How the world works

Patrick Nielsen Hayden, quoted in this article about anti-authoritarian ideas in science fiction:

“Young people read fiction to figure out how the world works,” he says, “and science fiction is an extremely effective, quick way of testing your views of how the world works.”

This is exactly what I often try to say.

I think not only young people go to fiction to figure out how the world works. We think and understand things to large extent in the form of stories, and get our role models from stories. Science fiction is very powerful, giving tools in the form of story pieces to reflect and make sense of things. Especially if you deal with lots of changes in the world around you.