In 1964, Stanley Kubrick penned a letter to writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke suggesting they join forces to produce “the proverbial ‘really good’ science fiction movie.” A former chairman of the British Interplanetary Society and the author of many books on space travel, Clarke aided Kubrick in recruiting the experts who helped ensure that the resulting film, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), would be as technically accurate as possible for a story set more than thirty years in the future. The advances predicted included artificial intelligence, satellite communications, video conferencing, and