Science Fiction has an image problem. Its readers are ghettoised as strange men with beards; classic texts are dismissed as ‘not proper literature’. A new exhibition at the British Library seeks to rehabilitate this most maligned of genres.

The curators of Out Of This World are chiefly concerned with reincorporating SF into the mainstream of literary history. We begin with Lucian of Samosata’s True History (c170AD), and then trawl through tales of strange foreign lands, extraordinary voyages and terrible monsters, taking in some more recognisably SF notions – Hollow Earth, Percival Lowell’s ancient, dying Martian world – along the way.

It’s a broad, but also limited, conception of SF: speculative fiction concerned with an imagined other. To give this loose collection of works some shape, the curators have grouped them by theme, by what the authors used their imagined others for. So we get sections on SF as satire written by the likes of Jonathan Swift; SF as a way of thinking about society’s organisation – Thomas More's Utopia, for example; SF as expressing a fear of invasion, as in the popular 1871 anti-German serial The Battle of Dorking; SF as Ballardian warning of the effects of technological change on the human psyche. In their quest for relevance the curators also make a rare concession to actual science, highlighting instances of authors who helped inspire or shape progress: the Russian writer and scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky is considered one of the founding fathers of rocketry; William Gibson has been widely credited with the invention of cyberspace.

This history of alterity throws up some entertaining details. The apocalypse section includes “How Will The World End?” (Pearson’s Magazine, 1900), Herbert Fyfe’s sea monster invasion nightmare, complete with illustration of an attacking giant lobster. It would have been fun to be fooled – as many were, during the 1835 Great Moon Hoax – by the New York Sun's reports of bat-winged humanoids on the moon. Arthur C Clarke’s story of Tibetan monks who, believing that the Universe was created so that they could write out all God’s nine billion names, hire a couple of sceptical Westerners to install a computer to get the job done quick – and so speed up the end of the world (“The Nine Billion Names of God”, 1953) – is said to have made even the Dalai Lama laugh. And I never knew that Bovril got its name from Vril, an energy fluid supporting a subterranean master race in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871), or that Bertrand Russell wrote a SF short story collection called Nightmares (1954).

But you have to work through a lot of text to get at these nuggets. The exhibition is, essentially, a roomful of books in glass cases, with the contents of each briefly summarised in explanatory panels. While this might appeal to book fetishists, the information would be more easily conveyed were it presented in book form itself. That way you wouldn’t be constantly struggling to block out the platitudes spouted by talking heads on a video loop, or the sounds of a visiting women’s creative writing group all loudly finding their inner voices. There are audio and film clips, but – with the exception of the fantastical Martian costumes of Aelita (1924), and Marvin the Paranoid Android's circular argument with a mattress – these rarely add much. They feel like afterthoughts, a half-hearted attempt to jazz things up; as do sculptures of a UFO crashed into a bookshelf and a man falling from a giant lampshade. What might have worked better is more examples of the SF radio plays, films and TV shows that developed with the fiction, and without which this feels rather like one side of a conversation (Doctor Who is a rare inclusion; presumably the curators thought it had more mainstream cachet than, say, Star Trek).

So preoccupied is Out Of This World with proving SF’s relevance and historical antecedents that it concentrates on the known and the obvious and loses sight of what most would consider the genre’s most important elements. There are endless references to HG Wells – no doubt judged a respectable literary figure – but no explicit discussion of SF’s mid-century Golden Age or the enthusiasm for science it was inspired by. Hard SF gets hardly a look in, and while currently fashionable Victorian-influenced steampunk gets its own display case, other critical stages in the evolution of the genre – Michael Moorcock and New World in the Sixties, for example – are glossed over or ignored altogether. The imaginary worlds of the Brontës, interesting enough to Brontë fans but hardly central to SF development, are given more space than William Gibson. The curators seem unwilling to admit that SF is a genre at all, and any suggestion of embarrassing, intimidating geekery has been rigorously expunged. SF can seem niche and impenetrable, but that's why this exhibition could have been important – this was a chance to open a world up to us, show us its eccentricities and mysteries, its fashions and fascinations.

With its emphasis on books written before the term science fiction was invented, Out of This World fails to capture the genre’s dynamism, the heady excitement of the strange, the futuristic and the cosmic. To an extent this is a problem with the format; the accompanying programme of events looks like a more interesting examination of where SF is now and what it might do. But this is a timid exhibition and a missed opportunity, and it manages to reduce SF to little more than historical whimsy.


Out Of This World: Science Fiction but not as you know it runs at the British Library until 25 September. Entry is free. For visiting information see the Library's website.