Arthur C. Clarke is the wit who coined the expression, “For every expert there exists an equal and opposite expert.” He may have thought he was arranging a meeting of the two when he introduced Carl Sagan to Stanley Kubrick. They were both experts, and if their respective areas of expertise, science and filmmaking, are not exactly opposites, they will do for the purposes of this narrative. He hoped the two would hit it off. Instead, they couldn’t stand one another. Well—Sagan liked Kubrick well enough to all but assume takeover rights on his upcoming film, but the feeling wasn’t mutual. “Get rid of him. Make any excuse. I don’t want to see him again,” the director afterwards told Clarke.
Clarke may well have thought of himself and Kubrick as equal and opposite experts. He, Robert A. Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov were the Big 3 of science fiction just then. Kubrick’s star was quick rising in the film world. His ‘Paths of Glory’ (1957) was acclaimed an anti-war masterpiece. Big budget Spartacus (1960) won four Oscars. Lolita (1962–you don’t want to know what that one’s about) proved his literary chops. And Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worryng and Love the Bomb (1964)—who can forget General Buck Turgidson shielding war plans with his hands as the Russian ambassador enters the room, as though hiding Scrabble tiles from a cheating opponent? Or when he later scuffles with that ambassador and is rebuked by President Merkin Muffley; “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!” Or when cowboy pilot Major T J “King” Kong mounts the jammed nuke in his B52’s bomb bay to free it, then rides it down to earth, whooping and waving his hat as he triggers the end of the world?
So when Kubrick sought out Clarke for an upcoming science fiction movie, the latter might have thought the collaboration only natural. Didn’t the writer have some short story (The Sentinel) in which aliens monitor another civilization to alert them once they’ve grown smart? The two hit it off immediately. Nor did it dampen their relationship (as Clarke feared it might) when he fessed up to the director that he was a “well-adjusted homosexual.” “Yeah, I know,” Kubrick said and moved on. He probably had already looked into just why the British writer lived in Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon, and not his native England. He probably had not yet looked into it when Clarke first came to his attention, judging by his initial remark that the writer was “a nut who lives in a tree in India or someplace.” England was not then as gay friendly as it would later become.
There has never been a good science fiction movie, Kubrick observed to Clarke as he proposed brainstorming for one; they’d all been garbage up to then. Clarke wasn’t so sure of that. There had been two or three good ones, he thought, but there is a time to keep your mouth shut. It certainly was true that science fiction at the time was considered just one small step up from pornography, and film adaptations were mostly monsters on the beach eating teenagers. It would take Steven Spielberg 30 years to improve on that scenario with his Jurassic Park dinosaur eating a lawyer.
Sagan left his mark on the film, even if Kubrick did show him the door. He had advised that any aliens be not shown but only implied. Preserve the awe. If you show them and they are in any way contrived, it will be a letdown. If you show them and they are done perfectly, it will still be a letdown, since where do you go from there? Thus, the movie showed the deeds of the aliens, their devices, their abilities, but as to their appearance itself, they stayed as invisible as Yahweh: “No man has seen God at any time,” says the scripture. Nor would any see the aliens.
There really wouldn’t be much difference between aliens and God, Clarke had earlier mused. J. D. Vance said much the same much later in a Joe Rogan interview, in which he promised to use his Vice Presidential office to someday look into accumulating UFO reports. His VP status means nothing is off-limits to him, he told Joe. It is only time constraints that make it so (welcome to the human condition) plus the fact that in government there are foot draggers a’plenty who impede directives of any sort. But he would get around to it. A dull stretch of time would surely arise to permit undistracted investigation, he said—though his interest was beginning to wane, since he knew many far more interested in the question than he, and if they had come up with nothing, he was veering toward the view that maybe there was nothing to be had. If so, he would be joining the ranks of Elon Musk who said that if anyone would know, it would be him and he’d seen nothing.
The idea behind Clarke’s likening God to aliens is that any alien with the wherewithal to roam the galaxies and pay earth a visit would likely be indistinguishable from God. It wouldn’t just be the Gibeonites pretending that they were from far away. These beings would in reality be from unimaginably for away—and just try to fathom the technology that must be second nature to them in order to do that.
Space Odyssey pretty much ran with this idea, first presented in The Sentinel. Its aliens are an atheist’s God-dream come true—they only bestows gifts and expects nothing in return. That God they can get behind—one whose modus operandi is the Dylan line, “Oh, whatever makes you happy, I won’t stand in your way.” If they entertain the Bible God at all, they are miffed He isn’t that way. They are miffed that he wants stuff and doesn’t just give stuff. It wouldn’t be so bad for them if he was like Santa Claus.
So obliging is this Space Odyssey alien/god that the ending space-child, to the accompaniment of Also Sprach Zarethrusta, snuffs out in mid-flight (in the book, not the movie) the nukes that human governments have launched toward each other, taking for granted that they have learned their lesson and will not immediately build more. Many have been the science fiction scenarios that hold earthings a bunch of warlike losers who have not learned to get along and until they do any sane alien race is best advised to shun them. This particular alien race controls them by ruining their nukes, trusting (they don’t know much about humans, do they?) that they won’t afterwards complain about it.
****** The bookstore
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