Over 100 years after Martians landed on the outskirts of London in H G Wells’s famous novel War of the Worlds, London last week played host to an interplanetary gathering like no other at the World Science Fiction Convention or Worldcon. The convention named Loncon is in its 72nd year, and sci-fi and fantasy have come a long way since it began. The event brought together some of the biggest authors in the genres, from Game of Thrones writer George R R Martin and Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveller’s Wife, to 11-time Hugo award winner Connie Willis. Organisers claimed it was one of the biggest WorldCons since the first convention in 1939.
It could be said London is the spiritual home of sci-fi. You can trace its pedigree, winding through history like the Thames, from Thomas More’s 1516 breakthrough hit Utopia to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published anonymously by a small London publisher in 1818, from Wells painting the town red (his Martians landed in Woking but generally cut up rough within the M25) in War of the Worlds in 1898 to the Michael Moorcock-led new wave of the 1960s, from J G Ballard’s dystopias to China Miéville and Paul Cornell’s capital urban fantasies.
There are some who say the escapism that fantasy and sci-fi represent becomes more appealing as the world gets nastier. Others distinguish the genres by underlining one fundamental difference. The humanity can look forward to the kinds of achievements postulated in sci-fi, while with another part of our brain we can dream of the impossibilities conjured by fantasy. Sci-fi expands our world; fantasy transcends it. And though there is a big difference between science and science fiction, there is abundant evidence to suggest that sci-fi books and movies can spark a lifelong interest in science. Moreover, advances in some fields such as robotics and genetics blur the differences.