Disney's Blog

I paid the usual visit to the bookshop yesterday with my wife and baby. What I saw on the science fiction shelf was no coincidence. Among the mind boggling boring titles with probably equally boring contents that only my baby girl was interested in (probably because she is teething and she would pretty much chew on anything), were 4 titles that jumped at me off the shelf from the Grand Master of Science Fiction. Science "Fiction"?? I'll come back to the "Fiction" part later. The 4 titles were;

1. 2010 Odyssey Two
2. 2061 Odyssey Three
3. 3001 The Final Odyssey
4. The Sentinel

I never had a second thought - it was meant to be. I had to have them in my collection, I thought. Got myself my Christmas gift. I couldn't have wished for a better gift. Having said that, I must also confess that it was a little disappointing to not to have the first of the Odyssey series. Fortunately, the chap at the counter was good enough to reserve a copy of 2001: A Space Odyssey for me, which he said will arrive from Dubai in 2-3 days. And here I'm waiting for the call from the bookshop. Anyway, it's going to take a while for me to finish reading them or should I say re-reading them.

I said earlier that I'm going to come back to the "Fiction" part. The only plausible reason that I could give to the Fiction part in any Arthur C. Clarke novel is the fact that it's a novel. I've always found that the Science part is very plausible in that the sling shot technique described in A Space Odyssey was actually used by Nasa to get Neil Armstrong and the crew on to the moon. A day to day and ideal example would be the birds in the sky that bring us anything from movies, cricket matches, cartoons to internet. Arthur C. Clarke described satellite communication technology in such detail, 20 years before the first commercial satellite was launched,that the technology could not be patented when it actually arrived simmering hot!