It's a good question, but I definitely disagree with the idea of reading fiction - especially science fiction - to learn facts. That's what non-fiction is for; fiction, by definition, is made up and may be completely unrealistic.
As for the purpose of reading fiction... it's hard to give
one answer. Part of it is definitely escapism, and I don't see what's so strange about that; books enable you to travel through times, worlds and lives you could never experience yourself and allow you to lose yourself in that for a few hours. However, I also think there's other benefits to fiction.
You
can learn stuff from fiction - to paraphrase Jeanette Winterson, not facts but truths. While reading a novel set in a certain time and place will not necessarily get you the same (hopefully) reliable facts that a non-fiction book on the same time and place will get you, it
will get you one perspective on how people understand the world, how they deal with it. In other words, you learn not about the subject the writer writes about but about how the writer him/herself views the subject. It's an exercise in seeing different perspectives. To trot out one of my favourite quotes on writing fiction, from Ian McEwan's
Atonement:
She could write the scene three times over, from three points of view; her excitement was in the prospect of freedom, of being delivered from the cumbrous struggle between good and bad, heroes and villains. None of these three was bad, nor were they particularly good. She need not judge. There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have.
The non-fiction writer is restricted by facts; the fiction writer is free to make shit up and ask "wouldn't it be cool if..." Non-fiction gets an answer to the questions
what, how, when, why; fiction helps you ask those questions. Non-fiction tells us what the world is or has been like; fiction helps us make sense of that world - poetic lie-sense, if you will. Non-fiction is either true or false; fiction is neither true nor false. Non-fiction tells us something about others; fiction tells us something about ourselves.
I ramble. One more quote, this from the astronomer (and SF writer) Peter Nilson:
In the library of the observatory in Ondrejov above Prague I once found a catalogue of stars that astounded me. It had hundreds of pages with tables of stars that had been observed and confirmed to exist. Towards the end there was a table of stars thought to have been observed but confirmed to NOT exist. But to my astonishment, at the back of the volume I found a list of stars which had never been observed and did not exist. Perhaps the most amazing thing about the universe is that we could create an infinite catalogue of things, worlds and beings that no one has seen and which do not exist. Each story in the realm of fiction is a small part of that catalogue.
. That led me to the basic question why people read books. I read them to get skilled . why YOU read books ?
