As Twitter followers will know, I spent a couple of days in London last week, mainly because of the science fiction exhibition at the British Library. The launch party was on the Thursday evening. I went along with John & Judith Clute, and met large numbers of the British SF community there. I probably knew about a third of the attendees, at least by sight. The rest, I suspect, were either journalists or people who donate a lot of money to the Library.

The star of the show, aside from China Miéville who was clearly totally geeked-out by being asked to open the event, was Kazuo Ishiguro. He’s been a Clarke nominee, of course, and he was clearly very interested in the exhibition. Margaret Atwood was not there, but there is a video of her talking about her work in the exhibition. I did a bunch of mini interviews while I was there, which I need to edit together into a podcast.

The exhibition itself is awesome. There are loads of wonderful old books, and plenty of newer ones that we will all recognize. Who else but the British Library would have a first edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein? I’m going back as soon as I can.

On the Friday night I attended a panel debate on “Why Science Fiction Speaks to Us All”, featuring China, Trica Sullivan, Adam Roberts and Erik Davis (who writes about fan culture and the like). It was a good discussion, and much of it revolved around how science fiction means different things to different people.

Adam opened up by postulating that while science fiction and fantasy now pretty much dominates the movie business, and is moving in on TV, the audience for such material is somewhat different to that for science fiction novels. He didn’t go too much into why, but later conversation may have thrown some light on a related issue.

When we got to audience questions someone asked why, if science fiction speaks to us all, did his girlfriend refuse to come to the event with him? It was a cheap laugh, but Adam noted that SF is still regarded by many people as something you should grow out of.

That reminded me of this post by Andrew Wheeler in which he postulates that different literary genres are marketed at different age groups. YA is obvious, but you also have cozy mysteries featuring older sleuths such as Miss Marple, and you have “literary” fiction and its obsession with mid-life crises and unhappy marriages. Wheeler classes science fiction and fantasy as the fiction of the student and twenty-something. It is adventure fiction all about setting out on life’s great journey.

This is the sort of classification exercise that I expect to see attract a whole lot of snarky comment purporting to shoot it down with anecdata, and clearly it isn’t universally true. However, there may be something in the idea that the sort of science fiction that people think they need to grow out of is science fiction about growing up and discovering life. After all, once you are a grown up you shouldn’t need to read about growing up, should you?

So I stuck up my hand, and thanks to chair Sam Leith clearly making an effort to choose a few women (China’s partner, Jess, got to ask a question too), I got a chance to speak. Tricia responded with a very interesting comment about how our modern world is in a continuous state of adolescence because it changes so rapidly that we are always having to learn it anew. That, of course, makes it an ideal environment for those of us who are happy to grow old, but refuse to grow up. Once you think you know how the world works you are probably doomed.

There was another interesting conversation brewing about the relationship between SF and video games, but I knew I’d never get a second chance to speak. Then someone in the audience who wasn’t prepared to wait his turn yelled out a question about God, which pretty much brought things to a close.

There are many more fascinating panels scheduled. See here for a list of them. I so wish I lived nearer to London right now.