Thus we have the middle-age American tourists, the ship’s captain and stewardess, the Australian traveller, the ‘Commodore’ – a wise old well-travelled head, the opportunist privateer, the journalist, the scientist, the engineer/hero and most importantly the politicians and marketing men all playing their parts in a drama which unwinds in a desolately predictable-yet-tense way.

With such a set-up, Clarke can play with human archetypes and the sci-fi becomes strictly a backdrop to the larger messages and themes. It just so happens that the ship is carrying tourists on the moon – specifically to see the ‘Mountains of Inaccessibility’ from the ‘Sea of Thirst’, a large area like a sea but consisting only of unstable dust that ebbs, flows and can be traversed like water. Essentially a stripped-down Poseidon Adventure-in-space, dealing with the ‘sinking’ of a ‘pleasure boat’ it too deals with the practicalities of living in space. Though 2001 owes most to Clarke’s work The Sentinal, the same bleakness permeates A Fall Of Moondust too.

Humans are Not Very Nice, basically… We just can’t help ourselves like Floyd we are duplicitous, smarmy and secretive. We can learn to feel contempt and boredom even for the most beautiful of sights and we value our own comfort and pleasure above all other considerations. We commodify, sanitise, bureaucractise, politicise and package experience – even an experience as profound as travelling to the moon – like it is a genetic imperative. In these moments we know that, whilst humans may reach for the stars, they’ll never change. Kubrick’s wonderfully understated images have a bleakness that a thousand of Clarke’s words couldn’t hope to convey, but which his ideas render beautifully. The idea that Pan Am will one day be running chartered flights in space, the awkwardness of providing customer service in zero gravity, the endless instructions for the toilet, the inanity and ‘plastic fantastic’-ness of it all is… well, horrific. It’s probably sacrilege to say it, but my favourite section of 2001: A Space Odyssey – or rather the part that affects me the most – is Floyd’s trip to the space station towards the start of the movie.

A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke