Review

A show for boys of every vintage - Into the Unknown: A Journey into Science Fiction Barbican, review

A 1968 postcard depicting the first Lunar cosmodrome, on display at the Barbican's Into the Unknown
A 1968 postcard depicting the first Lunar cosmodrome, on display at the Barbican's Into the Unknown Credit: Moscow Design Museum

It was Steven Spielberg who best knew how to 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 space of Into the Unknown: A Journey through Science Fiction. This is an eventful walk-through almanack for fans of sci-fi, or “scientifiction” as it was called in Amazing Stories in 1926. There’s a certain amount of text, but the main aim is to make your jaw drop like Dern’s.

It should work on boys 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 necronom from Alien III.

Leonard Nimoy in Star Trek
Leonard Nimoy in Star Trek Credit: Paramount Pictures

The terms and conditions of the genre in the show’s title allude 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. Even in the 19th century, the undiscovered universe was a colourful place. Bright pinks and greens come up a treat in the glass plates of a magic-lantern depiction of Around the World in Eighty Days from 1885. The future was already in full Technicolor, above all in the garish covers of US pulp magazines that flourished from the 1930s onwards, their titles vouchsafing stories within that will startle, amaze and astound.

And it’s not just the colours that are loud: with plenty of clips on perma-spool, this is the most decibel-enriched 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.

Lynda Carter in Wonder Woman
Lynda Carter in Wonder Woman Credit: Dara Birnbaum, Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, 1978-9, Courtesy of the artist and Electronic Arts Intermix

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. But although there’s the briefest nod to Mary Shelley’s ur-text, Frankenstein, this world appears to be owned by the male imagination.

Most of the women featured in this show are on the receiving end of horrors. Some are savaged by attackers from Mars in a gorgeous set of 1962 trading cards (which shocked American parents succeeded in getting 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 those male imaginations is 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 B.C. 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.

A 1968 postcard depicting the electronic brain of a distant world.
A 1968 postcard depicting the electronic brain of a distant world. Credit: Moscow Design Museum

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. In fact, Russia’s preoccupation predated communism. While HG Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs pondered their own versions of otherwhere, a set of images from 1914 imagines a Moscow in the 23rd century consisting of Cossacks and cranes.

Meanwhile, in America, the space race got inevitably 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 (“How to launch a new moon,” read the ad) while Seagram’s VO Canadian whisky put its logo on visions of futuristic cities.

This is 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”. The allure of book jackets is always debatable, but there are plenty of seminal titles here. They include R.U.R by Karel Čapek, the Czech author who (here uncredited) invented the term “robot”.

A July 1933 issue of Amazing Stories
A July 1933 issue of Amazing Stories

Mostly what’s on display is behind glass, but the exhibition continues elsewhere. Clips from an episode of Black Mirror – Charlie Brooker’s Twilight Zone for the digital-age – greet you at the entrance. In the Pit, sculptor Conrad Shawcross has installed a sinister metal construction with a piercing torch beam that spins on a tripod.

Younger visitors weaned on the all-you-can-eat smorgasbord of modern CGI, and the exploratory world of videogames, may be underwhelmed by all the storyboards. The 2D visual material will appeal to older nostalgists who remember a time before the internet, although even they may find final section relating to Brave New Worlds a little on the dry side.

Interactivity is confined to the recreation of a sequence from Ridley Scott’s comedy-drama The Martian, in which you tap on a keyboard to trigger changes to a wall-mounted screen display. It’s a bit underwhelming, but it does contain a telling phrase. “Really looking forward to not dying,” the screen reads at one point.

The words encapsulate all of 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

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