, “Science Fiction and ‘Literature’-or, The Conscience of the King,” in Starboard Wine (1984).
“A historian [who] … had been a great reader of literature … had found, over a period of five or six years, that he was reading more and more science fiction until, for the last two years, other than his journals and nonfiction he read nothing else. “I was afraid to go back and read a ‘serious’ novel,” he told me. “I didn’t know what would happen. Finally, in fear and trembling, I picked up Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, always one of my favorites, just to see what happened when I did …. I thoroughly enjoyed it. But I realized something. Before, I used to read novels to tell me how the world really was at the time they were written. This time, I read the book asking myself what kind of world would have had to exist for Austen’s story to have taken place—which, incidentally, is completely different from the world as it actually was back then….” As far as I can tell, this man has started to read Austen as if her novels were science fiction.”