The purpose of fiction

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Never been down that road before. Fiction, ipso facto, lacks reality.

[trdsf]

I think sci-fi allows us to examine closely humanities views and opinion of our behaviors and beliefs at a “distance” We can show that our popular beliefs or behaviors can be a bad thing in certain ways and even our darkest secrets can at once be seen as a positive in another way. We are free to pass judgments without passing judgement. The writers get a pass to piss in an idea, behavior, belief or popular movement with relative impunity. Fiction is license to go off the rail.

Pretty much.  The usual interpretation of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds is that it was a commentary on British colonialism.  Asimov's Foundation trilogy is a riff on Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  Clarke's The Star, Harrison's The Streets of Ashkelon and Moorcock's Behold the Man all take more or less direct aim at the fundamentals of Christianity.

My own writing doesn't aim so high, although I have noticed I deal a lot with culture shock and trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.  No idea why...

[trdsf]

Never been down that road before. Fiction, ipso facto, lacks reality.

Fiction generally isn't strange enough to be real.  For example, if you look at the actual details of the Watergate break-in—a campaign with a massive lead ordering the bugging of the offices of the other party when the risk was wholly unnecessary, the failure of the first bug, getting caught because a night watchman happened to notice tape on a door when they tried a second time, suit-and-tie wearing burglars, a savvy and intelligent (and ruthless) politician going for the coverup rather than going on TV and saying "I'm firing these sonsabitches, this is not how we operate, let the courts handle it" (which would have deepened Nixon's landslide, not hurt it), Deep Throat, the Saturday Night Massacre, the 18½ minute gap, not to mention the unrelated sideshow with the Vice President, everything—and tried to sell that story as a political thriller, no one would publish it for being completely unbelievable... and yet it all actually happened.

[Mike Cl]

Truth is stranger than fiction.

[Mr.Obvious]

Truth is stranger than fiction.

Really? Recall the strangest true thing you can remember. Now imagine an android chimp wearing a Hitler outfit into that memory.

[Mike Cl]

Really? Recall the strangest true thing you can remember. Now imagine an android chimp wearing a Hitler outfit into that memory.

That is amazing!  I read 'recall the strangest true thing' -- so I did.  And this is what I remember--an android chimp wearing a Hitler outfit.
How did you do that???     

[Sorginak]

Fiction is meant to be an escape. We need escapes from reality in order to calm the chaos imposed upon our fragile minds by a sick society. Of course, there are varying forms of escape; some beneficial and some not so much. Religion is one form of escape I would deem quite damaging to the human psyche.

[Hydra009]

Fiction is meant to be an escape. We need escapes from reality in order to calm the chaos imposed upon our fragile minds by a sick society. Of course, there are varying forms of escape; some beneficial and some not so much. Religion is one form of escape I would deem quite damaging to the human psyche.

How much escape is beneficial and how much is harmful?

I find myself more and more adopting a work-to-live approach, where the drudgery of everyday life is simply a means to an end - to fuel creativity and discovery.

It's similar to the idea that sleep is the default state and waking life is a state of frenzied activity and consumption necessary to facilitate more sleeping.  ...It makes more sense to a bear.

[Sorginak]

I find myself more and more adopting a work-to-live approach.....

As I get older, I find myself toeing homelessness in preference over working myself to death for a capitalist economy.