”Robotrevolutionen”, verkligheten och fiktionen

Abstract

This article departs from a critical realist perspective to discuss how fiction could be understood as a way to make social contradictions and their subsequent collective experiences comprehensible. By studying the myth of “the man and the machine”, it argues that such an approach allows a disruption of the otherwise rigid division between fact and fiction without deeming the dichotomy obsolete. Instead, by studying the relationship between fictional works and the current public debates, the article illustrates how the factual and fictional nurture each other as essential parts in the social production of reality. As the reality at hand gives rise to undefined anticipations, hopes and anxieties, the fictional accounts of the future provide these formless anticipations with fixed contours.