There was a time in my early teens when I was obsessed with the book 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke. I saw the movie later, and have never liked it as well as the book. In the book, Clarke tells his story efficiently and well. True, the human characters are one-dimensional automatons, but that creates the delicious irony that HAL, the rogue computer, is the only three-dimensional and interesting character. When at last the human “protagonist” (although he is so bland and unsympathetic it’s hard to call him a protagonist) comes back to the solar system as a post-human creature produced by non-human aliens, you wish that HAL had survived instead — HAL seems more trustworthy.

I think I understood 2001 partly in religious terms:– a mysterious force (non-human aliens rather than God) determines the destiny of human affairs through rather heavy-handed interventions — and the prophet, the one who returns to earth after meeting this mysterious force, starts out as a bland faceless prig and doesn’t get any better from his encounter with the aliens. That is to say, I disagreed strongly with the basic moral argument of the book:– that humanity needs to depend on some external source, some deus ex machina, for moral authority. As a young teen, I only felt a vague disquiet with the premise of 2001, but somehow I knew it Clarke was wrong: humanity cannot depend on some outside saving force to redeem itself.

We need to read authors with whom we strongly disagree. As a teenaged science fiction fan, I got to disagree strongly with Arthur C. Clarke, which helped me better understand my own thoughts. That is a gift that cannot be underestimated. He wrote many other books and stories that made my teenaged self think, and so I was very sorry to hear that he died this morning.