Glossary

A misnomer reflecting old prejudices; used to refer to sciences that do not deal with human societies, such as physics, astronomy, engineering, etc.

Science fiction works that emphasize the so-called “hard” sciences.

With the term “low culture,” implicitly derogatory; certain kinds of writing were associated with higher classes and therefore valued differently.

A derogatory term for popular cultures.

A derogatory term for popular genres.

A misnomer reflecting old prejudices; usually used to refer to the human sciences such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc.

Science fiction that relies upon the so-called “soft” sciences.

A summary of an essay that usually precedes the work and contains keywords and ideas.

An unrealistic representation of a better world, usually literary.

A novel or other media that is a reworking of a previously existing story.

A dialect of English used among African-American communities.

A subgenre of SF/F that focuses on the experiences of those in the African diaspora, especially that of African-Americans.

An actual yet hypothetical warp drive.

A being from a planet other than Earth; as an adjective, unfamiliar, unsettling or uncanny.

From the German playwright Bertolt Brecht; an effect of art that disrupts the comfort of the viewer in order to induce critical thinking. See V-effect.

Having the features of an allegory.

A literary device whereby all elements of a piece of media can be interpreted as part of a larger hidden meaning, often religious or political in nature.

A subgenre of SF that is set in a parallel universe where history has taken a different path.

Open to multiple interpretations; unclear or holding several possibilities in play.

Being of two minds; a state of having conflicting or disparate opinions.

Championed by Ralph Waldo Emerson, a philosophy that believed civilization had corrupted man, who was essentially perfectable in a self-reliant state.

A method of mystical or spiritual analysis.

Detailed examination of the elements of a given work.

The part of the world where English is widely spoken.

A note clarifying the meaning of a text, often written in the margins.

A non-human being given or having the characteristics of a human.

A subgenre of SF usually concerned with the depiction of the “end-times.” See: Post-apocalyptic

Meant to deter bad luck or other misfortunes.

A writer’s claim made in a persuasive-writing piece meant to guide the work and be validated by supporting evidence throughout.

From Tolkien’s “on Fairy-Stories,” the surprise felt upon encountering a secondary world.

Any intelligent robot, computer, etc.

A general term for experimental art.

A person or character’s representative or embodiment in a virtual world.

Generally understood as a low-budget, independent film; a question of quality in production and taste-level in content is often attached to the label.

Short for “biographical picture,” a film which explores the life and times of a real person.

The bulk of an essay; body paragraphs.

An element in a text that asks or demands a reader do something to solve a problem the text has explicated.

A subversive literary mode that challenges dominant assumptions; high is made low, low is made high.

A story intended to highlight the deleterious effects of a given course of action; a story meant to show the “worst-case-scenario." See: Morality tale

Literally computer-generated-images; a type of special effect in film produced through digital means.

A figure, often but not always human, who drives the action in a piece of fiction.

The ways in which a character grows and changes over time or via plot developments.

Literature intended for consumption by young people, which started as a separate marketing category from books for adults in the 1740s.

A genre of book which prompts the reader with choices at certain narrative junctures, allowing for multiple endings.

The principle by which everything should be said as simply as possible.

Any symbol, convention, or commonplace that is so overused as to have become trite.

Wherein a person believes they are and acts like an animal.

A method of reading and writing the relies on drawing argumentative claims from small features of text such as word choice or punctuation.

A conclusive ending to a narrative in which conflict and questions posed by the story are resolved and answered.

Darko Suvin’s definition of science fiction.

A form of sequential art, usually short and episodic.

An elaborate metaphor.

The ending section of an essay.

A realistic representation of a possible better world, often in manifesto or treatise form.

From Tolkien’s “On Fairy-Stories,” the process by which fantasy comforts us for what modernity has taken.

Video games played at home on the television by virtue of gaming systems such as Nintendo.

