Different Engines How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives Science

by Brake, Mark; Hook, Neil

• ISBN13: 9780230019805
• ISBN10: 0230019803
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-12-10
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Since its emergence in the seventeenth century, science fiction has been a sustained, coherent and subversive check on the promises and pitfalls of science. In their turn, invention and discovery have forced fiction writers to confront the nature and limits of reality. Different Engines explores how this fascinating symbiosis shapes what we see, do, and dream. From Johannes Kepler's Somnium to Arthur C. Clarke's 2001, science fiction has emerged as a mode of thinking, complementary to the scientific method. Science fiction's field of interest is the gap between the new worlds uncovered by experimentation and exploration, and the fantastic worlds of the imagination. Its proponents find drama in the tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Its readers, many of them scientists and politicians, find inspiration in the contrast between the ordinary and the extraordinary. Brake and Hook's Different Engines is a unique, provocative and compelling account of science fiction as the arbiter of progress.

Author Biography

Mark Brake holds a chair in science communication at the University of Glamorgan. He writes for TV and radio, and has appeared on the Discovery Channel. Reverend Neil Hook is Associate Lecturer in Science Fiction at the University of Glamorgan and an Anglican priest.

Table of Contents

A Plurality of Habitable Worlds: The Age of Discovery

Remembrance of things to Come: The Mechanical Age

Pulp Fiction: The Astounding age

Cold War and Heat Death: The Atomic Age

Stranger in a Strange Land: The New Age

Information wants to be Free: The Computer Age

The Frankenstein Century: The Age of Biology

Index

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.