It was announced in 2006 that Arthur C. Clarke died at age 90. When I heard the news, I was moved back to years ago.
It was the middle of the 70s. I was a Science Fiction (SF) fan. There were not too many high-quality SF films around, the ones that were shown were mostly B-movies.
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was shown rather late in Turkey (it typically took 4-5 years before foreign films were shown). It grabbed the attention of intellectuals and started a lot of debates. The film used much more sophisticated special effects as compared to what was available at the time The music was terrific (one sequence I never forgot had two spacecrafts rotating and approaching each other to dock, with the Blue Danube waltz in the background, possibly one of the most effective uses of music on cinema). The special effects were amazing (for their time, of course), one had a bone thrown by a prehistoric man morphing into a spacecraft in the next scene.
.When I read Clarke’s short story The Sentinel years later, I once again appreciated the screenplay for the film, since I was astonished that such a short story with a very unambitious hypothesis thrown in casually ended up in such a great screenplay (written by Kubrick and Clarke).
The final section of the film - which was a jumble of special effects and colours - created a lot of discussion about film critics. Part of these were philosophical interpretations and there were interesting interpretation differences between socialist critics and others.
The personification of the computer HAL, which starts breaking down and moves against the humans, was a first. (Several publications talked about the “fact” that there was subliminal advertising through the use of the abbreviation HAL, which could be produced by using a simple +1 displacement code from IBM, but this was never acknowledged).
I remember watching the film 3 or 4 times. Much later, I read all the novels (2001: A Space Odyssey, 2010: Odyssey 2, 2061: Odyssey 3 and 3001: The Final Odyssey) and watched the second film (2001: Odyysey 2). Still, I could not find the atmosphere and the grandeur of the original film.
As to Clarke, he has lots of other books which are landmarks of science-fiction but are less well-known. The few that come to mind are Childhoods’s End, which covers a confrontation between the Overlords and Humanity, as humanity comes to a point in history ready to go out to the universe; and Expedition to Earth, a good book of classical science fiction stories. I also liked his memoir, Astounding Days, which covers his youth, centring on SF magazines such as Astounding. Rendezvous with Rama is also a good book about encounters with aliens, part of a 4-book series.
Clarke is one of the giants of SF and his works will always be read to get a glimpse of the Golden Age where SF literature thrived without help from cinema or any other influences.