One of Holbek’s Seven Rules; Refers to the shrinking of space and time: this is an aspect of the style of the tale; the point is to get to the heart of the matter quickly and not bother with irrelevant exposition, thus things happen fast, journeys seem short even if they are to the other side of the world, etc.

A norm or trope which is commonly upheld in a specific genre of writing.

The rules and regulations governing use of intellectual property.

The principle by which everything must be said with grammatical precision.

A genre in the fantastic mode that relies on the mysteries of the unfathomable cosmos to generate feelings of dread.

A belief system founded by H.P. Lovecraft which sees the universe as vast, impersonal, and indifferent.

To dress up like characters from film and literature, an essential element of paraliterary cultures. See: Paraliterary cultures

The practiced ability to see both sides without bias, requiring patient attention to one’s own cognitive biases; the ability to control for desire in thought and thereby reduce cognitive bias; examining one’s own assumptions and presuppositions.

Literally, Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats; a method of gene transformation.

A terrible ancient being from beyond the stars, incomprehensible to your feeble human mind.

A film receiving little critical acclaim or audience support upon initial release that gains a fan-following over time and possible positive reevaluation by critics.

The development and study of feedback systems between organisms and machines.

A subgenre of SF best summed up as “high-tech and low-life.”

Entities that are part-machine and part-organic.

Another formulation of estrangement; the aesthetic technique by which the common is made strange or new.

Also descriptive grammar; not concerned with how it should be but how it is.

Opposites that are not opposed but rather shape and inform each other.

The dispersion of people from a homeland.

A mode of writing which explicitly aims to teach the reader something and/or control his behavior.

A moment in a work when the author “breaks the fourth wall” and speaks directly to the reader or viewer.

A twin or copy of a person.

A hyper-stylized and hyperbolic representation of femininity or masculinity, such as drag queens and drag kings.

Another term for a playwright.

The logic of dreams, metaphor and metonymy.

A quotation that is not properly introduced and integrated. See: Floating quotation

The leader of a role-playing game such as Dungeons and Dragons, who is normally responsible for the game’s basic plot.

The desire to envision a better world, conveyed in a negative way.

The way of speaking appropriate to the enchantments of Fairyland.

Elvish craft is with language, hence a form of enchantment.

When you emigrate, you leave your homeland.

From Tolkien’s “On Fairy-Stories.” Not to be confused with magic, enchantment is a function of language.

A period in European history during which scientific reason was extolled and old superstitions eradicated.

A type of high fantasy usually concerned with world-changing events.

Of or relating to epistemology.

Major changes to the ways in which we know what we know; for example, the scientific revolution.

The study of how we know what we know.

A text composed of letters exchanged between characters.

The often-denigrated urge to escape one’s present reality through fiction.

Literally making strange; the use of art to make you see a commonplace in a new or inventive way.

An overall happy ending that ushers in radical changes to the status quo.

Taking as natural, normal, or central the experiences of the Western world or white Europeans specifically.

Armored tech suits common to military sf.

A fascination with other cultures, usually based in stereotype and appropriation.

Referring to exposition, a description or explanation of events.

One of Holbek’s Seven Rules; Refers to how an internal quality is made manifest in an object or physical phenomenon. Thus, a gift of a sword to the hero may well indicate that the hero has learned to fend for himself. Or the attractiveness of a character is demonstrated by the fact they glow with a golden aura. Negative externalization could be horns, donkey-ears, toads, etc.

A form of speculation grounded in facts and data. See: Extrapolative

Engaged in extrapolation. See: Extrapolation

A tale in verse, which originated in France in the twelfth century and lasted about one hundred years, dealing with humorous and often sexual matters.

A catch-all terms used to describe all sorts of sprites, gnomes, elves.

Copying of copyrighted material done for a limited and “transformative” purpose, such as to comment upon, criticize, or parody a copyrighted work.

A literary tale meant to convey wonder (Kuntsmärchen),

Deep fakes or pseudodocumentaries.

A literary mode that can be found in diverse genres, including fantasy, horror, and science fiction; relies on a disruption of empirical reality.

