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comment by theadvancedapes
theadvancedapes  ·  3529 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Neal Stephenson against Dystopia

    I think reaching back to Somnium and The New Atlantis as examples of early science fiction is kind of like pointing at Bosch as an early example of Surrealism - yeah, it fits the definition but it exists in a bubble, divorced from the rest of the movement without influence for or by the rest of the body of work.

Fair enough. What I was meaning to convey is that those early works are examples of science fiction writers thinking about phenomena that got others to think outside of the box (in their respective time period). This is exactly what engineers are asking of science fiction writers today.