Zepke Stephen: Head in the Stars. Essays on Science Fiction

Council has “requested formal security oaths” from anyone
with “any knowledge of this event”. This man, Dr. Floyd,
is working for a government, a techno-military amalgam
of state power and private finance that demands absolute
servitude, and where oaths don’t work, brain-washing will.
The festive outburst of the ape’s violence has now become
institutionalised and systematic, compelling obedience. 69
Mind control has conquered the body, confined it –
floating – in space, while consciousness has thrust forward,
hatching its cold hard plans.
Dr. Floyd now goes to see the monolith for himself,
which has turned up on the moon. On the way we get the
facts, the scientific ones anyway, about what, as they say,
the “damn thing” is. It was, he’s told, “deliberately buried”
over “four million years ago”. At this Floyd balks, he repeats
“deliberately buried”, snorts a laugh and shakes his head in
a gesture echoing that of the ape, when he had the first idea.
Floyd too, has had an idea. His thought, in sci-fi terms, is:
‘there’s something out there’. Floyd has had an intimation
of the alien. He feels this thought, it provokes him. But
entirely inadequate to the sensation, he shrugs it off and
turns his thoughts elsewhere, outwards and not in. The
drama of Floyd’s encounter with the monolith is given in a
hand-held camera sequence following his group down the
ramp into the archaeological site where they are excavating
their future. The men circle the monolith warily, before
Floyd extends his hand and touches it in a gesture that also
recalls the apes at the beginning of the film. Once more the
monolith appears on a stage, once more it is surrounded by
those eager to test it, and once more it gives a sign that will
be misunderstood, but followed nevertheless.
150