Book Review:
Brave New Words
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Only a couple of weeks ago, British scientists were reported to be
working on a force field to protect astronauts from radiation on
the space station and space shuttle, on interplanetary journeys or
while working in the projected NASA moonbase. We take such language
in our stride these days, when science-fictional concepts seem to
become reality almost month by month. But if you go back more than
a couple of generations, words like these were mainly the preserve
of people who wrote and read science fiction.
This book is a pure dictionary, albeit with a few mini-essays on
aspects of SF vocabulary; each entry is supported by a number of
example citations, just as in the Oxford English Dictionary. Here
you will find hyperspace, organlegger, phaser, ramscoop, spacesuit,
Dyson sphere, generation ship, terraforming, holodeck and hundreds
of other terms familiar to SF readers and viewers, plus a lot that
are less so, even to those well-read in the field. Also included
are abbreviations like BDO (Big Dumb Object), a mysterious object
of alien origin found somewhere out there (think of the monolith in
Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey) and BEM (Bug-Eyed Monster), any
stereotypical alien creature of hideous form created through
authorial imagination to terrify and fascinate. The genres of SF
are here, too, such as cyberpunk, new wave, slipstream and
steampunk. It also includes the vocabulary of people who engage in
SF fandom (fan activities), who attend cons (conventions), who
compose and sing filk songs (folk songs with SF leanings, a name
borrowed from a misprint), take FIAWOL as their motto (Fandom Is A
Way Of Life) and are gutted when they have to fafiate (from FAFIA,
Forced Away From It All), leave the world of cons and fans and
return to mundania, the mundane everyday world.
Cross-fertilisation between SF and the real world of technology and
science has been so great that it is often difficult to know where
the stimulus for a term has come from. Was it created within the SF
field and subsequently widened its appeal, or did SF writers take
over and build upon an existing term? It would be good to have this
made clearer in the text at times, at least where we know for sure.
"Hyperspace", for example, is correctly glossed to point out that
it was a term in mathematics long before SF writers got their hands
on it. On the other hand, "completist" is dated to an SF source of
1944, eleven years before the OED's first example, so seems to be a
term of SF origin; likewise "gas giant" (a very large planet made
largely from gaseous material) appears in an SF context 13 years
before the first citation in the OED's entry, which was drafted as
recently as 2006 (respect to editor Jeff Prucher and his team for
that one). "Insectoid" looks like a word that has been around for
centuries, but turns out to have been first used in an SF work by
Olaf Stapledon as recently as 1937. Casual readers, however, might
be confused by the inclusion of an entry on "gadget" and assume
it's a term of SF origin, first noted from 1942, whereas it was
popularised by Rudyard Kipling in 1904 and is actually a sailors'
term going back at least as far as 1886.
The choice of entries seems somewhat eclectic. Some words that you
might think are SF-oriented enough to be here are absent, such as
"astronaut", no doubt because it was created in the mainstream
astronautics field rather than SF (also omitted are related terms
such as "astroengineering", though others like "astrogation" are
in). But "space station" isn't here either, although it was first
recorded, in the genre, in the 1930s; nor is "space habitat" (often
just "habitat"), an artificial world; this might be a spinning
hollowed-out asteroid or an artefact of similar type constructed
from scratch, like Babylon Five (they're called O'Neill cylinders
after their inventor, Gerard K O'Neill, another unglossed term).
"Kryptonite" is absent, alas, as is H G Wells's gravity-blocking
material "cavorite". And why does "COA" (change of address) merit
an entry? Clarke's laws are included, each separately glossed and
listed under the name of their creator, the British SF and science
writer Sir Arthur C Clarke, the most famous being his Third Law
("any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from
magic"). But where are Isaac Asimov's more famous three laws of
robotics? They appear in no entry, neither under his name nor under
"robot" or its derivatives (ah, there they are, briefly mentioned
in passing on page 125).
It's easy to nitpick. This is a pioneering attempt to record the
vocabulary of the field; it's one which is notoriously difficult to
cover because of the number of neologisms for imaginative concepts
that writers are forced to invent, or take joy in inventing. Jeff
Prucher and his readers have scoured the literature for the early
history of the genre's language. If you're interested in the back-
story of SF, this is a reference work you will want to own.
[Jeff Prucher, Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science
Fiction; ISBN-13 978-0-19530567-8, ISBN-10 0195305671; hardback,
pp342; published by Oxford University Press, USA on 1 May 2007;
publisher's price US$29.95.]
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