Jan 27, 2021 7:00 AM

A New Way to Trace the History of Sci-Fi’s Made-Up Words

The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction turns a century of neologisms (and neosemes!) into a redefinition of the genre.

One thing nerds like to argue about is what nerds are allowed to argue about. If you agree to stipulate that science fiction is often one of those things—and, hey, we could argue about that—then a problem to solve is the boundaries of that genre, the what-it-is and what-it-isn’t. That’s not straightforward. Finding the edges of science fiction is like taking a walk around a hypercube in zero-gee; you keep bumping into walls and falling into other dimensions. Reasonable people don’t even agree on when it started—Frankenstein? The Time Machine? Gilgamesh? A story where a ghost kills people is horror; what if a robot did it? What if the universe has robots and spaceships but also magic and destiny?

It does seem all but inarguably true about science fiction, though, that the genre radiates neologisms (new words) and neosemes (new concepts made of old words) like an overloading warp core emits plasma and neutrinos. Just to be clear, that’s a lot.

Don’t get mad, romance and mystery fans; you are great. But the point is, if you’re doing it right, science fiction packs in new concepts, even entirely new languages—Klingon, for example, and that inkblot thing the heptapods squirted in Arrival. (What's that you say? Fantasy has Elvish and Dothraki, why am I leaving those out? Let’s take that to the comments.) It’s where writers need words—or, if need is too strong, maybe want—for rockets propelled by impossible technology, people who are also machines, guns that shoot light instead of bullets, and all sorts of other things that don’t exist and therefore don’t (yet) have names. “Naming things well—and I’m not purporting to be someone who does that—but as a reader it’s so satisfying, because it can be exposition without being expository,” says Charles Yu, occasional WIRED contributor and author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe and the National Book Award–winning Interior Chinatown. “And it’s so much fun too.”

That doesn’t mean it’s easy, of course. Those neologisms and neosemes exist within an individual story, but also in a larger conversation among every story, in a genre with fiercely loyal adherents. “The thing about making up new terminology—and this is a place that writers can fall down—is that, like anything else, it has to make sense not only within the universe that you’re building but also in the universe of the reader,” says John Scalzi, author of Old Man’s War and The Last Emperox, among other sci-fi works. “It has to be a term that is easily graspable, so they can put it into their lexicon and not have to think about it again, but at the same time it wants to be distinctive enough that when they see it they are reminded of you.”

If this process of word-making as world-building sounds a little religious, well, creating new worlds and naming the stuff in them is pretty standard creation myth fodder. And whether that new world is just ours-but-with-robots or happens a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, the process of neologogenesis (come on, you gotta love that one) isn’t just part of storytelling. It is itself a hologram of the story. “Part of the pleasure of science fiction is decoding that world, trying to figure out exactly how it works, and one of the main ways of doing that is going to be through new words,” says Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, a retired professor of world literature at DePauw University and coeditor of the journal Science Fiction Studies. “The reader expects the writer to make it into a kind of game.”

The game gets played between writer and reader, for sure, but also among writers, and between all the writers and all the readers. Some words get used again and again, becoming a meta-canonical corpus as allusive as classical haiku. It’s a game so complicated that it’d be nice to know the rules, maybe see the shape of the pieces. That’s where a lexicographical mad scientist named Jesse Sheidlower comes in. His creation, the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction came to life online this week—1,800 entries dating back to the beginning of the 20th century, with not only definitions but the earliest known uses, links to biographical information about the writers, and links to more than 1,600 scans of the original pages where the words appeared. It’s a wormhole into not just one alternate universe but a lexicographic multiverse, where time-traveling canons overlap in unexpected ways with each other and with whatever universe the reader happens to be sitting in. Cool concepts from your favorite movies turn out to precede those movies by decades; science fiction gets things right before science. It’s a trip, and it might just lead to some answers about what science fiction is and what it means. It’ll definitely start—and finish—some arguments.

Nearly two centuries before my WIRED colleagues Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson neologized the portmanteau “crowdsourcing,” the Oxford English Dictionary started recruiting readers and users to mail in new words, their definitions, and their etymology and usage history. It’s how the OED got done.

For the first decade of the 21st century, Sheidlower ran a subset of that kind of project. An editor at large for the OED, he managed the Science Fiction Citations Project, a crowdsourced effort to collect words from science fiction and their histories, attempting to collate and contextualize the made-up terms and phrases that characterize and in some ways define the genre.

It was a success, and it even led to a book by one its website's moderators—Brave New Words. But by 2020, the Science Fiction Citations Project was mostly fallow—Sheidlower had left the OED years before, and the website Sheidlower set up to acquire and organize them was in an attenuated state of cryosuspension, living on a computer in his New York apartment.

