We teamed up with the Arthur C Clarke Award once again as part of our Science Fiction: Voyage to the Edge of Imagination exhibition celebrations and earlier this month announced the highly anticipated shortlist for the 2023 Arthur C. Clarke Award science fiction book of the year. If that wasn’t enough, we are now offering four lucky bookworms for an exciting giveaway: win all six shortlisted novels AND last year’s winning book! A perfect opportunity to discover some new favourite authors and whole new worlds, enter the giveaway by Monday 10 July to be in with a chance to walk away with: DEEP W ..read more

As Doctor Who celebrates the landmark of its 60th anniversary, it seems appropriate for the Science Museum to mark the occasion with an object which celebrates the fans who sustained this iconic show through its many highs and lows. Fans are the lifeblood of any creative endeavour, but this is particularly powerful point for science fiction: were it not for the continued enthusiasm from fans then Doctor Who might have died never to be regenerated after initially leaving the air in 1989, or after the underperforming TV-movie in 1996 (starring the criminally underrated Paul McGann).  Exampl ..read more

The Deep Blue supercomputer made history when it won its chess matches against Garry Kasparov, the reigning world champion. Today, you can play against computer programs, called “chess engines”, that would trounce Deep Blue and are widely available online. IBM Watson, which once won a game of the quiz show Jeopardy! against human champions, streamlines and automates tasks – and can even create recipes for you. You can generate art and even ask AI to generate text for you. How did computers get this good? How do these world-changing inventions work? And what comes next? Since machines could fir ..read more

Like a comet whose orbit brings it into contact with planet Earth once a year, the announcement of a new Clarke Award shortlist is (probably) one of the most anticipated moments in the UK science fiction calendar. Many choose to look upon its arrival with a sense of wonder; some experience only superstitious omens of science fiction’s doom. Others, perhaps more sensibly, see it mostly as an opportunity to read more books and discover new favourite authors! Whichever camp you subscribe to, hopefully you will agree there is much to excite the imagination in this our 37th award shortlist year. If ..read more

As the curator of the museum’s Science Fiction exhibition, it will come as no surprise that I am a strong proponent of the idea that science is an important and fruitful stimulant of our creative imagination. A recent publication captures the truth of that idea by using the work of CERN as its imaginative fuel. Collision: Stories from the Science of CERN, is a collection of thirteen short stories inspired by one of the most ambitious scientific experiments in human history – the vast complex of the Large Hadron Collider which lies a hundred metres below the French-Swiss border and seeks to ans ..read more

Star Wars is a science fiction franchise like no other, dominating the cultural landscape in cinemas, streaming, video games, theme parks and beyond. Unlike some science fiction, Star Wars is not a universe which prioritises starting from a scientific premise, it’s a spacefaring adventure series full of heroic archetypes. It is, ungenerously perhaps, sometimes referred to as “wizards in space”. But actually, like all science fiction, Star Wars is full of interesting ideas which speak to scientific and technological issues here on Earth. Our Science Director, Roger Highfield, has already writte ..read more

Our mission is to inspire the next generation with science and every purchase (large or small) made on our online shop will make a huge difference. Here are some of our can’t-miss items: Science fiction gifts                           sCIENCE FICTION: VOYAGE TO THE EDGE OF IMAGINATION BOOK £30.00 Read the exhibition! To accompany our blockbuster Science Fiction exhibition, we have a gorgeous book published by Thames & Hudson and edited by our very own Glyn Morgan! Across five chapters – and drawing on a wide range of example ..read more

The X Files has become a cultural touchstone. Starting in 1993 it’s 218 episodes over 11 seasons and 2 feature length films, broke the mould. Its unique aesthetic and complex narrative arcs paved the way for many of the shows we now (binge) watch. Gillian Anderson as FBI Special Agent Dana Scully, a role that Anderson won an Emmy for in 1997 The show followed fictional FBI agents Dana Scully, played by Gillian Anderson, and Fox Mulder, played by David Duchovny, investigating the paranormal. They unravelled alien conspiracies and confronted monsters, everything from half man/half flukeworms to ..read more

I had read Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ so I knew what was happening: I was turning into a mosquito. She bit me at a writers festival. I’d just started working on a novel about interspecies communication and this mosquito shared a disease with me called chikungunya – meaning, in Kimakonde, ‘that which bends up’, for the pained and twisted state of its victims. Australian friends, unable to pronounce the word, would call it ‘chicken dinner’. Either way, my skin peeled off, translucent as wings. The fever sent me delirious – I saw the world insect. My body stayed arthritic and twisted, not quite huma ..read more

Teams across Wroughton and London took on the challenge of conserving a Cyberman and Dalek. Conservators Sophie Croft and Ruth Nightingale detail their personal encounters with the formidable foes.  Cyberman: A 1980s Suit fit for a Cyborg  by Sophie Croft  Complete with silver-painted boiler suit, cricket gloves, rubber army boots and infamous side-handled fibre glass helmet, the Cyberman is a sight to behold. Produced in 1988 for the ‘Silver Nemesis’ serial, this member of the Cyber-fleet battled the Doctor in the grounds of Windsor Castle. Cyberman costume as used in the T.V ..read more