Alternative Film Guide

Ed Park’s "Arthur C. Clarke’s down-to-earth legacy" in the Los Angeles Times:

". . . [Arthur C. Clarke] left explicit instructions that no religious ceremony accompany his death. (For good measure: In what was possibly his last interview, in BBC Focus magazine last December, he said the greatest danger humanity faced was ‘Organised religion polluting our minds as it pretends to deliver morality and spiritual salvation.’) Yet he was one of the genre’s presiding deities, a member of the Golden Age’s ‘Big Three,’ who still cast their shadows across the field. (That trio’s other two members, Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, predeceased Clarke.) . . ."

"For all Clarke’s hard-SF bona fides — background in physics and mathematics, chair of the British Interplanetary Society, inspiration to scores of astronauts, thinker-upper of geosynchronous orbit, etc. — a ghost in the machine lingers, a persistent aura of mysticism. Most famously, 2001: A Space Odyssey, which featured the menacing, omniscient spacecraft computer HAL. In The Nine Billion Names of God, the supercomputer imported from New York to Tibet hastens the quest for knowledge and expedites the end of everything."

***

In real life, however, what seems to be expediting the end of everything is our quest for ignorance.

Now, I tried looking for the text of the BBC Focus interview online, but it seems to be unavailable. But I found this video made on the occasion of Clarke’s 90th birthday in December 2007.

Technorati Tags: Arthur C. Clarke, Ed Park, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Nine Billion Names of God

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