Reading Science Fiction Research Articles

A Study on Literature Classes for Student Agency - Focusing on Reading Science Fiction Through Questions and Collaborative Inquiry -

A Study on Literature Classes for Student Agency - Focusing on Reading Science Fiction Through Questions and Collaborative Inquiry -

Reading Science Fiction in Socialist Hungary

Abstract The article explores the emergence of science fiction as a genre in socialist Hungary. By focusing on the origins and role of the science fiction anthology Galaktika [Galaxy] and the book series Kozmosz Fantasztikus Könyvek [Cosmos fantastic books] and exploring the role of their editor, Péter Kuczka, the article argues that book publication from the mid- to late 1960s onward was much more elastic and variable than one would think. Readers’ growing interest in science fiction, and the commercial success of science fiction publications, convinced the state that it needed to accept science fiction as a legitimate literary genre. By examining the intellectual and cultural development that led to this legitimization and by analyzing some of the key publications and their themes and topoi, the article hopes to contribute to a better understanding of Hungarian socialist cultural policy.

Critical reading self-efficacy of gifted students

The present study aimed to determine the critical reading self-efficacy levels of gifted students and to discuss certain variables that affect self-efficacy levels. The study was conducted with 299 (Female: 138, Male: 161) students attending four Science and Arts Centers (SACs) in Ankara during the 2022-2023 academic year. The participant were 5th and 6th grade students in the Recognition of Individual Talent (RIT) program. Participant Data Form and Critical Reading Self-Efficacy Scale were used to collect the omit data. The study was designed with the quantitative relational research method and the analyses were conducted on the SPSS software. The study findings were analyzed with descriptive statistics, independent samples t-test, and ANOVA. Analysis findings revealed that the critical reading self-efficacy levels of the gifted students were high. Ownership of a private library significantly affected the critical reading self-efficacy levels of the gifted students. In other words, the critical reading self-efficacy level of the students who had a library was higher than those who did not. Furthermore, students who read books every day had higher critical reading self-efficacy skills when compared to the students who did not read books every day. Other study findings demonstrated that gender, education level of the parents and household income did not have a significant effect on the critical reading self-efficacy level. In the study, it was also determined that gifted students mostly read science fiction and scientific books.

Early Soviet Science Fiction and the Unevenness of Modernism: An Aerial View

In envisioning alternative futures—utopian, dystopian, cataclysmic—we historicize the present. Marxist critics like Fredric Jameson read science fiction as the new Lukácsian historical novel.[1] Others, turning to a further distant future, elaborate on the new perceptions of time and space offered in SF as visions that push toward cosmic and nonhuman scales.[2] As such, SF

Combining Dynamic Network Analysis and Cerebral Carryover Effect to Evaluate the Impacts of Reading Social Media Posts and Science Fiction in the Natural State on the Human Brain.

Social media has been associated with decreased attention, memory, and learning abilities; however, the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Dynamic function network connectivity (dFNC) analysis is suitable for uncovering dynamical brain activity. Besides, the effects of a cognitive task may persist for a while on the brain, even after the termination of the task, also known as the carryover effect. Consequently, we combined the dFNC analysis and cerebral carryover effects to study the brain dynamics of reading social media posts in the natural state and comparatively investigated the brain dynamics of reading science fiction on the smartphone. We performed functional MRI (fMRI) scans of all subjects at baseline and then assigned them a social media post or science fiction reading task. Immediately after, another fMRI scanning was performed for these subjects. We found that the change between dFNC states, the number of dFNC states, and the total distances increased after reading science fiction. Furthermore, the global, local, and nodal efficiencies of the deep-thinking state tended to increase after reading science fiction. On reading social media posts, the functional connectivity (FC) between the default mode network (DMN) and bilateral frontoparietal network (FPN) decreased, while the FC between DMN and visual network (VN) increased. Given the current evidence, we concluded that reading science fiction could substantially increase brain activity and network efficiency, while social media was related to abnormal FCs between DMN, VN, and FPN.

O (nie tylko estetycznych) pożytkach z lektury fantastyki naukowej

The article is devoted to the potential benefits of a variety of natures from reading science fiction. They are divided into aesthetic and non-artistic, related to the functioning of this phenomenon in the congregational imagination, which models and at the same time is modelled by it. Given the properties of science fiction and its role in the reading circuit, one can conclude about the importance of science fiction as an artistic formula that approximates both the future and the dilemmas of the present, hidden in a futuristic stack of props (this is evident especially when reading socio-political fiction). At the same time, the reading experience contradicts such a high rating of science literature, most often – above – aspiring only to readily attractive “adventurials in space/cyberspace”. Indeed, if there are any advantages of reading science fiction, it must be realised, first of all, that they depend mainly on the expectations of the audience; their reading attitude (that is whether they will treat science fiction as a manifestation of literary escapism, or perhaps a medium of important socio-civilizational issues). However, readers who treat novels in an escapist way can be contrasted with those who equate it with the specific language of discourse over the present day. Therefore, it is important how the author will treat the chosen convention: as an excuse to present further “adventure in space”, or as an opportunity to look at the present from a special perspective, which is provided by the narrative future of action time of science fiction novels. Only then will it be possible to speak of the benefit of reading science fiction, which is more or less indirectly linked to the life of the reader.

