Perhaps because many people refuse to take science fiction seriously as a valid form of expression, they are less wary of its power to come up to them stealthily and bite them on the bum.
Everyone remembers the story of Orson Welles’ radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds which, when presented as a faux news bulletin, caused mass panic: people really believed that Martians had landed in New Jersey, when the application of even the tiniest amount of thought would have revealed many more interesting places they might have visited.
Every now and then, we receive (or are made aware of) confused reactions to Nature_’s column "_Futures":http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/arts/futures/, which is a weekly page devoted to science fiction. Yes, fiction. A few people are outraged, having laboured under the misperception that just because it has appeared in Nature_, it *_must be true*. On the other hand, some people (probably rejected authors) are, I suspect, of the view that everything published in Nature is science fiction.
For example, this (spoof) book review prompted a letter from a librarian, a Mrs Trellis of New South Wales, who was unable to find ISBNs for the books mentioned in the piece, seemingly unaware of the fact that the author of one of the books mentioned, and the reviewer, were robots – and that the dateline was the year 3000. Did Mrs Trellis actually read the story? Or was it more that she, perhaps not having been aware of science fiction, did not ‘see’ the science-fictional elements, even though they were in plain sight?
Well, a little while ago we published a story from SF writer Peter Watts couched as an account of a court case in which religious woman, kept alive by the placebo effect offered by a holy relic, died soon after a mild brush with a skeptic. This tale attracted (Hat Tip, Karl Ziemelis) a concerned blog entry from a skeptic who later had the grace to admit that even skeptics can get taken in, sometimes.
From this one can only wonder whether there is any intelligent life on Earth. The answer, of course, is ‘no’ – I’m only visiting.
