Affect/affective
Used as a noun in critical discourse about how people are motivated to behavior or make choices, affect describes the role of emotion or feeling in influencing what people do; it is used in contrast to logic or reason as motivational forces.
Cognitive estrangement
A longstanding definition of science fiction by Darko Suvin, in which “cognitive” refers to ideas or knowledge (understood as “science” by Suvin) and “estrangement” refers to the sense of the unexpected or unfamiliar associated with the different world of the fiction. The term has its roots in estrangement as a kind of alienation effect, theorized by Bertolt Brecht as an important function of art—that is, to make the familiar strange to audiences—thereby to see what we take for granted in a new way.
Cyberpunk
An important subgenre of science fiction that emerged in the 1980s, the cyber refers to computers and other IT, especially virtual reality, and the punk to the anti-establishment values associated with punk rock. The hacker heroes of cyberpunk used their skills with IT to reject and reorient its uses by corporate culture, just as punk music commented on consumerist culture by using its products in unintended ways.
Derivatives
The root meaning of the term is something based on another source, and it is used to describe financial instruments that circulate as tradeable stocks. Instead of being linked to an underlying material asset, the value of derivatives is linked to an underlying and ever-changing financial asset such as a stock, the value of market indexes, interest rates, and the like.
Fandom
A term used to describe a subculture of enthusiastic advocates (fans), the term has a particular meaning within science fiction, where fans have played a very significant role in the genre’s history. Early fans produced informal newsletters (fanzines) whose circulation created a sense of community and provided the first language for analysis of the genre. The first fan conventions were grassroots events within which writers, editors, and fans were often interchangeable, and these meetings grew out of locally organized fan societies. Fandom was the origin of many institutions that are hugely influential today, such as WorldCon, which presents the Hugo Awards, and the WisCon feminist convention, founded in 1977, home of the Otherwise Award (recognizing gender diversity) and the Carl Brandon Award (recognizing works countering racism). Fan studies have become an influential area of scholarship in its own right, often focusing on Internet-era fandom and fan fictions (in print and other media), a practice of extending or rewriting texts to reflect values and perspectives that fans wish to see as part of the text’s fictional universe. Once a fairly integrated community, fandom is now a large institution with a variety of subcultures within in.
Golden Age
The period of publishing from the late 1930s to the 1950s that has traditionally been seen as the period when science fiction developed its mature form. The genre made the transition from pulp magazines into paperback series during this period, with many early novels being compilations of several linked series. Writers who became celebrated originators of the genre published their most celebrated works during this period, chiefly Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, and Robert Heinlein. This period is largely shaped by the editorial dominance of John W. Campbell and marks a move away from Hugo Gernsback.
Hegemony
A term used in critical theory, chiefly associated with the work of Antonio Gramsci, it describes leadership or dominance of an idea or set of beliefs. Gramsci uses the term to explain how unequal power relationships are sustained in democratic societies (in contrast to the force used by dictatorships).
Kleptocracy
Sharing the same root as “kleptomania” (“klepto” means theft in Greek), this is a term for a mode of government by an elite who use their political power to enhance their own wealth rather than to serve the nation or its citizens.
Labor-power
Used by Karl Marx to refer to the work capacity that is sold on the market in conditions of wage labor, the term marks a distinction important to Marx between the natural activity of humanity (labor) and the alienation that follows when this part of one’s self is impersonally sold as an interchangement commodity on the market (labor-power).
New Wave
A term marketing a new set of aesthetic and thematic concerns, it has been applied to all of cinema, pop music, and science fiction. In this last context, it names a movement in the 1960s and 1970s that overtly linked the genre with contemporary countercultural movements. The New Wave was also concerned with literary style and formal experimentation and thus marks a shift within science fiction, understanding the genre more as a specific aesthetic cultural form rather than as an extension of interest in science generally, aligned with things like membership in rocketry clubs.
Speculative
Most basically, the term means “conjectural,” or refers to presentations based on extrapolation rather than certain knowledge. It also has the meaning of “hypothetical” or “uncertain,” and thus has come to be associated with wagers and risks (as in speculative finance). Within science fiction communities, it is sometimes preferred over the adjective “science” to describe fiction that differs from realist depiction, but not always based on scientific extrapolation. The term dates back to a 1947 essay by Robert Heinlein, meant to convey that the genre was interested in larger social questions, not just stories about the latest new gadget. It came into wider use to describe the more surrealist aesthetics of the New Wave, and is widely used today, often as a term that refuses genre boundaries among science fiction, fantasy, and horror. The reluctance to use the term science fiction is especially important in the work of writers who critique histories in which science as a concept has been complicit in colonial dismissals of non-Western knowledge and perspectives.
Surplus value
A term used by Karl Marx to explain the difference between what it costs to make a product and the price at which that product sells on a market—profit is the difference between these two prices. The idea is key to Marx’s theory, because he argues that this difference comes from exploiting the workers (extracting surplus value from them). The capitalist wants to pay as little as possible, but since human labor is the only source of value for Marx, the price of the product always represents its physical materials + the labor to make it: thus, a difference in manufacturing price vs. market price can only be achieved by paying the workers less than their true contribution.
Technocratic
A form of government based on rule and leadership by an elite of technical experts, generally understood to be experts in technology itself within science fiction contexts.
Terraform
A term developed within science fiction to describe the engineering processes by which a planet’s environment and ecosystem is changed, usually used to describe making a planet more like Earth to enable human colonization. First used in a story published in 1942.
Trope
A term in literary study used to refer to a figural use of language. It can collectively describe a range of techniques that each have specific and more narrow meanings (metaphor, simile, metonymy, etc.) and is also used to refer to a recurrent theme or idea, such as the “genius inventor” trope of pulp science fiction.