

There's no getting around it. Science fiction provides the bedrock for pretty much all of the biggest blockbusters Hollywood is producing at the moment.

The genre has fuelled the imagination of filmmakers right the way back to Georges MÃ©liÃ¨s's A Trip to the Moon, a 9-minute black-and-white short that charted an expedition into space.

Sci-fi moved quickly as Hollywood developed new visual effects to tell vastly different stories. From the transcendent 2001: A Space Odyssey to the galaxy-hopping soap opera of Star Wars, right through to horror Alien and the thrill-ride of Gravity, the genre has proved to be more malleable than any other.

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Lucasfilm 20th Century Fox

Warner Bros.



Just this year, we've seen Marvel infuse the superhero movie with a dose of sci-fi in Guardians of the Galaxy - a movie that currently sits on top of the 2014 worldwide box office with a staggering $650 million in ticket sales.

The BFI are also launching an ambitious Days of Fear and Wonder programme this month to showcase some of the very best science fiction works across film and television.

Still to come on the big screen this year, we have penultimate Hunger Games outing Mockingjay - Part 1 and Christopher Nolan's Interstellar. The latter is an ambitious blockbuster that dispatches a group of scientists to the far side of the galaxy in a bid to save an Earth rapidly running out of natural resources.

Nolan's movie harkens back to genre classics like Stanley Kubrick's 2001 and Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind - which begs the question: What is the greatest sci-fi movie of all time?

2001? Solaris? Blade Runner? What about more recent offerings like Sunshine or Moon?

We want you to share your lists in the comments section below. We'll whittle down your choices to a manageable amount, and in time for the release of Interstellar we'll put together a poll asking you to vote for the greatest ever sci-fi film.

Sound off about your favourite sci-fi film in the comments below!

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