fiction films are now commonplace but most of them deal with impossible worlds set in far-off futures, filled with death rays and weird monsters. In MGM's presentation of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, Kubrick has tried to imagine how things are really going to be a few decades from now. If computers talk in the film it is because the leading experts in the computer field in the United States and England, where the film was made, assured Kubrick that by the year 2001 computers will talk! If in 2001 the surface of the moon looks like what you'd expect it to look like from the latest rocket pictures, this is no accident, since Kubrick has been studying these pictures for the last three years to make sure that the Moon looks like the Moon. The real world of science is now so fantastic that old-fashioned science fiction movies-with space ships on strings-look tame and out of date, especially to the modern generation of moviegoers who have grown up on Sputnik, Cape Kennedy and manned space flight. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY is probably the most technically complex movie ever made. Each scene involving space flight or activity on the Moon took weeks of preparation. First Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, who co-authored the film and who is regarded as the world's most distinguished and exciting contemporary science fiction writer, studied technical reports, NASA photographs, or consulted with professionals in the field, to find out what was really known about futuristic communications or about what the Earth will look like when seen from the Moon, or how space suits will be designed thirty years from now. While these preparations were going on Kubrick's offices in the MGM studios looked something like an engineer's design room. Kubrick has a chess players instinct for organisation. (in his salad days he was a professional chess player and played for quarters in Washington Square in Manhattan), he estimated that he used to earn as much as three dollars a day playing chess, which, as