2001: A Space Odyssey

In his essay “Back to 2001,” which accompanies the edition of the novel referred to in this guide, Clarke says that “it’s almost impossible to recapture the spirit of that distant age” when he and Kubrick conceived of 2001: A Space Odyssey (2). A large part of this “spirit” stemmed from the fact that the Moon landings had not yet taken place but were already on the horizon: “In the Spring of ’64 […] the lunar landing still seemed psychologically a dream of the future. Intellectually, we knew it was inevitable; emotionally, we could not really believe it” (2).

A closely related context is the atmosphere of threat caused by the Cold War. Space travel, tribal tension, and the threat of violence are woven into the texture of 2001, with humanity’s evolution connected to the development of technology broadly, and of weapons and the will to use them specifically. Space exploration and the Cold War were indeed intimately linked: The Space Race was a 20th-century competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, each wanting to prove itself superior through space exploration. It developed through and alongside a missile-based nuclear arms race between the two nations after World War II. Winning the Space Race would mean proving technological superiority, but it would also have a symbolic and propagandistic role. The Cold War centered around the ideological and geopolitical struggle for global influence. 2001 reimagines these dynamics of international tension, with the USSR and the USA sometimes working cooperatively against a new threat posed by China.