Tomorrow's Worlds: The Unearthly History Of Science Fiction (2014) s01e01 Episode Script
Space
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.
The history of science fiction is an extraordinary story of innovation and imagination.
HE IMITATES 2001 MAIN THEME I mean, wow! The true seed of any great science fiction story is the idea.
What if? What if? I've loved science fiction ever since it first unlocked my childhood imagination.
And now, when I look back on the history of the last 100 years, I think that science fiction, more than almost any other genre, has been a remarkably revealing window onto our ambitions and our anxieties, our dreams and our nightmares.
In this series we'll explore the great themes of science fiction.
Space.
Journeys into the unknown.
And what's out there, the cosmos, the mystery of space.
Space, the final frontier.
The ultimate threat.
Alien invasion.
They're coming to get us.
'All over the world, human beings cower before the onslaught 'of these unearthly enemies!' The mysteries of artificial life.
Robots, cyborgs, where humanity and technology collide It's as close as we get to touching immortality and that can sort of be a scary thing as well as an exciting thing.
It's alive! It's alive! It's ALIVE! .
.
and the infinite possibilities of time travel.
The fantasy of it is eternally appealing, I think.
Off we go.
METALLIC THRUMMING From Flash Gordon to Star Wars, science fiction has constantly drawn on its past on its journey towards tomorrow and it's now impossible to imagine modern culture without it.
From box office blockbusters to the latest video games, from the gadget in your pocket to the skylines of our cities, it's become part of the fabric of our 21st century world.
This is the story of science fiction's most influential works and of their creators, the men and women who fell to Earth.
The pioneers of the history of science fiction.
My God, it's full of stars! 'Six, five, four, 'three, two, 'one, zero.
' For a writer or a film-maker, for any creator of science fiction, there's no bigger canvas than the unending reaches of space.
But even in our infinite universe, every story has to start somewhere.
Mine begins in Bridgnorth, Shropshire.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, my parents brought me here to the Majestic Cinema to see a film that I had been pestering them about for weeks.
By the time we got here, people were already queueing around the block, and I was beside myself with excitement.
And if you, like me, grew up in the 1970s, then you probably have a similar story of your own, because this film was to prove a landmark for an entire generation.
Star Wars begins in the middle of a spectacular space battle.
The opening moments alone give us vast battle cruisers, vivid robot characters and a gripping sense of tension.
EXPLOSIONS Right from the start, this was a film that lived up to its title.
Did you hear that? R2-D2 BEEPS They shut down the main reactor! We'll be destroyed for sure! Star Wars propelled science fiction to the very centre of our popular imagination and more than any other film since the early days of cinema, it transformed Hollywood itself.
But the great irony is that, for a long time, its staggering success had seemed completely unthinkable.
Indeed, for its founding father, George Lucas, the making of Star Wars had been an ordeal from start to finish.
Lucas had the backing of a studio boss, but hardly anybody else.
George was doing things that had never been done before ever in the film business.
It was quite risky and the board of directors didn't like the idea we were making it.
And the budget - very, very small, five million maybe, and it went up to 9.
5 million.
At the first screening we had of it, the board of directors saw it They hated it.
Even as Lucas was making Star Wars, his great friend Steven Spielberg was filming Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.
George was really feeling it.
He was seeing the film that we were shooting and, in many ways, he had wanted that to be Star Wars.
And even Lucas' actors themselves struggled to see the merits of his film.
I remember driving across the desert one morning with Mark Hamill.
We, out of courtesy, were going through each other's lines, you know, and I said to him, "How can you say rubbish like that with a straight face?" He said, "Well, look what you have to say.
" I said, "Yeah, but I'm behind a mask.
"None of my friends know I'm in this movie, so it's fine.
" I don't know where George got his names from.
Obi-Wan Kenobi? Who thought of that one? Darth Vader.
Chewbacca.
Chewbacca?! Probably we all thought "I won't ever see this film, "because this is not a good film.
"This is not a film anyone's going to see.
" Even Lucas himself was racked with doubt about what he'd created.
Because what he wanted was a film that would appeal to audiences of all ages, not just wide-eyed little boys like me.
I remember one night, sitting in a restaurant, and George was glum.
George is always rather glum, but this was a particularly glum night and I leaned over and said, "What's the matter?" And he said "I made a kid's film.
" And he had wanted to make an adult film and we commiserated with the billionaire-to-be.
Lucas's great inspiration for Star Wars was an adventure serial from the 1930s - Flash Gordon.
This was the archetypal space opera.
An epic saga of cliff-hanging derring-do set on a distant world, as its athletic heroes and gorgeous heroines lead their rebellion against an evil emperor.
Punish all those who dare debunk me in my determination to conquer the universe! Lucas had originally wanted to remake Flash Gordon.
He only wrote Star Wars when he couldn't get the rights.
The similarities between Star Wars and Flash Gordon go well beyond the plot.
Flash Gordon first appeared during the depths of the Great Depression.
In a society haunted by the spectre of unemployment, here was a thrilling adventure story utterly removed from its social context.
This was science fiction as pure escapism and that is what George Lucas wanted to give American audiences in the 1970s, the era of Vietnam, Watergate, economic stagflation and morbid introspection.
"It had become depressing" he once said, "to go to the movies.
" so Lucas decided that it was time to make a movie where people would feel better going out of the theatre than when they went in.
It kind of took space opera into .
.
into a place where everybody wanted to see it and it became spectacle and excitement and that's just lasted and lasted and lasted.
There were planets, Death Stars, bad guys, good guys, you know, the Force.
All these things are part of an alternate world that George constructed that he was then able to roll out many, many sequels and variations on.
The key to the film's extraordinary appeal is that Star Wars was utterly unlike almost anything else coming out of Hollywood in the 1970s.
Here was a film with no time for irony and no room for self-doubt.
Even the most jaded adults found themselves entranced, not just by the spectacle, but by the sheer power and commitment of its old-fashioned storytelling.
Nowhere is that better demonstrated than in Star Wars' rousing final battle, where Lucas seamlessly moves from space-age heroics to romantic mysticism.
- OBIWAN: - 'Use the Force, Luke.
' And that's the moment you really believe that a humble farm boy can save the galaxy.
The Force is strong with this one.
Watching Star Wars, everybody becomes an eight-year-old.
Star Wars may have looked to the 1930s for inspiration, but the roots of space fiction go even further back to the great Victorian age of astronomy and exploration.
In the last years of the 19th century, this huge telescope was at the cutting edge of British astronomy.
It's one of the chief exhibits here at Greenwich's Royal Observatory, and through this telescope, as well as its primitive predecessors, our ancestors gazed at the stars, and they drew up their charts and they set out to explore our world.
The Victorian era marked the high point of public interest in exploration.
And stories of remarkable voyages held a particular fascination for the French writer, Jules Verne.
But in 1865, Verne went one step further, when he published his groundbreaking novel, From The Earth To The Moon.
What made Verne's book so revolutionary is that it took science seriously.
Its characters painstakingly work out the right velocity.
They take into account the effects of gravity.
To put it simply, they do the maths.
Unfortunately, Verne's biggest idea, a spaceship fired from a giant gun, didn't quite work out.
But many of his other ideas were to prove remarkably prescient.
'1,000 feet high.
'80 feet per second vertical rise.
' He figured out that if you're going to shoot a projectile at the moon, you should do it from Cape Canaveral or from Tampa.
'Tower cleared.
' If you were going to get it back, you would get it back picked up out of the ocean, which is how they recovered the first space capsules.
He got all that right.
In 1902, Verne's space cannon inspired what's considered the first science fiction film, Le Voyage Dans La Lune, but its director, George Melies, added plenty of audience-friendly fantasy borrowed from H G Wells' recent book The First Men In The Moon.
For example, a thrilling battle with the moon's insect-like inhabitants! The move away from Verne's scientific rigour caught on across the Atlantic, where America's new pulp magazines were quick to embrace the spirit of the fantastic.
And it was these magazines that brought science fiction to the masses, taking up the Victorian formula of exploration and adventure, but adding eye-catching aliens and outlandish planets.
Meanwhile, starship crews replaced the old gentleman explorers.
'Imagine yourself as one of the crew 'of this faster-than-light spaceship of the future, 'sharing their curiosity to know the unknown, 'their tension, their readiness for inconceivable adventures' Forbidden Planet was the first big budget feature film set entirely in space and it paved the way for the best known space exploration saga of all.
- CAPTAIN KIRK: - 'Space, the final frontier.
' 'These are the voyagers of the starship Enterprise 'Its five-year mission to explore strange new worlds, 'to seek out new life and new civilisations, 'to boldly go where no man has gone before.
' This show and science fiction in general appeals to a mythological need in people and I love that idea.
The Enterprise's crew travel the galaxy, exploring new worlds, righting wrongs and promoting peace.
