Most of this glossary is words originally coined in science fiction to describe technologies that did not exist at the time of writing or SFnal ideas for which no obviously suitable mainstream term was handy (some of these have since become mainstream). Some words coined elsewhere but now used almost exclusively in SF (e.g. cyborg, ornithopter) are included.
The intent is to capture terms which are general to SF, not terms specific to one single imagined world. SF writers use, and experienced SF readers learn, a vocabulary that crosses multiple fictional worlds. This vocabulary of conventional terms conveys important information about the kind of world the author has imagined, and that world's relationship to the archetypes and tropes of SF.
A limited number of terms used by SF fans in discussing SF, but not used in SF itself, are included. These are tagged "Critical term".
Contributions and corrections are invited; send them to . Where an entry says "[first use unknown]" this is specific invitation to send information on the earliest usage you know about.
A biological robot, esp. a cloned or synthetic human (but compare droid).
Clute and Nicholls' Encylopedia of Science Fiction traces the first modern use to Jack Williamson's The Cometeers (1936, book version 1950). The distinction between mechanical robots and organic androids was popularized by Edmond Hamilton in his Captain Future series a few years later, and had become a feature of mainstream press discussion of SF by 1958.
OED II says "An automaton resembling a human being", with cites for the older variant "androides" going back to 1727.
General SFnal term for FTL radio; a communicator using a method with instantaneous or at least superluminal propagation speed.
General SFnal term for a hypothetical technology of local gravity nullification or control allowing objects (especially vehicles) to levitate or fly without wings, ducted fans or other aerodynamics. There are variants including contragrav and agrav understood to be equivalent.
Antigrav is functionally similar to a reactionless drive, but unlike the latter it is often assumed to be limited to operating near a planetary surface or other large mass. It is generally (but not always) assumed that antigravity is a major consequence of forcefield technology, which is applied in many other ways.
Shortened noun form of "autonomous" used to describe a non-humanoid robot. Not found in other SF to date, but in speculative use among some software researchers as a shorthand for "autonomous system" referring to a software agent.
Critical term, abbreviation for "Bug-Eyed Monster". Use of this term is now rare and implicitly derogatory, equating the work in which the BEM appears to the category of low-grade space opera.
General SFnal term for hypothetical technologies which combine genetic engineering, surgical, and nanotech methods to make the manipulation of living tissue as readily available and sophisticated as present-day construction and manipulation of nonliving artifacts.
General SFnal term for a hand weapon analogous to a pistol but firing some unspecified form of radiant energy. The term predates laser and maser technology by decades, going back to space opera. Compare disrupter, stunner, needler, magrifle, plasma rifle.
Critical term widely used to describe a subgenre of SF that is generally imitative of or inspired by William Gibson's Neuromancer and Count Zero (though the source stream goes back through John Brunner's 1975 The Shockwave Rider to earlier works like Frederic Pohl's Day Million (1966) and Murray Leinster's The Wabbler (date?)).
Cyberpunk SF is mythically fascinated by computer networking, human/computer interfacing and biosculpture, but tends to approach them with a dark and cynical attitude. Cyberpunk writing tends to be stylish, dystopian and humorless. At its best (in works like Walter John Williams's Hardwired, Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix or Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash) the form poses hard questions about the extent to which digital intelligence and advanced biosculpture may transform human experience.
The totality of all the world's networked computers, represented as a visual virtual 3D domain in which a user may move and act with consequences in the real world. Now widely known (and widely abused) in the mainstream; today's Internet does not yet have the most salient characteristics of cyberspace.
General SF term for a technological melding of human and machine, with the machine parts intended to enhance normal human abilities and environmental tolerances. The term was first coined in astronautics but quickly crossed over into SF, acquiring grim and mythic overtones perhaps best expressed by H.R. Giger's dark biomechanical fantasy art.
A future cracker; a software expert skilled at manipulating cyberspace, especially at circumventing security precautions. Not yet used in other SF, but widely found in cyberpunk role-playing games.
General SFnal term for a weapon that operates by disrupting molecular bonds. Often implicitly a short form of gravitic disrupter which hypothetically disrupts by using focused oscillating gravity beams to shake or vibrate its target to pieces. Seldom a hand weapon.
Compare blaster, needler, magrifle, stunner, plasma rifle.
A robot. This somewhat misapplied contraction of android is not much used in other SF (LucasFilms has a trademark on it!). It is now widely known outside SF circles but only used mythically of fictional characters.
A sphere around a star, a macrostructure proposed as a possible habitat of very advanced civilizations who wish to capture the entire energy output of their sun.
Bob Shaw set Orbitsville on a Dyson sphere. Some astronomers have speculated that the reason we don't see signs of advanced civilizations in the sky is that they're living in Dyson spheres, which trap their radio noise and look like large stellar remnants radiating only in the hard-to-detect infrared.
