Chaired by Professor Zhong Longxi
at Hong Kong 2001 Conference
"Technology, Identity, Futurity, East and West, In the Emerging Global Village" (at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, January 4-6, 2001)
2001 or Cyberspace Odyssey: Towards the Ideographic Imagination
The year 2000 saw amazing upheaval in the field of Japanese Archeology. On February 21 last year, prehistorical houses thought to be 500,000 years old and built by primitive humans were found in Saitama Prefecture-Kanto District. The discovery, which strongly suggests Homo erectus constructed buildings, is likely to overturn the established theory that they were constantly on the move hunting for food without staying in one place. The group of archeologists led by Professor Fujimura Shin'Ichi found 10 pits in the ground lined up to form two pentagons. They believe the pits are the remains of houses. Seven stone tools, which were typical of those used in the Lower Paleolithic about 500,000 years ago, were excavated from inside the houses. Including these, 30 stone tools, such as scrapers, have been unearthed from the entire site. The Saitama Prefectural Government has named the ruins "Ogasaka site." Homo erectus who are believed to have appeared about 1.6 million years ago, likely reached Japan 600,000 years ago at the latest, as 600,000-year-old Lower Paleolithic stone tools were discovered last year at the Kamitakamori site in Tohoku District.
However, this big news in February is to be followed by a big disclosure in November. On Nov 5, the said Fujimura Shin'ichi, 50, highly esteemed self-educated archeologist with "God's Hands", officially admitted that he had buried with his own hands 61 out of the 65 Paleolithic stone implements discovered in the said Kamitakamori ruins. Pity on Japanese archeology!
But, what stimulated me most at that point is that this big disclosure of fake discovery was immediately reappropriated and intelligently reconstructed by the most playful internet conversations among Japanese SF fans. I could not help but follow their lengthy and fascinating discussions, for their thread goes like this: "Monolith on the moon turned out to be a fake: Dr. Heywood Floyd officially confessed that he had buried with his own hands the monolith beneath the surface of the moon." Although the chatters are all anonymous, I consider the writer of this headline a kind of genius who aroused our science fictional imagination to a great extent, by beautifully remixing our historical memory with science fictional "fake" memory. Yes, once we have fashioned ourselves through the cinematographic voyage of 2001, we cannot do without thinking that our outerspace voyage is always accompanied by Johan Straus's waltz. Likewise, it is very natural for us to plan going sightseeing on the moon just in order to rediscover "monolith." The film of 2001 was so stimulating and realistic that it has long been impossible for us to tell the real Apollo project of NASA from the imaginary voyage of Clarke and Kubrick. Only recently have American journalists begun comparing the vision of the film with what's going on right now in NASA, concluding that much didn’t come true. It is safe to say the enduring appeal of the film 2001 clarifies how science fiction is immersed within our contemporary culture. The development of high-technology has been forming and formed by the science fictional imagination.
And yet, one serious question still remains unresolved. Why on earth is this 60s movie still stimulating and refreshing? I strongly believe this mystery could be disentangled by redefining the status of the monolith in our own global cultural history. Let me begin by refreshing our own memory of the relationship between the film and fictional versions of 2001: A Space Odyssey, focusing on what I take to be the "representational wars" still raging within the film.
The movie version of 2001 is of course now generally regarded as not only a landmark SF film but a cinematic masterpiece generally. It was a collaborative effort by the British SF novelist Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote the original script in 1965, and the American film director Stanley Kubrick, who spent three years revising Clarke's script and completed the film in 1968. Reports about the making of the film indicate that the novelist and the director had a serious conflict about how to best visualize what they wanted to represent. Most of the details regarding these creative differences at that time seem relatively trivial today. Of much greater interest is what the audio-visual textuality of 2001 represents to us today, after a lapse of almost twenty-five years. And, indeed, this movie is full of images demanding not only close examination but close re-examination in light of various crucial "paradigm shifts" in our ways of thinking and seeing visually--for instance, the Man-Ape beginning to use a weapon in the pre-historical age, the Artificial Intelligence controlling the spaceship Discovery in the twenty-first century, the mysterious Monolith (the extra-terrestrial rectangular medium of human evolution), and the Star-Child as a type of super-human. My present interest, however, lies less in what those figures originally represented in the 1960s than in what those figures represent for us today literally in the year 2001, in light of the transfigurations occurring in the interface between technology and ideology in the post-1980s milieu.
