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.