[Appeared in the July 1990 issue of New Pathways. I have added the additional definitions from Bruce Sterling's similar article entitled "A Workshop Lexicon" in the Sept. 1990 Interzone as well. -Glen Cox, [email protected]]

INTRODUCTION

This manual is intended to focus on the special needs of the science fiction workshop. Having an accurate and descriptive critical term of a common SF problem makes it easier to recognize and discuss.
This guide is intended to save workshop participants from having to "re-invent the wheel" (see section 3) at every session. The terms here were generally developed over a period of many years in many workshops. Those identified with a particular writer are acknowledged in parenthesis at the end of the entry. Particular help for this project was provided by Bruce Sterling and the other regulars of the Turkey City Workshop in Austin, Texas.

=== 1. WORDS ===

"Said-book"ism -- Artificial, literary verb used to avoid the perfectly good word "said." "Said" is one of the few invisible words in the language; it is almost impossible to overuse. Infinitely less distracting than "he retorted," "she inquired," or the all-time favorite, "he ejaculated." [The term "said-book" comes from certain pamphlets, containing hundres of purple-prose synonyms for the word "said," which were sold to aspiring authors from tiny advertisements in American pulp magazines of the pre-WWII era.]

Tom Swifty -- Similar compulsion to follow the word "said" (or "said" bookism) with an adverb. As in "'We'd better hurry,' said Tom swiftly." Remember that the adverb is a leech sucking the strength from a verb. 99% of the time it is clear from the context how something was said.

Brenda Starr dialogue -- Long sections of talk with no physical background or descriptions of the characters. Such dialogue, detached from the story's setting, tends to echo hollowly, as if suspended in mid-air. Named for the American comic-strip in which dialogue balloons were often seen emerging from the Manhattan skyline.

"Burly Detective" Syndrome -- Fear of proper names. Found in most of the same pulp magazines that abound with "said" bookisms and Tom Swifties. This is where you can't call Mike Shayne "Shayne" but substitute "the burly detective" or "the red-headed sleuth." Like the "said" bookism it comes from the entirely wrong- headed conviction that you can't use the same word twice in the same sentence, paragraph, or even page.
This is only true of particularly strong and highly visible words, like, say, "vertiginous." It's always better to re-use an ordinary, simple noun or verb rather than contrive a cumbersome method of avoiding it.

Pushbutton Words -- Words used to evoke an emotional response without engaging the intellect or critical faculties.
Words like "song," "poet," "tears," "dreams," "dance" or "star." These are supposed to make us misty-eyed without quite knowing why. Most often found in story titles.

Bathos -- Sudden change in level of diction. "The massive hound barked in a stentorian voice then made wee-wee on the carpet."

Brand Name Fever -- Use of a brand name alone, without accompanying visual detail, to create false versimilitude. You can stock a future with Hondas and Sonys and IBMs and still have no idea what it *looks* like.

Calling a Rabbit a Smeerp -- An unneccesary made-up name for an alien animal, custom, etc. If it hops like a rabbit and squeaks like a rabbit, call it a rabbit. "Smeerps" are especially common in fantasy novels, where people often ride exotic steeds that look and act just like horses. (James Blish)

Roget's Disease -- The ludicrous over-use of far-fetched adjectives, piled into a festering, fungal, tenebrous, troglodytic, ichorous, leprous, synonymic heap.
(John W. Campbell)

Gingerbread -- Useless ornament in prose, such as fancy sesquipedalian Latinate words where short clear English ones will do. Novice authors sometimes use "gingerbread" in the hope of disguising faults and conveying an air of refinement. Tough-guy journalists of the old school used to refer to this derisively as "fine writing."
(Damon Knight)

Not Simultaneous -- A common structural sentence-fault in beginning writers, "not simultaneous" involves the mis-use of the present-participle. "Putting his key in the door, he leapt up the stairs and go his revolver out of the bureau." Alas, our hero couldn't do this even if his arms were forty feet long. This shades into "Ing Disease," the tendancy to pepper sentences with words ending in "-ing," a grammatical construction which tends to confuse the proper sequence of events.
(Damon Knight)

=== 2. SENTENCES & PARAGRAPHS ===

Countersinking -- Expositional redundancy. Make the actions implied in a conversation explicit, e.g., "'Let's get out of here,' he said, urging her to leave."

