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A short George Orwell biography describes George Orwell's life, times, and work. Also explains the historical and literary context that influenced 1984.

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On the Beach is a 1957 post-apocalyptic novel written by British-Australian author Nevil Shute after he emigrated to Australia. The novel details the experiences of a mixed group of people in Melbourne as they await the arrival of deadly radiation spreading towards them from the Northern Hemisphere following a nuclear war a year previously.

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Student Planning TRiTime Calendar and Book Notes - Google Docs

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Student Planning TRiTime Calendar and Book Notes - Google Docs

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Model of HG Wells' "time machine"

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The Time Machine (also known promotionally as H. G. Wells' The Time Machine) is a 1960 British-American time travel science fiction film in Metrocolor from MGM, produced and directed by George Pal, that stars Rod Taylor, Yvette Mimieux, and Alan Young. The film was based on the 1895 novella of the same name by H.

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written 1949

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Nineteen Eighty-Four (also published as 1984) is a dystopian novel and cautionary tale by English writer George Orwell. It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and final book completed in his lifetime. Thematically, it centres on the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance and repressive regimentation of people and behaviours within society. Orwell, a democratic socialist, modelled the authoritarian state in the novel on the Soviet Union in the era of Stalinism, and Nazi Germany. More broadly, the novel examines the role of truth and facts within societies and the ways in which they can be manipulated.

The story takes place in an imagined future in an unspecified year believed to be 1984, when much of the world is in perpetual war. Great Britain, now known as Airstrip One, has become a province of the totalitarian superstate Oceania, which is led by Big Brother, a dictatorial leader supported by an intense cult of personality manufactured by the Party's Thought Police. The Party engages in omnipresent government surveillance and, through the Ministry of Truth, historical negationism and constant propaganda to persecute individuality and independent thinking.

The protagonist, Winston Smith, is a diligent mid-level worker at the Ministry of Truth who secretly hates the Party and dreams of rebellion. Smith keeps a forbidden diary. He begins a relationship with a colleague, Julia, and they learn about a shadowy resistance group called the Brotherhood. However, their contact within the Brotherhood turns out to be a Party agent, and Smith and Julia are arrested. He is subjected to months of psychological manipulation and torture by the Ministry of Love and is released once he has come to love Big Brother.

Nineteen Eighty-Four has become a classic literary example of political and dystopian fiction. It also popularised the term " Orwellian" as an adjective, with many terms used in the novel entering common usage, including "Big Brother", " doublethink", "Thought Police", " thoughtcrime", " Newspeak", and " 2 + 2 = 5". Parallels have been drawn between the novel's subject matter and real life instances of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and violations of freedom of expression among other themes. Orwell described his book as a " satire", and a display of the "perversions to which a centralised economy is liable," while also stating he believed "that something resembling it could arrive." included the novel on its list of the 100 best English-language novels published from 1923 to 2005, and it was placed on the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels list, reaching number 13 on the editors' list and number 6 on the readers' list. In 2003, it was listed at number eight on The Big Read survey by the BBC.

The Orwell Archive at University College London contains undated notes about ideas that evolved into Nineteen Eighty-Four. The notebooks have been deemed "unlikely to have been completed later than January 1944", and "there is a strong suspicion that some of the material in them dates back to the early part of the war".

In one 1948 letter, Orwell claims to have "first thought of [the book] in 1943", while in another he says he thought of it in 1944 and cites 1943's Tehran Conference as inspiration: "What it is really meant to do is to discuss the implications of dividing the world up into 'Zones of Influence' (I thought of it in 1944 as a result of the Tehran Conference), and in addition to indicate by parodying them the intellectual implications of totalitarianism". Orwell had toured Austria in May 1945 and observed manoeuvering he thought would likely lead to separate Soviet and Allied Zones of Occupation.

In January 1944, literature professor Gleb Struve introduced Orwell to Yevgeny Zamyatin's 1924 dystopian novel . In his response Orwell expressed an interest in the genre, and informed Struve that he had begun writing ideas for one of his own, "that may get written sooner or later." In 1946, Orwell wrote about the 1931 dystopian novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley in his article "Freedom and Happiness" for the Tribune, and noted similarities to We. By this time Orwell had scored a critical and commercial hit with his 1945 political satire Animal Farm, which raised his profile. For a follow-up he decided to produce a dystopian work of his own.

In a June 1944 meeting with Fredric Warburg, co-founder of his British publisher Secker & Warburg, shortly before the release of Animal Farm, Orwell announced that he had written the first 12 pages of his new novel. He could only earn a living from journalism, however, and predicted the book would not see a release before 1947. Progress was slow going; by the end of September 1945 Orwell had written some 50 pages. Orwell became disenchanted with the restrictions and pressures involved with journalism and grew to detest city life in London. His health also suffered, with the harsh winter worsening his case of bronchiectasis and a lesion in one lung.

The novel was completed at Barnhill, Jura.

In May 1946, Orwell arrived on the Scottish island of Jura. He had wanted to retreat to a Hebridean island for several years, to which David Astor recommended he stay at Barnhill, a remote farmhouse on the island that his family owned. Barnhill had no electricity or hot water, but it was here where Orwell intermittently drafted and finished Nineteen Eighty-Four. His first stay lasted until October 1946, during which time he made little progress on the few already completed pages and at one point, did no work on it for three months. After spending the winter in London, Orwell returned to Jura; in May 1947 he reported to Warburg that despite progress being slow and difficult, he was roughly a third of the way through. He sent his "ghastly mess" of a first draft manuscript to London where Miranda Christen volunteered to type a clean version. Orwell's health took a turn in September, however, and he was confined to bed with inflammation of the lungs. He lost almost two stone (28 pounds or 12.7 kg) in weight and had recurring night sweats, but he decided not to see a doctor and continued writing. On 7 November 1947, he completed the first draft in bed and subsequently travelled to East Kilbride near Glasgow for medical treatment at Hairmyres Hospital, where a specialist confirmed a chronic and infectious case of tuberculosis.

Orwell was discharged in the summer of 1948, after which he returned to Jura and produced a full second draft of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which he finished in November. He asked Warburg to have someone come to Barnhill and retype the manuscript, which was so untidy that the task was only considered possible if Orwell was present, as only he could understand it. The previous volunteer had left the country and no other could be found at short notice, so an impatient Orwell retyped it himself at a rate of roughly 4,000 words a day during bouts of fever and bloody coughing fits. On 4 December 1948, Orwell sent the finished manuscript to Secker & Warburg and left Barnhill for good in January 1949. He recovered at a sanitarium in the Cotswolds.

Shortly before completion of the second draft, Orwell hesitated between two titles for the novel: The Last Man in Europe, an early title, and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Warburg suggested the latter, which he took to be a more commercially viable choice. There has been a theory - doubted by Dorian Lynskey (author of a 2019 book about Nineteen Eighty-Four) - that 1984 was chosen simply as an inversion of the year 1948, the year in which it was being completed. Lynskey says the idea was "first suggested by Orwell's US publisher", and it was also mentioned by Christopher Hitchens in his introduction to the 2003 edition of Animal Farm and 1984, which also notes that the date was meant to give "an immediacy and urgency to the menace of totalitarian rule". However, Lynskey does not believe the inversion theory:

This idea ... seems far too cute for such a serious book. ... Scholars have raised other possibilities. [His wife] Eileen wrote a poem for her old school's centenary called 'End of the Century: 1984.' G. K. Chesterton's 1904 political satire The Napoleon of Notting Hill, which mocks the art of prophecy, opens in 1984. The year is also a significant date in The Iron Heel. But all of these connections are exposed as no more than coincidences by the early drafts of the novel ... First he wrote 1980, then 1982, and only later 1984. The most fateful date in literature was a late amendment."

A 1947 draft manuscript of the first page of Nineteen Eighty-Four, showing the editorial development

In the run up to publication, Orwell called the novel "a beastly book" and expressed some disappointment towards it, thinking it would have been improved had he not been so ill. This was typical of Orwell, who had talked down his other books shortly before their release. Nevertheless, the book was enthusiastically received by Secker & Warburg, who acted quickly; before Orwell had left Jura he rejected their proposed blurb that portrayed it as "a thriller mixed up with a love story." He also refused a proposal from the American Book of the Month Club to release an edition without the appendix and chapter on Goldstein's book, a decision which Warburg claimed cut off about £40,000 in sales.

Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on 8 June 1949 in the UK; Orwell predicated earnings of around £500. A first print of 25,575 copies was followed by a further 5,000 copies in March and August 1950. The novel had the most immediate impact in the US, following its release there on 13 June 1949 by Harcourt Brace, & Co. An initial print of 20,000 copies was quickly followed by another 10,000 on 1 July, and again on 7 September. By 1970, over 8 million copies had been sold in the US and in 1984, it topped the country's all-time best seller list.

In June 1952, Orwell's widow Sonia Bronwell sold the only surviving manuscript at a charity auction for £50. The draft remains the only surviving literary manuscript from Orwell, and is presently held at the John Hay Library at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

In 1984, civilisation has been ravaged by world war, civil conflict, and revolution. Airstrip One (formerly known as Great Britain) is a province of Oceania, one of the three totalitarian super-states that rule the world. It is ruled by "The Party" under the ideology of " Ingsoc" (a Newspeak shortening of "English Socialism") and the mysterious leader Big Brother, who has an intense cult of personality. The Party brutally purges out anyone who does not fully conform to their regime, using the Thought Police and constant surveillance through telescreens (two-way televisions), cameras, and hidden microphones. Those who fall out of favour with the Party become "unpersons", disappearing with all evidence of their existence destroyed.

In London, Winston Smith is a member of the Outer Party, working at the Ministry of Truth, where he rewrites historical records to conform to the state's ever-changing version of history. Winston revises past editions of , while the original documents are destroyed after being dropped into ducts known as memory holes, which lead to an immense furnace. He secretly opposes the Party's rule and dreams of rebellion, despite knowing that he is already a " thought-criminal" and is likely to be caught one day.

While in a prole neighbourhood he meets Mr. Charrington, the owner of an antiques shop, and buys a diary where he writes criticisms of the Party and Big Brother. To his dismay, when he visits a prole quarter he discovers they have no political consciousness. As he works in the Ministry of Truth, he observes Julia, a young woman maintaining the novel-writing machines at the ministry, whom Winston suspects of being a spy, and develops an intense hatred of her. He vaguely suspects that his superior, an Inner Party official O'Brien, is part of an enigmatic underground resistance movement known as the Brotherhood, formed by Big Brother's reviled political rival Emmanuel Goldstein.

One day, Julia secretly hands Winston a love note, and the two begin a secret affair. Julia explains that she also loathes the Party, but Winston observes that she is politically apathetic and uninterested in overthrowing the regime. Initially meeting in the country, they later meet in a rented room above Mr. Charrington's shop. During the affair, Winston remembers the disappearance of his family during the civil war of the 1950s and his tense relationship with his estranged wife Katharine. Weeks later, O'Brien invites Winston to his flat, where he introduces himself as a member of the Brotherhood and sends Winston a copy of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by Goldstein. Meanwhile, during the nation's Hate Week, Oceania's enemy suddenly changes from Eurasia to Eastasia, which goes mostly unnoticed. Winston is recalled to the Ministry to help make the necessary revisions to the records. Winston and Julia read parts of Goldstein's book, which explains how the Party maintains power, the true meanings of its slogans, and the concept of perpetual war. It argues that the Party can be overthrown if proles rise up against it. However, Winston never gets the opportunity to read the chapter that explains 'why' the Party is motivated to maintain power.

Winston and Julia are captured when Mr. Charrington is revealed to be an undercover Thought Police agent, and they are separated and imprisoned at the Ministry of Love. O'Brien also reveals himself to be a member of the Thought Police and a member of a false flag operation which catches political dissidents of the Party. Over several months, Winston is starved and relentlessly tortured to bring his beliefs in line with the Party. O'Brien tells Winston that he will never know whether the Brotherhood actually exists and that Goldstein's book was written collaboratively by him and other Party members. For the final stage of re-education, O'Brien takes Winston to Room 101, which contains each prisoner's worst fear. When confronted with rats, Winston denounces Julia and pledges allegiance to the Party.

Winston is released into public life and continues to frequent the Chestnut Tree café. He encounters Julia, and both reveal that they have betrayed the other and are no longer in love. Back in the café, a news alert celebrates Oceania's supposed massive victory over Eurasian armies in Africa. Winston finally accepts that he loves Big Brother.

Winston Smith - the 39-year old protagonist who is a phlegmatic everyman harbouring thoughts of rebellion and is curious about the Party's power and the past before the Revolution.

Julia - Winston's lover who publicly espouses Party doctrine as a member of the fanatical Junior Anti-Sex League. Julia enjoys her small acts of rebellion and has no interest in giving up her lifestyle.

O'Brien - A mysterious character, O'Brien is a member of the Inner Party who poses as a member of The Brotherhood, the counter-revolutionary resistance, to catch Winston. He is a spy intending to deceive, trap, and capture Winston and Julia.

Aaronson, Jones, and Rutherford - former members of the Inner Party whom Winston vaguely remembers as among the original leaders of the Revolution, long before he had heard of Big Brother. They confessed to treasonable conspiracies with foreign powers and were then executed in the political purges of the 1960s. In between their confessions and executions, Winston saw them drinking in the Chestnut Tree Café-with broken noses, suggesting that their confessions had been obtained by torture. Later, in the course of his editorial work, Winston sees newspaper evidence contradicting their confessions, but drops it into a memory hole. Eleven years later, he is confronted with the same photograph during his interrogation.

Ampleforth - Winston's one-time Records Department colleague who was imprisoned for leaving the word "God" in a Kipling poem as he could not find another rhyme for "rod"; Winston encounters him at the Ministry of Love. Ampleforth is a dreamer and intellectual who takes pleasure in his work, and respects poetry and language, traits which cause him disfavour with the Party.

Charrington - an undercover officer of the Thought Police masquerading as a kind and sympathetic antiques dealer amongst the proles.

Katharine Smith - the emotionally indifferent wife whom Winston "can't get rid of". Despite disliking sexual intercourse, Katharine married Winston because it was their "duty to the Party". Although she was a "goodthinkful" ideologue, they separated because the couple could not conceive children. Divorce is not permitted, but couples who cannot have children may live separately. For much of the story Winston lives in vague hope that Katharine may die or could be "got rid of" so that he may marry Julia. He regrets not having killed her by pushing her over the edge of a quarry when he had the chance many years previously.

Tom Parsons - Winston's naïve neighbour, and an ideal member of the Outer Party: an uneducated, suggestible man who is utterly loyal to the Party, and fully believes in its perfect image. He is socially active and participates in the Party activities for his social class. He is friendly towards Smith, and despite his political conformity punishes his bullying son for firing a catapult at Winston. Later, as a prisoner, Winston sees Parsons is in the Ministry of Love, as his daughter had reported him to the Thought Police, saying she heard him speak against Big Brother in his sleep. Even this does not dampen his belief in the Party, and he states he could do "good work" in the hard labour camps.

Mrs. Parsons - Parsons's wife is a wan and hapless woman who is intimidated by her own children.
The Parsons children - a nine-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter. Both are members of the Spies, a youth organisation that focuses on indoctrinating children with Party ideals and training them to report any suspected incidents of unorthodoxy. They represent the new generation of Oceanian citizens, without memory of life before Big Brother, and without family ties or emotional sentiment; the model society envisioned by the Inner Party.

Syme - Winston's colleague at the Ministry of Truth, a lexicographer involved in compiling a new edition of the Newspeak dictionary. Although he is enthusiastic about his work and support for the Party, Winston notes, "He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly." Winston predicts, correctly, that Syme will become an unperson.

Additionally, the following characters, mentioned in the novel, play a significant role in the world-building of 1984. Whether these characters are real or fabrications of Party propaganda is something that neither Winston nor the reader is permitted to know:

Winston Smith's memories and his reading of the proscribed book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by Emmanuel Goldstein, reveal that after the Second World War, a Third World War broke out in the early 1950s in which nuclear weapons destroyed hundreds of cities in Europe, western Russia and North America (though not stated, it is implied this was a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union). Colchester was destroyed, and London also suffered widespread aerial raids, leading Winston's family to take refuge in a London Underground station.

During the war, the Soviet Union invaded and absorbed all of Continental Europe, while the United States absorbed the British Commonwealth and later Latin America. This formed the basis of Eurasia and Oceania respectively. Due to the instability perpetuated by the nuclear war, these new nations fell into civil war, but who fought whom is left unclear (there is a reference to the child Winston having seen rival militias in the streets, each one having a shirt of a distinct colour for its members). Meanwhile, Eastasia, the last superstate established, emerged only after "a decade of confused fighting". It includes the Asian lands conquered by China and Japan. Although Eastasia is prevented from matching Eurasia's size, its larger populace compensates for that handicap.

However, due to the fact that Winston only barely remembers these events as well as the Party's constant manipulation of historical records, the continuity and accuracy of these events are unknown, and exactly how the superstates' ruling parties managed to gain their power is also left unclear. If the official account was accurate, Smith's strengthening memories and the story of his family's dissolution suggest that the atomic bombings occurred first, followed by civil war featuring "confused street fighting in London itself" and the societal postwar reorganisation, which the Party retrospectively calls "the Revolution". It is very difficult to trace the exact chronology, but most of the global societal reorganisation occurred between 1945 and the early 1960s.

In 1984, there is a perpetual war between Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, the superstates that emerged from the global atomic war. The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, by Emmanuel Goldstein, explains that each state is so strong that it cannot be defeated, even with the combined forces of two superstates, despite changing alliances. To hide such contradictions, the superstates' governments rewrite history to explain that the (new) alliance always was so; the populaces are already accustomed to doublethink and accept it. The war is not fought in Oceanian, Eurasian or Eastasian territory but in the Arctic wastes and a disputed zone comprising the sea and land from Tangiers (Northern Africa) to Darwin (Australia). At the start, Oceania and Eastasia are allies fighting Eurasia in northern Africa and the Malabar Coast.

That alliance ends, and Oceania, allied with Eurasia, fights Eastasia, a change occurring on Hate Week, dedicated to creating patriotic fervour for the Party's perpetual war. The public are blind to the change; in mid-sentence, an orator changes the name of the enemy from "Eurasia" to "Eastasia" without pause. When the public are enraged at noticing that the wrong flags and posters are displayed, they tear them down; the Party later claims to have captured the whole of Africa.

Goldstein's book explains that the purpose of the unwinnable, perpetual war is to consume human labour and commodities so that the economy of a superstate cannot support economic equality, with a high standard of life for every citizen. By using up most of the produced goods, the proles are kept poor and uneducated, and the Party hopes that they will neither realise what the government is doing nor rebel. Goldstein also details an Oceanian strategy of attacking enemy cities with atomic rockets before invasion but dismisses it as unfeasible and contrary to the war's purpose; despite the atomic bombing of cities in the 1950s, the superstates stopped it for fear that it would imbalance the powers. The military technology in the novel differs little from that of World War II, but strategic bomber aeroplanes are replaced with rocket bombs, helicopters were heavily used as weapons of war (they were very minor in World War II) and surface combat units have been all but replaced by immense and unsinkable Floating Fortresses (island-like contraptions concentrating the firepower of a whole naval task force in a single, semi-mobile platform; in the novel, one is said to have been anchored between Iceland and the Faroe Islands, suggesting a preference for sea lane interdiction and denial).

The three fictional superstates of the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four are Oceania (Black), Eurasia (Red), and Eastasia (Yellow). 'Disputed territories' are indicated in grey.

Three perpetually warring totalitarian superstates control the world in the novel:

Oceania (ideology: Ingsoc, known in Oldspeak as English Socialism), whose core territories are "the Americas, the Atlantic Islands, including the British Isles, Australasia and the southern portion of Africa".

Eurasia (ideology: Neo-Bolshevism), whose core territories are "the whole of the northern part of the European and Asiatic landmass from Portugal to the Bering Strait".

Eastasia (ideology: Obliteration of the Self, also known as Death-Worship), whose core territories are "China and the countries to the south of it, the Japanese islands, and a large but fluctuating portion of Manchuria, Mongolia and Tibet".

The perpetual war is fought for control of the "disputed area" lying between the frontiers of the superstates. The majority of the disputed territories form "a rough quadrilateral with its corners at Tangier, Brazzaville, Darwin and Hong Kong", including Equatorial Africa, North Africa, the Middle East, Indian subcontinent and Indonesia. Fighting also takes place along the unstable Eurasian-Eastasian border, over various islands in the Indian and Pacific Ocean, as well as around the North Pole.

In London, the capital city of Airstrip One, Oceania's four government ministries are in pyramids (300 m high), the façades of which display the Party's three slogans - "WAR IS PEACE", "FREEDOM IS SLAVERY", "IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH". As mentioned, the ministries are deliberately named after the opposite ( doublethink) of their true functions: "The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation." (Part II, chapter IX - "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism" (by Emmanuel Goldstein)).

While a ministry is supposedly headed by a minister, the ministers heading these four ministries are never mentioned. They seem to be completely out of the public view, Big Brother being the only, ever-present public face of the government. Also, while an army fighting a war is typically headed by generals, none are ever mentioned by name. News reports of the ongoing war assume that Big Brother personally commands Oceania's fighting forces and give him personal credit for victories and successful strategic concepts.

The Ministry of Peace maintains Oceania's perpetual war against either of the two other superstates:

The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognised and not recognised by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial society. At present, when few human beings even have enough to eat, this problem is obviously not urgent, and it might not have become so, even if no artificial processes of destruction had been at work.

The Ministry of Plenty rations and controls food, goods, and domestic production; every fiscal quarter, it claims to have raised the standard of living, even during times when it has, in fact, reduced rations, availability, and production. The Ministry of Truth substantiates the Ministry of Plenty's claims by manipulating historical records to report numbers supporting the claims of "increased rations". The Ministry of Plenty also runs the national lottery as a distraction for the proles; Party members understand it to be a sham in which all the larger prizes are "won" by imaginary people. Only small amounts are actually paid out.

The Ministry of Truth controls information: news, entertainment, education, and the arts. Winston Smith works in the Records Department, "rectifying" historical records to accord with Big Brother's current pronouncements so that everything the Party says appears to be true.

The Ministry of Love identifies, monitors, arrests and converts real and imagined dissidents. This is also the place where the Thought Police beat and torture dissidents, after which they are sent to Room 101 to face "the worst thing in the world"-until love for Big Brother and the Party replaces dissension.

Big Brother is a fictional character and symbol in the novel. He is ostensibly the leader of Oceania, a totalitarian state wherein the ruling party Ingsoc wields total power "for its own sake" over the inhabitants. In the society that Orwell describes, every citizen is under constant surveillance by the authorities, mainly by telescreens (with the exception of the proles). The people are constantly reminded of this by the slogan "Big Brother is watching you": a maxim that is ubiquitously on display.

The keyword here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink. Doublethink is basically the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

The Principles of Newspeak is an academic essay appended to the novel. It describes the development of Newspeak, an artificial, minimalistic language designed to ideologically align thought with the principles of Ingsoc by stripping down the English language in order to make the expression of "heretical" thoughts (i.e. thoughts going against Ingsoc's principles) impossible. The idea that a language's structure can be used to influence thought is known as linguistic relativity.

Whether or not the Newspeak appendix implies a hopeful end to Nineteen Eighty-Four remains a critical debate. Many claim that it does, citing the fact that it is in standard English and is written in the past tense: "Relative to our own, the Newspeak vocabulary was tiny, and new ways of reducing it were constantly being devised" (p. 422). Some critics ( Atwood, Benstead, Milner, Pynchon) claim that for Orwell, Newspeak and the totalitarian governments are all in the past.

Thoughtcrime describes a person's politically unorthodox thoughts, such as unspoken beliefs and doubts that contradict the tenets of Ingsoc (English Socialism), the dominant ideology of Oceania. In the official language of Newspeak, the word crimethink describes the intellectual actions of a person who entertains and holds politically unacceptable thoughts; thus the government of the Party controls the speech, the actions, and the thoughts of the citizens of Oceania. In contemporary English usage, the word thoughtcrime describes beliefs that are contrary to accepted norms of society, and is used to describe theological concepts, such as disbelief and idolatry, and the rejection of an ideology.

Nineteen Eighty-Four expands upon the subjects summarised in Orwell's essay " Notes on Nationalism" about the lack of vocabulary needed to explain the unrecognised phenomena behind certain political forces. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Party's artificial, minimalist language 'Newspeak' addresses the matter.

Positive nationalism: For instance, Oceanians' perpetual love for Big Brother. Orwell argues in the essay that ideologies such as Neo-Toryism and Celtic nationalism are defined by their obsessive sense of loyalty to some entity.

Negative nationalism: For instance, Oceanians' perpetual hatred for Emmanuel Goldstein. Orwell argues in the essay that ideologies such as Trotskyism and Antisemitism are defined by their obsessive hatred of some entity.

Transferred nationalism: For instance, when Oceania's enemy changes, an orator makes a change mid-sentence, and the crowd instantly transfers its hatred to the new enemy. Orwell argues that ideologies such as Stalinism and redirected feelings of racial animus and class superiority among wealthy intellectuals exemplify this. Transferred nationalism swiftly redirects emotions from one power unit to another. In the novel, it happens during Hate Week, a Party rally against the original enemy. The crowd goes wild and destroys the posters that are now against their new friend, and many say that they must be the act of an agent of their new enemy and former friend. Many of the crowd must have put up the posters before the rally but think that the state of affairs had always been the case.

O'Brien concludes: "The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power."

In the book, Inner Party member O'Brien describes the Party's vision of the future:

There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always-do not forget this, Winston-always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face-forever.

-  Part III, chapter III, Nineteen Eighty-Four

One of the most notable themes in Nineteen Eighty-Four is censorship, especially in the Ministry of Truth, where photographs and public archives are manipulated to rid them of "unpersons" (people who have been erased from history by the Party). On the telescreens, almost all figures of production are grossly exaggerated or simply fabricated to indicate an ever-growing economy, even during times when the reality is the opposite. One small example of the endless censorship is Winston being charged with the task of eliminating a reference to an unperson in a newspaper article. He also proceeds to write an article about Comrade Ogilvy, a made-up party member who allegedly "displayed great heroism by leaping into the sea from a helicopter so that the dispatches he was carrying would not fall into enemy hands."

In Oceania, the upper and middle classes have very little true privacy. All of their houses and apartments are equipped with telescreens so that they may be watched or listened to at any time. Similar telescreens are found at workstations and in public places, along with hidden microphones. Written correspondence is routinely opened and read by the government before it is delivered. The Thought Police employ undercover agents, who pose as normal citizens and report any person with subversive tendencies. Children are encouraged to report suspicious persons to the government, and some denounce their parents. Citizens are controlled, and the smallest sign of rebellion, even something as small as a suspicious facial expression, can result in immediate arrest and imprisonment. Thus, citizens are compelled to obedience.

According to Goldstein's book, almost the entire world lives in poverty; hunger, thirst, disease, and filth are the norms. Ruined cities and towns are common: the consequence of perpetual wars and extreme economic inefficiency. Social decay and wrecked buildings surround Winston; aside from the ministries' headquarters, little of London was rebuilt. Middle class citizens and proles consume synthetic foodstuffs and poor-quality "luxuries" such as oily gin and loosely-packed cigarettes, distributed under the "Victory" brand, a parody of the low-quality Indian-made "Victory" cigarettes, which British soldiers commonly smoked during World War II.

Winston describes something as simple as the repair of a broken window as requiring committee approval that can take several years and so most of those living in one of the blocks usually do the repairs themselves (Winston himself is called in by Mrs. Parsons to repair her blocked sink). All upper-class and middle-class residences include telescreens that serve both as outlets for propaganda and surveillance devices that allow the Thought Police to monitor them; they can be turned down, but the ones in middle-class residences cannot be turned off.

In contrast to their subordinates, the upper class of Oceanian society reside in clean and comfortable flats in their own quarters, with pantries well-stocked with foodstuffs such as wine, real coffee, real tea, real milk, and real sugar, all denied to the general populace. Winston is astonished that the lifts in O'Brien's building work, the telescreens can be completely turned off, and O'Brien has an Asian manservant, Martin. All upper class citizens are attended to by slaves captured in the "disputed zone", and "The Book" suggests that many have their own cars or even helicopters.

However, despite their insulation and overt privileges, the upper class are still not exempt from the government's brutal restriction of thought and behaviour, even while lies and propaganda apparently originate from their own ranks. Instead, the Oceanian government offers the upper class their "luxuries" in exchange for them maintaining their loyalty to the state; non-conformant upper-class citizens can still be condemned, tortured, and executed just like any other individual. "The Book" makes clear that the upper class' living conditions are only "relatively" comfortable, and would be regarded as "austere" by those of the pre-revolutionary élite.

The proles live in poverty and are kept sedated with pornography, a national lottery whose winnings are rarely paid out, and gin, "which the proles were not supposed to drink". At the same time, the proles are freer and less intimidated than the upper classes: they are not expected to be particularly patriotic and the levels of surveillance that they are subjected to are very low; they lack telescreens in their own homes. "The Book" indicates that because the middle class, not the lower class, traditionally starts revolutions, the model demands tight control of the middle class, with ambitious Outer-Party members neutralised via promotion to the Inner Party or "reintegration" by the Ministry of Love, and proles can be allowed intellectual freedom because they are deemed to lack intellect. Winston nonetheless believes that "the future belonged to the proles".

The standard of living of the populace is extremely low overall. Consumer goods are scarce, and those available through official channels are of low quality; for instance, despite the Party regularly reporting increased boot production, more than half of the Oceanian populace goes barefoot. The Party claims that poverty is a necessary sacrifice for the war effort, and "The Book" confirms that to be partially correct since the purpose of perpetual war is to consume surplus industrial production. As "The Book" explains, society is in fact designed to remain on the brink of starvation, as "In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance."

Nineteen Eighty-Four uses themes from life in the Soviet Union and wartime life in Great Britain as sources for many of its motifs. Some time at an unspecified date after the first American publication of the book, producer Sidney Sheldon wrote to Orwell interested in adapting the novel to the Broadway stage. Orwell wrote in a letter to Sheldon (to whom he would sell the US stage rights) that his basic goal with Nineteen Eighty-Four was imagining the consequences of Stalinist government ruling British society:

[ Nineteen Eighty-Four] was based chiefly on communism, because that is the dominant form of totalitarianism, but I was trying chiefly to imagine what communism would be like if it were firmly rooted in the English speaking countries, and was no longer a mere extension of the Russian Foreign Office.

According to Orwell biographer D. J. Taylor, the author's A Clergyman's Daughter (1935) has "essentially the same plot of Nineteen Eighty-Four ... It's about somebody who is spied upon, and eavesdropped upon, and oppressed by vast exterior forces they can do nothing about. It makes an attempt at rebellion and then has to compromise".

A 1931 poster for the [first five-year plan of the Soviet Union by Yakov Guminer ru] reading "The arithmetic of an industrial-financial counter-plan: 2 + 2 plus the enthusiasm of the workers = 5"

The statement " 2 + 2 = 5", used to torment Winston Smith during his interrogation, was a communist party slogan from the second five-year plan, which encouraged fulfilment of the five-year plan in four years. The slogan was seen in electric lights on Moscow house-fronts, billboards and elsewhere.

The switch of Oceania's allegiance from Eastasia to Eurasia and the subsequent rewriting of history ("Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. A large part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete"; ch 9) is evocative of the Soviet Union's changing relations with Nazi Germany. The two nations were open and frequently vehement critics of each other until the signing of the 1939 Treaty of Non-Aggression. Thereafter, and continuing until the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, no criticism of Germany was allowed in the Soviet press, and all references to prior party lines stopped-including in the majority of non-Russian communist parties who tended to follow the Russian line. Orwell had criticised the Communist Party of Great Britain for supporting the Treaty in his essays for Betrayal of the Left (1941). "The Hitler-Stalin pact of August 1939 reversed the Soviet Union's stated foreign policy. It was too much for many of the fellow-travellers like Gollancz [Orwell's sometime publisher] who had put their faith in a strategy of construction Popular Front governments and the peace bloc between Russia, Britain and France."

The description of Emmanuel Goldstein, with a "small, goatee beard", evokes the image of Leon Trotsky. The film of Goldstein during the Two Minutes Hate is described as showing him being transformed into a bleating sheep. This image was used in a propaganda film during the Kino-eye period of Soviet film, which showed Trotsky transforming into a goat. Like Goldstein, Trotsky was a formerly high-ranking party official who was ostracized and then wrote a book criticizing party rule, The Revolution Betrayed, published in 1936.

The omnipresent images of Big Brother, a man described as having a moustache, bears resemblance to the cult of personality built up around Joseph Stalin.

The news in Oceania emphasised production figures, just as it did in the Soviet Union, where record-setting in factories (by " Heroes of Socialist Labour") was especially glorified. The best known of these was Alexei Stakhanov, who purportedly set a record for coal mining in 1935.

The tortures of the Ministry of Love evoke the procedures used by the NKVD in their interrogations, including the use of rubber truncheons, being forbidden to put your hands in your pockets, remaining in brightly lit rooms for days, torture through the use of their greatest fear, and the victim being shown a mirror after their physical collapse.

The Thought Police is based on the NKVD, which arrested people for random "anti-soviet" remarks.

The confessions of the "Thought Criminals" Rutherford, Aaronson, and Jones are based on the show trials of the 1930s, which included fabricated confessions by prominent Bolsheviks Nikolai Bukharin, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev to the effect that they were being paid by the Nazi government to undermine the Soviet regime under Leon Trotsky's direction.

The song " Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree" ("Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you, and you sold me") was based on an old English song called "Go no more a-rushing" ("Under the spreading chestnut tree, Where I knelt upon my knee, We were as happy as could be, 'Neath the spreading chestnut tree."). The song was published as early as 1891. The song was a popular camp song in the 1920s, sung with corresponding movements (like touching one's chest when singing "chest", and touching one's head when singing "nut"). Glenn Miller recorded the song in 1939.

The "Hates" (Two Minutes Hate and Hate Week) were inspired by the constant rallies sponsored by party organs throughout the Stalinist period. These were often short pep-talks given to workers before their shifts began (Two Minutes Hate), but could also last for days, as in the annual celebrations of the anniversary of the October Revolution (Hate Week).

Orwell fictionalised "newspeak", "doublethink", and "Ministry of Truth" based on both the Soviet press, and British wartime usage, such as "Miniform". In particular, he adapted Soviet ideological discourse constructed to ensure that public statements could not be questioned.

Winston Smith's job, "revising history" (and the "unperson" motif) are based on censorship of images in the Soviet Union, which airbrushed images of "fallen" people from group photographs and removed references to them in books and newspapers. In one well-known example, the second edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia had an article about Lavrentiy Beria. After his fall from power and execution, subscribers received a letter from the editor instructing them to cut out and destroy the three-page article on Beria and paste in its place enclosed replacement pages expanding the adjacent articles on F. W. Bergholz (an 18th-century courtier), the Bering Sea, and Bishop Berkeley.

Big Brother's "Orders of the Day" were inspired by Stalin's regular wartime orders, called by the same name. A small collection of the more political of these have been published (together with his wartime speeches) in English as On the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union by Joseph Stalin. Like Big Brother's Orders of the day, Stalin's frequently lauded heroic individuals, like Comrade Ogilvy, the fictitious hero Winston Smith invented to "rectify" (fabricate) a Big Brother Order of the day.

The Ingsoc slogan "Our new, happy life", repeated from telescreens, evokes Stalin's 1935 statement, which became a CPSU slogan, "Life has become better, Comrades; life has become more cheerful."

During World War II, Orwell believed that British democracy as it existed before 1939 would not survive the war. The question being "Would it end via Fascist coup d'état from above or via Socialist revolution from below?" Later, he admitted that events proved him wrong: "What really matters is that I fell into the trap of assuming that 'the war and the revolution are inseparable'."

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Animal Farm (1945) share themes of the betrayed revolution, the individual's subordination to the collective, rigorously enforced class distinctions (Inner Party, Outer Party, proles), the cult of personality, concentration camps, Thought Police, compulsory regimented daily exercise, and youth leagues. Oceania resulted from the US annexation of the British Empire to counter the Asian peril to Australia and New Zealand. It is a naval power whose militarism venerates the sailors of the floating fortresses, from which battle is given to recapturing India, the "Jewel in the Crown" of the British Empire. Much of Oceanic society is based upon the USSR under Joseph Stalin- Big Brother. The televised Two Minutes Hate is ritual demonisation of the enemies of the State, especially Emmanuel Goldstein ( viz Leon Trotsky). Altered photographs and newspaper articles create unpersons deleted from the national historical record, including even founding members of the regime (Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford) in the 1960s purges ( viz the Soviet Purges of the 1930s, in which leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution were similarly treated). A similar thing also happened during the French Revolution's Reign of Terror in which many of the original leaders of the Revolution were later put to death, for example Danton who was put to death by Robespierre, and then later Robespierre himself met the same fate.

In his 1946 essay " Why I Write", Orwell explains that the serious works he wrote since the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) were "written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism". Nineteen Eighty-Four is a cautionary tale about revolution betrayed by totalitarian defenders previously proposed in Homage to Catalonia (1938) and Animal Farm (1945), while Coming Up for Air (1939) celebrates the personal and political freedoms lost in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Biographer Michael Shelden notes Orwell's Edwardian childhood at Henley-on-Thames as the golden country; being bullied at St Cyprian's School as his empathy with victims; his life in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma and the techniques of violence and censorship in the BBC as capricious authority.