This is Captain James T Kirk of the starship Enterprise representing the United Federation of Planets.
We have contacted your buoy and understand its message.
We hope that you will understand that our intent is to establish peaceful relations with you.
The idea was we are moving out into seeking out new life forms, seeking out new worlds, going where no man has gone before.
Um, and I think that was such a very, very '60s, very optimistic way to think.
Star Trek was the brainchild of a former commercial pilot, Gene Roddenberry.
He characterised this series like a popular series at the time, which was called Wagon Train, which was a series of settlers heading out to the West of the United States at the time when it was unknown.
And he called Star Trek, "Wagon Train To The Stars.
" Star Trek's crew were more than just explorers.
They were ambassadors for tolerance and multiculturalism.
The Enterprise's first officer, Mr Spock, was half alien, but it was the ship's communications officer, Lieutenant Uhura, who went where no woman had gone before.
There had been nothing like Star Trek on the television ever and I didn't even know I was the first black actress in a major role on television.
Somebody keeps telling me that, and I'm going, "No, not actually.
" No, a REAL character, an honest character.
It was amazing, the response that I got, that Gene got, that the studio got, that the network got.
Star Trek is the one idea of the future where it all works out, where it's all actually pretty good, where we saw the Earth is one world.
We've solved poverty and disease and war and racism and everything else and we're going out in the galaxy and we're making friends with other people with bumps on their heads and it's all working out for them, too.
The Enterprise is a family and it's all like a great idea.
But how far does Star Trek really depart from the 19th century model of space exploration? Star Trek might look like a model of '60s liberalism, but I think there's something eminently Victorian about using the Enterprise's crew as embodiments of the ideals of their age.
After all, Captain Kirk and co can never resist an opportunity to lecture their alien acquaintances about the error of their ways, or about the difference between right and wrong.
And whether you find that refreshingly idealistic, or sickeningly sanctimonious, the fact is that the Enterprise's journey is a classic civilizing mission.
Nowhere is this civilizing mission better captured than in the early episode Errand Of Mercy, as Captain Kirk tries to reason with some intransigent locals.
In addition to military aid we can send you specialists, technicians.
We can show you how to feed 1,000 people where one was fed before.
We can help you build schools, educate the young in the latest technological and scientific skills.
Your public facilities are almost non-existent, we can help you remake your world.
'When you look at the television series,' while it, you know, pays lip service to an integrated crew, it's really all about the white man's way is best.
It is a sort of gunboat diplomacy.
Barely a stone's throw away from Greenwich's Royal Observatory stands this temple to British sea power - the former Royal Naval College.
This, if you like, was our equivalent of Star Trek's Starfleet Academy.
In fact, from their command structure to their sophisticated weaponry, the crew of the starship Enterprise are effectively the Royal Navy in space.
This naval analogy particularly appealed to the young director Nicholas Meyer, who made the second Star Trek film, The Wrath Of Khan, in 1982.
Meyer was no fan of the original series, and he was looking for a fresh way to approach the story.
It sort of tickled something at the back of my mind because it became - it was reminiscent of something that I liked.
Oh, yes, this is like those Captain Hornblower novels of CS Forester's, about an English naval captain during the Napoleonic wars.
Then when I met Bill Shatner, he got excited when I mentioned that because he said, "Oh, that's what Gene Roddenberry had in mind.
" This is Hornblower in outer space.
'Warner Brothers take you before the mast with the greatest 'naval hero of all time 'in the fabulous days when iron men hurled wooden ships 'into mortal combat, when history hung on the slice of a sword' And then I watched the Gregory Peck Hornblower movie and the opening bugle call is the same.
BUGLE CALL Once I made the Hornblower connection I said, "OK, this is Hornblower in outer space," then the spaceships become frigates, submarines, destroyers, men-o'-war.
Meyer's crew looks unashamedly military, and his Enterprise has the sleek, dark interior of a warship bristling with weaponry.
- Yellow alert.
- Energise defence fields.
Suddenly the uniforms took on a more precise aspect for me.
You know, we're not going to have pyjamas because we're in the Navy.
For all its shiny modernity, Star Trek is at heart a Victorian exploration story.
Its crew set sail on the high seas of space, to satisfy their curiosity, yes, but also to spread their values.
And if things do get a bit hairy, well, they can always use their photon torpedoes to blast their way out of trouble, and to leave the natives to clean up afterwards.
Victorian science fiction positioned man firmly at the centre of the universe.
But by the 1960s, the advance of astronomy had rather put us in our place.
Thanks to radio telescopes like these we now have a much better idea of the vast size and age of the universe, and also, perhaps, of our own cosmic insignificance in the grand scheme of things.
Now, you might find that thought a little bit depressing.
But for the writer Arthur C Clarke it opened up an exciting new intellectual opportunity.
Could there, he wondered, be creatures up there that were older, wiser and more developed than we were? In 1964, Clarke met the American film director Stanley Kubrick to discuss the possibilities, and four years later the world saw the result - a film of unprecedented ambition.
This is the screenplay of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, which Stanley Kubrick and I have been working on for the last two years.
We are concerned with nothing less than man's place in the universe and his possible position in the pecking order of cosmic intelligence.
2001 suggests that we are being watched by a higher alien intelligence, in the form of mysterious black monoliths.
These strange artefacts have overseen our evolution, from the dawn of man to the moment we're ready to voyage into space.
Kubrick wanted consciously to make an epic spectacle that wasn't just another melodramatic talky story with conflict and fights and guns and things like that.
And so he was just working completely outside that realm.
No science fiction film had ever tried anything so conceptually daring.
The thing about 2001 that really profoundly affected me was that he wanted to make a film that was extremely immersive for the audience, where the audience would have a feeling that they were in the movie, that they were actually in space.
HE IMITATES 2001 MAIN THEME I mean, wow! Kubrick knew that he could only sell Clarke's grand ideas to the audience if they wholeheartedly believed in the film's vision of the future.
Stanley went to great pains to be absolutely as authentic and, not just up to date, but up to the date of 2001 as you could possibly guess.
The design was based upon real spacecraft design, helped by people who worked in the space programme, so there was a reality to it instead of, "Oh, this is the way you would have to have "vector thrusters to manoeuvre a pod in space or whatever.
" He had about 40 corporations that were co-operating with him and each of those corporations were presenting him with their best guess as to what they would be able to achieve that many years in the future.
And I think the fact that there's nothing that catches your eye that looks fake makes it all look more real, you just buy into it.
The results are so convincing that it's not surprising Kubrick's camera lingers over his detailed miniatures.
Notice that you never see any rockets or thrusters firing, because Kubrick thought the effects wouldn't look realistic.
For all the pleasures of Stanley Kubrick's meticulous vision of space at the dawn of the 21st century, what I really love about 2001 are the psychedelic scenes at the very end of the film when Keir Dullea's astronaut finally gets to meet the alien intelligence.
In many ways, of course, those scenes are completely baffling but that, I suppose, is the point.
After all, how could our puny human minds possibly begin to make sense of the terrifying awe-inspiring majesty of alien lifeforms so much more advanced than ourselves? Kubrick's scenes of alien contact break spectacularly with typical science fiction iconography.
Keir Dullea's astronaut finds himself in a room full of 18th century furniture but the unsettling soundtrack and underfloor lighting suggest that things aren't quite as they seem.
This may be something I kind of have come up with, whether it was Stanley telling me this or whether it was my own conclusion when I saw the film, but that room represents perhaps the aliens, being millions of years in advance of human beings, had the technology just to go inside a brain and look for what that creature considered habitat and maybe one day the character that I was playing visited the Louvre museum and saw that and the aliens figured, "That's his habitat.
" There's an ambiguity about his film, the very fact that people constantly ask me, "What is the film about?" "What does it mean?" And so there is an intrigue on the part of this film that few other science fiction films have.
2001 feels a very long way from those first Victorian stories of intrepid explorers conquering space, but it does engage with the hottest scientific debate of the 19th century - evolution.
It opens with man's ape-like ancestors and it ends with our ascent onto a higher plane of consciousness.
Who knows what Charles Darwin would have made of it? Clarke and Kubrick had pushed the audience's imagination further than any film had ever done before.
They also proved that stories set in space could aspire to high-minded intellectualism, but not everybody bought into their cold, cerebral vision.
The idea of space travel as being clean and sleek lines and all easy is ridiculous.
Just imagine being stuck inside this capsule for months, years.
2001: A Space Odyssey, the astronauts, they're kind of boring.
They had nothing going on, they weren't angry at each other, they were out there along time, so I thought, "We can do better than that.
" In 1974, the young John Carpenter offered a countercultural riposte to 2001 - Dark Star.
The film's tone is established early on when the ship's crew return to their squalid quarters, the walls covered in pictures from men's magazines.
'After a while the hygiene begins to drop off' so the idea of, "We'll fix it when it goes bad, just leave it alone.