A map of a fantasy world, essential to completing the virtual experience.

The created races of fantasy worlds, essential to the virtual experience.

SF that forgegrounds the experiences of women.

The catchphrase Gretchen Weiners attempts to make a trend in Mean Girls (2004); at the time of the film’s release, we might say “fetch” means “cool.”

The imagined experience of meeting with members of an alien race for the first time.

A quotation that is not properly introduced and integrated.

Concern wonders understood by teller and adult communities as fictional content.

Oral narratives usually focusing on one primary event and containing folk beliefs that involve some traditional attitude towards the past and often the role of the supernatural within the storytelling community.

Oral narratives by definition in origin but in practice not only became embedded in other mediums, such as books, films, and memes, but may now originate from digital sources rather than oral contexts.

An oral tale meant to convey wonder (Volksmärchen).

A type of pre-Enlightenment tale of marvel and wonder.

A set narrative with expected parts.

A quotation that is introduced and cited correctly. See: Properly incorporated quotation

Changing the genome of an organism.

Any classification of a body of texts with a shared set of conventions, themes, or ideas.

The study of the subdivisions of literature, art, film, etc.

A movement in film and the arts originating in post-WWI Germany.

The post-WWII period, when science fiction moved from the obscure pages of pulp magazines to the silver screen.

A genre in the fantastic mode that is usually concerned with haunting, ghosts, and vampires, real or imagined.

World-historical and totalizing narratives such as the Second Coming, the Third Reich, a communist utopia, etc.

A full-length work of sequential art.

Literature and art that focuses on the disruption or exaggeration of the human body.

An occurrence among a group of people in which the desire for uniformity of thought replaces individual critical thinking.

A popular genre focused on passionate romance.

A set of self-censoring codes created by the film industry which prohibited profanity, nudity, and sexual suggestion among other things.

An archetypal story form described by Joseph Campbell.

Nearly synonymous with high fantasy, but focus is on the hero.

Concerning legendary deeds that are popular within a traditional community.

Skepticism in the face of the supernatural common to the fantastic and folk legends.

A space that has features of both a utopia and a dystopia at the same time; a space with conflicting rhetorical or epistemological purposes.

A genre of fantasy in the virtual mode that is usually preoccupied with pseudo-medieval imagery, world-building, and myth-making.

With the term “low genre,” implicitly derogatory; certain kinds of writing were associated with higher classes and therefore valued differently.

A subgenre of realism associated with the late 19th and early 20th centuries, sometimes called bourgeois realism to indicate the classes which consumed and produced it.

One of the philosophical schools of marxism, concerned with how changing material conditions affect human culture and society.

Similar to the utopian impulse; the desire for a changed, better world.

A genre stylized–written and visually–by fear, anxiety, and dread.

One of Holbek’s Seven Rules; Figures as a knock over the head to make a point. If the guardian of the princess is a dragon, one can look at that as an exaggerated split of her father, who is less than anxious to let her be married to the presumptuous hero.

The erroneous belief that one is unqualified for the positions one holds or the honors one has achieved.

The collection and concentration of capital toward mass production in a particular.

Art, literature, information, or ideas that are protected by copyright.

An adventure story that takes place between two to three different worlds.

The beginning section of an essay or work of art.

Refers to rules that were added in the last century or to rules that writers routinely ignore.

The terms and language specific to a field of study.

Excessive nationalism and militarism. See: Militarism.

Literally milk vampire, used to describe changelings who preyed in new mothers.

A maxim of SF/F used to stress the importance of worldbuilding to character and the importance of landscape as a character.

Computer programs that are programmed to learn things they weren’t programmed to know.

RPGs turned into novels, or novels written in the style of an RPG.

Role-playing games that are acted out in person, often with foam weapons.

The illness which afflicts those who become werewolves at the full moon.

In literature and art, gruesome, producing horror, concerned with death.

