The Philosophical Roots of Science Fiction

io9 digs deep.

From the piece...

And by the same token, the philosophy of human nature often seems to depend on conjuring imaginary worlds, whether it be Hobbes' "nasty, brutish and short" world without laws, or Rousseau's "state of nature." A great believer in the importance of science, Hobbes sees humans as essentially mechanistic beings who are programmed to behave in a selfish fashion — and the state is a kind of artificial human that can contain us and give us better programming, in a sense.

So not only can you use something like Star Trek's Holodeck to point out philosophical notions of the fallibility of the senses, and the possible falseness of reality — philosophy's own explorations of those sorts of topics are frequently kind of other-worldly. Philosophical thought experiments, like the oft-cited "state of nature," are also close kin to science fiction world building. As Susan Schneider writes in the book Science Fiction and Philosophy, "if you read science fiction writers like Stanislaw Lem, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Sawyer, you already aware that some of the best science fiction tales are in fact long versions of philosophical thought experiments."

But meanwhile, when people come to list the earliest known works that could be considered "real" science fiction, they always wind up listing philosophical works, written by philosophers.