“Science fiction has its own specialized vocabulary, words that are immediately understandable to initiated readers but largely incomprehensible to the world in general—words like hyperspace, teleportation, telekinesis, esper, solarian, terraforming. The subculture known as science fiction fandom has a special esoteric jargon too, and its words are so cryptic that only a fraction of the main science fiction audience would understand them—corflu, filk-song, Hugo, gafia, GoH, and many more.

But it occurred to me the other day that a good many sciencefictional words, and even some of the fannish ones, have escaped from our microcosm and established themselves as standard terms in modern English. I mean words like “robot” and “alien” and “fanzine.” So I betook myself to that estimable reference volume, Brave New Words, otherwise known as the Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, to see just how many escapees there are. (Brave New Words, edited by Jeff Prucher and published in 2007 by the Oxford University Press, became self-referential a year later when it won a Hugo for best non-fiction work. Page 93 defines the Hugo as “any of several awards presented annually at the World Science Fiction Convention . . . for excellence in science fiction or fantasy writing, art, publishing, etc.”) From it I drew these examples:
Robot. Everybody knows what a robot is: a big clunking metal machine, usually, but not always, anthropomorphic in shape, that does the jobs humans don’t want to do. Robots perform dangerous tasks inside atomic power plants. Assembly lines in factories use robot arms to put things together. People who speak in dull, monotonous, mechanical tones are described as “robotic.” The word is part of the common language. But it comes straight out of science fiction: Karel Capek’s 1923 play, R.U.R—the initials stand for “Rossum’s Universal Robots”—which is about the advent of quasiintelligent mechanical laborers. Capek didn’t have to reach very far to invent a name for his machines. It came from his native language, Czech, where it means “work,” usually with the implication of hard, boring work. It is found in other Slavic languages, too, which provided a strange experience for me last year when I visited Poland and, on my first day, found a sign posted on the wall outside my hotel that said, UWAGA! ROBOTY BUDOWLANE! I had learned already that “uwaga!” meant “danger!” Were we being warned against berserk robots in the vicinity? Not quite. A Polish friend provided the prosaic translation: “Danger! Construction work!”

From robot we move smoothly to android, a word that in its SF usage generally is intended to mean a kind of artificial human that more closely resembles the real thing than a robot does: not a metal creature but one made of synthetic flesh. It, too, is widely used in standard English these days. Brave New Words tells us that it was in use centuries ago to describe artificial beings supposedly manufactured by alchemists, so perhaps we ought not to credit its coinage to science fiction writers, though they were the ones who popularized its usage, beginning in the 1930s. But its variant, droid, even more widely used nowadays, unquestionably comes straight out of SF—from George Lucas’s movie Star Wars, which gave us the beloved and not at all human-shaped droid R2D2, among others. Science fiction movies and television shows have much greater audiences than even the most popular SF novel, which is why their coinages pass so readily into the language. Beam me up, Scotty—even the stodgy magazine American Banker was using the phrase as far back as an issue of July 1984, according to Brave New Words, in its sense of “Get me out of here fast.” It originated, of course, on Star Trek, as did many another phrase now in colloquial use.

The ease with which people use the expression “ET” to describe some strange creature that they have encountered is another example of the power of Hollywood science fiction to transform our language. I have heard the term used by real-world people, people who don’t know Bradbury from Heinlein, when speaking of an odd-looking cat, a peculiar aquarium specimen, even a funny-looking baby. “ET,” of course, is short for “extraterrestrial,” which means “not of this earth.” That word was once part of our private lingo, traceable back at least to a 1941 pulp story by C.M. Kornbluth. “ET,” the abbreviation, turns up as far back as 1944 in a fan publication. But it was Stephen Spielberg who put it into the public vocabulary with his 1982 movie, E.T.: the Extraterrestrial, which showed umpty million filmgoers that a creature from another world could be charming, winsome, lovable...and extraterrestrial.

