Word: fictional
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...niche subject? For some, it’s the tantalizing possibility of being able to think outside the literary box and extrapolate from the page to society at large. Ian J. Storey ’10, a student in the course and a member of the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association, says, “Because SF takes place in unusual worlds where new things are possible, societies or situations can be set up to ask fascinating ‘what if’ questions...
Burt sees similar value in the works studied in the course. “The study of science fiction helps us think about social and political life outside literature,” he says, “because in science fiction the effect of material conditions on individual lives becomes unignorable.” According to Burt, this perspective is in contradistinction to other forms of prose that students often encounter...
...certain kinds of psychological or realist fiction,” he says, “peoples’ inward states appear to be determined mostly by who they fall in love with or how their families work. But when you read science fiction attentively you see how much of an individual’s life is guided not by psychology, and not by the unconscious so much as by technological and material circumstances—the difficulty of obtaining information, the availability of transport fuel, the speed of communications...
...don’t think we need to have ‘Science Fiction’ available to study every year, in the way we need to have Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf available,” he explains. “But I do think science fiction is important and interesting and includes some wonderful works...
...also believes that science fiction can train students to better understand the nuances of what they read, whatever the genre. “Part of learning to read attentively is learning to pick up on those signals a text gives out about what you should expect, so you can see when that text and its language violate those expectations,” Burt says. Originality, in other words, is only perceptible if the reader knows what conventions have been broken...