I’ve volunteered at the last minute to appear on a panel following a screening of Monsters from the Id, a documentary about 50s Sci-Fi movies and, apparently, their influence on science itself.

The filmmaker is Homer Hickam, an engineer and novelist, author of Rocket Boys, the “novelized” memoir of his rocket-obsessed post-Sputnik childhood in the West Virginia mining country. (I haven’t read it or seen the movie, October Sky, based on it, although it’s been recommended to me several times.)

So if you’re in London and pre-cgi special effects, giant irradiated insects, aliens with ray-guns and the over-arching fear of destruction raining down from above were a big part of your childhood (or maybe your parents’), come along to the Barbican on May 26th.