This article introduces user experience research that has been carried out by evaluating a video-illustrated science fiction prototype with process control workers. Essentially, the prototype ‘A remote operator’s day in a future control center in 2025’ was aimed at discovering opportunities for new interaction methods and ambient intelligence for the factories of the future. The theoretical obj...

A considerable part of our lives is spent engaging in the entertaining worlds of fiction that are accessible through media such as books and television. Little is known, however, about how we are able to readily understand that fictional events are distinct from those occurring within our real world. The present functional imaging study explored the brain correlates underlying such abilities by...

Skull can be interpreted as an investigation by PD James into the way a classical detective character, stereotypes, crime and setting would be affected by the introduction of modern-world issues and values. Essentially she has placed the manor-house setting within contemporary Britain, and migrated its inhabitants to Courcy Castle as a controlled experiment in sociology. In this way, James succ...

The current paradigm for synthetic reality based interactive fiction features familiar kinds of worlds realistically presented. This approach is unsatisfying in that it excludes several interesting classes of worlds, such as worlds where the user experiences the subjective reality of a character with a substantially different personality. We wish to extend the current paradigm to include classe...

When we read literary fiction, we are transported to fictional places, and we feel and think along with the characters. Despite the importance of narrative in adult life and during development, the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying fiction comprehension are unclear. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate how individuals differently employ neural networks importan...

What we tend to call postmodernism in literature today is usually characterized by intense self-reflexivity and overtly parodic intertextuality. In fiction this means that it is usually metafiction that is equated with the postmodern. Given the scarcity of precise definitions of this problematic period designation, such an equation is often accepted without question. What I would like to argue ...

BookSampo is a joint project between the Finnish public libraries and semantic web researchers, to improve fiction literature search and recommendation. In the project, dozens of librarians around Finland have used a collaborative web-based metadata editor to input diverse knowledge about fiction literature into a shared database. Particularly, the project has sought to improve access by indexi...

Houshang Golshiri is among the Iranian leading creative and imaginative fiction writers who managed to open up new horizons in Iranian fiction. Hence he could be claimed to be an innovative avant-garde short story writer with unique stylistic characteristics. Although inspired by fiction writers such as Alavi, Sadeqi, Golestan and Sa'edi in the techniques of narration, Golshiri nonetheless stan...