Other influences include Darkness at Noon (1940) and The Yogi and the Commissar (1945) by Arthur Koestler; The Iron Heel (1908) by Jack London; 1920: Dips into the Near Future by John A. Hobson; Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley; (1921) by Yevgeny Zamyatin which he reviewed in 1946; and The Managerial Revolution (1940) by James Burnham predicting perpetual war among three totalitarian superstates. Orwell told Jacintha Buddicom that he would write a novel stylistically like A Modern Utopia (1905) by H. G. Wells.

Extrapolating from World War II, the novel's pastiche parallels the politics and rhetoric at war's end-the changed alliances at the " Cold War's" (1945-91) beginning; the Ministry of Truth derives from the BBC's overseas service, controlled by the Ministry of Information; Room 101 derives from a conference room at BBC Broadcasting House; the Senate House of the University of London, containing the Ministry of Information is the architectural inspiration for the Minitrue; the post-war decrepitude derives from the socio-political life of the UK and the US, i.e., the impoverished Britain of 1948 losing its Empire despite newspaper-reported imperial triumph; and war ally but peace-time foe, Soviet Russia became Eurasia.

The term "English Socialism" has precedents in Orwell's wartime writings; in the essay " The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius" (1941), he said that "the war and the revolution are inseparable... the fact that we are at war has turned Socialism from a textbook word into a realisable policy"-because Britain's superannuated social class system hindered the war effort and only a socialist economy would defeat Adolf Hitler. Given the middle class's grasping this, they too would abide socialist revolution and that only reactionary Britons would oppose it, thus limiting the force revolutionaries would need to take power. An English Socialism would come about which "will never lose touch with the tradition of compromise and the belief in a law that is above the State. It will shoot traitors, but it will give them a solemn trial beforehand and occasionally it will acquit them. It will crush any open revolt promptly and cruelly, but it will interfere very little with the spoken and written word."

In the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, "English Socialism" (or " Ingsoc" in Newspeak) is a totalitarian ideology unlike the English revolution he foresaw. Comparison of the wartime essay "The Lion and the Unicorn" with Nineteen Eighty-Four shows that he perceived a Big Brother regime as a perversion of his cherished socialist ideals and English Socialism. Thus Oceania is a corruption of the British Empire he believed would evolve "into a federation of Socialist states, like a looser and freer version of the Union of Soviet Republics".

When it was first published, Nineteen Eighty-Four received critical acclaim. V. S. Pritchett, reviewing the novel for the New Statesman stated: "I do not think I have ever read a novel more frightening and depressing; and yet, such are the originality, the suspense, the speed of writing and withering indignation that it is impossible to put the book down." P. H. Newby, reviewing Nineteen Eighty-Four for The Listener magazine, described it as "the most arresting political novel written by an Englishman since Rex Warner's The Aerodrome." Nineteen Eighty-Four was also praised by Bertrand Russell, E. M. Forster and Harold Nicolson. On the other hand, Edward Shanks, reviewing Nineteen Eighty-Four for The Sunday Times, was dismissive; Shanks claimed Nineteen Eighty-Four "breaks all records for gloomy vaticination". C. S. Lewis was also critical of the novel, claiming that the relationship of Julia and Winston, and especially the Party's view on sex, lacked credibility, and that the setting was "odious rather than tragic".

On its publication, many American reviewers interpreted the book as a statement on British Prime Minister Clement Attlee's socialist policies, or the policies of Joseph Stalin. Serving as prime minister from 1945 to 1951, Attlee implemented wide-ranging social reforms and changes in the British economy following World War II. American trade union leader Francis A. Hanson wanted to recommend the book to his members but was concerned with some of the reviews it had received, so Orwell wrote a letter to him. In his letter, Orwell described his book as a satire, and said:

I do not believe that the kind of society I describe will necessarily arrive, but I believe (allowing, of course, for the fact that the book is a satire) that something resembling it could arrive...[it is] a show...[of the] perversions to which a centralised economy is liable and which have already been partly realisable in communism and fascism.

-  George Orwell, Letter to Francis A. Hanson

Throughout its publication history, Nineteen Eighty-Four has been either banned or legally challenged as subversive or ideologically corrupting, like the dystopian novels (1924) by Yevgeny Zamyatin, Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley, Darkness at Noon (1940) by Arthur Koestler, (1940) by Karin Boye, and Fahrenheit 451 (1953) by Ray Bradbury.

On 5 November 2019, the BBC named Nineteen Eighty-Four on its list of the 100 most influential novels.

According to Czesław Miłosz, an exile from Stalinist Poland, the book also made an impression behind the Iron Curtain. Writing in The Captive Mind, he stated "[a] few have become acquainted with Orwell's 1984; because it is both difficult to obtain and dangerous to possess, it is known only to certain members of the Inner Party. Orwell fascinates them through his insight into details they know well ... Even those who know Orwell only by hearsay are amazed that a writer who never lived in Russia should have so keen a perception into its life." Writer Christopher Hitchens has called this "one of the greatest compliments that one writer has ever bestowed upon another ... Only one or two years after Orwell's death, in other words, his book about a secret book circulated only within the Inner Party was itself a secret book circulated only within the Inner Party."

In the same year as the novel's publishing, a one-hour radio adaptation was aired on the United States' NBC radio network as part of the NBC University Theatre series. The first television adaptation appeared as part of CBS's series in September 1953. BBC Television broadcast an adaptation by Nigel Kneale in December 1954. The first feature film adaptation, 1984, was released in 1956. A second feature-length adaptation, Nineteen Eighty-Four, followed in 1984, a reasonably faithful adaptation of the novel. The story has been adapted several other times to radio, television, and film; other media adaptations include theater (a musical and a play), opera, and ballet.

Nineteen Eighty-Four Russian version published in the Soviet Union in 1984. A limited edition, only for members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

The novel was banned in the Soviet Union until 1988, when the first publicly available Russian version in the country, translated by Vyacheslav Nedoshivin, was published in Kodry, a literary journal of Soviet Moldavia. In 1989, another Russian version, translated by Viktor Golyshev, was also published. Outside the Soviet Union, the first Russian version was serialised in the emigre magazine Grani in the mid-1950s, then published as a book in 1957 in Frankfurt. Another Russian version, translated by Sergei Tolstoy from French version, was published in Rome in 1966. These translations were smuggled into the Soviet Union, which became quite popular among dissidents. Some underground published translations also appeared in the Soviet Union, for example, Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov translated the novel from German version into a Russian version.

For Soviet elite, as early as 1959, according to the order of the Ideological Department of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, the Foreign Literature Publishers secretly issued a Russian version of the novel, for the senior officers of the Communist Party.

In the People's Republic of China, the first Simplified Chinese version, translated by Dong Leshan, was serialised in the periodical Selected Translations from Foreign Literature in 1979, for senior officials and intellectuals deemed politically reliable enough. In 1985, the Chinese version was published by Huacheng Publishing House, as a restricted publication. It was first available to the general public in 1988, by the same Publisher. Amy Hawkins and Jeffrey Wasserstrom of The Atlantic stated in 2019 that the book is widely available in Mainland China for several reasons: the general public by and large no longer reads books; because the elites who do read books feel connected to the ruling party anyway; and because the Communist Party sees being too aggressive in blocking cultural products as a liability. The authors stated "It was-and remains-as easy to buy 1984 and Animal Farm in Shenzhen or Shanghai as it is in London or Los Angeles." They also stated that "The assumption is not that Chinese people can't figure out the meaning of 1984, but that the small number of people who will bother to read it won't pose much of a threat." British journalist Michael Rank argued that it is only because the novel is set in London and written by a foreigner that the Chinese authorities believe it has nothing to do with China.

By 1989, Nineteen Eighty-Four had been translated into 65 languages, more than any other novel in English at that time.

"Happy 1984" (in Spanish or Portuguese) stencil graffito, denoting mind control via a PlayStation controller, on a standing piece of the Berlin Wall, 2005

The effect of Nineteen Eighty-Four on the English language is extensive; the concepts of Big Brother, Room 101, the Thought Police, thoughtcrime, unperson, memory hole (oblivion), doublethink (simultaneously holding and believing contradictory beliefs) and Newspeak (ideological language) have become common phrases for denoting totalitarian authority. Doublespeak and groupthink are both deliberate elaborations of doublethink, and the adjective "Orwellian" means similar to Orwell's writings, especially Nineteen Eighty-Four. The practice of ending words with "-speak" (such as mediaspeak) is drawn from the novel. Orwell is perpetually associated with 1984; in July 1984, an asteroid was discovered by Antonín Mrkos and named after Orwell.

References to the themes, concepts and plot of Nineteen Eighty-Four have appeared frequently in other works, especially in popular music and video entertainment. An example is the worldwide hit reality television show Big Brother, in which a group of people live together in a large house, isolated from the outside world but continuously watched by television cameras.

In November 2012, the US government argued before the US Supreme Court that it wants to continue utilising GPS tracking of individuals without first seeking a warrant. In response, Justice Stephen Breyer questioned what that means for a democratic society by referencing Nineteen Eighty-Four. Justice Breyer asked, "If you win this case, then there is nothing to prevent the police or the government from monitoring 24 hours a day the public movement of every citizen of the United States. So if you win, you suddenly produce what sounds like Nineteen Eighty-Four... "

The book touches on the invasion of privacy and ubiquitous surveillance. From mid-2013 it was publicised that the NSA has been secretly monitoring and storing global internet traffic, including the bulk data collection of email and phone call data. Sales of Nineteen Eighty-Four increased by up to seven times within the first week of the 2013 mass surveillance leaks. The book again topped the Amazon.com sales charts in 2017 after a controversy involving Kellyanne Conway using the phrase " alternative facts" to explain discrepancies with the media.

Nineteen Eighty-Four was number three on the list of "Top Check Outs Of All Time" by the New York Public Library.

Nineteen Eighty-Four entered the public domain on 1 January 2021, 70 calendar years after Orwell's death, in much of the world. It is still under copyright in the US until 95 years after publication, or 2044.

Brave New World comparisons

In October 1949, after reading Nineteen Eighty-Four, Huxley sent a letter to Orwell in which he argued that it would be more efficient for rulers to stay in power by the softer touch by allowing citizens to seek pleasure to control them rather than use brute force. He wrote:

Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World.

...

Within the next generation I believe that the world's rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.

In the decades since the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, there have been numerous comparisons to Huxley's Brave New World, which had been published 17 years earlier, in 1932. They are both predictions of societies dominated by a central government and are both based on extensions of the trends of their times. However, members of the ruling class of Nineteen Eighty-Four use brutal force, torture and harsh mind control to keep individuals in line, while rulers in Brave New World keep the citizens in line by drugs, hypnosis, genetic conditioning and pleasurable distractions. Regarding censorship, in Nineteen Eighty-Four the government tightly controls information to keep the population in line, but in Huxley's world, so much information is published that readers do not know which information is relevant, and what can be disregarded.

Elements of both novels can be seen in modern-day societies, with Huxley's vision being more dominant in the West and Orwell's vision more prevalent with dictatorships, including those in communist countries (such as in modern-day China and North Korea), as is pointed out in essays that compare the two novels, including Huxley's own Brave New World Revisited.

Comparisons with later dystopian novels like The Handmaid's Tale, Virtual Light, The Private Eye and The Children of Men have also been drawn.

In 1955, an episode of BBC's The Goon Show, 1985, was broadcast, written by Spike Milligan and Eric Sykes and based on Nigel Kneale's television adaptation. It was re-recorded about a month later with the same script but a slightly different cast. 1985 parodies many of the main scenes in Orwell's novel.

In 1970, the American rock group Spirit released the song "1984" based on Orwell's novel.

In 1973, ex-Soft Machine bassist Hugh Hopper released an album called 1984 on the Columbia label (UK), consisting of instrumentals with Orwellian titles such as "Miniluv", "Minipax", "Minitrue", and so forth.

In 1974, David Bowie released the album Diamond Dogs, which is thought to be loosely based on the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. It includes the tracks "We Are The Dead", "1984" and "Big Brother". Before the album was made, Bowie's management (MainMan) had planned for Bowie and Tony Ingrassia (MainMan's creative consultant) to co-write and direct a musical production of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, but Orwell's widow refused to give MainMan the rights.

In 1977, the British rock band The Jam released the album This Is the Modern World, which includes the track "Standards" by Paul Weller. This track concludes with the lyrics "...and ignorance is strength, we have God on our side, look, you know what happened to Winston."

In 1984, Ridley Scott directed a television commercial, "1984", to launch Apple's Macintosh computer. The advert stated, "1984 won't be like 1984", suggesting that the Apple Mac would be freedom from Big Brother, i.e., the IBM PC.

An episode of , called "The God Complex", depicts an alien ship disguised as a hotel containing Room 101-like spaces, and also, like the novel, quotes the nursery rhyme "Oranges and Lemons".

The two part episode Chain of Command on Star Trek: The Next Generation bears some resemblances to the novel.

Radiohead's 2003 single "2 + 2 = 5", from their album Hail to the Thief, is Orwellian by title and content. Thom Yorke states, "I was listening to a lot of political programs on BBC Radio 4. I found myself writing down little nonsense phrases, those Orwellian euphemisms that [the British and American governments] are so fond of. They became the background of the record."

In September 2009, the English progressive rock band Muse released The Resistance, which included songs influenced by Nineteen Eighty-Four.

In Marilyn Manson's autobiography The Long Hard Road Out of Hell, he states: "I was thoroughly terrified by the idea of the end of the world and the Antichrist. So I became obsessed with it... reading prophetic books like... 1984 by George Orwell..."

English band Bastille references the novel in their song "Back to the Future", the fifth track on their 2022 album Give Me the Future, in the opening lyrics: "Feels like we danced into a nightmare/We're living 1984/If doublethink's no longer fiction/We'll dream of Huxley's Island shores."

Released in 2004, KAKU P-Model/Susumu Hirasawa's song Big Brother directly references 1984, and the album itself is about a fictional dystopia in a distant future.

Aubrey, Crispin; Chilton, Paul, eds. (1983). Nineteen Eighty-four in 1984: Autonomy, Control, and Communication (repr. ed.). London: Comedia Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-906890-42-4.

Bloom, Harold, George Orwell's 1984 (2009), Facts on File, Inc. ISBN 978-1-4381-1468-2

Di Nucci, Ezio and Storrie, Stefan (editors), 1984 and Philosophy: Is Resistance Futile? (2018), Open Court Publishing Company. ISBN 978-0-8126-9985-2

Goldsmith, Jack and Nussbaum, Martha, On Nineteen Eighty-Four: Orwell and Our Future (2010), Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-1-4008-2664-3

Hillegas, Mark R. (1967). The Future as Nightmare: H. G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians. Southern Illinois University Press. ISBN 978-0-8093-0676-3

Howe, Irving, ed. (1983). 1984 Revisited: Totalitarianism in Our Century. New York: Harper Row. ISBN 978-0-06-080660-6.

Orwell, George (1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four. A novel. London: Secker & Warburg.

Orwell, George (1984). Davison, Peter (ed.). Nineteen Eighty-Four: The Facsimile Manuscript. London, United Kingdom: Secker & Warburg. ISBN 978-0-436-35022-1 - via Internet Archive.

Orwell, George (1977). 1984. Erich Fromm (foreword) (reissue ed.). Signet Classics. ISBN 978-0-451-52493-5.

Orwell, George. 1984 (Vietnamese edition), translation by Đặng Phương-Nghi, French preface by Bertrand Latour ISBN 978-0-9774224-5-6.

Plank, Robert, George Orwell's Guide Through Hell: A Psychological Study of 1984 (1994), Borgo Pres. ISBN 978-0-89370-413-1

Smith, David; Mosher, Michael (1984). Orwell for Beginners (1st ed.). [London], England: Writers and Readers Pub. Cooperative. ISBN 978-0-86316-066-0.

Steinhoff, William R. (1975). George Orwell and the Origins of 1984. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ISBN 978-0-472-87400-2.

Taylor, D. J. On Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Biography (2019), Abrams. ISBN 978-1-68335-684-4

Tuccille, Jerome (1975). Who's Afraid of 1984? The case for optimism in looking ahead to the 1980s. New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House Publishers. ISBN 978-0-87000-308-0 - via Internet Archive.

Waddell, Nathan (editor), The Cambridge Companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four (2020), Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-108-84109-2

West, W. J. (1992). The Larger Evils - Nineteen Eighty-Four: the Truth Behind the Satire. Edinburgh: Canongate Press. ISBN 978-0-86241-382-8.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Nineteen Eighty-Four (also published as 1984 ) is a dystopian novel and cautionary tale by English writer George Orwell. It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and final book completed in his lifetime. Thematically, it centres on the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance and repressive regimentation of people and behaviours within society.

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Written 1948

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Beyond This Horizon is a science fiction novel by American writer Robert A. Heinlein. It was originally published as a two-part serial in Astounding Science Fiction (April, May 1942, under the pseudonym Anson MacDonald) and then as a single volume by Fantasy Press in 1948.

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HG Wells emphasises the fact that the future can never be completely utopian.

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Is it really a source?

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Should I read each of the books, but in graphic novel form?

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Nearly 2018; what do I think of the future?

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See how they saw the future: how do they feel today?

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Mom says to read books; not enough time! Possibly: Read chunks of book pointed out by summaries.

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All author's had another occupation in the scientific/education field.
-HG Wells-historian
-Isaac Asimov-prof. of biochemistry
-Arthur C. Clark-Inventor

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How did the author's life and hopes affect writing?

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Landed July 20th, 1969.

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 Sources and Their Written/Produced Dates

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 Sources and Their Written/Produced Dates

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-HG Wells "The Time Machine"-1895
-Isaac Asimov "Nightfall"-1941
-Robert A Heinlein "Beyond This Horizon"-1948
-George Orwell "1984"-1949
-Arthur C Clarke "2001: A Space Odyssey"-1968

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H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine" and Robert A. Heinlein's "Beyond This Horizon" were both reprinted in "Two Compete Science Fiction Books", but in different editions. Wells in 1951, Heinlein in 1942.

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Nightfall (Asimov novelette and novel) - Wikipedia

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Nightfall (Asimov novelette and novel) - Wikipedia

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Written in 1941.
Focuses more on the future of technology

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Nightfall (Asimov novelette and novel) - Wikipedia

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" Nightfall" is a 1941 science fiction novelette by American writer Isaac Asimov about the coming of darkness to the people of a planet ordinarily illuminated by sunlight at all times. It was adapted into a novel with Robert Silverberg in 1990.

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Although written in 1895, still possible source.
Focuses on future of technology and prospect of time travel.

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The Time Machine is a post-apocalyptic science fiction novella by H. G. Wells, published in 1895. The work is generally credited with the popularization of the concept of time travel by using a vehicle or device to travel purposely and selectively forward or backward through time. The term "time machine", coined by Wells, is now almost universally used to refer to such a vehicle or device.

Utilizing a frame story set in then-present Victorian England, Wells' text focuses on a recount of the otherwise anonymous Time Traveller's journey into the far future. A work of future history and speculative evolution, Time Machine is interpreted in modern times as a commentary on the increasing inequality and class divisions of Wells' era, which he projects as giving rise to two separate human species: the fair, childlike Eloi, and the savage, simian Morlocks, distant descendants of the contemporary upper and lower classes respectively. It is believed that Wells' depiction of the Eloi as a race living in plenitude and abandon was inspired by the utopic romance novel News from Nowhere (1890), though Wells' universe in the novel is notably more savage and brutal.

In his 1931 preface to the book, Wells wrote that The Time Machine seemed "a very undergraduate performance to its now mature writer, as he looks over it once more", though he states that "the writer feels no remorse for this youthful effort". However, critics have praised the novella's handling of its thematic concerns, with Marina Warner writing that the book was the most significant contribution to understanding fragments of desire before Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, with the novel "[conveying] how close he felt to the melancholy seeker after a door that he once opened on to a luminous vision and could never find again".

The Time Machine has been adapted into two feature films of the same name, as well as two television versions and many comic book adaptations. It has also indirectly inspired many more works of fiction in many media productions.

Wells had considered the notion of time travel before, in a short story titled " The Chronic Argonauts" (1888). This work, published in his college newspaper, was the foundation for The Time Machine.

He frequently stated that he had thought of using some of this material in a series of articles in the Pall Mall Gazette, but in response to a request by W. E. Henley, the editor of National Observer, he rewrote "The Chronic Argonauts" into a series of seven loosely connected and fictionalized essays which were anonymously published in the newspaper from 17 March to 23 June 1894. The series was never completed as Henley stepped down from his role as editor in National Observer. With his encouragement, Wells continued to work on the story, and at the end of the year when Henley was given the position as editor of Heinemann's periodical The New Review, he arranged for the story to be published there in serialized form in the January to May 1895 editions instead, which Wells was paid £100 (equal to about £12,000 today) for. Henry Holt and Company published the first book edition (possibly prepared from a different manuscript) on 7 May 1895; Heinemann published an English edition on 29 May. These two editions are different textually and are commonly referred to as the "Holt text" and "Heinemann text", respectively. Nearly all modern reprints reproduce the Heinemann text.

The story reflects Wells's own socialist political views, his view on life and abundance, and the contemporary angst about industrial relations. It is also influenced by Ray Lankester's theories about social degeneration and shares many elements with Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel Vril, the Power of the Coming Race (1871). It is also thought that Wells' Eloi race shares many features with the works of other English socialists, most notably William Morris and his work News from Nowhere (1890), in which money is depicted as irrelevant and work is merely undertaken as a form of pleasure. Other science fiction works of the period, including Edward Bellamy's novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888) and the later film Metropolis (1927), dealt with similar themes. In his later reassessment of the book, published as the 1931 preface to The Time Machine, Wells wrote that the text seemed to him "a very undergraduate performance to its now mature writer, as he looks over it once more", though he also claims that "the writer feels no remorse for this youthful effort". His preface also notes that the text has "lasted as long as the diamond-framed safety bicycle, which came in at about the date of its first publication", and is "assured it will outlive him", attesting to the power of the book.

Based on Wells's personal experiences and childhood, the working class literally spent a lot of their time underground. His own family would spend most of their time in a dark basement kitchen when not being occupied in their father's shop. Later, his own mother would work as a housekeeper in a house with tunnels below, where the staff and servants lived in underground quarters. A medical journal published in 1905 would focus on these living quarters for servants in poorly ventilated dark basements. In his early teens, Wells became a draper's apprentice, having to work in a basement for hours on end.

This work is an early example of the Dying Earth subgenre. The portion of the novella that sees the Time Traveller in a distant future where the sun is huge and red also places The Time Machine within the realm of eschatology; that is, the study of the end times, the end of the world, and the ultimate destiny of humankind.

Holt, Rinehart & Winston re-published the book in 2000, paired with The War of the Worlds, and commissioned Michael Koelsch to illustrate a new cover art.

The Time Machine was reprinted in Two Complete Science-Adventure Books in 1951

A Victorian English scientist and gentleman inventor, identified by a narrator simply as the Time Traveller, lives in Richmond, Surrey.

He explains to his weekly dinner guests that time is a fourth dimension and demonstrates a tabletop model machine for travelling through it. He reveals he has built a machine capable of carrying a person through time, and he returns at dinner the following week to recount what he did with it.

In the new narrative, the Time Traveller tests his device. At first, he thinks nothing has happened but soon finds out he went five hours into the future. He continues forward and sees his house disappear and turn into a lush garden. The Traveller stops in A.D. 802,701, where he meets the Eloi, a society of small, elegant, childlike adults. They live in small communities within large and futuristic yet slowly deteriorating buildings and adhere to a fruit-based diet. His efforts to communicate with them are hampered by their lack of curiosity or discipline. They appear happy and carefree but fear the dark, and particularly moonless nights. They give no response to mysterious nocturnal disappearances, possibly because the thought of it alone frightens them. After exploring the area around the Eloi's residences, the Traveller reaches the top of a hill overlooking London. He concludes that the entire planet has become a garden, with little trace of human society or engineering from the hundreds of thousands of years prior, and that communism has at last been achieved.

Returning to the site where he arrived, the Traveller is shocked to find his machine missing; it has been dragged by some unknown party into a nearby structure with heavy doors, locked from the inside, which resembles a Sphinx. Luckily, the machine cannot travel through time without its levers, which he had removed before leaving it. Later, he is approached by the Morlocks, ape-like troglodytes who live in darkness underground and surface only at night. Exploring one of many "wells" that lead to the Morlocks' dwellings, he discovers the machinery and industry that makes the above-ground paradise of the Eloi possible. He alters his theory, speculating that the human race has evolved into two species: the favoured aristocracy has become the intellectually degraded Eloi, and their mechanical servants have become the brutal light-fearing Morlocks.

Deducing that the Morlocks have taken his time machine, he explores their tunnels, learning that due to a lack of any other means of sustenance, they feed on the Eloi. The Traveller theorizes that intelligence is the result of and response to danger; with no real challenges facing the Eloi, they have lost the spirit, intelligence, and physical fitness of humanity at its peak.

Meanwhile, he saves an Eloi named Weena from drowning as none of the other Eloi take any notice of her plight, and with time, they develop an affectionate relationship. He takes Weena with him on an expedition to "The Palace of Green Porcelain", a distant structure which turns out to be a derelict museum. Here, the Traveller finds a fresh supply of matches and fashions a crude weapon against Morlocks, whom he must fight to get his machine back. He plans to take Weena back to his own time. Because the long and tiring journey back to Weena's home is too much for them, they stop in the forest for the night. They are eventually overcome by Morlocks, and Weena faints. The Traveller escapes when a small fire he had left behind them to distract the Morlocks turns into a forest fire; Weena and the Morlocks are lost in the fire, and the Traveller is devastated over his loss.

The Morlocks open the Sphinx and use the machine as bait to capture the Traveller, not understanding that he will use it to escape. He reattaches the levers before travelling further ahead to roughly 30 million years from his own time. There, he sees some of the last living things on a dying Earth: reddish crab-like creatures slowly wandering the blood-red beaches chasing enormous butterflies, in a world covered in simple lichenous vegetation. He continues to make jumps forward through time, seeing Earth's rotation gradually cease and the sun grow larger, redder, and dimmer, and the world falling silent and freezing as the last degenerate living things die out.

Overwhelmed, he returns to his own time, arriving at the laboratory just three hours after he originally left. He arrives late to his own dinner party, whereupon, after eating, the Traveller relates his adventures to his disbelieving visitors, producing as evidence two strange white flowers Weena had put in his pocket.

The original narrator relates that he returned to the Traveller's house the next day, finding him preparing for another journey and promising to return in a short time. After waiting for three years, however, the Narrator states that the Traveller has not returned from his journey.

A section from the thirteenth chapter of the serial published in New Review (May 1895, partway down p. 577 to p. 580, line 29) does not appear in either of the 1895 editions of the book. It was drafted at the suggestion of Wells's editor, William Ernest Henley, who wanted Wells to "oblige your editor" by lengthening the text with, among other things, an illustration of "the ultimate degeneracy" of humanity. "There was a slight struggle," Wells later recalled, "between the writer and W. E. Henley who wanted, he said, to put a little 'writing' into the tale. But the writer was in reaction from that sort of thing, the Henley interpolations were cut out again, and he had his own way with his text." This portion of the story was published elsewhere as " The Final Men" (1940) and " The Grey Man". The deleted text was also published by Forrest J Ackerman in an issue of the American edition of Perry Rhodan.

The deleted text recounts an incident immediately after the Traveller's escape from the Morlocks. He finds himself in the distant future in a frost-covered moorland with simple grasses and black bushes, populated with furry, hopping herbivores resembling kangaroos. He stuns or kills one with a rock, and upon closer examination realises they are probably the descendants of humans / Eloi / Morlocks. A gigantic, centipede-like arthropod approaches and the Traveller flees into the next day, finding that the creature has apparently eaten the tiny humanoid. The Dover Press and Easton Press editions of the novella restore this deleted segment.

Significant scholarly commentary on The Time Machine began from the early 1960s, initially contained in various broad studies of Wells's early novels (such as Bernard Bergonzi's The Early H.G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances) and studies of utopias/dystopias in science fiction (such as Mark R. Hillegas's The Future as Nightmare: H.G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians). Much critical and textual work was done in the 1970s, including the tracing of the very complex publication history of the text, its drafts, and unpublished fragments.

A further resurgence in scholarship came around the time of the novella's centenary in 1995, and a major outcome of this was the 1995 conference and substantial anthology of academic papers, which was collected in print as H.G. Wells's Perennial Time Machine. This publication then allowed the development of a guide-book for academic study at Master's and Ph.D. level: H.G. Wells's The Time Machine: A Reference Guide.

The scholarly journal The Wellsian has published around twenty articles on The Time Machine, and a U.S. academic journal The Undying Fire, devoted to H.G. Wells studies, has published three articles since its inception in 2002.

Subtext of the names Eloi and Morlock

Wells's source for the name Morlock is less clear. It may refer to the Canaanite god Moloch associated with child sacrifice. The name Morlock may also be a play on mollocks - what miners might call themselves - or a Scots word for rubbish, or a reference to the Morlacchi community in Dalmatia.

The Time Machine can be read as a symbolic novel. The time machine itself can be viewed as a symbol, and there are several symbols in the narrative, including the Sphinx, flowers, and fire.

The statue of the Sphinx is the place where the Morlocks hide the time machine and references the Sphinx in the story of Oedipus who gives a riddle that he must first solve before he can pass. The Sphinx appeared on the cover of the first London edition as requested by Wells and would have been familiar to his readers.

The white flowers can symbolize Weena's devotion and innocence and contrast with the machinery of the time machine. They are the only proof that the Time Traveller's story is true.

Fire symbolizes civilization: the Time Traveller uses it to ward off the Morlocks, but it escapes his control and turns into a forest fire.

Escape radio broadcasts

The CBS radio anthology adapted The Time Machine twice, in 1948 starring Jeff Corey, and again in 1950 starring Lawrence Dobkin as the traveller. A script adapted by Irving Ravetch was used in both episodes. The Time Traveller was named Dudley and was accompanied by his skeptical friend Fowler as they travelled to the year 100,080.

In 1994, an audio drama was released on cassette and CD by Alien Voices, starring Leonard Nimoy as the Time Traveller (named John in this adaptation) and John de Lancie as David Filby. John de Lancie's children, Owen de Lancie and Keegan de Lancie, played the parts of the Eloi. The drama is approximately two hours long and is more faithful to the story than several of the film adaptations. Some changes are made to reflect modern language and knowledge of science.

In 2000, Alan Young read The Time Machine for 7th Voyage Productions, Inc., in 2016 to celebrate the 120th Anniversary of H.G. Wells's novella.

Robert Glenister starred as the Time Traveller, with William Gaunt as H. G. Wells in a new 100-minute radio dramatisation by Philip Osment, directed by Jeremy Mortimer as part of a BBC Radio Science Fiction season. This was the first adaptation of the novella for British radio. It was first broadcast on 22 February 2009 on BBC Radio 3 and later published as a 2-CD BBC audio book.

The other cast members were:

Donnla Hughes as Martha

Gunnar Cauthery as Young H. G. Wells

Stephen Critchlow as Filby, friend of the young Wells

Chris Pavlo as Bennett, friend of the young Wells

Manjeet Mann as Mrs. Watchett, the Traveller's housemaid

Jill Crado as Weena, one of the Eloi and the Traveller's partner

Robert Lonsdale, Inam Mirza, and Dan Starkey as other characters

The adaptation retained the nameless status of the Time Traveller and set it as a true story told to the young Wells by the time traveller, which Wells then re-tells as an older man to the US journalist, Martha, whilst firewatching on the roof of Broadcasting House during the Blitz. It also retained the deleted ending from the novella as a recorded message sent back to Wells from the future by the traveller using a prototype of his machine, with the traveller escaping the anthropoid creatures to 30 million AD at the end of the universe before disappearing or dying there.

On 5 September 2017, Big Finish Productions released an adaptation of The Time Machine. This adaptation was written by Marc Platt and starred Ben Miles as the Time Traveller.

Platt explained in an interview that adapting The Time Machine to audio was not much different from writing Doctor Who, and that he could see where some of the roots of early Doctor Who came from.

The first visual adaptation of the book was a live teleplay broadcast from Alexandra Palace on 25 January 1949 by the BBC, which starred Russell Napier as the Time Traveller and Mary Donn as Weena. No recording of this live broadcast was made; the only record of the production is the script and a few black and white still photographs. A reading of the script, however, suggests that this teleplay remained fairly faithful to the book.

In 1960, the novella was made into a US science fiction film, also known promotionally as H.G. Wells's The Time Machine. The film starred Rod Taylor, Alan Young, and Yvette Mimieux. The film was produced and directed by George Pal, who also filmed a 1953 version of Wells's The War of the Worlds. The film won an Academy Award for time-lapse photographic effects showing the world changing rapidly.

In 1993, Rod Taylor hosted Time Machine: The Journey Back reuniting him with Alan Young and Whit Bissell, featuring the only sequel to Mr. Pal's classic film, written by the original screenwriter, David Duncan. In the special were Academy Award-winners special effect artists Wah Chang and Gene Warren.

Sunn Classic Pictures produced a television film version of The Time Machine as a part of their " Classics Illustrated" series in 1978. It was a modernization of the Wells's story, making the Time Traveller a 1970s scientist working for a fictional US defence contractor, "the Mega Corporation". Dr. Neil Perry ( John Beck), the Time Traveller, is described as one of Mega's most reliable contributors by his senior co-worker Branly (Whit Bissell, an alumnus of the 1960 adaptation). Perry's skill is demonstrated by his rapid reprogramming of an off-course missile, averting a disaster that could destroy Los Angeles. His reputation secures a grant of $20 million for his time machine project. Although nearing completion, the corporation wants Perry to put the project on hold so that he can head a military weapon development project. Perry accelerates work on the time machine, permitting him to test it before being forced to work on the new project.

The 1960 film was remade in 2002, starring Guy Pearce as the Time Traveller, a mechanical engineering professor named Alexander Hartdegen, Mark Addy as his colleague David Filby, Sienna Guillory as Alex's ill-fated fiancée Emma, Phyllida Law as Mrs. Watchit, and Jeremy Irons as the Uber-Morlock. Playing a quick cameo as a shopkeeper was Alan Young, who featured in the 1960 film. (H.G. Wells himself can also be said to have a "cameo" appearance, in the form of a photograph on the wall of Alex's home, near the front door.)

The film was directed by Wells's great-grandson Simon Wells, with an even more revised plot that incorporated the ideas of paradoxes and changing the past. The place is changed from Richmond, Surrey, to downtown New York City, where the Time Traveller moves forward in time to find answers to his questions on 'Practical Application of Time Travel;' first in 2030 New York, to witness an orbital lunar catastrophe in 2037, before moving on to 802,701 for the main plot. He later briefly finds himself in 635,427,810 with toxic clouds and a world laid waste (presumably by the Morlocks) with devastation and Morlock artifacts stretching out to the horizon.

It was met with mixed reviews and earned $56 million before VHS/DVD sales. The Time Machine used a design that was very reminiscent of the one in the Pal film but was much larger and employed polished turned brass construction, along with rotating glass reminiscent of the Fresnel lenses common to lighthouses. (In Wells's original book, the Time Traveller mentioned his 'scientific papers on optics'). Hartdegen becomes involved with a female Eloi named Mara, played by Samantha Mumba, who essentially takes the place of Weena, from the earlier versions of the story. In this film, the Eloi have, as a tradition, preserved a "stone language" that is identical to English. The Morlocks are much more barbaric and agile, and the Time Traveller has a direct impact on the plot.

Time After Time (1979 film)

In Time After Time, H.G. Wells invents a time machine and shows it to some friends in a manner similar to the first part of the novella. He does not know that one of his friends is Jack The Ripper. The Ripper, fleeing police, escapes to the future (1979), but without a key which prevents the machine from remaining in the future. When it does return home, Wells follows him in order to protect the future (which he imagines to be a utopia) from the Ripper. In turn, the film inspired a 2017 TV series of the same name.

Classics Illustrated was the first to adapt The Time Machine into a comic book format, issuing an American edition in July 1956.

The Classics Illustrated version was published in French by Classiques Illustres in Dec 1957, and Classics Illustrated Strato Publications (Australian) in 1957, and Kuvitettuja Klassikkoja (a Finnish edition) in November 1957. There were also Classics Illustrated Greek editions in 1976, Swedish in 1987, German in 1992 and 2001, and a Canadian reprint of the English edition in 2008.

In 1976, Marvel Comics published a new version of The Time Machine, as #2 in their Marvel Classics Comics series, with art by Alex Niño. (This adaptation was originally published in 1973 by Pendulum Press as part of their Pendulum Now Age Classics series; it was colorized and reprinted by Marvel in 1976.)

In 1977, Polish painter Waldemar Andrzejewski adapted the novel as a 22-page comic book, written in Polish by Antoni Wolski.

From April 1990, Eternity Comics published a three-issue miniseries adaptation of The Time Machine, written by Bill Spangler and illustrated by John Ross - this was collected as a trade paperback graphic novel in 1991.

In 2018, US imprint Insight Comics published an adaptation of the novel, as part of their "H. G. Wells" series of comic books.

Wells's novella has become one of the cornerstones of science-fiction literature. As a result, it has spawned many offspring. Works expanding on Wells's story include:

La Belle Valence by Théo Varlet and André Blandin (1923) in which a squadron of World War I soldiers find the Time Machine and are transported back to the Spanish town of Valencia in the 14th century. Translated by Brian Stableford as Timeslip Troopers (2012).

