2001: A Space Odyssey (film) essay "Odyssey of Stanley Kubrick" wrote, "Kubrick has conceived a film which in one stroke has made the whole science fiction cinema obsolete." Others credit "2001" with opening up a market for films such as "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", "Alien", "Blade Runner", "Contact", and "Interstellar", proving that big-budget "serious" science-fiction films can be commercially successful, and establishing the "sci-fi blockbuster" as a Hollywood staple. Science magazine "Discover"s blogger Stephen Cass, discussing the film's considerable impact on subsequent science fiction, writes that "the balletic spacecraft scenes set to sweeping classical music, the tarantula-soft tones of HAL 9000, and the
2001: A Space Odyssey (film) in "The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy", titled "Sense of Wonder," describes how "2001" creates a "numinous sense of wonder" by portraying a universe that inspires a sense of awe but that at the same time we feel we can understand. Christopher Palmer wrote that "the sublime and the banal" coexist in the film, as it implies that to get into space, people had to suspend the "sense of wonder" that motivated them to explore it. The influence of "2001" on subsequent filmmakers is considerable. Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and others, including many special effects technicians, discuss the