"I don't want to do that.
" People don't care as much, the pleasantries between people drop off.
"Don't bother me.
" That starts to take over.
It's just kind of human nature.
I do not like the men on this spaceship.
They are uncouth and fail to appreciate my better qualities.
I have something of value to contribute to this mission if they would only recognise it.
Nobody would have imagined it at the time but the low-budget Dark Star would prove enormously influential.
Here the actor and co-writer Dan O'Bannon struggles to feed the ship's misbehaving resident alien, which, in a nicely surreal touch, is basically a glorified beach ball.
Idiot! A few years later Dan O'Bannon returned to the theme of an extraterrestrial on a spaceship when he co-wrote perhaps the most celebrated alien story in cinematic history, but this time the alien was a perfectly evolved predator, and this time nobody was playing it for laughs.
The director of Alien, Ridley Scott, wanted the creature that threatens the crew of the space freighter Nostromo to look like nothing the audience had seen before.
He turned to a Swiss artist, HR Giger, famous for his nightmarish paintings.
Ridley Scott really lucked out when he found Giger.
Giger's inclusion into Alien was pivotal because, you know, Scott found this guy who had this whole vision, kind of Necronomicon, other world thing like totally worked out in his head.
The great thing about Giger and his designs is that they're not like anything you have seen before.
They're beautiful but at the same time incredibly disturbing.
Ridley Scott's film has an almost scientific obsession with the biological intricacies of its diabolical alien, and with the features that the creature must have developed to survive at the top of the food chain.
It's tongue has its own set of teeth, its blood is a powerful acid, it incubates inside its prey and then it eats it.
What the film franchise has been able to do is to create a life cycle for that creature.
The face hugger, the chest burster, the warrior.
These are all the stuff of nightmares.
What is more horrible than having a You know, thing with a Going down your throat, that looks like a spider and a crab and a tumour and like One scene more than any other captured the alien's horrific biology and, like Stanley Kubrick, Scott was determined that it should feel startlingly real.
I was told I'd get a little blood on my face.
They had four cameras, so everybody was being shot.
I think they got it on the first take, you know a lot of this stuff, because the actors didn't know what was going to happen.
Well I leaned directly into a blood jet that hit me square in the face.
And all this blood comes out and this penis thing comes out and like Our reactions to it were the audience reactions.
It's like these people going like, "What is happening?" Oh, God! Nothing had been done like that before.
Alien's strength was it's meticulous attention to detail.
A principle that's been very dear to some of science fiction's greatest writers.
These are the futuristic domes of the Eden Project, a tropical rainforest in the heart of Cornwall.
But science fiction has presented us with entire ecologies unlike anything anywhere on Earth.
All writers, I suppose, end up creating their own worlds, whatever the genre, but I think there's something particularly exciting about a writer who builds an alien world from the ground up and then puts man in an utterly unfamiliar environment.
And these kinds of stories really gathered momentum in the 1960s and '70s and they often reflected the ecological concerns of the day.
And yet, the bestselling alien world story of all was set, ironically enough, in an ecosystem that could not have been more hostile.
Its author was Frank Herbert, and the book was Dune.
Frank Herbert's Dune was a really big science fiction achievement.
This was a planet that had an ecological system that made sense, it was dry, therefore water mattered, therefore the plant life and the animal life were all desert.
It was really excellent on a planetary ecology in a way that had never been true before.
Dune changed the landscape of science fiction.
Herbert created a remarkably detailed galaxy as the setting for his epic tale about the struggle to control the desert planet Arrakis, source of an addictive, life enhancing and infinitely desirable drug, the "spice".
It kind of made a big wave because he had spent so much time thinking out his world and seeing it and feeling it and, you know, making it real and doing the details.
In 1969, Ursula K Le Guin attempted something perhaps even more ambitious.
Like Dune, her book, The Left Hand Of Darkness, was set in an inhospitable environment - the ice planet, Winter.
But it wasn't the landscape that made Le Guin's work so startling, it was the people.
The kind of science fiction I write is People call it social science fiction or sociological or something, and so when I invent a world I have to I have to know a lot about the whole culture.
Or I can't imagine who the people are.
You know, you can't just have a human being that doesn't have a culture behind it.
There's one line in The Left Hand Of Darkness that has entered science fiction legend, "The king was pregnant.
" You see, Winter has a very unusual kind of alien world.
Its people are ambisexual so most of the year they're sexually neuter, but once a month, for mating purposes, they can be either male or female.
It's no accident that Ursula K Le Guin was writing in the late 1960s, just when the women's liberation and gay rights movements were getting off the ground.
She very deliberately used science fiction to question the fixed gender roles that her readers took for granted.
One reason why I wrote the book was to find out what they were like when they were neither.
Would they be human without having any sexual drive or characteristic? It seems to me that they came out quite human.
I read that book when I was 11 or 12 and it undid the inside of my head.
It had not occurred to me up until that point that things could be another way than the way that I saw that they were.
Men were men, women were women, wasn't that obvious? Wasn't that unchangeable? I wonder now how today's younger generation, who've grown up in a world in which gender is increasingly fluid, I wonder how they read and take and comprehend The Left Hand Of Darkness.
The questions that I was asking in the book seem to be questions that we're still, we're still looking for answers to, what is it to be male and female? For years, creating a plausible alien environment on the screen seemed a daunting prospect, so very few films could match the literary ambitions of the 1960s.
But then, in 2009, came James Cameron's Avatar.
We went to extraordinary lengths to study the natural environment of a forest, natural places that have not had man actually change them.
A lot of times you can see nature and it's like nature is in a zoo because we are the dominant force, but on Pandora we are still just a small footprint in that whole overall planet.
Jim did just a fantastic job of thinking about, "What's the flora, what's the fauna, what's the atmosphere? "What's the gravity? How does this whole place work?" He named all the plants, he named the creatures, he created this whole world.
Thanks to the advance of computer graphics and 3-D technology, Cameron created a world so immersive, so real you could almost touch it.
One of the things I read a lot about was that people kept going back over and over to see that movie because it was like a vacation on another planet, it was like some big experiential thing.
Pandora may look very alien to us but its creatures are inspired by our own natural world, in particular by James Cameron's love of deep sea diving.
Jim Cameron has gone to the bottom of the ocean and seen forms of life that very few of us have ever really seen.
I think that what we tried to do was always make it reference to something that we could believe in from our natural world.
I think that's what he tried to convey for audiences through his movie in a 3-D experience was to make it immersive.
It was extremely visionary, extremely risky and extremely effective and profitable.
The most profitable movie of all time is probably the geekiest movie of all time.
It's like, "Yes!" The inhabitants of Pandora are the Na'vi.
Like the characters in The Left Hand Of Darkness, they have their own culture and their own language.
"Oel ngati kameie," which is "I see you.
" The language really helped me understand her more so it was a combo that needed itself, like, one cannot insist without the other.
In order for the Na'vi to really become what they are, you know, they're alive, they're real.
Avatar's lovingly detailed alien world is not just a pretty backdrop.
It's the entire point of the film because, like Dune, this is a story about a bitter battle for power and resources.
In fact, James Cameron's film belongs to a rich science fiction tradition that uses stories about intergalactic empires and alien worlds to challenge our own history of conquest and imperialism.
So, in Avatar, the humans land on Pandora to exploit its precious minerals, with scant regard for its native inhabitants or its fragile ecosystem.
You don't have to be a genius to work out the parallels.
It's the taking advantage of a society, that once you come in as a self-considered "civilised" species or creature or person, you immediately take advantage of the purity and the simplicity, and take from the other.
Jim really wanted to showcase that and that, to me, is a very simple way of telling a story, that we will continue to repeat the same mistakes over and over again, so that was a very relatable topic.
Of course, James Cameron's film could hardly be more loaded in favour of Pandora's idealistic alien inhabitants.
I always think of it as Dances With Wolves in space but one bestselling American writer has argued that even colonising an empty, uninhabited planet might present all kinds of political, moral and ecological challenges.
The possibility of building a new home on a real planet, Mars, first struck the novelist Kim Stanley-Robinson when he saw NASA's detailed images of the Red Planet in the 1970s.
When I first saw the satellite photos from the Viking orbiter, looking down at Mars, I was struck by how much they resembled the American West, especially the High Sierra of California where I was doing a lot of backpacking at that time, so I looked at these photos of Mars and I thought, "Wow, this would be a great planet "to go backpacking on," but of course that wasn't quite right because there is no atmosphere and the water's all frozen.
You would need to make it Earth-like in order to live on it as human beings live on this planet, so I had the idea it would be a great story to tell.
In three lovingly detailed novels, Robinson imagines how Mars might be terraformed, deliberately changed into a habitable, Earth-like environment.
His characters warm the planet using nuclear power and reflected sunlight, they give Mars plant life, breathable air, even its own oceans.
