Museum Pieces

Science fiction is a genre that looks to the future and revels in technological advances. It nonetheless has an ongoing and multi-levelled dialogue with the arts, and with history in particular. Here I take a look at the relationship between science fiction, science and some of the strongest bastions of the past: museums.

[Note: In the interest of length I’m going to keep this focussed on museums which are primarily the repositories of historical artefacts, rather than primarily art galleries or libraries, on this occasion.]

Memories of times past

Museums are traditionally repositories of distant history, with an intimate relationship with time. It’s perhaps small surprise that some of the earliest and most evocative descriptions of museums in science fiction are associated with stories of the distant future, and time travel in particular. Proto-SF writers of the late nineteenth century recognised the ability of the genre to reflect on the culture of the current time by looking back on it from some hypothetical future.

Amongst the first to do so was William Morris, better known as a leading advocate of the Arts and Crafts movement and philosophy. His novel News from Nowhere was published in 1890. It followed a man who woke one day to find himself in a Utopian future. Through the eyes of this respectable Victorian gentleman, we see how Morris imagines a society might be better run, in a de-urbanised, de-industrialised and collective manner. Seeking familiar ground, and striving to understand how his own world could change into the new one to which he has awakened, the narrator seeks out an elderly retired librarian, living in the run-down remnants of the now-largely ignored British Museum, and quizzes him about the transition.

This is a future society so content and satisfied with its present that it sees little value in studying what it considers to be a barbaric and incomprehensible past. Despite that, it continues to preserve the museum collections and archives, despite it’s opinion of the museum building itself:
“It is rather an ugly old building, isn’t it? Many people have wanted to pull it down and rebuild it: and perhaps if work does really get scarce we may yet do so.”

A similar approach can be found in the near-contemporary In the Year Ten Thousand by William Harben, first published in Arena in 1892, and published in book form in 1917. Rather than a time traveller, Harben tells of the history of humanity from the point of view of an elderly man educating his grandson in a future utopia. Using a museum - and the now-unfamiliar books stored there - as a demonstration tool, he explains how society was first cured of physical ailments by becoming vegetarian and then of spiritual ailments, as humans became telepathic and immortal.

Soon thereafter, H G Wells used the same basic premise as William Morris in his The Time Machine (novel, 1895). Disoriented by his displacement into the future, Wells’ time traveller seeks knowledge in a museum which lays out the way in which the world of the year Eight Hundred and Two Thousand diverged from his own. While the earlier stories had been utopian and focussed on the attainment of well-being by the future populace, Wells takes a more cynical approach. His time traveller is interested primarily in the future history of technology, but finds only ruin and decay, and unlike the utopias of earlier authors, the circumstances in which he finds himself are far from perfect, with the two races of future man, Eloi and Morlock, both degenerate in different ways.

The narrator describes the large museum he discovers, dubbed the Palace of Green Porcelain as a “latter-day South Kensington” (referencing the complex of major museums in central London) and comments that:
“To judge from the size of the place, this Palace of Green Porcelain had a great deal more in it than a Gallery of Palæontology; possibly historical galleries; it might be, even a library!”

Indeed, Wells describes his narrator exploring displays of minerals, machinery and chemistry, as well as other glimpses of the interval that bridged his own time and this time’s deep past. Unfortunately, on discovering the library he finds it in a state of deep decay.

“Had I been a literary man I might, perhaps, have moralised upon the futility of all ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck me with keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to which this sombre wilderness of rotting paper testified. At the time I will confess that I thought chiefly of the Philosophical Transactions and my own seventeen papers upon physical optics.”

Wells’ time traveller doesn’t have an opportunity to linger in the Palace of Green Porcelain very long, being driven by the need to confront the morlocks and recover his machine. The incident nonetheless emphasises the indifference of the Eloi to their past, the gulf between them and the traveller, and - as his contemplation of the library demonstrates - the ultimate futility of trying to preserve knowledge beyond the limit of understanding.

After the End

Wells’ dystopia is far distant and results from slow evolution, but museums have also been used as a tool for familiarisation with the past in other dystopian situations - those which follow apocalyptic disasters. 

The mid-twentieth century was well supplied with post-apocalyptic fiction, much of it based on nuclear holocaust. Amongst these is Poul Anderson’s The Vault of the Ages. This is set five centuries after a nuclear burn, in a society in which the ruins of the past are considered taboo, and only lived in (and mined for refined metals) by outcasts. The titular cache of technology, found buried in one ruined city, serves as a cross between a museum and a time capsule. It was, in fact, deliberately planned as a teaching aid to coach its inheritors towards a revival of civilisation. It barely survives long enough for that to occur, as it becomes the focal point of a conflict between populations being displaced by climate change.

