The subtitle of the Science Museum’s exciting-sounding exhibition is all too accurate. It’s set up as a journey in space, where you queue to board an interplanetary craft and are guided through the bowels of the ship by an onscreen talking head. But it takes you to the “edge” of imagination only in that it lets you dip a toe in the marvellous worlds of sci-fi without ever truly diving in.
The show so wants to be fun that it refuses to engage with its subject, in case it does our poor heads in. Science fiction is as old as modern science, if not older: what are Leonardo da Vinci’s designs for flying machines if not medieval sci-fi? Cyrano de Bergerac, in the age of Isaac Newton, wrote a space fantasy called A Voyage to the Moon. By the 19th century, the genre was being forged by Mary Shelley and her successors. All we get of this history are two books by Jules Verne and HG Wells in a glass case, alongside an incredibly familiar still from Georges Méliès’s film A Trip to the Moon. Later, you can see Boris Karloff’s huge tattered suit from Bride of Frankenstein.
