You had to admit that they did suggest a formidable fighting force, when no one could have sensibly expected it of them. They stood in a double row to either side of the arched entrance to the City Courthouse, from the top of the steps to the kerbside, as if forming a rather untidy guard of honour. Which, I realised, in a sense they were. There were a dozen in each rank, all women, mostly in their thirties and forties although there were a couple of young girls and a couple of grandmothers—not a great number but in the circumstances more than enough. All of them had troubled to don their Sunday best, high heels, ridiculous hats with veils, white gloves. They might have gathered for a Tupperware Party or a meeting of the Mother’s Club—indeed the thermos’s of tea were present—except the women stood silently, rigidly in their ranks, and each carried a white card about a foot square that they clutched in front of their breasts. Each had been neatly inscribed with a message—’Thou shalt not kill’, ‘Stop Conscription’, ‘Keep our boys home’—but mostly they emblazoned a common message—’Save Our Sons’.

And with the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, came the death of a remarkable genre, the fifties science fiction film, with their wooden acting, dodgy special effects, naively stupid physics and fascist ideals.
    Two splendid books that studied—indeed eulogised this matter—are Phillip Strick’s Science Fiction Movies, and David Kyle’s A Pictorial History of Science Fiction, both of which come to a similar end, completing themselves with Kubrick’s immense achievement, even though both were published over a decade later. The first offered details on those wonderful mad projects of Jack Arnold, Charles H Schneer and George Pal. The second deals mostly with the sci-fi magazine, beginning with those that published original Verne and Wells stories, and on into the fifties. I delve into both regularly, and it is always a great pleasure.
    But, suddenly, the shonky, well-intentioned efforts of the past were no longer good enough. Kubrick had upped the ante to such a high level that it left them all awed for about ten years, with only a handful of honourable efforts, until Lucas and Spielberg figured out how to make a buck out of it.