2. WHY SCIENCE FICTION IS "GOOD TO THINK WITH" - SCIENCE FICTION AS 'THOUGHT EXPERIMENT'
Creative forms such as science fiction can offer a wider field, when we are concerned with critiquing and unpacking techno scientific practices, cultures and knowledge. Furthermore, as "cross-cultural" narrative in encounters between the humanities and sciences - this conjunction of disciplines figured by the term science fiction - bears re-examination as a resource for Science Studies, and a potential mediator in science-humanities dialogues which could illuminate the social and cultural meanings and consequences of scientific research(Merrick, 2005, Gough, 2006).
A basic element of science fiction is the challenges and the questioning articulated in its reading process whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of
estrangement and cognition or cognition effect (Freedman, 2000:16-23). As theoretical models – abstract constructions of subject, of representation – become fleshed out in the particularized worlds of the science fiction imagination, science fiction articulates and explores those models through its narrative experiments and, in the ongoing dialectical relationship between abstraction and concretization science fiction continues to influence the development of the new worlds and the new futures. The mixing of science fictions with science 'facts' and theories serves the immediate function of undermining universal claims to 'truth', and in emphasizing narrativity, it potentially opens up scientific discourses to challenge and interpretation. In this essence, science fiction is called upon as useful space, "reading practice"or "dream laboratory" in which to reflect upon and engage with scientific cultures, practices and knowledges and configures a more productive interaction relation between fictional and theoretical writings on science, especially in the field that opposes the authority of the natural sciences as "crafts for distinguishing between fact and fiction"