| Heywood R. Floyd | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Background | |
| Name | Heywood R. Floyd |
| Aliases | Heywood Floyd |
| Continuity | Space Odyssey |
| Category | Supporting character |
| General | |
| Type | Scientist |
| Race | Human |
| Gender | Male |
| Base of Operations | Clavius Base |
| Known relatives | Marion Floyd (wife, deceased); Christopher Floyd; Carolyn Floyd |
| Status | Alive |
| Born | |
| Died | |
| Out-of-Universe | |
| First Appearance | 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) |
| Played by | William Sylvester Roy Scheider |
Heywood R. Floyd is a fictional scientist and a provincial character in the "Space Odyssey" series of novels authored by Arthur C. Clarke. Floyd was introduced in the 1968 novel 2001: A Space Odyssey as well as the Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey, released that same year. In the film, Heywood R. Floyd is played by actor William Sylvester. In the 1984 sequel, 2010: The Year We Make Contact, the role is played by Jaws luminary Roy Scheider. The character was also prominently featured in the 1987 novel 2061: Odyssey Three, but was not presented in the fourth book in the series 3001: The Final Odyssey.
Biography[]
Space Odyssey[]
Doctor Heywood R. Floyd was the chairman of the National Council of Astronautics on Earth. A middle-aged man, Floyd's position often required him to make various interplanetary journeys, including trips to Mars and the moon. In the year 2000, Floyd was instructed to embark upon a top secret mission to Clavius Base on the moon's Clavius Crater, which had been reportedly quarantined. He began his journey on an Orion III spacecraft, which took him to Space Station One. From there, he boarded the Aries-1B shuttle to Clavius.
Doctor Floyd met with several of Clavius' administrators including Bill Michaels. He presided over a meeting to discuss the project known as TMA-1 and how vital it was to maintain secrecy about the project until they were able to come to a better understanding of what they were dealing with. TMA-1, or Tycho Magnetic Anomaly-1, was a mysterious alien Monolith that geophysicists discovered buried forty feet beneath the crater at Tycho. This Monolith represented irrefutable proof of an intelligent race other than man. Floyd took a lunar shuttle out to the Tycho crater to inspect the Monolith first-hand. As the team continued to run an analysis on the device, the sun came up over the horizon, casting light upon the Monolith for the first time in millions of years. The device emitted a massive wave of energy that caused everyone in the surrounding area, including Floyd, massive amounts of pain.
In the months that followed, Floyd and his team monitored the trail of the radio wave signal and deduced that it was spreading out towards the planet Jupiter. Heywood recorded a message, detailing the true nature of Tycho Magnetic Anomaly-1 and how it served as proof that there existed extraterrestrial life, much older and more intelligent than mankind. The message was uploaded into the computer system of the Discovery One exploratory vessel. In the year 2001, Discovery One captain Dave Bowman was forced to shut down the ship's onboard computer, the HAL 9000 due to an extreme malfunction. When the system went offline, Floyd's prerecorded message began playing automatically and Bowman learned the truth about their mission to Jupiter. [1][2]
Odyssey Two[]
Notes & Trivia[]
- The character of Heywood R. Floyd was created by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick and expanded upon by Peter Hyams.
- In the 2001: A Space Odyssey film, Heywood is shown in one scene wishing his daughter a Happy Birthday. Floyd's daughter was played by Vivian Kubrick, the real-life daughter of film director Stanley Kubrick.