Different Engines
Subtitle: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives Science
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: December 10, 2007
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 250
ISBN-13: 9780230019805
Subjects: Popular science; Literature And Science; Science Fiction And Fantasy; Literary Criticism; Literature - Classics / Criticism; Science; History; Science Fiction & Fantasy; Science / General; General; History and criticism; Science and civilization; Science fiction; Science in literature
Description: "The symbiosis of science and science fiction shapes what we see, do and dream." "Since its emergence in the 17th century, science fiction (SF) 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 is the first trade book to explore 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, argue Professor Mark-Brake and Reverend Neil Hook SF'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."--Jacket.