What is it about?
Science fiction is used in a variety of research areas, not only for science education. After a methodical search of published research, we found that science fiction has become a useful and significant tool for describing, explaining and learning about human cultural interests and activities, including people's attitudes to, and ways of learning about, science.
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Why is it important?
Science fiction is being used more and more to support research, particularly in education across a range of topics and as a language for understanding science. The better our understanding of the way people use and relate to science fiction, the more effectively we can use it to help our research, especially when we want to engage with non-scientists.
Perspectives
As a researcher, I focus on how popular fiction provides us with a window into the interests and concerns of people. Science fiction is particularly useful for this task as it can be used to discuss any subject, without the constraints of more formal fictional genres. By examining how people talk, and have talked about, personal, social, cultural and technological change in science fiction, we can gain an understanding of what these issues and concerns are and use that to help us understand cultural processes in their context. Science fiction helps us identify the background causes of many common human reactions to the changes and innovations that we experience around us today.
Christopher Menadue
James Cook University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Human Culture and Science Fiction: A Review of the Literature, 1980-2016, SAGE Open, July 2017, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/2158244017723690.
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