A E Van Vogt was a little less optimistic about the basic altruism of humanity. In The Monster (short story, Astounding Stories, Aug 1948), he describes an alien expedition to a long-ruined Earth. In an attempt to understand the vanished inhabitants, and most importantly what killed them, they discover a museum and use their own technology to revive human remains found there. The museum gives them access to an ancient Egyptian, a man of the twentieth century and two from our future. The first of these is able to use the technology in the museum to note both that it was far in advance of our own and also far beyond his own.

The second future revivee rapidly escapes, demonstrating enormous mental power, and presents an immediate threat to the alien Ganae’s plans to settle Earth, and to the aliens themselves. Eventually he reveals that the Earth’s life was wiped out by a “nucleonic storm” - a space phenomenon, rather than anything native, but their hopes for settlement are still dashed.

The role of the museum here is maybe not central, but it is certainly telling - it establishes the passage through time both of Earth’s lost civilisation and of the aliens as they investigate it. It is also clear that both human anthropology and novel or historic technologies are preserved side by side in a comprehensive and structured way.

A slightly different use of a museum for guiding the protagonists through a lost Earth of times past can be found in the 1981 radio drama Earthsearch. In this drama series, written by James Follett for the BBC, a small group of human children are raised by rogue AI who have killed the crew of their exploration ship (including the children’s parents), and kept the children sexually immature in an attempt to better control them. However the damaged AI have lost any knowledge of relativistic time dilation, and so the whole group are astonished on returning to their home solar system to find a million years passed since the ship’s departure and Earth missing. Finding the Moon intact, the crew visit First Footprint City on Luna and are guided to a museum at the original human landing site.

This museum not only provides an orientation for the young crewpeople, recapping the history of the last million years of humanity, but also for the listener, since it becomes increasingly clear in the course of this visit that the Earth being discussed has a different history to our own. Interestingly, in this case, the museum has been deliberately left to inform aliens of the vanished Earth’s glorious history - but also as a trap to destroy any alien who seeks to find the relocated planet.

A Clash of Cultures

As a number of authors have noted, orienting characters (or science fiction audiences) in time requires at least some degree of common ground in terms of the meaning of displays and understanding of cultural and technological development. It also can lead to friction where cultural expectations come into conflict. This is particularly true where the museum is intended to record or commemorate events that occurred within living memory.

An interesting and relatively recent story to explore this is The Museum of Modern Warfare by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (short story, 2015). This follows the journey of a multi-lingual human diplomat, returning to a world where she fought in a traumatic war some years before. The natives of this world have built a museum to commemorate the battle on their territory, and permit only veterans to visit its more important areas - some of whom have complained over the content. The Honor Room proves to be a display in which the dead of both sides, lost on the battlefield, are restored to the semblance of life and posed as tableaux. Initially horrified, the ambassador is able to read the information in its original tongue, understand its context and recognises that the display is meant to honour the lost and to be a healing force. She identifies that cultural differences in respectful ways of treating deceased individuals are at the root of a misunderstanding.

The museum is intended to horrify, but horrify regarding the realities of war than than as a macabre or deliberate insult.

By contrast, the “museums” in Robert William Moore’s short story Be It Ever Thus (short story, Fantastic Universe, Jan 1954) are clearly presenting a one sided picture. The Earth in this story has been invaded by aliens, a generation or more earlier, and most of the planet is occupied, with humanity wiped out. Only in Museums are human populations permitted to survive, confined in the preserved ruins of their old cities. They are subject to sightseeing by alien visitors and discipline from alien overseers. As we’re told,

“The senior class from the Star Institute of Advanced Science was scheduled to go through the Museum of the Conquered and observe the remnants of the race that had once ruled this planet. There were many such museums maintained for the purpose of allowing the people to see the greatness their ancestors had displayed in conquering this world and also to demonstrate how thorough and how complete that conquest had been. Perhaps the museums had other reasons for existing, but the authorities did not reveal these reasons. Visiting such a museum was part of the exercises of every graduating class.”

It’s strongly implied that the museums exist more as a way of suppressing the surviving human remnants than recording the past, although the alien guide also points out ruined buildings as a record of the glorious alien invasion. This is a museum as imposition and control - although as the story proceeds it is clear that the human inmates are not as passive as they might initially appear.

