Word: slabs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Ojukwu on the evening of the Umuahia air raid in his closely guarded stucco house atop a hill outside town, he spoke of the "hot and cold flashes that go through my mind" when he sees the air raid victims. "Viewing their mangled remains on a mortuary slab," he said, "I feel anger with those who made devastating weapons available to primitive men. I even find myself wondering whether there is a God, and what has happened to the conscience of the world...
...herd of hairy simians chatters and skirmishes beside a water hole. It is, says the screen, "The Dawn of Man." But is it? From somewhere, a strange rectangular slab appears, gleaming in the primeval sunlight. Its appearance stimulates one of the simians to think for the first time of a bone as a weapon. Now he is man, the killer; the naked ape has arisen, and civilization is on its way. With a burst of animal spirits, the bone is flung into the air, dissolves into an elongated spacecraft, and aeons of evolution fall away. It is 2001, the epoch...
Mind Bender. After a wrenching struggle, Dullea manages to disarm the mutinous Hal just as Discovery I enters the orbit of Jupiter. There he sees the object of his trip-the omnipotent slab. He heads for it, and suddenly conventional dimensions vanish. An avalanche of eerie, kinetic effects attacks the eye and bends the mind. Kubrick turns the screen into a planetarium gone mad and provides the viewer with the closest equivalent to psychedelic experience this side of hallucinogens. At the end, beyond time and space, Dullea apparently learns the secret of the universe-only to find that, as Churchill...
LEFT alone in the space ship, Bowman sees the monolith slab floating in space in Jupiter's atmosphere and takes off in a pod to follow it; knowing by now the properties of the pod, we can conjure images of the mechanical arms controlled by Bowman reaching to touch the monolith as did the australopithicines and the humans. The nine moons of Jupiter are in orbital conjunction (a near-impossible astronomical occurrance) and the monolith floats into that orbit and disappears. Bowman follows it and enters what Clarke calls the time-space warp, a zone "beyond the infinite" conceived cinematically...
...that makes his volumes about the British diplomatic corps such delights. But there is also much over writing. The book is littered with show-off phrases such as "alembicated piety" and "the penetralia of one's self-regard." The mixed metaphors are painful: "I lay on the slab, the mortuary slab of my immortal life-twitching like a skate in a frying pan." And the puns are leaden: a Rolls-Royce is a "flatus symbol," lovemaking is a "deathscapade," and a gourmet ponders whether there is "life beyond the gravy...