Science fiction: Voyage to the Edge of Imagination

Although it coincides with the eponymous exhibition at the Science Museum in London (6 October 2022 - 4 May 2023), the book published by Thames&Hudson is much more than an exhibition catalogue and can be read as a stand-alone book. In 280 pages and over 200 colour illustrations, Science Fiction: Voyage to the Edge of Imagination illuminates our near future with a possible common narrative.

Its author, Glyn Morgan, is also the curator of the Science Musem exhibition and a specialist in the field. He is a former editor of Vector, the Critical Journal of the British Science Fiction Association. He regularly publishes his analyses in specialist journals such as the Los Angeles Review of Books and the Science Fiction Studies Review, alongside his own publications. 

This book explores the following questions: What does science fiction tell us about our human condition? Can it help us to address the societal challenges of our time, such as climate change and social injustice, and to imagine a common future? Is science fiction simply a way of telling stories about the realities of scientific evolution? The holding of an exhibition on science fiction in a museum dedicated to science since 1857 is a first answer.

"Peoples and machines", "Travelling the Cosmos", "Communication and language", "Aliens and alienation", "Anxieties and hope": through five chapters, the authors invited by Glyn Morgan, all expert on the subjects covered, develop this fascinating premise. Science fiction can be more influential than scientific papers, it is much more than fiction. Through an exciting panel of artworks and innovations, they explore the answers science fiction has provided in modern times, and the paths it illuminates in our near future: George Méliès's 1902 A Trip to the Moon, the first creator of special effects in cinema, or Pan African Flag for the Relic Traveller by English visual artist Larry Achiampong (2017), thus rub shoulders with photographs of Alessandro Volta's first voltaic battery (1800-1820), or images of the film Frankenstein by James Whale (1031), based on Mary Shelley's novel (1818).