What is Literature?

January 16, 2008

Tobias S. Buckell wrote a piece about "what is science fiction,"and here it is:

I've always had this theory that literature is humanity dreaming. When you dream you process your past and what has happened to you. And to match that, I think that science fiction is our imagination, the daydreaming of the species. It's something completely different, and it explains why science fiction works so differently for many different people.

The imagination of inventors, the question 'what if,' the suspicion that the world may be different than it seems, that is where genre lies.

But that's just *my* imagination at work.

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Frankly, I couldn't quite get past the idea of "literature is humanity dreaming."

That's really quite lovely.

Cheers,

Mark Terry