The broad church of science fiction

I was a lucky ducky this morning to get a sneak preview of the new science fiction exhibition at the British Library, which opens tomorrow. I've been a fan of the genre since I was a kid, so it was brilliant to see such a beautifully curated collection, including Thomas More's Utopia from 1516 and Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone from 1638, as well as modern giants like Asimov and Clarke. You can also listen to snippets from a BBC play from 1953, Journey into Space, which was the last radio show to have higher ratings than a television programme. But even more interesting was to see how much comes under the science fiction banner these days... it's not just paperbacks about aliens, but alternative histories and realities too, like Fatherland by Robert Harris. It's proof that science fiction and fantasy is finally overlapping with serious literature.

So if you have a free lunchtime or weekend anytime before 25th September then head down to the library. The Out of this World exhibition is totally free and full of fascinating insights into how people in the past imagined we might be living now (look out for the 1825 William Heath drawings tucked away at the back, which imagine the future might include a vacuum tunnel from Britain to to India). Plus you can draw your own alien, which gets projected onto the wall. Mine looks like a red cube with blue buttons.