But if there’s one thing mad scientists like, it’s resurrecting frozen corpuses. Fans, being fans, wouldn’t let the project go. And neither could he. “People were still sending things in, but they couldn’t go anywhere, which was very frustrating,” he says. “Even though there were discoveries, they couldn’t go in.” He dreamed of spinning it up again, of turning his team’s word-collecting effort into a useful reference site.

Then, two things happened.

First, the classic pulp magazines of the mid-20th century got scanned, almost en masse, into the Internet Archive. Research that used to require nerds digging around in older nerds’ basements could now take place anywhere with Wi-Fi.

Second, there was a pandemic. “I haven’t left my apartment in a year,” Sheidlower says. “Nothing else to do on weekends.” He got the OK from OED to take control of the old project and run a little digital lightning through its neck bolts. Behold! Sheidlower’s Modern Promethesaurus lives again!

It wasn’t easy. Part of the job is finding first uses and good examples, and for that you need access to the whole of the genre. Before the pulps came online, there weren’t many databases, and copyright meant lots of early science fiction wasn’t available. “And science fiction presented another difficulty,” Sheidlower says. “A lot of science fiction is not held in libraries traditionally. Many forms of pop culture, libraries just ignore them, even research libraries, because it’s not ‘important’ or not literary, or not the kind of thing they collect.”

But one thing science fiction does have is avid devotees. You know who I mean. That’s who drove the Citations Project. “Science fiction fans are very good at the kind of hyper-detailed work of looking up this sort of thing,” Sheidlower says. His team put a solicitation for entries on the project website, and pretty soon his team of moderators was getting emails from hundreds of people, readers and even notable authors, all trying to set the record straight on who said what first, and what the real origin stories were.

Now that so much of the original source documentation is available online, Sheidlower’s research has gotten easier, but his editorial decisionmaking is trickier. This is a historical dictionary, about not only definitions but first uses and how those uses changed over time. That traps Sheidlower in a bit of a time loop—in a sense, he’s setting the rules for genre boundaries (no fantasy or gaming in the dictionary—yet), but then he only looks for words within those boundaries, which in turn define the history of the genre.

And this is a dictionary, not the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. As Sheidlower explains, there’s a Wikipedia page of 60 named alien species in the Star Wars universe—and that’s just A through E, the first page of a half-dozen. Those are all science fiction words, but outside his scope. “You need ‘wookiee.’ I don’t know if you need ‘ewok,’” Sheidlower says. “Some people said yes, but I haven’t done the research yet.”

Even without Ewoks, the result is generally both amazing and astonishing. In just a few minutes of reconnaissance, for example, I learned that the first person to pilot a jet car was not, as I hoped, Buckaroo Banzai, but in fact a character in Bryce Walton’s 1946 short story “Prisoner of the Brain Mistress.” I figured that Han Solo wasn’t the first person to make the jump to “hyperspace,” but I didn’t expect the concept to first come up in 1928, in Kirk Meadowcroft’s story “The Invisible Bubble” in the germinal pulp Amazing Stories. Nor did I expect big names like E. E. “Doc” Smith, Isaac Asimov, Samuel Delaney, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and David Brin to have also used the idea. And let’s say you wanted to go back in time and kill the person who came up with the idea of the grandfather paradox. You’d have to assassinate Hugo Gernsback, arguably the coinventor of the modern iteration of the genre, before he published his essay “The Question of Time-Traveling” in Science Wonder Stories in 1929.

The fact that so many of these terms have examples of their use from a dozen different writers across decades of history proves that sometimes writers aren’t neologizing so much as digging into the genre lexicon. Well, newish. “You leverage off of other people’s work, but really you’ve activated decades of associations that other people might or might not be bringing,” Yu says. “That’s something really rich about science fiction in general. There’s this overlap, or this tangent point. This dictionary is kind of trying to be placed squarely in that region, the overlap.”

For all that, though, it turns out that science fiction writers have frequently beat actual scientists to the neologistic punch. The hypothetical quantum unit of gravity, the graviton, entered scientific parlance in 1934—but Harl Vincent alighted on the heavy concept in Amazing Stories in 1929. And while the origin of the word “robot” in Karel Capek’s 1920 play RUR is a classic, I was confident that Isaac Asimov invented “roboticist” in 1942, but “robotic” first appeared in a 1928 newspaper article. (It’s fine; I don’t mean to sound anti-neosemetic.)

Finding these earliest dates of a usage is called “antedating,” and it’s a way of giving words their own diagetic histories in the larger canon of all stories. It also gives the words stories in the real world—or, at least, wherever I’m writing this and you’re reading it—by showing how neologisms and neosemes connect various writers’ work. “That’s the exact purpose of historical lexicography and being able to do reverse counts,” Sheidlower says. “We show the authors most frequently quoted and most frequent first examples.”