It's a process that lasts for decades, and it proves enormously divisive.
When my characters first get to Mars, some of them fall in love with the place as it already is.
The place as it already is has some natural integrity, it has beauty that is important for human beings.
So, it seemed to me very possible, in fact likely, that there would be people living on Mars who would say, "We want this place "to stay the way it is, we'll live indoors "and we'll go out in space suits "but the place itself should not just be turned into a second Earth.
" And I thought this might be a fundamental division, a political and philosophical division between the components of the Martian population as it grew.
No other literary work matches the Mars Trilogy's painstakingly precise vision of how mankind might build a new home, yet the reality is that Mars may be as far as we will ever go.
Realistically, space travel is something we do in our neighbourhood, and our neighbourhood is this solar system.
I think that science fiction tells a persistent lie, which is that we will go to the stars, that humanity will be a species that lives outside this solar system.
It's a nice story to tell because it gives you such a gigantic playground, the galaxy, the universe, but it ignores the reality that even the closest stars are stupendously far away.
Robinson's novels offer a grittily realistic alternative to the implausible fantasies of so many space stories, but some of science fiction's most popular works not only embrace the implausible, they positively revel in the absurd.
One of British science fiction's best loved space travellers isn't an inventor or an astronaut, he's a man in a dressing gown whose main goal is to find himself a decent cup of tea.
His name is Arthur Dent and he is the unlikely hero of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.
You barbarians, I'll sue the council for every penny it's got! I'll have you hung, drawn and quartered and whipped and boiled until Until Until you had enough! Arthur, don't bother, there's no point, there's only a minute or so left.
And then I'll do it some more, and then I'll take all the little bits and I'll jump on them and I'll carry on jumping on them until I get blisters and Or I'll think of something even more unpleasant to do.
What the hell's that?! Arthur, quick, over here.
What the hell is it? It's a fleet of flying saucers, what you think it is? Arthur is the last surviving Earth man.
Together with his alien friend, Ford Prefect, he ends up wandering across the stars, the Earth having been demolished to make way for an intergalactic bypass.
The Hitchhiker's Guide began as a BBC radio series created by Douglas Adams, a former comedy sketch writer and Doctor Who script editor.
The first episode of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy went out on Radio 4 at 10.
30pm on 8th March, 1978.
If you'd turned straight over to Radio 1 afterwards you'd have heard John Peel blowing away the prog rock cobwebs with a bracing blast of punk.
In many ways Hitchhiker's was the science fiction equivalent.
After years of operatic bombast, here was a breath of fresh air.
'The Babel Fish is probably the oddest thing in the universe.
'It feeds on brainwave energy, 'the practical upshot of which is that if you stick one in your ear 'you instantly understand anything said to you 'in any form of language.
' One of the great uses of science fiction is for humour and for satire because the intrinsic things of science fiction are all gloriously and infinitely mockable.
Douglas Adams understood science fiction but he also fundamentally understood humour and humorous writing better than anybody else out there.
As the hapless Arthur travels the galaxy he finds himself in situations that are both bizarrely exotic and oddly familiar, from alien bureaucrats to Marvin, the Paranoid Android.
I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed.
But perhaps Douglas Adams' most memorable creation was the titular Hitchhiker's Guide, the ultimate traveller's companion.
"Don't Panic", that's the first helpful or intelligible thing - anyone's said to me all day.
- Yes, that's why it sells so well.
The idea of the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, this thing that you can hold that looks probably a bit like a phone, a bit like a small iPad, that is being continually updated over sub-ether.
'Here is what to do if you want to get a lift from a Vogon, 'forget it.
' The idea of that circa 1978, you have to imagine so many things that do not yet exist for us to get there.
It's actually quite shocking and you start to wonder how much of the future really is Douglas Adams' fault.
What an extraordinary book! How did we get on board, then? The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy has become a multimedia phenomenon.
From its humble beginnings on late-night radio, it's spawned a TV series, books, a stage play, comics, a computer game and even its own towel.
I think the secret of its success is that it's more than just a spoof.
What Douglas Adams created was a genuine work of science fiction in its own right.
It takes on fairly classic themes - aliens, artificial intelligence, the big bang, the death of the universe - but it does it with an abundance of imagination and a very British sense of humour.
Earth man, the planet you inhabited was commissioned, paid for and run by the mice.
It was destroyed five minutes before the completion of the purpose for which it was built, so we have to build another one.
Mice?! Even as British listeners were chuckling at poor old Arthur, the underlying theme of The Hitchhiker's Guide, exile in space, was echoed on primetime American television.
The opening titles of the series Battlestar Galactica present an image of interstellar exodus - an entire fleet of spaceships searching for a new home.
Battlestar Galactica's characters aren't explorers, they're refugees, forced to wander the universe after the destruction of their home by their robotic enemies the Cylons.
The series traded very heavily on its spectacular space battles.
I got him on the right Its expensive special effects set a new standard for television and were designed to meet the higher expectations of viewers who'd just seen Star Wars.
But for Battlestar Galactica's creator, the veteran TV producer Glen A Larson, the series had a very particular spiritual resonance.
You see, Larson was a Mormon.
The story of his characters' quest to find a new home among the stars echoed not just the Book of Exodus but the Mormons' own journey across the 19th century American West to find sanctuary in Utah.
Forget Star Trek, this really was Wagon Train To The Stars.
But a quarter of a century later, Larson's wholesome family saga was reborn as an irresistibly dark military epic steeped in the anxieties of 21st century America.
Vipers in position.
Signal Vipers, engage fighters only.
Leave basestars to us.
Execute.
This grimmer tone was reflected in the new show's space battles, shot in a way inconceivable in the 1970s.
The cameras appear to be handheld, finding the action rather than following it, like footage from a news crew embedded on the front line.
I wanted it to be recognisable to people as something that was an outgrowth or a reinvention of the original Galactica but it was an opportunity for me to do certain things that I was interested in doing in science fiction in general, to make a more documentary-style shooting, to make it more socially relevant.
The sense of rupture and insecurity that haunts Battlestar Galactica's frightened refugees very clearly paralleled America's own national trauma.
It came on the back of something that really had been very difficult to take, on the planet, which was the destruction of the Twin Towers and the vulnerability.
And all of a sudden, here we were, doing the pilot and it really had a different feeling to it.
The possibilities were stronger and it lent itself to making this reality come to life.
And, in the strained relationship between its two central characters, Commander Adama and President Roslin, Battlestar Galactica captured the political and military divisions in a society reeling from a devastating attack.
One scene early in the series makes the tension explicit.
- What? - You plan to declare martial law? Take over the government? Of course not.
Then you do acknowledge my position as President, as duly constituted under the Articles of Colonisation? Miss Roslin, my primary objective at the present time is to repair the Galactica and continue to fight.
Cover! And I just realised if you did that show in the post-9/11 environment it would have a completely different resonance to the audience than it did in 1978.
In the War on Terror, the invasion of Iraq, a time of great debate about freedom versus security, how far would you go to safeguard a population? How far is too far? Science fiction in film and television had become all escapism and all popcorn and I love Star Wars as much as the next guy.
You know, I'm not going to bang on Star Wars but I didn't want that to be the only flavour out there.
Throughout its five-year run, Battlestar Galactica's storylines seemed to have been ripped from the front pages of the newspapers.
As its characters flee the wreckage of their societies, they face a series of impossible political and military dilemmas.
And even as the American army was fighting insurgents in Iraq, so Battlestar Galactica's heroes were turning to terrorism.
One moment stands out for its bleakness.
The refugees find an apparent safe haven, a new world to settle, but the dream turns sour when they fall under enemy occupation.
Congratulations, Sergeant.
The resistance responds with extreme measures and, as the tension builds, the story hurtles towards a shattering ending.
Congratulations, Captain, it's great to have you with us.
I'll see you soon, Nora.
From political comment to pure escapism .
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from satirical comedy to high art .
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from alien cultures to distant worlds, space stories continue to fascinate us.
Everybody ready to say goodbye to our solar system, to our galaxy? Here we go.
The latest, Christopher Nolan's film Interstellar is a gigantic spectacle with all the ambition of Kubrick's 2001.
Not only does it capture the drama and beauty of space travel, but it has a suitably grand theme about the fate of humanity and it's a reminder that the spirit of exploration has never really gone away.
The great irony is that our drive to conquer the vast expanse of space has now rather ground to a halt.
Even the excitement of the moon landings has largely fizzled out, perhaps after Star Wars and its grand spectacle the reality was always going to prove a bit of a disappointment.
But I don't think space stories will ever go away, after all, curiosity, adventure, and exploration are all part of being human and, like our predecessors, we can't help but turn our eyes to the stars.
Next time Daleks in London Kill him! .
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Body Snatchers in small town America.
SHE SCREAMS From the War Of The Worlds to District 9 .
