The most unsettling thing at the end of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is not that David Bowman has become something other than human. It is that he has acquired dominion before deciding what to do with it. The novel enlarges intelligence without settling the purposes intelligence should serve.

Spoilers for the novel follow.

The first safe night#

Moon-Watcher begins as a hungry creature who thinks he might reach the Moon by finding a sufficiently tall tree. Curiosity precedes an adequate account of distance.

The monolith’s education changes what his group can do. Meat means relief from hunger. Bringing an antelope into the refuge also brings a blood trail for the leopard to follow. Collective violence kills the predator, and its immediate reward is an uninterrupted night’s sleep. Evolution means, briefly, being able to close your eyes.

Then Moon-Watcher carries the leopard’s severed head across the stream. The trophy becomes a weapon against another group. What delivered safety now delivers conquest, without any change of protagonist. The relief was real; it does not acquit what follows. The ending gives a new master the same unfinished question, now on a planetary scale.

Ordinary bodies, extraordinary distances#

Clarke’s practical detail is not ballast attached to the sublime. It is how he earns it. Floyd’s supposedly ordinary lunar journey requires restraints for sleeping, surfaces that hold the feet and arrangements that let people eat.

Diana, born on the Moon, supplies a sharper judgment than the rhetoric of pioneering around her: Earth is a place where falling hurts. Elsewhere, the stewardess Simmons asks Floyd about the boyfriend from whom she has heard nothing. Official secrecy becomes an interruption in someone’s intimate life, not merely a contest between government and press.

The astronauts are thinly differentiated: often competence replaces contradiction. Concrete observations nevertheless keep them from becoming interchangeable. Poole pockets four nuts while working outside the ship. Bowman listens to the sleepers’ slow heartbeats although the alarms already provide the necessary monitoring.

Distance also separates people in time. Poole watches his family gathered around a birthday cake after the gathering has already dispersed on Earth. The transmission succeeds; the shared occasion cannot be recovered.

Two regressions#

The ship’s computer belongs to that domestic world before he destroys it. His programmed losses at games and the men’s pretence not to notice make companionship a small collaboration.

The secrecy imposed on him makes the catastrophe more troubling than a straightforward rebellion. He must conceal the mission’s purpose from his waking colleagues. The novel attributes his breakdown to that conflict; a similar failure in a computer on Earth later supports the diagnosis. But explanation does not erase the dead. Bowman’s later hope that the computer never intended to kill Poole remains explicitly unproved.

The disconnection is the book’s most concentrated scene of intimacy under necessity. Bowman removes the higher functions while leaving the ship’s vital regulation intact. The computer passes through pleas and failing calculations toward his earliest lesson. Bowman must continue dismantling someone whom the narrative allows him to recognize as a conscious creature. The scene neither makes self-defence painless nor permits pity to make it impossible.

That regression anticipates Bowman’s own return through memory toward infancy. One mind loses its adult capacities as another is prepared to exceed them. The echo troubles the final transformation: minds can be worked upon by powers they cannot resist.

A room assembled from television#

The alien apartment is Clarke’s finest combination of absurdity, reassurance and dread. After stellar immensities, Bowman encounters a telephone directory with blank pages, books he cannot remove and food packages containing the same blue substance. Beer and cereal differ only in their packaging.

Yet this is not simply a failed imitation. The bathroom works. The food nourishes. Bowman still checks the air and samples the food: reassurance does not replace inquiry. When a television drama reveals the room from which his surroundings were copied, he has an explanation for their selective fidelity.

The episode refuses a lazy opposition between genuine nature and false simulation. A room derived from fiction can provide actual shelter. Its limits matter nonetheless: meeting bodily needs does not tell Bowman what is being done to his mind.

A child with the world before him#

Here the novel’s assurance becomes my difficulty with it. The narrator tells us that Bowman’s memories are preserved as the human being gives way to an immortal successor. That assurance belongs to the narration; it is not a decision the human Bowman gets to make. Earlier, the makers’ cultivation of intelligence includes weeding. The gardening metaphor supplies no view from those weeded out.

Clarke’s explanatory voice sometimes closes questions that his scenes have made more interesting. Nevertheless, the transformed child’s sudden fear of eternity restores vulnerability. He needs guidance, and his recovery is not entirely his own achievement. Greater intelligence has not abolished dependence.

Back at Earth, he detonates an orbiting nuclear payload. The silent explosion produces a false dawn, not a declared political future. Earth has become a tempting toy; its new master has yet to determine his next act. We have watched hunger relieved, a predator killed, companions murdered and a frightened traveller sheltered. None of those events makes overwhelming power its own justification. Clarke sends us beyond humanity, then leaves us with the old problem of what the powerful will choose.

Text consulted: Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: Odissea nello spazio (Italian translation).