Hold on to your warp-speeds; don’t exit the airlock just yet. The authors of a 2017 study which found that reading science fiction “makes you stupid” have conducted a follow-up that found that it’s only bad sci-fi that has this effect: a well-written slice of sci-fi will be read just as thoroughly as a literary story.

Two years ago, Washington and Lee University professors Chris Gavaler and Dan Johnson published a paper in which they revealed that when readers were given a sci-fi story peopled by aliens and androids and set on a space ship, as opposed to a similar one set in reality, “the science fiction setting triggered poorer overall reading” and appeared to “predispose readers to a less effortful and comprehending mode of reading – or what we might term non-literary reading”.

But after critics suggested that merely changing elements of a mainstream story into sci-fi tropes did not make for a quality story, Gavaler and Johnson decided to revisit the research. This time, 204 participants were given one of two stories to read: both were called “Ada” and were identical apart from one word, to provide the strictest possible control. The “literary” version begins: “My daughter is standing behind the bar, polishing a wine glass against a white cloth.” The science-fiction variant begins: “My robot is standing behind the bar, polishing a wine glass against a white cloth.”

In what Gavaler and Johnson call “a significant departure” from their previous study, readers of both texts scored the same in comprehension, “both accumulatively and when divided into the comprehension subcategories of mind, world, and plot”.

The presence of the word “robot” did not reduce merit evaluation, effort reporting, or objective comprehension scores, they write; in their previous study, these had been reduced by the sci-fi setting. “This difference between studies is presumably a result of differences between our two science-fiction texts,” they say.

Gavaler said he was “pretty startled” by the result.

“It turns out our first study didn’t reveal much about sci-fi generally but about what we would now have to call ‘non-literary sci-fi’. The text we used for our new study is instead ‘literary sci-fi’, and it didn’t trigger poor reading at all. Not even when it was introduced with a paragraph describing the story as non-literary. Readers basically ignored that intro and engaged actively with the text itself anyway,” he said. “I assume there were plenty of readers in the sample groups who don’t like sci-fi, but it didn’t matter because they still responded to the literary qualities of the story. Their comprehension didn’t drop this time.”

The paper, titled The Literary Genre Effect, is due to be published later this year in the journal Scientific Study of Literature.

“I’m hopeful that it will once-and-for-all give definitive evidence that literary fiction and genre fiction, specifically science fiction, are not separate categories,” said Gavaler.