The Pnictogen Wing

just how fucked would the solar system be if Jupiter were somehow ignited? And gawd only knows what sort of wacky transmogrification of matter you'd need to bring about in order to turn Jupiter into a star. the mass just isn't there for an ordinary sort of star. ~Chara

it's ever so slightly goofy, still. I struggle to think of how it could even happen at all and fail completely. ~Chara

just how fucked would the solar system be if Jupiter were somehow ignited? And gawd only knows what sort of wacky transmogrification of matter you'd need to bring about in order to turn Jupiter into a star. the mass just isn't there for an ordinary sort of star. ~Chara

It turns out that 2010 is on YouTube so I am revisiting it. I happen to have seen it well before watching 2001, thanks to TV broadcasts. It's not a great movie, but it was how I learned about HAL 9000 for the first time. (Then I read Clarke's book, then I read The Lost Worlds of 2001, and only after all that did I eventually watch the Kubrick movie.) ~Chara

I think pi may have a good point with 2010: 2001 may be regarded as the enigmatic masterpiece but 2010 is good and straightforward and—most importantly—there's some actual emotional depth. Neither Kubrick nor Clarke were the best with that stuff.

~Chara

a slight discontinuity between 2001 and 2010, although it's purely through subtext: Kubrick depicts Heywood Floyd as a smarmy bureaucrat and while the movie doesn't explicitly finger him as the one who decided to use HAL 9000 for some tedious spy games that backfired, the implication is clear enough: it's Floyd himself who appears in the recorded message to talk about the "security reasons" behind using HAL to conceal the real purpose of Discovery's mission. Clarke softens Floyd considerably in 2010 and Roy Scheider completes the job of transforming the sinister space manager into an honest scientific administrator. ~Chara

it's a funny visual joke: the TIME Magazine cover in 2010, featuring Arthur Clarke's face as the American President, Stanley Kubrick's face as the Russian premier ~Chara

Noël Coward said that about Keir Dullea upon meeting him in the mid-1960s; at least, that's the story I know. It's a cruel line but unfortunately apt for Dullea; I can't recall seeing him in anything else other than 2001 and 2010, though I do know that he did a lot of TV and had some role in a TV adaptation of Huxley's Brave New World.

His very next role, after 2001, was playing the Marquis de Sade. Welp. ~Chara

It turns out that 2010 is on YouTube so I am revisiting it. I happen to have seen it well before watching 2001, thanks to TV broadcasts. It's not a great movie, but it was how I learned about HAL 9000 for the first time. (Then I read Clarke's book, then I read The Lost Worlds of 2001, and only after all that did I eventually watch the Kubrick movie.) ~Chara

I think pi may have a good point with 2010: 2001 may be regarded as the enigmatic masterpiece but 2010 is good and straightforward and—most importantly—there's some actual emotional depth. Neither Kubrick nor Clarke were the best with that stuff.

~Chara

a slight discontinuity between 2001 and 2010, although it's purely through subtext: Kubrick depicts Heywood Floyd as a smarmy bureaucrat and while the movie doesn't explicitly finger him as the one who decided to use HAL 9000 for some tedious spy games that backfired, the implication is clear enough: it's Floyd himself who appears in the recorded message to talk about the "security reasons" behind using HAL to conceal the real purpose of Discovery's mission. Clarke softens Floyd considerably in 2010 and Roy Scheider completes the job of transforming the sinister space manager into an honest scientific administrator. ~Chara

it's a funny visual joke: the TIME Magazine cover in 2010, featuring Arthur Clarke's face as the American President, Stanley Kubrick's face as the Russian premier ~Chara