SCALE MODEL NEWS

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY  is now approaching half a century old, and even the title is dated 15 years in the past. Yet this space movie to end all space movies still holds a fascination for many, and new facts about the movie and its creators are still being unearthed. Mat Irvine:  This limited-edition book is focussed on the movie, but naturally enough, it includes a huge amount of detail that is useful for space modellers. The Making of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey  is written by the science writer and  2001  historian, Piers Bizony, and published by the highly-respected Taschen company, from Germany. It is printed in what seems to be an unusual, tall and thin, format. Then you realise that the format is actually the same as the mysterious alien monolith from  2001 , a proportional ratio of 1:4:9. The book has nine chapters, with author’s text introducing each of them. Most pages concentrate on pictures that include concept artwork, behind-the-sce...

MAT IRVINE REPORTS Ask any film enthusiast, and probably many non-enthusiasts, to name the best science-fiction movie of all time, and you will probably get 9 out of 10 voting for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey . For all those fans - and for space modellers too - comes the new book,  2001: The Lost Science by Adam K. Johnson. 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. Other 2001...