by considering it to be cognitively engaging and distinct from fantasy fiction. This doubled strategy of discovering sf's thoughtful, reflexive qualities and of elevating it from other, more degraded popular genres has largely held sway in the tiny discipline of sf studies. Here, I want to reverse this trend to argue that sf can be mediocre and can lack those cognitive, reflexive ideas that define literature. To do this I turn to one of the most popular writers of sf in the twentieth century, Arthur C. Clarke. This essay illustrates the mediocrity of sf with five examples of Clarke's fiction, as well as with the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) that he co-wrote with filmmaker Stanley Kubrick. First published in the pulp magazine Astounding in 1946, Clarke went on to become not only a bestselling sf writer, but a leading propagandist for space exploration. His fictions can be considered as something of an extension of this public role, as they demonstrate the feasibility of near-future technologies. Yet, while illustrating the possibilities for the human race off the planet, they also subsume human relations to this greater goal. As Merritt Abrash points out, "cooperation serves no necessary function" for Clarke, instead being a means to the ends of human expansion into space (377). This contradiction between the grandiose and the banal, the contrast between the infinite and the finitude of Clarke's fiction, is understood here to be its distinctive quality. Clarke's mediocrity is a way of understanding the way in which the genre functions aesthetically.

<2> To make claims for the genre, sf studies differentiated it from fantasy by arguing that its narratives were cognitively valid, ruled by scientific or at worst pseudo-scientific logic (Suvin). Science makes sf a privileged meditation on modern civilisation and its potentials. This measure not only serves to set boundaries for the genre but to privilege some science fiction from others. Thus two of the progenitors of the genre, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, can be distinguished from each other by the degree of scientific viability they exhibit in their narratives. At least, this was Verne's own opinion, when he wrote of Wells that

I consider him, as a purely imaginative writer, to be deserving of very high praise, but our methods are entirely different. I have always made a point in my romances of basing my so-called inventions upon a groundwork of actual fact, and of using their construction methods and materials which are not entirely without the pale of contemporary engineering skill and knowledge. (cited in Costello 186)

Verne claims that his own inventions are more feasible than those of Wells because they are extrapolations of known technologies. Thus, "there is nothing extraordinary" about his massive submarine in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Verne cited in Costello 187). Verne is, in the parlance of sf theory, writing hard sf that keeps its technology close to the known. But Wells' The First Men in the Moon (1900) breaks with all known sciences by using an anti-gravitation device to lift his extraterrestrial travelers into the sky. His is soft or social sf, since Wells cares more about his characters than the science of his technologies. Clarke works after Verne's philosophy rather than that of Wells. This in the sense that he works with feasible technologies, and in that both Clarke and Verne neglect the complexity of human relations in their fictions. Verne's From the Earth to the Moon, for instance, spends "some 110 pages discovering how to get to the moon", only to leave his astronauts "quite literally dangling in the breeze" (Thurber 222). These astronauts have no way of getting home at the end of the novel. Verne's apparent indifference to their fate, if not to narrative resolution, is of less interest to him than imagining a journey into space. The mediocrity of Verne's fiction is supplemented by this intensive attention to the veracity of space travel.

<3> It is useful, then, to turn to Clarke's story, "First Encounter" for the sense in which he turns mediocrity from a way of neglecting certain narrative conventions into a philosophy for the space age. "First Encounter " was the redraft of an earlier story, "Encounter in the Dawn," published in Amazing Stories in 1953. It was written to be a part of the novel 2001 but never made it into the final draft because Kubrick chose to make another kind of film. A line in this abandoned chapter provides something of a key to Clarke's thinking, and to the way in which mediocrity turns into a positive dimension of sf. In this story Clarke argues that that humans were a mediocre species to begin with, and that is why they were able to invent things. When an alien visitor to pre-historic Earth meets a proto-human ape, the alien notices that:

Where the other animals had become virtuosos, [the proto-human apes] had specialized in a universal mediocrity - and therein, in a million years hence, might lie their salvation. Having failed to adapt themselves to their environment, they might yet one day change it to suit their own desires. ("First Encounter" 57-8)

