Allen’s psychosis was extreme, but it showed in stark clarity what drew readers to science fiction: an imagined life of power and status that compensated for the readers’ own deficiencies and disappointments. But Lindner, himself a science fiction fan, remarked also on the seductive attraction of Allen’s second life, which began to offer, as he put it, a “fatal fascination”. Lindner explained Allen’s condition as an escape from overwhelming mental anguish rooted in childhood trauma. He believed he could enter his other life by mental time travel into the far-off future, where his destiny awaited in scenes of power, respect, and conquest – both military and sexual. Schnoodles blog, CC BYĪllen believed he was at once a scientist on Earth – and simultaneously an interplanetary emperor. Fantasy migration is “adaptive” – dressing up as Princess Leia or Darth Vader makes science fiction fans happy and keeps them out of trouble.īut, while psychology may not exactly diagnose fans as mentally ill, the insinuation remains – science fiction evades, rather than confronts, disappointment with the real world.Ĭase studies from the edge.
The authors of a 2015 study stress that, while they have found evidence to confirm this hypothesis, such psychological profiling of “geeks” is not intended to be stigmatising. They consequently migrate to a land of make-believe where they can live out their grandiose fantasies. This supposes that the real world of unemployment and debt is too disappointing for a generation of entitled narcissists. The most recent psychological accusation against science fiction is the “ great fantasy migration hypothesis”. Psychology has often supported this dismissal of the genre.
According to McEwan, his own book about intelligent robots, Machines Like Me, provided the latter by examining the ethics of artificial life – as if this were not a staple of science fiction from Isaac Asimov’s robot stories of the 1940s and 1950s to TV series such as Humans (2015-2018). In 2019, the celebrated author Ian McEwan dismissed science fiction as the stuff of “anti-gravity boots” rather than “human dilemmas”. Science fiction has struggled to achieve the same credibility as highbrow literature.