The familiar strange of sociological fiction

Abstract

Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude makes the magical and strange feel familiar, and short stories from Fiction @ The Sociological Review inversely make the familiar feel strange. I consider this ability to make the familiar strange as a key part of having a sociological sense of the world: as an ability to disturb what seems fixed and settled in society, and unmake any given set of social relations as the only and natural way of life. I conceptualise the crafting of this sense in fiction as a process of distillation. When writing sociological fiction, we distil our disciplinary attunement – strip down, concentrate and refine the many concepts and findings of our work – to craft scenes which unsettle ‘common sense’.