Of all the truths in this broad universe, there's one that we here at the Folger care about probably more than anything else.

You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.

Ha ha!

Ha, ha! From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited.

I'm Michael Whitmore, the Folgers director.

That, of course, was from the 1991 movie Star Trek Six, The Undiscovered Country.

But, as you're about to learn, it turns out that's not the only place that William Shakespeare

has turned up in the world of science fiction.

Despite science fiction's association with modernity in popular culture, it is, in many ways, haunted by the literary canon.

And since at least the 1820s, Shakespeare the Man, Shakespeare the Idea, Shakespeare's

writing, and Shakespeare's meaning have cropped up in the genre in ways that we think you'll find

really surprising. Sarah Annis Brown has been writing about

Shakespeare and science fiction for quite some time now. She's a professor of

English literature at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England, and co-director of

the university's Center for Science Fiction and Fantasy. Right now she's writing a book

that looks in particular at representations

of how Shakespeare's plays are performed in the future. We call this podcast, I shall tell you

a pretty tale. Sarah Brown is interviewed by Barbara Bogave. Before we get to Shakespeare,

what exactly are we talking about when we say science fiction?

I know that there's a lot of wrangling that goes on around that term.

How do you define it?

And are we going back as far as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, say, or Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea?

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