ABSTRACT
Science fiction seems to stir up some extreme reactions. On the one hand dismissed as cultural trash produced for purely commercial gain and consumed by dreadful obsessives terminally disengaged from ‘serious’ concerns. On the other, a genre that usefully offers scientific extrapolation and social criticism. Hence we find a selfsatisfied distancing from the vulgarity of mass consumption contrasted with an overearnest maintenance of a ‘methodology’ that produces prediction and/or critique.