Mediocrity is the condition by which technology comes into being. Humans are only of interest in so far as they shape what is around them. It is significant that Clarke uses the term "salvation" to describe the relationship of technology to human nature. Technology rescues the human race from its fallen, terrestrial state. The new life it brings is the life of civilization. There is also a dialectic in Clarke's work between humans who determine their fate in the universe by shaping matter before them, and salvation from an exterior force that rescues the fallen. In "Encounter in the Dawn" this exteriority is an alien who has arrived from the depths of the universe to teach an ape things that will help its species to evolve. The alien teaches the use of tools, and the dialectic of human and alien gives way to a synthesis in a universality of technology. Bridging the human mind and the universe, technology becomes the means by which the human race is both thought of as mediocre and transcends the Earth.

<4> The consequence of Clarke's grandiose philosophy is that his characters have little to say about their own individual fate, as they are subsumed within the greater human adventure in the universe. The technologies that humans shape drive the fate of the race and of individuals. Even in scenes of death, his characters meet their end with little emotional reaction. In the 1961 novel, A Fall of Moondust, Clarke stages a disaster on the moon's surface. A tourist vehicle is designed to sail over an imaginary dust ocean, still named the Sea of Thirst. On one of its journeys, it falls deep within this dust, and is trapped many meters below. Those aboard are white-collar workers on holiday from Earth: a lawyer, physicist, accountant, journalist, professor, engineer and a few of their wives. They are joined by a heroic space veteran, the captain of the vehicle and its hostess. The gender relations of this novel are unashamedly patriarchal, with women fitting into the social roles that middle class society had allocated for them in the 1950s.

<5> It is a strange moment when, in the face of their approaching deaths, the tourists choose to play games that imitate, on a smaller scale, their terrestrial lives. They improvise a mock theatre, a court of law and a set of cards. Such antics are not without historical precedent. As Francis Spufford notes of Arctic travelers trapped in the Arctic ice over winter - their dancing, amateur theatricals and shipboard newspaper were a way of "defying the elements", but end up magnifying the perversity of where they are (50). The scene also recalls the card game in Wells' own War of the Worlds (1898), as the narrator sits in a cellar playing cards as the Martians wreak havoc above. Yet while Clarke's A Fall of Moondust does not lend itself to thinking the irony or absurdity of the situation, Wells' novel does. The game Wells' characters play is called euchre, whose prize is the city of London. Under the yoke of imperial invasion, these Englishmen carry on thinking like imperialists (193). The regression that Wells introduces here saves his game from being mediocre, as it acts as a metaphor for the novel's narrative at large. Clarke's characters, on the other hand, play games to defeat their "biggest problem" that is not so much their mortality (the air that is running out in the cabin), but "boredom" (Fall of Moondust 33). As sf author Christopher Priest writes, the author's "level of characterization is that of a boy's adventure magazine" (93).

<6> Scenes of characters facing their own death recur throughout Clarke's oeuvre, and are remarkable for the indifference that these characters show toward their own situation. When in the 1968 novel 2001 the astronaut Dave arrives at Jupiter, after following the signal of TMA-1, he finds an identical black object floating in the giant's orbit. It takes him on a psychedelic journey over the surface of suns and through interstellar gateways, before leaving him in a room. The novel describes this room like this:

He was prepared, he thought, for any wonder. The only thing he had never expected was the utterly commonplace.
The space pod was resting on the polished floor of an elegant, anonymous hotel suite that might have been in any large city on Earth. He was staring into a living room with a coffee table, a divan, a dozen chairs, a writing desk, a half-filled bookcase with some magazines lying on it, and even a bowl of flowers. (original italics, 208-9)

After a journey through a stargate and into an alien universe, Clarke returns to the mediocre, in this ordinary hotel room (207). His frequent combinations of the ordinary and extraordinary have led E. Michael Thron to point out that "the more predictable the fiction, the stronger will be the alien" in Clarke's work (72). Indeed, 2001 supplements a bourgeoisie future with the most fantastic and transcendent of alien beings. However, most of Clarke's writings do not feature aliens, and instead the ordinary is simply displaced into the fantastic environment of outer space, that tehn occupies the extraordinary place of the alien. Thron argues that within this combination of the very ordinary and extraordinary lies the aesthetic appeal of Clarke's fiction. Thus his descriptions of the bureaucratic problems of a lunar colony in A Fall of Moondust, or of arriving at a transdimensional Hotel in 2001, emphasize just how ordinary the fact of being in space is for his characters from the future. Conversely, for his readers in the twentieth century, the mediocrity of Clarke's everyday scenes in space only serve to emphasize the most extraordinary dimensions of outer space itself.

