If you can, visit here.
It's the British Library's terrific exhibition on sci fi, or as it's sometimes rather pompously called 'speculative fiction'. It's free and runs until September.
It features everything from stories dating back to 175 AD to current bestsellers and shows that the difference between genre and what might be called 'literary' fiction is more about how libraries and bookshops lay out their wares rather than any indication of quality.
It was also fascinating to see the later C18th/19th trend for utopian sci fi; often suggesting a future rural idyll in which war, money and inequality had been banished to the history books.
It's a very telling contrast with our current attitudes towards the future. I've not done any research on this, but my gut tells me that most future-set stories being written today offer a much bleaker view.
How we got from this:
To This:
-Is something I'll leave to the inummerable cultural commentators out there.On a much cheerier note (well cheerier if you don't read the heartbreaking Goodbye Mog) there's a lovely Judith Kerr retrospective at the Museum of Childhood.
As well as original work from the likes of The Tiger Who Came Tea there are some truly beautiful childhood drawings, and well, it's all just lovely.And Leeds? I'm off there in a couple of weeks to the BBC TV Writers' Drama Festival, a 2 day event for writers, producers and directors to talk drama. The list of people attending is impressive (I'd probably go there just to hear anything Jimmy McGovern has to say) and if it's anything like last year, there was a nice sociable atmosphere.
If you're going, I'll be the fella in the geeky t-shirt, baseball boots and jeans.
Er that probably doesn't narrow it down, does it? Hopefully there'll be name badges or something.
3 comments:
SciFi silent films from the early 20th century were about trips to the moon and encountering alien kings and queens and such. I guess it didn't take much back then to get people's attention.
With toxins in the atmosphere and water below ground, the thought of men and women becoming sterile does make for good SciFi. 28 Days Later (rage virus drives the world's population to homicide) was a good scary SciFi movie, too.
My favorite scary Scifi movies as a child in the 60s usually had Frankenstein or Vincent Price in it.
Hi Goldenrod
thanks for the post. Yes, I think in the days of Melies' 'A Trip To The Moon' the spectacle of cinema itself was still in its infancy so complex plotting kind of took a back seat. Yes, love 28 Days Later too. As Alex Garland himself acknowledged, it owed a lot to 'Day Of The Triffids' but really revitalised the genre.
Vincent Price is wonderful- I'd watch him in anything. love the Roger Corman Edgar Allen Poe films- and he's great in an adaptation of 'I Am Legend' called 'The Last Man On Earth'.
I loved the book the tiger who came to tea :).Also reminds me of another chilhood fav, A lion in the meadow.
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