The Sentinel
From the Introduction... Today's readers are indeed fortunate; this really is the Golden Age of science fiction. There are dozens of authors at work today who can match all but the giants of the past. (And probably one who can do even that, despite the handicap of being translated from Polish... ) Yet I do not really envy the young men and women who first encounter science fiction as the days shorten towards 1984, for we old-timers were able to accomplish something that was unique. Ours was the last generation that was able to read everything. No one will ever do that again. Of course, it may well be argued that no one should want to do so, in deference to Theodore Sturgeon's much-quoted Law: "Ninety percent of everything is crud." It is—to say the least—a sobering thought that this might apply even to my writing. I can only hope that everything that follows comes from the other ten percent.
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What Hacker News says
- Also read Clarke's short story "The Sentinel", upon which 2001 is based.
- > My father was a radar officer in WWII, and recalled warming his hands on cold British mornings in front of the beam emitted by a "magnetron" inside his primitive radar transmitter. Then he went back to work detecting Nazi aircraft. But, it is a short distance from warming to cooking- in 1946 engineers at the military contractor Raytheon noticed microwaves could not only warm, they could heat and cook food.
In the 1990s I was a contractor at DRA Malvern in the UK, which was one of the successor organisations to the WW2 radar research establishments. The greybeards I encountered always felt that they had invented microwave cooking even if Raytheon got the credit later. Sausages cooked using the lab magnetrons, they said, although unfortunately there were no photographs.
The future of cooking was something that famous futurist Arthur C Clarke got wrong. He might have predicted geostationary communications satellites but in his short story The Sentinel - which was the inspiration for the film/book 2001 - the crew of a small lunar rover fry their sausages in a conventional frying pan.
- Well, Kubrick and Clarke developed 2001 together, based pretty loosely on the Clarke short story The Sentinel, so I don't think it is applicable.
- > based pretty loosely on the Clarke short story The Sentinel
The Sentinel provided the idea for the monolith on the moon being an alien 'intelligent life detector' (i.e. to detect when humans had achieved spaceflight). But it has no man-apes, no Jupiter mission, no HAL, no star-gate sequence. The bulk of the plot came from the Clarke-Kubrick collaboration, which had numerous other inputs [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey#Writing
- Hence 'loosely'. From your link:
> Clarke offered Kubrick six of his short stories, and by May 1964, Kubrick had chosen "The Sentinel" as the source material for the film
- The book and movie were done at the same time. Clarke wrote multiple versions of it - see "The Lost Worlds of 2001".
The concept is from a short story "The Sentinel" by Clarke.
