Science and Fiction: Complementary Modes of Thought

Extract

[...] Yet these two products of human thought are not incommensurable but rather complementary and inseparable. Real and imaginary maintain a dialectical relationship The major difference between the two modes of thought - fiction and science - remains that science is subject to empirical verification However, there is no imagination that is not anchored in reality, and even if we refer to a genre of fiction that does not yet exist - science fiction - it is precisely the reflection of the projections, hopes, desires for knowledge and innovation of a society, which it returns to its younger generations as a legacy. [...]

[...] The common point of science and fiction is that these two fruits of human thought produce their own imaginatione. While fiction inspires an imaginary of action, whether in a desperate perspective of trying to save the world (texte or of carrying its optimistic technological aspirations (texte science provides for its part the material of fictional imagination. The distance between fiction and science must therefore be strongly relativized, because fiction has an 'experimental' aspect as a possible experience of thinking about the consequences between future interactions of phenomena. [...]

[...] But the boundaries crossed by human technology, capable of putting an end to the world itself, have been so pushed back that human imagination can today go beyond what was imaginable while remaining in the space of the credible, transcending in a certain way the conceptual separation between the imaginary and realism. Text Interview of Roland Lehoucq, astrophysicist at the Commissariat à l'énergie atomique at Saclay (Essonne) and president of Utopiales, an international science-fiction festival in Nantes (Loire Atlantique), Le Monde of July 2019. Text Jacques Noiray, The Novelist and His Machine, 1982. [...]