.
prepare for a close encounter with alien invaders.
Exterminate! Exterminate!
The history of science fiction is an extraordinary story of innovation and imagination.
HE IMITATES 2001 MAIN THEME I mean, wow! The true seed of any great science fiction story is the idea.
What if? What if? I've loved science fiction ever since it first unlocked my childhood imagination.
And now, when I look back on the history of the last 100 years, I think that science fiction, more than almost any other genre, has been a remarkably revealing window onto our ambitions and our anxieties, our dreams and our nightmares.
In this series we'll explore the great themes of science fiction.
Space.
Journeys into the unknown.
And what's out there, the cosmos, the mystery of space.
Space, the final frontier.
The ultimate threat.
Alien invasion.
They're coming to get us.
'All over the world, human beings cower before the onslaught 'of these unearthly enemies!' The mysteries of artificial life.
Robots, cyborgs, where humanity and technology collide It's as close as we get to touching immortality and that can sort of be a scary thing as well as an exciting thing.
It's alive! It's alive! It's ALIVE! .
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and the infinite possibilities of time travel.
The fantasy of it is eternally appealing, I think.
Off we go.
METALLIC THRUMMING From Flash Gordon to Star Wars, science fiction has constantly drawn on its past on its journey towards tomorrow and it's now impossible to imagine modern culture without it.
From box office blockbusters to the latest video games, from the gadget in your pocket to the skylines of our cities, it's become part of the fabric of our 21st century world.
This is the story of science fiction's most influential works and of their creators, the men and women who fell to Earth.
The pioneers of the history of science fiction.
My God, it's full of stars! 'Six, five, four, 'three, two, 'one, zero.
' For a writer or a film-maker, for any creator of science fiction, there's no bigger canvas than the unending reaches of space.
But even in our infinite universe, every story has to start somewhere.
Mine begins in Bridgnorth, Shropshire.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, my parents brought me here to the Majestic Cinema to see a film that I had been pestering them about for weeks.
By the time we got here, people were already queueing around the block, and I was beside myself with excitement.
And if you, like me, grew up in the 1970s, then you probably have a similar story of your own, because this film was to prove a landmark for an entire generation.
Star Wars begins in the middle of a spectacular space battle.
The opening moments alone give us vast battle cruisers, vivid robot characters and a gripping sense of tension.
EXPLOSIONS Right from the start, this was a film that lived up to its title.
Did you hear that? R2-D2 BEEPS They shut down the main reactor! We'll be destroyed for sure! Star Wars propelled science fiction to the very centre of our popular imagination and more than any other film since the early days of cinema, it transformed Hollywood itself.
But the great irony is that, for a long time, its staggering success had seemed completely unthinkable.
Indeed, for its founding father, George Lucas, the making of Star Wars had been an ordeal from start to finish.
Lucas had the backing of a studio boss, but hardly anybody else.
George was doing things that had never been done before ever in the film business.
It was quite risky and the board of directors didn't like the idea we were making it.
And the budget - very, very small, five million maybe, and it went up to 9.
5 million.
At the first screening we had of it, the board of directors saw it They hated it.
Even as Lucas was making Star Wars, his great friend Steven Spielberg was filming Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.
George was really feeling it.
He was seeing the film that we were shooting and, in many ways, he had wanted that to be Star Wars.
And even Lucas' actors themselves struggled to see the merits of his film.
I remember driving across the desert one morning with Mark Hamill.
We, out of courtesy, were going through each other's lines, you know, and I said to him, "How can you say rubbish like that with a straight face?" He said, "Well, look what you have to say.
" I said, "Yeah, but I'm behind a mask.
"None of my friends know I'm in this movie, so it's fine.
" I don't know where George got his names from.
Obi-Wan Kenobi? Who thought of that one? Darth Vader.
Chewbacca.
Chewbacca?! Probably we all thought "I won't ever see this film, "because this is not a good film.
"This is not a film anyone's going to see.
" Even Lucas himself was racked with doubt about what he'd created.
Because what he wanted was a film that would appeal to audiences of all ages, not just wide-eyed little boys like me.
I remember one night, sitting in a restaurant, and George was glum.
George is always rather glum, but this was a particularly glum night and I leaned over and said, "What's the matter?" And he said "I made a kid's film.
" And he had wanted to make an adult film and we commiserated with the billionaire-to-be.
Lucas's great inspiration for Star Wars was an adventure serial from the 1930s - Flash Gordon.
This was the archetypal space opera.
An epic saga of cliff-hanging derring-do set on a distant world, as its athletic heroes and gorgeous heroines lead their rebellion against an evil emperor.
Punish all those who dare debunk me in my determination to conquer the universe! Lucas had originally wanted to remake Flash Gordon.
He only wrote Star Wars when he couldn't get the rights.
The similarities between Star Wars and Flash Gordon go well beyond the plot.
Flash Gordon first appeared during the depths of the Great Depression.
In a society haunted by the spectre of unemployment, here was a thrilling adventure story utterly removed from its social context.
This was science fiction as pure escapism and that is what George Lucas wanted to give American audiences in the 1970s, the era of Vietnam, Watergate, economic stagflation and morbid introspection.
"It had become depressing" he once said, "to go to the movies.
" so Lucas decided that it was time to make a movie where people would feel better going out of the theatre than when they went in.
It kind of took space opera into .
.
into a place where everybody wanted to see it and it became spectacle and excitement and that's just lasted and lasted and lasted.
There were planets, Death Stars, bad guys, good guys, you know, the Force.
All these things are part of an alternate world that George constructed that he was then able to roll out many, many sequels and variations on.
The key to the film's extraordinary appeal is that Star Wars was utterly unlike almost anything else coming out of Hollywood in the 1970s.
Here was a film with no time for irony and no room for self-doubt.
Even the most jaded adults found themselves entranced, not just by the spectacle, but by the sheer power and commitment of its old-fashioned storytelling.
Nowhere is that better demonstrated than in Star Wars' rousing final battle, where Lucas seamlessly moves from space-age heroics to romantic mysticism.
- OBIWAN: - 'Use the Force, Luke.
' And that's the moment you really believe that a humble farm boy can save the galaxy.
The Force is strong with this one.
Watching Star Wars, everybody becomes an eight-year-old.
Star Wars may have looked to the 1930s for inspiration, but the roots of space fiction go even further back to the great Victorian age of astronomy and exploration.
In the last years of the 19th century, this huge telescope was at the cutting edge of British astronomy.
It's one of the chief exhibits here at Greenwich's Royal Observatory, and through this telescope, as well as its primitive predecessors, our ancestors gazed at the stars, and they drew up their charts and they set out to explore our world.
The Victorian era marked the high point of public interest in exploration.
And stories of remarkable voyages held a particular fascination for the French writer, Jules Verne.
But in 1865, Verne went one step further, when he published his groundbreaking novel, From The Earth To The Moon.
What made Verne's book so revolutionary is that it took science seriously.
Its characters painstakingly work out the right velocity.
They take into account the effects of gravity.
To put it simply, they do the maths.
Unfortunately, Verne's biggest idea, a spaceship fired from a giant gun, didn't quite work out.
But many of his other ideas were to prove remarkably prescient.
'1,000 feet high.
'80 feet per second vertical rise.
' He figured out that if you're going to shoot a projectile at the moon, you should do it from Cape Canaveral or from Tampa.
'Tower cleared.
' If you were going to get it back, you would get it back picked up out of the ocean, which is how they recovered the first space capsules.
He got all that right.
In 1902, Verne's space cannon inspired what's considered the first science fiction film, Le Voyage Dans La Lune, but its director, George Melies, added plenty of audience-friendly fantasy borrowed from H G Wells' recent book The First Men In The Moon.
For example, a thrilling battle with the moon's insect-like inhabitants! The move away from Verne's scientific rigour caught on across the Atlantic, where America's new pulp magazines were quick to embrace the spirit of the fantastic.
And it was these magazines that brought science fiction to the masses, taking up the Victorian formula of exploration and adventure, but adding eye-catching aliens and outlandish planets.
Meanwhile, starship crews replaced the old gentleman explorers.
'Imagine yourself as one of the crew 'of this faster-than-light spaceship of the future, 'sharing their curiosity to know the unknown, 'their tension, their readiness for inconceivable adventures' Forbidden Planet was the first big budget feature film set entirely in space and it paved the way for the best known space exploration saga of all.
- CAPTAIN KIRK: - 'Space, the final frontier.
' 'These are the voyagers of the starship Enterprise 'Its five-year mission to explore strange new worlds, 'to seek out new life and new civilisations, 'to boldly go where no man has gone before.
' This show and science fiction in general appeals to a mythological need in people and I love that idea.
The Enterprise's crew travel the galaxy, exploring new worlds, righting wrongs and promoting peace.
This is Captain James T Kirk of the starship Enterprise representing the United Federation of Planets.