Die Rückkehr der Zeitmaschine (1946) by Egon Friedell was the first direct sequel. It dwells heavily on the technical details of the machine and the time-paradoxes it might cause when the time machine was used to visit the past. After visiting a futuristic 1995 where London is in the sky and the weather is created by companies, as well as the year 2123 where he meets two Egyptians who study history using intuition instead of actual science, the time traveler, who is given the name James MacMorton, travels to the past and ends up weeks before the time machine was built, causing it to disappear. He is forced to use the miniature version of his time machine, which already existed at that time, to send telegraphic messages through time to a friend (the author), instructing him to send him things that will allow him to build a new machine. After returning to the present, he tells his friend what happened. The 24,000-word German original was translated into English by Eddy C. Bertin in the 1940s and eventually published in paperback as The Return of the Time Machine (1972, DAW).

The Hertford Manuscript by Richard Cowper, first published in 1976. It features a "manuscript", which reports the Time Traveller's activities after the end of the original story. According to this manuscript, the Time Traveller disappeared, because his Time Machine had been damaged by the Morlocks without him knowing it. He only found out when it stopped operating during his next attempted time travel. He found himself on 27 August 1665, in London during the outbreak of the Great Plague of London. The rest of the novel is devoted to his efforts to repair the Time Machine and leave this time period before getting infected with the disease. He also has an encounter with Robert Hooke. He eventually dies of the disease on 20 September 1665. The story gives a list of subsequent owners of the manuscript until 1976. It also gives the name of the Time Traveller as Robert James Pensley, born to James and Martha Pensley in 1850 and disappearing without trace on 18 June 1894.

The Space Machine by Christopher Priest, first published in 1976. Because of the movement of planets, stars, and galaxies, for a time machine to stay in one spot on Earth as it travels through time, it must also follow the Earth's trajectory through space. In Priest's book, a travelling salesman damages a Time Machine similar to the original, and arrives on Mars, just before the start of the invasion described in The War of the Worlds. H.G. Wells appears as a minor character.

Morlock Night by K. W. Jeter, first published in 1979. A steampunk fantasy novel in which the Morlocks, having studied the Traveller's machine, duplicate it and invade Victorian London. This culminates in Westminster Abbey being used as a butcher shop of human beings by the Morlocks in the 20th century, and a total disruption and collapse of the time stream. There the hero and Merlin must find - and destroy - the Time Machine, to restore the time stream and history.

Time Machine II by George Pal and Joe Morhaim, published in 1981. The Time Traveller, named George, and the pregnant Weena try to return to his time, but instead land in the London Blitz, dying during a bombing raid. Their newborn son is rescued by an American ambulance driver and grows up in the United States under the name Christopher Jones. Sought out by the lookalike son of James Filby, Jones goes to England to collect his inheritance, leading ultimately to George's journals, and the Time Machine's original plans. He builds his own machine with 1970s upgrades and seeks his parents in the future. Pal also worked on a detailed synopsis for a third sequel, which was partly filmed for a 1980s U.S. TV special on the making of Pal's film version of The Time Machine, using the original actors. This third sequel, the plot of which does not seem to fit with Pal's second, opens with the Time Traveller enjoying a happy life with Weena, in a future world in which the Morlocks have died out. He and his son return to save Filby in World War I. This act changes the future, causing the nuclear war not to happen. He and his son are thus cut off from Weena in the far future. The Time Traveller thus has to solve a dilemma - allow his friend to die, and cause the later death of millions, or give up Weena forever.

The Man Who Loved Morlocks (1981) and The Truth about Weena (1998) are two different sequels, the former a novel and the latter a short story, by David J. Lake. Each of them concerns the Time Traveller's return to the future. In the former, he discovers that he cannot enter any period in time he has already visited, forcing him to travel into the further future, where he finds love with a woman whose race evolved from Morlock stock. In the latter, he is accompanied by Wells and succeeds in rescuing Weena and bringing her back to the 1890s, where her political ideas cause a peaceful revolution.

The Time Ships, by Stephen Baxter, first published in 1995. This sequel was officially authorised by the Wells estate to mark the centenary of the original's publication. In its wide-ranging narrative, the Traveller's desire to return and rescue Weena is thwarted by the fact that he has changed history (by telling his tale to his friends, one of whom published the account). With a Morlock (in the new history, the Morlocks are intelligent and cultured), he travels through the multiverse as increasingly complicated timelines unravel around him, eventually meeting mankind's far future descendants, whose ambition is to travel back to the birth of the universe, and modify the way the multiverse will unfold. This sequel includes many nods to the prehistory of Wells's story in the names of characters and chapters.

In "The Richmond Enigma" by John DeChancie, Sherlock Holmes investigates the disappearance of the Time Traveler, a contemporary and, in this story, a distant relative. The intervention of Holmes and Watson succeeds in calling back the missing Time Traveler, who has resolved to prevent the time machine's existence, out of concern for the danger it could make possible. The story appeared in Sherlock Holmes in Orbit (1995)

The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down: A Dime Novel by Joe R. Lansdale, first published in The Long Ones (1999). In this story, the Time Traveller accidentally damages the space-time continuum and is transformed into the vampire-like Dark Rider.

The 2003 short story "On the Surface" by Robert J. Sawyer begins with this quote from the Wells original: "I have suspected since that the Morlocks had even partially taken it [the time machine] to pieces while trying in their dim way to grasp its purpose." In the Sawyer story, the Morlocks develop a fleet of time machines and use them to conquer the same far future Wells depicted at the end of the original, by which time, because the sun has grown red and dim and thus no longer blinds them, they can reclaim the surface of the world.

The Time Traveller and his machine appear in the story Allan and the Sundered Veil by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill, which acts as a prequel to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume One. The Time Traveller shares an adventure with fellow literary icons Allan Quatermain, John Carter, and Randolph Carter.

David Haden's novelette The Time Machine: A Sequel (2010) is a direct sequel, picking up where the original finished. The Time Traveller goes back to rescue Weena but finds the Eloi less simple than he first imagined, and time travel far more complicated.

Simon Baxter's novel The British Empire: Psychic Battalions Against the Morlocks (2010) imagines a steampunk/cyberpunk future in which the British Empire has remained the dominant world force until the Morlocks arrive from the future.

Hal Colebatch's Time-Machine Troopers (2011) (Acashic Publishers) is twice the length of the original. In it, the Time Traveller returns to the future world about 18 years after the time he escaped from the Morlocks, taking with him Robert Baden-Powell, the real-world founder of the Boy Scout movement. They set out to teach the Eloi self-reliance and self-defence against the Morlocks, but the Morlocks capture them. H.G. Wells and Winston Churchill are also featured as characters.

Paul Schullery's The Time Traveller's Tale: Chronicle of a Morlock Captivity (2012) continues the story in the voice and manner of the original Wells book. After many years' absence, the Time Traveller returns and describes his further adventures. His attempts to mobilize the Eloi in their own defense against the Morlocks failed when he was captured by the Morlocks. Much of the book is occupied with his deeply unsettling discoveries about the Morlock / Eloi symbiosis, his gradual assimilation into Morlock society, and his ultimately successful attempt to discover the true cause of humanity's catastrophic transformation into two such tragic races.

The Great Illustrated Classics in 1992 published an adaptation of Wells's novella that adds an extra destination to the Time Traveller's adventure: Stopping in 2200 AD on his way back home, he becomes caught up in a civil war between factions of a technocratic society that was established to avert ecological catastrophe.

Beyond the Time Machine by Burt Libe (2002). The first of two Time Machine sequels written by US writer Burt Libe, it continues the story of the Time Traveller: where he finally settles down, including his rescue of Weena and his subsequent family with her. Highlighted are exploits of his daughters Narra and her younger sister Belinda; coping with their 33rd-Century existence; considering their unusual past and far-Future heritage. Doing some time travelling of their own, the daughters revisit 802,701 AD, discovering that the so-called dual-specie Eloi and Morlock inhabitants actually are far more complex and complicated than their father's initial appraisal.

Tangles in Time by Burt Libe (2005). The second of two Time Machine sequels written by American writer Burt Libe, it continues the story of younger daughter Belinda, now grown at age 22. Her father (the original Time Traveller) has just died from old age, and she and Weena (her mother) now must decide what to do with the rest of their lives. Weena makes a very unusual decision, leaving Belinda to search for her own place in time. Also, with further time travel, she locates her two long-lost brothers, previously thought to be dead; she also meets and rescues a young man from the far future, finding herself involved in a very confusing relationship.

Epilogue: Time Machine Chronicles is a 2010 sequel by Jaime V. Batista

1. ^ Pilkington, Ace G. (2017). Science Fiction and Futurism: Their Terms and Ideas. McFarland. p. 137.

2. ^ Parrinder, Patrick (2000), "Science Fiction: Metaphor, Myth or Prophecy?", Science Fiction, Critical Frontiers, London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, pp. 23-34, doi:10.1007/978-1-349-62832-2_2, ISBN 978-1-349-62834-6, archived from the original on 20 March 2022

3. ^ Edward Bulwer-Lytton (2007). The Coming Race. Wesleyan University Press. p. 46. ISBN 978-0-8195-6735-2. Archived from the original on 20 March 2022.

4. ^ Beale, Lewis (3 March 2002). "Wells's Future is Forever Recurring". Film. The New York Times. Archived from the original on 15 July 2018.

5. ^ John R. Hammond (2004). H. G. Wells's The Time Machine: A Reference Guide. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 62. ISBN 978-0-313-33007-0. Archived from the original on 20 March 2022.

6. ^ Bashir, Seema (October 2017). "Christian Eschatology and Science Fiction: An Study of HG Wells' The Time Machine". The Creative Launder. 2 (4): 610-614.

7. ^ Wells, H. G. (Herbert George) (2000). The time machine; and, The war of the worlds. Internet Archive. Austin, TX : Holt, Rinehart and Winston. ISBN 978-0-03-056476-5.

8. ^ Everett Franklin Bleiler; Richard Bleiler (1990). Science-Fiction, the Early Years: A Full Description of More Than 3,000 Science-Fiction Stories from Earliest Times to the Appearance of the Genre Magazines in 1930, with author, title, and motif indexes. Kent State University Press. p. 796. ISBN 9780873384162.

9. ^ H.G. Wells's Perennial Time Machine: Selected Essays from the Centenary Conference, "The Time Machine: Past, Present, and Future". H.G. Wells's Time Machine centenary conference, 1995. University of Georgia Press. 2001.

10. ^ Wolff, Larry (2003). "The rise and fall of 'Morlacchismo': South Slavic identity in the mountains of Dalmatia". In Naimark, Norman; Case, Holly (eds.). Yugoslavia and Its Historians: Understanding the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. Stanford University Press. p. 49. ISBN 9780804780292. Archived from the original on 20 March 2022.

11. ^ Sherlock Holmes in Orbit, Archived 24 July 2019 at the Wayback Machine, John DeChancie, "The Richmond Enigma", Sherlock Holmes in Orbit, DAW Books, New York: 1995

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The Time Machine is a post-apocalyptic science fiction novella by H. G. Wells, published in 1895. The work is generally credited with the popularization of the concept of time travel by using a vehicle or device to travel purposely and selectively forward or backward through time.

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Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 - 13 August 1946) was an English writer. Prolific in many genres, he wrote more than fifty novels and dozens of short stories. His non-fiction output included works of social commentary, politics, history, popular science, satire, biography, and autobiography. Wells' science fiction novels are so well regarded that he has been called the "father of science fiction".

In addition to his fame as a writer, he was prominent in his lifetime as a forward-looking, even prophetic social critic who devoted his literary talents to the development of a progressive vision on a global scale. As a futurist, he wrote a number of utopian works and foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television and something resembling the World Wide Web. His science fiction imagined time travel, alien invasion, invisibility and biological engineering before these subjects were common in the genre. Brian Aldiss referred to Wells as the "Shakespeare of science fiction", while Charles Fort called him a "wild talent".

Wells rendered his works convincing by instilling commonplace detail alongside a single extraordinary assumption per work - dubbed "Wells's law" - leading Joseph Conrad to hail him in 1898 with "O Realist of the Fantastic!". His most notable science fiction works include The Time Machine (1895), which was his first novel, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), the military science fiction The War in the Air (1907), and the dystopian When the Sleeper Wakes (1910). Novels of social realism such as (1905) and The History of Mr Polly (1910), which describe lower-middle-class English life, led to the suggestion that he was a worthy successor to Charles Dickens, but Wells described a range of social strata and even attempted, in Tono-Bungay (1909), a diagnosis of English society as a whole. Wells was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times.

Wells's earliest specialised training was in biology, and his thinking on ethical matters took place in a Darwinian context. He was also an outspoken socialist from a young age, often (but not always, as at the beginning of the First World War) sympathising with pacifist views. In his later years, he wrote less fiction and more works expounding his political and social views, sometimes giving his profession as that of journalist. Wells was a diabetic and co-founded the charity The Diabetic Association ( Diabetes UK) in 1934.

Young Wells, "Bertie" as he was known, c.  1870s

Herbert George Wells was born at Atlas House, 162 High Street in Bromley, Kent, on 21 September 1866. Called "Bertie" by his family, he was the fourth and last child of Joseph Wells, a former domestic gardener, and at the time a shopkeeper and professional cricketer and Sarah Neal, a former domestic servant. An inheritance had allowed the family to acquire a shop in which they sold china and sporting goods, although it failed to prosper: the stock was old and worn out, and the location was poor. Joseph Wells managed to earn a meagre income, but little of it came from the shop and he received an unsteady amount of money from playing professional cricket for the Kent county team.

A defining incident of young Wells's life was an accident in 1874 that left him bedridden with a broken leg. To pass the time he began to read books from the local library, brought to him by his father. He soon became devoted to the other worlds and lives to which books gave him access; they also stimulated his desire to write. Later that year he entered Thomas Morley's Commercial Academy, a private school founded in 1849, following the bankruptcy of Morley's earlier school. The teaching was erratic, the curriculum mostly focused, Wells later said, on producing copperplate handwriting and doing the sort of sums useful to tradesmen. Wells continued at Morley's Academy until 1880. In 1877, his father, Joseph Wells, fractured his thigh. The accident effectively put an end to Joseph's career as a cricketer, and his subsequent earnings as a shopkeeper were not enough to compensate for the loss of the primary source of family income.

Wells spent the winter of 1887-88 convalescing at Uppark, where his mother, Sarah, was the housekeeper.[18]

No longer able to support themselves financially, the family instead sought to place their sons as apprentices in various occupations. From 1880 to 1883, Wells had an unhappy apprenticeship as a draper at Hide's Drapery Emporium in Southsea. His experiences at Hide's, where he worked a thirteen-hour day and slept in a dormitory with other apprentices, later inspired his novels The Wheels of Chance, The History of Mr Polly, and , which portray the life of a draper's apprentice as well as providing a critique of society's distribution of wealth.

Wells's parents had a turbulent marriage, owing primarily to his mother's being a Protestant and his father's being a freethinker. When his mother returned to work as a lady's maid (at Uppark, a country house in Sussex), one of the conditions of work was that she would not be permitted to have living space for her husband and children. Thereafter, she and Joseph lived separate lives, though they never divorced and remained faithful to each other. As a consequence, Herbert's personal troubles increased as he subsequently failed as a draper and also, later, as a chemist's assistant. However, Uppark had a magnificent library in which he immersed himself, reading many classic works, including Plato's , Thomas More's , and the works of Daniel Defoe. When he became the first doyen of science fiction as a distinct genre of fiction, Wells referenced Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in relation to his works, writing, "they belong to a class of writing which includes the story of Frankenstein."

Commemorative plaque in Midhurst, West Sussex, marking where Wells lodged while a teacher at Midhurst Grammar School between 1883 and 1884

In October 1879, Wells's mother arranged through a distant relative, Arthur Williams, for him to join the National School at Wookey in Somerset as a pupil-teacher, a senior pupil who acted as a teacher of younger children. In December that year, however, Williams was dismissed for irregularities in his qualifications and Wells was returned to Uppark. After a short apprenticeship at a chemist in nearby Midhurst and an even shorter stay as a boarder at Midhurst Grammar School, he signed his apprenticeship papers at Hyde's. In 1883, Wells persuaded his parents to release him from the apprenticeship, taking an opportunity offered by Midhurst Grammar School again to become a pupil-teacher; his proficiency in Latin and science during his earlier short stay had been remembered.

The years he spent in Southsea had been the most miserable of his life to that point, but his good fortune in securing a position at Midhurst Grammar School meant that Wells could continue his self-education in earnest. The following year, Wells won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science (later the Royal College of Science in South Kensington, which became part of Imperial College London) in London, studying biology under Thomas Henry Huxley. As an alumnus, he later helped to set up the Royal College of Science Association, of which he became the first president in 1909. Wells studied in his new school until 1887, with a weekly allowance of 21 shillings (a guinea) thanks to his scholarship. This ought to have been a comfortable sum of money (at the time many working class families had "round about a pound a week" as their entire household income), yet in his Experiment in Autobiography Wells speaks of constantly being hungry, and indeed photographs of him at the time show a youth who is very thin and malnourished.

He soon entered the Debating Society of the school. These years mark the beginning of his interest in a possible reformation of society. At first approaching the subject through Plato's Republic, he soon turned to contemporary ideas of socialism as expressed by the recently formed Fabian Society and free lectures delivered at Kelmscott House, the home of William Morris. He was also among the founders of The Science School Journal, a school magazine that allowed him to express his views on literature and society, as well as trying his hand at fiction; a precursor to his novel The Time Machine was published in the journal under the title The Chronic Argonauts. The school year 1886-87 was the last year of his studies.

Wells studying in London c. 1890

During 1888, Wells stayed in Stoke-on-Trent, living in Basford. The unique environment of The Potteries was certainly an inspiration. He wrote in a letter to a friend from the area that "the district made an immense impression on me." The inspiration for some of his descriptions in The War of the Worlds is thought to have come from his short time spent here, seeing the iron foundry furnaces burn over the city, shooting huge red light into the skies. His stay in The Potteries also resulted in the macabre short story " The Cone" (1895, contemporaneous with his famous The Time Machine), set in the north of the city.

After teaching for some time, he was briefly on the staff of Holt Academy in Wales - Wells found it necessary to supplement his knowledge relating to educational principles and methodology and entered the College of Preceptors ( College of Teachers). He later received his Licentiate and Fellowship FCP diplomas from the college. It was not until 1890 that Wells earned a Bachelor of Science degree in zoology from the University of London External Programme. In 1889-90, he managed to find a post as a teacher at Henley House School in London, where he taught A. A. Milne (whose father ran the school). His first published work was a Text-Book of Biology in two volumes (1893).

Upon leaving the Normal School of Science, Wells was left without a source of income. His aunt Mary-his father's sister-in-law-invited him to stay with her for a while, which solved his immediate problem of accommodation. During his stay at his aunt's residence, he grew increasingly interested in her daughter, Isabel, whom he later courted. To earn money, he began writing short humorous articles for journals such as The Pall Mall Gazette, later collecting these in Select Conversations with an Uncle (1895) and Certain Personal Matters (1897). So prolific did Wells become at this mode of journalism that many of his early pieces remain unidentified. According to David C. Smith, "Most of Wells's occasional pieces have not been collected, and many have not even been identified as his. Wells did not automatically receive the byline his reputation demanded until after 1896 or so .... As a result, many of his early pieces are unknown. It is obvious that many early Wells items have been lost." His success with these shorter pieces encouraged him to write book-length work, and he published his first novel, The Time Machine, in 1895.

141 Maybury Rd, Woking, where Wells lived from May 1895 until late 1896[33]

In 1891, Wells married his cousin Isabel Mary Wells (1865-1931; from 1902 Isabel Mary Smith). The couple agreed to separate in 1894, when he had fallen in love with one of his students, Amy Catherine Robbins (1872-1927; later known as Jane), with whom he moved to Woking, Surrey, in May 1895. They lived in a rented house, 'Lynton' (now No.141), Maybury Road, in the town centre for just under 18 months and married at St Pancras register office in October 1895. His short period in Woking was perhaps the most creative and productive of his whole writing career, for while there he planned and wrote The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, completed The Island of Doctor Moreau, wrote and published The Wonderful Visit and The Wheels of Chance, and began writing two other early books, When the Sleeper Wakes and Love and Mr Lewisham.

Wells's second wife, Amy Catherine "Jane" Wells

In late summer 1896, Wells and Jane moved to a larger house in Worcester Park, near Kingston upon Thames, for two years; this lasted until his poor health took them to Sandgate, near Folkestone, where he constructed a large family home, Spade House, in 1901. He had two sons with Jane: George Philip (known as "Gip"; 1901-1985) and Frank Richard (1903-1982) (grandfather of film director Simon Wells). Jane died on 6 October 1927, in Dunmow, at the age of 55, which left Wells devastated. She was cremated at Golders Green, with friends of the couple present including George Bernard Shaw.

Wells had multiple love affairs. Dorothy Richardson was a friend with whom he had a brief affair which led to a pregnancy and miscarriage, in 1907. Wells' wife had been a schoolmate of Richardson. In December 1909, he had a daughter, Anna-Jane, with the writer Amber Reeves, whose parents, William and Maud Pember Reeves, he had met through the Fabian Society. Amber had married the barrister G. R. Blanco White in July of that year, as co-arranged by Wells. After Beatrice Webb voiced disapproval of Wells's "sordid intrigue" with Amber, he responded by lampooning Beatrice Webb and her husband Sidney Webb in his 1911 novel The New Machiavelli as 'Altiora and Oscar Bailey', a pair of short-sighted, bourgeois manipulators. Between 1910 and 1913, novelist Elizabeth von Arnim was one of his mistresses. In 1914, he had a son, Anthony West (1914-1987), by the novelist and feminist Rebecca West, 26 years his junior. In 1920-21, and intermittently until his death, he had a love affair with the American birth control activist Margaret Sanger.

Between 1924 and 1933 he partnered with the 22-year-younger Dutch adventurer and writer Odette Keun, with whom he lived in Lou Pidou, a house they built together in Grasse, France. Wells dedicated his longest book to her (The World of William Clissold, 1926). When visiting Maxim Gorky in Russia 1920, he had slept with Gorky's mistress Moura Budberg, then still Countess Benckendorf and 27 years his junior. In 1933, when she left Gorky and emigrated to London, their relationship renewed and she cared for him through his final illness. Wells repeatedly asked her to marry him, but Budberg strongly rejected his proposals.

In Experiment in Autobiography (1934), Wells wrote: "I was never a great amorist, though I have loved several people very deeply". David Lodge's novel A Man of Parts (2011) - a 'narrative based on factual sources' (author's note) - gives a convincing and generally sympathetic account of Wells's relations with the women mentioned above, and others.

Director Simon Wells (born 1961), the author's great-grandson, was a consultant on the future scenes in Back to the Future Part II (1989).

One of the ways that Wells expressed himself was through his drawings and sketches. One common location for these was the endpapers and title pages of his own diaries, and they covered a wide variety of topics, from political commentary to his feelings toward his literary contemporaries and his current romantic interests. During his marriage to Amy Catherine, whom he nicknamed Jane, he drew a considerable number of pictures, many of them being overt comments on their marriage. During this period, he called these pictures "picshuas". These picshuas have been the topic of study by Wells scholars for many years, and in 2006, a book was published on the subject.

Statue of a tripod from The War of the Worlds in Woking, England. The book is a seminal depiction of a conflict between humankind and an extraterrestrial race.

Some of his early novels, called " scientific romances", invented several themes now classic in science fiction in such works as The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, When the Sleeper Wakes, and The First Men in the Moon. He also wrote realistic novels that received critical acclaim, including and a critique of English culture during the Edwardian period, Tono-Bungay. Wells also wrote dozens of short stories and novellas, including, "The Flowering of the Strange Orchid", which helped bring the full impact of Darwin's revolutionary botanical ideas to a wider public, and was followed by many later successes such as " The Country of the Blind" (1904).

According to James E. Gunn, one of Wells's major contributions to the science fiction genre was his approach, which he referred to as his "new system of ideas". In his opinion, the author should always strive to make the story as credible as possible, even if both the writer and the reader knew certain elements are impossible, allowing the reader to accept the ideas as something that could really happen, today referred to as "the plausible impossible" and " suspension of disbelief". While neither invisibility nor time travel was new in speculative fiction, Wells added a sense of realism to the concepts which the readers were not familiar with. He conceived the idea of using a vehicle that allows an operator to travel purposely and selectively forwards or backwards in time. The term " time machine", coined by Wells, is almost universally used to refer to such a vehicle. He explained that while writing The Time Machine, he realized that "the more impossible the story I had to tell, the more ordinary must be the setting, and the circumstances in which I now set the Time Traveller were all that I could imagine of solid upper-class comforts." In "Wells's Law", a science fiction story should contain only a single extraordinary assumption. Therefore, as justifications for the impossible, he employed scientific ideas and theories. Wells's best-known statement of the "law" appears in his introduction to a collection of his works published in 1934:

As soon as the magic trick has been done the whole business of the fantasy writer is to keep everything else human and real. Touches of prosaic detail are imperative and a rigorous adherence to the hypothesis. Any extra fantasy outside the cardinal assumption immediately gives a touch of irresponsible silliness to the invention.

Dr. Griffin / The Invisible Man is a brilliant research scientist who discovers a method of invisibility, but finds himself unable to reverse the process. An enthusiast of random and irresponsible violence, Griffin has become an iconic character in horror fiction. The Island of Doctor Moreau sees a shipwrecked man left on the island home of Doctor Moreau, a mad scientist who creates human-like hybrid beings from animals via vivisection. The earliest depiction of uplift, the novel deals with a number of philosophical themes, including pain and cruelty, moral responsibility, human identity, and human interference with nature. In The First Men in the Moon Wells used the idea of radio communication between astronomical objects, a plot point inspired by Nikola Tesla's claim that he had received radio signals from Mars. In addition to science fiction, Wells produced work dealing with mythological beings like an angel in The Wonderful Visit (1895) and a mermaid in The Sea Lady (1902).

Though Tono-Bungay is not a science-fiction novel, radioactive decay plays a small but consequential role in it. Radioactive decay plays a much larger role in The World Set Free (1914), a book dedicated to Frederick Soddy who would receive a Nobel for proving the existence of radioactive isotopes. This book contains what is surely Wells's biggest prophetic "hit", with the first description of a nuclear weapon (which he termed "atomic bombs"). Scientists of the day were well aware that the natural decay of radium releases energy at a slow rate over thousands of years. The rate of release is too slow to have practical utility, but the total amount released is huge. Wells's novel revolves around an (unspecified) invention that accelerates the process of radioactive decay, producing bombs that explode with no more than the force of ordinary high explosives-but which "continue to explode" for days on end. "Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the earlier twentieth century, than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible ... [but] they did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands". In 1932, the physicist and conceiver of nuclear chain reaction Leó Szilárd read The World Set Free (the same year Sir James Chadwick discovered the neutron), a book which he wrote in his memoirs had made "a very great impression on me." In 1934, Szilárd took his ideas for a chain reaction to the British War Office and later the Admiralty, assigning his patent to the Admiralty to keep the news from reaching the notice of the wider scientific community. He wrote, "Knowing what this [a chain reaction] would mean-and I knew it because I had read H.G. Wells-I did not want this patent to become public."

The H.G. Wells crater, located on the far side of the Moon, was named after the author of The First Men in the Moon (1901) in 1970.

Wells also wrote non-fiction. His first non-fiction bestseller was Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (1901). When originally serialised in a magazine it was subtitled "An Experiment in Prophecy", and is considered his most explicitly futuristic work. It offered the immediate political message of the privileged sections of society continuing to bar capable men from other classes from advancement until war would force a need to employ those most able, rather than the traditional upper classes, as leaders. Anticipating what the world would be like in the year 2000, the book is interesting both for its hits (trains and cars resulting in the dispersion of populations from cities to suburbs; moral restrictions declining as men and women seek greater sexual freedom; the defeat of German militarism, and the existence of a European Union) and its misses (he did not expect successful aircraft before 1950, and averred that "my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocate its crew and founder at sea").

His bestselling two-volume work, The Outline of History (1920), began a new era of popularised world history. It received a mixed critical response from professional historians. However, it was very popular amongst the general population and made Wells a rich man. Many other authors followed with "Outlines" of their own in other subjects. He reprised his Outline in 1922 with a much shorter popular work, A Short History of the World, a history book praised by Albert Einstein, and two long efforts, The Science of Life (1930)-written with his son G. P. Wells and evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley, and The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (1931). The "Outlines" became sufficiently common for James Thurber to parody the trend in his humorous essay, "An Outline of Scientists"-indeed, Wells's Outline of History remains in print with a new 2005 edition, while A Short History of the World has been re-edited (2006).

H.G. Wells c. 1918

From quite early in Wells's career, he sought a better way to organise society and wrote a number of Utopian novels. The first of these was A Modern Utopia (1905), which shows a worldwide utopia with "no imports but meteorites, and no exports at all"; two travellers from our world fall into its alternate history. The others usually begin with the world rushing to catastrophe, until people realise a better way of living: whether by mysterious gases from a comet causing people to behave rationally and abandoning a European war (In the Days of the Comet (1906)), or a world council of scientists taking over, as in The Shape of Things to Come (1933, which he later adapted for the 1936 Alexander Korda film, Things to Come). This depicted, all too accurately, the impending World War, with cities being destroyed by aerial bombs. He also portrayed the rise of fascist dictators in The Autocracy of Mr Parham (1930) and The Holy Terror (1939). Men Like Gods (1923) is also a utopian novel. Wells in this period was regarded as an enormously influential figure; the literary critic Malcolm Cowley stated: "by the time he was forty, his influence was wider than any other living English writer".

Wells contemplates the ideas of nature and nurture and questions humanity in books such as The First Men in the Moon, where nature is completely suppressed by nurture, and The Island of Doctor Moreau, where the strong presence of nature represents a threat to a civilized society. Not all his scientific romances ended in a Utopia, and Wells also wrote a dystopian novel, When the Sleeper Wakes (1899, rewritten as The Sleeper Awakes, 1910), which pictures a future society where the classes have become more and more separated, leading to a revolt of the masses against the rulers. The Island of Doctor Moreau is even darker. The narrator, having been trapped on an island of animals vivisected (unsuccessfully) into human beings, eventually returns to England; like Gulliver on his return from the Houyhnhnms, he finds himself unable to shake off the perceptions of his fellow humans as barely civilised beasts, slowly reverting to their animal natures.

Wells also wrote the preface for the first edition of W. N. P. Barbellion's diaries, The Journal of a Disappointed Man, published in 1919. Since "Barbellion" was the real author's pen name, many reviewers believed Wells to have been the true author of the Journal; Wells always denied this, despite being full of praise for the diaries.

H.G. Wells, one day before his 60th birthday, on the front cover of Time magazine, 20 September 1926

In 1927, a Canadian teacher and writer Florence Deeks unsuccessfully sued Wells for infringement of copyright and breach of trust, claiming that much of The Outline of History had been plagiarised from her unpublished manuscript, The Web of the World's Romance, which had spent nearly nine months in the hands of Wells's Canadian publisher, Macmillan Canada. However, it was sworn on oath at the trial that the manuscript remained in Toronto in the safekeeping of Macmillan, and that Wells did not even know it existed, let alone seen it. The court found no proof of copying, and decided the similarities were due to the fact that the books had similar nature and both writers had access to the same sources. In 2000, A. B. McKillop, a professor of history at Carleton University, produced a book on the case, The Spinster & The Prophet: Florence Deeks, H.G. Wells, and the Mystery of the Purloined Past. According to McKillop, the lawsuit was unsuccessful due to the prejudice against a woman suing a well-known and famous male author, and he paints a detailed story based on the circumstantial evidence of the case. In 2004, Denis N. Magnusson, Professor Emeritus of the Faculty of Law, Queen's University, Ontario, published an article on Deeks v. Wells. This re-examines the case in relation to McKillop's book. While having some sympathy for Deeks, he argues that she had a weak case that was not well presented, and though she may have met with sexism from her lawyers, she received a fair trial, adding that the law applied is essentially the same law that would be applied to a similar case today (i.e., 2004).

H. G. Wells Society plaque at Chiltern Court, Baker Street in the City of Westminster, London, where Wells lived between 1930 and 1936

In 1933, Wells predicted in The Shape of Things to Come that the world war he feared would begin in January 1940, a prediction which ultimately came true four months early, in September 1939, with the outbreak of World War II. In 1936, before the Royal Institution, Wells called for the compilation of a constantly growing and changing World Encyclopaedia, to be reviewed by outstanding authorities and made accessible to every human being. In 1938, he published a collection of essays on the future organisation of knowledge and education, World Brain, including the essay "The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia".

Prior to 1933, Wells's books were widely read in Germany and Austria, and most of his science fiction works had been translated shortly after publication. By 1933, he had attracted the attention of German officials because of his criticism of the political situation in Germany, and on 10 May 1933, Wells's books were burned by the Nazi youth in Berlin's Opernplatz, and his works were banned from libraries and book stores. Wells, as president of PEN International (Poets, Essayists, Novelists), angered the Nazis by overseeing the expulsion of the German PEN club from the international body in 1934 following the German PEN's refusal to admit non- Aryan writers to its membership. At a PEN conference in Ragusa, Wells refused to yield to Nazi sympathisers who demanded that the exiled author Ernst Toller be prevented from speaking. Near the end of World War II, Allied forces discovered that the SS had compiled lists of people slated for immediate arrest during the invasion of Britain in the abandoned Operation Sea Lion, with Wells included in the alphabetical list of " The Black Book".

Wartime works

Title page of Wells's The War That Will End War (1914)

Seeking a more structured way to play war games, Wells wrote Floor Games (1911) followed by Little Wars (1913), which set out rules for fighting battles with toy soldiers (miniatures). A pacifist prior to the First World War, Wells stated "how much better is this amiable miniature [war] than the real thing". According to Wells, the idea of the game developed from a visit by his friend Jerome K. Jerome. After dinner, Jerome began shooting down toy soldiers with a toy cannon and Wells joined in to compete.

During August 1914, immediately after the outbreak of the First World War, Wells published a number of articles in London newspapers that subsequently appeared as a book entitled The War That Will End War. He coined the expression with the idealistic belief that the result of the war would make a future conflict impossible. Wells blamed the Central Powers for the coming of the war and argued that only the defeat of German militarism could bring about an end to war. Wells used the shorter form of the phrase, " the war to end war", in In the Fourth Year (1918), in which he noted that the phrase "got into circulation" in the second half of 1914. In fact, it had become one of the most common catchphrases of the war.

In 1918 Wells worked for the British War Propaganda Bureau, also called Wellington House. Wells was also one of fifty-three leading British authors - a number that included Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - who signed their names to the "Authors' Declaration." This manifesto declared that the German invasion of Belgium had been a brutal crime, and that Britain "could not without dishonour have refused to take part in the present war."

Wells (left) pictured with Soviet physiologist Ivan Pavlov

Wells visited Russia three times: 1914, 1920 and 1934. After his visit to Petrograd and Moscow, in January 1914, he returned "a staunch Russophile". He revealed his impressions in "Russia and England: A Study on Contrasts" in The Daily News, on 1 February 1941 and in the novel Joan and Peter (1918). During his second visit, he saw his old friend Maxim Gorky and with Gorky's help, met Vladimir Lenin. In his book Russia in the Shadows, Wells portrayed Russia as recovering from a total social collapse, "the completest that has ever happened to any modern social organisation." On 23 July 1934, after visiting U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Wells went to the Soviet Union and interviewed Joseph Stalin for three hours for the New Statesman magazine, which was extremely rare at that time. He told Stalin how he had seen 'the happy faces of healthy people' in contrast with his previous visit to Moscow in 1920. However, he also criticised the lawlessness, class discrimination, state violence, and absence of free expression. Stalin enjoyed the conversation and replied accordingly. As the chairman of the London-based PEN International, which protected the rights of authors to write without being intimidated, Wells hoped by his trip to USSR, he could win Stalin over by force of argument. Before he left, he realised that no reform was to happen in the near future.

H.G. Wells in 1943

Wells's greatest literary output occurred before the First World War, which was lamented by younger authors whom he had influenced. In this connection, George Orwell described Wells as "too sane to understand the modern world", and "since 1920 he has squandered his talents in slaying paper dragons." G. K. Chesterton quipped: "Mr Wells is a born storyteller who has sold his birthright for a pot of message".

Wells had diabetes, and was a co-founder in 1934 of The Diabetic Association (now Diabetes UK, the leading charity for people with diabetes in the UK).

On 28 October 1940, on the radio station KTSA in San Antonio, Texas, Wells took part in a radio interview with Orson Welles, who two years previously had performed a famous radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds. During the interview, by Charles C Shaw, a KTSA radio host, Wells admitted his surprise at the sensation that resulted from the broadcast but acknowledged his debt to Welles for increasing sales of one of his "more obscure" titles.

Commemorative blue plaque at Wells's final home in Regent's Park, London

Wells died on 13 August 1946, aged 79, at his home at 13 Hanover Terrace, overlooking Regent's Park, London. In his preface to the 1941 edition of The War in the Air, Wells had stated that his epitaph should be: "I told you so. You damned fools". Wells's body was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium on 16 August 1946; his ashes were subsequently scattered into the English Channel at Old Harry Rocks, the most eastern point of the Jurassic Coast and about 3.5 miles (5.6 km) from Swanage in Dorset.

A commemorative blue plaque in his honour was installed by the Greater London Council at his home in Regent's Park in 1966.

