Catching up with long-overdue feed items I come across a reference to Clive Thompson’s musings on sci-fi as the last last bastion of philosophical writing. Thompson writes:
If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best — and perhaps only — place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas.
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Its authors rewrite one or two basic rules about society and then examine how humanity responds — so we can learn more about ourselves. How would love change if we lived to be 500? If you could travel back in time and revise decisions, would you? What if you could confront, talk to, or kill God?
Serendipitously, a later post on the same blog points to an amusing visualization of books preferred at certain US colleges, correlated with the average SAT scores from those universities. Booksthatmakeyoudumb offers a conveniently genre-sorted chart which shows Philosophy as the genre correlated with the highest SATs; following as a close second is, yes, you guessed right, science fiction.
Ender’s game beats Anna Karenina. Tolstoy is surely the better writer, but Scott Card gave us the most food for thought.
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[...] bookmarks tagged literature Sci-fi, literature of ideas, correlated with highe… saved by 3 others kagebunshinnofootsu bookmarked on 01/31/08 | [...]
[...] Ana mentioned this article, which describes the result when someone plays around with facebook and statistics. This diagram shows the correlation between what books students read and how high their average grade is. It seems to be not meant really serious, but I think it is an interesting aspect to look at. I like ironic voice of the author saying “I changed both Lolita from ‘Erotica’ and ‘Pride and Prejudice’ from ‘Chick Lit’ to Classics. You Literature majors all lack any sense of humor.” [...]
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