<7> It is from within this contrast of the mediocre and extraordinary that Clarke returns to his role as propagandist for space travel. In his extraordinary scenes of characters dying in outer space, the contrast works to minimize the dangerous aspects of interplanetary and interstellar travel, as if ending one's life off the Earth were a trivial matter. In 2010 (1982), a taikonaut is facing death alone on Europa, an ice moon of Jupiter. His ship has been destroyed by a giant life-form that unexpectedly crawled out from the ocean beneath the ice. The taikonaut recognizes the significance of his discovery of life on another world, and calls back to a Russian spaceship making its way into Jupiter space: "I've only two requests to make, Doctor. When the taxonomists classify this creature, I hope they'll name it after me. And - when the next ship comes home - ask them to take our bones back to China" (50). The name of this character offers the continuity deprived him by death, as it extends infinitely and immortally with civilization into outer space. Mortality is subsumed by this concern for the greater potential of technology that has carried him into outer space. In his 1986 novel The Songs of Distant Earth, Clarke makes use of death only to emphasise the relative importance of human travel in outer space. He describes the final moments of a man drowning in the ocean of Thalassa like this: "When he realised it was all over, he felt no fear. His last conscious thought was pure anger that he had travelled fifty light-years, only to meet so trivial and unheroic an end" (136). The scale of a human life is here placed in contrast to the scale of the universe. The character wishes for a heroic death that would make him more of a part of the overarching program of space exploration, that would redeem him from the fallen and trivial state of the individual. Heroism is a contribution to human expansion, individual finitude becoming a part of an infinite progression into the universe.

Masculine Anxieties

<8> It is worth pausing on the ideology of this relationship between mortality and infinitude here, in order to historicise Clarke's representations of death. In his interest in subsuming human life to its destiny in the galaxy, Clarke can be thought of as a product of ideologies particular to the 1940s and 1950s, when Clarke started his writing career. Sociologists, journalists and philosophers of this time were concerned about the way in which subjects were being interpellated into ways of life sanctioned by the state and its industrial complexes after the Second World War. A group of dissident American sociologists were concerned about a rising new middle class in the US. David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (1950), C. Wright Mills' White Collar (1951), and William H. Whyte's The Organization Man (1957) map the tension between this new bourgeoisie and their society. While liberal histories of the period emphasize how secure, wealthy and family orientated the post-war US was, these works point specifically to the detrimental effects of social change upon the American male. Mills points out that the "material hardship of nineteenth-century industrial workers finds its parallel on the psychological level among twentieth-century white-collar employees" (xvi). The alienation of the new workplace lay in its cognitive complexity, as the mind of the worker was forced to deal with bureaucracy, meritocracy, and new technologies.

<9> The anxieties attendant upon these cognitions turn up not only in the stories of the pulp sf magazines that Clarke first published in, but in their advertisements. Promising a plethora of products implied in masculine anxieties, from mind improvement to confidence enhancement and muscle building, these advertisements signal the insecurities of a male whose identity was traditionally predicated on blue collar work that now finds himself in a feminine workplace (Hoberek 380). Rather than the weary bodies of the industrial era, the exploitation of white collar labour has to do with the mind. These advertisements represent the self-alienation of one who has been interpolated into the workplace by means of his cognitive specialization (Mills xii). Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders (1957) revealed the psychological techniques used by the advertising industry, the foundation of these techniques in gendered anxieties. However, Clarke's technocratic characters are by comparison not anxious or alienated, as they betray no signs of individual resistance or repression as a consequence of being a part of their space bound societies. In subsuming themselves to the social order, they represent Clarke's ideologies of human progress into space.

