cliches calculated to render the SF audience misty-eyed and
tender-hearted.
Brand-name fever. The over-use of commercial brand-names to
create a false sense of gritty verisimilitude. It is useless to
stock the future with Hondas, Sonys, and Brauns without
accompanying visual and physical detail.
"Call a Rabbit a Smeerp." A cheap technique for false exoticism,
in which common elements of the real world are re-named for a
fantastic milieu without any real alteration in their basic nature
or behavior. "Smeerps" are especially common in fantasy worlds,
where people often ride exotic steeds that look and act just like
horses. (Attributed to James Blish.)
Roget's Disease. The ludicrous overuse of far-fetched adjectives,
piled into a festering, fungal, tenebrous, troglodytic, ichorous,
leprous, synonymic heap. (Attr. John W. Campbell)
Gingerbread. Useless ornament in prose, such as fancy
sesquipedalian Latinate words where short clear English ones will
do. Novice authors sometimes use "gingerbread" in the hope of
disguising faults and conveying an air of refinement. (Attr. Damon
Knight)
Not Simultaneous. The mis-use of the present participle is a
common structural sentence-fault for beginning writers. "Putting
his key in the door, he leapt up the stairs and got his revolver
out of the bureau." Alas, our hero couldn't do this even if his
arms were forty feet long. This fault shades into "Ing Disease,"
the tendency to pepper sentences with words ending in "-ing," a
grammatical construction which tends to confuse the proper
sequence of events. (Attr. Damon Knight)
PART TWO: PARAGRAPHS AND PROSE STRUCTURE
Bathos. A sudden, alarming change in the level of diction. "There
will be bloody riots and savage insurrections leading to a violent
popular uprising unless the regime starts being lots nicer about
stuff."
Countersinking. A form of expositional redundancy in which the
action clearly implied in dialogue is made explicit. "'Let's get
out of here!' he shouted, urging her to leave."
Show Don't Tell. A cardinal principle of effective writing. The
reader should be allowed to react naturally to the evidence
presented in the story, not instructed in how to react by the
author. Specific incidents and carefully observed details will