"Novelist and thinker". Statue of H.G. Wells by Wesley Harland in Woking

A futurist and "visionary", Wells foresaw the advent of aircraft, tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, satellite television, and something resembling the World Wide Web. Asserting that "Wells's visions of the future remain unsurpassed", John Higgs, author of Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century, states that in the late 19th century Wells "saw the coming century clearer than anyone else. He anticipated wars in the air, the sexual revolution, motorised transport causing the growth of suburbs and a proto-Wikipedia he called the " world brain". In his novel The World Set Free, he imagined an "atomic bomb" of terrifying power that would be dropped from aeroplanes. This was an extraordinary insight for an author writing in 1913, and it made a deep impression on Winston Churchill."

Many readers have hailed H.G. Wells and George Orwell as special kinds of writers, ones endowed with remarkable prescriptive and prophetic powers. Wells was the twentieth-century prototype of this literary vatic figure: he invented the role, explored its possibilities, especially through new forms of prose and new ways to publish, and defined its boundaries. His impact on his culture was profound; as George Orwell wrote, "The minds of all of us, and therefore the physical world, would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed."

- The Author as Cultural Hero: H.G. Wells and George Orwell.

In 2011, Wells was among a group of science fiction writers featured in the Prophets of Science Fiction series, a show produced and hosted by film director Sir Ridley Scott, which depicts how predictions influenced the development of scientific advancements by inspiring many readers to assist in transforming those futuristic visions into everyday reality. In a 2013 review of The Time Machine for the New Yorker magazine, Brad Leithauser writes, "At the base of Wells's great visionary exploit is this rational, ultimately scientific attempt to tease out the potential future consequences of present conditions-not as they might arise in a few years, or even decades, but millennia hence, epochs hence. He is world literature's Great Extrapolator. Like no other fiction writer before him, he embraced " deep time".

Churchill avidly read Wells. An October 1906 Churchill speech was partly inspired by Wells's ideas of a supportive state as a "Utopia". Two days earlier, Churchill had written Wells: "I owe you a great debt."[113][114]

Wells was a socialist and a member of the Fabian Society. He stood as a Labour Party candidate for London University in the 1922 and 1923 general elections.

Winston Churchill was an avid reader of Wells's books, and after they first met in 1902 they kept in touch until Wells died in 1946. As a junior minister Churchill borrowed lines from Wells for one of his most famous early landmark speeches in 1906, and as Prime Minister the phrase " the gathering storm"-used by Churchill to describe the rise of Nazi Germany-had been written by Wells in The War of the Worlds, which depicts an attack on Britain by Martians. Wells's extensive writings on equality and human rights, most notably his most influential work, The Rights of Man (1940), laid the groundwork for the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the United Nations shortly after his death.

His efforts regarding the League of Nations, on which he collaborated on the project with Leonard Woolf with the booklets The Idea of a League of Nations, Prolegomena to the Study of World Organization, and The Way of the League of Nations, became a disappointment as the organization turned out to be a weak one unable to prevent the Second World War, which itself occurred towards the very end of his life and only increased the pessimistic side of his nature. In his last book Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945), he considered the idea that humanity being replaced by another species might not be a bad idea. He referred to the era between the two World Wars as "The Age of Frustration".

He was a member of The Other Club, a London dining club.

Wells' views on God and religion changed over his lifetime. Early in his life he distanced himself from Christianity, and later from theism, and finally, late in life, he was essentially atheistic. Martin Gardner summarises this progression:

[The younger Wells] ... did not object to using the word "God" provided it did not imply anything resembling human personality. In his middle years Wells went through a phase of defending the concept of a "finite God," similar to the god of such process theologians as Samuel Alexander, Edgar Brightman, and Charles Hartshorne. (He even wrote a book about it called God the Invisible King.) Later Wells decided he was really an atheist.

In God the Invisible King (1917), Wells wrote that his idea of God did not draw upon the traditional religions of the world:

This book sets out as forcibly and exactly as possible the religious belief of the writer. [Which] is a profound belief in a personal and intimate God. ... Putting the leading idea of this book very roughly, these two antagonistic typical conceptions of God may be best contrasted by speaking of one of them as God-as-Nature or the Creator, and of the other as God-as-Christ or the Redeemer. One is the great Outward God; the other is the Inmost God. The first idea was perhaps developed most highly and completely in the God of Spinoza. It is a conception of God tending to pantheism, to an idea of a comprehensive God as ruling with justice rather than affection, to a conception of aloofness and awestriking worshipfulness. The second idea, which is contradictory to this idea of an absolute God, is the God of the human heart. The writer suggested that the great outline of the theological struggles of that phase of civilisation and world unity which produced Christianity, was a persistent but unsuccessful attempt to get these two different ideas of God into one focus.

Later in the work, he aligns himself with a "renascent or modern religion ... neither atheist nor Buddhist nor Mohammedan nor Christian ... [that] he has found growing up in himself".

Of Christianity, he said: "it is not now true for me. ... Every believing Christian is, I am sure, my spiritual brother ... but if systemically I called myself a Christian I feel that to most men I should imply too much and so tell a lie". Of other world religions, he writes: "All these religions are true for me as Canterbury Cathedral is a true thing and as a Swiss chalet is a true thing. There they are, and they have served a purpose, they have worked. Only they are not true for me to live in them. ... They do not work for me". In The Fate of Homo Sapiens (1939), Wells criticised almost all world religions and philosophies, stating "there is no creed, no way of living left in the world at all, that really meets the needs of the time.... When we come to look at them coolly and dispassionately, all the main religions, patriotic, moral and customary systems in which human beings are sheltering today, appear to be in a state of jostling and mutually destructive movement, like the houses and palaces and other buildings of some vast, sprawling city overtaken by a landslide."

Wells's opposition to organised religion reached a fever pitch in 1943 with publication of his book Crux Ansata, subtitled "An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church" in which he attacked Catholicism, Pope Pius XII and called for the bombing of the city of Rome.

H.G. Wells as depicted in Gernsback's Science Wonder Stories in 1929

The science fiction historian John Clute describes Wells as "the most important writer the genre has yet seen", and notes his work has been central to both British and American science fiction. Science fiction author and critic Algis Budrys said Wells "remains the outstanding expositor of both the hope, and the despair, which are embodied in the technology and which are the major facts of life in our world". He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1921, 1932, 1935, and 1946. Wells so influenced real exploration of space that impact craters on Mars and the Moon were named after him.

Wells's genius was his ability to create a stream of brand new, wholly original stories out of thin air. Originality was Wells's calling card. In a six-year stretch from 1895 to 1901, he produced a stream of what he called "scientific romance" novels, which included The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds and The First Men in the Moon. This was a dazzling display of new thought, endlessly copied since. A book like The War of the Worlds inspired every one of the thousands of alien invasion stories that followed. It burned its way into the psyche of mankind and changed us all forever.

Magazine reprint of Wells's 1910 dystopian science fiction When the Sleeper Wakes

In the United Kingdom, Wells's work was a key model for the British "scientific romance", and other writers in that mode, such as Olaf Stapledon, J. D. Beresford, S. Fowler Wright, and Naomi Mitchison, all drew on Wells's example. Wells was also an important influence on British science fiction of the period after the Second World War, with Arthur C. Clarke and Brian Aldiss expressing strong admiration for Wells's work. A self-declared fan of Wells, John Wyndham, author of The Day of the Triffids and The Midwich Cuckoos, echoes Wells's obsession with catastrophe and its aftermath. His early work (pre 1920) made Wells the literary hero of dystopian novelist George Orwell. Among contemporary British science fiction writers, Stephen Baxter, Christopher Priest and Adam Roberts have all acknowledged Wells's influence on their writing; all three are vice-presidents of the H. G. Wells Society. He also had a strong influence on British scientist J. B. S. Haldane, who wrote Daedalus; or, Science and the Future (1924), "The Last Judgement" and "On Being the Right Size" from the essay collection Possible Worlds (1927), and Biological Possibilities for the Human Species in the Next Ten Thousand Years (1963), which are speculations about the future of human evolution and life on other planets. Haldane gave several lectures about these topics which in turn influenced other science fiction writers.

Wells's works were reprinted in American science fiction magazines as late as the 1950s.

In the United States, Hugo Gernsback reprinted most of Wells's work in the pulp magazine Amazing Stories, regarding Wells's work as "texts of central importance to the self-conscious new genre". Later American writers such as Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, Carl Sagan, and Ursula K. Le Guin all recalled being influenced by Wells.

Sinclair Lewis's early novels were strongly influenced by Wells's realistic social novels, such as The History of Mr Polly; Lewis also named his first son Wells after the author. Lewis nominated H.G. Wells for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932.

In an interview with The Paris Review, Vladimir Nabokov described Wells as his favourite writer when he was a boy and "a great artist." He went on to cite The Passionate Friends, Ann Veronica, The Time Machine, and The Country of the Blind as superior to anything else written by Wells's British contemporaries. Nabokov said: "His sociological cogitations can be safely ignored, of course, but his romances and fantasies are superb."

2016 illustrated postal envelope with an image from The War of the Worlds, Russian Post, commemorating the 150th anniversary of the author's birth

Jorge Luis Borges wrote many short pieces on Wells in which he demonstrates a deep familiarity with much of Wells's work. While Borges wrote several critical reviews, including a mostly negative review of Wells's film Things to Come, he regularly treated Wells as a canonical figure of fantastic literature. Late in his life, Borges included The Invisible Man and The Time Machine in his Prologue to a Personal Library, a curated list of 100 great works of literature that he undertook at the behest of the Argentine publishing house Emecé. Canadian author Margaret Atwood read Wells's books, and he also inspired writers of European speculative fiction such as Karel Čapek and Yevgeny Zamyatin.

In 2021, Wells was one of six British writers commemorated on a series of UK postage stamps issued by Royal Mail to celebrate British science fiction. Six classic science fiction novels were depicted, one from each author, with The Time Machine chosen to represent Wells.

In M. P. Shiel's short story "The Primate of the Rose" (1928), there is an unpleasant womaniser named E.P. Crooks, who was written as a parody of Wells. Wells had attacked Shiel's Prince Zaleski when it was published in 1895, and this was Shiel's response. Wells praised Shiel's The Purple Cloud (1901); in turn Shiel expressed admiration for Wells, referring to him at a speech to the Horsham Rotary Club in 1933 as "my friend Mr. Wells".

In C. S. Lewis's novel That Hideous Strength (1945), the character Jules is a caricature of Wells, and much of Lewis's science fiction was written both under the influence of Wells and as an antithesis to his work (or, as he put it, an "exorcism" of the influence it had on him).

In Brian Aldiss's novella The Saliva Tree (1966), Wells has a small off-screen guest role.

In The Dancers at the End of Time by Michael Moorcock (1976) Wells has an important part.

In The Map of Time (2008) by Spanish author Félix J. Palma; Wells is one of several historical characters.

David Lodge's novel A Man of Parts (2011) is a literary retelling of the life of Wells.

Rod Taylor portrays Wells in the 1960 science fiction film The Time Machine (based on the novel of the same name), in which Wells uses his time machine to try to find his Utopian society.

Malcolm McDowell portrays Wells in the 1979 science fiction film Time After Time, in which Wells uses a time machine to pursue Jack the Ripper to the present day. In the film, Wells meets "Amy" in the future who then returns to 1893 to become his second wife Amy Catherine Robbins.

Wells is portrayed in the 1985 story from the 22nd season of the BBC science-fiction television series . In this story, Herbert, an enthusiastic temporary companion to the Doctor, is revealed to be a young H.G. Wells. The plot is loosely based upon the themes and characters of The Time Machine with references to The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man and The Island of Doctor Moreau. The story jokingly suggests that Wells's inspiration for his later novels came from his adventure with the Sixth Doctor.

In the BBC2 anthology series Encounters about imagined meetings between historical figures, Beautiful Lies, by Paul Pender (15 August 1992) centred on an acrimonious dinner party attended by Wells (Richard Todd), George Orwell (Jon Finch), and William Empson (Patrick Ryecart).

The character of Wells also appeared in several episodes of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1993-1997), usually pitted against the time-travelling villain known as Tempus (Lane Davies). Wells's younger self was played by Terry Kiser, and the older Wells was played by Hamilton Camp.

In the British TV mini-series The Infinite Worlds of H.G. Wells (2001), several of Wells's short stories are dramatised but are adapted using Wells himself (Tom Ward) as the main protagonist in each story.

In the Disney Channel Original Series Phil of the Future, which centres on time-travel, the present-day high school that the main characters attend is named "H.G. Wells".

In the 2006 television docudrama H.G. Wells: War with the World, Wells is played by Michael Sheen.

Television episode "World's End" of Cold Case (2007) is about how the discovery of human remains in the bottom of a well leads to the reinvestigation of the case of a housewife who went missing during Orson Welles' radio broadcast of "War of the Worlds".

On the science fiction television series Warehouse 13 (2009-2014), there is a female version Helena G. Wells. When she appeared she explained that her brother was her front for her writing because a female science fiction author would not be accepted.

Comedian Paul F. Tompkins portrays a fictional Wells as the host of The Dead Authors Podcast, wherein Wells uses his time machine to bring dead authors (played by other comedians) to the present and interview them.

H.G. Wells as a young boy appears in the Legends of Tomorrow episode "The Magnificent Eight". In this story, the boy Wells is dying of consumption but is cured by a time-travelling Martin Stein.

In the four part series The Nightmare Worlds of H.G. Wells (2016), Wells is played by Ray Winstone.

In the 2017 television series version of Time After Time, based on the 1979 film, H.G. Wells is portrayed by Freddie Stroma.

In the 2019 television adaptation of The War of the Worlds, the character of 'George', played by Rafe Spall, demonstrates a number of elements of Wells's own life, including his estrangement from his wife and unmarried co-habitation with the character of 'Amy'.

The novels and short stories of H.G. Wells have been adapted for cinema. These include Island of Lost Souls (1932), The Invisible Man (1933), Things to Come (1936), The Man Who Could Work Miracles (1937), The War of the Worlds (1953), The Time Machine (1960), First Men in the Moon (1964), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), The Time Machine (2002) and War of the Worlds (2005).

In 1954, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign purchased the H.G. Wells literary papers and correspondence collection. The university's Rare Book & Manuscript Library holds the largest collection of Wells manuscripts, correspondence, first editions and publications in the United States. Among these is unpublished material and the manuscripts of such works as The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine. The collection includes first editions, revisions and translations. The letters contain general family correspondence, communications from publishers, material regarding the Fabian Society, and letters from politicians and public figures, most notably George Bernard Shaw and Joseph Conrad.

Cole, Sarah (2021). Inventing Tomorrow: H.G. Wells and the Twentieth Century. Columbia University Press.

Dickson, Lovat. H.G. Wells: His Turbulent Life & Times. 1969.

Elber-Aviram, Hadas (2021). "Chapter 2: The Martian on Primrose Hill: Wells's scientific romances". Fairy Tales of London: British Urban Fantasy, 1840 to the Present. Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 61-94. ISBN 978-1-350-11069-4.

Gilmour, David. The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002 (paperback, ISBN 0-374-18702-9); 2003 (paperback, ISBN 0-374-52896-9).

Gomme, A. W., Mr. Wells as Historian. Glasgow: MacLehose, Jackson, and Co., 1921.

Gosling, John. Waging the War of the Worlds. Jefferson, North Carolina, McFarland, 2009 (paperback, ISBN 0-7864-4105-4).

Jasanoff, Maya, "The Future Was His" (review of Sarah Cole, Inventing Tomorrow: H.G. Wells and the Twentieth Century, Columbia University Press, 374 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXVII, no. 12 (23 July 2020), pp. 50-51. Writes Jasanoff (p. 51): "Although [Wells] was prophetically right, and right-minded, about some things... [n]owhere was he more disturbingly wrong than in his loathsome affinity for eugenics...."

Lynn, Andrea The secret love life of H.G. Wells

Mackenzie, Norman and Jean, The Time Traveller: the Life of H.G. Wells, London: Weidenfeld, 1973, ISBN 0-2977-6531-0

Mauthner, Martin. German Writers in French Exile, 1933-1940, London: Vallentine and Mitchell, 2007, ISBN 978-0-85303-540-4.

McLean, Steven. 'The Early Fiction of H.G. Wells: Fantasies of Science'. Palgrave, 2009, ISBN 978-0-230-53562-6.

Partington, John S. Building Cosmopolis: The Political Thought of H.G. Wells. Ashgate, 2003, ISBN 978-0-7546-3383-9.

Roberts, Adam. H.G. Wells A Literary Life. Springer International Publishing, 2019, ISBN 978-3-03-026421-5.

Roukema, Aren. 2021. "The Esoteric Roots of Science Fiction: Edward Bulwer-Lytton, H.G. Wells, and the Occlusion of Magic." Science Fiction Studies 48 (2): 218-42.

Shadurski, Maxim. The Nationality of Utopia: H.G. Wells, England, and the World State. London: Routledge, 2020, ISBN 978-0-36733-049-1.

Sources-collections

Sources-letters, essays and interviews

Archive of Wells's BBC broadcasts

Film interview with H.G. Wells Archived 2010-08-20 at the Wayback Machine

"Stephen Crane. From an English Standpoint", by Wells, 1900.

"Introduction", to W.N.P. Barbellion's The Journal of a Disappointed Man, by Wells, 1919.

"Woman and Primitive Culture", by Wells, 1895.

Letter, to M. P. Shiel, by Wells, 1937.

An introduction to The War of the Worlds by Iain Sinclair on the British Library's Discovering Literature website.

"Socialism and the Family" (1906) by Belfort Bax, Part 1, Part 2.

"H.G. Wells warned us how it would feel to fight a War of the Worlds", by Niall Ferguson, in The Telegraph, 24 June 2005.

"H.G. Wells's Idea of a World Brain: A Critical Re-assessment", by W. Boyd Rayward, in Journal of the American Society for Information Science 50 (15 May 1999): 557-579

"Mr H.G. Wells and the Giants", by G.K. Chesterton, from his book Heretics (1908).

"The Internet: a world brain?", by Martin Gardner, in Skeptical Inquirer, Jan-Feb 1999.

"Science Fiction: The Shape of Things to Come", by Mark Bould, in The Socialist Review, May 2005.

"Who needs Utopia? A dialogue with my utopian self (with apologies, and thanks, to H.G. Wells)", by Gregory Claeys in Spaces of Utopia: An Electronic Journal, no 1, Spring 2006.

"When H.G. Wells Split the Atom: A 1914 Preview of 1945", by Freda Kirchwey, in , posted 4 September 2003 (original 18 August 1945 issue).

"War of the Worldviews", by John J. Miller, in The Wall Street Journal Opinion Journal, 21 June 2005.

"Wells's Autobiography", by John Hart, from New International, Vol.2 No.2, Mar 1935, pp. 75-76.

"History in the Science Fiction of H.G. Wells", by Patrick Parrinder, Cycnos, 22.2 (2006).

"From the World Brain to the Worldwide Web", by Martin Campbell-Kelly, Gresham College Lecture, 9 November 2006.

"The Beginning of Wisdom: On Reading H.G. Wells", by Vivian Gornick, Boston Review, 31.1 (2007).

John Hammond, The Complete List of Short Stories of H.G. Wells

"H.G. Wells Predictions Ring True, 143 Years Later" at National Geographic

"H.G. Wells, the man I knew" Obituary of Wells by George Bernard Shaw, at the New Statesman

Elber-Aviram, Hadas (2015). ""My own particular city": H.G. Wells's Fantastical London". The Wellsian (38): 97-117.

Hughes, David Y. (1998). "A Queer Notion of Grant Allen's". Science Fiction Studies. 25 (2): 271-284. JSTOR 4240701.

Scuriatti, Laura (2003). "A Tale of Two Cities: H.G. Wells's The Door in the Wall". In Partington, John S. (ed.). The Wellsian: Selected Essays on H.G. Wells. Illustrated by Alvin Landon Coburn. Oss, Netherlands: Equilibris. ISBN 978-90-5976-001-1. OCLC 54814627.

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Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 - 13 August 1946) was an English writer. Prolific in many genres, he wrote more than fifty novels and dozens of short stories. His non-fiction output included works of social commentary, politics, history, popular science, satire, biography, and autobiography.

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2001: A Space Odyssey (film) - Wikipedia

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2001: A Space Odyssey (film) - Wikipedia

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Was produced in 1968-has computer/robot "incapable of error"-similar to today's predictions on robots becoming major part of society

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2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 epic science fiction film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick. The screenplay was written by Kubrick and science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, and was inspired by Clarke's 1951 short story " The Sentinel" and other short stories by Clarke. Clarke also published a novelisation of the film, in part written concurrently with the screenplay, after the film's release. The film stars Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester, and Douglas Rain, and follows a voyage by astronauts, scientists and the sentient supercomputer HAL to Jupiter to investigate an alien monolith.

The film is noted for its scientifically accurate depiction of space flight, pioneering special effects, and ambiguous imagery. Kubrick avoided conventional cinematic and narrative techniques; dialogue is used sparingly, and there are long sequences accompanied only by music. The soundtrack incorporates numerous works of classical music, by composers including Richard Strauss, Johann Strauss II, Aram Khachaturian, and György Ligeti.

The film received diverse critical responses, ranging from those who saw it as darkly apocalyptic to those who saw it as an optimistic reappraisal of the hopes of humanity. Critics noted its exploration of themes such as human evolution, technology, artificial intelligence, and the possibility of extraterrestrial life. It was nominated for four Academy Awards, winning Kubrick the award for his direction of the visual effects. The film is now widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential films ever made. In 1991, it was selected by the United States Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry. In 2022, 2001: A Space Odyssey placed in the top ten of Sight & Sound's decennial critics' poll, and topped their directors' poll.

In a prehistoric veldt, a tribe of hominins is driven away from its water hole by a rival tribe. The next day, they find an alien monolith has appeared in their midst. They then learn how to use a bone as a weapon and, after their first hunt, return to drive their rivals away with it.

Millions of years later, Dr. Heywood Floyd, Chairman of the United States National Council of Astronautics, travels to Clavius Base, an American lunar outpost. During a stopover at Space Station 5, he meets Russian scientists who are concerned that Clavius seems to be unresponsive. He refuses to discuss rumours of an epidemic at the base. At Clavius, Heywood addresses a meeting of personnel to whom he stresses the need for secrecy regarding their newest discovery. His mission is to investigate a recently found artefact, a monolith buried four million years earlier near the lunar crater Tycho. As he and others examine the object, it is struck by sunlight, upon which it emits a high-powered radio signal.

Eighteen months later, the American spacecraft Discovery One is bound for Jupiter, with mission pilots and scientists Dr. David "Dave" Bowman and Dr. Frank Poole on board, along with three other scientists in suspended animation. Most of Discovery's operations are controlled by HAL, a HAL 9000 computer with a human personality. When HAL reports the imminent failure of an antenna control device, Dave retrieves it in an extravehicular activity (EVA) pod, but finds nothing wrong. HAL suggests reinstalling the device and letting it fail so the problem can be verified. Mission Control advises the astronauts that results from their twin 9000 computer indicate that HAL has made an error, but HAL blames it on human error. Concerned about HAL's behaviour, Dave and Frank enter an EVA pod so they can talk without HAL overhearing. They agree to disconnect HAL if he is proven wrong, but HAL follows their conversation by lip reading.

While Frank is outside the ship to replace the antenna unit, HAL takes control of his pod, setting him adrift. Dave takes another pod to rescue Frank. While he is outside, HAL turns off the life support functions of the crewmen in suspended animation, killing them. When Dave returns to the ship with Frank's body, HAL refuses to let him back in, stating that their plan to deactivate him jeopardises the mission. Dave releases Frank's body and, despite not having a spacesuit helmet, exits his pod, crosses the vacuum and opens the ship's emergency airlock manually. He goes to HAL's processor core and begins disconnecting HAL's circuits, despite HAL begging him not to. When the disconnection is complete, a prerecorded video by Heywood plays, revealing that the mission's objective is to investigate the radio signal sent from the monolith to Jupiter.

At Jupiter, Dave finds a third, much larger monolith orbiting the planet. He leaves Discovery in an EVA pod to investigate. He is pulled into a vortex of coloured light and observes bizarre cosmological phenomena and strange landscapes of unusual colours as he passes by. Finally he finds himself in a large neoclassical bedroom where he sees, and then becomes, older versions of himself: first standing in the bedroom, middle-aged and still in his spacesuit, then dressed in leisure attire and eating dinner, and finally as an old man lying in bed. A monolith appears at the foot of the bed, and as Dave reaches for it, he is transformed into a foetus enclosed in a transparent orb of light floating in space above the Earth.

Production

Development

After completing Dr. Strangelove (1964), director Stanley Kubrick told a publicist from Columbia Pictures that his next project would be about extraterrestrial life, and resolved to make "the proverbial good science fiction movie". How Kubrick became interested in creating a science fiction film is far from clear. Biographer John Baxter notes possible inspirations in the late 1950s, including British productions featuring dramas on satellites and aliens modifying early humans, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's big budget CinemaScope production Forbidden Planet, and the slick widescreen cinematography and set design of Japanese (monster movie) productions (such as and Warning from Space).

Kubrick obtained financing and distribution from the American studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer with the selling point that the film could be marketed in their ultra-widescreen Cinerama format, recently debuted with their How the West Was Won. It would be filmed and edited almost entirely in southern England, where Kubrick lived, using the facilities of MGM-British Studios and Shepperton Studios. MGM had subcontracted the production of the film to Kubrick's production company to qualify for the Eady Levy, a UK tax on box-office receipts used at the time to fund the production of films in Britain.

Pre-production

Kubrick's decision to avoid the fanciful portrayals of space found in standard popular science fiction films of the time led him to seek more realistic and accurate depictions of space travel. Illustrators such as Chesley Bonestell, Roy Carnon, and Richard McKenna were hired to produce concept drawings, sketches, and paintings of the space technology seen in the film. Two educational films, the National Film Board of Canada's 1960 animated short documentary and the 1964 New York World's Fair movie To the Moon and Beyond, were major influences.

According to biographer Vincent LoBrutto, Universe was a visual inspiration to Kubrick. The 29-minute film, which had also proved popular at NASA for its realistic portrayal of outer space, met "the standard of dynamic visionary realism that he was looking for." Wally Gentleman, one of the special-effects artists on Universe, worked briefly on 2001. Kubrick also asked Universe co-director Colin Low about animation camerawork, with Low recommending British mathematician Brian Salt, with whom Low and Roman Kroitor had previously worked on the 1957 still-animation documentary City of Gold. Universe's narrator, actor Douglas Rain, was cast as the voice of HAL.

After pre-production had begun, Kubrick saw To the Moon and Beyond, a film shown in the Transportation and Travel building at the 1964 World's Fair. It was filmed in Cinerama 360 and shown in the "Moon Dome". Kubrick hired the company that produced it, Graphic Films Corporation-which had been making films for NASA, the US Air Force, and various aerospace clients-as a design consultant. Graphic Films' Con Pederson, Lester Novros, and background artist Douglas Trumbull airmailed research-based concept sketches and notes covering the mechanics and physics of space travel, and created storyboards for the space flight sequences in 2001. Trumbull became a special effects supervisor on 2001.

Searching for a collaborator in the science fiction community for the writing of the script, Kubrick was advised by a mutual acquaintance, Columbia Pictures staff member Roger Caras, to talk to writer Arthur C. Clarke, who lived in Ceylon. Although convinced that Clarke was "a recluse, a nut who lives in a tree," Kubrick allowed Caras to cable the film proposal to Clarke. Clarke's cabled response stated that he was "frightfully interested in working with [that] enfant terrible", and added "what makes Kubrick think I'm a recluse?" Meeting for the first time at Trader Vic's in New York on 22 April 1964, the two began discussing the project that would take up the next four years of their lives. Clarke kept a diary throughout his involvement with 2001, excerpts of which were published in 1972 as The Lost Worlds of 2001.

Kubrick told Clarke he wanted to make a film about "Man's relationship to the universe", and was, in Clarke's words, "determined to create a work of art which would arouse the emotions of wonder, awe ... even, if appropriate, terror". Clarke offered Kubrick six of his short stories, and by May 1964, Kubrick had chosen " The Sentinel" as the source material for the film. In search of more material to expand the film's plot, the two spent the rest of 1964 reading books on science and anthropology, screening science fiction films, and brainstorming ideas. They created the plot for 2001 by integrating several different short story plots written by Clarke, along with new plot segments requested by Kubrick for the film development, and then combined them all into a single script for 2001. Clarke said that his 1953 story " Encounter in the Dawn" inspired the film's "Dawn of Man" sequence.

Kubrick and Clarke privately referred to the project as How the Solar System Was Won, a reference to how it was a follow-on to MGM's Cinerama epic How the West Was Won. On 23 February 1965, Kubrick issued a press release announcing the title as Journey Beyond The Stars. Other titles considered included Universe, Tunnel to the Stars, and Planetfall. Expressing his high expectations for the thematic importance which he associated with the film, in April 1965, eleven months after they began working on the project, Kubrick selected 2001: A Space Odyssey; Clarke said the title was "entirely" Kubrick's idea. Intending to set the film apart from the "monsters-and-sex" type of science-fiction films of the time, Kubrick used Homer's The Odyssey as both a model of literary merit and a source of inspiration for the title. Kubrick said, "It occurred to us that for the Greeks the vast stretches of the sea must have had the same sort of mystery and remoteness that space has for our generation."

How much would we appreciate La Gioconda today if Leonardo had written at the bottom of the canvas: "This lady is smiling slightly because she has rotten teeth" - or "because she's hiding a secret from her lover"? It would shut off the viewer's appreciation and shackle him to a reality other than his own. I don't want that to happen to 2001.

Originally, Kubrick and Clarke had planned to develop a 2001 novel first, free of the constraints of film, and then write the screenplay. They planned the writing credits to be "Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, based on a novel by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick" to reflect their preeminence in their respective fields. In practice, the screenplay developed in parallel with the novel, with only some elements being common to both. In a 1970 interview, Kubrick said:

There are a number of differences between the book and the movie. The novel, for example, attempts to explain things much more explicitly than the film does, which is inevitable in a verbal medium. The novel came about after we did a 130-page prose treatment of the film at the very outset.... Arthur took all the existing material, plus an impression of some of the rushes, and wrote the novel. As a result, there's a difference between the novel and the film ... I think that the divergences between the two works are interesting.

In the end, Clarke and Kubrick wrote parts of the novel and screenplay simultaneously, with the film version being released before the book version was published. Clarke opted for clearer explanations of the mysterious monolith and Star Gate in the novel; Kubrick made the film more cryptic by minimising dialogue and explanation. Kubrick said the film is "basically a visual, nonverbal experience" that "hits the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does, or painting".

The screenplay credits were shared whereas the 2001 novel, released shortly after the film, was attributed to Clarke alone. Clarke wrote later that "the nearest approximation to the complicated truth" is that the screenplay should be credited to "Kubrick and Clarke" and the novel to "Clarke and Kubrick". Early reports about tensions involved in the writing of the film script appeared to reach a point where Kubrick was allegedly so dissatisfied with the collaboration that he approached other writers who could replace Clarke, including Michael Moorcock and J. G. Ballard. But they felt it would be disloyal to accept Kubrick's offer. In Michael Benson's 2018 book Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece, the actual relation between Clarke and Kubrick was more complex, involving an extended interaction of Kubrick's multiple requests for Clarke to write new plot lines for various segments of the film, which Clarke was expected to withhold from publication until after the release of the film while receiving advances on his salary from Kubrick during film production. Clarke agreed to this, though apparently he did make several requests for Kubrick to allow him to develop his new plot lines into separate publishable stories while film production continued, which Kubrick consistently denied on the basis of Clarke's contractual obligation to withhold publication until release of the film.

Astronomer Carl Sagan wrote in his 1973 book The Cosmic Connection that Clarke and Kubrick had asked him how to best depict extraterrestrial intelligence. While acknowledging Kubrick's desire to use actors to portray humanoid aliens for convenience's sake, Sagan argued that alien life forms were unlikely to bear any resemblance to terrestrial life, and that to do so would introduce "at least an element of falseness" to the film. Sagan proposed that the film should simply suggest extraterrestrial superintelligence, rather than depict it. He attended the premiere and was "pleased to see that I had been of some help." Sagan had met with Clarke and Kubrick only once, in 1964; and Kubrick subsequently directed several attempts to portray credible aliens, only to abandon the idea near the end of post-production. Benson asserts it is unlikely that Sagan's advice had any direct influence. Kubrick hinted at the nature of the mysterious unseen alien race in 2001 by suggesting that given millions of years of evolution, they progressed from biological beings to "immortal machine entities" and then into "beings of pure energy and spirit" with "limitless capabilities and ungraspable intelligence".

In a 1980 interview (not released during Kubrick's lifetime), Kubrick explains one of the film's closing scenes, where Bowman is depicted in old age after his journey through the Star Gate:

The idea was supposed to be that he is taken in by godlike entities, creatures of pure energy and intelligence with no shape or form. They put him in what I suppose you could describe as a human zoo to study him, and his whole life passes from that point on in that room. And he has no sense of time.... [W]hen they get finished with him, as happens in so many myths of all cultures in the world, he is transformed into some kind of super being and sent back to Earth, transformed and made some kind of superman. We have to only guess what happens when he goes back. It is the pattern of a great deal of mythology, and that is what we were trying to suggest.

The script went through many stages. In early 1965, when backing was secured for the film, Clarke and Kubrick still had no firm idea of what would happen to Bowman after the Star Gate sequence. Initially all of Discovery's astronauts were to survive the journey; by 3 October, Clarke and Kubrick had decided to make Bowman the sole survivor and have him regress to infancy. By 17 October, Kubrick had come up with what Clarke called a "wild idea of slightly fag robots who create a Victorian environment to put our heroes at their ease." HAL 9000 was originally named Athena after the Greek goddess of wisdom and had a feminine voice and persona.

Early drafts included a prologue containing interviews with scientists about extraterrestrial life, voice-over narration (a feature in all of Kubrick's previous films), a stronger emphasis on the prevailing Cold War balance of terror, and a different and more explicitly explained breakdown for HAL. Other changes include a different monolith for the "Dawn of Man" sequence, discarded when early prototypes did not photograph well; the use of Saturn as the final destination of the Discovery mission rather than Jupiter, discarded when the special effects team could not develop a convincing rendition of Saturn's rings; and the finale of the Star Child exploding nuclear weapons carried by Earth-orbiting satellites, which Kubrick discarded for its similarity to his previous film, Dr. Strangelove. The finale and many of the other discarded screenplay ideas survived in Clarke's novel.

Kubrick made further changes to make the film more nonverbal, to communicate on a visual and visceral level rather than through conventional narrative. By the time shooting began, Kubrick had removed much of the dialogue and narration. Long periods without dialogue permeate the film: the film has no dialogue for roughly the first and last twenty minutes, as well as for the 10 minutes from Floyd's Moonbus landing near the monolith until Poole watches a BBC newscast on Discovery. What dialogue remains is notable for its banality (making the computer HAL seem to have more emotion than the humans) when juxtaposed with the epic space scenes. Vincent LoBrutto wrote that Clarke's novel has its own "strong narrative structure" and precision, while the narrative of the film remains symbolic, in accord with Kubrick's final intentions.

Principal photography began on 29 December 1965, in Stage H at Shepperton Studios, Shepperton, England. The studio was chosen because it could house the 60-by-120-by-60-foot (18 m × 37 m × 18 m) pit for the Tycho crater excavation scene, the first to be shot. In January 1966, the production moved to the smaller MGM-British Studios in Borehamwood, where the live-action and special-effects filming was done, starting with the scenes involving Floyd on the Orion spaceplane; it was described as a "huge throbbing nerve center ... with much the same frenetic atmosphere as a Cape Kennedy blockhouse during the final stages of Countdown." The only scene not filmed in a studio-and the last live-action scene shot for the film-was the skull-smashing sequence, in which Moonwatcher (Richter) wields his newfound bone "weapon-tool" against a pile of nearby animal bones. A small elevated platform was built in a field near the studio so that the camera could shoot upward with the sky as background, avoiding cars and trucks passing by in the distance. The Dawn of Man sequence that opens the film was shot at Borehamwood with John Alcott as cinematographer after Geoffrey Unsworth left to work on other projects. The still photographs used as backgrounds for the Dawn of Man sequence were taken in Namibia.

Filming of actors was completed in September 1967, and from June 1966 until March 1968, Kubrick spent most of his time working on the 205 special-effects shots in the film. He ordered the special-effects technicians to use the painstaking process of creating all visual effects seen in the film " in camera", avoiding degraded picture quality from the use of blue screen and travelling matte techniques. Although this technique, known as "held takes", resulted in a much better image, it meant exposed film would be stored for long periods of time between shots, sometimes as long as a year. In March 1968, Kubrick finished the "pre-premiere" editing of the film, making his final cuts just days before the film's general release in April 1968.

The film was announced in 1965 as a " Cinerama" film and was photographed in Super Panavision 70 (which uses a 65 mm negative combined with spherical lenses to create an aspect ratio of 2.20:1). It would eventually be released in a limited " roadshow" Cinerama version, then in 70 mm and 35 mm versions. Colour processing and 35 mm release prints were done using Technicolor's dye transfer process. The 70 mm prints were made by MGM Laboratories, Inc. on Metrocolor. The production was $4.5 million over the initial $6 million budget and 16 months behind schedule.

For the opening sequence involving tribes of apes, professional mime Daniel Richter played the lead ape and choreographed the movements of the other man-apes, who were mostly portrayed by his mime troupe.

