Can Fiction Tell Us Something About Reality?

I've started to read To Seek Out New Worlds: Exploring Links between Science Fiction and World Politics which is edited by Jutta Weldes. It's a fun book to read because each chapter talks about popular works of science fiction and how they relate to international relations. Thus, the writers got to watch hours upon hours of Star Trek and other assorted works of science fiction for "research purposes" (Isn't academia great?).

The question hangs in the air though whether this type of analysis can be useful. What can fiction tell us about the 'real world'? As Neumann writes in the chapter, To Know Him Was To Love Him, "Star Trek representations ...which are American representations, tell us something about American practices of representation" (47). I think this holds true because people cannot be seperated from their societies, especially fiction writers (at least the good ones). Probably the best works of fiction are the ones that say something about the world in which we live. That's why the best works of fiction like "To Kill a Mockingbird" or "Huckleberry Finn" all deal with subjects that readers know about and have to deal with on a daily basis.

I don't think science fiction is any different. Looking beyond the flashy, computer animated graphics, and weird creatures, science fiction is a representation about how we deal with the unknown and change. In the science fiction genre every movie or book has to introduce readers and viewers to something new and different. However, it can only do this by using shared meaning and common knowledge, otherwise no one could understand what the author was getting at. In this way, we learn about ourselves by engaging the unknown. Thus, every work of science fiction challenges readers to deal with change (e.g. new technology) or the unknown (e.g. aliens) at the same time it uses ideas already known by the viewer or reader.

What's interesting is that no author can reach a total seperation from society. Therefore, how authors deal with the new and unknown through the tools given to them by the society in which they are a part is often a reflection on how the society in which the author is a part deals with these concepts. Thus, science fiction in the 50's and 60's is quite different than the science fiction of today because the middle of the 20th century the US was dealing with the communist threat while today we are dealing with an open, globalized world.

In the future, I would like to read an article or book comparing the US's science fiction to other country's science fiction. I think this would say a lot about how different countries deal with the "new" and the "unknown" and highlight differences in how people see the world in which we live.