From Asimov to Zelazny, I had read every SF book that the branch library contained.

My Saturdays were spent making the miles-long journey on foot from my house to the main library downtown. I walked in order to save money; I stopped at every used-book store along the way and spent my pennies on tattered copies of Amazing Stories magazine, or Ace novels, printed two per volume, with each half printed upside-down from the other, and two garishly-colored covers.

Arthur C. Clarke was already one of my favorite SF authors, so when he and Kubrick produced 2001, I begged my grandmother to take me to see it in one of the BIG theaters downtown (my savings were not sufficient for such an extravagance; it must have cost at least one whole dollar, not counting the twenty-five cent bus fare -- each way!).

I sat there, totally absorbed by the technology showcased in the movie. The plot didn't hold water—I was already advanced enough in my reading to recognize a slap-dash hack cranked out to make a few bucks—but the premises built into the movie seemed totally plausible. After all, it was but one year before we were to land men on the moon! Who could doubt that thirty-two years after that, we would be living and working in space, and that our mighty Saturn V rockets would have evolved into even mightier ships, capable of carrying a crew on the long journey out to Jupiter?

The clincher for me was that Dr. Heywood Floyd, one of the main characters in the movie, was born the same year that I was. In the year 2001, his character was forty-six years old, and traveled to the Moon on a commercial transport flight. I decided there and then that I would be working on the Moon in 2001, when I was his age. I took up electronics, tinkered in the garage, and studied engineering in college. By 2001, I expected to be a senior engineer or technician with enough experience to grab a job on the Moon, perhaps in a Clavius Base like the one in the movie.

Well, that hasn't come about. The Vietnam war and urban unrest at home distracted us and consumed the money that would have made Clavius Base a reality. Now Vietnam exports scissors to us. They are made out of scrap steel from rusting American weapons scavenged from the jungles and swamps.

I've resigned myself to the likelihood that I won't make it to the Moon in my own lifetime; my son still dreams of going, and he promises me that he'll send me a postcard.

I'm a consulting engineer now, and I get to play with some pretty neat technology. How close is it to what I saw back then? Let's see:

1) Commercial space travel, bases on the moon, real inhabited space stations, and manned flights to the outer planets?

Nope. We learned that it is just too expensive to put such large payloads into space reliably enough to make it commercially lucrative, using chemical rockets.

In fact, one of the main commercial activities in space, sending up and running communications satellites, is experiencing declines in recent years. It's just cheaper to use fiber optic lines and cellular phone systems. Witness the death of the Iridium project.

The new International Space Station will be, at best, a research platform. It certainly will not be a way station on the trip out from Earth.

2) Talking, intelligent (let alone malevolent!) computers?

Nope. Artificial Intelligence isn't substantially further along than it was when the movie was made. Sure, you can buy a very powerful personal computer; but it can't do anything even remotely like understanding ordinary conversation and responding sensibly.

In fact, the big automakers just announced long delays in introducing the in-dash PCs that they were promoting in 1998. The problem? The speech recognition software just isn't good enough yet... and that is for simple commands such as turning up the stereo volume or dialing a cell phone (much less steering a spaceship to Jupiter!).

For example, the manufacturers report a 90% success rate for simple in-dash PC voice-controlled tasks such as recognizing the digits of a phone number and dialing a cell phone. They point out that 90% is not good enough at all; it means that one digit in each 10-digit phone number the PC dialed would be incorrect!

3) Suspended animation?

Nope. There are companies that will freeze your remains for possible thawing out in the future; but your cells still get ruptured in the process. Doesn't sound too promising to me. Of course, if you're rich and you're about to die, you might want to invest it in that; what have you got to lose? Maybe that's what the operators of those companies have in mind...

4) Flexible, full-color, paper-thin newspapers with animated graphics?

Well, not quite. But we ARE working on that. There are some promising "e-ink" technologies in the labs, and work on OLEDs (organic light-emitting diodes) is proceeding very rapidly. It probably will be possible to print a flexible plastic display sheet in a few years, with embedded smarts to make it display downloaded text and pictures. We'll see.

5) Zero-gravity toilets?

Yes! The shuttle and the International Space Station have solved that problem. They're big and intimidating, but they do work.

And that, I think, was the last major technology predicted in 2001 (if you don't count the ridiculous alien artifacts; and Apollo and subsequent unmanned explorers found no traces of "Magnetic Anomalies" on the Moon).

So, the coming of 2001 is, for me, an occasion to reflect on what technical wonders we have wrought... and what we have not.

I hope it will be the start of a good new year for all of you.