Post-production

The film was edited before it was publicly screened, cutting out, among other things, a painting class on the lunar base that included Kubrick's daughters, additional scenes of life on the base, and Floyd buying a bush baby for his daughter from a department store via videophone. A ten-minute black-and-white opening sequence featuring interviews with scientists, including Freeman Dyson discussing off-Earth life, was removed after an early screening for MGM executives.

From early in production, Kubrick decided that he wanted the film to be a primarily nonverbal experience that did not rely on the traditional techniques of narrative cinema, and in which music would play a vital role in evoking particular moods. About half the music in the film appears either before the first line of dialogue or after the final line. Almost no music is heard during scenes with dialogue.

The film is notable for its innovative use of classical music taken from existing commercial recordings. Most feature films, then and now, are typically accompanied by elaborate film scores or songs written specially for them by professional composers. In the early stages of production, Kubrick commissioned a score for 2001 from Hollywood composer Alex North, who had written the score for and also had worked on Dr. Strangelove. During post-production, Kubrick chose to abandon North's music in favour of the now-familiar classical pieces he had earlier chosen as temporary music for the film. North did not learn that his score had been abandoned until he saw the film's premiere.

Design and special effects

Costumes and set design

Kubrick involved himself in every aspect of production, even choosing the fabric for his actors' costumes, and selecting notable pieces of contemporary furniture for use in the film. When Floyd exits the Space Station5 elevator, he is greeted by an attendant seated behind a slightly modified George Nelson Action Office desk from Herman Miller's 1964 " Action Office" series. Danish designer Arne Jacobsen designed the cutlery used by the Discovery astronauts in the film.

Other examples of modern furniture in the film are the bright red Djinn chairs seen prominently throughout the space station and Eero Saarinen's 1956 pedestal tables. Olivier Mourgue, designer of the Djinn chair, has used the connection to 2001 in his advertising; a frame from the film's space station sequence and three production stills appear on the homepage of Mourgue's website. Shortly before Kubrick's death, film critic Alexander Walker informed Kubrick of Mourgue's use of the film, joking to him "You're keeping the price up". Commenting on their use in the film, Walker writes:

Everyone recalls one early sequence in the film, the space hotel, primarily because the custom-made Olivier Mourgue furnishings, those foam-filled sofas, undulant and serpentine, are covered in scarlet fabric and are the first stabs of colour one sees. They resemble Rorschach "blots" against the pristine purity of the rest of the lobby.

The film features an extensive use of Eurostile Bold Extended, Futura and other sans serif typefaces as design elements of the 2001 world. Computer displays show high-resolution fonts, colour, and graphics that were far in advance of what most computers were capable of in the 1960s, when the film was made.

Design of the monolith

Kubrick was personally involved in the design of the monolith and its form for the film. The first design for the monolith for the 2001 film was a transparent tetrahedral pyramid. This was taken from the short story " The Sentinel" that the first story was based on.

To heighten the reality of the film, very intricate models of the various spacecraft and locations were built. Their sizes ranged from about two-foot-long models of satellites and the Aries translunar shuttle up to the 55-foot (17 m)-long model of the Discovery One spacecraft. "In-camera" techniques were again used as much as possible to combine models and background shots together to prevent degradation of the image through duplication.

In shots where there was no perspective change, still shots of the models were photographed and positive paper prints were made. The image of the model was cut out of the photographic print and mounted on glass and filmed on an animation stand. The undeveloped film was re-wound to film the star background with the silhouette of the model photograph acting as a matte to block out where the spaceship image was.

Shots where the spacecraft had parts in motion or the perspective changed were shot by directly filming the model. For most shots the model was stationary and camera was driven along a track on a special mount, the motor of which was mechanically linked to the camera motor-making it possible to repeat camera moves and match speeds exactly. Elements of the scene were recorded on the same piece of film in separate passes to combine the lit model, stars, planets, or other spacecraft in the same shot. In moving shots of the long Discovery One spacecraft, in order to keep the entire model in focus (and preserve its sense of scale), the camera's aperture was stopped down for maximum depth-of-field, and each frame was exposed for several seconds. Many matting techniques were tried to block out the stars behind the models, with filmmakers sometimes resorting to hand-tracing frame by frame around the image of the spacecraft ( rotoscoping) to create the matte.

Some shots required exposing the film again to record previously filmed live-action shots of the people appearing in the windows of the spacecraft or structures. This was achieved by projecting the window action onto the models in a separate camera pass or, when two-dimensional photographs were used, projecting from the backside through a hole cut in the photograph.

All of the shots required multiple takes so that some film could be developed and printed to check exposure, density, alignment of elements, and to supply footage used for other photographic effects, such as for matting.

Rotating sets

For spacecraft interior shots, ostensibly containing a giant centrifuge that produces artificial gravity, Kubrick had a 30-short-ton (27 t) rotating "ferris wheel" built by Vickers-Armstrong Engineering Group at a cost of $750,000. The set was 38 feet (12 m) in diameter and 10 feet (3.0 m) wide. Various scenes in the Discovery centrifuge were shot by securing set pieces within the wheel, then rotating it while the actor walked or ran in sync with its motion, keeping him at the bottom of the wheel as it turned. The camera could be fixed to the inside of the rotating wheel to show the actor walking completely "around" the set, or mounted in such a way that the wheel rotated independently of the stationary camera, as in the jogging scene where the camera appears to alternately precede and follow the running actor.

The shots where the actors appear on opposite sides of the wheel required one of the actors to be strapped securely into place at the "top" of the wheel as it moved to allow the other actor to walk to the "bottom" of the wheel to join him. The most notable case is when Bowman enters the centrifuge from the central hub on a ladder, and joins Poole, who is eating on the other side of the centrifuge. This required Gary Lockwood to be strapped into a seat while Keir Dullea walked toward him from the opposite side of the wheel as it turned with him.

Another rotating set appeared in an earlier sequence on board the Aries trans-lunar shuttle. A stewardess is shown preparing in-flight meals, then carrying them into a circular walkway. Attached to the set as it rotates 180 degrees, the camera's point of view remains constant, and she appears to walk up the "side" of the circular walkway, and steps, now in an "upside-down" orientation, into a connecting hallway.

Zero-gravity effects

The realistic-looking effects of the astronauts floating weightless in space and inside the spacecraft were accomplished by suspending the actors from wires attached to the top of the set and placing the camera beneath them. The actors' bodies blocked the camera's view of the wires and appeared to float. For the shot of Poole floating into the pod's arms during Bowman's recovery of him, a stuntman on a wire portrayed the movements of an unconscious man and was shot in slow motion to enhance the illusion of drifting through space. The scene showing Bowman entering the emergency airlock from the EVA pod was done similarly: an off-camera stagehand, standing on a platform, held the wire suspending Dullea above the camera positioned at the bottom of the vertically oriented airlock. At the proper moment, the stage-hand first loosened his grip on the wire, causing Dullea to fall toward the camera, then, while holding the wire firmly, jumped off the platform, causing Dullea to ascend back toward the hatch.

The methods used were alleged to have placed stuntman Bill Weston's life in danger. Weston recalled that he filmed one sequence without air-holes in his suit, risking asphyxiation. "Even when the tank was feeding air into the suit, there was no place for the carbon dioxide Weston exhaled to go. So it simply built up inside, incrementally causing a heightened heart rate, rapid breathing, fatigue, clumsiness, and eventually, unconsciousness." Weston said Kubrick was warned "we've got to get him back" but reportedly replied, "Damn it, we just started. Leave him up there! Leave him up there!" When Weston lost consciousness, filming ceased, and he was brought down. "They brought the tower in, and I went looking for Stanley,... I was going to shove MGM right up his... And the thing is, Stanley had left the studio and sent Victor [Lyndon, the associate producer] to talk to me." Weston claimed Kubrick fled the studio for "two or three days. ... I know he didn't come in the next day, and I'm sure it wasn't the day after. Because I was going to do him."

"Star Gate" sequence

The coloured lights in the Star Gate sequence were accomplished by slit-scan photography of thousands of high-contrast images on film, including Op art paintings, architectural drawings, Moiré patterns, printed circuits, and electron-microscope photographs of molecular and crystal structures. Known to staff as "Manhattan Project", the shots of various nebula-like phenomena, including the expanding star field, were coloured paints and chemicals swirling in a pool-like device known as a cloud tank, shot in slow motion in a dark room. The live-action landscape shots were filmed in the Hebridean islands, the mountains of northern Scotland, and Monument Valley. The colouring and negative-image effects were achieved with different colour filters in the process of making duplicate negatives in an optical printer.

Visual effects

"Not one foot of this film was made with computer-generated special effects. Everything you see in this film or saw in this film was done physically or chemically, one way or the other."

2001 contains a famous example of a match cut, a type of cut in which two shots are matched by action or subject matter. After Moonwatcher uses a bone to kill another ape at the watering hole, he throws it triumphantly into the air; as the bone spins in the air, the film cuts to an orbiting satellite, marking the end of the prologue. The match cut draws a connection between the two objects as exemplars of primitive and advanced tools respectively, and demonstrates humanity's technological progress since the time of early hominids.

2001 pioneered the use of front projection with retroreflective matting. Kubrick used the technique to produce the backdrops in the Africa scenes and the scene when astronauts walk on the Moon.

Front projection had been used in smaller settings before 2001, mostly for still photography or television production, using small still images and projectors. The expansive backdrops for the African scenes required a screen 40 feet (12 m) tall and 110 feet (34 m) wide, far larger than had been used before. When the reflective material was applied to the backdrop in 100-foot (30 m) strips, variations at the seams of the strips led to visual artefacts; to solve this, the crew tore the material into smaller chunks and applied them in a random "camouflage" pattern on the backdrop. The existing projectors using 4-×-5-inch (10 × 13 cm) transparencies resulted in grainy images when projected that large, so the crew worked with MGM's special-effects supervisor Tom Howard to build a custom projector using 8-×-10-inch (20 × 25 cm) transparencies, which required the largest water-cooled arc lamp available. The technique was used widely in the film industry thereafter until it was replaced by blue/green screen systems in the 1990s.

Soundtrack

The initial MGM soundtrack album release contained none of the material from the altered and uncredited rendition of Ligeti's Aventures used in the film, used a different recording of Also sprach Zarathustra (performed by the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Karl Böhm) from that heard in the film, and a longer excerpt of Lux Aeterna than that in the film.

In 1996, Turner Entertainment/ Rhino Records released a new soundtrack on CD that included the film's rendition of "Aventures", the version of "Zarathustra" used in the film, and the shorter version of Lux Aeterna from the film. As additional "bonus tracks" at the end, the CD includes the versions of "Zarathustra" and Lux Aeterna on the old MGM soundtrack album, an unaltered performance of "Aventures", and a nine-minute compilation of all of HAL's dialogue.

Alex North's unused music was first released in Telarc's issue of the main theme on Hollywood's Greatest Hits, Vol. 2, a compilation album by Erich Kunzel and the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra. All of the music North originally wrote was recorded commercially by his friend and colleague Jerry Goldsmith with the National Philharmonic Orchestra and released on Varèse Sarabande CDs shortly after Telarc's first theme release and before North's death. Eventually, a mono mix-down of North's original recordings was released as a limited-edition CD by Intrada Records.

Theatrical run and post-premiere cuts

The film's world premiere was on 2 April 1968, at the Uptown Theater in Washington, D.C. with a 160-minute cut. It opened the next day at the Loew's Capitol in New York and the following day at the Warner Hollywood Theatre in Los Angeles. The original version was also shown in Boston.

Kubrick and editor Ray Lovejoy edited the film between 5 April and9, 1968. Kubrick's rationale for trimming the film was to tighten the narrative. Reviews suggested the film suffered from its departure from traditional cinematic storytelling. Kubrick said, "I didn't believe that the trims made a critical difference. ... The people who like it like it no matter what its length, and the same holds true for the people who hate it." The cut footage is reported as being 19 or 17 minutes long. It includes scenes revealing details about life on Discovery: additional space walks, Bowman retrieving a spare part from an octagonal corridor, elements from the Poole murder sequence-including space-walk preparation and HAL turning off radio contact with Poole-and a close-up of Bowman picking up a slipper during his walk in the alien room. Jerome Agel describes the cut scenes as comprising "Dawn of Man, Orion, Poole exercising in the centrifuge, and Poole's pod exiting from Discovery." The new cut was approximately 143 minutes long, around 88 minutes for the first section, followed by an intermission, and 55 minutes in the second section. Detailed instructions were sent to theatre owners already showing the film so that they could make the specified trims themselves.[citation needed ] Some of the cuts may have been poorly done in a particular theatre, possibly causing the version seen by viewers early in the film's run to vary from theatre to theatre.

According to his brother-in-law, Jan Harlan, Kubrick was adamant that the trims were never to be seen and had the negatives, which he had kept in his garage, burned shortly before his death. This was confirmed by former Kubrick assistant Leon Vitali: "I'll tell you right now, okay, on Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Barry Lyndon, some little parts of 2001, we had thousands of cans of negative outtakes and print, which we had stored in an area at his house where we worked out of, which he personally supervised the loading of it to a truck and then I went down to a big industrial waste lot and burned it. That's what he wanted." However, in December 2010, Douglas Trumbull, the film's visual effects supervisor, announced that Warner Bros. had found 17 minutes of lost footage from the post-premiere cuts, "perfectly preserved", in a Kansas salt mine vault used by Warners for storage. No plans have been announced for the rediscovered footage.

The revised version was ready for the expansion of the roadshow release to four other U.S. cities (Chicago, Denver, Detroit and Houston), on 10 April 1968, and internationally in five cities the following day, where the shortened version was shown in 70mm format in the 2.21:1 aspect ratio and used a six-track stereo magnetic soundtrack.

By the end of May, the film had opened in 22 cities in the United States and Canada and in another 36 in June. The general release of the film in its 35 mm anamorphic format took place in autumn 1968 and used either a four-track magnetic stereo soundtrack or an optical monaural one.

The original 70-millimetre release, like many Super Panavision 70 films of the era such as , was advertised as being in "Cinerama" in cinemas equipped with special projection optics and a deeply curved screen. In standard cinemas, the film was identified as a 70-millimetre production. The original release of 2001: A Space Odyssey in 70-millimetre Cinerama with six-track sound played continually for more than a year in several venues, and for 103 weeks in Los Angeles.

As was typical of most films of the era released both as a " roadshow" (in Cinerama format in the case of 2001) and general release (in 70-millimetre in the case of 2001), the entrance music, intermission music (and intermission altogether), and postcredit exit music were cut from most prints of the latter version, although these have been restored to most DVD releases.

In its first nine weeks from 22 locations, it grossed $2 million in the United States and Canada. The film earned $8.5 million in theatrical gross rentals from roadshow engagements throughout 1968, contributing to North American rentals of $16.4 million and worldwide rentals of $21.9 million during its original release. The film's high costs, in excess of $10 million, meant that the initial returns from the 1968 release left it $800,000 in the red; but the successful re-release in 1971 made it profitable. By June 1974, the film had rentals from the United States and Canada of $20.3 million (gross of $58 million) and international rentals of $7.5 million. The film had a reissue on a test basis on 24 July 1974 at the Cinerama Dome in Los Angeles and grossed $53,000 in its first week, which led to an expanded reissue. Further re-releases followed, giving a cumulative gross of over $60 million in the United States and Canada. Taking its re-releases into account, it is the highest-grossing film of 1968 in the United States and Canada. Worldwide, it has grossed $146 million across all releases, although some estimates place the gross higher, at over $190 million.

Critical response

Upon release, 2001 polarised critical opinion, receiving both praise and derision, with many New York-based critics being especially harsh. Kubrick called them "dogmatically atheistic and materialistic and earthbound". Some critics viewed the original 161-minute cut shown at premieres in Washington D.C., New York, and Los Angeles. Keir Dullea says that during the New York premiere, 250 people walked out; in L.A., Rock Hudson not only left early but "was heard to mutter, 'What is this bullshit?'" "Will someone tell me what the hell this is about?" "But a few months into the release, they realised a lot of people were watching it while smoking funny cigarettes. Someone in San Francisco even ran right through the screen screaming: 'It's God!' So they came up with a new poster that said: '2001 - the ultimate trip!'"

In The New Yorker, Penelope Gilliatt said it was "some kind of great film, and an unforgettable endeavor ... The film is hypnotically entertaining, and it is funny without once being gaggy, but it is also rather harrowing." Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times wrote that it was "the picture that science fiction fans of every age and in every corner of the world have prayed (sometimes forlornly) that the industry might some day give them. It is an ultimate statement of the science fiction film, an awesome realization of the spatial future ... it is a milestone, a landmark for a spacemark, in the art of film." Louise Sweeney of The Christian Science Monitor felt that 2001 was "a brilliant intergalactic satire on modern technology. It's also a dazzling 160-minute tour on the Kubrick filmship through the universe out there beyond our earth." Philip French wrote that the film was "perhaps the first multi-million-dollar supercolossal movie since D.W. Griffith's Intolerance fifty years ago which can be regarded as the work of one man ... Space Odyssey is important as the high-water mark of science-fiction movie making, or at least of the genre's futuristic branch." The Boston Globe's review called it "the world's most extraordinary film. Nothing like it has ever been shown in Boston before or, for that matter, anywhere ... The film is as exciting as the discovery of a new dimension in life." Roger Ebert gave the film four stars in his original review, saying the film "succeeds magnificently on a cosmic scale." He later put it on his Top 10 list for Sight & Sound. provided at least seven different mini-reviews of the film in various issues in 1968, each one slightly more positive than the preceding one; in the final review dated 27 December 1968, the magazine called 2001 "an epic film about the history and future of mankind, brilliantly directed by Stanley Kubrick. The special effects are mindblowing."

Others were unimpressed. Pauline Kael called it "a monumentally unimaginative movie." Stanley Kauffmann of The New Republic described it as "a film that is so dull, it even dulls our interest in the technical ingenuity for the sake of which Kubrick has allowed it to become dull." The Soviet film director Andrei Tarkovsky found the film to be an inadequate addition to the science fiction genre of filmmaking. Renata Adler of The New York Times wrote that it was "somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring." Variety's Robert B. Frederick ('Robe') believed the film was a "[b]ig, beautiful, but plodding sci-fi epic ... A major achievement in cinematography and special effects, 2001 lacks dramatic appeal to a large degree and only conveys suspense after the halfway mark." Andrew Sarris called it "one of the grimmest films I have ever seen in my life ... 2001 is a disaster because it is much too abstract to make its abstract points." (Sarris reversed his opinion upon a second viewing, and declared, " 2001 is indeed a major work by a major artist.") John Simon felt it was "a regrettable failure, although not a total one. This film is fascinating when it concentrates on apes or machines ... and dreadful when it deals with the in-betweens: humans ... 2001, for all its lively visual and mechanical spectacle, is a kind of space- Spartacus and, more pretentious still, a shaggy God story." Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. deemed the film "morally pretentious, intellectually obscure and inordinately long ... a film out of control". In a 2001 review, the BBC said that its slow pacing often alienates modern audiences more than it did upon its initial release.

On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a "Certified Fresh" rating of 92% based on 116 reviews, with an average rating of 9.2/10. The website's critical consensus reads: "One of the most influential of all sci-fi films - and one of the most controversial - Stanley Kubrick's 2001 is a delicate, poetic meditation on the ingenuity - and folly - of mankind." Review aggregator Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, has assigned the film a score of 84 out of 100, based on 25 critic reviews, indicating "universal acclaim". 2001 was the only science fiction film to make Sight & Sound's 2012 list of the ten best films, and tops the Online Film Critics Society list of greatest science fiction films of all time. In 2012, the Motion Picture Editors Guild listed the film as the 19th best-edited film of all time based on a survey of its membership. Other lists that include the film are 50 Films to See Before You Die (#6), The Village Voice 100 Best Films of the 20th century (#11), and Roger Ebert's Top Ten (1968) (#2). In 1995, the Vatican named it one of the 45 best films ever made (and included it in a sub-list of the "Top Ten Art Movies" of all time.) In 1998, conducted a reader's poll and 2001: A Space Odyssey was voted as #9 on the list of "greatest films of all time". Entertainment Weekly voted it no. 26 on their list of 100 Greatest Movies of All Time. In 2017, magazine's readers' poll ranked the film 21st on its list of "The 100 Greatest Movies". In the Sight & Sound poll of 480 directors published in December 2022, 2001: A Space Odyssey was voted as the Greatest Film of All Time, ahead of Citizen Kane and The Godfather.

Science fiction writers

The film won the Hugo Award for best dramatic presentation, as voted by science fiction fans and published science-fiction writers. Ray Bradbury praised the film's photography, but disliked the banality of most of the dialogue, and believed that the audience does not care when Poole dies. Both he and Lester del Rey disliked the film's feeling of sterility and blandness in the human encounters amidst the technological wonders, while both praised the pictorial element of the film. Reporting that "half the audience had left by intermission", Del Rey described the film as dull, confusing, and boring ("the first of the New Wave-Thing movies, with the usual empty symbols"), predicting "[i]t will probably be a box-office disaster, too, and thus set major science-fiction movie making back another ten years". Samuel R. Delany was impressed by how the film undercuts the audience's normal sense of space and orientation in several ways. Like Bradbury, Delany noticed the banality of the dialogue (he stated that characters say nothing meaningful), but regarded this as a dramatic strength, a prelude to the rebirth at the conclusion of the film. Without analysing the film in detail, Isaac Asimov spoke well of it in his autobiography and other essays. James P. Hogan liked the film but complained that the ending did not make any sense to him, leading to a bet about whether he could write something better: "I stole Arthur's plot idea shamelessly and produced Inherit the Stars."

Awards and honours

In 1969, a United States Department of State committee chose 2001 as the American entry at the 6th Moscow International Film Festival.

2001 was ranked 15th on the American Film Institute's 2007 100 Years ... 100 Movies (22 in ), was no. 40 on its 100 Years, 100 Thrills, was included on its 100 Years, 100 Quotes (no. 78 "Open the pod bay doors, HAL."), and HAL 9000 was the no. 13 villain in 100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains. The film was also no. 47 on AFI's 100 Years ... 100 Cheers and the no.1 science fiction film on AFI's 10 Top 10.

Interpretations

Since its premiere, 2001: A Space Odyssey has been analysed and interpreted by professional critics and theorists, amateur writers, and science fiction fans. In his monograph for BFI analysing the film, Peter Krämer summarised the diverse interpretations as ranging from those who saw it as darkly apocalyptic in tone to those who saw it as an optimistic reappraisal of the hopes of mankind and humanity. Questions about 2001 range from uncertainty about its implications for humanity's origins and destiny in the universe to interpreting elements of the film's more enigmatic scenes, such as the meaning of the monolith, or the fate of astronaut David Bowman. There are also simpler and more mundane questions about the plot, in particular the causes of HAL's breakdown (explained in earlier drafts but kept mysterious in the film).

Audiences vs. critics

A spectrum of diverse interpretative opinions would form after the film's release, appearing to divide theatre audiences from the opinions of critics. Krämer writes: "Many people sent letters to Kubrick to tell him about their responses to 2001, most of them regarding the film-in particular the ending-as an optimistic statement about humanity, which is seen to be born and reborn. The film's reviewers and academic critics, by contrast, have tended to understand the film as a pessimistic account of human nature and humanity's future. The most extreme of these interpretations state that the foetus floating above the Earth will destroy it."

Some of the critics' cataclysmic interpretations were informed by Kubrick's prior direction of the Cold War film Dr. Strangelove, immediately before 2001, which resulted in dark speculation about the nuclear weapons orbiting the Earth in 2001. These interpretations were challenged by Clarke, who said: "Many readers have interpreted the last paragraph of the book to mean that he (the foetus) destroyed Earth, perhaps for the purpose of creating a new Heaven. This idea never occurred to me; it seems clear that he triggered the orbiting nuclear bombs harmlessly...". In response to Jeremy Bernstein's dark interpretation of the film's ending, Kubrick said: "The book does not end with the destruction of the Earth."

Regarding the film as a whole, Kubrick encouraged people to make their own interpretations and refused to offer an explanation of "what really happened". In a 1968 interview with Playboy magazine, he said:

You're free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film-and such speculation is one indication that it has succeeded in gripping the audience at a deep level-but I don't want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that every viewer will feel obligated to pursue or else fear he's missed the point.

In a subsequent discussion of the film with Joseph Gelmis, Kubrick said his main aim was to avoid "intellectual verbalization" and reach "the viewer's subconscious." But he said he did not strive for ambiguity-it was simply an inevitable outcome of making the film nonverbal. Still, he acknowledged this ambiguity was an invaluable asset to the film. He was willing then to give a fairly straightforward explanation of the plot on what he called the "simplest level," but unwilling to discuss the film's metaphysical interpretation, which he felt should be left up to viewers.

Meaning of the monolith

Carolyn Geduld writes that what "structurally unites all four episodes of the film" is the monolith, the film's largest and most unresolvable enigma. Vincent LoBrutto's biography of Kubrick says that for many, Clarke's novel supplements the understanding of the monolith which is more ambiguously depicted in the film. Similarly, Geduld observes that "the monolith ... has a very simple explanation in Clarke's novel", though she later asserts that even the novel does not fully explain the ending.

Bob McClay's Rolling Stone review describes a parallelism between the monolith's first appearance in which tool usage is imparted to the apes (thus 'beginning' mankind) and the completion of "another evolution" in the fourth and final encounter with the monolith. In a similar vein, Tim Dirks ends his synopsis saying "[t]he cyclical evolution from ape to man to spaceman to angel-starchild-superman is complete."

Humanity's first and second encounters with the monolith have visual elements in common; both the apes, and later the astronauts, touch it gingerly with their hands, and both sequences conclude with near-identical images of the Sun appearing directly over it (the first with a crescent moon adjacent to it in the sky, the second with a near-identical crescent Earth in the same position), echoing the Sun-Earth-Moon alignment seen at the very beginning of the film. The second encounter also suggests the triggering of the monolith's radio signal to Jupiter by the presence of humans, echoing the premise of Clarke's source story "The Sentinel".

The monolith is the subject of the film's final line of dialogue (spoken at the end of the "Jupiter Mission" segment): "Its origin and purpose still a total mystery." Reviewers McClay and Roger Ebert wrote that the monolith is the main element of mystery in the film; Ebert described "the shock of the monolith's straight edges and square corners among the weathered rocks," and the apes warily circling it as prefiguring man reaching "for the stars." Patrick Webster suggests the final line relates to how the film should be approached as a whole: "The line appends not merely to the discovery of the monolith on the Moon, but to our understanding of the film in the light of the ultimate questions it raises about the mystery of the universe."

According to other scholars, "the monolith is a representation of the actual wideframe cinema screen, rotated 90 degrees ... a symbolic cinema screen". "It is at once a screen and the opposite of a screen, since its black surface only absorbs, and sends nothing out. ... and leads us ... to project ourselves, our emotions".

"A new heaven"

Clarke indicated his preferred reading of the ending of 2001 as oriented toward the creation of "a new heaven" provided by the Star Child. His view was corroborated in a posthumously released interview with Kubrick. Kubrick says that Bowman is elevated to a higher level of being that represents the next stage of human evolution. The film also conveys what some viewers have described as a sense of the sublime and numinous. Ebert writes in his essay on 2001 in The Great Movies:

North's [rejected] score, which is available on a recording, is a good job of film composition, but would have been wrong for 2001 because, like all scores, it attempts to underline the action-to give us emotional cues. The classical music chosen by Kubrick exists outside the action. It uplifts. It wants to be sublime; it brings a seriousness and transcendence to the visuals.

In a book on architecture, Gregory Caicco writes that Space Odyssey illustrates how our quest for space is motivated by two contradictory desires, a "desire for the sublime" characterised by a need to encounter something totally other than ourselves-"something numinous"-and the conflicting desire for a beauty that makes us feel no longer "lost in space," but at home. Similarly, an article in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy, titled "Sense of Wonder," describes how 2001 creates a "numinous sense of wonder" by portraying a universe that inspires a sense of awe but that at the same time we feel we can understand. Christopher Palmer wrote that "the sublime and the banal" coexist in the film, as it implies that to get into space, people had to suspend the "sense of wonder" that motivated them to explore it.

HAL's breakdown

The reasons for HAL's malfunction and subsequent malignant behaviour have elicited much discussion. He has been compared to Frankenstein's monster. In Clarke's novel, HAL malfunctions because of being ordered to lie to the crew of Discovery and withhold confidential information from them, namely the confidentially programmed mission priority over expendable human life, despite being constructed for "the accurate processing of information without distortion or concealment". This would not be addressed on film until the 1984 follow-up, 2010: The Year We Make Contact. Film critic Roger Ebert wrote that HAL, as the supposedly perfect computer, is actually the most human of the characters. In an interview with Joseph Gelmis in 1969, Kubrick said that HAL "had an acute emotional crisis because he could not accept evidence of his own fallibility".

"Star Child" symbolism

Multiple allegorical interpretations of 2001 have been proposed. The symbolism of life and death can be seen through the final moments of the film, which are defined by the image of the "Star Child," an in utero foetus that draws on the work of Lennart Nilsson. The Star Child signifies a "great new beginning," and is depicted naked and ungirded but with its eyes wide open. Leonard F. Wheat sees 2001 as a multi-layered allegory, commenting simultaneously on Nietzsche, Homer, and the relationship of man to machine. Rolling Stone reviewer Bob McClay sees the film as like a four-movement symphony, its story told with "deliberate realism".

Military satellites

Kubrick originally planned a voice-over to reveal that the satellites seen after the prologue are nuclear weapons, and that the Star Child would detonate the weapons at the end of the film but felt this would create associations with Dr. Strangelove and decided not to make it obvious that they were "war machines". A few weeks before the film's release, the U.S. and Soviet governments had agreed not to put any nuclear weapons into outer space.

Kubrick scholar Michel Ciment, discussing Kubrick's attitude toward human aggression and instinct, observes: "The bone cast into the air by the ape (now become a man) is transformed at the other extreme of civilization, by one of those abrupt ellipses characteristic of the director, into a spacecraft on its way to the moon." In contrast to Ciment's reading of a cut to a serene "other extreme of civilization", science fiction novelist Robert Sawyer, in the Canadian documentary 2001 and Beyond, says he sees it as a cut from a bone to a nuclear weapons platform, explaining that "what we see is not how far we've leaped ahead, what we see is that today, '2001', and four million years ago on the African veldt, it's exactly the same-the power of mankind is the power of its weapons. It's a continuation, not a discontinuity in that jump."

Legacy and influence

2001: A Space Odyssey is widely regarded as among the greatest and most influential films ever made. It is considered one of the major artistic works of the 20th century, with many critics and filmmakers considering it Kubrick's masterpiece. In the 1980s, critic David Denby compared Kubrick to the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, calling him "a force of supernatural intelligence, appearing at great intervals amid high-pitched shrieks, who gives the world a violent kick up the next rung of the evolutionary ladder". By the start of the 21st century, 2001: A Space Odyssey had become recognised as among the best films ever made by such sources as the British Film Institute (BFI). The Village Voice ranked the film at number 11 in its Top 250 "Best Films of the Century" list in 1999, based on a poll of critics. In January 2002, the film was included on the list of the "Top 100 Essential Films of All Time" by the National Society of Film Critics. Sight & Sound magazine ranked the film 12th in its greatest films of all-time list in 1982, tenth in 1992 critics' poll of greatest films, sixth in the top ten films of all time in its 2002, 2012 and 2022 critics' polls editions; it also tied for second and first place in the magazine's 2012 and 2022 directors' poll. The film was voted no. 43 on the list of "100 Greatest Films" by the prominent French magazine Cahiers du cinéma in 2008. In 2010, The Guardian named it "the best sci-fi and fantasy film of all time". The film ranked 4th in BBC's 2015 list of the 100 greatest American films. In 1991, it was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. In 2010, it was named the greatest film of all time by The Moving Arts Film Journal.

Stanley Kubrick made the ultimate science fiction movie, and it is going to be very hard for someone to come along and make a better movie, as far as I'm concerned. On a technical level, it [] can be compared, but personally I think that 2001 is far superior.

The influence of 2001 on subsequent filmmakers is considerable. Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and others-including many special effects technicians-discuss the impact the film has had on them in a featurette titled Standing on the Shoulders of Kubrick: The Legacy of 2001, included in the 2007 DVD release of the film. Spielberg calls it his film generation's "big bang", while Lucas says it was "hugely inspirational", calling Kubrick "the filmmaker's filmmaker". Director Martin Scorsese has listed it as one of his favourite films of all time. Sydney Pollack calls it "groundbreaking", and William Friedkin says 2001 is "the grandfather of all such films". At the 2007 Venice film festival, director Ridley Scott said he believed 2001 was the unbeatable film that in a sense killed the science fiction genre. Similarly, film critic Michel Ciment in his essay "Odyssey of Stanley Kubrick" wrote, "Kubrick has conceived a film which in one stroke has made the whole science fiction cinema obsolete."

Others credit 2001 with opening up a market for films such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, , Blade Runner, , and Interstellar, proving that big-budget "serious" science-fiction films can be commercially successful, and establishing the "sci-fi blockbuster" as a Hollywood staple. Science magazine Discover's blogger Stephen Cass, discussing the film's considerable impact on subsequent science fiction, writes that "the balletic spacecraft scenes set to sweeping classical music, the tarantula-soft tones of HAL 9000, and the ultimate alien artifact, the monolith, have all become enduring cultural icons in their own right". Trumbull said that when working on Star Trek: The Motion Picture he made a scene without dialogue because of "something I really learned with Kubrick and 2001: Stop talking for a while, and let it all flow".

Kubrick did not envision a sequel to 2001. Fearing the later exploitation and recycling of his material in other productions (as was done with the props from MGM's Forbidden Planet), he ordered all sets, props, miniatures, production blueprints, and prints of unused scenes destroyed.[citation needed ] Most of these materials were lost, with some exceptions: a 2001 spacesuit backpack appeared in the "Close Up" episode of the Gerry Anderson series , and one of HAL's eyepieces is in the possession of the author of Hal's Legacy, David G. Stork. In 2012, Lockheed engineer Adam Johnson, working with Frederick I. Ordway III, science adviser to Kubrick, wrote the book 2001: The Lost Science, which for the first time featured many of the blueprints of the spacecraft and film sets that previously had been thought destroyed. Clarke wrote three sequel novels: 2010: Odyssey Two (1982), 2061: Odyssey Three (1987), and 3001: The Final Odyssey (1997). The only filmed sequel, 2010: The Year We Make Contact, released in 1984, was based on Clarke's 1982 novel. Kubrick was not involved; it was directed as a spin-off by Peter Hyams in a more conventional style. The other two novels have not been adapted for the screen, although actor Tom Hanks in June 1999 expressed a passing interest in possible adaptations.

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the film's release, an exhibit called "The Barmecide Feast" opened on 8 April 2018, in the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum. The exhibit features a fully realised, full-scale reflection of the neo-classical hotel room from the film's penultimate scene. Director Christopher Nolan presented a mastered 70 mm print of 2001 for the film's 50th anniversary at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival on 12 May. The new 70 mm print is a photochemical recreation made from the original camera negative, for the first time since the film's original theatrical run. Further, an exhibit entitled "Envisioning 2001: Stanley Kubrick's Space Odyssey" presented at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, New York City opened in January 2020.

In July 2020, a silver space suit was sold at auction in Los Angeles for $370,000, exceeding its estimate of $200,000-300,000. Four layers of paint indicate it was used in multiple scenes, including the Clavius Moon base sequence. The helmet had been painted green at one stage, leading to a belief that it may have been worn during the scene where Dave Bowman disconnects HAL 9000.

Stanley Kubrick introduced Arthur C. Clarke to the book The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell during the writing of 2001: A Space Odyssey. There are allegorical archetypal patterns of the " hero's journey" in this film. Arthur C. Clarke called Joseph Campbell's book "very stimulating" in his diary entry.

The film has been released in several forms:

Re-releases

The film was re-released in 1974, 1977, 1980 and 1993. In 2001, a restoration of the 70 mm version was screened at the Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival, and the production was also reissued to selected film houses in North America, Europe and Asia.

For the film's 50th anniversary, Warner Bros. struck new 70mm prints from printing elements made directly from the original film negative. This was done under the supervision of film director Christopher Nolan, who has spoken of 2001's influence on his career. Following a showing at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival introduced by Nolan, the film had a limited worldwide release at select 70mm-equipped theatres in the summer of 2018, followed by a one-week run in North American IMAX theatres (including five locations equipped with 70 mm IMAX projectors).

References

Informational notes

Citations

1. "2001: A Space Odyssey". British Board of Film Classification.

2. ^ ""Two days turned into four weeks": an interview with Maggie D'Abo, hostess in '2001'". 2001italia.it. Archived from the original on 24 August 2019.

3. ^

4. ^ Evans, Gary (1991). In the national interest: a chronicle of the National Film Board of Canada from 1949 to 1989 (Repr. ed.). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. p. 75. ISBN 0-8020-6833-2. In the National Interest City of Gold.

5. ^ Benson, Michael (2018). Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-1-5011-6395-1. Archived from the original on 31 August 2018.

6. ^ Clarke, Arthur C. (2001). Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke. Macmillan. p. 460. ISBN 978-0-312-87821-4.

7. ^ Barham, J. M. (2009). "Incorporating Monsters: Music as Context, Character and Construction in Kubrick's The Shining". Terror Tracks: Music and Sound in Horror Cinema. London, U.K.: Equinox Press. pp. 137-170. ISBN 978-1-84553-202-4. Archived from the original on 4 August 2017.

