No doubt a very interesting book could be written about
science fiction in which the writing itself played no part. This
phantom history could detail the social demimonde of workshops and
their associated cliques: Milford, the Futurians, Milwaukee
Fictioneers, Turkey City, New Wave, Hydra Club, Jules Verne's
Eleven Without Women, and year after year after year of Clarion --
a thousand SF groups around the world, known and unknown.
Anyone can play. I've noticed that workshops have a
particularly crucial role in non-Anglophone societies, where fans,
writers, and publishers are often closely united in the same
handful of zealots. This kind of fellow-feeling may be the true
hearts-blood of the genre.
We now come to the core of this piece, the SF Workshop
Lexicon. This lexicon was compiled by Mr Lewis Shiner and myself
from the work of many writers and critics over many years of genre
history, and it contains buzzwords, notions and critical terms of
direct use to SF workshops.
The first version, known as the "Turkey City Lexicon" after
the Austin, Texas writers' workshop that was a cradle of
cyberpunk, appeared in 1988. In proper ideologically-correct
cyberpunk fashion, the Turkey City Lexicon was distributed
uncopyrighted and free-of-charge: a decommodified, photocopied
chunk of free literary software. Lewis Shiner still thinks that
this was the best deployment of an effort of this sort, and thinks
I should stop fooling around with this fait accompli. After all,
the original Lexicon remains uncopyrighted, and it has been
floating around in fanzines, prozines and computer networks for
seven years now. I respect Lew's opinion, and in fact I kind of
agree with him. But I'm an ideologue, congenitally unable to
leave well-enough alone.
In September 1990 I re-wrote the Lexicon as an installment in
my critical column for the British magazine INTERZONE. When
Robin Wilson asked me to refurbish the Lexicon yet again for
PARAGONS, I couldn't resist the temptation. I'm always open to
improvements and amendments for the Lexicon. It seems to me that
if a document of this sort fails to grow it will surely become a
literary monument, and, well, heaven forbid. For what it's
worth, I plan to re-release this latest edition to the Internet at
the first opportunity. You can email me about it: I'm
[email protected].
Some Lexicon terms are attributed to their originators, when
I could find them; others are not, and I apologize for my
ignorance.
Science fiction boasts many specialized critical terms. You
