Word: fiction
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Besides plugging for a more direct, personalized approach to psychosis, Brand's book theorizes earnestly about the oral sources of anxiety. Mixing pseudo fact with pseudo fiction makes fairly lively reading. But fiction is a flimsy vehicle for advancing a medical thesis. You cannot prove a theory with a novel. Or rather-and this is what psychologist-novelists like Brand will never quite admit-you can pretend to prove just about any theory you like...
BEGINNING WITH Galileo and the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and Newton and his famous apple, there has been more fiction than truth in the popular conception of how scientists discover what they discover. And the conception of what motivates them to discover anything at all is equally mythical...
KURT VONNEGUT has written five novels (Player Piano, Cat's Cradle, God Bless you, Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine, Mother Night, and The Sirens of Titan); periodic short stories that keep popping up in magazines like Playboy and science fiction anthologies like Tomorrow, the Stars; a book of collected short stories called Welcome to the Monkey-house; and a new novel out this spring called The Slaughterhouse Five, the first two chapters of which were recently printed in Ramparts...
...same scientific league with Somnium, a piece of science fiction by Johann Kepler, the famed 17th century astronomer and mathematician who explained the laws of planetary motion. Describing space flight, Kepler called the "initial movement," or launch, "most uncomfortable and dangerous, for the traveler is torn aloft as if blown up by gunpowder." He explained the bitter cold and airlessness of space, discussed weightlessness, and even suggested the equivalent of reverse thrust to land gently on the moon...
...classic science-fiction novel, From the Earth to the Moon, published in 1865, Jules Verne moved even closer to an accurate description of 20th century space flight. His man-carrying space projectile was shot from a giant cannon in Florida, reached an escape velocity of almost 25,000 m.p.h., became almost red-hot as it passed through the atmosphere, was steered by rockets, and circumnavigated the moon...