Tony White was writer in residence at the Science Museum for summer 2008.
It's been a great privilege to be writer in residence at the Science Museum for summer 2008. I saw the residency as an opportunity to use fiction - the short story - as a kind of laboratory, a place for myself and others to experiment, and as a means to also reflect on the kinds of stories that the Science Museum tells the world about itself, about its collections, and about projects like Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin's Listening Post (the Science Museum's recent art acquisition which can be seen every day for free until February 2010).
'Albertopolis' was the affectionate and satirical Victorian-era nickname given to this part of South Kensington. The area was purchased specifically to continue the legacy of Prince Albert's Great Exhibition of 1851 by becoming home to all these great, Victorian-era, cultural and educational institutions. As I wandered around the Museum's great halls and researched in the Science Museum collections I found myself revisiting a science-fiction genre called 'steampunk'. To generalise only slightly, 'steampunk' is based on the assumption that mechanical 19th-century computing technologies such as Babbage's Difference Engine created our contemporary information age a century or so early.
With so many steam engines, flying machines and 'infernal devices' of all kinds housed in its collections, the Science Museum feels like the genre's spiritual home. Babbage's Analytical Engine and the original Difference Engine No. 2 (which took until 1991 to build from Babbage's drawings) are also housed right here in 'South Ken'.
To mark the completion of my residency the Science Museum are publishing a limited edition short story book, 'Albertopolis Disparu.' The booklet will be available free to museum visitors while stocks last, from a display near the Listening Post exhibition on the first floor.
In 'Albertopolis Disparu', I tell of my discovery in the Museum's collection of papers 'by author unknown' that form a draft introduction to a hitherto uncatalogued work by the late science fiction author James Colvin. This now lost work of Colvin's tells of a top secret telegraphic 'listening post' that was situated in museum buildings during World War One, and of its destruction in a mysterious zeppelin raid in 1916.
James Colvin was a pseudonym created by the celebrated author Michael Moorcock when he was editor of the hugely influential New Worlds magazine in the 1960s. I'm grateful to him for allowing us to invoke Colvin's name here!
I also wanted to use my residency to create free opportunities for other writers to come here. I devised a series of writing workshops, which took their cue from a suggestion by Hansen and Rubin that their Listening Post begins to turn chatroom communication in to 'a giant cut-up poem'. I thought that this might open the door both to some interesting writing and to new ways of looking at or engaging with the artwork.
During the workshop sessions participants used writing techniques such as the cut-up, developed by writer William S Burroughs (1914-97) and Bryon Gysin (1916-86), as a means to create new works of fiction. All of the resulting stories reflect - in their own unique ways - upon our contemporary information and surveillance societies. We're delighted to be able to publish a selection of those stories here as downloadable PDFs.
Tony White is the author of novels including Foxy-T (Faber and Faber), which was described by Toby Litt as 'one of the best London novels you'll ever get to read’. As well as publishing short stories in a wide variety of journals and collections, including the Idler and All Hail the New Puritans, Tony co-edited the fiction anthology Croatian Nights (Serpent's Tail/VBZ), edited the Brit-pulp collection (Sceptre), and has taught the course in writing the short story at Brunel University. Tony received a Grants for the Arts award from Arts Council England in 2007. He is currently writer in residence at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, supported by the Leverhulme Trust.