8. ^ Ebert, Roger (12 April 1968). "2001: A Space Odyssey Movie Review". RogerEbert.com. Archived from the original on 4 April 2019.

9. ^ Geduld 1973, p. 24, reproduced in Castle 2005 and Schwam 2010, p. 22.

10. ^ Lightman, Herb A. (June 1968). "Filming 2001: A Space Odyssey". American Cinematographer. Excerpted in Castle 2005.

11. Chiasson, Dan (16 April 2018). ""2001: A Space Odyssey": What It Means, and How It Was Made". The New Yorker. Archived from the original on 26 October 2022.

12. Geduld 1973, p. 27, reproduced in: Schwam (2010, p. 26).

13. ^ Dyson, Freeman (1979). Disturbing the Universe. pp. 189-191. ISBN 0-330-26324-2.

14. ^ Castle 2005, p. [page needed ]

15. LoBrutto 1998, p. 308

16. Agel 1970, pp. 321-324

17. ^ DeMet, George D. (July 1999). "The Special Effects of '2001: A Space Odyssey'". DFX. Archived from the original on 9 May 2008.

18. ^ Benson, Michael (3 April 2018). "Dangling on a Wire: A Tale from the Making Of '2001: A Space Odyssey'". space.com. Archived from the original on 28 September 2018.

19. ^ Roberte, Dariusz. "2001: A Space Odyssey: A Critical Analysis of the Film Score". Visual-memory.co.uk. The Kubrick Site: Slavoj Zizek on Eyes Wide Shut. Archived from the original on 7 February 2018.

20. ^

21. 2001: A Space Odyssey at the American Film Institute Catalog

22. Frederick, Robert B. (2 April 1968). "Review: '2001: A Space Odyssey'". Variety. Archived from the original on 12 May 2018.

23. ^ "Kubrick Trims '2001' by 19 Mins., Adds Titles to Frame Sequences; Chi, Houston, Hub Reviews Good". Variety. 16 May 2020. p. 7.

24. Hart, Hugh (20 December 2010). "It's Official: Warner Bros. Has No Plans for Deleted <cite>2001: A Space Odyssey</cite> [sic] Vault Footage". Wired.

25. ^ Sneider, Jeff (16 December 2010). "WB Uncovers Lost Footage From Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey'". Archived from the original on 16 August 2011.

26. "$2 Mil 'Odyssey' B.O. Gross To Date". Daily Variety. 7 June 1968. p. 3.

27. Hall, Sheldon (9 April 2011). "Introduction to 2001: A Space Odyssey". In70mm.com. Archived from the original on 26 May 2011.

28. ^ "Big Rental Films of 1968". Variety. 8 January 1969. p. 15. This figure refers to rental revenue accruing to distributors.

29. Block & Wilson 2010, pp. 492-493

30. ^

31. ^

32. French, Philip. Review of ^ 2001 reprinted from an unnamed publication in Agel 1970, pp. 237-239.

33. Sarris, Andrew. Review of ^ 2001 quoted from a WBAI radio broadcast in Agel 1970, pp. 242-3.

34. Simon, John. Review of ^ 2001 reprinted from The New Leader in Agel 1970, p. 244.

35. ^ Christie, Ian (7 August 2017) [September 2012]. "The 50 Greatest Films of All Time". Sight & Sound. et al. British Film Institute. Archived from the original on 1 March 2017.

36. ^ "2001: A Space Odyssey Named the Greatest Sci-Fi Film of All Time By the Online Film Critics Society". Online Film Critics Society. 12 June 2002. Archived from the original on 26 November 2006.

37. ^ "The 75 Best Edited Films". Editors Guild Magazine. 1 (3). May 2012. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016.

38. ^ "Entertainment Weekly's 100 Greatest Movies of All Time". Filmsite.org. Archived from the original on 31 March 2014.

39. ^ "'2001: A Space Odyssey' named the greatest movie of all time by 480 filmmakers". 2 December 2022.

40. ^ Brosnan, John (1978). Future tense : the cinema of science fiction. Internet Archive. New York : St. Martin's Press. ISBN 978-0-312-31488-0.

41. Samuel R. Delany's and Lester del Rey's reviews both appear in the 1968 anthology ^ The Year's Best Science Fiction No. 2 edited by Harry Harrison and Brian W. Aldiss. Both are also printed on The Kubrick Site:

42. ^

43. ^ "AFI's 100 Years ... 100 Movies" (PDF). afi.com (10th Anniversary ed.). American Film Institute. 16 June 1998. Archived (PDF) from the original on 6 June 2013.

44. ^ Houston, Penelope (Spring 1971). "Skeleton Key to 2001". Sight and Sound International Film Quarterly. London: British Film Institute. 40 (2).

45. ^ Webster, Patrick (2010). Love and Death in Kubrick: A Critical Study of the Films from Lolita Through Eyes Wide Shut. McFarland. p. 66. ISBN 978-0-7864-5916-2.

46. ^ Chion, Michel (2019) [2001]. Kubrick's Cinema Odyssey. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 116. ISBN 978-1-838-71665-3.

47. ^ Palmer, Christopher (Spring 2006). "Big Dumb Objects in Science Fiction: Sublimity, Banality, and Modernity". Extrapolation. Kent. 47 (1): 103. doi:10.3828/extr.2006.47.1.10.

48. ^ Overbye, Dennis (10 May 2018). "'2001: A Space Odyssey' Is Still the 'Ultimate Trip' - The rerelease of Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece encourages us to reflect again on where we're coming from and where we're going". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 11 May 2018.

49. ^ Parrett, Aaron (March 2008). "Review: Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey: New Essays by Robert Kolker". Science Fiction Studies. SF-TH Inc. 35 (1): 116-120. JSTOR 25475111.

50. ^ Carr, Jay (2002). The A List: The National Society of Film Critics' 100 Essential Films. Da Capo Press. p. 81. ISBN 978-0-306-81096-1.

51. ^ "Sight and Sound Poll 1992: Critics". California Institute of Technology. Archived from the original on 18 June 2015.

52. ^

53. "Votes for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)". Sight & Sound. British Film Institute. Archived from the original on 1 December 2018.

54. ^ Heron, Ambrose (23 November 2008). "Cahiers du cinéma's 100 Greatest Films".

55. ^ "National Film Registry". National Film Registry (National Film Preservation Board, Library of Congress). 13 December 2011. Archived from the original on 28 March 2013.

56. ^ Ciment, Michel (1972). "Odyssey of Stanley Kubrick". In Johnson, William (ed.). Focus on the Science Fiction Film. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. ISBN 978-0-13-795179-6.

57. Deb, Sopan (11 May 2018). "Christopher Nolan's Version of Vinyl: Unrestoring '2001'". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 11 May 2018.

58. ^ Wiseman, Andreas (28 March 2018). "Cannes: Christopher Nolan To Present 70 mm Print Of Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey'". Deadline Hollywood. Archived from the original on 28 March 2018.

59. ^

60. ^ 2001: A Space Odyssey (Laserdisc). The Criterion Collection/The Voyager Company. ASIN B00417U8UU.

61. ^ Klady, Leonard (23 March 1993). "'Turtles' Fans Shell Out". Daily Variety. p. 3.

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Ciment, Michel (1999) [1980]. Kubrick. New York: Faber and Faber. ISBN 0-571-21108-9.

Clarke, Arthur C. (1972). The Lost Worlds of 2001. London: Sidgwick and Jackson. ISBN 0-283-97903-8.

Gelmis, Joseph (1970). The Film Director As Superstar. New York: Doubleday & Company.

Geduld, Carolyn (1973). "4. The Production: A Calendar". Filmguide to 2001: A Space Odyssey. Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-39305-0.

Kolker, Robert, ed. (2006). Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey: New Essays. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-517453-4.

Krämer, Peter (2010). 2001: A Space Odyssey. BFI Film Classics. London: British Film Institute.

McAleer, Neil (1992). Arthur C. Clarke. The Authorized Biography. Contemporary Books. ISBN 0-8092-4324-5.

McAleer, Neil (1 April 2013). Sir Arthur C. Clarke: Odyssey of a Visionary: A Biography. RosettaBooks. ISBN 978-0-9848118-0-9. Archived from the original on 18 July 2020.

Richter, Daniel (2002). Moonwatcher's Memoir: A Diary of 2001: A Space Odyssey. foreword by Arthur C. Clarke. New York City: Carroll & Graf Publishers. ISBN 0-7867-1073-X.

Schwam, Stephanie, ed. (2010) [2000]. The Making of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Introduction by Jay Cocks. New York City: Random House. ISBN 978-0-307-75760-9. Archived from the original on 14 November 2020.

Note: This is a revised edition of Walker 1971.

Further reading

Emme, Eugene M., ed. (1982). Science fiction and space futures - past and present. AAS History Series. Vol. 5. San Diego: Univelt. ISBN 0-87703-172-X.

Frayling, Christopher (2015). The 2001 File: Harry Lange and the Design of the Landmark Science Fiction Film. London: Reel Art Press. ISBN 978-0-9572610-2-0.

Johnson, Adam (2012). 2001 The Lost Science. Burlington Canada: Apogee Prime. ISBN 978-1-926837-19-2.

Johnson, Adam (2016). 2001 The Lost Science Volume 2. Burlington Canada: Apogee Prime. ISBN 978-1-926837-35-2.

Ordway, Frederick I; Godwin, Robert (2014). 2001 The Heritage & Legacy of the Space Odyssey. Burlington Canada: Apogee Prime. ISBN 978-1-9268373-2-1.

Shuldiner, Herbert (June 1968). "How They Filmed '2001: A Space Odyssey'". Popular Science. Vol. 192, no. 6. Bonnier Corporation. pp. 62-67. ISSN 0161-7370.

Wigley, Samuel (28 March 2018). "50 years of 2001: A Space Odyssey - 5 films that influenced Kubrick's giant leap for sci-fi". .

External links

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2001: A Space Odyssey (film) - Wikipedia

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2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 epic science fiction film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick. The screenplay was written by Kubrick and science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, and was inspired by Clarke's 1951 short story " The Sentinel" and other short stories by Clarke.

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Sir Arthur Charles Clarke (16 December 1917 - 19 March 2008) was an English science fiction writer, science writer, futurist, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host.

He co-wrote the screenplay for the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, widely regarded as one of the most influential films of all time. Clarke was a science fiction writer, an avid populariser of space travel, and a futurist of a distinguished ability. He wrote many books and many essays for popular magazines. In 1961, he received the Kalinga Prize, a UNESCO award for popularising science. Clarke's science and science fiction writings earned him the moniker "Prophet of the Space Age". His science fiction writings in particular earned him a number of Hugo and Nebula awards, which along with a large readership, made him one of the towering figures of the genre. For many years Clarke, Robert Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov were known as the "Big Three" of science fiction.

Clarke was a lifelong proponent of space travel. In 1934, while still a teenager, he joined the BIS, British Interplanetary Society. In 1945, he proposed a satellite communication system using geostationary orbits. He was the chairman of the British Interplanetary Society from 1946 to 1947 and again in 1951-1953.

Clarke emigrated to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1956, to pursue his interest in scuba diving. That year, he discovered the underwater ruins of the ancient original Koneswaram Temple in Trincomalee. Clarke augmented his popularity in the 1980s, as the host of television shows such as Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World. He lived in Sri Lanka until his death.

Clarke was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1989 "for services to British cultural interests in Sri Lanka". He was knighted in 1998 and was awarded Sri Lanka's highest civil honour, Sri Lankabhimanya, in 2005.

Clarke was born in Minehead, Somerset, England, and grew up in nearby Bishops Lydeard. As a boy, he lived on a farm, where he enjoyed stargazing, fossil collecting, and reading American science fiction pulp magazines. He received his secondary education at Huish's Grammar School in Taunton. Some of his early influences included dinosaur cigarette cards, which led to an enthusiasm for fossils starting about 1925. Clarke attributed his interest in science fiction to reading three items: the November 1928 issue of Amazing Stories in 1929; Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon in 1930; and The Conquest of Space by David Lasser in 1931.

In his teens, he joined the Junior Astronomical Association and contributed to Urania, the society's journal, which was edited in Glasgow by Marion Eadie. At Clarke's request, she added an "Astronautics" section, which featured a series of articles written by him on spacecraft and space travel. Clarke also contributed pieces to the "Debates and Discussions Corner", a counterpoint to a Urania article offering the case against space travel, and also his recollections of the Walt Disney film . He moved to London in 1936 and joined the Board of Education as a pensions auditor. He and some fellow science fiction writers shared a flat in Gray's Inn Road, where he got the nickname "Ego" because of his absorption in subjects that interested him, and later named his office filled with memorabilia as his "ego chamber".

During the Second World War from 1941 to 1946, he served in the Royal Air Force as a radar specialist and was involved in the early-warning radar defence system, which contributed to the RAF's success during the Battle of Britain. Clarke spent most of his wartime service working on ground-controlled approach (GCA) radar, as documented in the semiautobiographical , his only non-science fiction novel. Although GCA did not see much practical use during the war, after several years of development it proved vital to the Berlin Airlift of 1948-1949. Clarke initially served in the ranks and was a corporal instructor on radar at No.2 Radio School, RAF Yatesbury in Wiltshire. He was commissioned as a pilot officer (technical branch) on 27 May 1943. He was promoted to flying officer on 27 November 1943. He was appointed chief training instructor at RAF Honiley in Warwickshire and was demobilised with the rank of flight lieutenant.

After the war, he attained a first-class degree in mathematics and physics from King's College London. After this, he worked as assistant editor at Physics Abstracts. Clarke served as president of the British Interplanetary Society from 1946 to 1947 and again from 1951 to 1953.

Although he was not the originator of the concept of geostationary satellites, one of his most important contributions in this field was his idea that they would be ideal telecommunications relays. He advanced this idea in a paper privately circulated among the core technical members of the British Interplanetary Society in 1945. The concept was published in Wireless World in October of that year. Clarke also wrote a number of nonfiction books describing the technical details and societal implications of rocketry and space flight. The most notable of these may be Interplanetary Flight: An Introduction to Astronautics (1950), The Exploration of Space (1951), and The Promise of Space (1968). In recognition of these contributions, the geostationary orbit 36,000 kilometres (22,000 mi) above the equator is officially recognised by the International Astronomical Union as the Clarke Orbit.

His 1951 book, The Exploration of Space, was used by the rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun to convince President John F. Kennedy that it was possible to go to the Moon.

Following the 1968 release of 2001, Clarke became much in demand as a commentator on science and technology, especially at the time of the Apollo space program. On 20 July 1969, Clarke appeared as a commentator for the CBS News broadcast of the Apollo 11 Moon landing.

Clarke lived in Sri Lanka from 1956 until his death in 2008, first in Unawatuna on the south coast, and then in Colombo. Initially, he and his friend Mike Wilson travelled around Sri Lanka, diving in the coral waters around the coast with the Beachcombers Club. In 1957, during a dive trip off Trincomalee, Clarke discovered the underwater ruins of a temple, which subsequently made the region popular with divers. He described it in his 1957 book The Reefs of Taprobane. This was his second diving book after the 1956 The Coast of Coral. Though Clarke lived mostly in Colombo, he set up a small dive school and a simple dive shop near Trincomalee. He dived often at Hikkaduwa, Trincomalee, and Nilaveli.

The Sri Lankan government offered Clarke resident guest status in 1975. He was held in such high esteem that when fellow science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein came to visit, the Sri Lanka Air Force provided a helicopter to take them around the country. In the early 1970s, Clarke signed a three-book publishing deal, a record for a science fiction writer at the time. The first of the three wasRendezvous with Rama in 1973, which won all the main genre awards and spawned sequels that along with the 2001 series formed the backbone of his later career.

Clarke receives the Marconi International Fellowship Award from Prince Claus of the Netherlands in 1982

In 1986, Clarke was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America.

In 1988, he was diagnosed with post-polio syndrome, having originally contracted polio in 1962, and needed to use a wheelchair most of the time thereafter. Clarke was for many years a vice-patron of the British Polio Fellowship.

In the 1989 Queen's Birthday Honours, Clarke was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) "for services to British cultural interests in Sri Lanka". The same year, he became the first chancellor of the International Space University, serving from 1989 to 2004. He also served as chancellor of Moratuwa University in Sri Lanka from 1979 to 2002.

In 1994, Clarke appeared in a science fiction film; he portrayed himself in the film Without Warning, an American production about an apocalyptic alien first-contact scenario presented in the form of a faux newscast.

Clarke also became active in promoting the protection of gorillas and became a patron of the Gorilla Organization, which fights for the preservation of gorillas. When tantalum mining for mobile phone manufacture threatened the gorillas in 2001, he lent his voice to their cause. The dive shop that he set up continues to operate from Trincomalee through the Arthur C Clarke Foundation.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, Clarke presented his television programmes Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World, Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Powers, and Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious Universe.

On a trip to Florida in 1953, Clarke met and quickly married Marilyn Mayfield, a 22-year-old American divorcee with a young son. They separated permanently after six months, although the divorce was not finalised until 1964. "The marriage was incompatible from the beginning," said Clarke. Marilyn never remarried and died in 1991. Clarke also never remarried, but was close to a Sri Lankan man, Leslie Ekanayake (13 July 1947 - 4July 1977), whom Clarke called his "only perfect friend of a lifetime" in the dedication to his novel The Fountains of Paradise. Clarke is buried with Ekanayake, who predeceased him by three decades, in Colombo's central cemetery. In his biography of Stanley Kubrick, John Baxter cites Clarke's homosexuality as a reason why he relocated, due to more tolerant laws with regard to homosexuality in Sri Lanka. Journalists who enquired of Clarke whether he was gay were told, "No, merely mildly cheerful." However, Michael Moorcock wrote:

Everyone knew he was gay. In the 1950s, I'd go out drinking with his boyfriend. We met his protégés, western and eastern, and their families, people who had only the most generous praise for his kindness. Self-absorbed he might be and a teetotaller, but an impeccable gent through and through.

In an interview in the July 1986 issue of Playboy magazine, when asked if he had had a bisexual experience, Clarke stated, "Of course. Who hasn't?" In his obituary, Clarke's friend Kerry O'Quinn wrote: "Yes, Arthur was gay ... As Isaac Asimov once told me, 'I think he simply found he preferred men.' Arthur didn't publicise his sexuality - that wasn't the focus of his life - but if asked, he was open and honest."

Clarke accumulated a vast collection of manuscripts and personal memoirs, maintained by his brother Fred Clarke in Taunton, Somerset, England, and referred to as the "Clarkives". Clarke said some of his private diaries will not be published until 30 years after his death. When asked why they were sealed, he answered, "Well, there might be all sorts of embarrassing things in them."

On 26 May 2000, he was made a Knight Bachelor "for services to literature" at a ceremony in Colombo. The award of a knighthood had been announced in the 1998 New Year Honours list, but investiture with the award had been delayed, at Clarke's request, because of an accusation by the tabloid the Sunday Mirror of paying boys for sex. The charge was subsequently found to be baseless by the Sri Lankan police. According to The Daily Telegraph, the Mirror subsequently published an apology, and Clarke chose not to sue for defamation. The Independent reported that a similar story was not published, allegedly because Clarke was a friend of newspaper tycoon Rupert Murdoch. Clarke himself said, "I take an extremely dim view of people mucking about with boys", and Rupert Murdoch promised him the reporters responsible would never work in Fleet Street again. Clarke was then duly knighted.

Clarke at his home in Sri Lanka, 2005

Although he and his home were unharmed by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake tsunami, his "Arthur C. Clarke Diving School" (now called "Underwater Safaris") at Hikkaduwa near Galle was destroyed. He made humanitarian appeals, and the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation worked towards better disaster notification systems.

Because of his post-polio deficits, which limited his ability to travel and gave him halting speech, most of Clarke's communications in his last years were in the form of recorded addresses. In July 2007, he provided a video address for the Robert A. Heinlein Centennial in which he closed his comments with a goodbye to his fans. In September 2007, he provided a video greeting for NASA's Cassini probe's flyby of Iapetus (which plays an important role in the book of 2001: A Space Odyssey). In December 2007 on his 90th birthday, Clarke recorded a video message to his friends and fans bidding them good-bye.

Clarke died in Colombo on 19 March 2008, at the age of 90. His aide described the cause as respiratory complications and heart failure stemming from post-polio syndrome.

Just hours before Clarke's death, a major gamma-ray burst (GRB) reached Earth. Known as GRB 080319B, the burst set a new record as the farthest object that can be seen from Earth with the naked eye. It occurred about 7.5 billion years ago, the light taking that long to reach Earth. Larry Sessions, a science writer for Sky and Telescope magazine blogging on earthsky.org, suggested that the burst be named the "Clarke Event". American Atheist Magazine wrote of the idea: "It would be a fitting tribute to a man who contributed so much, and helped lift our eyes and our minds to a cosmos once thought to be province only of gods."

A few days before he died, he had reviewed the manuscript of his final work, The Last Theorem, on which he had collaborated by e-mail with contemporary Frederik Pohl. The book was published after Clarke's death. Clarke was buried in Colombo in traditional Sri Lankan fashion on 22 March. His younger brother, Fred Clarke, and his Sri Lankan adoptive family were among the thousands in attendance.

Clarke's papers were donated to the National Air and Space Museum in 2014.

On 8 January 2024 Clarke's ashes were launched on the Peregrine Mission One to the Moon. The Peregrine spacecraft failed to land on the moon, and the spacecraft disintegrated in the Earth's atmosphere on January 19, 2024.

Clarke's novella "The Road to the Sea" was originally published in Two Complete Science-Adventure Books in 1951 as "Seeker of the Sphinx".

While Clarke had a few stories published in fanzines, between 1937 and 1945, his first professional sale appeared in Astounding Science Fiction in 1946: " Loophole" was published in April, while " Rescue Party", his first sale, was published in May. Along with his writing, Clarke briefly worked as assistant editor of Science Abstracts (1949) before devoting himself in 1951 to full-time writing.

Clarke began carving out his reputation as a "scientific" science fiction writer with his first science fiction novel, Against the Fall of Night, published as a novella in 1948. It was very popular and considered ground-breaking work for some of the concepts it contained. Clarke revised and expanded the novella into a full novel, which was published in 1953. Clarke later rewrote and expanded this work a third time to become The City and the Stars in 1956, which rapidly became a definitive must-read in the field. His third science fiction novel, Childhood's End, was also published in 1953, cementing his popularity. Clarke capped the first phase of his writing career with his sixth novel, A Fall of Moondust, in 1961, which is also an acknowledged classic of the period.

During this time, Clarke corresponded with C. S. Lewis in the 1940s and 1950s and they once met in an Oxford pub, the Eastgate, to discuss science fiction and space travel. Clarke voiced great praise for Lewis upon his death, saying The Ransom Trilogy was one of the few works of science fiction that should be considered literature.

"The Sentinel"

Clarke's novelette "Jupiter Five" was cover-featured on the May 1953 issue of If.

In 1948, he wrote " The Sentinel" for a BBC competition. Though the story was rejected, it changed the course of Clarke's career. Not only was it the basis for 2001: A Space Odyssey, but "The Sentinel" also introduced a more cosmic element to Clarke's work. Many of Clarke's later works feature a technologically advanced but still-prejudiced mankind being confronted by a superior alien intelligence. In the cases of Childhood's End, and the 2001 series, this encounter produces a conceptual breakthrough that accelerates humanity into the next stage of its evolution. This also applies in the far-distant past (but our future) in The City and the Stars (and its original version, Against the Fall of Night).

In Clarke's authorised biography, Neil McAleer writes: "many readers and critics still consider Childhood's End Arthur C. Clarke's best novel." But Clarke did not use ESP in any of his later stories, saying, "I've always been interested in ESP, and of course, Childhood's End was about that. But I've grown disillusioned, partly because after all this time, they're still arguing about whether these things happen. I suspect that telepathy does happen."

A collection of early essays was published in The View from Serendip (1977), which also included one short piece of fiction, " When the Twerms Came". Clarke also wrote short stories under the pseudonyms of E. G. O'Brien and Charles Willis. Almost all of his short stories can be found in the book The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (2001).

Clarke as depicted in Amazing Stories in 1953

Clarke's novelette "The Songs of Distant Earth", the cover story for the June 1958 issue of If, was expanded to novel length almost three decades later.

For much of the later 20th century, Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Robert A. Heinlein were informally known as the "Big Three" of science fiction writers. Clarke and Heinlein began writing to each other after The Exploration of Space was published in 1951, and first met in person the following year. They remained on cordial terms for many years, including during visits to the United States and Sri Lanka.

Clarke and Asimov first met in New York City in 1953, and they traded friendly insults and gibes for decades. They established an oral agreement, the "Clarke-Asimov Treaty", that when asked who was better, the two would say Clarke was the better science fiction writer and Asimov was the better science writer. In 1972, Clarke put the "treaty" on paper in his dedication to Report on Planet Three and Other Speculations.

In 1984, Clarke testified before Congress against the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Later, at the home of Larry Niven in California, a concerned Heinlein attacked Clarke's views on United States foreign and space policy (especially the SDI), vigorously advocating a strong defence posture. Although the two later reconciled formally, they remained distant until Heinlein's death in 1988.

2001: A Space Odyssey, Clarke's most famous work, was extended well beyond the 1968 movie as the Space Odyssey series. In 1982, Clarke wrote a sequel to 2001 titled 2010: Odyssey Two, which was made into a film in 1984. Clarke wrote two further sequels which have not been adapted into motion pictures: 2061: Odyssey Three (published in 1987) and 3001: The Final Odyssey (published in 1997).

2061: Odyssey Three involves a visit to Halley's Comet on its next plunge through the Inner Solar System and a spaceship crash on the Jovian moon Europa. The whereabouts of astronaut Dave Bowman (the "Star Child"), the artificial intelligence HAL 9000, and the development of native life on Europa, protected by the alien Monolith, are revealed.

Finally, in 3001: The Final Odyssey, astronaut Frank Poole's freeze-dried body, found by a spaceship beyond the orbit of Neptune, is revived by advanced medical science. The novel details the threat posed to humanity by the alien monoliths, whose actions are not always as their builders had intended.

Clarke's first venture into film was 2001: A Space Odyssey, directed by Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick and Clarke had met in New York City in 1964 to discuss the possibility of a collaborative film project. As the idea developed, they decided to loosely base the story on Clarke's short story, " The Sentinel", written in 1948 as an entry in a BBC short-story competition. Originally, Clarke was going to write the screenplay for the film, but Kubrick suggested during one of their brainstorming meetings that before beginning on the actual script, they should let their imaginations soar free by writing a novel first, on which they would base the film. "This is more or less the way it worked out, though toward the end, novel and screenplay were being written simultaneously, with feedback in both directions. Thus, I rewrote some sections after seeing the movie rushes - a rather expensive method of literary creation, which few other authors can have enjoyed." The novel ended up being published a few months after the release of the movie.

Due to the hectic schedule of the film's production, Kubrick and Clarke had difficulty collaborating on the book. Clarke completed a draft of the novel at the end of 1964 with the plan to publish in 1965 in advance of the film's release in 1966. After many delays, the film was released in the spring of 1968, before the book was completed. The book was credited to Clarke alone. Clarke later complained that this had the effect of making the book into a novelisation, and that Kubrick had manipulated circumstances to downplay Clarke's authorship. For these and other reasons, the details of the story differ slightly from the book to the movie. The film contains little explanation for the events taking place. Clarke, though, wrote thorough explanations of "cause and effect" for the events in the novel. James Randi later recounted that upon seeing the premiere of 2001, Clarke left the theatre at the intermission in tears, after having watched an eleven-minute scene (which did not make it into general release) where an astronaut is doing nothing more than jogging inside the spaceship, which was Kubrick's idea of showing the audience how boring space travels could be.

In 1972, Clarke published The Lost Worlds of 2001, which included his accounts of the production, and alternative versions of key scenes. The "special edition" of the novel A Space Odyssey (released in 1999) contains an introduction by Clarke in which he documents the events leading to the release of the novel and film.

In 1982, Clarke continued the 2001 epic with a sequel, 2010: Odyssey Two. This novel was also made into a film, , directed by Peter Hyams for release in 1984. Because of the political environment in America in the 1980s, the film presents a Cold War theme, with the looming tensions of nuclear warfare not featured in the novel. The film was not considered to be as revolutionary or artistic as 2001, but the reviews were still positive.

Clarke's email correspondence with Hyams was published in 1984. Titled The Odyssey File: The Making of 2010, and co-authored with Hyams, it illustrates his fascination with the then-pioneering medium of email and its use for them to communicate on an almost daily basis at the time of planning and production of the film while living on opposite sides of the world. The book also included Clarke's personal list of the best science fiction films ever made.

Clarke appeared in the film, first as the man feeding the pigeons while Dr. Heywood Floyd is engaged in a conversation in front of the White House. Later, in the hospital scene with David Bowman's mother, an image of the cover of portrays Clarke as the American President and Kubrick as the Soviet Premier.

In 1996, Sierra Entertainment created as a point and click adventure game in the style of . Along with highly detailed graphics, Arthur C. Clarke also appeared in the game as the guide for the player. This game featured details from Rendezvous with Rama and characters from the Rama II novel.

Rendezvous with Rama was optioned for filmmaking in the early 21st century but this motion picture has remained in " development hell". In the early 2000s, actor Morgan Freeman expressed his desire to produce a movie based on Rendezvous with Rama. After a drawn-out development process, which Freeman attributed to difficulties in getting financing, it appeared in 2003 that this project might be proceeding, but this was very dubious. The film was to be produced by Freeman's production company, Revelations Entertainment, and David Fincher has been touted on Revelations' Rama web page as far back as 2001 as the film's director. After years of no progress, Fincher stated in an interview in late 2007 (in which he also opined the novel as being influential on the films and Star Trek: The Motion Picture) that he is still attached to helm. Revelations indicated that Stel Pavlou had written the adaptation.

In late 2008, Fincher stated the movie is unlikely to be made. "It looks like it's not going to happen. There's no script and as you know, Morgan Freeman's not in the best of health right now. We've been trying to do it but it's probably not going to happen." In 2010, though, the film was announced as still planned for future production and both Freeman and Fincher mentioned it as still needing a worthy script.

In late 2021, it was announced that Denis Villeneuve would direct the adaptation of Rendezvous with Rama, following the successful and critically praised release of Villeneuve's adaption of Frank Herbert's . Freeman is listed as a producer.

Clarke published a number of nonfiction books with essays, speeches, addresses, etc. Several of his nonfiction books are composed of chapters that can stand on their own as separate essays.

In particular, Clarke was a populariser of the concept of space travel. In 1950, he wrote Interplanetary Flight, a book outlining the basics of space flight for laymen. Later books about space travel included The Exploration of Space (1951), The Challenge of the Spaceship (1959), Voices from the Sky (1965), The Promise of Space (1968, rev. ed. 1970), and Report on Planet Three (1972) along with many others.

His books on space travel usually included chapters about other aspects of science and technology, such as computers and bioengineering. He predicted telecommunication satellites (albeit serviced by astronauts in space suits, who would replace the satellite's vacuum tubes as they burned out).

His many predictions culminated in 1958 when he began a series of magazine essays which eventually became Profiles of the Future, published in book form in 1962. A timetable up to the year 2100 describes inventions and ideas including such things as a "global library" for 2005. The same work also contained "Clarke's First Law" and text that became Clarke's three laws in later editions.

In a 1959 essay, Clarke predicted global satellite TV broadcasts that would cross national boundaries indiscriminately and would bring hundreds of channels available anywhere in the world. He also envisioned a "personal transceiver, so small and compact that every man carries one". He wrote: "the time will come when we will be able to call a person anywhere on Earth merely by dialing a number." Such a device would also, in Clarke's vision, include means for global positioning so "no one need ever again be lost". Later, in Profiles of the Future, he predicted the advent of such a device taking place in the mid-1980s.

1974 ABC interview with Clarke in which he describes a future of ubiquitous computing reminiscent of the modern Internet

Clarke described a global computer network similar to the modern World Wide Web in a 1964 presentation for the BBC's programme, predicting that, by the 21st century, access to information and even physical tasks such as surgery could be accomplished remotely and instantaneously from anywhere in the world using internet and satellite communication.

In a 1974 interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the interviewer asked Clarke how he believed the computer would change the future for the everyday person, and what life would be like in the year 2001. Clarke accurately predicted many things that became reality, including online banking, online shopping, and other now commonplace things. Responding to a question about how the interviewer's son's life would be different, Clarke responded: "He will have, in his own house, not a computer as big as this, [points to nearby computer], but at least, a console through which he can talk, through his friendly local computer and get all the information he needs, for his everyday life, like his bank statements, his theatre reservations, all the information you need in the course of living in our complex modern society, this will be in a compact form in his own house ... and he will take it as much for granted as we take the telephone."

An extensive selection of Clarke's essays and book chapters (from 1934 to 1998; 110 pieces, 63 of them previously uncollected in his books) can be found in the book Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! (2000), together with a new introduction and many prefatory notes. Another collection of essays, all previously collected, is By Space Possessed (1993). Clarke's technical papers, together with several essays and extensive autobiographical material, are collected in Ascent to Orbit: A Scientific Autobiography (1984).

Geostationary or Clarke orbit

Clarke contributed to the popularity of the idea that geostationary satellites would be ideal telecommunications relays. He first described this in a letter to the editor of Wireless World in February 1945 and elaborated on the concept in a paper titled Extra-Terrestrial Relays - Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?, published in Wireless World in October 1945. The geostationary orbit is sometimes known as the Clarke orbit or the Clarke belt in his honour.

It is not clear that this article was actually the inspiration for the modern telecommunications satellite. According to John R. Pierce, of Bell Labs, who was involved in the Echo satellite and Telstar projects, he gave a talk upon the subject in 1954 (published in 1955), using ideas that were "in the air", but was not aware of Clarke's article at the time. In an interview given shortly before his death, Clarke was asked whether he had ever suspected that one day communications satellites would become so important; he replied: "I'm often asked why I didn't try to patent the idea of a communications satellite. My answer is always, 'A patent is really a licence to be sued.'"

Though different from Clarke's idea of telecom relay, the idea of communicating via satellites in geostationary orbit itself had been described earlier. For example, the concept of geostationary satellites was described in Hermann Oberth's 1923 book Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen ( The Rocket into Interplanetary Space), and then the idea of radio communication by means of those satellites in Herman Potočnik's (written under the pseudonym Hermann Noordung) 1928 book Das Problem der Befahrung des Weltraums - ), sections: Providing for Long Distance Communications and Safety, and (possibly referring to the idea of relaying messages via satellite, but not that three would be optimal) Observing and Researching the Earth's Surface, published in Berlin. Clarke acknowledged the earlier concept in his book Profiles of the Future.

Clarke was an avid scuba diver and a member of the Underwater Explorers Club. In addition to writing, Clarke set up several diving-related ventures with his business partner Mike Wilson. In 1956, while scuba diving, Wilson and Clarke uncovered ruined masonry, architecture, and idol images of the sunken original Koneswaram temple - including carved columns with flower insignia, and stones in the form of elephant heads - spread on the shallow surrounding seabed. Other discoveries included Chola bronzes from the original shrine, and these discoveries were described in Clarke's 1957 book The Reefs of Taprobane.

In 1961, while filming off Great Basses Reef, Wilson found a wreck and retrieved silver coins. Plans to dive on the wreck the following year were stopped when Clarke developed paralysis, ultimately diagnosed as polio. A year later, Clarke observed the salvage from the shore and the surface. The ship, ultimately identified as belonging to the Mughal Emperor, Aurangzeb, yielded fused bags of silver rupees, cannon, and other artefacts, carefully documented, became the basis for The Treasure of the Great Reef. Living in Sri Lanka and learning its history also inspired the backdrop for his novel The Fountains of Paradise in which he described a space elevator. This, he believed, would make rocket-based access to space obsolete, and more than geostationary satellites, would ultimately be his scientific legacy. In 2008, he said in an interview with IEEE Spectrum, "maybe in a generation or so the space elevator will be considered equally important" as the geostationary satellite, which was his most important technological contribution.

Themes of religion and spirituality appear in much of Clarke's writing. He said: "Any path to knowledge is a path to God - or Reality, whichever word one prefers to use." He described himself as "fascinated by the concept of God". J. B. S. Haldane, near the end of his life, suggested in a personal letter to Clarke that Clarke should receive a prize in theology for being one of the few people to write anything new on the subject, and went on to say that if Clarke's writings had not contained multiple contradictory theological views, he might have been a menace. When he entered the Royal Air Force, Clarke insisted that his dog tags be marked " pantheist" rather than the default, Church of England, and in a 1991 essay entitled "Credo", described himself as a logical positivist from the age of 10. In 2000, Clarke told the Sri Lankan newspaper, The Island, "I don't believe in God or an afterlife", and he identified himself as an atheist. He was honoured as a Humanist Laureate in the International Academy of Humanism. He has also described himself as a "crypto-Buddhist", insisting Buddhism is not a religion. He displayed little interest about religion early in his life, for example, only discovering a few months after marrying that his wife had strong Presbyterian beliefs.[citation needed ]

Later in his life, Clarke began to hold a more hostile view of religion. A famous quotation of Clarke's is often cited: "One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion." He was quoted in Popular Science in 2004 as saying of religion: "Most malevolent and persistent of all mind viruses. We should get rid of it as quick as we can." In a three-day "dialogue on man and his world" with Alan Watts, Clarke said he was biased against religion and could not forgive religions for what he perceived as their inability to prevent atrocities and wars over time. In his introduction to the penultimate episode of Mysterious World, entitled "Strange Skies", Clarke said, "I sometimes think that the universe is a machine designed for the perpetual astonishment of astronomers", reflecting the dialogue of the episode, in which he stated this concept more broadly, referring to "mankind". Near the very end of that same episode, the last segment of which covered the Star of Bethlehem, he said his favourite theory was that it might be a pulsar. Given that pulsars were discovered in the interval between his writing the short story, " The Star" (1955), and making Mysterious World (1980), and given the more recent discovery of pulsar PSR B1913+16, he said: "How romantic, if even now, we can hear the dying voice of a star, which heralded the Christian era."

