'At the Museum' by Marian Womack - Running Review of Uncertainties IV

In Billion Year Spree, his history of science fiction (later revised and expanded as Trillion Year Spree) Brian W. Aldiss rightly argues that the sf genre stems from the Gothic - Frankenstein, mesmerism, telepathy, and all that jazz.

Marian Womack demonstrates this link in fictional in her remarkable tale set in a distant, starfaring future, but also in a timeless Gothic pseudo-past. The Museum is on another world, one of several that our species has used up in its cosmic odyssey. This sounds like Arthur C. Clarke country, but in fact this is a tale of technology - a kind of virtual reality system - used to recreate a familiar and dark world that existed just before the Space Age.

The story has stories inside it (like many a Gothic novel), but as the 'contemporary' tale unfolds we realise that the Gothic is - as with the Romantic, originally - seen as subversive, dangerous to the status quo, always prone to running out of control. The ending is suitably ironic, as the far-future regime imposes a penalty on the wayward artist/dreamer that combines Edgar Allan Poe with Gene Wolfe.

I was very pleased to see the sci-fi brigade represented her by such a fine story. More from this review within the next few aeons.