Another Bletchley story, perhaps apocryphal, is an account of Winston Churchill's inspection of the staff there. He is supposed to have remarked to the superintendent, "When I told you to leave no stone unturned, I didn't expect you to take me so literally." Those Bletchley boffins sure were a weird crew!

Then there is the issue of the date of HAL's birth. When writing the novel, I dimly recall choosing 1997 because it seemed close enough to the launch time for Discovery. But why January 12? No particular reason, though I later realized that it was a Sunday. The engineers were working hard on the weekend!

In 1972, four years after the release of 2001,I put together my reminiscences of the production, together with thousands of words of deathless prose not used in the final novel, in The Lost Worlds of 2001. In chapter 11, "The Birth of Hal," I reveal that the ship's computer was originally named Socrates (or, alternatively, Athena) and was conceived of as a fully mobile robot. Here's a snatch of dialogue I had completely forgotten but which undoubtedly -- though perhaps unconsciously -- presaged things to come. Although I have always assumed that lipreading was Stanley's idea -- and have also said I thought it the only thing in the movie that was technically improbable! -- this passage suggests I should share some of the blame.

"Bruno," asked the robot, "What is life?"

Then there is the issue of HAL's death. In the early 1960s at Bell Laboratories I had heard a recording of an Illiac computer singing "Bicycle Built for Two." I thought it would be good for the death scene especially the slowing down of the words at the end. Imagine my surprise, then, when I recently came upon a 1918 poem, "In the Theater," about brain surgeon Lambert Rogers operating to remove a brain tumor. Near the end of the poem the patient on the operating table speaks to the surgeon:

Then, suddenly, the cracked record in the brain,
a ventriloquist voice that cried, "You sod,
leave my soul alone, leave my soul alone," --
the patient's dummy lips moving to that refrain,
the patient's eyes too wide. And, shocked,
Lambert Rogers drawing out the probe
with nurses, students, sister, petrified.

"Leave my soul alone, leave my soul alone,"
that voice so arctic and that cry so odd
had nowhere else to go - till the antique
gramophone wound down and the words began
to blur and slow, " ... leave ... my ... soul ... alone ..."
to cease at last when something other died.
And silence matched the silence under snow.

-- Dannie Abse

I will always remember my collaboration with Stanley Kubrick as some of the most intellectually stimulating (and demanding!) work of my career. Anecdotes such as those of Dr. Minsky's recounts in chapter 2 bring back fond memories of the set. Speaking of the set, I do not know how many actors Stanley interviewed before he settled on Douglas Rain as the voice of HAL; but I am almost certain that one of them was Martin Balsam, who comes to a memorably sticky end in Psycho. Apparently Martin made some recordings but decided the role wasn't for him. So here is another piece of unknown Kubricana - like the custard-pie fight in the war room of Dr. Strangelove that never made it into the final version. (Did you ever wonder what those tables of goodies were doing at the back of the room?) I still hear Douglas Rain's silky voice every time I tell my computer to do something stupid and it says reproachfully, "I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that."