2001 has four sections in the film (1:"Dawn of Man," 2: "[No Title]," 3: "Jupiter Mission: Eight Months Later" [3&4 in the novel], 4: "Jupiter and Beyond the infinite" [5&6 in the novel]), while comprising six sections in the novel (1: "Primeval Night," 2: "TMA-1 [Tycho-Magnetic-Anomaly-One]," 3: "Between Planets," 4: "Abyss," 5: "The Moons of Saturn," 6: "Through the Star Gate"). Despite the ideological differences between Clarke and Kubrick, both the movie and the novel versions of 2001 share the central topic of super-evolution of Man intermediated by an Artificial Intelligence, as well as by an extra-terrestrial being. According to Kubrick's scheme, the first section called "The Dawn of Man" in which a Man-Ape tentatively called "The Moon Watcher" is inspired by the first Monolith to use a bone as a weapon and thereby extinguish an antagonistic tribe, outlines the whole story. The significance of the introduction becomes clearer if we recognize what follows: in the untitled second section (Clarke calls it "TMA-1" in the novel), Dr. Heywood Floyd comes across the second Monolith discovered beneath the surface of the moon; in "Jupiter Mission: Eight Months Later," Captain David Bowman of the spaceship Discovery comes to be deceived by the hyper-computer HAL 9000 gone mad, and in the concluding section, by way of the Star Gate of the third and huge and non-Euclidean Monolith, Bowman is reborn as the Star Child. As the Man-Ape given the knowledge of weapons symptomizes the interrelation between technology and evolution, so the astronaut of the coming age is destined to be metamorphosed into a higher being, with the help of "technology," whether man-made or extra-terrestrial-made.
In contrast to Clarke's novelistic explanation of techno-evolution, Kubrick's film largely elides the science and fills the logical gap with symbolic dramaturgy. Kubrick carefully and beautifully chained the cinematic images of "tools," ranging from the smashed bones, an orbiting satellite, a floating ball-point pen, to the spaceship Discovery with HAL 9000, the ultimate tool to be abandoned by the captain. The name of Bowman's spaceship "Discovery" ironically suggests that, as Norman Kagan pointed out, 2001 can be interpreted primarily as a story of the passage from the discovery of technology to the discovery of a new form of being within oneself (Kagan, p.161). In order to convince the audience of the techno-evolution of Man, Kubrick, unlike Clarke, preferred the "performative" effect of cinematic symbolism to the constative one of the science fictional idiom. In other words, Kubrick employed expressions whose function is "not to inform or to describe, but to carry out a 'performance'" (Shoshana Felman, p.15).
And yet, let me here question the status of "performative language" itself. Shoshana Felman once compared speech act theory to atomic physics: "If the matter of History is made up, among others, of speech acts it is because for Austin, as for Einstein, matter itself has ceased, above all, to be a "thing": matter itself is an event" (Felman, p. 148). Trying to explain the science of language, making use of the Einsteinian notion of "relativism" first established in 1915, Felman seems unwittingly to perform a persistent obsession with the cultural ideology of radical relativism dominant in the 1960s. The theory of relativity was set up as a constative (scientific) system in the 1910s, while the ideology of radical relativism was conceived as a performative (rhetorical) strategy in the 1960s. The passage from the 1910s to the 1960s signifies the way the system of relativism in the field of physics gets transfigured into the absolute belief in relativism in the form of the metaphysics of counter-culture. Of course, I do not say the development of relativism from the 1910s to the 1960s is completely linear. Einstein reconfirmed relativistic perspective by questioning the Newtonian and Euclidian world-view, whereas American people were thrown into radical relativism in the wake of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, which deprived American ideology of any belief in the idea of totality, as Raymond Federman once explicated in his archaeological study of American metafiction ("Reflexive Fiction," 1988).
The intertextual possibility of 2001 resides in the fascinating encounter between Arthur C. Clarke's close re-examination of Einsteinian physical relativism and Stanley Kubrick's deeper empathy with post-JFK cultural relativism. What functions as the performative on the screen of 2001 is not simply the Kubrickian imagery, but also the post-Mcluhanesque intersection between Clarke's scientific relativity and Kubrick's rhetorical relativism. What appears to be the most marvelous free play of imagination in 2001 is not necessarily free from the network of socio-political discourses, but no more than the effect of the representational war between the ideologies of Clarke and Kubrick. In short, however free the performative tries to become, it is the act of trying to be free that endorses the very notion of performative as restricted by the ideology of radical relativism.
