2010: The Year We Make Contact

I was re-watching the 1984 film 2010: The Year We Make Contact last night. Might as well while the irony is fresh, I thought. It's a fairly pedestrian film, which wouldn't be a criticism of a summer blockbuster if it weren't a sequel to one of the greatest films of all time with a script written with the help of Sir Arthur C Clarke himself.

Picking up where 2001: a Space Odyssey left off, 2010 opens with Dr Heywood Floyd learning that the abandoned spaceship Discovery with all its data about its ill-fated expedition is in a decaying orbit and will crash into Jupiter before the next American expedition can reach it. However, a Soviet ship will get there a year earlier and so Floyd, the designer of Discovery, and the man who built the homicidal Hal 9000 hitch a ride on the Soviet Leonov.

Not surprisingly, 2010 doesn't hold a candle to its predecessor, though you can't fault the director, who undertook the herculean task of re-building all the sets and props that Kubrick insisted be destroyed back in 1968 to prevent them being reused in other sci-fi films. Unfortunately, attention to that sort of detail doesn't necessarily make for a good film–especially when all the other costumes, props, and models look like they came from a completely different universe. Imagine if the makers of Star Trek kept confusing it with Star Wars and you get the idea. It also doesn't help that without Stanley Kubrick's cynicism and vision, Sir Arthur fell back on his own admirable, but overly tidy imagination that resulted in the transcendent mysticism of the first film falling sequel by sequel in this film and the novels into more and more pedestrian (and manageable) explanations about what was behind all the mysteries.

What many people might find interesting in the real 2010 AD is how far off the mark the film version is. I don't believe for one minute that Sir Arthur seriously thought the Russians would be building spaceships the size of frigates by now, but I'm sure he hoped so. What he probably didn't believe was that the Americans would start a new manned spacecraft programme and then abandon it (both being right decisions made for disastrously wrong reasons), that said spacecraft would be merely an supersized Apollo capsule while all the other versions public and private around the world would be merely updated versions of the Soyuz. Nor that the world's only space station would be built merely as an exercise in building a space station. Mind you, I'm not sure what to make of Pan Am going out of business or the notion that the Hal 9000 uses a Kaypro keyboard or that modern monitors would be the size of 30-inch CRT televisions circa 1995.

Unlike most other sci-fi writers of the Golden Age, Sir Arthur's politics aren't very easy to deduce. Or rather, they aren't until you realise that he didn't actually have any politics as such. If Sir Arthur did have any, it was that politics of any stripe is merely a temporary state of affairs until Science got a proper grip on the world and all that petty squabble would just melt away. Despite having folded like wet cardboard in 1991, the Soviet Union in 2010 is still going strong and the Cold War hasn't shifted an inch since 1984. In fact, the USA and USSR are still happily playing brinksmanship over Central America and teetering on the edge of nuclear war, so the last 26 years must have been awful "samey". That doesn't matter to the Americans and Soviets aboard the Leonov, though. That's because they're all Scientists with a capital letter. In fact, everyone in the cast is a Scientist. I even suspect that Dr Floyd's five-year old son is a Scientist, but hasn't finished his thesis yet. True, there is tension in orbit around Jupiter, but only because the Earthmen are obliged to follow the orders of their unenlightened countrymen. Left to themselves, the Soviets and Americans get along fine because Science is ever and always the objective and selfless pursuit of the truth in which politics has no place. It isn't that our heroes disagree with their governments, they can't even see the point of posing the question.

There's something charming about Sir Arthur's attitude–or would be if it didn't require him to indulge in moral equivalence to work. Even back in the 1950s in novels such as Childhood's End and Earthlight he couldn't imagine an enemy who might actually be ruthless and totalitarian or that the Cold War might have something to do with the Communists being really, really nasty. In 2010 I can't help but think that the commissar at Baikanour has fallen down on the job and is slated for a one-ounce retirement package in the back of the head. Surely the crew of a major Soviet spacecraft would have been chosen first and foremost for political reliability (fanaticism) before technical competence.

More to the point, Sir Arthur always struck me as being a bit naive when it came to science being apolitical and altruistic. You would have thought that Lysenkoism and Eugenics would have put paid to that. These days, what with the radical environmentalism of Rachel Carson et al and the tens of millions of deaths they've caused exposed to the world, the sexually self-serving fraud of Margaret Mead, and the on-going scandal of Climategate it's obvious that scientists are just as vulnerable to the corrupting temptations of money, power, status, and ideology as any politician.

That was true in 1984. It was true in 2001. And it is true in 2010.