Aliens in the stacks

How do I stop a conversation at parties? By telling people I am a librarian, maintaining one of the world's largest collections of science fiction. Those not scared off by the initial confession frequently ask what a science fiction librarian actually does. The answer is that I do what any librarian does: I'm responsible for books and other media, and I deal with academics and scholars who need a particular resource. The collection in the Science Fiction Foundation Library is made up of over 30,000 books and 2000 periodical titles, including extensive runs of the "pulp" magazines of the 20s and 30s. Brought together by the Science Fiction Foundation and administered by University of Liverpool's library system, the collection is taken seriously, and it recently received a prestigious grant from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council.A more probing question, which I seldom get asked at parties, is why maintain a collection of science fiction, or SF, in the first place? To answer, we need to go back to first principles: How do you define SF? Some claim it started with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in 1818. Or with H. G. Wells in 1895. Or Thomas More's Utopia in 1516, or Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories in 1926. But as a conceptual exercise, let's forget all that and imagine a literature which has coalesced from a number of sources, including the earliest explorations of mythology. This genre would cover the fictional exploration of areas as diverse as the 19th century response to Darwin's theory of natural selection, and the post-Industrial Revolution's reaction against the effects of science and technology on society. Within this genre, one would expect utopian and dystopian speculation, in which authors play with the concept that the future may not -- will not -- be the same as the present. And of course, one would expect authors to wrestle with the idea that humanity may not be alone in the universe, using alien worlds as both real possibilities and metaphorical settings in which our current dilemmas can be examined.These areas would be fruitful sources for thought experiments in, say, the relationship between science and ethics raised by bioengineering, cloning, or nanotechnology, or literary responses to the social, political, and technological changes of the past century. It would be the literature of 'What if?' "Science fiction" or "speculative fiction" is the catch-all term for this range of different approaches. In past SF, we can see our present: John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids, for instance, was written to reflect anxieties about the future of civilization in the confused and tense years after World War II. Now, the same book is frequently interpreted as dramatizing contemporary fears about genetic modification. SF doesn't necessarily give us fair and accurate descriptions of scientists and scientific research, but it does what science itself does: It takes a situation -- say, the possibility of manipulating the human genome -- and extrapolates from it in order to bring understanding. What would a society where we could actually change the human form be like? A library of science fiction offers thousands of these thought-experiments, a gold-mine for anyone interested in how popular culture reacts to scientific ideas.Another enquiry I often get, usually from television researchers who think they have come up with an original program idea, is: "So what scientific marvels has science fiction predicted?" Which is precisely the wrong question, as the point of extrapolation is to come up with possible, not actual answers. One of my favorite stories, Rudyard Kipling's "With the Night Mail" (1905), creates a vision of 21st century air transport which is startlingly prescient in some ways, and utterly wrong in others. The effect of the story is the dislocation it gives, reminding us (as Kipling knew) that we cannot always forecast the effects of new technologies.In building a library of science fiction, you realize how much SF forms our global culture. We have copies of the biggest-selling SF magazine in the world -- and it's in Chinese. We have perhaps the only SF novels published in Ethiopia and Burkino Faso, as well as the standard classics of the field from Wells to Olaf Stapledon to Arthur C. Clarke.SF librarians are a rare breed -- I am the only one in the UK. There are others in the U.S. and Canada, and two wonderful SF museums in Switzerland and Seattle. If, as Stephen King wrote in his novel It, to be a librarian is "to come as close as any human being can to sitting in the peak-seat of eternity's engine," then to be a science fiction librarian must put me close to its engine-room.Andy Sawyer is the librarian at the SF Foundation Library and course director of the science fiction studies program at the University of Liverpool.Andy Sawyer mail@the-scientist.comLinks within this article:The University of Liverpool Libraries http://www.liv.ac.uk/library/The SF Foundation Library http://www.sfhub.ac.ukThe Science Fiction Foundation http://www.sf-foundation.com/K. Bergman, "Invasion of the clones," The Scientist, August 3, 2006. http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/24249/S. Perkowitz, "Female scientists on the big screen," The Scientist, July 7, 2006 http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/24009/S. Gallagher, "Working on 'Eleventh Hour,' "The Scientist, July 7, 2006. http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/23878/Course Director, MA in Science Fiction Studies http://www.liv.ac.uk/english/pdf/ScienceFictionStudies_MA.pdf

Aliens in the stacks

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