It was another film that gave us that dreadful term “outer space,” so widely and unfortunately used today—1953’s It Came from Outer Space. (Not a very distinguished movie, though it was adapted from a story by Ray Bradbury, and let us hope Bradbury had nothing to do with coining that silly locution. Where is “outer” space? How far out there do we have to go to reach it?) The movie did lead British novelist J.B. Priestley to urge writers, a year later, to devote themselves instead to the literary exploration of inner space, “the hidden life of the psyche,” and “inner space,” too, has passed into our language as the antithesis of the place where the dumb sci-fi movies are set.
Oh, sci-fi. Another hateful term that will never be eradicated from our language. It was coined, apparently, by analogy with “hi-fi,” a twentieth-century term short for “high fidelity,” referring to superior reproduction of musical sound. It’s reasonable enough to collapse “high fidelity” into “hi-fi,” I suppose, and even “science” into “sci-,” but abbreviating “fiction” as “fi” has always struck me as barbarous. I used to blame the old-time SF fan Forrest J Ackerman for setting “hi-fi” loose in our midst somewhere in the 1950s, but to my chagrin Brave New Words has found a 1949 citation for it in a letter from none other than Robert A. Heinlein, talking about his writing a “sci-fi” short story. Perhaps we don’t owe “outer space” to Bradbury, but evidently Heinlein was using “sci-fi” long before Ackerman, and more’s the pity. (Heinlein also provided us with grok, from his 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land, which everybody has used since the hippie era to mean “to understand” or “to be in tune with” or, well, “to dig,” in the sixties sense of that verb. It doesn’t belong to Heinlein any more. You see it everywhere from TV Guide to People Magazine to The New York Times.)

What about science fiction itself? It’s a term that the whole world understands, but once upon a time it was exclusively ours, right? Well, not exactly. Brave New Words has found an 1851 essay talking about science fiction as a kind of fiction that offers “a knowledge of the Poetry of Science, clothed in a garb of the Poetry of Life.” A little flowery, perhaps, but as good a definition as any I’ve heard, even though it does anticipate the founding of the first science fiction magazine, Hugo Gersback’s Amazing Stories, by seventy-five years. Gernsback himself can be seen in a 1927 issue of Amazing referring to Jules Verne as “a sort of Shakespeare in science fiction,” but in fact he preferred to call the stuff he published “scientifiction,” an ugly neologism formed by smoodjing together “scientific” and “fiction.” The term never caught on, unlike, alas, “sci-fi,” which seems here to stay.

Astronomers use the term “gas giant” to speak of big, vaporous planets like Jupiter or Neptune, whose apparent great size results from having a vast quantity of gaseous material wrapped around a relatively small solid core. They probably aren’t aware that James Blish coined the term in 1952 in a science fiction story called “Solar Plexus.” (The story wasn’t one of Blish’s best, but he was tremendously proud to see his coinage pass into the language of science.) The phrase “flash crowd” is often used nowadays to mean a rapidly assembled large group that is called together via cellphone or the Internet. Larry Niven invented it in 1973 in a story of just that name. (I remember it well. I published it in an anthology I was editing.)

If you regard George Orwell’s 1984 as science fiction, and I am one of those who do, you must credit it with coining a whole array of words that are by now indispensable to any discussion of political life: doublethink, thoughtcrime, Big Brother, unperson, and many more—to which we must add the adjective Orwellian, honoring the author himself. They all come out of a 1948 book that took place thirty-six years in the future, and I think novels set in the future qualify as science fiction.

Science fiction also gave us alien (in the sense of a being from another world), spacesuit, time machine, blastoff, and a host of other words that seem like perfectly standard English today. A fanzine used to be a mimeographed magazine published by some science-fiction reader in an edition of one hundred copies or so and full of essays on the stories in last month’s Astounding Science Fiction, letters from SF fans, and, sometimes, amateur science fiction. I wrote for fanzines myself, sixty years ago, before magazines started paying me for my stories. (The term, derived from “fan magazine,” goes back to 1944.) Today a fanzine is more usually a big, glossy publication devoted to video games, the collecting of sports memorabilia, the life and times of some pop star, or any other sort of hobby, and they are very commercial enterprises indeed. Then there are viruses—not the ones that give us the flu, but the kind that want to infest our computers. David Gerrold wrote about them in his 1972 novel When Harlie Was One, years and yearas before most of us ever expected to be using computers in our daily lives. (The companion tech-term, “worm,” meaning invasive code that travels in viral fashion from computer to computer, comes from John Brunner’s novel Shockwave Rider of 1975.)

And so it goes, as a writer who wrote a lot of great science fiction but didn’t want it called that once said. We live in a world shaped in large measure by the images and ideas of science fiction—and the language we speak has been shaped the same way.