Because critics limit the significance of the movie to the American sixties, I have spent much time specifying the status of performative in 2001. 2001 critics like Yasuki Hamano attempt to analogize Bowman's lobotomy of HAL 9000 with the authoritarian repression of the freaks, as was typically seen in the lobotomized McMurphy of Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962). Furthermore, the ideology of post-60s culture encourages us to identify what Bowman sees inside the Star Gate as a typically wild drug-induced fantasy, and the birth of the Star Child with an exemplary stage of higher consciousness in the post-Aquarius age. Let me call this sort of critical reduction the "relativist tyranny." Note that I am not attacking counter-culture per se, as Allan Bloom did in his The Closing of the American Mind (1988), but merely discouraging the view that radical relativism is the absolute ideology applicable to anything produced in the 1960s. To put it another way, my purpose here is to acclaim, from the perspective of the post-1980s, not "relativist tyranny" but "relativist legacy." For, to me, what radical relativism aimed at back in the 1960s seems to have been realized in the most ideal forms during the last two decades. Thus, conceiving a movie like 2001 to be a typical product of the Aquarian Age can be said to ironically evade the blind spot of these very 1960s.
The monolith has remained such an unresolvable enigma that people seem reluctant to clarify its essence. Certainly, even Clarke and Kubrick characterized the monolith very differently: the former wanted to foreground monolith as a teaching machine, whereas the latter hated to limit its meaning to such a science-fictional formula. What is more, while in his original script Clarke wanted to design this TMA1 like a pyramid and the alien as humanoid, Kubrick hated the writer’s idea so radically that he redesigned it as a mysteriously rectangular signifier, preventing the alien as such from presenting somewhere in the narrative. The contrast between the novelist and the director becomes clearer if we pay attention to their respective treatments of the first Monolith that the Man-Ape "Moon Watcher" encounters in "The Dawn of Man." Clarke describes not a single Monolith but a number of its replicas as "scattered across half the globe," suggesting a post-Darwinian lesson that "A hundred failures would not matter, when a single success could change the destiny of the world"(p. 25), whereas Kubrick diminishes the Clarkean implication and strengthens the symbolic image of Monolith as something rectangular and mysterious and pedagogic. Kubrick's arrangement makes perfect sense, because, if the movie had been forced to reflect Clarke's original idea, he should have been just content with the stereotypical image of the earth inundated by a lot of Monolith replicas, as is the case with typically cheap Invader= Body-Snatcher sci-fi trash entertainment. Kubrick tried to depart from science-fictional cinematic formulae, while Clarke was eager to take every advantage of hard science-fictional novelistic conventions.
The ideological conflict between Clarke and Kubrick coincides with that between Cambellian SF and the literary experiments by J. G. Ballard in the 1960s. Longing for America but rejecting America--this is the psychological ambivalence towards the United States that shaped the speculative fiction of Ballard as a child of the time; thus, it is no wonder that the conflictual production of 2001 (another child of the 1960s) coincided with what happened to the New Wave Revolution within the field of science fiction. To put it another way, in the conflictual production of 2001, Clarke and Kubrick unwittingly assist us in reconsidering the ideological dissent between outer space and inner space, characteristic of the science fiction scene in those days. Thus, one way of interpreting 2001 is to read such a controversy into the shipwreck of the Discovery and the transcendental experience within the Star Gate; the former represents the failure of the ideology of outerspace, while the latter the frontier of the ideology of innerspace.
In the wake of the cyberspace perspective of the 1980s, however, the traditional boundary between outerspace and innerspace becomes very problematic. At this point, let us take the opportunity to question Kubrick's re-presentation of the monolith in the final section of 2001, which is opposed to Clarke's description of the monolith as literalization of scientific knowledge. In the cultural context of the late 60s, Kubrick's choice was absolutely right, because he succeeded in providing the audience with a more focused and metaphysically resonant image of the transcendence of man-machine symbiosis. The sperm-like spaceship plunges into the womb-like Star Gate and conceives the Star Child. Kubrick's re-imagining of Clarke's text is sufficiently phallogocentric that the cinematic version of the third Monolith as the Star Gate probably simulates our own subliminal experience of being born of woman. Among often rich and mutually non-exclusive possibilities, then, watching the dazzling sequences of the final section can be experienced as a psychedelic trip as well as womb phantasy. Here the symbolic aesthetics of Kubrick are incredibly superb.
