First Lines of "The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of"

"America is a nation of liars, and for that reason Science Fiction has a special claim to be our national literature, as the art form best adapted to telling the lies we like to hear and to pretend we believe."

-   Thomas Disch, The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of, How Science Fiction Conquored the World.

The book is, so far, a comprehensive, insightful, relentlessly cynical of SciFi, and I can't put it down. So far I've gone through Disch's analysis of Poe as SciFi's "embarrassing ancestor" and his reading of the bigger meaning of the rocket. Eye-opening and deflating all at the same time.