'Experience has not yet learned her letters': Narrative and Information in the Works of Francis Bacon

In this article, I investigate the way forms of writing construct temporal frameworks for processing information into knowledge in the works of Francis Bacon. Baconian science looks to the distant future even as it requires immediately useful information. One means of processing information is narrative. I argue that the New Atlantis , Bacon’s utopian narrative, functions similarly to modern scientific hypothesis, projecting beyond the current state of knowledge to imagine how things might be. The New Atlantis thus presents a solution to the problem of deriving knowledge from incomplete information: because knowledge is not a discrete object to be collected, but something produced over time, fiction can shape our understanding of the truth, as long as we understand that knowledge to be perennially incomplete and provisional.