Post by a425coupleArthur C. Clarke's '3001: The Final Odyssey' to Be Syfy Miniseries
By Miriam Kramer, Space.com Staff Writer | November 4, 2014 12:19pm ET
Syfy is adapting Arthur C. Clarke's much lauded novel, "3001: The Final
Odyssey" into a television miniseries, the network announced Monday
"3001," first published in 1997, is the final book in Clarke's "Odyssey"
series that began with "2001: A Space Odyssey," which was originally
published in 1968, the same year the movie of the same name directed by
Stanley Kubrick was released. "3001" follows the story of Frank Poole,
the astronaut killed by the HAL 9000 computer in "2001." Ridley Scott
has signed as an executive producer for the project.
https://www.space.com/27654-syfy-3001-final-odyssey-miniseries.html >
The Spacecraft Designs of Arthur C. Clarke (Space.com Exclusive)
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Stanley Kubrick's Iconic '2001: A Space Odyssey' Sci-Fi Film Explained
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The Spacecraft Designs of Arthur C. Clarke (Space.com Exclusive)
By Stephen Baxter, Author | July 27, 2016 03:30pm ET
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The Spacecraft Designs of Arthur C. Clarke (Space.com Exclusive)
Discovery, the spacecraft in Arthur C. Clarke's "2001: A Space Odyssey,"
drawn in a concept painting for Stanley Kubrick's "2001" movie.
Credit: Copyright © 2014 Turner Entertainment Co. 2001: A Space Odyssey
and all related characters and elements are trademarks of and © Turner
Entertainment Co. (s14)
Science-fiction author Stephen Baxter co-wrote the "A Time Odyssey"
series of books with Arthur C. Clarke, author of "2001: A Space
Odyssey." More recently, Baxter teamed up with author Alastair Reynolds
to write "The Medusa Chronicles" (Saga Press, 2016) which expands on a
short story Clarke wrote in 1971.
Baxter was inspired to write this piece for Space.com after he drew
heavily from Clarke's spaceship designs for that work; in the pages of
fiction and in the real world, Clarke "was a postwar visionary regarding
possible spacecraft designs and purposes," Baxter told Space.com.
It's the year 2099. What do spaceships look like? The great science
fiction author Arthur C. Clarke had some pretty visionary — yet
surprisingly realistic — ideas.
"The Medusa Chronicles" (Saga Press, 2016), by Stephen Baxter and
Alastair Reynolds, expands on a short story by Arthur C. Clarke.
"The Medusa Chronicles" (Saga Press, 2016), by Stephen Baxter and
Alastair Reynolds, expands on a short story by Arthur C. Clarke.
Credit: Saga Press
"The Medusa Chronicles," a book I co-authored with Alastair Reynolds, is
a sequel to Clarke's 1971 novella "A Meeting with Medusa," a saga of the
exploration of space (and, specifically, of Jupiter). In the course of
drafting the book, we had a lot of fun with speculative spacecraft
designs, drawing heavily on Clarke's wider work.
Thus, in the year 2099, our hero Howard Falcon flies "Discovery"-class,
interplanetary, fusion-propelled ships — a nod to Clarke's "2001" series
(1968 onward). And by 2284, he uses more advanced "Goliath"-class ships
— a reference to "The Hammer of God" (1993), as well as an homage to
later entries in the "2001" series. [Gallery: Visions of Interstellar
Starship Travel]
Clarke was a real-world spaceflight visionary, but he never forgot his
boyhood science-fiction dreams. And that background is reflected in his
fiction.
Born in 1917, Clarke had grown up with gaudy and mostly impractical
pulp-era visions of spaceflight. But as a young man, working with early
space-advocacy bodies such as the British Interplanetary Society (BIS),
he contributed to speculative but realistic designs of craft capable of
interplanetary travel, as documented in his highly readable nonfiction
survey "Interplanetary Flight" (1950) as well as in his fiction.
Thus, Clarke's 1951 novel "The Sands of Mars" featured what may have
been the first reasonably realistic fictional depiction of a spacecraft
powered by a fusion rocket. Earlier writers, such as Olaf Stapledon, had
vaguely described spaceflight using nuclear energy, but Clarke gave
precise numbers for his spaceliner Ares, which he described as flying in
the 1990s, capable of a 100-day trip to Mars.
