As he points out, these three disciplines are the only ones in which prepubescents have made major accomplishments, from Mozart and Rossini to Gauss and Pascal to Morphy.
For Steiner, chess is as human as music and mathematics. The same year that 2001 premiered, literary critic and polymath George Steiner published an essay in The New Yorker called “A Death of Kings.” “The origins of chess are shrouded in mists of controversy, but unquestionably this very ancient, trivial pastime has seemed to many exceptionally intelligent human beings of all races and centuries to constitute a reality, a focus for the emotions, as substantial as, often more substantial than, reality itself,” he wrote. (Kubrick based the game on a real one played in Hamburg in 1910.) Frank Poole plays chess against supercomputer HAL 9000, which is, it claims, “foolproof and incapable of error.” While that statement will be called into question later in the film, it holds true in their game: HAL beats Poole handily. On the spaceship Discovery One, which is bound for Jupiter, Dr. Looking back on the film, countless scenes and moments stand out for their prescience and beauty, but one in particular seems to most eerily encapsulate the oracular foresight of Kubrick and his cowriter, the sci-fi novelist Arthur C. Half a century ago, Stanley Kubrick’s transcendent 2001: A Space Odyssey debuted in theaters.
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