A bumpy but spectacular trip back to the future
Into the Unknown: A Journey into Science Fiction
It was Steven Spielberg who put a human face on the feeling of encountering the unbelievable. Nothing conveys that shock like the reaction shot of Laura Dern’s palaeontologist in Jurassic Park – her mouth gapes in sheer awe at the wondrous otherness of a diplodocus made flesh. The Dern clip features on a screen overhanging the Barbican’s exhibition of Into the Unknown: A Journey through Science Fiction, an eventful walk-through almanack for fans of sci-fi, or “scientifiction” as it was called in Amazing Stories in 1926. The main aim is to make your jaw drop like Dern’s.
It should work on jaws of every vintage. There are monster maquettes and models of modules and capsules, even if not all of them are displayed at optimal height for a stargazing 11-year-old. There are enough space suits on display to staff a mission to Mars: Leonard Nimoy’s in Star Trek, Cillian Murphy’s blingy gold all-in-one in Sunshine, John Hurt’s ragged patchwork onesie from Alien. And once you get to space, Darth Vader’s helmet awaits, alongside HR Giger’s skeletal creation from Alien III.
The show’s title alludes to fiction that is both speculative and rational: fantastical narratives, in other words, that adhere to their own internal logic. That said, there’s surprisingly little chin-stroking about the semiotics of sci-fi, nor deep investigation of the impetus that fired human imagination to conjure up what might be termed the alternative facts of other worlds.
Mostly, the emphasis is on spectacle. Bright pinks and greens come up a treat in the glass plates of a magiclantern depiction of Around the World
in Eighty Days from 1885, when the future was already in full Technicolor. On the garish covers of US pulp magazines that flourished from the 1930s, their titles vouchsafe stories that will startle, amaze and astound.
And with plenty of clips on permaspool, this is the most decibelenriched show since the screams and howls that soundtracked the British Library’s tour of the Gothic imagination in 2014. Headphones are available only for “Astro Black”, a freaky video installation looking at sci-fi through the prism of black culture.
The least shocking thing about Into the Unknown is its maleness. Sci-fi, this show underlines, is predominantly a phallocracy. The genre just happens to be having a female moment with Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale on Channel 4, while Wonder Woman, Hollywood’s first superhero movie directed by a woman, opens in cinemas. Most of the women featured here, though, are on the receiving end of horrors. Some are savaged by attackers from Mars in a gorgeous set of 1962 trading cards (which so shocked American parents that it was banned). The cover of a 1954 Galaxy magazine shows a boffin assembling a sexy semi-clad lady robot. There is a GIF of Lynda Carter’s busty Seventies Wonder Woman, but no sign of Sigourney Weaver’s ball-breaking Ripley, from the Alien films.
Chief among the male imaginations celebrated here is that of Jules Verne, a model of whose vessel Nautilus prepares to head 20,000 leagues below in the “Extraordinary Voyages” section. If Verne was concerned with how man reached these destinations, the hugely influential stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen (of One Million Years BC fame) lavishly depicted what awaited: dinosaurs, mainly, and not friendly ones. Both this and the “Space Odysseys” section are indebted to the collection of Paul G Allen, the Microsoft co-founder who hordes this sort of stuff. The Warner Bros store cupboard has also been raided.
But more intriguing and rarefied loans come from the Moscow Design Museum. Space, lest we forget, was a Soviet destination too, and the USSR produced literature to massage the fantasy, here represented by youth magazines and a glorious set of postcards.
Russia’s preoccupation predated Communism: while HG Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs in the West were pondering visions of otherwhere, a set of Russian images from 1914 imagined a 23rd-century Moscow filled with Cossacks and cranes. In America, the space race inevitably got entangled with the capitalist project. Brands brought a new literalness to the term “advertising space”. Shell let everyone know they were funding the first satellite while Seagram’s VO Canadian whisky put its logo on visions of futuristic cities.
Most of the displays in the exhibition are behind glass, but clips from an episode of Black Mirror
– Charlie Brooker’s Twilight Zone for the digital-age – greet you at the entrance, while in the Pit, sculptor Conrad Shawcross has installed a sinister metal construction with a piercing torch beam that spins on a tripod. This is, though, a history of what the future used to look like, and, being history, it has its fair share of paperwork. There is no way of jazzing up a caption such as “Selection of documents from the film Interstellar”, and the allure of a display of book jackets is always debatable, even though there are plenty of seminal titles here, among them RUR by Karel Čapek, the Czech author who (here uncredited) invented the term “robot”.
Younger visitors weaned on the all-you-can-eat smorgasbord of CGI, and the exploratory world of videogames, may be underwhelmed by the storyboards, but the 2D visual material will appeal to nostalgists who remember a time before the internet.
The exhibition encapsulates the mystery and anxiety of science fiction: the yearning to boldly go where no man has gone before – and then come back.
Until Sept 1. Tickets: 020 7638 8891; barbican.org.uk/intotheunknown