We cannot forget, however, that this is also the point with which Clarke apparently radically disagreed. Why? The answer to this question is very simple and can be inferred by examining the movie, 2010: A Space Odyssey, the sequel to 2001 based on Clarke's 1982 novel and directed by Peter Hyams in 1984. Of course, we do not doubt that what has made 2001 very popular is the characterization of the super-computer HAL9000 getting out of control. And yet, in this sequel 2010 we can see the characterization of the monolith as another kind of super-computer, which is able to reconstruct the personality of David Bowman by picking up the fragments of his bio-psychological data scattered over the Star Gate. Viewers of 2010 are probably surprised at seeing the ghost of Bowman still haunting the spaceship Discovery; it's also true, however, that the monolith's cybernetic reconstruction of human personality was already implied in Clarke's text of 2001. My point is that today the monolith can be seen as representing not only an anthropomorphic metaphor of womb, as Kubrick wished it to be, but also a kind of cyberspace capable of simulating even transcendental experiences. Thus, what initially seemed to be a typical drug trip in 2001 is later revealed to be the effect of cyberspace matrix scanning, resolving, and rebuilding the accumulated data of human life.
Let's now reexamine what happens to Captain Bowman in the text of Clarke's 2001. Bowman has just entered a Hotel room and what he sees on TV is, not surprisingly, quite astonishing to him:
All the programs were about two years old. That was around the time TMA-1 had been discovered, and it was hard to believe that this was a pure coincidence. Something had been monitoring the radio waves; that ebon block had been busier than men had suspected.
He continued to wander across the spectrum, and suddenly recognized a familiar scene. Here was this very suite, now occupied by a celebrated actor who was furiously denouncing an unfaithful mistress. Bowman looked with a shock of recognition upon the living room he had just left--and when the camera followed the indignant couple toward the bedroom, he involuntarily looked toward the door to see if anyone was entering.
So that was how this reception area had been prepared for him; his hosts had based their ideas of terrestrial living upon TV programs. His feeling that he was inside a movie set was almost literally true. (Chapter 44 "Reception," p. 214)
The vision, or illusion, lasted only a moment. Then the crystalline planes and lattices, and the interlocking perspectives of moving light, flickered out of existence, as David Bowman moved into a realm of consciousness that no man had experienced before.A close reading of Clarke's careful description of Bowman's transcendental experience reveals that this is neither a phantasmagoric, drug-induced product nor one of religious transcendence; rather it is simply but the effect of the monolith-as-computer-matrix sampling, remixing, and cutting up Bowman and his bio-history. This is also the way that the film version of 2010 confronts us with a variety of Bowman's ghosts--including the old man Bowman, the Star Child Bowman, as well as the "normal" Bowman in spacesuit. Thus within the historical context of the 1980s, Bowman is reconstructed not as a tragic visionary but as a floating signifier within cyberspace, an "area" located between outerspace and innerspace. He is Bowman and not-Bowman, lost between life and death (and between the 1960s and the 1980s). In short, Bowman is a new type of zombie possessing the kind of "Thanatoid" existence described by Thomas Pynchon in Vineland--a being yet recovered from the sense of loss after the Vietnam War, one still haunting the postmodern city in the 1980s as one of the living dead represented in Adrianne Lyne's film Jacob's Ladder (1990)--another work where the remnants of the late 60s is transfigured and reconsidered from the 80s perspective. Furthermore, in the post-90s context, this way of reviewing Monolith’s function may quickly remind you of Greg Egan’s 1994 novel Permutation City, in which he refreshed the idea of cyberspace by constructing the "Autoverse" inhabited by a tribe of thanatoids called "Copy."
At first, it seemed that Time itself was running backward. Even this marvel he was prepared to accept, before he realized the subtler truth. The spring of memory were being tapped; in controlled recollection, he was reliving the past. There was the hotel suite--there the space pod--there the burning starscapes of the red sun--there the shining core of the galaxy--there the gateway through which he had reemerged into the universe. And not only vision, but all the sense impressions, and all the emotions he had felt at the time, were racing past, more and more swiftly. His life was unreeling like a tape recorder playing back at ever-increasing speed. ...
...He was retrogressing down the corridors of time, being drained of knowledge and experience as he swept back toward his childhood. But nothing was being lost; all that he had ever been, at every moment of his life, was being transferred to safer keeping. Even as one David Bowman ceased to exist, another became immortal. ...
