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Welcome to 2001

Jan 1, 2001

In 1964 the film director Stanley Kubrick wrote to Arthur C Clarke asking if he had any good ideas that would help Kubrick to make the "proverbial good science-fiction movie". The end result was 2001: A Space Odyssey, one of the most admired and influential films ever made. Science fiction it might have been, but Star Wars or Star Trek it was not. All the same, the year 2001 entered the public consciousness just as surely as George Orwell's 1984 had done. More than three decades on from its first release in 1968 - the year before the first Moon landings - the public's fascination with space has waxed and waned, and waxed again, while physicists have shown no sign of tiring of science fiction.

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