But the images a video camera collects can also, of course, be manipulated and distorted; its self-evident transparency, the enabling fiction behind Webcams, security surveillance tapes and reality television, can be blurred and smeared.
The biggest impediment to change is that the C.I.A.'s role enables a fiction that has suited the United States, which refuses to acknowledge striking militants in the lawless Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, and Pakistan, which denounces American strikes but actually allows them.
A deal with a TV division of Warner Brothers enables fan fiction based on three TV series to be self-published.
Providing sophisticated characters for players to interact with in a more human-like fashion than ever before enabled interactive fiction to serve as a platform for role-play.
The first level is that in practice minting the coin would be nothing but an accounting fiction, enabling the government to continue doing exactly what it would have done if the debt limit were raised.
Aside from enabling a science fiction luxury — simply speaking into your collar when you want to talk to somebody — antenna clothing could offer covert communication for soldiers, wireless monitoring for the sick and much better reception in general.
What Nabokov seems to have understood intuitively is what neuroscience is now proving: reading fiction enables a deeply memorable engagement with our sense of space and place.
This is not science fiction; much of the enabling technology has started to trickle out of the laboratory.
In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak.
It would plug into a prodigious textual database, enabling the user to generate, on demand, erudite references to centuries of place-specific fact and fiction.
