Simon <sim### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> Think of it, which is the first to come, the monolith? or the desire to
> study, understand and possibly dominate the monolith from mankind? (by
> domination I mean, can we make a weapon or a commodity out it, etc)  And
> an any rate, the monolith is not man-made.  To me it symbolises
> evolution, evolution is a concept beyond our imagination and we just
> started several years ago to understand some of it (with Darwin and many
> others).

I'm not sure the monolith is meant to symbolise anything. I always thought
of it as either a tool or a physical embodiment of an intelligence that
likes to create life and play with the forces of evolution ('a shape for
something that has no shape' as Heywood Floyd says). This of course could
also serve as a fairly broad description of a Creator/God, but as Clarke
once said, 'any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from
magic'. It's entirely possible that Kubrick and Clarke had very different
ideas about what the monolith was and what it did to Dave Bowman.

There's nothing terribly godly about showing an ape how to use a thighbone
as a club, or indeed throwing mass at a gas giant until hydrogen starts to
fuse at its core (we could do that, given the resources). On the other
hand, mysterious ways and all that...

With so few plot clues about the origins of the monoliths, everyone's bound
to have different interpretations, but that's the fun of it!

:-)

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