We have contacted your buoy and understand its message.
We hope that you will understand that our intent is to establish peaceful relations with you.
The idea was we are moving out into seeking out new life forms, seeking out new worlds, going where no man has gone before.
Um, and I think that was such a very, very '60s, very optimistic way to think.
Star Trek was the brainchild of a former commercial pilot, Gene Roddenberry.
He characterised this series like a popular series at the time, which was called Wagon Train, which was a series of settlers heading out to the West of the United States at the time when it was unknown.
And he called Star Trek, "Wagon Train To The Stars.
" Star Trek's crew were more than just explorers.
They were ambassadors for tolerance and multiculturalism.
The Enterprise's first officer, Mr Spock, was half alien, but it was the ship's communications officer, Lieutenant Uhura, who went where no woman had gone before.
There had been nothing like Star Trek on the television ever and I didn't even know I was the first black actress in a major role on television.
Somebody keeps telling me that, and I'm going, "No, not actually.
" No, a REAL character, an honest character.
It was amazing, the response that I got, that Gene got, that the studio got, that the network got.
Star Trek is the one idea of the future where it all works out, where it's all actually pretty good, where we saw the Earth is one world.
We've solved poverty and disease and war and racism and everything else and we're going out in the galaxy and we're making friends with other people with bumps on their heads and it's all working out for them, too.
The Enterprise is a family and it's all like a great idea.
But how far does Star Trek really depart from the 19th century model of space exploration? Star Trek might look like a model of '60s liberalism, but I think there's something eminently Victorian about using the Enterprise's crew as embodiments of the ideals of their age.
After all, Captain Kirk and co can never resist an opportunity to lecture their alien acquaintances about the error of their ways, or about the difference between right and wrong.
And whether you find that refreshingly idealistic, or sickeningly sanctimonious, the fact is that the Enterprise's journey is a classic civilizing mission.
Nowhere is this civilizing mission better captured than in the early episode Errand Of Mercy, as Captain Kirk tries to reason with some intransigent locals.
In addition to military aid we can send you specialists, technicians.
We can show you how to feed 1,000 people where one was fed before.
We can help you build schools, educate the young in the latest technological and scientific skills.
Your public facilities are almost non-existent, we can help you remake your world.
'When you look at the television series,' while it, you know, pays lip service to an integrated crew, it's really all about the white man's way is best.
It is a sort of gunboat diplomacy.
Barely a stone's throw away from Greenwich's Royal Observatory stands this temple to British sea power - the former Royal Naval College.
This, if you like, was our equivalent of Star Trek's Starfleet Academy.
In fact, from their command structure to their sophisticated weaponry, the crew of the starship Enterprise are effectively the Royal Navy in space.
This naval analogy particularly appealed to the young director Nicholas Meyer, who made the second Star Trek film, The Wrath Of Khan, in 1982.
Meyer was no fan of the original series, and he was looking for a fresh way to approach the story.
It sort of tickled something at the back of my mind because it became - it was reminiscent of something that I liked.
Oh, yes, this is like those Captain Hornblower novels of CS Forester's, about an English naval captain during the Napoleonic wars.
Then when I met Bill Shatner, he got excited when I mentioned that because he said, "Oh, that's what Gene Roddenberry had in mind.
" This is Hornblower in outer space.
'Warner Brothers take you before the mast with the greatest 'naval hero of all time 'in the fabulous days when iron men hurled wooden ships 'into mortal combat, when history hung on the slice of a sword' And then I watched the Gregory Peck Hornblower movie and the opening bugle call is the same.
BUGLE CALL Once I made the Hornblower connection I said, "OK, this is Hornblower in outer space," then the spaceships become frigates, submarines, destroyers, men-o'-war.
Meyer's crew looks unashamedly military, and his Enterprise has the sleek, dark interior of a warship bristling with weaponry.
- Yellow alert.
- Energise defence fields.
Suddenly the uniforms took on a more precise aspect for me.
You know, we're not going to have pyjamas because we're in the Navy.
For all its shiny modernity, Star Trek is at heart a Victorian exploration story.
Its crew set sail on the high seas of space, to satisfy their curiosity, yes, but also to spread their values.
And if things do get a bit hairy, well, they can always use their photon torpedoes to blast their way out of trouble, and to leave the natives to clean up afterwards.
Victorian science fiction positioned man firmly at the centre of the universe.
But by the 1960s, the advance of astronomy had rather put us in our place.
Thanks to radio telescopes like these we now have a much better idea of the vast size and age of the universe, and also, perhaps, of our own cosmic insignificance in the grand scheme of things.
Now, you might find that thought a little bit depressing.
But for the writer Arthur C Clarke it opened up an exciting new intellectual opportunity.
Could there, he wondered, be creatures up there that were older, wiser and more developed than we were? In 1964, Clarke met the American film director Stanley Kubrick to discuss the possibilities, and four years later the world saw the result - a film of unprecedented ambition.
This is the screenplay of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, which Stanley Kubrick and I have been working on for the last two years.
We are concerned with nothing less than man's place in the universe and his possible position in the pecking order of cosmic intelligence.
2001 suggests that we are being watched by a higher alien intelligence, in the form of mysterious black monoliths.
These strange artefacts have overseen our evolution, from the dawn of man to the moment we're ready to voyage into space.
Kubrick wanted consciously to make an epic spectacle that wasn't just another melodramatic talky story with conflict and fights and guns and things like that.
And so he was just working completely outside that realm.
No science fiction film had ever tried anything so conceptually daring.
The thing about 2001 that really profoundly affected me was that he wanted to make a film that was extremely immersive for the audience, where the audience would have a feeling that they were in the movie, that they were actually in space.
HE IMITATES 2001 MAIN THEME I mean, wow! Kubrick knew that he could only sell Clarke's grand ideas to the audience if they wholeheartedly believed in the film's vision of the future.
Stanley went to great pains to be absolutely as authentic and, not just up to date, but up to the date of 2001 as you could possibly guess.
The design was based upon real spacecraft design, helped by people who worked in the space programme, so there was a reality to it instead of, "Oh, this is the way you would have to have "vector thrusters to manoeuvre a pod in space or whatever.
" He had about 40 corporations that were co-operating with him and each of those corporations were presenting him with their best guess as to what they would be able to achieve that many years in the future.
And I think the fact that there's nothing that catches your eye that looks fake makes it all look more real, you just buy into it.
The results are so convincing that it's not surprising Kubrick's camera lingers over his detailed miniatures.
Notice that you never see any rockets or thrusters firing, because Kubrick thought the effects wouldn't look realistic.
For all the pleasures of Stanley Kubrick's meticulous vision of space at the dawn of the 21st century, what I really love about 2001 are the psychedelic scenes at the very end of the film when Keir Dullea's astronaut finally gets to meet the alien intelligence.
In many ways, of course, those scenes are completely baffling but that, I suppose, is the point.
After all, how could our puny human minds possibly begin to make sense of the terrifying awe-inspiring majesty of alien lifeforms so much more advanced than ourselves? Kubrick's scenes of alien contact break spectacularly with typical science fiction iconography.
Keir Dullea's astronaut finds himself in a room full of 18th century furniture but the unsettling soundtrack and underfloor lighting suggest that things aren't quite as they seem.
This may be something I kind of have come up with, whether it was Stanley telling me this or whether it was my own conclusion when I saw the film, but that room represents perhaps the aliens, being millions of years in advance of human beings, had the technology just to go inside a brain and look for what that creature considered habitat and maybe one day the character that I was playing visited the Louvre museum and saw that and the aliens figured, "That's his habitat.
" There's an ambiguity about his film, the very fact that people constantly ask me, "What is the film about?" "What does it mean?" And so there is an intrigue on the part of this film that few other science fiction films have.
2001 feels a very long way from those first Victorian stories of intrepid explorers conquering space, but it does engage with the hottest scientific debate of the 19th century - evolution.
It opens with man's ape-like ancestors and it ends with our ascent onto a higher plane of consciousness.
Who knows what Charles Darwin would have made of it? Clarke and Kubrick had pushed the audience's imagination further than any film had ever done before.
They also proved that stories set in space could aspire to high-minded intellectualism, but not everybody bought into their cold, cerebral vision.
The idea of space travel as being clean and sleek lines and all easy is ridiculous.
Just imagine being stuck inside this capsule for months, years.
2001: A Space Odyssey, the astronauts, they're kind of boring.
They had nothing going on, they weren't angry at each other, they were out there along time, so I thought, "We can do better than that.
" In 1974, the young John Carpenter offered a countercultural riposte to 2001 - Dark Star.
The film's tone is established early on when the ship's crew return to their squalid quarters, the walls covered in pictures from men's magazines.
'After a while the hygiene begins to drop off' so the idea of, "We'll fix it when it goes bad, just leave it alone.
"I don't want to do that.
