words that you only ever read in science fiction

You're right. Restrict it to somebody's name, or some pseudo-physics term.

can we include fantasy too?

Wyrd

not *only* in sf, but certain writers really cherish certain words

piers anthony: balk
stephen r. donaldson: thews
frank herbert: woolgathering

i probably haven't read a piers anthony book since i was 13 but i still remember all the balking

there are a LOT of them in this M. John Harrison book I'm reading. Here, I will open a random page and demonstrate:

ki-gas
gamma-ablated
talc
three-finner

Lovecraft: gambrel
Asimov: the phrase "not one but" (meaning "all")

wub-fur

PKD had a bunch of these actually:

homeopape
servo-motor

Wankh

Words you may discover in the works of M. John Harrison

1) Geological terminology:

Smoke and snow filled them, a pearly grey light like dawn over the tottering seracs of some marine glacier in the north beyond the North. It shivered and was wrenched away-
"Methvet Nian!"
Fused sand, and a sky filled with mica, the rolling dunes and dry saline wadis of the sempiternal erg.

2) Repurposed words given new futuristic meanings
&3) Tropes/phrases he likes to reuse

They had innumerable soldiers, shadow boys in cultivars, cheap teenage punks with guns. Also, in their antique briefcases, or big, soft leather purses, they each carried a Chambers reaction pistol.

2b)

And the Cray sisters appeared in the tank farm doorway, shaking their heads and reaching for the pieces in their purses.

4) Dated slang, precisely used

They wore double-breasted sharkskin suits with the jackets hanging open so you could see they were heeled

5) Gnostic or other mystical terminology such as "Pleroma." Don't have a copy of The Course of the Heart handy or I'd quote. But you can apparently buy a very cheap used volume called Anima containing both that and Signs of Life, which might be his two best books.

Finally there is this at the beginning of the first Viriconium book, The Pastel City

He wore a dark green velvet cloak, spun about him like a cocoon against the wind, a tabard of antique leather set with iridium studs over a white kid shirt; tight mazarine velvet trousers and high, soft boots of pale blue suede. Beneath the heavy cloak, his slim and deceptively delicate hands were curled into fists, weighted, as was the custom of the time, with heavy rings of nonprecious metals intagliated with involved cyphers and sphenograms.

OK, now back to Appleseed, by John Clute, which is so full of these words it will necessitate liveblogging on this thread.

Hah, already got one from that book, "sophont," first used by- guess who? Poul Anderson.

wadis of the sempiternal erg

Next album title to the first taker. GO!

And another, "fuligin," which he seems to have gotten from Gene Wolfe.

Think that was already a Macca remix album, Laurel.

homeworld (not seen in this book, yet )

Old-timey words otherwise most recently used for comedic effect by such writers as P.G. Wodehouse and S.J. Perelman such as "yclept."

_- terran_

^^This will be hard to top

OK, another example of archaic word just showed up in this book, "appaumy." Amusing discussion of this actual passage here: http://books.google.com/books?id=uJyXcehjHCAC&pg=PA192&lpg=PA192&dq=appaumy&source=bl&ots=eZRcBMGpSV&sig=7F64OpWZq_4r6_8VZfRZ64xiuUo&hl=en&sa=X&ei=1to3Uv27A8_a4AOh5YDoAg&ved=0CG0Q6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=appaumy&f=false

Same article but easier to get to without google books search: http://extropians.weidai.com/extropians/0302/2570.html

more from MJH

proteome
non-Abelian

Fused sand, and a sky filled with mica, the rolling dunes and dry saline wadis of the sempiternal erg.

this is just fucking magnificent

Forget it, Tracer, it's Viriconiumtown.

You never heard of non-Abelian before, Shakey? What kind of nerd are you?

the kind who was bad at math

"He wore a dark green velvet cloak, spun about him like a cocoon against the wind, a tabard of antique leather set with iridium studs over a white kid shirt; tight mazarine velvet trousers and high, soft boots of pale blue suede. Beneath the heavy cloak, his slim and deceptively delicate hands were curled into fists, weighted, as was the custom of the time, with heavy rings of nonprecious metals intagliated with involved cyphers and sphenograms."

I almost didn't make it past the first page, I hadn't had to look up so many words in an unabridged dictionary since reading Blood Meridian.

This seems interesting to me in terms of ~ reading strategies ~ -- like reading that (which I have done twice, I think, and I'm pretty sure never bothered with the dictionary) I feel like the narrator or implied author doesn't care too much if you follow precisely what's going on. (Like I want to claim that that's actually a part of the effect that Harrison's going for and insisting on reducing that bit of description to something that actually visually works is cheating him a little.)

Moorcock is prone to similar descriptions of clothing

The phrase "intagliated with involved cyphers and sphenograms" just trips right off the tongue, don't it?

