alternative
history.
A SF work which may well seem on the
surface to be quite "realistic" but which deals with a "what if" in which
historical events have turned out differently. Examples include
Dick's
The
Man in the High Castle
(Germany and Japan win WW II) and Gibson
and Sterling's
The
Difference Engine
(in which computers become prominent in the Victorian
era). |
allegory
An all-encompassing symbolic tale in
which virtually all elements of the tale, and the tale as a whole, can
be understood to have another symobolic meaning. |
allusion
A reference in a work of literature
to something outside the work. To get the full the meaning of the text,
the reader will need to get the reference. |
android.
An automaton made to resemble a human
being. |
archetypes.
Jung's
term for the ever-recurrent road markers of human experience; images, forms,
patterns, symbols, rites of passage that transcend particular cultures. |
canon, the.
The body of works deemed acceptible
(usually by high culture elites like academics and critics) for study and
serious consideration. Once outside the canon, SF (or some of it at least)
has now become "canonical"--follwing a path similar to literature by women,
minorities, etc. |
convention
A pre-ordained way of doing something.
Each and every art, including literature, has its own conventions. In opera,
for example, people sing. A particular genre/or sub-genre is identifable,
in part, by its particular conventions. |
cult SF.
A work, either book or film, that develops
a fanatic following, a group whose members identify with the work,
usually knowing it by heart, able to quote it and discuss it (at conventions,
on the internet) exhaustively, even patterning their lives after its characters.
Works as dfiferent as Star Trek and Star Wars, Liquid Sky and
Repo Man have attained cult status. |
cyberpunk.
Prominent late 20th Century SF postmodern
subgenre, tracing its origins back to the early work of William
Gibson (some make J.
G. Ballard and William
Burroughs the originators). Characterized by 1) noirish depiction
of urban landscapes (often in decay), 2) ambivalent take on technology,
3) hardboiled characters, 4) emphasis on international crime, 5) preoccupation
with cyberspace, into which its
characters, anxious to escape the "meat," becoming
pure consciousness, can enter and travel about. Several of the stories
in the NASF are by Cyberpunkers (the stories by Gibson, Dorsey,
Sterling, Cadigan, for example). The current film The Matrix is
a cyberpunk movie. Academic interest in cyberpunk has helped to unmarginalize
the genre.
alt.culture
entry |
cyberspace.
William
Gibson's term for the virtual reality
created by computers and the internet. |
cyborg.
A human being modified for life in a
hostile or alien environment by the substitution of artificial organs and
other body parts, or a part human/part robot hybrid. |
defamiliarization.
See estrangement. |
disaster
stories.
A SF subgenre--most prominent 9n SF
film--which focuses on natural or human disasters and their aftermaths. |
dystopia.
The opposite of a utopia.
Any tale, usually set in the future, in which scciety has become, in its
denial of human freedom, nightmarish and oppressive, and a denial
of human freedom. Classic examples include Le Guin's "The
New Atlantis" (in NBSF), Orwell's1984,
Huxley's
Brave
New World, Atwood's
A
Handmaid's Tale, and Bradbury's
Fahrenheit
451. |
epiphany.
A moment of awareness, of revelation.
Joyce believed that short stories, by their very nature, tend to be about
epiphanal moments. |
estrangement.
A Russian formalist term, coined
early in the century: The power--central to all art--to make things strange/unfamiliar
and thus open to new understandings. Translation of the Russian word "ostranenie." |
extrapolation.
To arrive at (conclusions or results)
by hypothesizing from known facts or observations. According to LeGuin,
extrapolation gives rise to much of SF. |
fan fiction.
Supplementary unofficial stories written
by fans of a book, a series, a movie, making use of already existing characters
in news plots. A postmodern phenomenon. |
fantastic,
the.
Todorov's term for that art (especially
literature) which deals with supernatural or quasi-supernatural, "fantastic"
things. According to Todorov, the fantastic exist only until science comes
up with explanations that will suffice. The biggest conference annually
(held in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida) that brings together both fantasy and
SF scholars and writers is called the International Conference on the Fantastic. |
fantasy.
In LeGuin's
term, literature that is grounded in a supernatural, non-scientific, magical
worldview. For LeGuin, fantasy is the "grandmother"; SF is one of the "kids." |
first-person
narrator.
A narrator who speaks in his own voice;
when "I" tells a tale. |
foreshadowing.
When later developments in a narrative
are hinted at early on. The famous Pushkin law--"Never plant a gun in the
first act unless you intend to use it in the last"--is really about foreshadowing. |
formula.
Customary, prefabricated, conventional
styles of plot/imagery/setting, etc. routinely/conventionally followed
by an author/artist. Probably every narrative form--from literature to
opera--develops formulae. |
genre
fiction.
Largely formulaic fiction with pre-ordained
character types, conventions, motifs, iconography. In traditional assessments
of the canon, genre fiction--including SF--ranks low and is often not considered
art. According to Thomas Schatz (Hollywood Film Genres) Platonic
models for a given genre might be thought to exist. |
Golden Age
(of SF).
SF from (roughly) 1930-1960, usually
hard. |
Grandmother
and the Kids.
LeGuin's
special desgination for fantasy (the Grandmother)
and all the literary forms it has spun-off over the centuries. |
hard SF.
SF from the
Golden Age, characterized by the overwhelming predominance of male
writers and its almost scientistic faith
in science, technology, and the future. See also soft
SF. |
icon/iconography
A recurring image/imagery or motif(s)
of a particular genre.
Leguin
argues that SF is in some part identifiable by its iconography. Bear in
mind that the term "icon" originally referred to religious relics (a statue
of the Virgin Mary, for example); hence "icon" as a metaphor carries
religious overtones. |
in
medias res.