Show Don't Tell -- Violates the cardinal rule of good writing. The reader should be allowed to react, not instructed in *how* to react. Carefully observed details render authorial value judgments unneccessary. For instance, instead of telling us "she had a bad childhood, an unhappy childhood," specific incidents-- involving, say, a locked closet and two jars of honey--should be shown. [Rigid adherence to show- don't-tell can become absurd. Minor matters are sometimes best gotten out-of-the-way in swift, straightforward fashion.]

Laughtrack -- Characters give cues to the reader as to how to react. They laugh at their own jokes, cry at their own pain, and (unintentionally) feel everything so that the reader doesn't have to.

Squid in the Mouth -- Inappropriate humor in front of strangers. Basically the failure of an author to realize that certain assumptions or jokes are not shared by the world at large. In fact, the world at large will look upon such writers as if they had squid in their mouths. [Since SF writers as a breed are generally quite loony, and in fact make this a stock- in-trade, "squid in the mouth" doubles as a term of grudging praise, describing the essential, irreducible, divinely unpredictable lunacy of the true SF writer.
(James Blaylock)

Handwaving -- Distracting readers with dazzling prose or other fireworks to keep them from noticing a severe logical flaw.
(Stuart Brand)

You Can't Fire Me, I Quit -- Attempt to diffuse lack of credibility with hand-waving. "I would never have believed it if I hadn't seen it myself." "It was one of those amazing coincidences that can only take place in real life!" "It's a one-in-a-million chance, but it's so crazy it just might work!" As if by anticipating the reader's objections the author had somehow answered them. Surprisingly common, especially in SF.
(John Kessel)

Fuzz -- Element of motivation the author was too lazy to supply. The word "somehow" is an automatic tipoff to fuzzy areas of a story. "Somehow she forgot to bring her gun."

Dischism -- Intrusion of the author's physical surroundings (or mental state) into the narrative. Like characters who always light cigarettes when the author does, or is thinking about how they wished they hadn't quit smoking. In more subtle forms the characters complain that they're confused and don't know what to do--when this is actually the author's condition.
(Tom Disch)

Signal from Fred -- A comic form of the Dischism in which the author's subconscious, alarmed by the poor quality of the work, makes unwitting critical comments: "This doesn't make sense." "This is really boring." "This sounds like a bad movie."
(Damon Knight)

False Interiorization -- Another Dischism, in which the author, too lazy to describe the surroundings, inflicts the viewpoint character with space sickness, a blindfold, etc.

False Humanity -- An ailment endemic to genre writing, in which soap-opera elements of purported human interest are stuffed into the story willy-nilly, whether or not they advance the plot or contribute to the point of the story. The actions of such characters convey an itchy sense of irrelevance, for the author has invented their problems out of whole cloth, so as to have something to emote about.

Wiring-Diagram Fiction -- A genre ailment related to "False Humanity," "Wiring-Diagram Fiction" involves "characters" who show no convincing emotional reactions at all, since they are overwhelmed by the author's fascination with gadgetry or didactic lectures.

White Room Syndrome -- Author's imagination fails to provide details. Most common in the beginning of a story. "She awoke in a white room." The white room is obviously the white piece of paper confronting the author. The character has just woken up in order to ponder the circumstances and provide an excuse for Info Dump (q.v.). This "white room" opening is generally followed by much earnest pondering of circumstances and useless exposition; all of which can be cut, painlessly.

=== 3. COMMON STORY-TYPES ===

Jar of Tang -- "For you see, we are all living in a jar of Tang!" or "For you see, I am a dog!" Mainstay of the old Twilight Zone TV show. An entire point- less story contrived so that the author can cry "Fooled you!" This is a classic case of the difference between a conceit and an idea. "What if we all lived in a jar of Tang?" is an example of the former; "What if the revolutionaries from the sixties had been allowed to set up their own society?" is an example of the latter. Good SF requires ideas, not conceits.
(Stephen P. Brown)
[When done with serious intent rather than as a passing conceit, this type of story can be dignified by the term "Concealed Environment."
(Christopher Priest)]

The "Poor Me" Story -- Autobiographical piece in which the male viewpoint character complains that he is ugly and can't get laid.
(Kate Wilhelm)

Grubby Apartment Story -- Writing too much about what you know. The kind of story where the starving writer living in the grubby apartment writes a story about a starving writer in a grubby apartment. Stars all his friends.

The Shaggy God Story -- A piece which mechanically adopts a Biblical or other mythological tale and provides flat science-fictional "explanations" for the theological events.
(Michael Moorcock)

Adam and Eve Story -- Nauseatingly common subset of the Shaggy God Story in which a terrible apocalypse, spaceship crash, etc., leaves two survivors, man and woman, who turn out to be Adam and Eve, parents of the human race!!

