Fantasy as thought experiment

One of the architects of 20th-century science fiction, the influential writer and vastly more influential magazine editor John W. Campbell Jr., liked to argue that science fiction was a series of thought experiments, that each good sf story was a well-worked-out answer to a stated or implied "What if?" question about the universe and humanity's place in it. In this Slate article, Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik -- whose upcoming book is winningly titled How Children Change the World -- argues that for children, fantasy, too, is a series of thought experiments, a series of well-worked-out answers to a stated or implied "What if?" question about the universe and the child's place in it.