Introduction: Museums in Science Fiction, Science Fiction in Museums
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Introduction: Museums in Science Fiction, Science Fiction in Museums
“It’s really hard running a natural history museum on Gora.”“Because visitors are so unpredictable?”“No, because there’s no life here.”1
When we think of museums and science fiction (sf), we might first think of museums in science fiction. H. G. Wells’s Palace of Green Porcelain (from The Time Machine, 1895), is perhaps the most famous example, but it certainly is not the last. Becky Chambers’s recent The Galaxy, and the Ground Within (2021) shows that museums continue to be useful tools for sf writers. In the above-quoted exchange, Chambers is perhaps reflecting on her wider project of exploring human ideas without human subjects—nearly the entire cast of this novel is alien—and though her use of the museum is very different from Wells’s (which is the subject of Jordan Kistler’s article in this issue), the museum turns out to be just as useful for her speculative ends as it was for Wells’s at the end of the nineteenth century.
The museum, then, remains a valuable tool for sf authors. If we look carefully, though, we can also trace an equally important line of influence travelling in the opposite direction. Museums are constantly engaging with the ideas tabled by sf in all sorts of ways—not least, commercially—and the influence of imaginative writing over the display of the actual world is also the subject of this special issue. In this brief introduction, we outline a few recent examples of the [End Page 247] museum in science fiction, discuss some practical and theoretical engagements with science fiction in museums, and outline the essays that will, we hope, stimulate further critical discussion on this topic.
Museums in Recent Science Fiction
Chambers’s novel is set entirely on Gora, a barren fictitious planet whose only function is as a layover point. Stranded at a refuelling station on the planet’s surface by events in the atmosphere overhead, the traveller Roveg kills some time in the Goran Natural History Museum, which is actually a collection of rocks and ephemera maintained by Tupo, child of the refuelling station’s proprietor.
Tupo is a Laru adolescent, and as such is yet to choose a gender. Surly and dutiful when encountered in the other parts of xyr mother’s establishment, xe comes bounding in with enthusiasm when xe sees Roveg, a male Quelin adult, entering the museum: “Not a lot of people come in here, so I got excited.”2 Despite being of a very different species and temperament to Tupo, Roveg recognizes that his intention to “simply take a peek at the place” will no longer do: “Now, he had but one goal, and that was to give his full, undivided attention to the head curator.”3
Like many things in Chambers’s world, the Goran Natural History Museum functions as a venue for cultural interchange for all the superficially wrong reasons. It is not because Roveg reads the labels (which, he admits to himself, he will only skim) or because Tupo tells him anything new about Goran or natural history (which xe does not) that he leaves the museum slightly changed. Rather, it is because he finds in the collection an object of his own people—a Quelin poem stone—whose significance is completely unknown to Tupo. An exile, Roveg has reasons of his own for finding an unexpected encounter with his people’s literature moving. Tupo and xyr collection, meanwhile, are enriched by Roveg’s lengthy account of Quelin writing. And the whole episode, of course, affords Chambers the opportunity to teach her actual-world readers more about her characters and her universe. It is precisely because Tupo’s museum is bad (and because Roveg’s mind is open) that it does what a good museum should: bring people together with stories about the world.
Narrating the world is even more instrumentally desirable in The Outer Wilds (2019), a videogame written by Kelsey Beachum and published by Mobius Digital and Annapurna. This game is set in a tiny solar system, only a few kilometres across—its single...
