Does science fiction have its roots in Asian mythology?

Who invented science fiction? Everyone from Mary Shelley to Isaac Asimov and 17th-century German author Johann Valentin Andreae has been credited, but a new exhibition at Science Gallery Melbourne posits a very different idea – that many of Western science fiction’s best known tropes actually have their roots in ancient Asian mythologies. The gallery’s new exhibition SCI-FI: Mythologies Transformed , first exhibited at the ArtScience Museum in Singapore, features works from mostly women artists from the Asia-Pacific region, and for the Australian iteration, from First Nations women artists. Galactica v-2.

1 Dharma Garden by Indonesian art collective The House of Natural Fiber, which explores the idea of terraforming. Credit: Matthew Stanton During the pandemic, Honor Harger, ArtScience Museum director and one of the exhibition’s co-curators, found herself thinking about a more harmonious future. She’d also noticed a wave of contemporary Asian women artists making works with science-fiction aesthetics.

“And these works had a completely different feeling than other types of sci-fi that we’re familiar with, which is usually made by men,” she says. Much science fiction, Harger says, veers on the dystopian, and that wasn’t the vibe she was seeing in the work made by women artists. “Their work was coming from a much more thoughtful .

.. not utopian perspective, but what people often refer to as ‘protopian’ place – visions of the future that are neither negat.