Later editors began to improve the fiction, and by the end of the 1940s, in the opinion of science fiction historian Mike Ashley, the magazine briefly rivaled Astounding.
Jenny starts writing another book and taking a college writing class to improve her fiction skills.
Did the nature of that job improve your own fiction?
I cannot provide the quantitative data that he requests, but three novels leap off my bookshelf to support the idea that good fiction can improve our lives: "Uncle Tom's Cabin," Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel, articulated a critique of American slavery that turned many 19th-century Americans toward abolition.
We know that literacy correlates with better social outcomes, that literary fiction can improve our understanding of others, but despite the best efforts of the boffins, literature is one of the few areas of modern life where it's not all about the numbers.
In a new column for BBC Culture, Hephzibah Anderson explains that it's not just self-help books that can improve our well-being – fiction can cure us too.
The results were unremarkable, but Reiss was energetic, and was able to improve the quality of fiction in succeeding issues, though he occasionally apologized to the readers for printing weak material.
"These are aesthetic and stylistic concerns which as psychologists we can't and don't want to make judgments about," said Kidd. "Neither do we argue that people should only read literary fiction; it's just that only literary fiction seems to improve Theory of Mind in the short-term.
The UK government has even launched a dedicated lab - the Policy Lab - aimed at using design methods, including design fictions to improve the "pace, quality and deliverability of policy in the civil service".
Researchers recently published research showing that literary fiction improves "empathy".