Ares is a luxurious passenger liner that includes a dining hall
measuring about 400 feet (120 meters) across. The design is a dumbbell —
similar to the later Discovery of "2001" (1968). There is a main sphere
with a radius of about 200 feet (60 m) containing passenger cabins and a
lower hemisphere that's "almost entirely fuel." A 330-foot (100 m) strut
connects the main sphere to the smaller engine sphere. Ares is an
"atomic rocket," and specifically fusion-driven: "The forces that
powered the stars themselves were being unleashed," clarke wrote. And
the dumbbell design is logical, with the inhabited sections positioned
as far as possible from the leaked radiation of the engine.
Stephen Baxter (right) with Alastair Reynolds, co-author of "The Medusa
Chronicles."
Stephen Baxter (right) with Alastair Reynolds, co-author of "The Medusa
Chronicles."
Credit: Saga Press
Where Clarke gives specific numbers, they are sensible. To drive the
ship out of high Earth orbit, the engines of Ares burn for 11 hours at 5
percent the acceleration of Earth's gravity, and then Ares coasts for
100 days to Mars and decelerates. You can work out that after such a
journey, 1.1 astronomical units (AU) would have been traveled — a
reasonable distance for an Earth-Mars flight. (One AU is the average
distance from the Earth to the sun — 93 million miles, or 150 million
kilometers.) Clarke doesn't give a specific mass breakdown, but a
reasonable estimate is that the engine's exhaust velocity would be
several hundred kilometers per second. That's well within the
anticipated performance of fusion engines; the uncrewed starship of the
BIS' Daedalus design had an exhaust velocity of 9,000 km/s (5,600 miles
per second). Clarke's spacecraft always had reasonable and consistent
designs — a lesson for any budding hard-sci-fi writer.
But, with time, those designs evolved.
While we worked on "Medusa," I took the chance to re-read the four books
of the Odyssey series: "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968); "2010: Odyssey
Two" (1982); "2061: Odyssey Three" (1987); and "3001: The Final Odyssey"
(1997). And I was very struck by how Clarke's visions of spacecraft
developed over the course of those books.
Although the movie "2001" was first screened the same year Apollo 8
circled the moon, its vision was a sort of summary of older dreams of
spaceflight — including Clarke's own. The space clippers and great
rotating space wheels were straight out of a blueprint that German
aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun had been developing for NASA since
the 1950s, while the beautiful, elegant Discovery is a classic Clarke
dumbbell shape.
But by the time "2010" was published in 1982, the last Apollo mission
was already 10 years in the past, and the space shuttle had just begun
flying; we had learned what space is really like. In the story, a new
spacecraft, called Leonov, goes to Jupiter to retrieve the lost
Discovery. The contrast between the old and new spacecraft is very
striking — visually so in the movie. Leonov is an expression of the
reality of spaceflight as it had been experienced: It is cramped,
uncomfortable, squat and ugly — and there's certainly no
gravity-inducing carousel. When the two spacecraft dock, it's a
collision of post-Apollo reality with pre-Apollo dreams, as if two
universes were overlapping. [Arthur C. Clarke: Luminaries Pay Tribute]
But by "3001," thanks to the advanced-physics "inertial drive," more
extravagant spacecraft designs became possible. With a craft that can
travel at several thousand kilometers per second, even the very sparse
interplanetary dust is a significant hazard, and streamlining and
shielding are necessary. And so the old pulp-magazine fantasies of
Clarke's boyhood are back, as Clarke says explicitly through a character
in the novel. As reincarnated "2001" astronaut Frank Poole puts it, "Do
you know what Goliath reminds me of? … When I was a boy, I came across a
whole pile of old science-fiction magazines that my Uncle George had
abandoned — 'pulps', they were called … They had wonderful garish
covers, showing strange planets and monsters — and of course,
spaceships! As I grew older, I realised how ridiculous those spaceships
were. They were usually rocket-driven — but there was never any sign of
propellant tanks! Some of them had rows of windows from stem to stern,
just like ocean liners. There was one favourite of mine with a huge
glass dome — a space-going conservatory … Well, those old artists had
the last laugh … Goliath looks more like their dreams than the flying
fuel-tanks we used to launch from the Cape."
Though the "2001" books were obviously written within the span of a
single lifetime, they date from different epochs. There is an immense
gulf especially between the first two books. As Clarke noted in his
foreword to "2010," "2001" was written in an age that now lies beyond
one of the Great Divides in human history; we are sundered from it
forever by the moment when Neil Armstrong set foot upon the Moon [in
1969]." But Clarke's visionary work — as refined and updated by such
studies as the BIS' current fusion-ship study Project Icarus — still
stands as a bridge between the fantastic dreams of the past and the
practicalities of the future.
Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of
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are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the
publisher. This article was originally published on Space.com.
https://www.space.com/33537-spacecraft-of-arthur-c-clarke-stephen-baxter.html