Author notes

Chapter 5 Prologue 1

Abt_Nihil

on Sept. 16, 2009

While I haven't read the original story Arthur C. Clarke wrote as the basis for Stanley Kubrick's 2001 - A Space Odyssey, I have read my share of background info on the movie. I learned that the monoliths were originally supposed to have been left by an ancient alien civilization. These aliens had evolved into immaterial beings who would spend all of their time just travelling the universe, watching stars come into being, solar systems merge and all that good stuff. And they would leave their monoliths to guide budding life on those planets which could support it.

Yes, eternally travelling space in immaterial form is pretty much my idea of the perfect life.

And since I'm mostly using these prologues to talk metaphorically about language (and in chapter six you might even find out why), I chose to use this particular prologue to write about writing. The good news is: ever since I discovered the possibility to publish my comics on the web, feedback is not taking decades anymore :3 (Comics still travel at sub-light speed, sadly… but before the web, my comics rarely ever travelled outside of my home. A minor tragedy, as stories are indeed a social experience).

Thanks for reading and commenting!


REPLIES:

Nepath: Thanks a lot!

JNP: Thank you very much. Your wish might actually come true, since this story arc should be completed quite soon. So making some spin-offs is really the only alternative to letting it die…
And yes, I used to fall victim to the same sort of visual ambiguity in alej's icon, until I got to this page.
Improvement is indeed the second best thing about my making webcomics, right after the great feedback (for which I should thank you again)!

DAJB: Thanks! I remember having read an early draft of the screenplay, which was more revealing than the final one… that must have been how I found about the aliens. Many people who had just seen the movie (me included, prior to my reading up on the background info) saw the monoliths as either a metaphor for evolution, or God Himself.

alejkhan: Oh yes, those are all interesting questions, and even though I think trying to answer them separately would be more constructive than claiming there is one common ground, exploring which would explain them all, it is amazing that they all spring from the same cultural practice: writing (I also think writing has its own special qualities, different from other means of communication). In that sense, writing about writing means raising those questions without really trying to answer them. Also, since you're already using the term "translating", I think it's crucial to see translating as a way of redescribing things, rather than as a means of preserving the same meaning in different languages, or, in this case, different ways of describing the same event (- it's very meta indeed, as we try to describe events as having happened, versus describing them as being described: in one case we're describing a description, in the other the event itself, while the event itself, beyond the description, seems to move further away and slip from our grasp. Paradoxically, grasping things by writing also means losing them - all we end up is in fact the description).

PeiPei, Jabali, mmm bacon0: Thanks!