(from the Legacy of Korra: An Avatar in New Avalon discussion)

>The future is going to have stuff that we can't even imagine right
>now

I have a book that came out in 2001, to mark the year of 2001: A Space Odyssey, called Hal's Legacy: 2001's Computer in Fiction and Reality (or words to that effect, I forget the precise subtitle). It's a collection of essays by various technologists about aspects of the HAL 9000 computer - speech recognition and synthesis, decision-making, and so on - and how close to achievable they were with the real computer science of the late 1990s.

It was entertaining reading at the time, if only because, well, the answer was generally "not very" - but I re-read it recently, and as a historical document it's even stranger, because it's a comparison of a past fictional future with a present day that is itself now 13 years in the past, and that's a whole lot of wacky temporality going on.

One of the most interesting (to me) aspects in which 2001 fails as futurism has nothing to do with the technology, but rather involves the product placement. Recall, for instance, that at the beginning of the film, Heywood Floyd is taking a Pan Am commercial flight to the Moon. Everyone focuses on the fact that there are still not commercial flights to the Moon in 2014 (and it's not looking particularly likely to happen ever), but beyond that, there'd been no such airline as Pan Am for 10 years by 2001.

Similarly, the IBM logo is prominently displayed in a lot of places over the course of the movie, and IBM certainly still exists as a company - but they changed their logo in 1969, the year after 2001 was released.

I feel I should clarify, in the interest of full disclosure, that I am... not a particular fan of the film, or of Kubrick's films generally, but I find it intensely interesting as a cultural artifact. That is to say, I'm not engaged by the story it's trying to tell (give me either version of 2010 any day), but I'm fascinated by the way the movie itself was made (similarly, I find Kubrick much more interesting as a technician than as a storyteller). Little things like the typography of the film, and how much attention he paid to it. But then I'm a font nerd anyway.

(For instance, the opening title of the film. If you look at it, it's in Futura Medium, a different weight of the same font NASA used on its official diagrams and documents in the '60s - but it doesn't say 2001, it says "2OO1", because in Futura that's more eyecatching. The capital O in Futura is a perfect circle - you can see that on the cover of Challenging the Cold Silence, which is in NASA's own Futura Heavy. Kubrick had his faults as a filmmaker, but one thing you can't say is that he let the little stuff slide. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

LAST EDITED ON Aug-16-14 AT 10:10 AM (EDT)
 
>Kubrick had his faults as a filmmaker, but one thing
>you can't say is that he let the little stuff slide. :)

For those of us who like Kubrick's movies¹, we've come to appreciate that his insane² obsession with detail and verisimilitude are a big part why his movies are so well-crafted.

Of course, this same obsession is why, for The Shining, Shelley Duvall spent a year in living hell (and probably years of therapy afterwards, over and above what would presumably be baseline for working on a Kubrick film), and the actor who played the kid remembers it as something somewhere between an awesome extended vacation and spending time with a really cool babysitter who bends the rules about bedtime and lies to your parents.

As for the future itself? There's a lot of mileage to be gotten out of looking at how fiction writers handle futurism, not to mention other sources of predictions, both where they get it right and where it goes laughably wrong. (I saw someone recently claim that William Gibson's predictions about the Internet were eerily spot-on, which was a statement on roughly the same level as when the film student/video store clerk told me that Princess Mononoke was an American film -- just do not engage, because no good can come of it.) Pay phones are my personal favorite -- their unquestioned ubiquity up until ... hell, not fifteen years ago, maybe ... and how difficult it proved to be to see their demise coming until cell phones hit a critical mass. Thus, they're all over the place in The Future as depicted in things written/produced even as late as the mid-1990s, and now I'd be hard pressed to name a place where I could find one.

---

"Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis."
- Kenneth Boulding

---

1. I've generally liked his movies, though I deliberately avoided seeing Eyes Wide Shut, and I was rather disappointed to learn that far-future ending segment of A.I. dated to when Kubrick was still directing it, and couldn't be fairly blamed on Spielberg despite feeling far more like his work than the rest of the film.
2. Quite possibly clinically such.

>Pay phones are
>my personal favorite -- their unquestioned ubiquity up until ... hell,
>not fifteen years ago, maybe ... and how difficult it proved to be to
>see their demise coming until cell phones hit a critical mass. Thus,
>they're all over the place in The Future as depicted in things
>written/produced even as late as the mid-1990s, and now I'd be hard
>pressed to name a place where I could find one.

I think there are a few around the city centre of Leeds but not many and I'm not 100% sure they've not been re-purposed as Wifi nodes or whatever the term is.

Internet cafes are also harder to find although fortunately not impossible.

>>Pay phones are
>>my personal favorite -- their unquestioned ubiquity up until ... hell,
>>not fifteen years ago, maybe ... and now I'd be hard
>>pressed to name a place where I could find one.
>I think there are a few around the city centre of Leeds

The last time I can specifically remember seeing a pay phone was a couple years back in the middle of a park -- and it surprised the hell out of me more because it was a pay phone than because "hey, phone in the middle of the park!"

-- Bob
-------------------
My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.

> Little things
>like the typography of the film, and how much attention he paid
>to it. But then I'm a font nerd anyway.
>>(For instance, the opening title of the film. If you look at it, it's
>in Futura Medium, a different weight of the same font NASA used on its
>official diagrams and documents in the '60s - but it doesn't say
>2001, it says "2OO1", because in Futura that's more eyecatching.
>The capital O in Futura is a perfect circle - you can see that on the
>cover of Challenging the Cold Silence, which is in NASA's own
>Futura Heavy. Kubrick had his faults as a filmmaker, but one thing
>you can't say is that he let the little stuff slide. :)

Nit: Title card is Gill Sans. Futura does show up later though.

For anyone else who is or wants to become a font nerd and needs to know more about 2001's typography: TypesetInTheFuture has you covered.

-VR
I want a version of Manifold with lower case extensions to use for a programming font.
"They copied all they could follow, but they couldn't copy my mind,
And I left 'em sweating and stealing a year and a half behind."

>Nit: Title card is Gill Sans. Futura does show up later though.

Hmm. Was I thinking of the poster? I haven't actually seen the movie in a long time, having concluded long ago that my biological lifespan's limitations are incompatible with Kubrick's pacing. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

LAST EDITED ON Aug-16-14 AT 04:12 PM (EDT)
 
>Hmm. Was I thinking of the poster?

Possibly. A quick search does show up some poster images that use a heavier weight Futura or one of it's near-clones, such as Spartan. (Trivia from Type Set In The Future: Apollo 11 patch used Spartan, not Futura..the digit 1's are different.)

> I haven't actually seen the movie
>in a long time, having concluded long ago that my biological
>lifespan's limitations are incompatible with Kubrick's pacing. :)

Don't ever watch anything by Tarkovsky then.

-VR
And of course there are all the DVD/tape/etc. box covers that may have used darn near anything.
"They copied all they could follow, but they couldn't copy my mind,
And I left 'em sweating and stealing a year and a half behind."

And, of course, the Bell System logo which, just like the IBM logo, was changed the year after /2001/ was released.

"Hey, kids - I'm so old, I remember virtual reality!"
-- Terry Pratchett, A Blink Of The Screen

---
"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But
I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.