Some people are sniffy about science fiction. For them the genre carries the taint of embarrassment, of adolescence. Sci-fi seems synonymous with awkwardness, the preserve of spotty boys attempting to grow their first beard. It is something that we really should have grown out of.
That is a shame. As shown by Out of this World, the new exhibition at the British Library, some of our most important books can be categorised as science fiction. Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke are here, of course. But Charlotte Bronte? P. D. James? Doris Lessing? All are represented.
The exhibition almost attempts a redefinition of the genre. As it makes clear, all fiction is the art of speculation, of the imagined scenario. Science can be defined as the field of rational, explainable knowledge. Science fiction, then, is what happens when writers imagine an alternative knowledge and apply its rules to their fictional world. Unlike fantasy, science fiction requires internal consistency. You may have shrugged off the constraints of realism but you can’t just make up the rules as you go along.
Walking through Out of this World, one can see how, since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (published in 1818 and arguably the first sci-fi novel, though there is an exhibit of a story written by Lucian in the second century AD), science fiction has reflected the knowledge and preoccupations of its time. As our enthusiasm for exploration grew, novelists began to look to the stars or to the centre of the Earth, or to the few remote locations on the planet. After Darwin published On the Origin of Species, in 1859, aliens began to appear in literature; once scientists had glimpsed canals on Mars, novels began to imagine invaders from the red planet.
The paranoia of the McCarthy era in the US gave rise to stories in which alien intelligences live among us or have taken over our minds. In the 1980s, literature dealt with the threat of nuclear annihilation (here, When the Wind Blows by Raymond Briggs is juxtaposed with a government how-to pamphlet, Protect and Survive). In the present day, novelists are looking at the possibility that it will not be alien invaders or marauding sea monsters that deliver the death blow but ourselves, via pollution, sterility or climate change.
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How we will live in the future has also been a long-standing preoccupation. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward was published in 1888. It is set in 2000 and it imagines credit cards, muzak and the dangers of the stock market. Other books (notably Emile Souvestre’s Le Monde tel qu’il sera, written in 1846 and which imagines the world in 3000) have imagined everything from typewriters and submarines to social and political reform. It is even arguable that such imaginings may shape the future they describe: William Gibson used the term “cyberspace” in a short story, Burning Chrome, in 1982. Is it possible that he not only foresaw the internet but also influenced its development?
Other works have imagined alternative histories — what if Hitler had won? What if the outcome of the American Civil War had been different? — or looked at alternative realities. The existence of a “multiverse”, a universe in which more than one set of realities exist at once, was postulated in fiction long before quantum physics pointed to it as a possibility. Ditto time travel. Sci-fi has also questioned the very notion of “reality”. Think of films like The Truman Show or The Matrix — represented here by a poster.
This could hardly fail to be a fascinating exhibition. The exhibits are varied, with copies of books alongside play scripts and pages from graphic novels. There is audio, in an extract from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and video, as Margaret Atwood discusses how we became the biggest threat to our own survival. Most thrilling are glimpses into the creation of some of the work; Kazuo Ishiguro’s handwritten first draft of the opening of Never Let Me Go; a page from George Orwell’s notebook in which he lists the things he still has to include in Nineteen Eighty-Four (“Newspeak”, “War is peace, Freedom is slavery” and “Two minutes hate” among others). I shall return before the exhibition closes.
S.J. Watson is a bestselling author and clinical scientist. His first novel, Before I Go to Sleep, deals with amnesia and is available now (Doubleday, £12.99); www.sjwatson-books.com
Out of this World
The British Library, London NW1 2DB
Mon-Fri 9.30am-6pm (Tues until 8, Sat until 5), Sun 11am-5pm, until Sept 25. Free