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The latest episode of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,” called “Once La’an a Time,” is a sequel to the first-season episode “The Elysian Kingdom.” In “Kingdom,” an eerie psychic consciousness inside a nebula reached into a little girl’s mind, found her favorite fantasy story, and recreated its characters on the USS Enterprise, using the crew as its puppets. The central appeal of the episode is to see the “SNW” actors behaving out of character, and wearing Ren Faire-ready medieval outfits. In “Once,” it’s revealed that the Elysian Kingdom was also manifested in space as a miniature earthen disk that floats through the heavens. All of the same characters are still alive in the Kingdom, played by the same actors.
The central drama of the episode ultimately focuses on La’an (Christina Chong), who has been wrestling with some tough inner turmoil recently. La’an has the opportunity to meet her fantasy doppelgänger, a prissy princess who lacks all of La’an’s inner violence and toughness.
When the crew of the Enterprise first beams down to the Elysian Kingdom, they’re astonished to note that it seems to possess actual magic. There are wizards who can cast spells and sorceresses who can do things that are well outside the purview of Trek’s usual technobabble. When Pike (Anson Mount) makes this observation aloud, Spock (Ethan Peck) counters with a famous quote from noted sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Spock feels that “magic” in this case might just be some kind of ineffably advanced tech that he doesn’t yet understand.
Pelia (Carol Kane) recognizes the quote immediately. In a fun throw-away gag, she announces that she knew Clarke back in the day, and even served as an uncredited consultant on “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which Clarke co-wrote.
Pelia claims to have worked on 2001: A Space Odyssey
To remind readers, Pelia belongs to a species called Lanthanites that can apparently live many thousands of years. Pelia has said variously throughout “Strange New Worlds” that she was alive to talk to Pythagoras, and that she was born in the 28th century BCE. That would make her about 5,000 years old by the events of “Strange New Worlds.” Pelia has led a very interesting life in those 5,000 years, having witnessed the first ancient hybridization of the lemon on Earth, spent some time hanging out with Cary Grant, and even had a stint as a roadie for the Grateful Dead. In a cute wink to Whovians, Pelia also once mentioned that she once spent a span of her life with a mysterious time-traveling Doctor.
In “Once La’an a Time,” Pelia notes that she was also a consultant on “2001: A Space Odyssey,” name checking Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick. She doesn’t say if she oversaw the writing of the screenplay for the “2001” movie, released in May of 1968, or the “2001” novel that was published a month later. Both could be possible. Clarke and Kubrick, you see, co-wrote the screenplay for “2001” together, while Kubrick directed. The duo also developed a “2001” novel concurrently with the screenplay. The book was published shortly after the release of the movie, with Clarke receiving sole authorship credit. The book is not so much a novelization as a fully dramatized story, based on early script drafts.
Pelia, being very old and from another planet, had a better understanding of futuristic space travel than either Clarke or Kubrick, denizens of Earth’s 20th century. How cute that she contributed to the classic movie’s celebrated scientific accuracy.
The full meaning of the Arthur C. Clarke quote on Strange New Worlds
The “indistinguishable from magic” quote, as it so happens, does not come from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Indeed, it’s part of three basic laws of the universe that have come to be known as Clarke’s Three Laws, which were first published in the author’s 1962 essay book “Profiles of the Future: An Enquiry into the Limits of the Possible.” His essays sought to expand the limits of scientific thinking by looking beyond what was currently known. Rather than think of the unknown parts of the universe as beyond our understanding, Clarke preferred to think of those parts as things we simply didn’t understand yet.
Clarke’s Three Laws are as follows. #1: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” That is to say, an older scientist might have become jaded about the way physics works, and come to feel that some things will never be achieved. Clarke disagreed, staging this cynicism as a result of old age.
Law #2 is: “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.” In other words, when conducting thought experiments, let your imagination wander a little bit into fantasy, and you may find that fantasy can perhaps become reality.
And then Law #3: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” If a super-advanced alien species were to appear on Earth with advanced tech, they might look like wizards to our primitive human eyes. This quote has been flouted a lot in fantasy entertainment, from “Thor” to “The Box” to just about every sci-fi TV show.
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