Deus Ex Machina or God-in-the-Box -- Story featuring a miraculous solution to the story's conflict, which comes out of nowhere and renders the plot-struggles irrelevant. "Look, the Martians all caught cold and died!"

Just-Like Fallacy -- SF story which thinly adapts the trappings of a standard old pulp-adventure setting. The spaceship is "just like" an Atlantic steamship, down to the Scottish engineer in the hold; a colony-planet is "just like" Arizona except for two moons in the sky. The "Space Western," in which the grizzled space captain swaggers into the space bar and slugs down a Jovian brandy, then lays down a few credits for a space hooker to give him a Galactic Rim Job, is perhaps the commonest version.

Re-Inventing the Wheel -- In which the novice author goes to enormous lengths to create a situation already familiar to an experienced reader. You most often see this when a highly regarded mainstream writer tries to write an SF novel without actually reading any of the existing stuff first (because it's all obviously crap anyway). Thus you get endless explanations of, say, how an atomic war might get started by accident. Thank you, but we've all read that already. Also you get tedious explanations by physicists of how their interstellar drive works. Unless it impacts the plot, we don't care.

The Cosy Catastrophe -- Story in which horrific events are overwhelming the entirety of human civilization, but the action concentrates on a small group of tidy, middle-class, white Anglo-Saxon protagonists. The essence of the cosy catastrophe is that the hero should have a pretty good time (a girl, free suites at the Savoy, automobiles for the taking) while everyone else is dying off.
(Brian Aldiss)

The Kitchen-Sink Story -- A story overwhelmed by the inclusion of any and every new idea that occurs to the author in the process of writing it.
(Damon Knight)

The Whistling Dog -- A story related in such an elaborate, arcane, or convoluted manner that it impresses by its sheer narrative ingenuity, but which, as a story, is basically not worth the candle. Like the whistling dog, it's astonishing that the thing can whistle--but it doesn't actually whistle very well.
(Harlan Ellison)

The Rembrandt Comic Book -- A story in which incredible craft- manship has been lavished on an idea which is basically trivial or subliterary, and which simply cannot bear the weight of such deadly-serious artistic portent.

The Steam-Grommet Factory -- Didactic SF story which consists entirely of a guided tour of a large and elaborate gimmick. A common technique of SF utopias and dystopias.
(Gardner Dozois)

=== 4. PLOTS ===

Idiot Plot -- A plot which works only because all the characters involved are idiots. They behave in a way that suits the author's convenience, rather than through any rational motivation of their own.
(James Blish)

Second-order Idiot Plot -- A plot involving an entire created SF society which functions only because every single person in it is necessarily an idiot.
(Damon Knight)

And Plot -- Picaresque plot in which this happens, and then that happens, and then something else happens, and it all adds up to nothing in particular.

Kudzu Plot -- Plot which weaves and curls and writhes in weedy organic profusion, smothering everything in its path.

Card Tricks in the Dark -- Authorial tricks to no visible purpose. The author has contrived an elaborate plot to arrive at a) the punchline of a joke no one else will get, or b) some bit of historical trivia.
This stunt may be intensely ingenious, and very gratifying to the author, but it serves no visible fictional purpose.
(Tim Powers)

Abbess Phone Home -- Takes its name from a mainstream story about a medieval cloister which was sold as SF because of the serendipitous arrival of a UFO at the end. By extension, any mainstream story with a gratuitous SF or fantasy element tacked on so it could be sold.

Plot Coupons -- The true structure of the quest-type fantasy novel. The "hero" collects sufficient plot coupons (magic sword, magic book, magic cat) to send off to the author for the ending. Note that "the author" can be substituted for "the Gods" in such a work: "The Gods decreed he would pursue this quest." Right, mate. The author decreed he would pursue this quest until sufficient pages were filled to complete a trilogy.
(Dave Langford)

Bogus Alternatives -- List of actions a character could have taken but didn't. Frequently includes all the reasons why. A type of Dischism in which the author works out complicated plot problems at the reader's expense. "If I'd gone along with the cops they would have found the gun in my purse. And anyway, I didn't want to spend the night in jail. I suppose I could have just run instead of stealing their car, but then..." etc. Best dispensed with entirely.

=== 5. BACKGROUND ===

Info Dump -- Large chunk of indigestible expository matter intended to explain the background situation. This can be overt, as in a fake newspaper or "Encyclopedia Galactica" articles, or covert, in which all action stops as the author assumes center stage and lectures.
Info-dumps are also known as "expository lumps." The use of brief, deft, inoffensive info-dumps is known as "kuttnering," after Henry Kuttner. When information is worked unobtrusively into the story's basic structure, this is known as "heinleining."

