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.

This article aimed to uncover the foci, themes, and findings of research literature that utilized science fiction content or concepts to describe and illustrate human culture. To capture a representative range of research, the PRISMA process was applied to database searches across a range of disciplines, not restricted to science fiction journals. Findings revealed that science fiction literature has been used in research across disciplines including theology, semantics, natural sciences, and education. Two characteristics of the use of science fiction in research became evident in the review: its role as a tool for advocacy and cultural insight and its effectiveness as an aid to learning and teaching. An unclear boundary between real science and science in the public imagination is problematic for research success, but the purposeful integration of fictional representations of science (both natural and social) into the research story has demonstrable benefits. To address the limited application of objective methodologies, adoption of increasingly robust quantitative analysis into research in the fields of literature and culture is recommended. This would assist in bridging the two cultures divide between the humanities and natural sciences.Keywords convergence, fiction, methodology, multidisciplinary, science communication, two cultures 2 SAGE Open increasingly complex and unstable social and intellectual reality, it absorbed and softened the impact of that complexity by depicting possible futures as being similarly iconoclastic and haphazard (Greenland, 1983). It has even been argued that the intermingling of science fiction and fact regarding the creation of artificial intelligences and synthetic humans permeates our culture so deeply that it influences our existential relationship with God (Geraci, 2007).Science fiction questions the role, relevance, costs, and benefits of current and future technologies, and presents ideas that can influence public opinion. Brian Stableford claimed that science fiction could determine the worldview of individuals, by the modification of attitudes to the significance of current and future science and technology (Stableford, 1979). Marshall Tymn agreed that as a literature, science fiction equips us to accept change as natural and inevitable (Tymn, 1985). As change is a natural outcome of applied scientific research, science fiction has been employed as a tool by researchers to provide metaphors, analogies, and models that describe the findings of their research (Bina, Mateus, Pereira, & Caffa, 2017;Hansen, 2004;Kotasek, 2015;McIntire, 1982;Toscano, 2011). Human acceptance of change is difficult and resists authoritative statements of fact, as has been identified in applied psychological and sociological studies (Nyhan, Reifler, Richey, & Freed, 2014;Prochaska, DiClemente, & Norcross, 1992). Science fiction is an effective agent for change, and, as Stableford (1979) has suggested, it also has a "directive effect" on people's interpretations of science. Ann Rigney desc...

In science fiction magazines of the first half of the twentieth century, tropical environments are chaotic domains where civilised restrictions do not apply. Visitors who cross the boundary between civilisation and jungle exhibit carnal desires and violent behaviours in response to the opportunities and threats they encounter. Mysterious cities and settlements hidden in the jungle and inhabited by supernatural beings are a common feature of science fiction of this period. The tropics are 'torrid' in both a human, emotional sense, as well as in the sense of Aristotle's definition of a geographical area that is virtually uninhabitable due to the hostility of the climate (Physics, 362a33-362b29). However, by the end of the century, the tropical jungle had been transformed in science fiction into something positive and less fearsome; a rich ecological reserve, endangered, and in need of preservation. Tropical science fiction narratives reflect a changing public understanding of the tropics, and illustrate the value of science fiction as a record of the history of changes in social and cultural values.

A search for imaginary cities and city-like objects portrayed in twentieth century science fiction magazine cover art employed digital tools and followed a PRISMA methodology for systematic analysis. The findings include a correlation between indigenous peoples being portrayed as possessing less advanced technology than human visitors or human city builders in the tropics. Human cultural tropes are identified in the depiction of indigenous peoples, and trends over time in the increasing sophistication of portrayals, and a decline in gratuitously sexual artwork are visible, which supports findings of other work on changing cultural perceptions of the tropics found in science fiction. Notable themes were the tropics as a place of conflict, simplistic depictions of women, the difference between the portrayal of jungle and desert environments and the colonial mythology perpetuated in cover art over this period. Science fiction cities of the tropics were often still or devoid of life, rather than vibrant, active places. An intriguing finding was that building a filtering model for tropical environments in a science fiction setting leads naturally to a consideration of how the concept of the tropics is based on arbitrary, Earthly, cartographic conventions, which do not exist on other worlds. This difference highlights the value-laden meaning of tropical environments and societies applied by the ‘alien,’ whether European colonist or visiting Earthling, and that the inhabitants of the tropics are not bound by these conventions.

Data from an audience survey on the characteristics of the science fiction and fantasy genres was compared to existing approaches to genre classification to build an alternative genre classification for science fiction based on popular understanding of the genre.