Now, at last, the headlong regression was slackening; the wells of memory were nearly dry. Time flowed more and more sluggishly, approaching a moment of stasis--as a swinging pendulum, at the limit of its arc, seems frozen for one eternal instant, before the next cycle begins. (Chapter 45 "Recapitulation," pp. 216-217)
In the context of SF, it's interesting (and even amusing) to note that it was the rise of the 80s high-tech writers like William Gibson, Greg Bear, or Richard Calder whose fictions are so full of the fragments of microtechnology, biotechnology, and nanotechnology that makes Clarke's original representation of monolith very "readable" to us today. We should also not ignore the implications of Clarke-Hyams' representation of the multiplying monoliths as a kind of virus infecting Jupiter. "So the damn thing's gone down to Jupiter--and multiplied. There was something simultaneously comic and sinister about a plague of blackmonoliths" (2010, p.254). Looking at them, Katerina states: "Do you know what it reminds me of? A virus attacking a cell. The way a phage injects its DNA into a bacterium, and then multiplies until it takes over" (p.263). Insofar as the monolith tends to steal and rearrange human data, it plays the role of a computer virus--the fear of which is most aptly compared to the AIDS scare in the 1980s. This is why Clarke forbids us to suppose monolith to be an intelligent being. In this sense, monolith is another name for Overlord which Clarke describes as a medium of human evolution in Childhood's End (1953), one of the archetypes of 2001.
In the novel 2061: Odyssey Three (1987), the sequel to 2010, the Bowman fused with HAL 9000 explains to Dr. Floyd the nature of monolith: "It is only a tool: it has vast intelligence--but no consciousness. Despite all its powers, you, Hal, and I are its superior"(p. 263). At this point Clarke's sense of colonialist hierarchy seems to reconfirm his investigation of the possibility of techno-imperialism most appropriate in the 1980s, establishing a new kind of discrimination between Superhuman as the master and high-technology as the slave. This vision is further confirmed in 3001: the Final Odyssey (1997), in which the man-machine hybrid HalMan explains: "The Monolith is a fantastically powerful machine --look what it did to Jupiter! --but it's no more than that. It's running on automatic; it has no consciousness"(p.189)
Rather than assuming that Clarke has been gradually revising his late-60s notion of the monolith in passage from 2001, 2010, 2061 through 3001, it is perhaps more useful to see that it is our own post-80s ideology that permits us to recognize the monolith as a figuration of cyberspace, thanatoids's house, and computer virus. All these representations had been scattered over the screen of 2001 from the beginning. As Fredric Jameson noticed in his excellent essay on Kubrick, 2001 is basically a movie in which the SF content is a vehicle for a message about our own technological present ("Historicism in The Shining," Signatures of the Visible, p.86). Therefore, the more we speculate on such functions of the monolith, the more aware we become of the virtual reality effect within the SFX of more recent films like Terminator 2, Prospero's Books, Naked Lunch, and David Blair's WAX: or the Discoveries of Television among the Bees, JM, and even Matrix, all of which display representations of much higher resolutional ability than the monolith.
In conclusion, I would like to point out that this perspective unveiled above will further allow us to locate the origin of the monolith in the western cultural history of the memory palace, which was transmitted into Asia by a Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci as the effect of 16th century colonialism. Although a number of critics have had difficulty understanding why stargate provides Bowman with a suite in Rococo fashion, now the answer is very simple; this Rococo suite is a hotel room made to imitate a palace room, which undoubtedly alludes to the memory palace revived in the 1960s by a cultural historian Frances Yates in her book The Art of Memory (1966). Of course, the very concept of memory would not have been possible without the Jewish fate of diaspora, which must have inspired Clarke to envision a memory city called "Diasper" in The City and the Stars. But, let me note here that the idea of cyberspace is brought out through a long and rich tradition of the memory palace, which went through an amazing metamorphosis in a transcultural encounter with the heritage of Chinese characters. According to a postmodern sinologist Jonathan Spence, certainly Matteo Ricci provided the 16th century Chinese with the western art of memory, the seemingly alchemic and almost supernatural aspect of which enabled him to popularize Christianity in China. But, by the same token, Matteo Ricci awakened the Chinese people to the enormous potentiality of Chinese characters themselves constituting a gigantic memory palace. Spence is convinced that Ricci owes much to Host von Romberch's book published in 1533:"Romberch worked out elaborated schemes for identifying storage spaces in memory cities according to occupational categories --shops, libraries, slaughter yards, schools, etc.--and developed complex "memory alphabets" based on human, plant, and animal figures or on logically interconnected sequences of objects. At the same time, the actual choosing of memory images to be fixed in the memory places had grown more subtle and sophisticated" (p.135). Thus, by demonstrating the amazing art of memory, Ricci explains: "in truth this Memory Place System seems as if it had been invented for Chinese letters, for which it has particular effectiveness and use, in that each letter is a figure that means a thing"(cited in Spence, p.139).