The count has already yielded a surprise. “Doc Smith is not someone I would say is widely familiar, but he is number one in terms of authors with first quotations,” Sheidlower says. Smith is perhaps most famous for creating the Lensman series, a space opera about a sort of proto-Green Lantern Corps. Robert Heinlein is number two; the early editor and writer John W. Campbell is number three. “There has been science fiction going back thousands of years by some definitions, but science fiction as we know it is basically from the 1920s. People writing hard science fiction at that time, this is what set the pace for science fiction for the rest of its history.”

Here’s where some arguments might start. (Sheidlower doesn’t quite agree. “The purpose of any kind of scholarly work, I hope—at least the kind that I’m interested in—is not to start fights. It’s to settle them,” he says.)

For a genre that was for decades associated with iconoclasts and outcasts, the in-grouping of a shared language—among stories and among readers—helped keep the clubhouse doors locked. As editor of Astounding Science Fiction, maybe the foremost of the sci-fi pulps, Campbell had an outsized role as gatekeeper and thinker. The words he thought sounded like science fiction are the words that became science fiction. But Campbell was also famously racist. When the writer Jeannette Ng won a prestigious award named for Campbell last year, she called him a fascist; the magazine that gives the award has since changed the name. “There’s an immediate, almost universal agreement of what science fiction means in the abstract,” Scalzi says, “but the flip side of that is that one person or very few people got to choose. It was a genre by oligarchy.”

Sheidlower knows his dictionary skews representation. Partially that’s an artifact of the published history of the genre, and partially it’s an artifact of his research process. “Shakespeare is not the most cited person in the OED because he coined the most. It’s because Shakespeare is privileged, and if you have a quote from Shakespeare and one from someone you’ve never heard of, you’ll probably put in the one from Shakespeare,” he says. “This raises real questions for how to deal with any kind of literary topic. Do people want to read about the ‘important’ authors? And how do you decide? Should you include everyone?”

Access to new databases, like the pulps on Internet Archive, changes that balance. As will ongoing changes in the kind of people who read and write science fiction today. Sheidlower’s dictionary is supposed to be a living thing, evolving with new input. Right now its 21st-century references are a little scant, and hard-SF, Star Trek-style technobabble has more of a presence in its consensually hallucinated lexicon than more idiosyncratic creative work. All of which adds up to mean lots of Heinlein and no N. K. Jemisin or Charlie Jane Anders—yet. “It’s an interesting question that I don’t necessarily have the answer to. People like Neil Gaiman, who I love, or N. K. Jemisin, don’t appear at all or rarely, and it’s not because I don’t like them or they’re not important. Quite the opposite,” Sheidlower says. “But they’re doing something very different. I think there’s an interesting tension where the more creative you are, the less likely you are for things to get picked up.”

In the end, the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction will have to catch up to its own temporal frame. History is what happened a century ago in the disposable pulp magazines that defined the modern genre, but it’s also what just happened a millisecond ago on a fanfic site.

In the end, the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction will have to catch up to its own temporal frame. History is what happened a century ago in the disposable pulp magazines that defined the modern genre, but it’s also what just happened a millisecond ago on a fanfic site, or what will have happened 20 minutes into the future when we all look back on it from minute 21. (Trust me, it works.) “The kind of resourceful-man archetype that dominated mid-century science fiction led to a lot of very specific jargon. But, you know, a lot of jargon also came from things like Star Trek that at least tried to be more inclusive,” says Anders, whose new book Victories Greater Than Death comes out in April. “Inevitably, any kind of science fiction is going to reflect the ways the genre was not very diverse in the past and the ways it is more diverse today.”

The Historical Dictionary is a record of the past whose job is to predict the future—or at least help its readers prepare for it. Science fictional neologogenesis is really just the way we live now, the future’s lingua francanstein. “The language of science fiction has saturated everyday life. In Silicon Valley, when they’re thinking up new words for things they’re working on, they draw on the dynamics of making new worlds and words in science fiction,” Csicsery-Ronay says. “A lot of those execs and programmers, they haven’t read very much mainstream literature. They read fantasy and science fiction.”

And as with any possible future, we’re all in this together. “If there are related fields that people are knowledgeable about and would like to include words from, I would be interested in doing that. And we need newer things,” Sheidlower says. Again, though: not Wikipedia. The dictionary is already vast but needs to contain more multiverses. It needs more collaboration and input. It’s just that Sheidlower wants to keep his hands on the controls. “I prefer—especially because the level of detail involved in doing this right is very high—I prefer not to leave it just wide open,” he says. “There’s an address on the site. If they send it to me, I’ll do things right away.” This mad scientist seems to be promising to make his creation bigger and stronger, but only if the villagers drop their pitchforks and pitch in. It’s wild. Someone should come up with a word for that.