Stranger than fiction: How important is science fiction for futures studies?

In experiments with micro-worlds, subjects are required to interact with a computer simulation of a complex dynamic system for some period of time, bringing the simulation to some specified state and keeping it there. There are now a number of such simulations available. They allow one to bridge the gap between the laboratory and the field and make it possible to study the circular relation between people and their environment in the laboratory under controlled circumstances focusing on how people develop intentions and handle feedback, especially feedback delays, in complex systems. Research with micro-worlds has followed two strategies: an individual differences strategy and an experimental strategy. Although early studies did not succeed in finding relations between micro-world performance and psychometric variables, probably because the experiments did not yield reliable data, one now knows how to obtain such data and stable correlations between standard measures of intelligence and micro-world perfor...

Micro-worlds and the circular relation between people and their environment

Although it is unclear whether, by ‘fantasy’, Butler intends a narrow denition (generic fantasy, i.e., imitation Tolkien heroic or epic fantasy and sword ’n’ sorcery) or a broad denition (the fantastic genres, i.e., generic fantasy, sf (science ction), horror, supernatural gothic, magic realism, etc.), such statistics nonethless make the need for a Marxist theory – or preferably, Marxist theories – of the fantastic selfevident. The last twenty or thirty years have witnessed a remarkable expansion in the study of fantastic texts and genres. Literary studies has embraced the gothic, fairy tales and sf, and screen studies has developed a complex critique of horror and is now beginning

The Dreadful Credibility of Absurd Things: A Tendency in Fantasy Theory

The method of analysis and synthesis in Greek geometry is perhaps the most significant key idea in the history of heuristic reasoning. In theoretical analysis, reasoning goes backward from a theorem to the axioms from which it deductively follows. In problematical analysis, the desired thing is supposed to be given (this defines the so-called “model figure”), and then the reasoning again goes backward looking for possible constructions from which the sought thing results. This paper states that Charles S. Peirce’s description of abduction, as a retroductive inference of a cause from its effects, is an instance of the propositional interpretation of analysis. What Jaakko Hintikka calls the “analysis of figures” view of problematical analysis is illustrated by detective stories of Edgar Allan Poe. The same idea is repeated in Poe’s essay “Philosophy of Composition” where he tells that he wrote his poem The Raven (1845) analytically by starting at the end.

Abduction and Geometrical Analysis. Notes on Charles S. Peirce and Edgar Allan Poe

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Franz Rottensteiner

Papers

Microworlds: Writings on Science Fiction and Fantasy

The Science Fiction Book

Science-Fiction Studies

European science fiction

The Fantasy Book: An Illustrated History From Dracula To Tolkien