Arachnion

What makes a word a “science fiction” word?

This is all prompted by my son’s recent acquisition of the words “dinosaur” and “spaceship;” an important achievement, I’m sure you’ll agree. So I announced that I’m going to start teaching him more “science fiction” words. But what does that mean?

A word is clearly an SF word if it appears only within science fiction works. Ansible, for example, or warp drive. But what about words that occur in normal (if technical) discourse as well? Is “spaceship” a science fiction word? Black hole? Antimatter? Does it help if that term was originally coined in a work of science fiction? Robot, for example, is a term that originated in fiction (well, drama, actually), and migrated into reality.

I’d suggest that a science fiction word is one that is used to describe a concept iconic to the genre: that is, where the sole presence of that concept in a work of fiction is a strong indicator that the work is science fiction. But that’s a discussion for another day.

I subscribe to an email list for graduates of Viable Paradise, a science-fiction writing workshop. On it, a writer described a science fictional concept (a sort of meshed human and computer brain), and asked if there were accepted or familiar terms for it in the genre.

The existence of the question itself is fascinating. I can’t think of another genre of fiction (counting SF and fantasy as one, that is), where it would even occur to writers to research the invented words of other writers. Certainly, genres have their own language and jargon: the procedurals of detective novels, the euphemisms of romance, the gadgets of technothrillers, the supernatural creatures of horror. But these words aren’t consciously invented by writers, generally; they are handed to them by the larger culture. In science fiction, though (and to a lesser extent in fantasy, which invents terms but also draws from mythology and folklore), it is considered normal — indeeed, exemplary — both to invent new terms to describe new ideas, and to borrow those terms and ideas from other writers.