How science fiction has been a tool for understanding and living through rapid technological
change. The world today seems to be slipping into a science fiction future. We have phones that
speak to us cars that drive themselves and connected devices that communicate with each other
in languages we don't understand. Depending the news of the day we inhabit either a
technological utopia or Brave New World nightmare. This volume in the MIT Press Essential
Knowledge surveys the uses of science fiction. It focuses on what is at the core of all
definitions of science fiction: a vision of the world made otherwise and what possibilities
might flow from such otherness.
