Different Engines: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives Science

Since its emergence in the seventeenth century, science fiction (SF) has been a sustained, coherent and subversive check on the promises and pitfalls of science. In their turn, invention and discovery have forced fiction writers to confront the nature and limits of reality. "Different Engines" is the first trade book to explore how this fascinating symbiosis shapes what we see, do and dream.

From Johannes Kepler's Somnium to Arthur C Clarke's 2001, science fiction has emerged as a mode of thinking, complementary to the scientific method, argue Professor Mark Brake and Reverend Neil Hook. SF's field of interest is the gap between the new worlds uncovered by experimentation and exploration, and the fantastic worlds of the imagination. Its proponents find drama in the tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar.

Its readers, many of them scientists and politicians, find inspiration in the contrast between the ordinary and the extraordinary. Brake and Hook's "Different Engines" is a unique, provocative and compelling account of science fiction as the arbiter of progress.