<10> A second model for mapping the subjectivity of the 1950s male is to be found back across the Atlantic in French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960). While Sartre is best known as an exponent of existentialism, in his later years he turned to Marxism to describe this subject's situation in the modern world. The tension described by the Critique is, like that of Riesman, Mills and Whyte, between this subject and their society. To paraphrase a comment that could just as easily have come from one of these sociologists, Sartre writes that "the intensity of isolation ... expresses the degree of massification" (257). While the sociologists analyse the relationship of the subject to their society as an exploitative one, Sartre describes the way these subjects choose to interpellate themselves into their social position. This isolation is produced through the "relation of exteriority between the members of a temporary and contingent gathering" (257). Thus the subject is constituted by relations with a social mass that is external to it. Sartre uses the example of people standing at a bus stop to illustrate this interpellation of the modern subject. Each pedestrian is, in this queue, as much other to themselves as to others, constructed "through Others in so far as they are Other than themselves" (261). He turns Karl Marx's concept of alienation into one of "seriality", in which people choose to be alienated from themselves (262-4). There is no better example of this psychological development within capitalism than false personalization, in which an entire personality is simulated for the benefit of office relations or customer service (Riesman 271). While Riesman wants to set legal limits to the psychic dangers of false personalization, Sartre recognizes that, to some degree at least, the person chooses to become this very lie.

<11> In many respects, then, Sartre's model of subjectivity in technocratic capitalism is a more appropriate one for Clarke, as both writers envisage social orders unencumbered by psychic complexity. Thus in The Songs of Distant Earth, the distant future is a bland version of the 1950s. In this novel different groups of humans have been separated by multiple generations and immense tracts of space, as they spread in ships and colonies across the universe. They are, however, culturally identical to each other, unchanged by time or the difference of their surroundings. At least in this later novel Clarke's women are of more consequence, The Songs of Distant Earth featuring a strong female leader on the alien world of Thalassa. When a group of interstellar travelers arrive on the planet, their similarity to the native population is uncanny:

The Mayor was holding out her hands in the traditional 'See - no weapons' gesture as old as history.
"I don't suppose you'll understand me," she said, "but welcome to Thalassa."
The visitors smiled, and the older of the two - a handsome, grey-haired man in his late sixties - held up his hands in response.
"On the contrary," he answered, in one of the deepest and most beautifully modulated voices Brant had ever heard, "we understand you perfectly. We're delighted to meet you." (21)

Clarke's disorientations lie not so much in the extraordinary but in the uncannily ordinary, that here appears in the distant future and deep space. Not only has human body language remained unchanged, but the polite and banal gentilities of the bourgeoisie are preserved in a space and time far removed from its historical specificity. When the captain of the starship and a local Lassan fall in love, Clarke describes their kiss like this: "And presently, between two worlds, they became one" (87). The phrase emphasises the scale of this homogenous humanity, universalised across far flung parts of the galaxy. Ingeniously, Clarke goes on to partially explain his interstellar monoculture: "When sound recording was invented, it froze the basic phoneme patterns of all languages. Vocabularies would expand, syntax and grammar might be modified - but pronunciation would remain stable for millennia" (21). Here Clarke repeats Sartre's deterministic relation between technology and the serial. Sound recording the "practico-inert" by which people enter into a sedentary constitution. The practico-inert is "matter which has absorbed the past actions and meanings of human beings" and then comes to constitute these beings in turn (Poster, 60-1). Again, technology comes to configure the mediocrity of human relations.

Cinematic Mediocrity

<12> To move from Clarke's novels to the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), co-written by Clarke but directed by Stanley Kubrick, is to change the conditions under which the reception of sf takes place, and subsequently the representation of seriality. A cinema of sf has been in place since the turn of the century, when George Melies made A Voyage to the Moon (1902), but the first sf film to produce a lot of critical attention was 2001. Since its release it has attracted a steady stream of secondary work. In her 1969 article on the film, Annette Michelson places it in a direct descent from Melies as a cinema of effect, suspending narrative and belief to stage a spectacle of the eye. 2001 is indeed made up of a series of historically unprecedented special effects - from the recreation of the dawn of the Earth to the hull of an orbiting space-station, a flight to Jupiter, and an astronaut's trans-dimensional voyage of through an alien "Stargate". Later criticisms of the film version of 2001 noted that its mediocrity functioned in a particular way. While many critics were bored by its dialogue (Fry; Gelmis; Gilliatt; Kauffmann; Williams), later writers point out that these conversations are laced with a kind of irony. Kubrick films the dialogue of the film only to accentuate the greater qualities of the universe in which it was set (Tapio 55).