A human being or other sophont capable of reading the emotions of others by some form of ESP. Distinguished from a telepath which can read thoughts.
General SFnal term of art for what was classically called clairvoyance and now called "remote sensing" by parapsychologists. The term ESP was coined as a term of art by early parapsychologists at the Rhine Institute and also included telepathic and empathic ability. It is no longer much used scientifically.
General SFnal term for a human or other sophont able to use ESP. In George O. Smith's classic Highways In Hiding and many later novels the term specifically excludes telepathic and empathic ability, being restricted to modes of clairvoyance or remote sensing.
Mildly derogatory term for someone who's never been off a planetary surface, i.e. into space. Resonant with the term used in Edwin A. Abbot's classic mathematical fantasy Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions to describe two-dimensional creatures unaware of the third dimension of space.
While this term is strongly associated witbh Larry Niven's fiction, other writers have used it. Compare groundhog.
General SFnal term for a personal flying vehicle, typically not winged but rather using some form of antigrav or exotic aerodynamics such as ducted-fan and Coanda-effect technology. Unlike a skimmer, a flitter is capable of free flight.
General SFnal term for a hypothetical technology which can interact with any material object in the ways that magnetic fields interact with magnetized ones. A forcefield may be deployed as a shield around a spaceship or other object (this is sometimes called a force shield). Other applications include the tractor beam, the pressor beam and antograv.
The concept goes back to E.E. "Doc" Smith's Skylark stories, a classic space opera series originally launched in 1928; those books referred to force screens. By the time of Asimov's Foundation in the 1940s the idea had been sufficiently naturalized that his world featured personal forcefields as a defense against the blaster.
General SFnal term for hypothetical means of circumventing the Einsteinian speed limit, these being necessary to a large class of SF plots that require easy travel between star systems. The abbreviation goes back at least as far as the late 1950s. Compare hyperspace, NAFAL.
General SFnal term for a hypothetical form of NAFAL starflight in which many generations of crewmembers live out the long transit time of an interstellar voyage, functioning a closed and self-sufficient society within a very large vessel set up as a closed miniature of a planetary ecology.
Arthur Clarke credits physicist J.D. Bernal's speculative non-fiction The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1929, MIT Press reprint in the Seventies) with describing large, slow multi-generation ships. There may be earlier antecedents. Heinlein's story, though, is certainly definitive.
General term for technologies based on the sophisticated manipulation of genetic material, used widely in SF for three decades before going mainstream in the early 1980s. In SF this term has much wider scope than current real-world applications involving tailored bacteria and transgenic plants; it is understood to include the creation of chimeras and entirely novel animals or (especially) varieties of humanity.
Literally the Martian verb "to drink", metaphorically "to become one with". To know deeply or achieve unity with. The word enjoyed a vogue in the 1960s counterculture. It seems to be in the recognition though not production vocabulary of many educated mainstream English speakers, and is still used casually on the Internet.
This term was used in Asimov's original Foundation novelette.
Another mildly derogatory term for someone who's never been off a planetary surface, i.e. into space. Probably as widely recognized as flatlander, though less used.
One common model of FTL travel is that a starship can somehow exit normal space to a domain in which the lightspeed limit does not apply, or the geometry of the realm permits quick transit between points widely separated in normal space.
General use of hyperspace as a term for such domains dates back at least to the 1940s; it is found in Asimov's epochal Foundation novels and probably predates those.
Describes what a physicist would call a "relativistic" starship. This near-antonym of FTL is not as generally used but is found in multiple writers. See also generation ship .
The (so far hypothetical) technology of manipulating matter exactly, and efficiently, atom by atom, as opposed to via bulk methods such as heat, pressure, mixing etc. Nanotechnology implies a world in which material scarcity is very nearly a thing of the past, because any desired object can be duplicated exactly at minimum energy cost. The only shortages might be of very rare elements, energy, and human attention.
A firearm, analogous to a rifle, that uses pulsed magnetic fields rather than chemical exposives to propel projectiles.
Compare needler, blaster, disrupter, plasma rifle.
General SFnal term for a weapon analogous to a firarm (usually a handgun, the long-arm equivalent is a magrifle) that fires needle-like projectiles, usually by magnetic accelleration.
Compare magrifle, blaster, disrupter, plasma rifle.
A flying machine that uses flapping wings. This term is well known to historians of flight; Leonardo Da Vinci drew pictures of ornithopters in his famous sketchbooks, and several early-20th-century attempts at powered flight were ornithopter variants. Unfortunately for their inventors, flapping wings are only effective given the high power-to-weight ratio of avian muscle. We cannot yet attain this in the real world, but SF is free to assume it in the future.
