2 THE UTOPIAN TRADITION

At its core, science fiction is about imagining how the world might be otherwise, and this impulse toward change connects sf to utopian writing. Their similarity becomes clear when we consider how science and technology change daily life. Thomas More's Utopia invented its fictional island's culture as a foil to specific problems in contemporary England, including enclosures that dispossessed peasants of their land to make way for grazing sheep, a practice motivated by technological shifts in English manufacture that changed their main export from raw wool to woolen cloth. Thus, a shift in one area of life—the technological capacity to produce good cloth—had consequences that extend far beyond the cloth's quality or the efficiency of its manufacture. Utopian writing works through such connections and consequences: it imagines an elsewhere that might result from different historical contingencies and uses the contrast between its depictions and ordinary life to prompt readers to understand the material world as malleable.