Dave, My Mind is Going
Calvin Reid -- Publishers Weekly, 12/2/1996
You may have loved Stanley Kubrick's 1968 visionary 2001: A Space Odyssey or perhaps you left the theater completely baffled, but the film has had as big an impact on real scientists as it has on science fiction filmmaking. Now MIT Press has launched a Web edition of HAL's Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality (MIT Press, Jan. $22.50), a fascinating, nontechnical anthology edited by David G. Stork, a scientist and a professor at Stanford, with essays by a group of distinguished scientists reflecting on the movie's handling of artificial intelligence, speech recognition and other computing fields, with particular emphasis on the fictional but prophetic HAL 9000, the spaceship's tragically flawed computer. Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote the novel and screenplay, contributes the foreword (Ballantine will publish Clarke's sequel, 3001, The Final Odyssey in March 1997). The Web edition alternates full-text chapters with chapter abstracts and a wide variety of links to pertinent scientific Web sites (and to the many 2001 sites) and an encryption-secured ordering system to buy the book.
