The Sentinel - Arthur C. Clarke [117]
And that was not the only thing bugging me. I had just seen two spectacular and highly successful space movies—Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind—and Star Trek was still doing reruns all over the planet. They were well done and I greatly enjoyed them, but they all had one thing in common. They were not, in the strictest sense, science fiction, but fantasy.
Now, I like fantasy every bit as much as science-fiction—its literary standards are usually higher, too—but I recognize the distinction between the genres. Critics have been trying for decades to define both categories, without much success. Here is my working definition: Fantasy is something that couldn’t happen in the real world (though often you wish it would); Science Fiction is something that really could happen (though often you’d be sorry if it did).
Today, we are 99.99 percent certain that it will always be impossible to travel faster than light, which means that journeys to even the nearest star systems will take decades. This is no problem to the fantasy writer, who can happily cling to the 0.01 percent chance that there may be a loophole that Einstein didn’t notice—and go racing round the galaxy, saving civilization once a week in prime time.
In September 1979, during one of my brief visits to England, I decided to accept the Universe as it really is. (As Dr. Johnson once said: “You’d better . . . ”) Was it possible, I asked myself, to write a completely realistic story using an interstellar—as opposed to a “merely” interplanetary—background?
I also decided to kill two birds with one typewriter. Ever since 2001, Stanley Kubrick had been saying wistfully, “What sort of movie should we have made?”, or words to that effect. So I decided to write Mk II in the form of a movie outline.
This would have two advantages. The first, and most important, was the saving of time and energy. An outline compresses, in a few pages, all the basic elements of a complete novel—locale, characters, plot. Though the act of creation may take months, the actual typing can be done in a couple of hours; you can have all the fun and none of the drudgery. (Of course, you sacrifice emotion, atmosphere, “fine writing.” But they can be added later, and perhaps on a firmer foundation.)
The second advantage was that it would keep Stanley quiet, at least for a while. In the event, he returned the outline with an unenthusiastic “Interesting . . . ”—which was exactly what I’d expected. (If he’d said, “O.K.—when can we get started?”, I would have been in a real dilemma. I owe Stanley so much that I would have felt morally obliged to cooperate—even if it killed me. Which it probably would . . . )
Breathing a sigh of relief, I sent Mk II off to my agent, who promptly sold it to Omni Magazine. (Vol. III, No. 12). As soon as it appeared, wouldn’t you know, a leading movie producer wanted to buy it—but only if I wrote the screenplay. This is a complicated, highly skilled yet essentially noncreative job I wouldn’t touch with a bargepole, so the deal was off. (I am prepared to spend two or even three days—depending on the weather—going through other people’s screenplays of my own novels. But that would be the maximum extent of my involvement.)
So here is the final version of “The Songs of Distant Earth”—which, incidentally, contains elements from another story, “The Shining Ones” (published in the collection The Wind From the Sun). I still think it would make a damn good movie, even though it doesn’t contain a single space-warp or black hole.
Perhaps more important is the fact that “S.D.E.” acted as a stepping stone to something much bigger. It got me interested in writing again, and also focussed my attention on the fact that there was another unaccepted challenge still lying around. For years I’d said it would be impossible to write a sequel to 2001. But just suppose . . .
So in March 1980 I started to write an outline for “Space Odyssey Two.” It wouldn’t be too much