Of course, this analogy between Spaceship Discovery's final mission and Matteo Ricci's mission could well sound too outrageous. Nevertheless, as Professor Wu Yang pointed out the day before yesterday, it is also true that in the novel version Clarke was keenly aware of the possible hegemony of China in the 21st century: "And now, for their own inscrutable reasons, the Chinese were offering to the smallest have-not nations a complete nuclear capability of fifty warheads and delivery systems" (p.44). What is more, we should not forget that once the monolith was discovered, it was immediately believed to be a remnant of "the 3rd Chinese Expedition, back in 1998" (p.71).
In the post-80s milieu it is very usual to visualize a Gibsonian cyberspace in which a variety of Chinese characters are dancing. We can find the perfect example in a jack-in scene of the movie JM, based upon William Gibson’s short story "Johnny Mnemonic." But, in retrospect, it is not that cyberspace is usually decorated with exotic Oriental images and glittering neon towers, but that cyberspace, from the beginning, was made possible through the transcultural clash between western mnemonics and Chinese ideograms, that is, between the iconographic imagination and the ideographic imagination. In the 16th century a Christian colonialist Matteo Ricci unwittingly performed a transcultural amalgamation, putting a great emphasis upon the image of the Virgin Mary holding the Christ Child as is symbolized in a Chinese ideograph pronounced hao "好." Likewise, the colonialist medium monolith came to represent a hypercultural chimera between human beings and aliens, giving birth to a star child out of its pre-cyberspacial womb. While the 1960s culture is skillfully reconstrudcted by the post-1980s culture, the 16th century image of memory palace is beautifully reconstructed within the post-20th century cyber-palace. It is in this image of monstrous birth through radical metamorphosis that we can give an insight into our own futurity in the emerging Global Village.
(Composed on January 1, 2001; delivered on January 6, 2001)
Works Cited
Beatie, Bruce A. "Arthur C. Clarke and the Alien Encounter: The Background of Childhood's End," Extrapolation, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Spring 1989), pp. 53-69.
Clarke, Arthur C. 2001: A Space Odyssey. New York: Signet, 1968.
---. 2010: Odyssey Two. London: Grafton, 1982.
---. 2061: Odyssey Three. New York: Del Rey, 1987.
---. 3001:The Final Odyssey. New York: Ballantine, 1997.
Felman, Shoshana. The Literary Speech Act. 1980. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983.
Hamano, Yasuki. Kubrick Mystery. Tokyo: Fukutake, 1990.
Jameson, Fredric. Signatures of the Visible. New York: Routledge, 1990.
--------------. "SF Novel / SF Film," Science-Fiction Studies #22, Vol. 7, Part 3 (November 1980), pp. 319-322.
Kagan, Norman. The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick. 1972; New York: Continuum, 1989.
Nelson, Thomas Allen. Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist's Maze. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982.
Shelton, Robert. "Rendezvous with HAL: 2001 / 2010," Extrapolation, Vol.28, No. 3 (Fall 1987), pp. 255-268.
Soriano. Cesar G. "2001 then and now."USA Today (December 29, 2000): 1A+
Spence, Jonathan. The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci. 1983. New York: Penguin, 1984.
Note
The earliest version of the paper was delivered at a special symposium "Happy Birthday, HAL 9000" held at ARK Hills in Tokyo on January 12, 1992, the very day this super-computer was born in the movie version of 2001. Later I discussed my point with my friends Lary McCaffery and Kathryn Kramer, and incorporated the argument into my talk in a panel on cinematic representations (held at Rikkyo University in Tokyo on June 18, 1993), with Fredric Jameson and Peter Fitting as other panelists, whose invaluable comments and advices encouraged me to complete the whole article. The organizers of "Hong Kong 2001," especially Professor K.Y. Wong and Professor Gary Westfahl, gave me a chance to further develop my interpretation of 2001. I also feel obliged to acknowledge two more debts. One is to Doug Rice, who generously printed one of the earlier drafts in the first issue of his edited "avant-pop" magazine Nobodaddies (Spring/Summer 1994). The other debt is to Hiroaki Sakashita, the editor of Heibonsha Publishers, who tactfully induced me to expand the idea of the paper and helped me publish a pocketbook Rereading 2001: a Space Odyssey (Tokyo: Heibonsha Publishers, 5/2001).
