Fiction And Reality II

I missed a connection between two recent posts. Fiction And Reality is about fiction becoming reality. Future City is about the contrast between the vision of a future city and the long process of its construction. The second post also mentions the contrast between two kinds of sf futures. However, the building of the City of the Future is itself another interaction between fiction and reality. President Roosevelt said in 1915 that the wonderful Exposition buildings would:

"'...be rebuilt in imperishable marble and granite...'"

-Daggers In Darkness, CHAPTER THREE, p. 54.

- thus initiating the transformation of mere images of a possible future into the actual future. However, Roosevelt began this process only within a work of fiction. Theodore Roosevelt was not President of the United States in 1915 and we are invited to imagine him in that role only through the medium of alternative history fiction. The relationship between fiction and reality becomes more complicated. Willingly suspending disbelief, we temporarily accept a fictional situation as if it were a reality. Within the imagined reality of Daggers In Darkness, buildings that were transient structures in our history are in the process of becoming permanent towers at a later date. We can handle such complexities because we have been accustomed from earliest childhood to hearing stories and to knowing that they did not really happen - although sometimes people get confused. I once asked a guy to accept as a fictional premise that The Time Machine was a true account mistaken for fiction because the Time Traveller had not returned. Almost immediately, he was asking me in puzzlement whether I thought that The Time Machine had really happened.