<13> Sf theorist Carl Freedman's article on 2001, while acknowledging that the special effects of cinema are technologically complicit with the technological interests of sf, makes a completely different point about the quality of these effects. He argues that they are the antithesis of sf's cognitive qualities. The reflexive thought that takes place in sf narrative is wholly at odds with special effects, that in fact work to interrupt this cognition. The differences between Bukatman and Freedman arise not only in locating sf differently, but in their preference of scenes from the movie. Wanting to emphasize cognitive disorientation, Bukatman thinks about the abstract 'Stargate' sequence, while Freedman confronts the entire range of the film's scenes. He points to the way the specular hegemony of 2001 contains its own quality of mediocrity. For Freedman it is a great film because it is conscious of the conceptual vacuity of special effects. 2001 can thus be taken as a kind of critical reflection upon Clarke's novels, which foreground technology at the price of human relations. The drawn-out sequences of spacecraft docking, an astronaut jogging in a centrifugal, and thus infinite corridor, contain a self-consciousness about their own mediocrity. Kubrick extended these scenes so that their implicit celebration of technological progress, as the camera dwells on the magnificence of spacecraft in flight, turns into a consciousness of the mediocrity of this technology. The technological ideal so valued by modernity is seen, through Kubrick's lingering camera, as an ultimately mediocre one.

<14> At the time of the film's release, many took the film's lack of narrative at face value. After test screenings, the production company MGM requested that Kubrick shorten its length because audiences were bored. Critic Stanley Kauffmann called it dull three times in one sentence and noted the "poor dialogue and acting" of the scenes in outer space (225). Michaela Williams notes that those "who want to abandon themselves in the film's visual beauty wince at the story; and those interested in plot are bored by stars" (277). Another review claimed its characters were "standardized, bland, depersonalised near-automatons who have surrendered their humanity to the computers" (Gelmis, 264). The lead actor, Kier Dullea, "must have been selected for his role as one of the astronauts on the basis of his limited range of expressions" (Williams 227). The reviewer for the New Yorker claimed that the

. . . citizens of 2001 have forgotten how to chat, speculate, grow intimate, or interest one another ... They lack the mind for acknowledging that they have managed to diminish outer space into the ultimate in humdrum, or for dealing with the fact that they are spent and insufficient . . . (Gilliatt, 211)

Yet what would initially be criticisms of this mediocrity would turn into a recognition that these dehumanised humans served some kind of a critical and aesthetic function. By 1977, 2001's mediocrity would become a part of its authorial intention:

They talk of it as though it were a defect when it actually is a virtue. For it is obviously silly to assume that Kubrick and Clarke could not have written brighter dialogue, had they wanted to. If it was developed the way it was and provided with its perfect setting of a Howard Johnson in space, an Orbiter Hilton, and all that, this must have been done for a reason. And its purpose is really clear: to show us up as we are or soon will be, by extrapolating a few decades ahead, almost imperceptibly magnifying our shortcomings and inanities. It is finely wrought satire, unwillingness (rather than inability) to put more than clich�s into the mouths of those stewardesses and security personal and space scientists of the near future. (Plank 126)

Plank recognizes that the mediocrity of 2001 is extrapolating upon the mediocrity of 1968. The utopian goals of the American space program in 1968, that envisaged moon bases and expeditions to the rest of the solar system within the foreseeable future, are implied in a society of dull mediocrity. Space travel is the goal of a bourgeoisie civilization whose social relations have been subsumed by technocratic cognition.

