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Since its emergence in the seventeenth 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.
From the Author
Revolutions in science, and their reciprocal relationship with science fiction, drive the narrative of The Different Engines. For the first time, discovery and invention delineate the evolution of science fiction:
A Plurality of Habitable Worlds: The Age of Discovery (1500 - 1800); Remembrance of Things To Come: The Mechanical Age (C19th); Pulp Fiction: The Astounding Age (1900 - 1940); Cold War and Heat Death: The Atomic Age (1940s, 1950s); Stranger in a Strange Land: The New Age (1960s, 1970s); Information Wants to be Free: The Computer Age (1980s, 1990s); The Frankenstein Century: The Age of Biology (C21st). Uniquely, each chapter showcases the evolutionary symbiosis of science fiction and science: their common origins identified in The Age of Discovery; the mutual influence of machine, evolution and fiction in The Mechanical Age; the reciprocal refuelling of emergent cosmologies, space opera and real-life space travel anticipated in The Astounding Age; the evolution of bombs and apocalyptic fiction in The Atomic Age; the many worlds, multiverses and alternative histories of quantum theory in The New Age; the prophesised liberating power of the web, and the virtual and tangible realities of AIs, robots and cyborgs in The Computer Age; and fictional projections of our troubled genetically-modified future in The Age of Biology.
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