" People don't care as much, the pleasantries between people drop off.
"Don't bother me.
" That starts to take over.
It's just kind of human nature.
I do not like the men on this spaceship.
They are uncouth and fail to appreciate my better qualities.
I have something of value to contribute to this mission if they would only recognise it.
Nobody would have imagined it at the time but the low-budget Dark Star would prove enormously influential.
Here the actor and co-writer Dan O'Bannon struggles to feed the ship's misbehaving resident alien, which, in a nicely surreal touch, is basically a glorified beach ball.
Idiot! A few years later Dan O'Bannon returned to the theme of an extraterrestrial on a spaceship when he co-wrote perhaps the most celebrated alien story in cinematic history, but this time the alien was a perfectly evolved predator, and this time nobody was playing it for laughs.
The director of Alien, Ridley Scott, wanted the creature that threatens the crew of the space freighter Nostromo to look like nothing the audience had seen before.
He turned to a Swiss artist, HR Giger, famous for his nightmarish paintings.
Ridley Scott really lucked out when he found Giger.
Giger's inclusion into Alien was pivotal because, you know, Scott found this guy who had this whole vision, kind of Necronomicon, other world thing like totally worked out in his head.
The great thing about Giger and his designs is that they're not like anything you have seen before.
They're beautiful but at the same time incredibly disturbing.
Ridley Scott's film has an almost scientific obsession with the biological intricacies of its diabolical alien, and with the features that the creature must have developed to survive at the top of the food chain.
It's tongue has its own set of teeth, its blood is a powerful acid, it incubates inside its prey and then it eats it.
What the film franchise has been able to do is to create a life cycle for that creature.
The face hugger, the chest burster, the warrior.
These are all the stuff of nightmares.
What is more horrible than having a You know, thing with a Going down your throat, that looks like a spider and a crab and a tumour and like One scene more than any other captured the alien's horrific biology and, like Stanley Kubrick, Scott was determined that it should feel startlingly real.
I was told I'd get a little blood on my face.
They had four cameras, so everybody was being shot.
I think they got it on the first take, you know a lot of this stuff, because the actors didn't know what was going to happen.
Well I leaned directly into a blood jet that hit me square in the face.
And all this blood comes out and this penis thing comes out and like Our reactions to it were the audience reactions.
It's like these people going like, "What is happening?" Oh, God! Nothing had been done like that before.
Alien's strength was it's meticulous attention to detail.
A principle that's been very dear to some of science fiction's greatest writers.
These are the futuristic domes of the Eden Project, a tropical rainforest in the heart of Cornwall.
But science fiction has presented us with entire ecologies unlike anything anywhere on Earth.
All writers, I suppose, end up creating their own worlds, whatever the genre, but I think there's something particularly exciting about a writer who builds an alien world from the ground up and then puts man in an utterly unfamiliar environment.
And these kinds of stories really gathered momentum in the 1960s and '70s and they often reflected the ecological concerns of the day.
And yet, the bestselling alien world story of all was set, ironically enough, in an ecosystem that could not have been more hostile.
Its author was Frank Herbert, and the book was Dune.
Frank Herbert's Dune was a really big science fiction achievement.
This was a planet that had an ecological system that made sense, it was dry, therefore water mattered, therefore the plant life and the animal life were all desert.
It was really excellent on a planetary ecology in a way that had never been true before.
Dune changed the landscape of science fiction.
Herbert created a remarkably detailed galaxy as the setting for his epic tale about the struggle to control the desert planet Arrakis, source of an addictive, life enhancing and infinitely desirable drug, the "spice".
It kind of made a big wave because he had spent so much time thinking out his world and seeing it and feeling it and, you know, making it real and doing the details.
In 1969, Ursula K Le Guin attempted something perhaps even more ambitious.
Like Dune, her book, The Left Hand Of Darkness, was set in an inhospitable environment - the ice planet, Winter.
But it wasn't the landscape that made Le Guin's work so startling, it was the people.
The kind of science fiction I write is People call it social science fiction or sociological or something, and so when I invent a world I have to I have to know a lot about the whole culture.
Or I can't imagine who the people are.
You know, you can't just have a human being that doesn't have a culture behind it.
There's one line in The Left Hand Of Darkness that has entered science fiction legend, "The king was pregnant.
" You see, Winter has a very unusual kind of alien world.
Its people are ambisexual so most of the year they're sexually neuter, but once a month, for mating purposes, they can be either male or female.
It's no accident that Ursula K Le Guin was writing in the late 1960s, just when the women's liberation and gay rights movements were getting off the ground.
She very deliberately used science fiction to question the fixed gender roles that her readers took for granted.
One reason why I wrote the book was to find out what they were like when they were neither.
Would they be human without having any sexual drive or characteristic? It seems to me that they came out quite human.
I read that book when I was 11 or 12 and it undid the inside of my head.
It had not occurred to me up until that point that things could be another way than the way that I saw that they were.
Men were men, women were women, wasn't that obvious? Wasn't that unchangeable? I wonder now how today's younger generation, who've grown up in a world in which gender is increasingly fluid, I wonder how they read and take and comprehend The Left Hand Of Darkness.
The questions that I was asking in the book seem to be questions that we're still, we're still looking for answers to, what is it to be male and female? For years, creating a plausible alien environment on the screen seemed a daunting prospect, so very few films could match the literary ambitions of the 1960s.
But then, in 2009, came James Cameron's Avatar.
We went to extraordinary lengths to study the natural environment of a forest, natural places that have not had man actually change them.
A lot of times you can see nature and it's like nature is in a zoo because we are the dominant force, but on Pandora we are still just a small footprint in that whole overall planet.
Jim did just a fantastic job of thinking about, "What's the flora, what's the fauna, what's the atmosphere? "What's the gravity? How does this whole place work?" He named all the plants, he named the creatures, he created this whole world.
Thanks to the advance of computer graphics and 3-D technology, Cameron created a world so immersive, so real you could almost touch it.
One of the things I read a lot about was that people kept going back over and over to see that movie because it was like a vacation on another planet, it was like some big experiential thing.
Pandora may look very alien to us but its creatures are inspired by our own natural world, in particular by James Cameron's love of deep sea diving.
Jim Cameron has gone to the bottom of the ocean and seen forms of life that very few of us have ever really seen.
I think that what we tried to do was always make it reference to something that we could believe in from our natural world.
I think that's what he tried to convey for audiences through his movie in a 3-D experience was to make it immersive.
It was extremely visionary, extremely risky and extremely effective and profitable.
The most profitable movie of all time is probably the geekiest movie of all time.
It's like, "Yes!" The inhabitants of Pandora are the Na'vi.
Like the characters in The Left Hand Of Darkness, they have their own culture and their own language.
"Oel ngati kameie," which is "I see you.
" The language really helped me understand her more so it was a combo that needed itself, like, one cannot insist without the other.
In order for the Na'vi to really become what they are, you know, they're alive, they're real.
Avatar's lovingly detailed alien world is not just a pretty backdrop.
It's the entire point of the film because, like Dune, this is a story about a bitter battle for power and resources.
In fact, James Cameron's film belongs to a rich science fiction tradition that uses stories about intergalactic empires and alien worlds to challenge our own history of conquest and imperialism.
So, in Avatar, the humans land on Pandora to exploit its precious minerals, with scant regard for its native inhabitants or its fragile ecosystem.
You don't have to be a genius to work out the parallels.
It's the taking advantage of a society, that once you come in as a self-considered "civilised" species or creature or person, you immediately take advantage of the purity and the simplicity, and take from the other.
Jim really wanted to showcase that and that, to me, is a very simple way of telling a story, that we will continue to repeat the same mistakes over and over again, so that was a very relatable topic.
Of course, James Cameron's film could hardly be more loaded in favour of Pandora's idealistic alien inhabitants.
I always think of it as Dances With Wolves in space but one bestselling American writer has argued that even colonising an empty, uninhabited planet might present all kinds of political, moral and ecological challenges.
The possibility of building a new home on a real planet, Mars, first struck the novelist Kim Stanley-Robinson when he saw NASA's detailed images of the Red Planet in the 1970s.
When I first saw the satellite photos from the Viking orbiter, looking down at Mars, I was struck by how much they resembled the American West, especially the High Sierra of California where I was doing a lot of backpacking at that time, so I looked at these photos of Mars and I thought, "Wow, this would be a great planet "to go backpacking on," but of course that wasn't quite right because there is no atmosphere and the water's all frozen.
You would need to make it Earth-like in order to live on it as human beings live on this planet, so I had the idea it would be a great story to tell.
In three lovingly detailed novels, Robinson imagines how Mars might be terraformed, deliberately changed into a habitable, Earth-like environment.
His characters warm the planet using nuclear power and reflected sunlight, they give Mars plant life, breathable air, even its own oceans.
It's a process that lasts for decades, and it proves enormously divisive.
