2001: A Space Odyssey The Lost Science Book

2001: A Space Odyssey The Lost Science Book

In the last four decades Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 has been dissected in books and theses from every conceivable angle. Until humanity actually encounters extraterrestrial intelligence, his movie will draw attention to this most tantalizing subject.

However, what is often overlooked in all of these critical studies is the almost flawless scientific façade constructed by Kubrick, Clarke, Ordway, Lange and the hundreds of engineers and scientists who contributed to the production. Author and engineer Adam Johnson has spent years accumulating information, believed to have been long since destroyed, to create a detailed and unprecedented analysis of the technology envisioned in Kubrick’s masterpiece. From British designers and model-makers to Soviet astronomers, from Canadian special effects wizards to German artists, from American spacecraft engineers and artificial intelligence scholars to French stylists, this is the Lost Science of 2001.

About the book

... Adam Johnson - also the driving force behind specialist model outfit AJA Models - has compiled and written the most detailed reference book on the movie so far, full title 2001: The Lost Science - the Frederick I. Ordway III Collection. With much material supplied by Dr Fred Ordway (more on him below), a great deal of the content has never been published before. Its 112 pages are full of detailed original plans (of which there were originally 2,400!), many of them painstakingly digitally enhanced, as the original blueprints have long-since faded. Examples of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ process are shown in the introduction.