<15> Unlike the crowded Mir and Salyut platforms that the real future would bring into being, 2001's International Space Station is remarkable in its very abundance of interior space. Lunar miners, diplomats, researchers and tourists wander broad and empty corridors glowing with artificial light. Arranged along these corridors are video phones and reclining chairs. Announcements for flights to the moon drift over the intercom. A long centrifugal corridor may as well have been made by an alien species, it is so devoid of humanizing touches. Its walls and floors are an antiseptic white, and are luxuriously vast as they stretch to a curved horizon. They have their corollary in an exterior of emptiness. The infinite reaches of outer space are relocated in the infinite circularity of an airtight tube that makes up the station's interior structure. The hull that separates the interior from the exterior of the station, life from death, is no longer a barrier but an agreement between forms of death. It grazes the physical death of airless space and contains within itself the death implied in a white, antiseptic space. Kauffmann calls it a "celestial Kennedy Airport" (226). Its Hilton Hotel, customs barrier and telephone booth are each familiar and strange, looking like the post-industrial ideal of Marc Auge's notion of the non-place, freed from the contingencies of its own production, and thus its place on the terrestrial world. The existence of these familiar objects is only betrayed by signs that point to exit gates and the sound of boarding calls. Its destinations are equivalent points in a deterritorialised space, partaking of an indifferent void that renders its locations all the same.

<16> The spatialisation of the International Space Station also infects the relations among those on board. When Floyd runs into his old Soviet friend Dimitri on the way to the moon, he cannot tell him that he is on his way to see the top-secret discovery site TMA-1. The old friends sit around a table of drinks, but unlike the proto-human apes who had previously battled around a waterhole, their conflict is banal. "He was sorry he could not sound more sincere," he thinks in the novel, "they really had enjoyed a week's vacation in Odessa with Dimitri during one of the Russian's visits to Earth" (Clarke, 2001 63). Personal relations are constrained by a competition between nations that is, in the non-territorial infinity of outer space, sheerly symbolic. The social order is maintained only to bring about what Mark Crispin Miller describes as a "sense of profound emptiness" (24). When Floyd is the only passenger of a shuttle flight to the moon, Clarke notes in the novel that the hostess is "determined, it seemed, to go through the full routine for her solitary passenger, and Floyd could not resist a smile as she continued inexorably" (Clarke 2001, 44-5). Again, the familiar becomes the site of the extraordinary for readers and viewers inexperienced in space flight. As Floyd passes through a customs barrier, he notices that: "There was a rather pleasant symbolism about the fact that as soon as they had passed through the barriers, in either direction, passengers were free to mix again. The division was purely for administrative purposes" (51). The customs barrier, floating in outer space, is thus removed from its geographic, and thus historical and cultural, contingencies. While the airport on Earth is located amidst the bustling heterogeneity of city life, the space station is surrounded by the emptiness of outer space. No longer relevant to the terrestrial, it represents a form without content, symbols with referents that are many kilometers away.

<17> It is through this reading of the film 2001 and its visualization of the contrary between the banal and the fantastic that it possible to return to the mediocrity of Clarke's fiction. For despite being dull, outer space is also a utopian vision for Clarke, as the conflicts that usually motivate human drama make no sense. There are no great battles, no unfriendly aliens, and ultimately no negative consequences of the human journey into outer space. Even death appears insignificant when compared to the experience of the greater universe. The mediocrity that Clarke finds beyond the Earth is a relief from drama of human affairs that appear of little consequence as they take place amidst the vastness. It is possible, then, to see in Clarke the mediocrity that the sf genre has been criticized for. Yet the banality of human affairs in Clarke's novels also make them appear as if in a new light, silhouetted as it were against the cosmos. For in focusing on the vastness of outer space and the potential of technology to master it, Clarke, perhaps in spite of himself, enacts a critique of the mediocrity of human affairs, and offers a feasible if simple alternative to them. By casting human beings in such limited ways, Clarke's novels only further his public arguments for manned space flight, that realize the potential of human mediocrity. While sf theorists have generally celebrated the capacity of the genre to explore the new (Bould; Suvin), Clarke in fact finds reason to celebrate the established and mediocre. It is in fact the commonplace rather than the innovative that gives the human race the potential to leave the Earth. Transcendence lies not in the potential to invent and innovate, but in the brute fact of a working technology, that shapes human beings after its own mediocre workings.