Traditional character type representing a scientist—typically male—who engages in unethical practices and experimentation to achieve an extraordinary feat; often characterized by mental-health instability and an experiment that brings out the scientist’s demise.

An exercise in will; the calling upon of arcane forces; often a powerful tool for wonder and strangeness.

A unique genre in the mimetic mode, often associated with the global south; in it, the supernatural is real and commonplace, giving such elements and air of verisimilitude without the feelings of horror or doubt so often associated with the fantastic mode.

A type of sequential art originating in Japan, usually read right to left.

Once an actual religion, generally used now to denote a world divided into good and evil.

Forms of media meant for consumption by large popular audiences.

A plural for medium (also media), indicating different forms in which information is transmitted.

A first or second-hand experience narrative involving the supernatural that has not achieved circulation within the community.

Beyond the physical world; dealing with the state of reality outside human perception.

The belief that a country should maintain a disproportionately strong military capability.

A subgenre of SF focused on military life and structures in interplanetary and intergalactic settings.

A mode of writing that seeks to represent reality “as it really is.”

An antiquated term for interracial sexual reproduction.

Multiplayer massive online role-playing game; online role-playing games where virtual immersion is nearly complete and the player lives as a character in a fantasy world.

A broader literary category that can describe conventions or techniques found across many different genres and forms.

Fantasy set in the modern world (or one like it).

Of or related to the Modern period, from the start of the 20th Century until WWII.

A general term for archetypal story types such as The Hero’s Journey.

A tale meant to instill a moral or principle. See: Cautionary tale

A recurring concept or detail that provides narrative resonance.

Multi-User Dungeons, a early form of Internet RPGs that paved way for MMORPGs.

The idea of multiple overlapping universes.

Folkloric narratives that have a sacred value to the community.

One of the major functions of fantasy; the art of making stories that capture and define a shared identity, national or otherwise. See: Mythopoesis.

Where the artist invents new myths. See: Myth-making

The action of narrating.

The plot; the story; the sequence of events, including climax and resolution.

Any film with a distinguishable narrative arc.

A genre in the mimetic mode that emphasizes human inability to escape nature and/or society.

Refers to the “current” that manifest between Black bodies conveyed by song, dance, and story.

A movement in SF during the 60s and 70s that emphasized the experience of the subject through a focus on character; started by Michael Moorcock, editor of New Worlds.

Anything that upholds or reinforces a norm.

A narrative with no concrete conclusion or resolution to story events; the ending is left to the interpretation of the audience.

The backstory for how an ordinary, unremarkable character becomes the protagonist of a narrative; often assigned to the binary construction of a villain and hero.

A concept derived from psychoanalysis but applicable to sociological analysis where it is used to describe different sociological groups outside of the dominant systems of cultural production and to analyze the sense of existential threat the dominant groups perceive when confronted with those differences.

A story, often religious, that teaches a moral.

Cultures that are adjacent and indebted to literature; for example, Trekkies are a paraliterary culture attached to the Star Trek universe.

Separate realities that run concurrent to our own.

Similar to summary, but a closer account that requires citation.

Imitation of a particular style or work of art.

One of Holbek’s Seven Rules; much like the prosodic term "metonymy"—whereby something, usually an object, stands in for something which is closely associated with it. Like the tablecloth that provides a meal for a protagonist who has learned a trade, the blue beard that indicates a sinister deviant, or the iron stove or tower that serves to obstruct a child from a social life. This is basically the language of symbol, decoding these symbols relies on knowledge of the cultural matrix, the context of the tale, the literal function of the symbol, the emotive aspect of the symbol etc.

The process by which your allow others to read your essay to create qualitative change; not just proofreading.

Using someone’s intellectual property without proper attribution or citation.

An adventure story on a planet that is not Earth.

An ideal toward which one might strive but never reach.

The narrative; introduction, exposition, conflict, climax, resolution.

A person, place, or thing that moves the plot along.

The ideas and practices through which multiple and diverse group coexist.

