Brave New Words

Everyone knows that William Gibson coined the word “cyberspace” in his 1982 story, “Burning Chrome,” and his seminal novel, Neuromancer (1984). Neuromancer also included the first use of the term “matrix” to refer to a global information network. But, do you know when the word “galactic” was first used in science fiction literature? In a story called “Asylum” in the May 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction magazine, A.E. van Vogt, one of the most popular and highly esteemed science fiction writers of the 1940s, wrote:

“There are no Galactics out here. But there is an Observer. I've been catching the secret ultra signals for the last two hours […] warning all ships to stay clear because the system isn't ready for any kind of contact with Galactic planets.”

Gems like this can be found in Brave New Words, the first historical dictionary devoted to science fiction. With full citations (some going back to the Renaissance), etymologies, and bibliographic information, Brave New Words is a storehouse of information on words coined and passed along by the genre's most talented writers. Many of the words have become part of the vocabulary of everyday language or have been moved into subcultures like computers or environmentalism.

Interestingly, BNW is based in part on citations collected at Science Fiction Citations, which fits in perfectly with the current trend of user-contributed, wiki-type collaborations.

Vista and the Sublime

Microsoft's “Wow” campaign for its Vista operating system has much in common with the concept of the “Sublime,” propagated by the statesman and writer Edmund Burke in 1756. His Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful argued that both beauty and the awe-inspiring experience of the sublime were perceived emotionally. The experience of the sublime is marked by awe, grandeur, vastness, incomprehensibility, and the power to cause an intense pleasure in the observer, a pleasure that has transcendent qualities. To Burke and other eighteenth century Romantics, the sublime was the representation of a spontaneity that had been lost in an enlightenment world of calculation and disenchantment.

Microsoft's Vista commercials involve a series of “wow” moments: a man sees a deer in his neighborhood; a boy is amazed by a blanket of snow; a young woman is awed by a view of misty mountain peaks. The voiceover: “Every so often you experience something so new, so delightfully unexpected, that there is only one word for it. Wow. Introducing Windows Vista.”

What's interesting here is the emphasis on the natural world and the implication that technology has the power to bring about a kind of aesthetic experience grand enough to transport us to virtual Elysian Fields. Despite our cyberpunk fantasies of neural jacks and cybernetic implants, I suspect we harbor a subconscious desire for an online experience grounded in the natural, organic world because we ourselves are products of it.