A more traditional museum, but still an imposition, can be found in the Doctor Who serial "The Space Museum" (TV, 1965). The First Doctor and his companions arrive on a barren and ruined planet, Xeros, finding a bizarre array of spaceships from different epochs, and enter a nearby building to find that it is a museum. Unlike many of the examples above, this museum appears to focus on technologies, containing examples of a range of pieces equipment (including those encountered by the travellers on their previous journeys). While initially delighted to encounter the museum, the Doctor and his companions discover themselves frozen and mounted as museum exhibits at some future (but not very distant) time.

In working to avoid that fate, and after some time-space-displacement confusion, the group learn that the museum contains two groups of people. The museum has been built and is governed by the alien Moroks, while manual labour is carried out by young adult members of the indigenous Xeron people. These were enslaved as children when the Moroks invaded, wiped out the rest of their planet and decided to build the museum to demonstrate the “glorious conquests” of the Morok race [1]. Unsurprisingly, the Doctor and his companions side with the Xerons in overthrowing their conquerors, leaving the fate of the museum itself uncertain, but at least escaping a future as museum exhibits.

The Doctor’s ambivalent relationship with museums continued into the modern era. Christopher Ecclestone’s Ninth Doctor encountered a billionaire egomaniac’s private museum of alien technology in the episode “Dalek” (TV episode, 2005). Its owner, Henry van Statten, not only maintains galleries of display-cased alien artefacts, but also retro-engineers innovations from them and is determined to add both a Dalek and the Doctor (both believed to be the last of their species, and thus unique specimens) to his collection.

A few years later, on the other hand, Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor took his companion Amy to the Delirium Archive - “the biggest museum ever!” - simply to enjoy it and shows a childish delight in the technology and artefacts he finds there (TV episode, “The Time of Angels”, 2010). Finding a message carved into a spaceship black box, sealed in one of the display cases, the Doctor has no problem with snatching the artefact and fleeing the museum. The Doctor and Amy are thus launched on an adventure, but not before the message’s sender, River Song, comments that:

“Two things always guaranteed to turn up in a museum: the home box of a category four star liner and, sooner or later, him. It's how he keeps score.”

The concept that living specimens including humans (or Time Lords) could be collected and preserved as museum exhibits has a long history in science fiction, and includes other examples such as Stopover Planet (short story, Robert E Gilbert in Imagination, Aug 1953) and Knock (two sentence short story, Fredric Brown in Thrilling Wonder Stories, Dec 1958, as adapted for radio by Ernest Kinoy for Dimension-X and X-Minus-One). It rests on an (often unconscious) assumption of superiority by the collectors, which diminishes or entirely neglects the rights of the collectees or their owners.

It also has echoes, albeit more thoughtful ones, in examples such as Arthur C Clarke’s Childhood’s End (novel, 1953). Here the alien Overseers are intent on collecting artefacts and animal specimens from a resentful Earth for a museum on their home planet. It only gradually becomes clear that this is a sombre effort to preserve humanity’s culture, in anticipation of its eventual extinction and evolution into a very different gestalt lifeform [2]. The sole surviving human eventually sees this record, finding the same mixture of technologies and culture seen in other examples:

“So this was the exhibit for Earth. They walked for a few meters past a beautiful model of Paris, past art treasures from a dozen centuries grouped incongruously together, past modern calculating machines and paleolithic axes, past television receivers and Hero of Alexandria’s steam turbine.”

Forgotten Technologies

While museums can act as mechanisms for worldbuilding and orientation, or as commentary on the role of cultural assumptions and asymmetries, they can also interact more directly with discussions of technology and technological advancement. A recurring theme of museums in science fiction is their role as a repository of technologies that have passed out of use - and the importance of that role in situations where ancient technologies may be better matched to a challenge than more complex or recent innovations.

In addition to the post-apocalyptic recovery genre already discussed, this has appeared prominently in SF in the context of space transport. Murray Leinster’s novel The Last Spaceship follows the adventures of a man who has been rejected and shunned by his tyrannical society. Crucially, in this distant future, all travel is via matter transportation, and the protagonist is aware that discontents like himself are automatically diverted to a barren prison. He opts instead to escape his planet aboard a two hundred year old spaceship which had been constructed by his grandfather, and loaned as a museum exhibit - but which was still his own property. This last operative spaceship gives him (and his girlfriend) not only liberty, but also the freedom to explore beyond the bounds of the rigid system (both in terms of society and transmat-network).

