From the Space Odyssey saga
Books by Arthur C. Clarke
2001:A Space Odyssey directed by Stanley Kubrick
2010: The Year We Make Contact directed by Peter Hyams
Nominated by Chris and Paul Boldt
We would like to nominate HAL as a character of great influence in popular American culture. For a people awed by technology, and terrified by our minimal understanding of it, he is the perfect icon.
He's sorry, Dave: HAL 9000, embodiment of our brightest tech dreams and our darkest fears, too.
He is coolly reasonable, yet hides dark secrets. He acts on principle, yet his principles are not those of the people whom he is intended to serve. His knowledge is only what his human creators have provided, but since he has been informed by many people, he can outwit any one of them.
The spaceship's crew are dependent on him, but their interests are not his first concern. They can only interrupt his forward progression by disrupting their own goals and bringing themselves to harm. He encapsulates all our bipolar reverence for human ingenuity, and his fatal flaw is that he, too, is conflicted.
Completely consonant with the zeitgeist of the decade in which he was invented, HAL's relevance increases with each new invention, and each compromise that invention forces us to make.
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