7 - When Was Science Fiction?

Summary

Between 20 May and 25 September 2011 the British Library in London held a public exhibition devoted to SF under the rubric Out of This World: Science Fiction but Not as You Know It. The Library is a United Kingdom deposit library and was thus able to draw on an extensive collection of first editions by British publishers, including Shelley's Frankenstein and The Last Man, Bellamy's Looking Backward (the London version), Wells's The Time Machine, Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. It also houses an extensive collection of archives, for example the Ballard papers, and was able to draw on these too, so as to include, for example, a page from the annotated typescript of an early draft of The Burning World. A series of related ‘Out of This World Events’ were also organised, including, two days before the exhibition closed, a distinguished panel of speakers on ‘J. G. Ballard: Further Reflections’. The overall effect of the entire four-month event, extensively advertised both in the London press and on local public transport, remains deeply impressive. Yet, its title was, in at least one significant respect, oddly inappropriate to its content. For at no point did any exhibit actually address either ABC TV's early-1960s Out of This World anthology series, from whence the exhibition's title was taken, or Star Trek, from whence came its subtitle, in an obvious reference to Commander Spock's much misquoted line from the first of the movies: ‘It's life, Captain, but not life as we know it’ (Wise, 1979).