Hossein Jorjani
First publication: 2026 – 07 – 27
Imagination has long served as an indispensable instrument for understanding reality. Yet it has not always been employed for the same intellectual purpose. Mythology, satire, and science fiction all construct worlds that differ from ordinary experience, but they do so in order to illuminate different aspects of human existence.
Mythology seeks to explain the present by recounting an imagined past. It answers questions concerning origins: the creation of the world, the emergence of humanity, the causes of death, the foundations of social order, and the relationship between gods and mortals. Whether these narratives are historically true is secondary to their explanatory function. Their purpose is to make the existing world intelligible by telling us how it came to be.
Satire employs imagination differently. Rather than inventing a distant past, it transforms the present. Jonathan Swift provides one of its finest examples. In Gulliver’s Travels, he isolated particular features of eighteenth-century politics, science, and human behavior and extended them to the point of absurdity. The imaginary societies of Lilliput, Laputa, and the Houyhnhnms were never intended as predictions. They were intellectual constructions designed to expose the hidden assumptions, contradictions, and follies of Swift’s own age. By exaggerating selected aspects of reality, satire makes the familiar appear unfamiliar and thereby reveals it more clearly.
Science fiction directs imagination toward yet another horizon. Instead of asking how the world came to be, it asks how the world might become. It projects current scientific knowledge, technological developments, or social tendencies into possible futures and explores their consequences. Artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, planetary colonization, ecological collapse, and human enhancement are presented not primarily as predictions but as opportunities to examine possibilities that may eventually confront humanity.
In this respect, both satire and science fiction resemble the thought experiment. Each deliberately alters one or a few features of reality while leaving the remainder largely unchanged. Swift magnified existing social and political tendencies until their underlying logic became unmistakable. Science fiction often magnifies emerging technologies or institutions until their potential consequences become visible. In both cases, controlled exaggeration serves not to escape reality but to understand it more deeply.
These three uses of imagination differ principally in their temporal orientation. Mythology looks backward in order to explain origins. Satire concentrates upon the present in order to illuminate the present more clearly. Science fiction looks forward in order to investigate possible futures and their ethical, social, and political implications. Together they demonstrate that imagination is not merely an escape from reality but one of the principal instruments by which human beings seek to understand it.
The distinction may be summarized succinctly: Mythology explains the world by telling us what has already happened. Satire illuminates the world by exaggerating what is already happening. Science fiction challenges the world by asking what might happen—and whether we should let it.
Hossein Jorjani 