Stapledon -- Name assigned to the auctorial voice which takes center stage to deliver a massive and magisterial info-dump. Actually a common noun, as in: "I like the way your stapledon describes the process of downloading brains into computer-memory, but when you try to heinlein it later, I can't tell what the hell is happening."

Frontloading -- Piling too much expository matter into the beginning of the story, so that it is so dense and dry that it is almost impossible to read.
(Connie Willis)

Nowhere Nowhen Story -- Putting too little exposition into the story's beginning, so that the story, while physically readable, seems to take place in a vacuum and fails to engage any readerly interest.
(L. Sprague de Camp)

"As You Know, Bob" -- A pernicious form of Info Dump through dialogue, in which the characters tell each other things they already know, for the sake of getting the reader up-to-speed. This very common technique is known as "Rod and Don dialogue" (Damon Knight) or "maid and butler dialogue". (Algis Budrys)

"I've Suffered for my Art" (and now it's your turn) -- Research dump. A form of the Info Dump in which the author inflicts upon the reader irrelevant, but hard-won, bits of data acquired while researching the story. As Algis Budrys once pointed out, homework exists to make the difficult look easy.

Used Furniture -- Use of a background out of Central Casting. Rather than invent a background and have to explain it, or risk re-inventing the wheel, let's just steal one. We'll set it in the Star Trek universe, only we'll call it the Empire instead of the Federation.

Eyeball Kick -- That perfect, telling detail that creates an instant visual image. The ideal of certain post- modern schools of SF is to achieve a "crammed prose" full of "eyeball kicks."
(Rudy Rucker)

Ontological riff -- Passage in an SF story which suggests that our deepest and most basic convictions about the nature of reality, space-time, or consciousness have been violated, technologically transformed, or at least rendered thoroughly dubious. The works of H.P. Lovecraft, Barrington Bayley, and Philip K. Dick abound in "ontological riffs."

Edges of Ideas -- The solution to the Info Dump problem (how to fill in the background). The theory is that, as above, the mechanics of an interstellar drive (the center of the idea) is not important; all that matters is the impact on your characters: they can get to other planets in a few months, and, oh yeah, it gives them hallucinations above past lives. Or, more radically: the physics of TV transmission is the center of an idea; on the edges we find people turning into couch potatoes because they no longer have to leave home for entertainment. Or, more bluntly: we don't need info dump at all. We just need a clear picture of how people's lives have been affected by their background. This is known as "carrying extrapolation into the fabric of daily life."

=== 6. CHARACTER AND VIEWPOINT ===

Viewpoint glitch -- The author loses track of point-of-view, switches point-of-view for no good reason, or relates something that the viewpoint character could not possibly know.

Submyth -- Classic character-types in SF which aspire to the condition of archetype but don't quite make it, such as the mad scientist, the bronzed spaceship captain, the superhuman telepath, the crazed supercomputer, the emotionless super-rational alien, the vindictive mutant child, etc.
(Ursula K. Le Guin)

Funny Hat Characterization -- Using unlikely gimmicks to lend otherwise indistinguishable characters some variety. One has an eyepatch, another a limp, another used the word "dang" every other sentence.

Mrs. Brown -- The small, downtrodden, eminently common, everyday little person who nevertheless encapsulates something vital and important about the human condition. "Mrs. Brown" is a rare personage in the SF genre, being generally overshadowed by swaggering submyth types made of the finest gold-plated cardboard. In a famous essay, "Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown," Ursula K. Le Guin decried Mrs. B's absence from the SF field.
(Virginia Woolf)

=== 7. MISCELLANEOUS ===

AM/FM -- Engineer's term distinguishing the inevitable clunky real-world faultiness of "Actual Machines" from the power-fantasy techno-dreams of "Fucking Magic."

Intellectual sexiness -- The intoxicating glamour of a novel scientific idea, as distinguished from any actual intellectual merit that it may someday prove to possess.

Consensus Reality -- Useful term for the purported world in which the majority of modern sane people generally agree that they live--as opposed to the worlds of, say, Forteans, semioticians, or quantum physicists.

The Ol' Baloney Factory -- "Science Fiction" as a publishing and promotional entity in the world of commerce.

[From Sal: Please take note that this is merely humour and though many forms of writing are made fun of, they are not all bad. When used in moderation and well thought-out, many of the above techniques can be slipped unnoticed past your average reader. Planning and superb writing are the key.]