Also seeking to overcome the limitations of a transmat system are the characters in early Doctor Who serial "The Seeds of Death" (TV serial, 1969). The Second Doctor, and companions Zoe and Jamie arrive at a private museum of spaceflight. Its owner, rocket designer Professor Eldred, has faced years of ridicule and is unimpressed by his trespassers’ claim to be interested:

“Interested? In Professor Eldred and his antiquated machines? Come for a good laugh, I suppose, like the rest of them.”

The Doctor finds this shocking:

“Laugh? You mean people laugh at all this? Why, it’s a magnificent exhibition.”

As Eldred explains though, human aspirations for space travel stopped at the Moon. Again, all travel is via matter transportation, controlled by a moonbase. However, when this base is taken over by the Ice Warriors, the result is infrastructure collapse and imminent world famine. As a result, the Second Doctor and his allies have no choice but to raid Eldred’s museum collection and plans for old fashioned chemical rockets, in order to try to reach the Moon and put matters right. The Doctor leaves the characters arguing over returning to T-Mat or maintenance of auxiliary rockets, but the implication is that the experience reverses humanity’s overdependence on T-Mat and sets them back on a course into deep space.

A similar approach is needed to reach Venus in the 1950 comic serial Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future. The untitled opening story (sometimes described as “The Venus Campaign” or “Voyage to Venus”) describes a number of exploration ships exploding on the approach to Venus, where they desperately hope to find food supplies for starving Earth. Dare eventually realises that the explosions may be linked to the form of broadcast power used by space vehicles in this future. To cross the “death zone” he and his colleagues must recover and learn to fly chemical rocket technology sourced from museums, albeit building a new craft. 

While these are distant futures, Stephen Baxter stayed closer to the current day in his novel Titan. This story about a NASA in decline in the face of an increasingly science-sceptic government regime culminates in the launching of a mission to Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. This mission is a last throw of the dice. It not only uses all of NASA’s existing resources in the novel but also requires the reclaiming, refurbishment and reuse of a wide range of space vehicles - from shuttles to launchers - which have long since been deactivated and mounted as museum pieces or gate guardians. This includes reclaiming the NASA Space Shuttle Discovery, famously donated to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

In each of these cases the museum is used as a source, from which technology can be recovered when needed. In each case, there is an advantage to be derived from returning to a technology considered to be outdated and obsolete [3], when the resources or circumstances are no longer right for its more specialised replacement.

Future aspirations

The Smithsonian Air and Space Museum may have lost an exhibit in Baxter’s Titan, but it gained one in one of the more memorable science fiction stories to have been set in a museum. 

Farewell to the Master is a short story by Harry Bates, which appeared in Astounding Science Fiction in October 1940. Best known as the story which inspired the classic film The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), its original plot is somewhat different. The story is set in a new wing of the Smithsonian which has been extended out to enclose an alien spacecraft and the giant, apparently inactive robot standing immediately outside it. This marks the location in Washington DC Capitol where an alien race first tried to make contact - and where the humanoid alien Klaatu who stepped out was shot dead by a deranged individual convinced he was a devil. The robot Gnut froze and has been frozen ever since, and the museum wing is a memorial to the event, an acknowledgement of the culpability of humanity and an attempt to educate visitors in the hopes of preventing another such tragedy in the future.

In the story, a press photographer, Cliff Sutherland, is comparing photographs taken on different days and realises that the robot may have moved fractionally between them. Concealing himself in the museum’s scientific research laboratory, he remains overnight, and discovers that after dark the robot is working on a project of his own within the spaceship - apparently creating duplicates of living creatures. After a couple of fraught nights of chaotic activity (including a military siege of the museum!), this proves to be an effort to revive the long-since buried alien ambassador.

Unlike in the film (where “Gort” is anthropoid only in shape, as if space-suit clad), the robot Gnut has the semblance of a finely crafted sculpture of a loincloth-clad man. Eventually he takes his leave. However, while he remains, the briefing tape played in the museum wing (as written by Bates) welcomes visitors to the Interplanetary Wing and narrates this history and the failure of scientists to investigate the robot or the ship, before concluding: “Look well, for before you stand stark symbols of the achievement, mystery and frailty of the human race.”

This use of a museum has echoes of Rusch’s Museum of Modern Warfare but also highlights the potential uses of museums as aspirational spaces, preserving ideas and conceptions of the future as well as records of the past. Museums around the world, and particularly those with a focus on science and technology have regularly engaged with science fiction as a way of contextualising potentialities, rendering the relationship with the genre bi-directional.

