Fiction as Truth

When Poe's story, "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" was first published he failed to state that it was a fictional work. Instead he let his readers believe that through hypnosis a person could become trapped in their own body.

In 1938, the Orson Welles' radio broadcast of the sci-fi fantasy "War of the Worlds" about aliens invading earth caused a nationwide panic.

In Poe's case the public was prepared to accept the idea of performing surgeries using hypnotism as an anesthetic, a commonly reported phenomenon (albeit untrue). "War of the Worlds" played on the scientific explanation of a crowded universe where sentient alien beings living on Mars.

Have you ever read a fictional work that you thought was true? Why did you believe it was true and what did it cause you to do?

Comments

  1. Ive never really read a book or story and believed it was true. but ive seen alot of movies when i was younger and recently and thought they were true and would eventually happen. they caused me to be scared at time and nervous and made me seem at bit naive to people who knew they werent but when you see something or read something its up to you about how you want to feel about that particular thing and until you find out for your self that its fake on untrue then your going to go on believing. you cant listen to what other people think becuse your not them and your minds are diffent thats how i feel.

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  3. the most fictional story that has trigger me to believe it was a movie called 2012. Because the facts of the Incas in the history channel has a straigth information of how they predicted the effect of the world in the future and so i believe it. It was centurys ago that the Incas were accurate to what happen next in their life.

    That led me to believe that 2012 is a dooms day. It made me ponder and search for the truth from all the website and a book of the Incas. I did a big research to make sure of my future to be safe. It was odd that i did it. after I've calm down and started to let my bealive of the Incas pass. The research was unecessary, it seems to me it was a bunch of fact that hasn't been proven exactly, i dont no what to believe from what i have red. and so i dont even know if it is true or not. Because we can only predict the future and live trough my life to see it for my self.

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  4. I have never really read a book that made me believe it was true. Although, as I read them I can picture them as if they were real. But I have seen movies that I believed were real. For example, The Fourth Kind, it had to do with alien abductions. You never really know if aliens really exist but they had real interviews with the woman whom it had happened to in the movie, they had plenty of real video recordings too. It was mainly the videos they showed that had freaked me out. They looked completely real and im sure anyone knows real when they see it. It blew my mind and when I saw the midnight showing of that movie, i couldn't go to sleep because i was freaking out, while I was sitting in my room alone, any little smidge of similarity to that movie would start making my heart race. I was even on the phone with my friend but she was sleeping, I still needed her to calm myself. I didn't go to bed untill 6a.m. and I had work at 10 the next day.

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  5. I've read soooo many books, I considered to be true. To start off, fiction novels by Jodi Picoult all in involve real life scenarios that could apply to anyone. BUT, I've definitely entertained the thought of the Twilight Saga or Harry Potter to be true. WHY? Because the readers have a gift; the ability to pull in its readers, by relating to each of them personally. That's why, I want to be a writer =)

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  6. I have read a lot of books and have not thought any to be true. And not because they were not well written. On the contrary, they are written to well that I don't think I can take it if I believed in them and later found out they were not real. They books I most wish were real are "Wuthering Heights" by Emily Brontë and "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Brontë. These sisters have a way of making the paranormal and love story go hand in hand. I wish the power of love in these books existed more often in the real world. The love between the protagonist in these books withstand anything, whether it be a fire, or even death. I just wish people loved with more purity now and days as they did before.

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  7. When I was 10 I'd read my first Harry Potter book, "The Chamber of Secretes", it was also my first chapter book. And i think because of that i got sucked into the story. I the world of harry potter was so vast, detailed, and magical that after id read it i started waiting for my letter to come in the mail, or Hagrid to come crashing through the door to take me King's Cross Station. it was only after i read about the larger than life spider that lived in the forest that i began to think the world of witch craft and wizardry might not be real. I hoped.

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  8. I don't mean to seem out of line when I say this but when I was little I thought that the bible was true; in a way that everything in the bible is fact as oppose to a belief. I believed that it was true because my mother is a very religious woman and she would always take me to church. I would hear all of the stories that the priest would tell and think, "Wow, that really happened?" Although I now do not claim any religion, I am glad I was raised Catholic because I took out the morals and values that I believed in and still have them today.

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  9. I have not read a fictional work that I thought was true, I have only read fictional books. I have thought about things in books that might be real. All things can be possible in this world and there might be things out there, that we do not know of. Scientist are able to make and create thing especially with technology that keeps growing and advancing. There is religious people that believe that when the world comes to an end. creatures that we do not know of will come out. Those creatures that they say will come out are like the ones from the movie Narnia. The creature that was a horse and a donkey. I do believe thing from somewhere I do not know will come out and all those fictional stories will end up being real.

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  10. This is a very interesting article. It seems so unreal that people would forget to mention that it is fiction. Many people get so into readings that they might believe that it is real. By not mentioning that it is fiction more people can get really into the reading more than they should. So like they would not be able to tell what is reality and what is fake. I have personally never read a book that I thought was real. Maybe it is jut me but I feel like I can really tell what is real and what is not. The only book that I have read that I actually enjoyed reading was East of Eden. That book really caught my attention and I enjoyed it. That book was good and I was able to tell apart reality from fiction.

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