This seems interesting to me in terms of ~ reading strategies
Will be back later to address this

if it were a movie where, say riddick showed up in a costume that was similarly unfamiliar and semiotically dense, would it also be a tar trap to the audience's attention, where the intended focus is riddick punching people?
(i'm thinking that might actually be the case, hence the simplified tank top)

zardoz.jpg

but, i mean, semiotic denseness is harrison's intended focus -- it's not a book about tegeus-Cromis stabbing ppl

So u r saying the rest of us are naive, literal-minded readers, thomp?

Another one from MJH, from "Settling the World," the first story in Things That Never Happen:

My very first glimpse of God's Own Road awaited me; the scent of my Palaeonophis mingled deliciously what the scent of the sea

in which the unfamiliar word seems to come from an H. G. Wells story called "The Flowering of the Strange Orchid."

Remembered the word I was looking for because I found it here: http://www.catb.org/esr/sf-words/glossary.html#sophont

sophont
[From Poul Anderson's `Polesotechnic League' stories, going back at least to 1963]

An evolved biological 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.

Already posted that upthread, sorry, although not the link to the glossary.

i finally finished green mars. no more pistes and escarpments for me for awhile.

I like some of his short stories and have a copy of Red Mars -they were giving the ebook a few years ago in the hope that you would read the whole series- but never managed to get too far into it.

The fourth word in this sentence, from the beginning of Jack Vance's "Mazirian the Magician": And beyond the roqual hedge the trees of the forest made a tall wall of mystery. In fact I'm still not sure what it means, I couldn't find it in any dictionary and if I google it I only get references to this exact same passage, or the suggestion Did you mean 'rorqual'?

not a word afaict (did an oed check), only thing i can think of is whether it's an invented adjectival form of 'roque':

"A form of croquet played in the United States on a court surrounded by a bank and using ten hoops and short-handled mallets."

still doesn't really make sense, but is closer than 'rorqual'. you might at a (very great) stretch replace 'the bank of a roque court' with a hedge?

Roque features heavily in Stephen King's novel The Shining. Where in the film adaptation Jack Torrance wields an axe, his weapon in the book was a roque mallet. The character Ullman tells Torrance that roque is the older, original form of the game and croquet is a "bastardized" American version. In fact, croquet is the original European game and roque is a later American variation.

but yeah, i think it's a made up word.

http://jackvance.yuku.com/topic/3599/Nuggets-kinds-specifically-Wodehouse-Vance#.WSfCTlP1A0o

gloottokoma. I've only ever seen this word used by M. John Harrison, in the Viriconium books and in an introduction to Disch's 334.

oh cool
An Unnatural Order: The Roots of Our Destruction of Nature
https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1590560817
Jim Mason - 2004 - ‎Nature
He explains the Greek word gloottokoma, which refers to boxes used to lock up little children with the aim of shaping their growth for a lucrative career as circus dwarfs. The Roman Longinus wrote in the first century a d, of the practice of caging people in order to stunt their growth. Romans were known to have disfigured

Speaking of words, last night I sent a New Year's greeting to an olde pal, addressing him as "Richard Chivas Regal---he just now responded with this (30 years he waits to tell me):
...my Kraut ancestors had nothing to do with anything royal, in fact, in German "Riegel" means "bar," not a saloon, but the bar that slides in a deadbolt...By extension from that usage, "Riegel" also came to mean "chocolate bar" in German (still not making this up.) I've been considering dubbing myself "Rich Candybar" should I need another nom de plume...

"Luna"

words I only ever see in sf or sf criticism: “jonbar point.”

oh right the original was “dilated.” Still...

i thought iris as a verb was used early in the movie industry to describe the wipe

torus

“strato-“ as a prefix

i thought iris as a verb was used early in the movie industry to describe the wipe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_shot

"iris out" and "iris in" are usually noun phrases -- "the film ends with an iris out" -- that encourage the belief in "iris" can act as a verb with "in" or "out" as its adverb: "let's end the film by irising out"

Thanks for, um, irising in, Mark.

offworld

The f-stop aperture of cameras was known as an iris decades before sci-fi got hold of the term.
https://tubularinsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/f-stop-scale.gif

"as a verb"

https://img.apmcdn.org/fab975fb18fd043b3007cd9d7eb8a357e712cf50/uncropped/27c825-20110402-bob-dylan-1975.jpg
Iris, oh, Iris, you’re a mystical child

the element in a camera is anyway transferred from the anatomical region that surrounds the pupil in the eye, so-called (since 1525 via SOED) bcz it is rainbow coloured, iris being the greek goddess of the rainbow -- and "irised" did actually pre-exist (acc.SOED, i've never spotted it) as a poetic verb meaning "exhibited the characteristics of a rainbow"

so there's a quadruple meaning transference, which is fun: from name-of-a-god to colour quality to mechanism (purposive-muscular) to mechanism (purposive-mechanical) to mechanism (similar mechanism different purpose)

El show de Iris Chacon to thread!

lidar

there's a lot of lidar talk in 1491! which, okay, does read a bit like science fiction in places