The Smithsonian Air and Space Museum may not have built a wing to house Klaatu’s spaceship, but its collection does house the original filming model of the USS Enterprise from television series Star Trek, and the mothership from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, as well as memorabilia relating to the science fiction movie Transformers 2 (which was filmed, in part, at the Udvar-Hazy Center annex to the museum [4]). It has also hosted exhibits dedicated to science fiction, including the Marvel Cinematic Universe character Captain America.

Similarly, London’s Science Museum routinely engages with popular media representations of science, with a number of relevant articles in its collection. Its past exhibitions have included a number inspired by or focussing on the futuristic visions in SF, and as recently as 2023, it hosted the major exhibit Science Fiction: Voyage to the Edge of the Imagination, which combined exhibits from science fiction past with displays of technologies which parallel or are inspired by those narratives, and which had an interactive science fiction scenario as its overarching theme.

The introduction to the accompanying book, written by Ian Blatchford, summed up the relationship and motivation for the exhibition:

"Science and science fiction spark off one another endlessly: science fiction provides a tool for future-gazing, social commentary, art and satire that can inspire scientists, while the latest advances from the laboratory often lead science fiction writers to ask, 'where could this take us?' No wonder then that so many scientists have taken to science fiction, from Fred Hoyle to Joan Slonczewski and Candana Singh.
This symbiotic relationship is reason enough for a museum on a mission to 'inspire futures' to enthusiastically support a science fiction exhibition."

These are just a couple of examples, amongst many [5] - science fiction is used by current science and technology museums as a draw, as a contextualisation of current and past technologies, and as a channel through which to extrapolate from the current state of science into its future potentialities - which is, after all, the role of science fiction in the first place.

Museum Pieces

Science fiction cannot and does not exist outside of its cultural context. Nor do museums. Both serve a complex function that often navigates the boundaries between science and society. The examples I’ve considered here, and the many others I didn’t have room for, demonstrate the tricky line both walk, and the ways in which they can become intertwined. 

The commentary on cultural imposition in the name of “improvement” in Doctor Who’s The Space Museum, is echoed in a gentler and more nuanced way in Rusch’s Museum of Modern Warfare. The “museums” of Be It Ever Thus bear an uncomfortable family relationship to the cultural experiences offered to tourists in some countries - reservations that allow an opportunity to preserve indigenous cultural history and tradition, but at the cost of becoming a focus for curiosity and entertainment. A number of the stories here question the validity of interpretations being offered, or the appropriateness of artefact collection strategies. Similarly, the technologies preserved in museums in time travel narratives are not presented uncritically - they are as often a way of looking back on the wasteful and polluting industries of the writers’ current time as they are a way to ease the travellers past their culture shock.

The role of museums as repositories of collections - as preservation and archival centres - is distinct from, although closely related to, their role as communicators of history, science and culture. This provides an interesting parallel to the similar dichotomy in science. Scientific insight can be sought for its own sake, but science as a discipline also has a responsibility to consider and communicate the impacts of that insight to a wider society. Recent work in both fields has acknowledged that neither artefacts nor insights have an unambiguous intrinsic value, and will be viewed differently by those from different cultural or societal backgrounds. What is straightforward to one will be challenging to another - as for instance in displays of indigenous worldviews with religious significance, or the teaching of western science precepts that conflict with those worldviews.

This is a challenge, for example, for both scientists and museum curators in countries where perceptions of astronomical objects and the manner in which they are described can differ significantly between minority and majority populations. Indeed the concept of a museum - or a science - itself can conflict with worldviews in which cultural transfer is primarily oral. This does not invalidate the scientific interpretation of evidence, but does demonstrate that it is not the only way of understanding and interpreting the world around us.

Several of the stories discussed here nonetheless also demonstrate the value of preserving knowledge, rather than discarding the past without considering its possible future value. In post-apocalyptic stories, whether or not any of humanity survive the apocalypse, museum collections - often of a scientific or technical nature - serve a vital role in allowing the past (whether of science or society) to be reconstructed, regardless of whether this is in a way that the devisers of the original exhibits would recognise. Importantly, many of these are stories of hope, rebuilding and anticipation. They describe museums as a seed from which a new culture can arise. In many ways, this is an approach already taken by contemporary museums of science and technology. By communicating ideas of the future, as well as the past, they allow visitors to reflect on how the two are related, and on how current decisions might influence the years (and peoples) to come.