On "2001 - A Space Odyssey"

There's a time in my childhood - and it's a time which i was very fond of, when i climb up the roof of my house on a clear night sky, stargazing (something you couldn't really did in a metropolis city such as Jakarta for its smug cloud would reflect-back the artificial light of the city and made it glowing with hue-ish orange). Once, i had a dream of being an astronomer, looking ever outward, tried to comprehended the puny nature of our Earth against the vast vast vast size of the universe. At that time, and even more so nowadays, I believe that looking upward is one of the surest way to get closer to the Ultimate Ruler of the Universe. If, of course, you're a believer. Although, here, 'upward' is merely a relative perspective of view that we, human, are suffered from. For if you're free floating in an empty vacuum of space, where's exactly "up"? Toward the Sun?

Alas, since I had suffered (or rather, blessed in disguise) from an early age myopia, I never really had a full enjoyment of stargazing that even to spot some constellations (i couldn't even spot the most familiar Crux constellation) is a hard task. Shortly, i turned my attention into books instead. Despite that the fire of my dreams of become an astronomer could be said as good as died (and not that long time ago, if i may add. In 1999, i had given a considerable thought of writing "Astronomy" as my second choice after graduating from High-School. In fact, on several cram test occasions, i had put "Astronomy" as my second choice before finally, nearly on a last minute, i put "Computer Science" as my second choice instead. And here i am, a "Computer Science" graduate), whenever i read books about exploring the wide vacuum of space, i still felt goosebumps all over.

I stumbled upon Arthur C. Clarke's tetralogy of "Space Odyssey" through Stanley Kubrick's "2001 - A Space Odyssey" during my early day as a would-be film junky. Though time and again i had ascertained that sitting through the film is practically hard (i watched the film on three different occasions, and successfully fell asleep on all three, on the very same scene, that "ray of light" scene), reading the book provides an utterly different and opposite experience.

In the book (in the film as well), the best character, probably the only character worth mentioning is HAL 9000. A super-computer that runs the Discovery's daily routine up to its very miniscule details, computing the - quite possibly - complex mathematic formulas to determine everything that could be counted to its most little details. He (if a computer could be subjected to "he") did his job flawlessly at first, until his fault prediction on unit AE-35 started the downward spiral that turns HAL from a computer with a slight inner-personality to a killer maniac. Nevertheless, as all computers go, he is still determined that all of his actions were based with a pure logic.

However, i read the book again and again not for its characters but rather for its detail depiction on the physical surrounding space around that of the Discovery as it made its flight to Jupiter and Saturn with an unimaginable velocity of several hundreds of miles per second, and later, its depiction on imagined surrounding space around that of Dave Bowman's space-pod as it floated two thousand light years away from our Solar System as we know it.

Although that the book was a work of purely fiction, it nevertheless provides some breath taking sceneries of Jupiter and Saturn along with their satellites and many space-objects in between. It never failed to tickle my imagination whenever Discovery released one of its probe toward Jupiter, when Clarke described the magnitude scale of how the eternal storms in Jupiter were moving, in fact, how EVERYTHING is moving, or its vastness of scale. Or how the enigmatic properties of many moons of Jupiter or Saturn that hinted extreme conditions unimaginable to us, puny human "trapped" in the relatively comfortable atmosphere on a third rock from the Sun but also offers many possibilities that lie in wait to get unraveled. I could very much guarantee that if one claimed to love reading and curious enough about the nature of the universe, he would easily found the book as quite a pleasant and thought-inducing read.

Granted, in its core, the book and the film has a far more ambitions than merely describing the interstellar travel. All those magnificent space physics and planetary stuffs were arguably no more than just a backdrop. They proposed, or rather, imagined about the next stages of human-race's evolution. When you think about it, the conclusions of what happened next to David Bowman was thought-provoking. Clarke, a proclaimed atheist probing with the existence of intellectual occupants of the universe aeons before human even existed, acknowledging the existence of God, but providing it as a mere nod, or a homage if you will to these intellectual beings who occupies no physical appearance (thus, here, in the book, there's no such thing as a humanoid alien). When David Bowman re-emerges from his sleep, reborn as a "Star Child", an entity of powerful intellectual being encased within an immaterial, yet indestructible cocoon, it has powers beyond third dimensional based physics, beyond Space and Time that it was tempting to think that David Bowman has re-emerges as a lesser God, or one of the Gods.

The book, along with its three sequels, are among the books that i often read again and again. If anything, it enriched my knowledge (although merely an infinitesimal fraction) on space-related physics that i've always found something new every time i read the book again. For instance, in my latest visit, i spent hours studying in more details about "gravitational slingshot" Here, hours means until my head felt like it's going to explode. If in the future, should my kid shown even a little interest toward the sky, i'd helped as much as i could and this book is definitely among one of the thing i'd introduce to him/her as early as possible.