Works Cited

2001: A Space Odyssey. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Screenplay by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick. Metro-Golden-Mayer, 1968.

Abrash, Merritt. "Utopia Subverted: Unstated Messages in Childhood's End." Extrapolation 30.4, 1989: 372-379.

Auge, Marc. Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Trans. John Howe. London: Verso, 1995.

Bould, Mark. "Introduction: Rough Guide to a Lonely Planet, from Nemo to Neo" Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction. Ed. Mark Bould and China Mieville. London: Pluto, 2009. 1-26.

Bukatman, Scott. "The Artificial Infinite: On Special Effects and the Sublime." Alien Zone II: The Spaces of Science Fiction Cinema. Ed. Annette Kuhn. London: Verso, 1999. 249-275.

Clarke, Arthur C. A Fall of Moondust. London: Pan, 1961.

Clarke, Arthur C. "First Encounter." The Lost Worlds of 2001. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1972. 53-58.

Clarke, Arthur C. Songs of Distant Earth. Grafton, London, 1986.

Clarke, Arthur C. 2001: A Space Odyssey. 1968. Orbit, 1998.

Clarke, Arthur C. 2010: Odyssey Two. London: Granada, 1982.

Costello, Peter. Jules Verne: Inventor of Science Fiction. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1978.

Crispin Miller, Mark. "A Cold Descent." Sight and Sound 4.1 (January 1994): 18-25.

Freedman, Carl. Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 2000.

Fry, Carrol L. "From Technology to Transcendence: Humanity's Evolutionary Journey in 2001: A Space Odyssey." Extrapolation 44.3 (Fall 2003): 331-343.

Gelmis, Joseph. "'Space Odyssey' Fails Most Gloriously" 1968. Review of Stanley Kubrick's 2001. The Making of Kubrick's 2001. Ed. Jerome Agel. New York: Signet, 1979. 263-265.

Gilliatt, Penelope. "After Man." 1968. Review of Stanley Kubrick's 2001. The Making of Kubrick's 2001. Ed. Jerome Agel. New York: Signet, 1979. 209-213.

Hoberek, Andrew P. "The 'Work' of Science Fiction: Philip K. Dick and Occupational Masculinity in the Post-World War II United States." Modern Fiction Studies 43 (2): 374-404.

Kauffmann, Stanley. "Lost in the Stars." 1968. Review of Stanley Kubrick's 2001. Ed. Jerome Agel, Jerome. The Making of Kubrick's 2001. New York: Signet, 1979. 223-226.

Michelson, Annette. "Bodies in Space." Artforum 7.6 (1969): 54-63.

Mills, C. Wright. White Collar: The American Middle Classes. 1951. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956.

Packard, Vance. The Hidden Persuaders. 1957. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960.

Plank, Robert. "Sons and Father in A.D. 2001." Arthur C. Clarke. Ed. Joseph D. Olander and Martin Harry Greenberg. Edinburgh: Paul Harris, 1977. 121-148.

Priest, Christopher. "Metaphorical Egyptian Tomb." Review of Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama. Foundation 5 (January 1974): 91-94.

Riesman, David. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. 1950. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Critique of Dialectical Reason. 1960. Trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith. Ed. Jonathon Ree. London: New Left Books, 1976.

Spufford, Francis. I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination. London: Faber and Faber, 1996.

Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: on the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New York: Yale University Press, 1979.

Tapio, Joha K. "On Science Fiction, Alienation, Infinity and Science Fiction: So What's All the Fuss About?" Foundation 44 (Winter 1988-89): 55-60.

Thron, E. Michael. "The Outsider from Inside: Clarke's Aliens." Arthur C. Clarke. Ed. Joseph D. Olander and Martin Harry Greenberg. Edinburgh: Paul Harris, 1977. 72-86.

Thurber, Bart. "Toward a Technological Sublime." The Intersection of Science Fiction and Philosophy. Ed. Robert E. Myers. Westport: Greenwood, 1983. 211-224.

Wells, H.G. War of the Worlds. 1898. Wisconsin: Golden, 1964.

Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society, 1780-1950. London: Chatto and Windus, 1958.

Return to Top