Introduction: Museums in Science Fiction, Science Fiction in Museums

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