Used to describe a city or nation comprised of people from many different sociological backgrounds.

A universe within a universe.

The artist’s implicit permission to take, adapt, and re-make previously existing ideas, images, or works.

The perspective from which a story is told.

Contentious and political.

Literary genres consumed primarily for entertainment, often found in grocery store aisles and in mass paperback formats.

Any literary device that conveys characters between two realms.

A fantasy that uses a portal to travel to the secondary world.

A subgenre of SF that portrays a world after societal or environmental collapse. See: Apocalyptic.

SF that focuses on the experiences of formerly colonized peoples.

An idea conveying the use of cybernetics and other advanced technologies to augment or improve humanity.

From the end of WWII until the present (our current cultural logic); marked by distrust in institutions and governments and grand narratives; devoted to questioning black/white thinking in discourses; contributed to experimental techniques in the arts; an increased focus on simulation and virtual reality.

Of or relating to the postmodern age.

Literally, after death; used colloquially to refer to something after-the-fact.

Film effects created during the production phase, captured directly by the camera.

Also prescriptive grammar; concerned not with how it is but how it should be.

Techniques, such as free-writing, that prepare prime your thinking.

Sources and data that have not been interpreted by a second party, such as direct testimonial.

Sources and data that have not been interpreted by a second party, such as direct testimonial.

One of Holbek’s Seven Rules; Refers to the outward displacement of internal feelings onto the external world--much like the pathetic fallacy of poetry. If one character sees her love partner as a frog this may indicate sexual immaturity on her part, repulsion as to sexual matters, or perhaps she sees the lover as unattractive and this frog aspect is hyperbole, an exaggeration to make a point.

The process of reading for grammatical and stylistic errors.

Purposefully biased and misleading information.

A quotation that is introduced and cited correctly. See: framed quotation

The main character of a narrative; traditionally labeled as the “hero” of the story.

A term usually designating pre-Enlightenment forms of science fiction; makes assumptive value judgements based upon non-literary characteristics (relation to modern science).

Language meant to imitate the terms and language specific to a field of study.

Fictions—usually popular genres—named after the cheap paper on which they were published.

See “pulp fiction.”

One of Holbek’s Seven Rules; The tactic of emphasizing a quality by increasing the quantity, basically "more is better." The task of the heroine was a long, arduous one: she milked 1000 cows in one day.

SF that emphasizes the experience of LGBTQ peoples.

Direct use of someone else’s words in an essay or article.

The reader’s intellectual and affective responses to the text.

Grammatical rules that native speakers know intuitively; if broken, communication fails entirely.

A general term for any non-magical genres in the mimetic mode. See: High realism

From Tolkien’s “On Fairy-Stories,” the process by which fantasy restores the world to its original, pre-modern sheen.

The retelling of events as they really were.

Who; What; When; Where; How; and Why.

The process of re-writing your text to improve it.

A programmable machine—sometimes in the likeness of a human—made to accomplish complex tasks typically beyond human capabilities.

Games where the player adopts an avatar and plays as that character for the duration of the narrative.

Typically, refers to adventure tales, including tales of knights and chivalry.

The early 19th century; the Romantics rebelled against reason and the Enlightenment by emphasizing emotion and embracing flights of fancy.

To look at naively, with rose-tinted glasses.

Literally role-playing game; a type of game (video, tabletop, or live-action) where you assume an avatar and play out that role, usually narrative-driven.

A group of early 20th century artists and literary theorists.

A long story of heroic achievement.

Another term for legends, plural sagen; not to be confused with sagas.

Ironic and cynical.

The use of humor to criticize ideas.

Omnipresent among folk culture, and it was well suited to expressing in a jocose manner the class, gender, and occupational tensions which the pilgrims experienced.

A contrived subgenre of SF/F that merges medieval imagery (knights, etc.) with futuristic imagery, especially space travel.

The period marking the emergence of modern science

A type of aesthetic belief (not suspension of disbelief) necessary to full immersion in the virtual, secondary world.