Despite his atheism, themes of deism are a common feature within Clarke's work. Clarke left written instructions for a funeral: "Absolutely no religious rites of any kind, relating to any religious faith, should be associated with my funeral."

Regarding freedom of information Clarke believed, "In the struggle for freedom of information, technology, not politics, will be the ultimate decider." Clarke also wrote, "It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars." Clarke opposed claims of sovereignty over space stating "There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum." Clarke was an anti-capitalist, stating that he did not fear automation because, "the goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That's why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system."

Regarding human jobs being replaced by robots, Clarke said: "Any teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be!" Clarke supported the use of renewable energy, saying: "I would like to see us kick our current addiction to oil, and adopt clean energy sources... Climate change has now added a new sense of urgency. Our civilisation depends on energy, but we can't allow oil and coal to slowly bake our planet."

About intelligent life and the Fermi paradox, Clarke stated:

The best proof that there's intelligent life in outer space is the fact that it hasn't come here... the fact that we have not yet found the slightest evidence for life-much less intelligence-beyond this Earth does not surprise or disappoint me in the least. Our technology must still be laughably primitive; we may well be like jungle savages listening for the throbbing of tom-toms, while the ether around them carries more words per second than they could utter in a lifetime. Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not... Both are equally terrifying.

Early in his career, Clarke had a fascination with the paranormal and said it was part of the inspiration for his novel Childhood's End. Citing the numerous promising paranormal claims that were later shown to be fraudulent, Clarke described his earlier openness to the paranormal having turned to being "an almost total sceptic" by the time of his 1992 biography. Similarly, in the prologue to the 1990 Del Rey edition of Childhood's End, he writes "...after ... researching my Mysterious World and Strange Powers programmes, I am an almost total skeptic. I have seen far too many claims dissolve into thin air, far too many demonstrations exposed as fakes. It has been a long, and sometimes embarrassing, learning process." During interviews, both in 1993 and 2004-2005, he stated that he did not believe in reincarnation, saying there was no mechanism to make it possible, though "I'm always paraphrasing J. B. S. Haldane: 'The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine.'" He described the idea of reincarnation as fascinating, but favoured a finite existence.

Clarke was known for hosting several television series investigating the unusual: Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World (1980), Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Power (1985), and Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious Universe (1994). Topics examined ranged from ancient, man-made artifacts with obscure origins (e.g., the Nazca lines or Stonehenge), to cryptids (purported animals unknown to science), or obsolete scientific theories that came to have alternate explanations (e.g., Martian canals).

In Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World, he describes three kinds of "mysteries":

Mysteries of the First Kind: Something that was once utterly baffling but is now completely understood, e.g. a rainbow.

Mysteries of the Second Kind: Something that is currently not fully understood and can be in the future.

Mysteries of the Third Kind: Something of which we have no understanding.

Clarke's programmes on unusual phenomena were parodied in a 1982 episode of the comedy series The Goodies, in which his show is cancelled after it is claimed that he does not exist.

Themes, style, and influences

Clarke's work is marked by an optimistic view of science empowering mankind's exploration of the Solar System and the world's oceans. His images of the future often feature a Utopian setting with highly developed technology, ecology, and society, based on the author's ideals. His early published stories usually featured the extrapolation of a technological innovation or scientific breakthrough into the underlying decadence of his own society.

A recurring theme in Clarke's works is the notion that the evolution of an intelligent species would eventually make them something close to gods. This was explored in his 1953 novel Childhood's End and briefly touched upon in his novel Imperial Earth. This idea of transcendence through evolution seems to have been influenced by Olaf Stapledon, who wrote a number of books dealing with this theme. Clarke has said of Stapledon's 1930 book Last and First Men that "No other book had a greater influence on my life ... [It] and its successor (1937) are the twin summits of [Stapledon's] literary career."

Clarke was well known as an admirer of Irish fantasy writer Lord Dunsany, also having corresponded with him until Dunsany's death in 1957. He described Dunsany as "one of the greatest writers of the century". He also listed H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Edgar Rice Burroughs as influences.

Awards, honours, and other recognition

Clarke won the 1963 Stuart Ballantine Medal from the Franklin Institute for the concept of satellite communications, and other honours. He won more than a dozen annual literary awards for particular works of science fiction.

Clarke won the UNESCO-Kalinga Prize for the Popularization of Science in 1961.

Shared a 1969 Academy Award nomination with Stanley Kubrick in the category Best Writing, Story and Screenplay - Written Directly for the Screen for 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The fame of 2001 was enough for the Command Module of the Apollo 13 craft to be named "Odyssey".

Clarke won both the Nebula (1979) and Hugo (1980) awards for his novel, The Fountains of Paradise.

In 1985 the Science Fiction Writers of America named him its 7th SFWA Grand Master.

In 1986, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering For conception of geosynchronous communications satellites, and for other contributions to the use and understanding of space

Readers of the British monthly voted him the all-time second best science fiction author in 1988-1989.

He received a CBE in 1989, and was knighted in 2000. Clarke's health did not allow him to travel to London to receive the latter honour personally from the Queen, so the United Kingdom's High Commissioner to Sri Lanka invested him as a Knight Bachelor at a ceremony in Colombo.

In 1994, Clarke was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize by law professor Glenn Reynolds.

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted Clarke in 1997, its second class of two deceased and two living persons. Among the living, Clarke and Andre Norton followed A. E. van Vogt and Jack Williamson.

The 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter is named in honour of Clarke's works.

In 2003, Clarke was awarded the Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology, where he appeared on stage via a 3-D hologram with a group of old friends including Jill Tarter, Neil Armstrong, Lewis Branscomb, Charles Townes, Freeman Dyson, Bruce Murray, and Scott Brown.

On 14 November 2005 Sri Lanka awarded Clarke its highest civilian award, the Sri Lankabhimanya (The Pride of Sri Lanka), for his contributions to science and technology and his commitment to his adopted country.

Clarke was the Honorary Board Chair of the Institute for Cooperation in Space, founded by Carol Rosin, and served on the Board of Governors of the National Space Society, a space advocacy organisation founded by Wernher von Braun.

In 1986, Clarke provided a grant to fund the prize money (initially £1,000) for the Arthur C. Clarke Award for the best science fiction novel published in the United Kingdom in the previous year. In 2001 the prize was increased to £2001, and its value now matches the year (e.g., £2005 in 2005).

In 2005 he lent his name to the inaugural Sir Arthur Clarke Awards - dubbed the "Space Oscars". His brother attended the awards ceremony, and presented an award specially chosen by Arthur (and not by the panel of judges who chose the other awards) to the British Interplanetary Society.

Arthur C. Clarke Foundation awards: "Arthur C. Clarke Innovator's Award" and "Arthur C. Clarke Lifetime Achievement Award"

The Sir Arthur C. Clarke Memorial Trophy Inter School Astronomy Quiz Competition, held in Sri Lanka every year and organised by the Astronomical Association of Ananda College, Colombo. The competition started in 2001 as "The Sir Arthur C. Clarke Trophy Inter School Astronomy Quiz Competition" and was renamed after his death.

Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society

An asteroid was named in Clarke's honour, 4923 Clarke (the number was assigned prior to, and independently of, the name - 2001, however appropriate, was unavailable, having previously been assigned to Albert Einstein).

A species of ceratopsian dinosaur, discovered in Inverloch in Australia, was named after Clarke, Serendipaceratops arthurcclarkei. The genus name may also be an allusion to his adopted country, Sri Lanka, one of whose former names is Serendib.

The Learning Resource Centre at Richard Huish College, Taunton, which Clarke attended when it was Huish Grammar School, is named after him.

Clarke was a distinguished vice-president of the H. G. Wells Society, being strongly influenced by Wells as a science fiction writer.

Arthur C. Clarke Institute for Modern Technologies, one of the major research institutes in Sri Lanka, is named after him.

The main protagonist of the series of video games, Isaac Clarke, takes his surname from Arthur C. Clarke, and his given name from Clarke's friendly rival and associate Isaac Asimov.

An outer-circular orbital beltway in Colombo, Sri Lanka, was named 'Arthur C. Clarke Expressway' in honour of Clarke.

'The Clarke Event' is a proposed name for GRB 080319B, a gamma-ray burst detected just hours before Clarke's death which set a new record for the most intrinsically bright object ever observed by humans in the universe. The name would honour Clarke and his award-winning short story "The Star".

Clarke Montes, a mountain on Pluto's moon Charon, is named after Clarke.

The Exploration of Space (1951), New York: Harper & Brothers

The Exploration of the Moon (1954), with R. A. Smith, New York: Harper Brothers

The Coast of Coral (1955), London: Frederick Muller

Voice Across the Sea (1958), New York: Harper

Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible (1962), New York: Harper & Row

The Treasure of the Great Reef (1964), with Mike Wilson, New York: Harper & Row

Man and Space (1964), Life Science Library, New York: Time Life

Voices from the Sky: Previews of the Coming Space Age (1965), New York: Harper & Row

The Promise of Space (1968), New York: Harper & Row

Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! : Collected Essays, 1934-1998 (1999), New York: St. Martin's Press, and London: Voyager

The City in the Image of Man: Ideas and Work of Paolo Soleri (1972)

2010: The Odyssey Continues (1984)

The Day of Five Billion (1987)

Fractals: The colors of infinity (1995), narrated documentary

Arthur C. Clarke: The Man Who Saw the Future (1997)

Odyssey of Survival (1999)

2001: HAL's Legacy (2001)

Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures (2001)

To Mars by A-Bomb: The Secret History of Project Orion (BBC, 2003)

The Martians and Us (2006)

Planetary Defense (2007)

Vision of a Future Passed: The Prophecy of 2001 (2007)

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Sir Arthur Charles Clarke (16 December 1917 - 19 March 2008) was an English science fiction writer, science writer, futurist, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host. He co-wrote the screenplay for the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey , widely regarded as one of the most influential films of all time.

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In 1929, Heinlein married Elinor Curry of Kansas City in Los Angeles, and their marriage lasted about a year. His second marriage in 1932 to Leslyn MacDonald (1904-1981) lasted for 15 years.

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Isaac Asimov ( AZ-ih-mov; c.  January 2, 1920 - April 6, 1992) was an American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University. During his lifetime, Asimov was considered one of the "Big Three" science fiction writers, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. A prolific writer, he wrote or edited more than 500 books. He also wrote an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. Best known for his hard science fiction, Asimov also wrote mysteries and fantasy, as well as much popular science and other non-fiction.

Asimov's most famous work is the Foundation series, the first three books of which won the one-time Hugo Award for "Best All-Time Series" in 1966. His other major series are the Galactic Empire series and the series. The Galactic Empire novels are set in the much earlier history of the same fictional universe as the Foundation series. Later, with Foundation and Earth (1986), he linked this distant future to the Robot series, creating a unified " future history" for his works. He also wrote over 380 short stories, including the social science fiction novelette " Nightfall", which in 1964 was voted the best short science fiction story of all time by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Asimov wrote the Lucky Starr series of juvenile science-fiction novels using the pen name Paul French.

Most of his popular science books explain concepts in a historical way, going as far back as possible to a time when the science in question was at its simplest stage. Examples include Guide to Science, the three-volume Understanding Physics, and Asimov's Chronology of Science and Discovery. He wrote on numerous other scientific and non-scientific topics, such as chemistry, astronomy, mathematics, history, biblical exegesis, and literary criticism.

Asimov's family name derives from the first part of озимый хлеб ( ozímyj khleb), meaning ' winter grain' (specifically rye) in which his great-great-great-grandfather dealt, with the Russian patronymic ending -ov added. Azimov is spelled in the Cyrillic alphabet. When the family arrived in the United States in 1923 and their name had to be spelled in the Latin alphabet, Asimov's father spelled it with an S, believing this letter to be pronounced like Z (as in German), and so it became Asimov. This later inspired one of Asimov's short stories, " Spell My Name with an S".

Asimov refused early suggestions of using a more common name as a pseudonym, believing that its recognizability helped his career. After becoming famous, he often met readers who believed that "Isaac Asimov" was a distinctive pseudonym created by an author with a common name.

Asimov was born in Petrovichi, Russian SFSR, on an unknown date between October 4, 1919, and January 2, 1920, inclusive. Asimov celebrated his birthday on January 2.

Asimov's parents were Anna Rachel (née Berman) and Judah Asimov, a family of Russian Jewish millers. He was named Isaac after his mother's father, Isaac Berman. Asimov wrote of his father, "My father, for all his education as an Orthodox Jew, was not Orthodox in his heart", noting that "he didn't recite the myriad prayers prescribed for every action, and he never made any attempt to teach them to me."

In 1921, Asimov and 16 other children in Petrovichi developed double pneumonia. Only Asimov survived. He later had two younger siblings: a sister, Marcia (born Manya; June 17, 1922 - April 2, 2011), and a brother, Stanley (July 25, 1929 - August 16, 1995), who was vice-president of the Long Island Newsday.

Asimov's family travelled to the United States via Liverpool on the RMS Baltic, arriving on February 3, 1923 when he was three years old. His parents spoke Yiddish and English to him; he never learned Russian, his parents using it as a secret language "when they wanted to discuss something privately that my big ears were not to hear". Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, Asimov taught himself to read at the age of five (and later taught his sister to read as well, enabling her to enter school in the second grade). His mother got him into first grade a year early by claiming he was born on September 7, 1919. In third grade he learned about the "error" and insisted on an official correction of the date to January 2. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1928 at the age of eight.

After becoming established in the U.S., his parents owned a succession of candy stores in which everyone in the family was expected to work. The candy stores sold newspapers and magazines, which Asimov credited as a major influence in his lifelong love of the written word, as it presented him with an unending supply of new reading material (including pulp science fiction magazines) as a child that he could not have otherwise afforded. Asimov began reading science fiction at age nine, at the time that the genre was becoming more science-centered. Asimov was also a frequent patron of the Brooklyn Public Library during his formative years.

Asimov attended New York City public schools from age five, including Boys High School in Brooklyn. Graduating at 15, he attended the City College of New York for several days before accepting a scholarship at Seth Low Junior College. This was a branch of Columbia University in Downtown Brooklyn designed to absorb some of the academically qualified Jewish and Italian-American students who applied to the more prestigious Columbia College, but exceeded the unwritten ethnic admission quotas which were common at the time. Originally a zoology major, Asimov switched to chemistry after his first semester because he disapproved of "dissecting an alley cat". After Seth Low Junior College closed in 1936, Asimov finished his Bachelor of Science degree at Columbia's Morningside Heights campus (later the Columbia University School of General Studies) in 1939.

After two rounds of rejections by medical schools, Asimov applied to the graduate program in chemistry at Columbia in 1939; initially he was rejected and then only accepted on a probationary basis, he completed his Master of Arts degree in chemistry in 1941 and earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree in chemistry in 1948. During his chemistry studies, he also learned French and German.

Robert A. Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp, and Asimov (left to right), Philadelphia Navy Yard, 1944

In between earning these two degrees, Asimov spent three years during World War II working as a civilian chemist at the Philadelphia Navy Yard's Naval Air Experimental Station, living in the Walnut Hill section of West Philadelphia from 1942 to 1945. In September 1945, he was drafted into the post-war U.S. Army; if he had not had his birth date corrected while at school, he would have been officially 26 years old and ineligible. In 1946, a bureaucratic error caused his military allotment to be stopped, and he was removed from a task force days before it sailed to participate in Operation Crossroads nuclear weapons tests at Bikini Atoll. He served for almost nine months before receiving an honorable discharge on July 26, 1946. He had been promoted to corporal on July 11.

After completing his doctorate and a postdoctoral year with Robert Elderfield, Asimov was offered the position of associate professor of biochemistry at the Boston University School of Medicine. This was in large part due to his years-long correspondence with William Boyd, a former associate professor of biochemistry at Boston University, who first reached out to compliment Asimov on his story . Upon receiving a promotion to professor of immunochemistry, Boyd reached out to Asimov, requesting him to be his replacement. The initial offer of professorship was withdrawn and Asimov was offered the position of instructor of biochemistry instead, which he accepted. He began work in 1949 with a $5,000 salary (equivalent to $61,000 in 2022), maintaining this position for several years. By 1952, however, he was making more money as a writer than from the university, and he eventually stopped doing research, confining his university role to lecturing students. In 1955, he was promoted to tenured associate professor. In December 1957, Asimov was dismissed from his teaching post, with effect from June 30, 1958, because he had stopped doing research. After a struggle which lasted for two years, he kept his title, he gave the opening lecture each year for a biochemistry class, and on October 18, 1979, the university honored his writing by promoting him to full professor of biochemistry. Asimov's personal papers from 1965 onward are archived at the university's Mugar Memorial Library, to which he donated them at the request of curator Howard Gotlieb.

In 1959, after a recommendation from Arthur Obermayer, Asimov's friend and a scientist on the U.S. missile defense project, Asimov was approached by DARPA to join Obermayer's team. Asimov declined on the grounds that his ability to write freely would be impaired should he receive classified information, but submitted a paper to DARPA titled "On Creativity" containing ideas on how government-based science projects could encourage team members to think more creatively.

Asimov met his first wife, Gertrude Blugerman (May 16, 1917, Toronto, Canada - October 17, 1990, Boston, U.S.), on a blind date on February 14, 1942, and married her on July 26. The couple lived in an apartment in West Philadelphia while Asimov was employed at the Philadelphia Navy Yard (where two of his co-workers were L. Sprague de Camp and Robert A. Heinlein). Gertrude returned to Brooklyn while he was in the army, and they both lived there from July 1946 before moving to Stuyvesant Town, Manhattan, in July 1948. They moved to Boston in May 1949, then to nearby suburbs Somerville in July 1949, Waltham in May 1951, and, finally, West Newton in 1956. They had two children, David (born 1951) and Robyn Joan (born 1955). In 1970, they separated and Asimov moved back to New York, this time to the Upper West Side of Manhattan where he lived for the rest of his life. He began seeing Janet O. Jeppson, a psychiatrist and science-fiction writer, and married her on November 30, 1973, two weeks after his divorce from Gertrude.

Asimov was a claustrophile: he enjoyed small, enclosed spaces. In the third volume of his autobiography, he recalls a childhood desire to own a magazine stand in a New York City Subway station, within which he could enclose himself and listen to the rumble of passing trains while reading.

Asimov was afraid of flying, doing so only twice: once in the course of his work at the Naval Air Experimental Station and once returning home from Oahu in 1946. Consequently, he seldom traveled great distances. This phobia influenced several of his fiction works, such as the Wendell Urth mystery stories and the Robot novels featuring Elijah Baley. In his later years, Asimov found enjoyment traveling on cruise ships, beginning in 1972 when he viewed the Apollo 17 launch from a cruise ship. On several cruises, he was part of the entertainment program, giving science-themed talks aboard ships such as the Queen Elizabeth 2. He sailed to England in June 1974 on the SS France for a trip mostly devoted to lectures in London and Birmingham, though he also found time to visit Stonehenge.

Asimov with his second wife, Janet. "They became a permanent feature of my face, and it is now difficult to believe early photographs that show me without sideburns."[80] (Photo by Jay Kay Klein.)

Asimov was an able public speaker and was regularly hired to give talks about science. He was a frequent participant at science fiction conventions, where he was friendly and approachable. He patiently answered tens of thousands of questions and other mail with postcards and was pleased to give autographs. He was of medium height (5 ft 9 in (1.75 m)), stocky, with-in his later years-"mutton-chop" sideburns, and a distinct New York accent. He took to wearing bolo ties after his wife Janet objected to his clip-on bow ties. He never learned to swim or ride a bicycle, but learned to drive a car after he moved to Boston. In his humor book Asimov Laughs Again, he describes Boston driving as "anarchy on wheels".

Asimov's wide interests included his participation in his later years in organizations devoted to the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan and in The Wolfe Pack,[failed verification ] a group of devotees of the Nero Wolfe mysteries written by Rex Stout. Many of his short stories mention or quote Gilbert and Sullivan. He was a prominent member of The Baker Street Irregulars, the leading Sherlock Holmes society, for whom he wrote an essay arguing that Professor Moriarty's work "The Dynamics of An Asteroid" involved the willful destruction of an ancient, civilized planet. He was also a member of the male-only literary banqueting club the Trap Door Spiders, which served as the basis of his fictional group of mystery solvers, the Black Widowers. He later used his essay on Moriarty's work as the basis for a Black Widowers story, " The Ultimate Crime", which appeared in More Tales of the Black Widowers.

In 1984, the American Humanist Association (AHA) named him the Humanist of the Year. He was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto. From 1985 until his death in 1992, he served as president of the AHA, an honorary appointment. His successor was his friend and fellow writer Kurt Vonnegut. He was also a close friend of creator Gene Roddenberry, and earned a screen credit as "special science consultant" on Star Trek: The Motion Picture for advice he gave during production.

Asimov was a founding member of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, CSICOP (now the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry) and is listed in its Pantheon of Skeptics. In a discussion with James Randi at CSICon 2016 regarding the founding of CSICOP, Kendrick Frazier said that Asimov was "a key figure in the Skeptical movement who is less well known and appreciated today, but was very much in the public eye back then." He said that Asimov being associated with CSICOP "gave it immense status and authority" in his eyes.

Asimov described Carl Sagan as one of only two people he ever met whose intellect surpassed his own. The other, he claimed, was the computer scientist and artificial intelligence expert Marvin Minsky. Asimov was an on-and-off member and honorary vice president of Mensa International, albeit reluctantly; he described some members of that organization as "brain-proud and aggressive about their IQs".

After his father died in 1969, Asimov annually contributed to a Judah Asimov Scholarship Fund at Brandeis University.

In 1977, Asimov had a heart attack. In December 1983, he had triple bypass surgery at NYU Medical Center, during which he contracted HIV from a blood transfusion. His HIV status was kept secret out of concern that the anti-AIDS prejudice might extend to his family members.

He died in Manhattan on April 6, 1992, and was cremated. The cause of death was reported as heart and kidney failure. Ten years following Asimov's death, Janet and Robyn Asimov agreed that the HIV story should be made public; Janet revealed it in her edition of his autobiography, It's Been a Good Life.

Asimov's career can be divided into several periods. His early career, dominated by science fiction, began with short stories in 1939 and novels in 1950. This lasted until about 1958, all but ending after publication of The Naked Sun (1957). He began publishing nonfiction as co-author of a college-level textbook called Biochemistry and Human Metabolism. Following the brief orbit of the first man-made satellite Sputnik I by the USSR in 1957, he wrote more nonfiction, particularly popular science books, and less science fiction. Over the next quarter-century, he wrote only four science fiction novels, and 120 nonfiction books.

Starting in 1982, the second half of his science fiction career began with the publication of Foundation's Edge. From then until his death, Asimov published several more sequels and prequels to his existing novels, tying them together in a way he had not originally anticipated, making a unified series. There are many inconsistencies in this unification, especially in his earlier stories. Doubleday and Houghton Mifflin published about 60% of his work as of 1969, Asimov stating that "both represent a father image".

Asimov believed his most enduring contributions would be his " Three Laws of Robotics" and the Foundation series. The Oxford English Dictionary credits his science fiction for introducing into the English language the words " robotics", " positronic" (an entirely fictional technology), and " psychohistory" (which is also used for a different study on historical motivations). Asimov coined the term "robotics" without suspecting that it might be an original word; at the time, he believed it was simply the natural analogue of words such as mechanics and hydraulics, but for robots. Unlike his word "psychohistory", the word "robotics" continues in mainstream technical use with Asimov's original definition. Star Trek: The Next Generation featured androids with " positronic brains" and the first-season episode " Datalore" called the positronic brain "Asimov's dream".

Asimov was so prolific and diverse in his writing that his books span all major categories of the Dewey Decimal Classification except for category 100, philosophy and psychology. He wrote several essays about psychology, and forewords for the books The Humanist Way (1988) and In Pursuit of Truth (1982), which were classified in the 100s category, but none of his own books were classified in that category.

According to UNESCO's Index Translationum database, Asimov is the world's 24th-most-translated author.

The first installment of Asimov's Tyrann was the cover story in the fourth issue of Galaxy Science Fiction in 1951. The novel was issued in book form later that year as The Stars Like Dust.

The first installment of Asimov's The Caves of Steel on the cover of the October 1953 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction, illustrated by Ed Emshwiller

The novelette "Legal Rites", a collaboration with Frederik Pohl, the only Asimov story to appear in Weird Tales

Asimov became a science fiction fan in 1929, when he began reading the pulp magazines sold in his family's candy store. At first his father forbade reading pulps until Asimov persuaded him that because the science fiction magazines had "Science" in the title, they must be educational. At age 18 he joined the Futurians science fiction fan club, where he made friends who went on to become science fiction writers or editors.

Asimov began writing at the age of 11, imitating The Rover Boys with eight chapters of The Greenville Chums at College. His father bought him a used typewriter at age 16. His first published work was a humorous item on the birth of his brother for Boys High School's literary journal in 1934. In May 1937 he first thought of writing professionally, and began writing his first science fiction story, "Cosmic Corkscrew" (now lost), that year. On May 17, 1938, puzzled by a change in the schedule of Astounding Science Fiction, Asimov visited its publisher Street & Smith Publications. Inspired by the visit, he finished the story on June 19, 1938, and personally submitted it to Astounding editor John W. Campbell two days later. Campbell met with Asimov for more than an hour and promised to read the story himself. Two days later he received a detailed rejection letter. This was the first of what became almost weekly meetings with the editor while Asimov lived in New York, until moving to Boston in 1949; Campbell had a strong formative influence on Asimov and became a personal friend.

By the end of the month, Asimov completed a second story, " Stowaway". Campbell rejected it on July 22 but-in "the nicest possible letter you could imagine"-encouraged him to continue writing, promising that Asimov might sell his work after another year and a dozen stories of practice. On October 21, 1938, he sold the third story he finished, " Marooned Off Vesta", to Amazing Stories, edited by Raymond A. Palmer, and it appeared in the March 1939 issue. Asimov was paid $64 (equivalent to $1,331 in 2022), or one cent a word. Two more stories appeared that year, " The Weapon Too Dreadful to Use" in the May Amazing and " Trends" in the July Astounding, the issue fans later selected as the start of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. For 1940, ISFDB catalogs seven stories in four different pulp magazines, including one in Astounding. His earnings became enough to pay for his education, but not yet enough for him to become a full-time writer.

Asimov later said that unlike other Golden Age writers Robert Heinlein and A. E. van Vogt-also first published in 1939, and whose talent and stardom were immediately obvious-he "(this is not false modesty) came up only gradually". Through July 29, 1940, Asimov wrote 22 stories in 25 months, of which 13 were published; he wrote in 1972 that from that date he never wrote a science fiction story that was not published (except for two "special cases"). By 1941 Asimov was famous enough that Donald Wollheim told him that he purchased " The Secret Sense" for a new magazine only because of his name, and the December 1940 issue of Astonishing-featuring Asimov's name in bold-was the first magazine to base cover art on his work, but Asimov later said that neither he nor anyone else-except perhaps Campbell-considered him better than an often published "third rater".

Based on a conversation with Campbell, Asimov wrote " Nightfall", his 32nd story, in March and April 1941, and Astounding published it in September 1941. In 1968 the Science Fiction Writers of America voted "Nightfall" the best science fiction short story ever written. In Nightfall and Other Stories Asimov wrote, "The writing of 'Nightfall' was a watershed in my professional career ... I was suddenly taken seriously and the world of science fiction became aware that I existed. As the years passed, in fact, it became evident that I had written a 'classic'." "Nightfall" is an archetypal example of social science fiction, a term he created to describe a new trend in the 1940s, led by authors including him and Heinlein, away from gadgets and space opera and toward speculation about the human condition.

After writing " Victory Unintentional" in January and February 1942, Asimov did not write another story for a year. Asimov expected to make chemistry his career, and was paid $2,600 annually at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, enough to marry his girlfriend; he did not expect to make much more from writing than the $1,788.50 he had earned from 28 stories sold over four years. Asimov left science fiction fandom and no longer read new magazines, and might have left the industry had not Heinlein and de Camp been coworkers and previously sold stories continued to appear. In 1942, Asimov published the first of his Foundation stories-later collected in the Foundation trilogy: Foundation (1951), Foundation and Empire (1952), and Second Foundation (1953). The books describe the fall of a vast interstellar empire and the establishment of its eventual successor. They also feature his fictional science of psychohistory, in which the future course of the history of large populations can be predicted.

The trilogy and Robot series are his most famous science fiction. In 1966 they won the Hugo Award for the all-time best series of science fiction and fantasy novels. Campbell raised his rate per word, Orson Welles purchased rights to " Evidence", and anthologies reprinted his stories. By the end of the war Asimov was earning as a writer an amount equal to half of his Navy Yard salary, even after a raise, but Asimov still did not believe that writing could support him, his wife, and future children.

His "positronic" robot stories-many of which were collected in (1950)-were begun at about the same time. They promulgated a set of rules of ethics for robots (see Three Laws of Robotics) and intelligent machines that greatly influenced other writers and thinkers in their treatment of the subject. Asimov notes in his introduction to the short story collection The Complete Robot (1982) that he was largely inspired by the tendency of robots up to that time to fall consistently into a Frankenstein plot in which they destroyed their creators.

The Robot series has led to film adaptations. With Asimov's collaboration, in about 1977, Harlan Ellison wrote a screenplay of I, Robot that Asimov hoped would lead to "the first really adult, complex, worthwhile science fiction film ever made". The screenplay has never been filmed and was eventually published in book form in 1994. The 2004 movie , starring Will Smith, was based on an unrelated script by Jeff Vintar titled Hardwired, with Asimov's ideas incorporated later after the rights to Asimov's title were acquired. (The title was not original to Asimov but had previously been used for a story by Eando Binder.) Also, one of Asimov's robot short stories, " The Bicentennial Man", was expanded into a novel The Positronic Man by Asimov and Robert Silverberg, and this was adapted into the 1999 movie Bicentennial Man, starring Robin Williams.

Besides movies, his Foundation and Robot stories have inspired other derivative works of science fiction literature, many by well-known and established authors such as Roger MacBride Allen, Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, David Brin, and Donald Kingsbury. At least some of these appear to have been done with the blessing of, or at the request of, Asimov's widow, Janet Asimov.

In 1948, he also wrote a spoof chemistry article, " The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline". At the time, Asimov was preparing his own doctoral dissertation, and for the oral examination to follow that. Fearing a prejudicial reaction from his graduate school evaluation board at Columbia University, Asimov asked his editor that it be released under a pseudonym, yet it appeared under his own name. Asimov grew concerned at the scrutiny he would receive at his oral examination, in case the examiners thought he wasn't taking science seriously. At the end of the examination, one evaluator turned to him, smiling, and said, "What can you tell us, Mr. Asimov, about the thermodynamic properties of the compound known as thiotimoline". Laughing hysterically with relief, Asimov had to be led out of the room. After a five-minute wait, he was summoned back into the room and congratulated as "Dr. Asimov".

Demand for science fiction greatly increased during the 1950s. It became possible for a genre author to write full-time. In 1949, book publisher Doubleday's science fiction editor Walter I. Bradbury accepted Asimov's unpublished "Grow Old with Me" (40,000 words), but requested that it be extended to a full novel of 70,000 words. The book appeared under the Doubleday imprint in January 1950 with the title of Pebble in the Sky. Doubleday published five more original science fiction novels by Asimov in the 1950s, along with the six juvenile Lucky Starr novels, the latter under the pseudonym of "Paul French". Doubleday also published collections of Asimov's short stories, beginning with The Martian Way and Other Stories in 1955. The early 1950s also saw Gnome Press publish one collection of Asimov's positronic robot stories as and his Foundation stories and novelettes as the three books of the Foundation trilogy. More positronic robot stories were republished in book form as The Rest of the Robots.

Books and the magazines and Fantasy & Science Fiction ended Asimov's dependence on Astounding. He later described the era as his "'mature' period". Asimov's " The Last Question" (1956), on the ability of humankind to cope with and potentially reverse the process of entropy, was his personal favorite story.

In 1972, his novel The Gods Themselves (which was not part of a series) was published to general acclaim, and it won the Hugo Award for Best Novel, the Nebula Award for Best Novel, and the Locus Award for Best Novel.

In December 1974, former Beatle Paul McCartney approached Asimov and asked him if he could write the screenplay for a science-fiction movie musical. McCartney had a vague idea for the plot and a small scrap of dialogue; he wished to make a film about a rock band whose members discover they are being impersonated by a group of extraterrestrials. The band and their impostors would likely be played by McCartney's group Wings, then at the height of their career. Intrigued by the idea, although he was not generally a fan of rock music, Asimov quickly produced a "treatment" or brief outline of the story. He adhered to McCartney's overall idea, producing a story he felt to be moving and dramatic, but did not use McCartney's brief scrap of dialogue. McCartney rejected the story. The treatment now exists only in the Boston University archives.

Asimov said in 1969 that he had "the happiest of all my associations with science fiction magazines" with Fantasy & Science Fiction; "I have no complaints about Astounding, Galaxy, or any of the rest, heaven knows, but F&SF has become something special to me". Beginning in 1977, Asimov lent his name to Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (now Asimov's Science Fiction) and wrote an editorial for each issue. There was also a short-lived Asimov's SF Adventure Magazine and a companion Asimov's Science Fiction Anthology reprint series, published as magazines (in the same manner as the stablemates Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine's and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine's "anthologies").

Due to pressure by fans on Asimov to write another book in his Foundation series, he did so with Foundation's Edge (1982) and Foundation and Earth (1986), and then went back to before the original trilogy with Prelude to Foundation (1988) and Forward the Foundation (1992), his last novel.

Asimov and two colleagues published a textbook in 1949, with two more editions by 1969. During the late 1950s and 1960s, Asimov substantially decreased his fiction output (he published only four adult novels between 1957's The Naked Sun and 1982's Foundation's Edge, two of which were mysteries). He greatly increased his nonfiction production, writing mostly on science topics; the launch of Sputnik in 1957 engendered public concern over a "science gap". Asimov explained in The Rest of the Robots that he had been unable to write substantial fiction since the summer of 1958, and observers understood him as saying that his fiction career had ended, or was permanently interrupted. Asimov recalled in 1969 that "the United States went into a kind of tizzy, and so did I. I was overcome by the ardent desire to write popular science for an America that might be in great danger through its neglect of science, and a number of publishers got an equally ardent desire to publish popular science for the same reason".

Fantasy and Science Fiction invited Asimov to continue his regular nonfiction column, begun in the now-folded bimonthly companion magazine Venture Science Fiction Magazine. The first of 399 monthly F&SF columns appeared in November 1958 and they continued until his terminal illness. These columns, periodically collected into books by Doubleday, gave Asimov a reputation as a "Great Explainer" of science; he described them as his only popular science writing in which he never had to assume complete ignorance of the subjects on the part of his readers. The column was ostensibly dedicated to popular science but Asimov had complete editorial freedom, and wrote about contemporary social issues[citation needed ] in essays such as "Thinking About Thinking" and "Knock Plastic!". In 1975 he wrote of these essays: "I get more pleasure out of them than out of any other writing assignment."

Asimov's first wide-ranging reference work, The Intelligent Man's Guide to Science (1960), was nominated for a National Book Award, and in 1963 he won a Hugo Award-his first-for his essays for F&SF. The popularity of his science books and the income he derived from them allowed him to give up most academic responsibilities and become a full-time freelance writer. He encouraged other science fiction writers to write popular science, stating in 1967 that "the knowledgeable, skillful science writer is worth his weight in contracts", with "twice as much work as he can possibly handle".

The great variety of information covered in Asimov's writings prompted Kurt Vonnegut to ask, "How does it feel to know everything?" Asimov replied that he only knew how it felt to have the 'reputation' of omniscience: "Uneasy". Floyd C. Gale said that "Asimov has a rare talent. He can make your mental mouth water over dry facts", and "science fiction's loss has been science popularization's gain". Asimov said that "Of all the writing I do, fiction, non-fiction, adult, or juvenile, these F & SF articles are by far the most fun". He regretted, however, that he had less time for fiction-causing dissatisfied readers to send him letters of complaint-stating in 1969 that "In the last ten years, I've done a couple of novels, some collections, a dozen or so stories, but that's nothing".

In his essay "To Tell a Chemist" (1965), Asimov proposed a simple shibboleth for distinguishing chemists from non-chemists: ask the person to read the word "unionized". Chemists, he noted, will read un- (electrically neutral), while non-chemists will read (belonging to a trade union).

Asimov coined the term " robotics" in his 1941 story " Liar!", though he later remarked that he believed then that he was merely using an existing word, as he stated in ("The Robot Chronicles"). While acknowledging the Oxford Dictionary reference, he incorrectly states that the word was first printed about one third of the way down the first column of page 100, Astounding Science Fiction, March 1942 printing of his short story " Runaround".

In the same story, Asimov also coined the term "positronic" (the counterpart to "electronic" for positrons).