Literally "in the midle of things."
Describes a narrative in which the story begins after some of the key events
have already taken place. |
intertextual.
When a work of art requires other "texts,"
to which it refers--by allusion and or quotation--
in order to establish its own meaning and significance. Commonplace in
postmodernism. |
irony.
A perceived discrepancy between appearance
and reality or between expectation and reality. If Jeff Gordan is killed
on the way to buy a loaf of bread, his death would be ironic. Sarcasm is
a form of verbal irony. |
magical
realism.
Literary style emanating from Latin
America which mixes without explanation the supernatural and the mundane.
Not SF, though it is one of the "kids."
Probably best understood as a form of the fantastic. |
marginalization.
The tendency to put aside (and not allow
in the canon) the literature/culture.artistic
forms of minority (women, African Americans, Native American) voices and
genres. SF has traditionally been marginalized. |
meat, the.
Cyberpunk
slang for the body. |
megatext.
The overarching (bigger than the story
itself) "mother" tale (LeGuin
would say grandmother):
the source on which literature perpetually draws. For LeGuin,
the megatext that governs SF may well be the story of science itself. |
metafiction.
Largely self-referential
fiction
which tends to be about itself--and about the process of writing fiction.
Common in postmodernism. |
metaphor
An expressed "poetic" comparison between
two things, one known and understood, the other known/not yet understood,
which seeks to illuminate the latter by drawing on the characteristics
of the former. From a Greek word for "bridge." According to LeGuin,
literalized metaphors are the seed crystal for many SF story. |
narratee
The specified or unspecified person
to whom a narrator is supposedly speaking. |
narrative
The fancy, more scientifc word for storytelling.
The critical study of narrative is called narratology. |
narrator
The teller of a tale. In fiction,
the perspective from which a narrator speaks is known as point-of-view. |
novum.
A "new thing" introduced into a story,
with resulting estrangement. According
to Darko Suvin, the presence of a novum(s) identifies a work as SF. |
omniscient
narrator.
A narrator (usually in third person)
who has god-like knowledge of characters and their motives. |
ostranenie.
See estragnement. |
parody.
A form of satire that sets out to spoof
another work of literature (or other art). |
pastiche.
Combining/hybridizing styles, icons,
formula. Distinctive signature of
postmodernism
(according to Jameson). Similarly, media critic Todd Gitlin has noted
postmodernism's
tendency toward the recombinant. |
persona.
The voice in which a a writer speaks
in a work. From the Greek word for mask. |
point
of view (POV).
The perspective from which a story is
told. Common povs include
-
first person: in which an "I" tells a tale,
usually from a limited, subjective vantage point, usually about events
in which the "I" is involved
-
third person; in which the story is told
by an outsider, either omniscient
or a central intelligence (who knows about the events of the narrative
as an observer of them but lacks comniscient knowledge).
|
postmodernism.
End of the Twentieth Century artistic
sensibility/cultural mindset, characterized by self-referentially,
intertextuality,
derivitiveness, excessive quotation--by an overpowering awareness of what
Eco has called "the already said." The advent of Postmodernism has lead
to an increased interest in--and decreased marginalization
of--SF. |
reader-response
criticism.
A school of literary criticism which
argues that the reader is as responsible for the construction of a text
as the author. |
reading
protocol.
A particular logic that governs the
way we read. We read poetry by a different protocol than we read fiction.
We read SF by a different protocol than we read realistic fiction. According
to Samuel
Delany, in fact, the RP with which we must approach SF is in large
part what defines it. Such an approach to literature is generally called
reader-response
criticism. |
resisting
reader.
Judith Fetterley's designation for a
reader/viewer who reads a text against the grain, finding in it uncommon,
often counter-cultural meanings. |
science
fiction.
See
"Toward a Definition of Science Fiction" on this site. |
scientistic.
The tendency to turn science into a
belief in science as a be-all and end-all. Science as a quasi-religion.
LeGuin
accuses much hard SF of being scientistic. |
self-referential.
When a work of art knows that it is
a work of art, referring, like a snake biting its own tail, to itself in
its presentation. Characteristic of postmodernism. |
slash
fan fiction.
Often pornographic, always edgy fan
fiction which transplants the characters of an existing work into
radically different kinds of stories, changing, for example, their sexual
orientations, making, for example, Spock and Kirk lovers. A postmodern
phenomenon. |
soft SF.
The opposite, obviously, of hard
SF; since the 1960s SF had tended to be "soft," that is non-scientistic,
concerned with themes like gender, self-identity, ecology, reality/illusion,
etc. Soft SF has arisen simultaneously with the greater prominence of minority
and women writers and audiences. |
space opera.
An old-fashioned SF tale (or an imitation
of it) involving all of the givens of the classic
Golden
Age tale: spaceships, ray guns, brave men, evil aliens, robots. |
steampunk.
Alternative
history cyberpunk in which modern
technology is transplanted back into earlier periods of history. Gibson
and
Sterling's
The
Difference Engine
(in which computers become prominent in the Victorian
era), or the film Wild, Wild West are good examples.
alt.culture
entry |
subtext.
An underlying, emergent theme in a work
or works. |
unreliable
narrator.
A narrator (usually first person) who
is not to be trusted. As readers, we are invited to doubt his/her presentation
of facts and intepretation of them. |
Utopia.
A tale depicting a perfect human society.
The name derives from Sir
Thomas More's 16th century book, though the Latin word "utopia"
actually means "nowhere." Prime examples include Butler's Erewhon ["nowhere"
spelled backwards] Bellamy's Looking Backward, and Russ' "A Few
Things I Know About Whileaway" (in NBSF). A dystopia
is an inverted utopia. |