Art is collective. Always, it has a tradition behind it. - Joanna Russ

...if everything is related to everything else (which I believe) then you can start anywhere, and (if you attend carefully to your own experience and everything you know) you will find yourself forced to broaden your inquiry to include as much of everything else as you possibly can.

Nothing but machines left between people. Telephones, taxis, letters, the discarded automata of the modern love affair. (p63)

SF was born didactic! It originated as a teaching medium-which is why its potential to actually effect some changes in people's attitudes is infinitely greater. It's got representative protagonists, for example-at least it starts like this in the works of H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, and other proto-SF writers. If you look at, say, The War of the Worlds, the human beings there may represent certain attitudes or types, but they are obviously not "individuals" in the sense that characters in the great realistic novels are.