Meet the First Authors

Meet the First Authors

Digital Culture's Humanistic Underpinnings

Digital Culture's Humanistic Underpinnings Nina Wexelblatt (bio) Theorizing Digital Cultures Grant Bollmer SAGE Publishing https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/theorizing-digital-cultures/book249651 264 Pages; Print, $36. 00 What really goes on between a person and a screen? Google's algorithm offers 33,600 guesses: Sign in, log on, and take calls. Complete selected forms. Play real poker for real money. Start surfing. Indeed, online space resembles— or replaces—these activities' offline arenas: the workplace, the bureaucrat's desk, the poker table, the open ocean. The tech industry's solutions-oriented optimism has worked hard to naturalize this condition, strategically disappearing theoretical questions into a crevasse. On one side, forbidding programming languages, illegible to the lay user, that silo the ability to develop new technologies to the realm of specialists; on the other, bottomless access to personalized (and often monetized) content, which risks casting the field as too prosaic to be a serious object of study. Yet leaving the contemporary digital world critically unexamined is dangerous and untenable. Grant Bollmer's Theorizing Digital Cultures offers a way out of this bind by situating digital technology within a history of humanistic thought. Published in 2018, as online channels were already far along the path of transforming democracy, and available just in time for a global health crisis to make virtual a large chunk of daily existence, this accessible book introduces young scholars in the Humanities and Social Sciences to analytical tools with which to interpret our ultra-mediated condition. In just over two hundred pages, Bollmer manifests an engaging vision of how to think with, and at times against, dozens of authors. He often references pre-digital theorists, like Raymond Williams and Walter Benjamin, alongside scholars whose work explicitly engages digital technology, such as Alexander Galloway and N. Katherine Hayles. As these pairings across time suggest, Bollmer works to integrate rather than distinguish recent technologies from theoretical discourses that preceded them. Bollmer's engaging study begins from the premise that the digital world is implicated in broad issues of language, presence, and difference. The book draws on case studies from recent mass and social media—from YouTube clips and vocaloid holograms to Facebook profiles and video games like Call of Duty (2003)—to demonstrate how one might apply often thorny theory to the objects and experiences one might encounter while browsing the internet or reading science fiction. He is clear that technology as a category is not limited to what happens on the computer; instead, it touches on material and social concerns at every scale, from the interpersonal to the planetary. Amid talk of virtual reality headsets and Twitch streams, Bollmer is less interested in medium specificity than in the politics of digital aesthetics. He argues persuasively that even the most commodified technologies are important objects of inquiry because they are fundamentally relational; as such, the power dynamics they inscribe are ripe for questioning. The book is split into two sections. Part I, Defining Digital Cultures, includes three chapters, "What are Digital Cultures?," "Culture and Technique," and "Digital and Analogue." Rejecting metaphysical understandings of technology as "utopian, even theological," this first section instead synthesizes the work of a host of theorists from Friedrich Kittler to Lev Manovich. The primer here on German media theory is particularly rich; Bollmer explains that for a thinker like Kittler, "any understanding of 'culture' is a result of how we use technologies to manage and control the environment in which we live." Prioritizing the material substrates of culture allows him to spend the rest of the book examining the artifacts that comprise and enable it. Also fruitful is his recurring discussion of Jacques Derrida's critique of the metaphysics of presence: a breakdown of the hierarchy that often attends binary categories. This is a smart move affording Bollmer the opportunity to question received wisdom about a field steeped in the foundational myth of binary code and hierarchies between "online and offline" and "a game and 'real life.'" Together, these early meditations sensitize the reader to the book's focus on materiality and difference. Part II, "Histories, Concepts and Debates," tackles thematic concerns across six chapters: "Cybernetics and Posthumanism," "Identities and...

