Tracking the vocabulary of sci-fi, from aerocar to zero-gravity
“Warp speed” may be a term of the moment, thanks to the federal coronavirus vaccine program. But it’s also one with a history — which goes back farther than “Star Trek,” to a forgotten 1952 science fiction story in the pulp magazine Imagination.
Ditto for “transporter,” “moon base” and “deep space,” to name just a few of the more than 400 words whose origins are getting pushed back earlier than their previously first appearance, thanks to the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, a new free online resource released Tuesday.
A historical dictionary devoted to the history of something as future-oriented (and imaginary) as science fiction may seem like a contradiction in terms.
But then science fiction always has had a curious relationship to the real world, said Jesse Sheidlower, its editor.
“Despite the fact a lot of people look down on science fiction as a genre, it’s everywhere,” he said. “And there is a very interesting crossover between science fiction and science.”
Sheidlower is a former editor at large at the Oxford English Dictionary who first came to prominence in
Although Captain Kirk often asked his crew to accelerate to warp speed, the term, as do many others from science fiction, has earlier origins, according to the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction.
the 1990s, as part of a new generation of lexicographers injecting the field with a fresh nerd-cool factor.
The science fiction dictionary grew out of the Science Fiction Citations Project, a crowd-sourced effort initiated in 2001 by the OED and managed by Sheidlower. The goal of that project was to expand the OED’s coverage of science fiction.
In early 2020, Sheidlower, who left the OED in 2013, got permission to continue the project independently.
As for his own science fiction consumption, Sheidlower described himself as more of a “regular reader” than a superfan.
The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction includes some 1,800 separate entries, from “actifan” and “aerocar” to “zero-gravity” and “zine.”
Users can look up individual words, or browse through subject categories like fandom, weaponry, FTL (shorthand for fasterthan-light travel) and, yes, “Star Trek.”
The citations lean toward so-called hard science fiction (defined as science fiction based on hard science, which does not violate known scientific laws).
The most cited authors are Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson and Isaac Asimov. But if an author is not represented, Sheidlower emphasized, that’s not a value judgment.
One of the main goals of historical lexicography is finding antedatings, as instances that push back the earliest known use of a term are called. Some included here involve large leaps: “Thought-controlled,” used to describe devices controlled by neural impulses, is pushed back to 1934 from 1977.
The dictionary also illustrates the complicated interplay between imaginative literature and the real world. The words “graviton” and “biotechnician,” for example, first appeared in science fiction sources before being adopted in the real world.
Conversely, Sheidlower said he was surprised to learn that “hypospray,” another term chiefly associated with “Star Trek,” not only appeared as early as the 1940s, but was in fact a real device that was trademarked in 1948.
Antedatings may be the sexy, attention-grabbing aspect of lexicography. But the guts of dictionary-making is the writing of definitions, which for science fiction terms carries particular challenges.
“When you’re talking about nonexistent things, the precise way they operate is often hand-waved away” by the writer, he said.
And then there’s the challenge of defining “science fiction” itself.
The dictionary defines the term science fiction (which it dates to 1911) as referring to “a genre (of fiction, film, etc.) in which the plot or setting features speculative scientific or technological advances or differences.”