General SFnal term for a long-arm analogue of a blaster, often conceived as a longer-range and more destructive weapon with much higher energy requirements. Often specifically imagined as using plasma-producing directed explosions to send a bolt of energy or superheated gas at the target.
General SFnal term for an application of forcefield technology that can push on material objects at a distance ranging from feet to miles. Perhaps popularized by E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman novels. See tractor beam (which is more common).
General SFnal term for a hypothetical means of propulsion through space not dependent (as is a rocket or mass driver) on expelling reaction mass and using Newton's Second Law. The default assumption (seldom spelled out) is that such a drive is able to use some form of exotic forcefield physics to get traction on the fabric of space itself. Compare antigrav.
A hoop around a star; an artificial macrostructure designed to provide a surface area billions of planetary surfaces in size. The life zone is on the hoop's inner surface, with side walls to hold in the atmosphere. Gravity is provided by centrifugal force, day-night alternation by a ring of shadow squares orbiting separately closer to the star.
Niven invented the idea and the term as a perhaps more feasible variant of the Dyson Sphere. The term has since become general.
Sex with a sophont of a species other than one's own. Not general in SF. Sometimes used by members of the SF-fan culture to describe sex with a non-fan.
An electromechanical construct with humanlike capabilities; a mobile, self-aware thinking machine. Interestingly, the first SFnal use of this word, in Karel Capek's 1920 play R.U.R., referred to what today would be called an android rather than an electromechanical artifact.
This word is ubiquitous in SF, quite well known in the mainstream, and seriously used to describe a large class of industrial machinery with some of the autonomy and intelligence ascribed to fictional robots.
General SF term for an extraterrestrial or alien possessing human-level intelligence (see sophont).
Etymologically, and in mainstream English the word means "feeling" but is rare and now archaic.
General SFnal term for a ground vehicle with roughly the performance characteristics of a fast hovercraft, but with the impolication that it uses some form of antigrav rather than ducted fans.
A biological nonhuman intelligence. Implies human-level cognitive and linguistic ability but not necessarily tool use. More specific and etymologically correct than sentient. Still less common than that term but has been used by multiple writers.
General term for a subgenre of adventure SF in which the men are heroic, the women beautiful, the monsters monstrous, and the spaceships make whooshing sounds in hard vacuum.
Star Wars and its sequels are perhaps now the paradigmatic examples, but real SF fans instantly think of great early works like E.E. "Doc" Smith's Skylark novels of the 1920s and 30s and the even more popular Lensman novels of the 1950s. Once upon a time, in the great between-the-wars era of the pulp magazines, almost all SF was divided between space opera and dystopian cautionary tales.
Microgravity nausea. Analogue of motion sickness produced by confusion of the human vestibular system in the absence of a gravitational verstical. Correctly predicted in SF long before the first manned spaceflight; however NASA assiduously avoids the SF term.
General SFnal term for a non-lethal weapon analogous to a firearm that renders the target unconscious. The standard assumptions about stunners are actually quite detailed; they are short-range weapons and victims are often groggy or nauseated or otherwise physically sub-par for some time after regaining consciousness (this condition is generally called stun shock). Usually they are imagined to use either some sort of infrasonics or a soporific dart.
SF stunners long predate real-world analogues like tasers and stun grenades. Compare blaster,disrupter needler, magrifle, plasma rifle.
A human or other sophont capable of directly reading the thoughts of others.
This terms seems to have originally been coined by 19th-century spiritualists and Theosophists and used to include both mind-reading and remote sensing; earliest OED cite is from 1883. It was established in SF by the late 1940s, completely replacing earlier terms such as "mind-reading" and "thought transference" perhaps (ironically) because it had the crisp Latinate sound of a scientific term.
General SFnal term for the art of modifying planetary surface conditions to resemble those of (idealized) Earth, including both macroengineering (such as the diversion of comets to provide water and volatile gasses) and seeding with tailored organisms. Widespread in in SF; used speculatively by astronomers.
SFnal adjective for anything from Earth (Terra). A "Terran" without modifier, is an Earth-descended human.
This usage displaced the earlier but more etymologically correct "Tellurian" and "Tellus" in the 1940s and 50s; these older terms are now primarily associated with space opera.
General SFnal term for an application of forcefield technology that can pull on material objects at a distance ranging from feet to miles. Perhaps popularized by E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman novels. See pressor beam.
Heinlein's description long predated the `telepresence' gadgets now commmon in high-radiation environments, on research submarines, and aboard the Space Shuttle. The SF world believes widely that such devices are commonly called "waldoes" by real-world engineers, but the evidence on this is spotty and mixed. Apparently some engineering subcultures (including oceanographers and movie special-effects wizards) use the term, but it is unknown in many others.
A movie special-effects company called The Character Shop has actually trademarked this term. Details here.