Asimov coined the term " psychohistory" in his Foundation stories to name a fictional branch of science which combines history, sociology, and mathematical statistics to make general predictions about the future behavior of very large groups of people, such as the Galactic Empire. Asimov said later that he should have called it psychosociology. It was first introduced in the five short stories (1942-1944) which would later be collected as the 1951 fix-up novel Foundation. Somewhat later, the term " psychohistory" was applied by others to research of the effects of psychology on history.

In addition to his interest in science, Asimov was interested in history. Starting in the 1960s, he wrote 14 popular history books, including The Greeks: A Great Adventure (1965), The Roman Republic (1966), The Roman Empire (1967), The Egyptians (1967) The Near East: 10,000 Years of History (1968), and Asimov's Chronology of the World (1991).

He published Asimov's Guide to the Bible in two volumes-covering the Old Testament in 1967 and the New Testament in 1969-and then combined them into one 1,300-page volume in 1981. Complete with maps and tables, the guide goes through the books of the Bible in order, explaining the history of each one and the political influences that affected it, as well as biographical information about the important characters. His interest in literature manifested itself in several annotations of literary works, including Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare (1970), Asimov's Annotated Don Juan (1972), Asimov's Annotated Paradise Lost (1974), and The Annotated Gulliver's Travels (1980).

Asimov was also a noted mystery author and a frequent contributor to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. He began by writing science fiction mysteries such as his Wendell Urth stories, but soon moved on to writing "pure" mysteries. He published two full-length mystery novels, and wrote 66 stories about the Black Widowers, a group of men who met monthly for dinner, conversation, and a puzzle. He got the idea for the Widowers from his own association in a stag group called the Trap Door Spiders, and all of the main characters (with the exception of the waiter, Henry, who he admitted resembled Wodehouse's Jeeves) were modeled after his closest friends. A parody of the Black Widowers, "An Evening with the White Divorcés," was written by author, critic, and librarian Jon L. Breen. Asimov joked, "all I can do ... is to wait until I catch him in a dark alley, someday."

Toward the end of his life, Asimov published a series of collections of limericks, mostly written by himself, starting with Lecherous Limericks, which appeared in 1975. Limericks: Too Gross, whose title displays Asimov's love of puns, contains 144 limericks by Asimov and an equal number by John Ciardi. He even created a slim volume of Sherlockian limericks. Asimov featured Yiddish humor in Azazel, The Two Centimeter Demon. The two main characters, both Jewish, talk over dinner, or lunch, or breakfast, about anecdotes of "George" and his friend Azazel. Asimov's Treasury of Humor is both a working joke book and a treatise propounding his views on humor theory. According to Asimov, the most essential element of humor is an abrupt change in point of view, one that suddenly shifts focus from the important to the trivial, or from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Particularly in his later years, Asimov to some extent cultivated an image of himself as an amiable lecher. In 1971, as a response to the popularity of sexual guidebooks such as The Sensuous Woman (by "J") and The Sensuous Man (by "M"), Asimov published The Sensuous Dirty Old Man under the byline "Dr. 'A'" (although his full name was printed on the paperback edition, first published 1972). However, by 2016, Asimov's habit of groping women was seen as sexual harassment and came under criticism, and was cited as an early example of inappropriate behavior that can occur at science fiction conventions.

Asimov published three volumes of autobiography. In Memory Yet Green (1979) and In Joy Still Felt (1980) cover his life up to 1978. The third volume, I. Asimov: A Memoir (1994), covered his whole life (rather than following on from where the second volume left off). The epilogue was written by his widow Janet Asimov after his death. The book won a Hugo Award in 1995. Janet Asimov edited It's Been a Good Life (2002), a condensed version of his three autobiographies. He also published three volumes of retrospectives of his writing, (1969), (1979), and (1984).

In 1987, the Asimovs co-wrote How to Enjoy Writing: A Book of Aid and Comfort. In it they offer advice on how to maintain a positive attitude and stay productive when dealing with discouragement, distractions, rejection, and thick-headed editors. The book includes many quotations, essays, anecdotes, and husband-wife dialogues about the ups and downs of being an author.

Asimov and creator Gene Roddenberry developed a unique relationship during Star Trek's initial launch in the late 1960s. Asimov wrote a critical essay on Star Trek's scientific accuracy for magazine. Roddenberry retorted respectfully with a personal letter explaining the limitations of accuracy when writing a weekly series. Asimov corrected himself with a follow-up essay to TV Guide claiming that despite its inaccuracies, Star Trek was a fresh and intellectually challenging science fiction television show. The two remained friends to the point where Asimov even served as an advisor on a number of Star Trek projects.

In 1973, Asimov published a proposal for calendar reform, called the World Season Calendar. It divides the year into four seasons (named A-D) of 13 weeks (91 days) each. This allows days to be named, e.g., "D-73" instead of December 1 (due to December 1 being the 73rd day of the 4th quarter). An extra 'year day' is added for a total of 365 days.

Asimov won more than a dozen annual awards for particular works of science fiction and a half-dozen lifetime awards. He also received 14 honorary doctorate degrees from universities.

1960 - Howard W. Blakeslee Award from the American Heart Association for The Living River

1965 - James T. Grady Award of the American Chemical Society (now called the James T. Grady-James H. Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry)

1966 - Best All-time Novel Series Hugo Award for the Foundation trilogy

1967 - AAAS-Westinghouse Science Writing Award for Magazine Writing, for essay "Over the Edge of the Universe" (in the March 1967 Harper's Magazine)

1986 - The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America named him its 8th SFWA Grand Master (presented in 1987).

1987 - Locus Award for Best Short Story for "Robot Dreams"

1992 - Hugo Award for Best Novelette for "Gold"

1997 - The Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted Asimov in its second class of two deceased and two living persons, along with H. G. Wells.

2000 - Asimov was featured on a stamp in Israel

2001 - The Isaac Asimov Memorial Debates at the Hayden Planetarium in New York were inaugurated

2010 - In the US Congress bill about the designation of the National Robotics Week as an annual event, a tribute to Isaac Asimov is as follows:
"Whereas the second week in April each year is designated as 'National Robotics Week', recognizing the accomplishments of Isaac Asimov, who immigrated to America, taught science, wrote science books for children and adults, first used the term robotics, developed the Three Laws of Robotics, and died in April 1992: Now, therefore, be it resolved ..."

2016 - A 1941 Retro-Hugo for Best Short Story of 1940 was given at the 2016 WorldCon for , his first positronic robot story, published in Super Science Stories, September 1940

2018 - A 1943 Retro-Hugo for Best Short Story of 1942 was given at the 2018 WorldCon for Foundation, published in Astounding Science-Fiction, May 1942

Asimov was his own secretary, typist, indexer, proofreader, and literary agent. He wrote a typed first draft composed at the keyboard at 90 words per minute; he imagined an ending first, then a beginning, then "let everything in-between work itself out as I come to it". (Asimov used an outline only once, later describing it as "like trying to play the piano from inside a straitjacket".) After correcting a draft by hand, he retyped the document as the final copy and only made one revision with minor editor-requested changes; a word processor did not save him much time, Asimov said, because 95% of the first draft was unchanged.

After disliking making multiple revisions of " Black Friar of the Flame", Asimov refused to make major, second, or non-editorial revisions ("like chewing used gum"), stating that "too large a revision, or too many revisions, indicate that the piece of writing is a failure. In the time it would take to salvage such a failure, I could write a new piece altogether and have infinitely more fun in the process". He submitted "failures" to another editor.

Asimov's fiction style is extremely unornamented. In 1980, science fiction scholar James Gunn wrote of I, Robot:

Except for two stories-" Liar!" and " Evidence"-they are not stories in which character plays a significant part. Virtually all plot develops in conversation with little if any action. Nor is there a great deal of local color or description of any kind. The dialogue is, at best, functional and the style is, at best, transparent. ... . The robot stories and, as a matter of fact, almost all Asimov fiction-play themselves on a relatively bare stage.

Asimov addressed such criticism in 1989 at the beginning of Nemesis:

I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing-to be 'clear'. I have given up all thought of writing poetically or symbolically or experimentally, or in any of the other modes that might (if I were good enough) get me a Pulitzer prize. I would write merely clearly and in this way establish a warm relationship between myself and my readers, and the professional critics-Well, they can do whatever they wish.

Gunn cited examples of a more complex style, such as the climax of "Liar!". Sharply drawn characters occur at key junctures of his storylines: Susan Calvin in "Liar!" and "Evidence", Arkady Darell in Second Foundation, Elijah Baley in The Caves of Steel, and Hari Seldon in the Foundation prequels.

Other than books by Gunn and Joseph Patrouch, there is relatively little literary criticism on Asimov (particularly when compared to the sheer volume of his output). Cowart and Wymer's Dictionary of Literary Biography (1981) gives a possible reason:

His words do not easily lend themselves to traditional literary criticism because he has the habit of centering his fiction on plot and clearly stating to his reader, in rather direct terms, what is happening in his stories and why it is happening. In fact, most of the dialogue in an Asimov story, and particularly in the Foundation trilogy, is devoted to such exposition. Stories that clearly state what they mean in unambiguous language are the most difficult for a scholar to deal with because there is little to be interpreted.

Gunn's and Patrouch's studies of Asimov both state that a clear, direct prose style is still a style. Gunn's 1982 book comments in detail on each of Asimov's novels. He does not praise all of Asimov's fiction (nor does Patrouch), but calls some passages in The Caves of Steel "reminiscent of Proust". When discussing how that novel depicts night falling over futuristic New York City, Gunn says that Asimov's prose "need not be ashamed anywhere in literary society".

Although he prided himself on his unornamented prose style (for which he credited Clifford D. Simak as an early influence), and said in 1973 that his style had not changed, Asimov also enjoyed giving his longer stories complicated narrative structures, often by arranging chapters in non chronological ways. Some readers have been put off by this, complaining that the nonlinearity is not worth the trouble and adversely affects the clarity of the story. For example, the first third of The Gods Themselves begins with Chapter 6, then backtracks to fill in earlier material. (John Campbell advised Asimov to begin his stories as late in the plot as possible. This advice helped Asimov create " Reason", one of the early Robot stories). Patrouch found that the interwoven and nested flashbacks of The Currents of Space did serious harm to that novel, to such an extent that only a "dyed-in-the-kyrt Asimov fan" could enjoy it. In his later novel Nemesis one group of characters lives in the "present" and another group starts in the "past", beginning 15 years earlier and gradually moving toward the time of the first group.

Asimov once explained that his reluctance to write about aliens came from an incident early in his career when Astounding's editor John Campbell rejected one of his science fiction stories because the alien characters were portrayed as superior to the humans. The nature of the rejection led him to believe that Campbell may have based his bias towards humans in stories on a real-world racial bias. Unwilling to write only weak alien races, and concerned that a confrontation would jeopardize his and Campbell's friendship, he decided he would not write about aliens at all. Nevertheless, in response to these criticisms, he wrote The Gods Themselves, which contains aliens and alien sex. The book won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1972, and the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1973. Asimov said that of all his writings, he was most proud of the middle section of The Gods Themselves, the part that deals with those themes.

In the Hugo Award-winning novelette " Gold", Asimov describes an author, based on himself, who has one of his books ( The Gods Themselves) adapted into a "compu-drama", essentially photo-realistic computer animation. The director criticizes the fictionalized Asimov ("Gregory Laborian") for having an extremely nonvisual style, making it difficult to adapt his work, and the author explains that he relies on ideas and dialogue rather than description to get his points across.

In the early days of science fiction some authors and critics felt that the romantic elements were inappropriate in science fiction stories, which were supposedly to be focused on science and technology. Isaac Asimov was a supporter of this point of view, expressed in his 1938-1939 letters to Astounding, where he described such elements as "mush" and "slop". To his dismay, these letters were met with a strong opposition.

Asimov attributed the lack of romance and sex in his fiction to the "early imprinting" from starting his writing career when he had never been on a date and "didn't know anything about girls". He was sometimes criticized for the general absence of sex (and of extraterrestrial life) in his science fiction. He claimed he wrote The Gods Themselves (1972) to respond to these criticisms, which often came from New Wave science fiction (and often British) writers. The second part (of three) of the novel is set on an alien world with three sexes, and the sexual behavior of these creatures is extensively depicted.

Asimov was an atheist, a humanist, and a rationalist. He did not oppose religious conviction in others, but he frequently railed against superstitious and pseudoscientific beliefs that tried to pass themselves off as genuine science. During his childhood, his father and mother observed the traditions of Orthodox Judaism less stringently than they had in Petrovichi; they did not force their beliefs upon young Isaac, and he grew up without strong religious influences, coming to believe that the represented Hebrew mythology in the same way that the recorded Greek mythology. When he was 13, he chose not to have a bar mitzvah. As his books Treasury of Humor and Asimov Laughs Again record, Asimov was willing to tell jokes involving God, Satan, the Garden of Eden, Jerusalem, and other religious topics, expressing the viewpoint that a good joke can do more to provoke thought than hours of philosophical discussion.

For a brief while, his father worked in the local synagogue to enjoy the familiar surroundings and, as Isaac put it, "shine as a learned scholar" versed in the sacred writings. This scholarship was a seed for his later authorship and publication of Asimov's Guide to the Bible, an analysis of the historic foundations for the Old and New Testaments. For many years, Asimov called himself an atheist; he considered the term somewhat inadequate, as it described what he did not believe rather than what he did. Eventually, he described himself as a "humanist" and considered that term more practical. Asimov continued to identify himself as a secular Jew, as stated in his introduction to Jack Dann's anthology of Jewish science fiction, Wandering Stars: "I attend no services and follow no ritual and have never undergone that curious puberty rite, the Bar Mitzvah. It doesn't matter. I am Jewish."

When asked in an interview in 1982 if he was an atheist, Asimov replied,

I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.

Likewise, he said about religious education: "I would not be satisfied to have my kids choose to be religious without trying to argue them out of it, just as I would not be satisfied to have them decide to smoke regularly or engage in any other practice I consider detrimental to mind or body."

In his last volume of autobiography, Asimov wrote,

If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.

The same memoir states his belief that Hell is "the drooling dream of a sadist" crudely affixed to an all-merciful God; if even human governments were willing to curtail cruel and unusual punishments, wondered Asimov, why would punishment in the afterlife not be restricted to a limited term? Asimov rejected the idea that a human belief or action could merit infinite punishment. If an afterlife existed, he claimed, the longest and most severe punishment would be reserved for those who "slandered God by inventing Hell".

Asimov said about using religious motifs in his writing:

I tend to ignore religion in my own stories altogether, except when I absolutely have to have it. ... and, whenever I bring in a religious motif, that religion is bound to seem vaguely Christian because that is the only religion I know anything about, even though it is not mine. An unsympathetic reader might think that I am "burlesquing" Christianity, but I am not. Then too, it is impossible to write science fiction and really ignore religion.

Asimov became a staunch supporter of the Democratic Party during the New Deal, and thereafter remained a political liberal. He was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War in the 1960s and in a television interview during the early 1970s he publicly endorsed George McGovern. He was unhappy about what he considered an "irrationalist" viewpoint taken by many radical political activists from the late 1960s and onwards. In his second volume of autobiography, In Joy Still Felt, Asimov recalled meeting the counterculture figure Abbie Hoffman. Asimov's impression was that the 1960s' counterculture heroes had ridden an emotional wave which, in the end, left them stranded in a "no-man's land of the spirit" from which he wondered if they would ever return.

Asimov vehemently opposed Richard Nixon, considering him "a crook and a liar". He closely followed Watergate, and was pleased when the president was forced to resign. Asimov was dismayed over the pardon extended to Nixon by his successor: "I was not impressed by the argument that it has spared the nation an ordeal. To my way of thinking, the ordeal was necessary to make certain it would never happen again."

After Asimov's name appeared in the mid-1960s on a list of people the Communist Party USA "considered amenable" to its goals, the FBI investigated him. Because of his academic background, the bureau briefly considered Asimov as a possible candidate for known Soviet spy ROBPROF, but found nothing suspicious in his life or background.

Asimov appeared to hold an equivocal attitude towards Israel. In his first autobiography, he indicates his support for the safety of Israel, though insisting that he was not a Zionist. In his third autobiography, Asimov stated his opposition to the creation of a Jewish state, on the grounds that he was opposed to having nation-states in general, and supported the notion of a single humanity. Asimov especially worried about the safety of Israel given that it had been created among hostile Muslim neighbors, and said that Jews had merely created for themselves another "Jewish ghetto".

Asimov believed that " science fiction ... serve[s] the good of humanity". He considered himself a feminist even before women's liberation became a widespread movement; he argued that the issue of women's rights was closely connected to that of population control. Furthermore, he believed that homosexuality must be considered a "moral right" on population grounds, as must all consenting adult sexual activity that does not lead to reproduction. He issued many appeals for population control, reflecting a perspective articulated by people from Thomas Malthus through Paul R. Ehrlich.

In a 1988 interview by Bill Moyers, Asimov proposed computer-aided learning, where people would use computers to find information on subjects in which they were interested. He thought this would make learning more interesting, since people would have the freedom to choose what to learn, and would help spread knowledge around the world. Also, the one-to-one model would let students learn at their own pace. Asimov thought that people would live in space by 2019.

In 1983 Asimov wrote:

Computerization will undoubtedly continue onward inevitably... This means that a vast change in the nature of education must take place, and entire populations must be made "computer-literate" and must be taught to deal with a "high-tech" world.

He continues on education:

Education, which must be revolutionized in the new world, will be revolutionized by the very agency that requires the revolution - the computer.

Schools will undoubtedly still exist, but a good schoolteacher can do no better than to inspire curiosity which an interested student can then satisfy at home at the console of his computer outlet.

There will be an opportunity finally for every youngster, and indeed, every person, to learn what he or she wants to learn, in his or her own time, at his or her own speed, in his or her own way.

Education will become fun because it will bubble up from within and not be forced in from without.

Asimov would often fondle, kiss and pinch women at conventions and elsewhere without regard for their consent. According to Alec Nevala-Lee, author of an Asimov biography and writer on the history of science fiction, he often defended himself by saying that far from showing objections, these women cooperated. In a 1971 satirical piece, The Sensuous Dirty Old Man, Asimov wrote: "The question then is not whether or not a girl should be touched. The question is merely where, when, and how she should be touched."

According to Nevala-Lee, however, "many of these encounters were clearly nonconsensual." He wrote that Asimov's behaviour, as a leading science-fiction author and personality, contributed to an undesirable atmosphere for women in the male-dominated science fiction community. In support of this, he quoted some of Asimov's contemporary fellow-authors such as Judith Merril, Harlan Ellison and Frederik Pohl, as well as editors such as Timothy Seldes. Additional specific incidents were reported by other people including Edward L. Ferman, long-time editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, who wrote "... instead of shaking my date's hand, he shook her left breast".

Asimov's defense of civil applications of nuclear power, even after the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant incident, damaged his relations with some of his fellow liberals. In a letter reprinted in Yours, Isaac Asimov, he states that although he would prefer living in "no danger whatsoever" than near a nuclear reactor, he would still prefer a home near a nuclear power plant than in a slum on Love Canal or near "a Union Carbide plant producing methyl isocyanate", the latter being a reference to the Bhopal disaster.

In the closing years of his life, Asimov blamed the deterioration of the quality of life that he perceived in New York City on the shrinking tax base caused by the middle-class flight to the suburbs, though he continued to support high taxes on the middle class to pay for social programs. His last nonfiction book, Our Angry Earth (1991, co-written with his long-time friend, science fiction author Frederik Pohl), deals with elements of the environmental crisis such as overpopulation, oil dependence, war, global warming, and the destruction of the ozone layer. In response to being presented by Bill Moyers with the question "What do you see happening to the idea of dignity to human species if this population growth continues at its present rate?", Asimov responded:

It's going to destroy it all ... if you have 20 people in the apartment and two bathrooms, no matter how much every person believes in freedom of the bathroom, there is no such thing. You have to set up, you have to set up times for each person, you have to bang at the door, aren't you through yet, and so on. And in the same way, democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people onto the world, the value of life not only declines, but it disappears.

Asimov enjoyed the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien, and used The Lord of the Rings as a plot point in a Black Widowers story, titled Nothing like Murder. In the essay "All or Nothing" (for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Jan 1981), Asimov said that he admired Tolkien and that he had read The Lord of the Rings five times. (The feelings were mutual, with Tolkien saying that he had enjoyed Asimov's science fiction. This would make Asimov an exception to Tolkien's earlier claim that he rarely found "any modern books" that were interesting to him.)

He acknowledged other writers as superior to himself in talent, saying of Harlan Ellison, "He is (in my opinion) one of the best writers in the world, far more skilled at the art than I am." Asimov disapproved of the New Wave's growing influence, stating in 1967 "I want science fiction. I think science fiction isn't really science fiction if it lacks science. And I think the better and truer the science, the better and truer the science fiction".

The feelings of friendship and respect between Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke were demonstrated by the so-called "Clarke-Asimov Treaty of Park Avenue", negotiated as they shared a cab in New York. This stated that Asimov was required to insist that Clarke was the best science fiction writer in the world (reserving second-best for himself), while Clarke was required to insist that Asimov was the best science writer in the world (reserving second-best for himself). Thus, the dedication in Clarke's book Report on Planet Three (1972) reads: "In accordance with the terms of the Clarke-Asimov treaty, the second-best science writer dedicates this book to the second-best science-fiction writer."

Asimov became a fan of mystery stories at the same time as science fiction. He preferred to read the former because "I read every [science fiction] story keenly aware that it might be worse than mine, in which case I had no patience with it, or that it might be better, in which case I felt miserable". Asimov wrote "I make no secret of the fact that in my mysteries I use Agatha Christie as my model. In my opinion, her mysteries are the best ever written, far better than the Sherlock Holmes stories, and Hercule Poirot is the best detective fiction has seen. Why should I not use as my model what I consider the best?" He enjoyed Sherlock Holmes, but considered Arthur Conan Doyle to be "a slapdash and sloppy writer."

Asimov also enjoyed humorous stories, particularly those of P. G. Wodehouse.

In non-fiction writing, Asimov particularly admired the writing style of Martin Gardner, and tried to emulate it in his own science books. On meeting Gardner for the first time in 1965, Asimov told him this, to which Gardner answered that he had based his own style on Asimov's.

Paul Krugman, holder of a Nobel Prize in Economics, stated Asimov's concept of psychohistory inspired him to become an economist.

John Jenkins, who has reviewed the vast majority of Asimov's written output, once observed, "It has been pointed out that most science fiction writers since the 1950s have been affected by Asimov, either modeling their style on his or deliberately avoiding anything like his style." Along with such figures as Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper, Asimov left his mark as one of the most distinguished interdisciplinarians of the 20th century. "Few individuals", writes James L. Christian, "understood better than Isaac Asimov what synoptic thinking is all about. His almost 500 books-which he wrote as a specialist, a knowledgeable authority, or just an excited layman-range over almost all conceivable subjects: the sciences, history, literature, religion, and of course, science fiction."

Bibliography

Depending on the counting convention used, and including all titles, charts, and edited collections, there may be currently over 500 books in Asimov's bibliography-as well as his individual short stories, individual essays, and criticism. For his 100th, 200th, and 300th books (based on his personal count), Asimov published (1969), (1979), and (1984), celebrating his writing. An extensive bibliography of Isaac Asimov's works has been compiled by Ed Seiler. He published enough that his book writing rate could be analysed, showing that the writing became faster as he wrote more.

An online exhibit in West Virginia University Libraries' virtually complete Asimov Collection displays features, visuals, and descriptions of some of his over 600 books, games, audio recordings, videos, and wall charts. Many first, rare, and autographed editions are in the Libraries' Rare Book Room. Book jackets and autographs are presented online along with descriptions and images of children's books, science fiction art, multimedia, and other materials in the collection.

"Greater Foundation" series

The Robot series was originally separate from the Foundation series. The Galactic Empire novels were published as independent stories, set earlier in the same future as Foundation. Later in life, Asimov synthesized the Robot series into a single coherent "history" that appeared in the extension of the Foundation series.

All of these books were published by Doubleday & Co, except the original Foundation trilogy which was originally published by Gnome Books before being bought and republished by Doubleday.

Lucky Starr series (as Paul French)

All published by Doubleday & Co

Norby Chronicles (with Janet Asimov)

All published by Walker & Company

Norby, the Mixed-Up Robot (1983)

Norby's Other Secret (1984)

Norby and the Lost Princess (1985)

Norby and the Invaders (1985)

Norby and the Queen's Necklace (1986)

Norby Finds a Villain (1987)

Norby Down to Earth (1988)

Norby and Yobo's Great Adventure (1989)

Norby and the Oldest Dragon (1990)

Norby and the Court Jester (1991)

Novels marked with an asterisk (*) have minor connections to Foundation universe.

The Gods Themselves (1972), Doubleday

Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain (1987), Doubleday (not a sequel to Fantastic Voyage, but a similar, independent story)

Nemesis (1989), Bantam Doubleday Dell (*)

Child of Time (1992), Bantam Doubleday Dell, with Robert Silverberg (based on "The Ugly Little Boy", a 1958 short story written by Asimov)

The Positronic Man (1992), Bantam Doubleday Dell, with Robert Silverberg (*) (based on The Bicentennial Man, a 1976 novella written by Asimov)

Collections of Asimov's essays for F&SF

The following books collected essays which were originally published as monthly columns in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and collected by Doubleday & Co

1. Fact and Fancy (1962)

2. View from a Height (1963)

3. Adding a Dimension (1964)

4. Of Time and Space and Other Things (1965)

5. From Earth to Heaven (1966)

6. Science, Numbers, and I (1968)

7. The Solar System and Back (1970)

8. The Stars in Their Courses (1971)

9. The Left Hand of the Electron (1972)

10. The Tragedy of the Moon (1973)

11. Asimov On Chemistry (updated version of essays in previous collections) (1974)

12. Of Matters Great and Small (1975)

13. The Planet That Wasn't (1976)

14. Asimov On Numbers (updated version of essays in previous collections) (1976)

15. Quasar, Quasar, Burning Bright (1977)

16. The Road to Infinity (1979)

17. The Sun Shines Bright (1981)

18. Counting the Eons (1983)

19. X Stands for Unknown (1984)

20. The Subatomic Monster (1985)

21. Far as Human Eye Could See (1987)

22. The Relativity of Wrong (1988)

23. Asimov on Science: A 30 Year Retrospective 1959-1989 (1989) (features the first essay in the introduction)

24. Out of the Everywhere (1990)

25. The Secret of the Universe (1991)

Today and Tomorrow and- (1973), Doubleday

Life and Time (1978), Doubleday

The Dangers of Intelligence (1986), Houghton Mifflin

The Tyrannosaurus Prescription (1989), Prometheus Books

Frontiers (1990), Dutton

Frontiers II (1993), Dutton

Realm of Measure (1960), Houghton Mifflin

The Genetic Code (1962), The Orion Press

The Human Body: Its Structure and Operation (1963), Houghton Mifflin, ISBN 978-0-451-02430-5, ISBN 978-0-451-62707-0 (revised)

Planets for Man (with Stephen H. Dole) (1964), Random House, reprinted by RAND in 2007 ISBN 978-0-8330-4226-2

The Intelligent Man's Guide to Science (1965), Basic Books
The title varied with each of the four editions, the last being Asimov's New Guide to Science (1984) ISBN 978-0-14-017213-3

The Measure of the Universe (1983), Harper & Row

Think About Space: Where Have We Been and Where Are We Going? with co-author Frank White (1989), Walker

Beginnings: The Story of Origins (1989), Walker

Earth's Moon (1988), Gareth Stevens, revised in 2003 by Richard Hantula ISBN 978-1-59102-122-3

All published by Doubleday

Words from Genesis (1962), Houghton Mifflin

Words from the Exodus (1963), Houghton Mifflin

In the Beginning (1981), Crown

In Memory Yet Green: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954 (1979, Doubleday)

In Joy Still Felt: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1954-1978 (1980, Doubleday)

I. Asimov: A Memoir (1994, Doubleday)

All published by Houghton Mifflin except where otherwise stated

The Greeks (1965)

The Roman Republic (1966)

The Roman Empire (1967)

The Egyptians (1967)

The Near East (1968)

The Dark Ages (1968)

Words from History (1968)

The Shaping of England (1969)

Constantinople: The Forgotten Empire (1970)

The Land of Canaan (1971)

The Shaping of France (1972)

The Shaping of North America: From Earliest Times to 1763 (1973)

The Birth of the United States: 1763-1816 (1974)

The Golden Door: The United States from 1865 to 1918 (1977)

Limericks for Children (1984), Caedmon

Asimov Laughs Again (1992), HarperCollins

Asimov on Science Fiction (1981), Doubleday

Asimov's Galaxy (1989), Doubleday

Television, music, and film appearances

Several of his stories ("The Dead Past", "Sucker Bait", "Satisfaction Guaranteed", "Reason", "Liar!", and "The Naked Sun") were adapted as television plays for the first three series of the science-fiction (later horror) anthology series Out of the Unknown between 1965 and 1969. Only The Dead Past and Sucker Bait (both from series one) are known to still exist entirely as 16mm telerecordings. Tele-snaps, brief audio recordings and video clips exist for Satisfaction Guaranteed and The Prophet (adapted from "Reason"), while only production stills, brief audio recordings and video clips exist for Liar!. Production stills and an almost complete audio recording exist for The Naked Sun.

A halhatatlanság halála (1977), TV movie directed by András Rajnai, based on novel The End of Eternity

The Ugly Little Boy (1977), short film directed by Barry Morse and Donald W. Thompson, based on novelette The Ugly Little Boy

All the Troubles of the World (1978), short film directed by Dianne Haak-Edson, based on short story "All the Troubles of the World"

The Last Alternative (1978), TV movie directed by Vladimir Latyshev, based on novel The Naked Sun

The End of Eternity (1987), film directed by Andrei Yermash, based on novel The End of Eternity

(1988), film directed by Doug Smith and Kim Takal, based on the Robot series

Feeling 109 (1988), short film directed by Richard Kletter, based on a story of Asimov

Teach 109 (1989), TV movie directed by Richard Kletter, based on a story of Asimov (the same as The Android Affair)

The Android Affair (1995), TV movie directed by Richard Kletter, based on a story of Asimov (the same as Teach 109)

Bicentennial Man (1999), film directed by Chris Columbus, based on novelette "The Bicentennial Man" and on novel The Positronic Man

(2004), film directed by Alex Proyas, based on ideas of short stories of the Robot series

Formula of Death (2012), TV movie directed by Behdad Avand Amini, based on novel The Death Dealers

Spell My Name with an S (2014), short film directed by Samuel Ali, based on short story "Spell My Name with an S"

Foundation (2021), series created by David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman, based on the Foundation series

1. Asimov, Isaac. In Memory Yet Green. p. 31. The date of my birth, as I celebrate it, was January 2, 1920. It could not have been later than that. It might, however, have been earlier. Allowing for the uncertainties of the times, of the lack of records, of the Jewish and Julian calendars, it might have been as early as October 4, 1919. There is, however, no way of finding out. My parents were always uncertain and it really doesn't matter. I celebrate January 2, 1920, so let it be.

2. ^ Pronunciation note: In the humorous poem "The Prime of Life" published in the anthology The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories (p. 3), Asimov rhymes his name thusly: "Why, mazel tov, it's Asimov." In his comments on the poem, Asimov wrote that originally it was "Why, stars above, it's Asimov," and when someone suggested to use "mazel tov" instead, Asimov accepted this as a significant improvement.

3. ^ Asimov, Stanley (1996). Yours, Isaac Asimov. My estimate is that Isaac received about 100,000 letters in his professional career. And with the compulsiveness that has to be a character trait of a writer of almost 500 books, he answered 90 percent of them. He answered more than half with postcards and didn't make carbons of them. But with the 100,000 letters he received, there are carbons of about 45,000 that he wrote.

4. He obtained his Ph.D. on May 20, 1948. The title of his dissertation was "Kinetics of the Reaction Inactivation of ^ Tyrosinase During Its Catalysis of the Aerobic Oxidation of Catechol". An abridged version was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (February 1950, p. 820; online at the JACS website. (subscription required)). (The introduction to the full dissertation was reprinted in his book , pp. 171-173.)

5. ^ Between 1950 and 1953 he published seven scientific research papers: the summary of his PhD dissertation (see previous footnote), which he described as "my longest and my best," and six papers about his research at Boston University ("all those papers were unimportant").

6. ^ Asimov, Isaac (1969). Nightfall, and Other Stories. Doubleday. p. 244. I wrote a novel in 1953 which pictured a world in which everyone lived in underground cities, comfortably enclosed away from the open air. People would say, 'How could you imagine such a nightmarish situation?' And I would answer in astonishment, 'What nightmarish situation?'

7. ^ On the subject of IQ tests, Asimov wrote: "there is no objective definition of intelligence, and what we call intelligence is only a creation of cultural fashion and subjective prejudice," and "I simply don't think it is reasonable to use IQ tests to produce results of questionable value, which may then serve to justify racists in their own minds and to help bring about the kinds of tragedies we have already witnessed earlier in this century."

8. The two exceptions were both 1,000-word short stories written in 1941, "Masks" and "^ Big Game." The latter was published in 1974.

9. ^ A 400th essay, a compilation of excerpts from his earlier essays edited by his widow Janet Jeppson Asimov, was published in the magazine in 1994.

10. Asimov, ^ In Joy Still Felt (1980), pp. 464-465: "Of all the books I have ever worked on, I think Asimov's Guide to Shakespeare gave me the most pleasure, day in, day out. For months and months I lived and thought Shakespeare, and I don't see how there can be any greater pleasure in the world-any pleasure, that is, that one can indulge in for as much as ten hours without pause, day after day indefinitely."

11. Reprinted as "The Birth and Death of the Universe" in ^ Is Anyone There? (Doubleday, 1967)

12. ^ Asimov, Isaac (1994). I, Asimov: A Memoir. New York: Doubleday. p. 380. When Israel was founded in 1948 and all my Jewish friends were jubilant, I was the skeleton at the feast. I said, "We are building ourselves a ghetto. We will be surrounded by tens of millions of Muslims who will never forgive, never forget and never go away."... But don't Jews deserve a homeland? Actually, I feel that no human group deserves a "homeland" in the usual sense of the word. ... I am not a Zionist, then, because I don't believe in nations, and Zionism merely sets up one more nation to trouble the world.

In Joy Still Felt (1980), New York: Avon ISBN 0-380-53025-2.

I. Asimov: A Memoir (1994), ISBN 0-385-41701-2 (hc), ISBN 0-553-56997-X (pb).

Yours, Isaac Asimov (1996), edited by Stanley Asimov. New York: Doubleday ISBN 0-385-47624-8.

It's Been a Good Life (2002), edited by Janet Asimov. ISBN 1-57392-968-9.

Goldman, Stephen H., "Isaac Asimov", in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 8, Cowart and Wymer eds. (Gale Research, 1981), pp. 15-29.

Gunn, James. "On Variations on a Robot", IASFM, July 1980, pp. 56-81.

Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction (1982). ISBN 0-19-503060-5.

The Science of Science-Fiction Writing (2000). ISBN 1-57886-011-3.

Fiedler, Jean; Mele, Jim (1982). Isaac Asimov. New York: Ungar. ISBN 0-8044-2203-6.

Olander, Joseph D.; Greenberg, Martin H., eds. (1974). Isaac Asimov. Taplinger Publishing Company. ISBN 978-0-8008-4257-4.

Patrouch, Joseph F. (1977). The Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. ISBN 0-385-08696-2.

Touponce, William F. (1991). Isaac Asimov. Boston: Twayne Publishers. ISBN 0-8057-7623-0.

White, Michael (1994). Asimov: The Unauthorized Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ISBN 0-14-004130-3.

White, Michael (2005). Isaac Asimov: A Life of the Grand Master of Science Fiction. Carroll & Graf Publishers. ISBN 0-7867-1518-9.

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Isaac Asimov ( AZ-ih-mov ; c.  January 2, 1920 - April 6, 1992) was an American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University. During his lifetime, Asimov was considered one of the "Big Three" science fiction writers, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke.

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Science fiction best depicts views of the future-didn't start to become popular until early 1900s

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Interview grandparents-How did most ppl see the future when you were growing up? Apollo 11 landing?

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A 19th-Century Vision of the Year 2000 – The Public Domain Review

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A 19th-Century Vision of the Year 2000 – The Public Domain Review

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A series of futuristic pictures by Jean-Marc Côté and other artists issued in France in 1899, 1900, 1901 and 1910. Originally in the form of paper cards enclosed in cigarette/cigar boxes and, later, as postcards, the images depicted the world as it was imagined to be like in the then distant year of 2000. As is so often the case their predictions fell some way off the mark, failing to go far enough in thinking outside the confines of their current technological milieu (hence the ubiquity of propellors, not to mention the distinctly 19th-century dress).

There are at least 87 cards known that were authored by various French artists, the first series being produced for the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris. Due to financial difficulties the cards by Jean-Marc Côté were never actually distributed and only came to light many years later after the science-fiction author Isaac Asimov chanced upon a set and published them in 1986, with accompanying commentary, in the book Futuredays: A Nineteenth Century Vision of the Year 2000.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A series of futuristic pictures by Jean-Marc Côté and other artists issued in France in 1899, 1900, 1901 and 1910. Originally in the form of paper cards enclosed in cigarette/cigar boxes and, later, as postcards, the images depicted the world as it was imagined to be like in the then distant year of 2000.