Science Fiction: Voyage to the Edge of the Imagination edited by Glyn Morgan

(Science Museum/Thames & Hudson, 2022)

Reviewed by Nick Hubble

Science Fiction: Voyage to the Edge of the Imagination is the companion book to the exhibition of the same name that opened at the Science Museum on 6 October 2022 and continues until (of course) 4 May 2023. There is also a programme of accompanying events, which included hosting the ceremony for the 36th annual edition of the Arthur C. Clarke Award on 26 October. That particular event, which saw copies of the shortlist on sale in the exhibition shop alongside a pretty decent range of fiction from across the field, complemented the exhibition’s understandable visual focus on juxtaposing iconic material from SF film and television, such as Iron Man’s armour suit and Hal 9000 from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, with space and cybernetic technology. This book, however, manages to combine fully the visual impact of the exhibition (by including over 200 colour illustrations) with an impressive survey of both media and books. Aside from the excellent design standards, the extent and quality of the analysis suggest that Science Fiction should appeal to an audience beyond those who’ve been to the exhibition, and remain of value for the foreseeable future.

As editor Glyn Morgan notes at the beginning of his introduction, ‘Science fiction is a near-boundless enterprise. It cannot be contained between the covers of a single book.’ This is, of course, very true and it is interesting to see how this book works its way round this problem. A few years ago, the companion book to the British Library’s SF exhibition took the form of a literary history, covering speculative writing from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. In this case, the key context is science rather than fiction (although there is some overlap of contributors with that earlier volume). The preface to the book by Ian Blatchford, Director of the Science Museum, answers the question of why a science museum would focus on SF by arguing that SF is ‘so much more than fiction’. He goes on to suggest that in the same way climate modellers explore different possible future scenarios, SF helps us imagine and deal with what is to come. In other words, as Nalo Hopkinson puts it in a second preface, SF is ‘the literature of social and technological change’. Therefore, as Morgan explains, ‘Science, society and [SF] are in constant conversation, trading ideas and hypotheticals, making suggestions and corrections’ and the chapters in the book are consequently organised in five sections which chart such ‘feedback loops, conversations and collaborations’. The potential range of such ‘conversations’ is illustrated by the double spread on which this passage is written, including pictures of the cover and disc of ‘The Sounds of Earth’ Golden Record attached to the Voyager space probes and a collage by Pamela Zoline, which was originally published in the July 1967 issue of New Worlds as part of her story, ‘The Heat Death of the Universe’.

The five sections, each of which contains two chapters, are ‘People and Machines’, ‘Travelling the Cosmos’, ‘Communications and Language’, ‘Aliens and Alienation’ and ‘Anxieties and Hopes’. There isn’t space in this review to discuss these in detail and so I will here briefly discuss the first section to give some idea of how it thematically coheres. Sherryl Vint’s ‘People as Machines/Machine People’ begins with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), often called the first SF novel, linking the ethical questions raised by the Creature—including the challenge to class-based inequality—to representations of the android/robot in texts ranging from Janelle Monáe’s 2018 album Dirty Computer back to Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (1921) and forward again to Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein: A Love Story (2019). An extracted quote from Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1985) proclaims: ‘The boundary between [SF] and social reality is an illusion.’ As if to prove this point, Colin Milburn’s ‘In the Loop’, the next chapter, begins with a discussion of how the developer of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, took inspiration from the 1965 short story ‘Dial ‘F’ For Frankenstein’ by Arthur C. Clarke, who was himself the originator of the concept of geosynchronous communications satellites. Similar connections throughout the rest of the book really do deliver on Morgan’s promise of ‘feedback loops’ between science, society and SF, and allow readers to form their own chains of association.

Each section also includes an author interview. In order, Chen Qiufan talks about AI, ecology, and the limits of ‘Chinese SF’ as a label; Charlie Jane Anders discusses tidally locked planets, why SF engages queer communities, and how it has the potential to help people deal with the rapid and bewildering change that is coming; Vandana Singh speaks eloquently about feeling like an alien after coming from India to the US as a graduate student and how the transdisciplinary lens of SF is a great tool for reconceptualising climate change; Tade Thompson is wonderfully blunt about the shortcomings of the term ‘hard SF’, how medicine is handled poorly in SF, and white Western culture’s ‘selective amnesia’ with respect to African SF; Kim Stanley Robinson describes ‘the kitchen sink approach’ to writing about climate change, how ‘future history’ exists between near-future extrapolation and far-future speculation, and instances of SF changing the culture, such as the post-apocalyptic novels of the 1950s helping create the climate for the nuclear test ban treaty. This is a great set of writers to highlight to new, or, indeed, old readerships.

Overall, far from just a glossy tie-in to the exhibition, this book is a hugely ambitious attempt to show SF for what it is in 2022: the culturally dominant global literary and media form for an age of unprecedented social and scientific change.

Review from BSFA Review 19 - Download your copy here.