Examining Alternate Histories

499 BOOKS IN REVIEW Examining Alternate Histories. Glyn Morgan and C. Palmer-Patel, eds. Sideways in Time: Critical Essays on Alternate History Fiction. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2019. 203 pp. $120 hc. Glyn Morgan and C. Palmer-Patel’s new anthology Sideways in Time, which was nominated for a 2019 British Science Fiction Association Award in the nonfiction category (although it did not win), brings together an array of wellrespected scholars in their examination of alternate-history fiction. The editors rightly highlight the pioneering quality of their work, following as it does several scholarly monographs on the topic; they may be the first to present a collection of different perspectives in an anthology form. While such books as Karen Hellekson’s The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time (2001), Kathleen Singles’s Alternate History: Playing with Contingency and Necessity (2013), Derek J. Thiess’s Relativism, Alternate History, and the Forgetful Reader: Reading Science Fiction and Historiography (2014), and Catherine Gallagher’s Telling It Like It Wasn’t: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction (2018) are in-depth studies of alternate history narratives focused on specific issues, the present anthology addresses a wide range of topics and authors in this genre, providing the reader with a broader variety of subjects and perspectives. Consequently, this book nicely complements such previous scholarship. Sideways in Time is organized into two parts of five chapters each, with an introduction, a foreword, and an afterword as well. The foreword by Stephen Baxter, an award-winning author of alternate history and science fiction and a judge of the Sidewise Award for alternate-history fiction, provides a general idea of the genre. Baxter traces the genre’s antiquity to 35 BCE in Roman historian Livy’s writing, but then mostly discusses examples from the twentieth century Anglo-American tradition (including his own novels). This laid-back foreword gives way to a more rigorous introduction by the editors. Morgan and Palmer-Patel explore the history of the genre in a more consistent manner from ancient Rome to nineteenth-century France; they see Louis Napoléon GeoffroyCh âteau’s Napoléon et la conquête du monde [Napoleon’s Conquest of the World, 1836] as the first modern instance of alternate history fiction. Their introduction further provides an interesting discussion about the relationship between non-fictional speculations regarding history and alternative-history fiction, and that between alternative history and science fiction. In addition, the editors conveniently lay out the basic characteristics of the genre and important terminologies to guide readers in the rest of the book. The two main parts of the book are organized under the categories of “Points of Divergence” and “Manipulating the Genre.” The first category explores works of alternative fiction that utilize the major tropes of the genre, such as specific points of divergence that create alternative historical developments, the “great man” theory, and the Tolstoian vision of history; in part this establishes a discourse of an emerging canon. The second part questions the basic tenets of alternate-history fiction. Sideways in Time nicely balances its attention on conformity and subversion with dominant genre expectations and consequently 500 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) exposes the developments of such genre qualities as functions of an oscillating historical process. The first chapter by Adam Roberts, “Napoleon as Dynamite: Geoffroy’s Napoléon Apocryphe and Science Fiction as Alternate History,” foregrounds the two major trends of the genre’s points of departure—alternative historical outcomes as determined by the actions of a great person (or a few persons) and the dispersed collectivity of small actions creating parallel historical streams—and shows that the historical divergences in this type of fiction are an ideological representation of the author’s own sense of historicity. His examination of early works in this vein establishes the prominence of the “great man” approach. Roberts’s chapter, coming after the introduction, creates a comprehensive idea of the genre’s early development, which, in addition to providing a thorough analysis of the text in question, establishes the groundwork for approaching the later chapters. Although the remainder of the chapters deal with much later works, similar historiographical concerns dominate the discussion. Chris Pak’s chapter, “‘It Is...

科幻小说的本体性知识：类型、要素与边界

We need three types of knowledge to support reading science fiction at least. Ontology knowledge is not only the lever to mobilize the other two kinds of knowledge to participate in reading, but also the key to avoid misreading, including stylistic knowledge such as concept, type, elements and boundary determination. In terms of type, science fiction is divided into two categories , in addition to the theory of “soft and hard”, the eight types determined from the perspective of subject matter are generally recognized by researchers. “Scientific elements”, “strange environment”, “humanistic thinking” and “logical self-consistency” are necessary elements of science fictions. Together with the literary attributes and scientific boundaries of science fictions, they define the creative territory and reading vision of this kind of novels.

Between Sensorimotor Data and Conceptual Message: Embodied Simulation as an Approach to the Reading of Two Science Fiction Plays, Jennifer Haley’s The Nether and Peter Sinn Nachtrieb’s Boom

This paper explains how the activation of the reader’s cognitive capacity of embodied simulation can improve the perception of science fiction and its interest in exploring the materiality of bodies. It offers an embodied cognitive interpretation of Haley’s The Nether and Nachtrieeb’s Boom, stressing the role of close reading of sensorimotor data in triggering the mental process of simulation and reinforcing the reader’s embodied involvement within the text. This paper also illustrates the cognitive link between linguistic input data in the process of reading science fiction and the stimulation of the capacity of embodied simulation. It argues that the more intensive the sensorimotor data is, the more appealing to the capacity of embodied simulation the text proves to be. The paper attempts to prove that the close reading of science fiction drama, abundant in sensorimotor data, is capable of generating an embodied simulative experience which guarantees a deeper understanding of the thematic content and an empathic engagement with the characters.