When my characters first get to Mars, some of them fall in love with the place as it already is.
The place as it already is has some natural integrity, it has beauty that is important for human beings.
So, it seemed to me very possible, in fact likely, that there would be people living on Mars who would say, "We want this place "to stay the way it is, we'll live indoors "and we'll go out in space suits "but the place itself should not just be turned into a second Earth.
" And I thought this might be a fundamental division, a political and philosophical division between the components of the Martian population as it grew.
No other literary work matches the Mars Trilogy's painstakingly precise vision of how mankind might build a new home, yet the reality is that Mars may be as far as we will ever go.
Realistically, space travel is something we do in our neighbourhood, and our neighbourhood is this solar system.
I think that science fiction tells a persistent lie, which is that we will go to the stars, that humanity will be a species that lives outside this solar system.
It's a nice story to tell because it gives you such a gigantic playground, the galaxy, the universe, but it ignores the reality that even the closest stars are stupendously far away.
Robinson's novels offer a grittily realistic alternative to the implausible fantasies of so many space stories, but some of science fiction's most popular works not only embrace the implausible, they positively revel in the absurd.
One of British science fiction's best loved space travellers isn't an inventor or an astronaut, he's a man in a dressing gown whose main goal is to find himself a decent cup of tea.
His name is Arthur Dent and he is the unlikely hero of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.
You barbarians, I'll sue the council for every penny it's got! I'll have you hung, drawn and quartered and whipped and boiled until Until Until you had enough! Arthur, don't bother, there's no point, there's only a minute or so left.
And then I'll do it some more, and then I'll take all the little bits and I'll jump on them and I'll carry on jumping on them until I get blisters and Or I'll think of something even more unpleasant to do.
What the hell's that?! Arthur, quick, over here.
What the hell is it? It's a fleet of flying saucers, what you think it is? Arthur is the last surviving Earth man.
Together with his alien friend, Ford Prefect, he ends up wandering across the stars, the Earth having been demolished to make way for an intergalactic bypass.
The Hitchhiker's Guide began as a BBC radio series created by Douglas Adams, a former comedy sketch writer and Doctor Who script editor.
The first episode of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy went out on Radio 4 at 10.
30pm on 8th March, 1978.
If you'd turned straight over to Radio 1 afterwards you'd have heard John Peel blowing away the prog rock cobwebs with a bracing blast of punk.
In many ways Hitchhiker's was the science fiction equivalent.
After years of operatic bombast, here was a breath of fresh air.
'The Babel Fish is probably the oddest thing in the universe.
'It feeds on brainwave energy, 'the practical upshot of which is that if you stick one in your ear 'you instantly understand anything said to you 'in any form of language.
' One of the great uses of science fiction is for humour and for satire because the intrinsic things of science fiction are all gloriously and infinitely mockable.
Douglas Adams understood science fiction but he also fundamentally understood humour and humorous writing better than anybody else out there.
As the hapless Arthur travels the galaxy he finds himself in situations that are both bizarrely exotic and oddly familiar, from alien bureaucrats to Marvin, the Paranoid Android.
I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed.
But perhaps Douglas Adams' most memorable creation was the titular Hitchhiker's Guide, the ultimate traveller's companion.
"Don't Panic", that's the first helpful or intelligible thing - anyone's said to me all day.
- Yes, that's why it sells so well.
The idea of the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, this thing that you can hold that looks probably a bit like a phone, a bit like a small iPad, that is being continually updated over sub-ether.
'Here is what to do if you want to get a lift from a Vogon, 'forget it.
' The idea of that circa 1978, you have to imagine so many things that do not yet exist for us to get there.
It's actually quite shocking and you start to wonder how much of the future really is Douglas Adams' fault.
What an extraordinary book! How did we get on board, then? The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy has become a multimedia phenomenon.
From its humble beginnings on late-night radio, it's spawned a TV series, books, a stage play, comics, a computer game and even its own towel.
I think the secret of its success is that it's more than just a spoof.
What Douglas Adams created was a genuine work of science fiction in its own right.
It takes on fairly classic themes - aliens, artificial intelligence, the big bang, the death of the universe - but it does it with an abundance of imagination and a very British sense of humour.
Earth man, the planet you inhabited was commissioned, paid for and run by the mice.
It was destroyed five minutes before the completion of the purpose for which it was built, so we have to build another one.
Mice?! Even as British listeners were chuckling at poor old Arthur, the underlying theme of The Hitchhiker's Guide, exile in space, was echoed on primetime American television.
The opening titles of the series Battlestar Galactica present an image of interstellar exodus - an entire fleet of spaceships searching for a new home.
Battlestar Galactica's characters aren't explorers, they're refugees, forced to wander the universe after the destruction of their home by their robotic enemies the Cylons.
The series traded very heavily on its spectacular space battles.
I got him on the right Its expensive special effects set a new standard for television and were designed to meet the higher expectations of viewers who'd just seen Star Wars.
But for Battlestar Galactica's creator, the veteran TV producer Glen A Larson, the series had a very particular spiritual resonance.
You see, Larson was a Mormon.
The story of his characters' quest to find a new home among the stars echoed not just the Book of Exodus but the Mormons' own journey across the 19th century American West to find sanctuary in Utah.
Forget Star Trek, this really was Wagon Train To The Stars.
But a quarter of a century later, Larson's wholesome family saga was reborn as an irresistibly dark military epic steeped in the anxieties of 21st century America.
Vipers in position.
Signal Vipers, engage fighters only.
Leave basestars to us.
Execute.
This grimmer tone was reflected in the new show's space battles, shot in a way inconceivable in the 1970s.
The cameras appear to be handheld, finding the action rather than following it, like footage from a news crew embedded on the front line.
I wanted it to be recognisable to people as something that was an outgrowth or a reinvention of the original Galactica but it was an opportunity for me to do certain things that I was interested in doing in science fiction in general, to make a more documentary-style shooting, to make it more socially relevant.
The sense of rupture and insecurity that haunts Battlestar Galactica's frightened refugees very clearly paralleled America's own national trauma.
It came on the back of something that really had been very difficult to take, on the planet, which was the destruction of the Twin Towers and the vulnerability.
And all of a sudden, here we were, doing the pilot and it really had a different feeling to it.
The possibilities were stronger and it lent itself to making this reality come to life.
And, in the strained relationship between its two central characters, Commander Adama and President Roslin, Battlestar Galactica captured the political and military divisions in a society reeling from a devastating attack.
One scene early in the series makes the tension explicit.
- What? - You plan to declare martial law? Take over the government? Of course not.
Then you do acknowledge my position as President, as duly constituted under the Articles of Colonisation? Miss Roslin, my primary objective at the present time is to repair the Galactica and continue to fight.
Cover! And I just realised if you did that show in the post-9/11 environment it would have a completely different resonance to the audience than it did in 1978.
In the War on Terror, the invasion of Iraq, a time of great debate about freedom versus security, how far would you go to safeguard a population? How far is too far? Science fiction in film and television had become all escapism and all popcorn and I love Star Wars as much as the next guy.
You know, I'm not going to bang on Star Wars but I didn't want that to be the only flavour out there.
Throughout its five-year run, Battlestar Galactica's storylines seemed to have been ripped from the front pages of the newspapers.
As its characters flee the wreckage of their societies, they face a series of impossible political and military dilemmas.
And even as the American army was fighting insurgents in Iraq, so Battlestar Galactica's heroes were turning to terrorism.
One moment stands out for its bleakness.
The refugees find an apparent safe haven, a new world to settle, but the dream turns sour when they fall under enemy occupation.
Congratulations, Sergeant.
The resistance responds with extreme measures and, as the tension builds, the story hurtles towards a shattering ending.
Congratulations, Captain, it's great to have you with us.
I'll see you soon, Nora.
From political comment to pure escapism .
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from satirical comedy to high art .
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from alien cultures to distant worlds, space stories continue to fascinate us.
Everybody ready to say goodbye to our solar system, to our galaxy? Here we go.
The latest, Christopher Nolan's film Interstellar is a gigantic spectacle with all the ambition of Kubrick's 2001.
Not only does it capture the drama and beauty of space travel, but it has a suitably grand theme about the fate of humanity and it's a reminder that the spirit of exploration has never really gone away.
The great irony is that our drive to conquer the vast expanse of space has now rather ground to a halt.
Even the excitement of the moon landings has largely fizzled out, perhaps after Star Wars and its grand spectacle the reality was always going to prove a bit of a disappointment.
But I don't think space stories will ever go away, after all, curiosity, adventure, and exploration are all part of being human and, like our predecessors, we can't help but turn our eyes to the stars.
Next time Daleks in London Kill him! .
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Body Snatchers in small town America.
SHE SCREAMS From the War Of The Worlds to District 9 .
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prepare for a close encounter with alien invaders.
Exterminate! Exterminate!