“Beyond the Borders — How Science Fiction examines more than just what we already know”
Review of the Science Museum, London’s, science fiction exhibition, Voyage to the Edge of Imagination.
“In the Science Museum’s Voyage to the Edge of Imagination exhibition we have a chance to explore how this genre of literature (in all its many and varied forms) speaks to us not just of the culture we’re familiar with but from across the world with ideas, forms and languages of which, taken together, no one can fully master.”
It can sound trite to say the world is bigger than our imaginations. For so many of us (myself included) science can act to make everything both smaller and somehow more overwhelming.
For most of us, remembering that every action has an equal and opposite reaction can feel like a triumph of education but understanding how vast the universe is, what a billion actually feels like or how a genome’s expression can change who we are rests on the very conceptual edge of what we’re able to hold in our minds.
Science Fiction comes into this in two ways. It allows us to use metaphor and the fantastic to explore some of the most counter-intuitive truths about the world we inhabit. It also acts as a mechanism for us to figure out the place we’re in when facing our issues head on might be too challenging, when our language or our courage or our relationships might fail us.
In that sense, even more so than the practice and representation of science itself, Science Fiction is inherently political because it deals with us as people encountering a world in which we are tiny and meaningless creatures who exist to create meaning out of our lives.
In the Science Museum’s Voyage to the Edge of Imagination exhibition we have a chance to explore how this genre of literature (in all its many and varied forms) speaks to us not just of the culture we’re familiar with but from across the world with ideas, forms and languages of which, taken together, no one can fully master.
It forces us to think about how people through time and around the world have encountered the edge of what we can know and the changes that understanding the world can cast upon us.
Science is distinct from the technologies it spawns — a fact not appreciated enough. If what types of scientific enquiry get funded and who gets to ask is deeply political, then what applications come from that knowledge is a second more complicated layer of human negotiation and cooperation.
Science Fiction sits at the junction between these practices and society, calling into question the consequences of such explorations when the mainstream may be barely aware of such subjects and their knock-on effects. For example, many worlds theory was first proposed by the physicist Hugh Everett in 1957 but it took more than fifty years for it to find its way into mainstream consciousness and that was via novels and then movies not widespread science education.
From the 1951 film The Day The Earth Stood Still right through to 2021’s Neptune Frost, a dense Afrofuturist film shot in Rwanda (and set in Burundi), SF demands we answer tough questions about what it means to be human. It can sit along all parts of the political landscape and, at its most glorious, sits on the periphery of the culture that gives it birth and dares it to think beyond its confines, to look at the world anew.
We live in a world in which vaccines can become the subject of groundless conspiracy theories and action to mitigate climate change can be opposed by people who know that their decisions will make the world less secure for their own children.
Telling stories that can reach into the meaning making architectures that are our brains is to engage in what the film critic Roger Ebert termed ‘the machine for generating empathy’.
Stories are no magic bullet for changing people’s minds but they are also the only real way to succeed in that challenge. Where we want to engage with how the world could be, about where we are and what could change, there is no way of telling those ideas like science fiction.
As a one-time physicist who has also judged the Arthur C Clarke award for science fiction I cannot think of a more profound intersection of human exploration than in seeking to understand the world and then explain what our understanding means to one another. Science needs Science Fiction to make itself human sized, to literally make itself meaningful.
The Science Museum’s theme here nails it — Science Fiction, a voyage to the edge of the imagination. It reminds us all that science and the stories we tell about it do just that — take us to cliff edge of what we know and asks us to take one step further and see what happens as we step into the unknown.
STEWART HOTSTON has had numerous short stories published as well as three novels, including the political thriller Tangle’s Game and science fiction novella The Entropy of Loss. He served as judge for the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2020 and 2021.