Atmospheres and science fiction

AbstractThis article proposes to read science fiction through the lens of atmosphere. Atmospheres, of course, have gained increased critical interest in recent years, most noticeably in Hans Ulrich...

‘Endless forms, vistas and hues’: why architects should read science fiction

Most of an architect's life is concerned with that which has not yet taken place, both foreseeing the near future and expressing an intention of how this future world should be remade. However small the intervention, all design proposals are utopian works. With this in mind, this article is a celebration of the utopian potential of reading science fiction (SF); to make the familiar strange, to reveal fears about the future, to confront us with ourselves, and to shape the world we inhabit. It is an unabashed call from an architect and avid SF reader, for architects to raid the bookshelves for the most lurid cover and glaring font and lose themselves in the exuberant worlds of science fiction.

Who Reads Science Fiction and Fantasy, and How Do They Feel About Science? Preliminary Findings From an Online Survey

This article describes findings from an online survey Science Fiction & Fantasy: Your Experiences, launched in November 2015 and closed 1 year later, which received 909 unique responses. The survey identified characteristics of readers of science fiction, their knowledge and experiences of works, authors, and subgenres. It examined their attitudes to science and science fiction and their judgment of the similarity between real and fictional scientists. Contrary to declining reading habits, the science fiction and fantasy audience read consistently high volumes of books, as well as watching genre TV and film. We discovered that reading science fiction and fantasy may have a role in sustained, and cognitively beneficial, adoption of reading by young people and is complementary to other forms of consumption, rather than competitive. Science fiction was also found to be an important influence on the perception and acceptance of science by the public. Implications of this are that science fiction and fantasy are now a normal part of life for a wide range of people, and science fiction has a positive influence on popular interpretation, acceptance, and support of scientific endeavors. These results support earlier work that suggests science fiction is a valuable research tool for public engagement with science.

Science fiction and the medical humanities

Research on science fiction within the medical humanities should articulate interpretative frameworks that do justice to medical themes within the genre. This means challenging modes of reading that encourage unduly...

Visionary medicine: speculative fiction, racial justice and Octavia Butler's ‘Bloodchild’

Medical students across the USA have increasingly made the medical institution a place for speculating racially just futures. From die-ins in Fall 2014 to silent protests in response to racially...

Ersatz America: Hidden Traces, Graphic Texts, and the Mending of DemocracyAmerica Writes Its History, 1650–1850: The Formation of a National NarrativeRelativism, Alternate History, and the Forgetful Reader: Reading Science Fiction and Historiography

Ersatz America: Hidden Traces, Graphic Texts, and the Mending of DemocracyAmerica Writes Its History, 1650–1850: The Formation of a National NarrativeRelativism, Alternate History, and the Forgetful Reader: Reading Science Fiction and Historiography

Solitary Act and Social Interaction: Adults Reading Science Fiction and Fantasy

Reading has the appearance of a solitary act, performed by individuals who separate themselves from the current world by immersion in the fictional world, yet participants in a LIS study of adult readers situate themselves and their reading a social context. Participants discussed their reading experiences against a backdrop of family, friends, librarians, teachers, co-workers. . .

Science fiction can spark science interest

I disagree with Moishe Garfinkle’s letter (Physics Today, April 2013, page 11) about science fiction’s effects on the public’s appreciation (or lack of it) of real science. I have seen through the eyes of my students and the teachers I have helped train over the years that an interest in science fiction can be a gateway to a broader or deeper interest in science. I got interested in astronomy through reading science fiction as a youngster—as did Carl Sagan and a number of other astronomers. Perhaps Garfinkle has a negative view of science fiction because he knows it only from the movies and TV shows he mentions. Yet written science fiction can be far richer than the thin, barely scientific gruel dished up in many movies.I keep a website of astronomically reasonable science fiction at http://www.astrosociety.org/edu/resources/scifiprint.html and invite readers to sample some of the works featured there. A good number of PhD physicists and astronomers, including Gregory Benford, Alastair Reynolds, and Geoffrey Landis, are writing marvelous stories humanizing and extrapolating from our latest understanding of real science. Through such stories, science can become exciting and inviting, the very opposite of Garfinkle’s “dull and dreary.”© 2013 American Institute of Physics.

“Resistance is futile”: reading science fiction alongside ubiquitous computing

Design-oriented research is an act of collective imagining--a way in which we work together to bring about a future that lies slightly out of our grasp. In this paper, we examine the collective imagining of ubiquitous computing by bringing it into alignment with a related phenomenon, science fiction, in particular as imagined by a series of television shows that form part of the cultural backdrop for many members of the research community. A comparative reading of these fictional narratives highlights a series of themes that are also implicit in the research literature. We argue both that these themes are important considerations in the shaping of technological design and that an attention to the tropes of popular culture holds methodological value for ubiquitous computing.