Tomorrow's Worlds: the Unearthly History of Science Fiction, review: 'a coherent thesis' The problem faced by the historian Dominic Sandbrook on Tomorrow's Worlds: the Unearthly History of Science Fiction (BBC Two, Saturday), was how to pitch it. The opener, entitled Space, was the first of five parts that will go on to look at the science fiction world thematically - alien invasion, artificial life, robots, and time travel are the others - and five hours of television should be enough to offer a fairly thorough history. But by its nature science fiction encourages intense study, fierce debate and geeky dogma. Sandbrook is a fan and student of the genre. Should he be explaining science fiction as if most viewers wouldn't know what it was, or should he just blast off into an impenetrable asteroid belt of minutiae? Sensibly he opted for a middle course that managed to offer a coherent thesis while still referencing films and books most punters will have heard of. Admittedly I got the impression that Sandbrook felt Star Wars was worthy of about as much considered analysis as a curry stain on a T-shirt, but he didn't (or more likely couldn't) ignore its significance in popular culture. As he hopscotched from 2001: A Space Odyssey through Star Trek and on to Avatar, the argument with which he linked them together wasn't exactly revelatory - science fiction reflects the preoccupations of our own time; it is a window onto our own ambitions and anxieties etc - but it was elegantly illustrated. To get Jules Verne, Ursula K Le Guin, William Shatner, John Carpenter and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy into the same programme is no mean feat. And it was a tacit reminder that SF (my friend who knows about these things tells me that calling it sci-fi is a philistinic blunder akin to calling football soccer) is a broad church. I will be intrigued to see if, in future episodes, Sandbrook dares to wade into the debate about what does and doesn't qualify as SF in the first place. As so often in these types of series, I could have done with fewer talking heads and more excerpts from the works under discussion. This, presumably, is a budgetary constraint, film rights costing much more than rent-a-gobs. Yet ultimately it is a mark of praise for Tomorrow's Worlds that I came out of it wanting to see, read, and know more. Just not about Star Wars.