The HALs of Knowledge by Nigel Roth
Did Kubrick and Clarke predict the site you just used to search Kubrick and Clarke?
In 1951, Arthur Charles Clarke wrote a short story called Sentinel of Eternity, for a BBC competition, in which it failed to even get a mention, and was rejected.
In 2020, as we sank under the pressure of an alien force called Covid-19, monoliths began appearing around the globe, in the deserts of California, in the tranquil countryside of Romania, in the obscurity of the Isle of Wight, in the flatlands of the Netherlands, in the orderliness of Germany, and in the aridity of Spain.
In 1968, seventeen after and fifty-two years before the Sentinel first appeared, Stanley Kubrick got together with Clarke to create 2001: A Space Odyssey, the seminal science fiction epic, based entirely on that original story, and inspirational to the organization known as The Most Famous Artist, who not only created the new sentinels, but will make you a replica for about $55,000.
Kubrick and Clarke didn’t predict that sentinels would appear on Earth during a contagious pandemic, but they did offer us glimpses of the future, from the non-existence of sound in space to the weightlessness of a low-gravity environment, from video conferencing and that awful delay in transmission which leaves us talking at the same time, to an international space…