Sources or data that have been interpreted by secondhand observers.

Sources or data that have been interpreted by secondhand observers.

An entirely fictional world created in the virtual mode.

The process of creating a secondary world.

Art, such as comic books, that is meant to be viewed in corerct order to reveal the narrative.

Published sequentially, whether weekly, monthly, etc.

The locale or place where a fiction is staged.

Any person or creature who can change shape.

A two-dimensional side-angle video game that moves from left to right across the screen.

The moment artificial intelligence exceeds human intelligence.

The East Asian cultural sphere that includes Chine, Japan, and Korea.

The sale and transportation of indigenous African peoples to the Americas.

The political, social, and economic status quo.

Grammatical rules particular to certain social situations.

The economic, political, legal, and cultural systems of a given society.

A new subgenre of SF that focuses on post-apocalyptic visions where humanity manages to survive and thrive.

“The good old stuff;” a subgenre of SF with epic adventure against an intergalactic backdrop.

Any travel through outer-space.

Film effects added in the post-production phase.

A catch-all term for non-realistic genres.

One of Holbek’s Seven Rules; Involves a character being separated into two to distinguish or emphasize particular qualities such as good vs. bad, body vs. spirit, active vs. passive (435). Think Mother & witch in “Hansel and Gretel” or the murdered child and the Juniper bird in “The Juniper Bird.”

A popular genre that relies on suspense, action, and espionage.

Dystopian literature focused on the state apparatus, including mass media.

Traditionally abbreviated to represent science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

A school of theoretical physics that proposes the existence of multiple universes.

Based in structuralist philosophy, which sees human culture, arts, etc. as ordered and knowable.

The manner in which a text is written.

A niche or specialized segment of a larger literary or filmic genre.

The subject is the perceiving consciousness; the object is the material world.

Does not require citation, a restatement of the main points of another document but in the author’s own word.

Not found in the natural world, a distinction that requires a scientific worldview.

An experimental and aleatory form of art that blurs the lines between reality, dream, hallucination, and fantasy.

The use of plot to build tension.

A dismissal of reality-based logic to engage with a work of fiction and accept its content as creative entertainment.

Rather than focus on the unfolding events of the empire, sword and sorcery focuses on the adventures of a single hero.

An image or motif used to convey a deeper meaning.

An RPG played at a table with friends; dice will be rolled.

An item with magical powers.

The moment artificial intelligence exceeds human intelligence. See: Singularity.

Advancements in tools, usually referring to robots, cybernetics, and computers.

The major ideas conveyed and explored by a literary work.

The main argument or idea in an essay.

A hypothetical situation in which an idea is demonstrated and tested.

The scientific principle that describes how time speeds and slows in relation to mass.

A subgenre of SF that involves traveling through time.

In afrofuturism, changing the past to change the future.

Fictional travel writing to other worlds and realms, often presented as journals or letters.

A commonplace theme, element, or visual cue that conveys figurative meaning.

The fear, dread, or anxiety introduced by a human-like copy that is nearly perfect but still somehow… off.

The “original” version of a story.

Fantasy works with an urban setting.

A philosophy that judges things according to their usefulness.

The desire in literature and life to envision a better world.

The general belief in humanity’s ability to create a better world.

Another term for Brecht’s alienation effect; the V is for Verfremdung. See: Alienation effect

A narrative evaluation that prioritizes the believability of something over the reality of said action, event, or happening.

A literary mode that creates new worlds that break sharply with empirical reality in a way that precludes the possibility of fantastic hesitation.

A mode of storytelling concerned with the creation of distinct worlds.

A faster than light propulsion system.

IBM’s supercomputer that crushes it on Jeopardy.

A subgenre of SF/F that blends elements of science fiction, fantasy, surrealism, and horror.

The process of creating new worlds in science fiction and fantasy, a function of the virtual mode.

Fear of someone or something unknown beyond the self or unlike the self; often associated with racism directed toward a specific group of people.