words that you only ever read in science fiction

he repeats himself a lot. even in the same paragraph. those books could have been cut down substantially by a good editor and you wouldn't have missed anything.

I loved the Mars books, but read them as they originally came out, so had years-long gaps between the ice talk

Scott will enjoy KSR's new one, I'm sure, about a shaman in the Ice Age
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/1841499994.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

mmm...icy...

can we include fantasy too?

- eldritch

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

credits (as currency)

ESCARPMENT! jesus frackin' christ if i never see that word again it will be too soon. must be in the mars books 500,000 times.

so i've got 200 pages left of blue mars and i'm all of a sudden really digging nirgal hanging out with the feral space hippies. oh well, better late than never.

Enantiodromic

Enantiodromic

That was in Jung before it was in science fiction.

Plasteel

(something)-drive

deathdrive! sexdrive! Also sega megadrive!

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."

yeah, me too

maybe that’s another thread, for words like that and “waldo.” There’s also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansible_(software)?wprov=sfti1

"Iris" as a verb. ("The door irised open")

didn’t RAH famously come up with that?

Cranch

apparently that is a real last name but yeah.

The story also makes reference to “the wire of Eustace Cranch.”

wait, I just happen to own the Cordwainer Smith concordance, let me look in that.

which quotes this from J. J. Pierce’s intro in The Best of:

At the time Smith wrote the story in 1945, there was an abandoned shop in his neighborhood called the Little Cranch—what “cranch” meant, he had no idea—but he used the word anyway.

then adding that “cranch” is a variant of “craunch” which I see in other sources seems to be an ancestor of “crunch.” /themoreyouknow

And here I thought all along it had something to do with Lucas Cranach.

Cranch, won’t pick it up

didn’t RAH famously come up with that?

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