I’m still working away on the 2001: A Space Odyssey Space Station V project (yeah, yeah, just a little slower than expected). The general concept is something I’ve been thinking about since the mid-1990’s, when 2001: In Real Life was still in the future.
Any description of “the present” merits – and usually requires – discussion of what happened in “the past.” Thus the SSV project, which is being put together as a report on the “current status” of the Station as of late 1999 (when, in 2001:ASO, Dr. Heywood Floyd passes through SSV on his way to Clavius Base), makes mention of the history of the Space Station program, including the previous 4 Stations. The question is, How to get from Real History to Fictional History while remaining believable?
I established a few grounds rules:
1) The divergence point(s) must be after the debut of 2001:ASO… April 2, 968.
2) Divergences must be based on human decisions changing history, not physical events. No cometary impacts or Yellowstone supervolcano explosions, for example.
3) The divergences must make sense… more or less.
4) The 2001:ASO movie is canon; stuff from secondary sources such as the 2001:ASO novel, 2010 (novel & movie), earlier versions of the 2001:ASO script, unused concept art, etc. can be used as backup material, so long as it does not conflict with 2001:ASO The Movie.
There is a trend in “Alternate History” to make major changes in the timeline, yet still have things kinda work out the same. See 2009’s “Star Trek,” for example: an incredibly powerful and advanced Romulan starship, enhanced with Borg technology, appears 120 years earlier. This completely alters history… yet thirty years later, Jim Kirk still winds up Captain of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701 (which while being *twice* the size of the original, still looks generally similar), with much the same crew in the same roles. But the worlds of 2001:ASO and 2001: IRL are *very* different. A massive and successful space program, a still extant Soviet Union, and an arms race in space including the Chinese, West Germans (thus implying a still extant East Germany) and French *screams* a timeline that is massively different from the world of 2001:IRL. So there is no need to try to shoehorn actual events into the world of 2001:OSO. Bill Clinton need not be President in 1999, for example.
So… how to get from April, 1968, with known historical events and world situation, to the world of 1999:ASO? I’ve come up with two known historical events that could have greatly changed things so that the disappointing space program of Real Life could perhaps have transformed into the amazing world of A Space Odyssey. And both revolve around hotels: The Ambassador and the Watergate.
To be continued…