Human Culture and Science Fiction: A Review of the Literature, 1980-2016

Abstract

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...

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