Bruce Sterling
 bruces@well.com
 
 Literary Freeware:  Not for Commercial Use
 
 A Workshop Lexicon
 
 The "Paragons" Iteration --  from PARAGONS: TWELVE MASTER SCIENCE
 FICTION  WRITERS PLY THEIR CRAFT edited by Robin Wilson
 St Martin's Press 1996  ISBN 0-312-14032-1
 
 	People often ask where science fiction writers get their
 ideas.  They rarely ask where society gets its science fiction
 writers. In many cases the answer is science fiction workshops.
 
 	Workshops come in many varieties -- regional and national,
 amateur and professional, formal and frazzled.   In science
 fiction's best-known workshop, Clarion, would-be writers are
 wrenched from home and hearth and pitilessly blitzed for six weeks
 by professional SF writers, who serve as creative-writing gurus.
 Thanks to the seminal efforts of Robin Wilson, would-be sf writers
 can receive actual academic credit for this experience.
 
 	But the workshopping experience does not require any
 shepherding by experts.  Like a bad rock band, an SF-writer's
 workshop can be set up in any vacant garage by any group of spotty
 enthusiasts with nothing better to occupy their time.   No one has
 a copyright on talent, desire, or enthusiasm.
 
 	The general course of action in the modern SF workshop (known
 as the "Milford system") goes as follows.  Attendees bring short
 manuscripts, with enough copies for everyone present.  No one can
 attend or comment who does not bring a story.  The contributors
 read and annotate all the stories.  When that's done, everyone
 forms a circle, a story is picked at random, and the person to the
 writer's right begins the critique.  (Large groups may require
 deliberate scheduling.)
 
 	Following the circle in order, with a minimum of cross-talk
 or interruptions, each person emits his/her considered opinions of
 the story's merits and/or demerits.  The author is strictly
 required, by rigid law and custom, to make no outcries, no matter
 how he or she may squirm.  When the circle is done and the last
 reader has vented his or her opinion, the silently suffering
 author is allowed an extended reply, which, it is hoped, will not
 exceed half an hour or so, and will avoid gratuitously personal
 ripostes.  This harrowing process continues, with possible breaks
 for food, until all the stories are done, whereupon everyone tries
 to repair ruptured relationships in an orgy of drink and gossip.
 
 	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
 bruces@well.com.
 
 	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
 can find a passel of these in Gary K Wolfe's CRITICAL TERMS FOR
 SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY:  A GLOSSARY AND GUIDE TO SCHOLARSHIP
 (Greenwood Press, 1986).   But you won't find them in here.  This
 lexicon is not a guide to scholarship.  The Workshop Lexicon is a
 guide (of sorts) for down-and-dirty hairy-knuckled sci-fi writers,
 the kind of ambitious subliterate guttersnipes who actually write
 and sell professional genre material.   It's rough, rollicking,
 rule-of-thumb stuff suitable for shouting aloud while pounding the
 table.
 
 THE LEXICON
 
 PART ONE:  WORDS AND SENTENCES
 
 "Said-book" ism.   An artificial verb used to avoid the word
 "said."  "Said" is one of the few invisible words in the English
 language and is almost impossible to overuse.  It is much less
 distracting than "he retorted," "she inquired," "he ejaculated,"
 and other oddities.  The term "said-book" comes from certain
 pamphlets, containing hundreds of purple-prose synonyms for the
 word "said," which were sold by aspiring authors from tiny ads in
 American magazines of the pre-WWII era.
 
 Tom Swifty.    An unseemly compulsion to follow the word "said"
 with a colorful adverb, as in "'We'd better hurry,' Tom said
 swiftly."  This was a standard mannerism of the old Tom Swift
 adventure dime-novels.  Good dialogue can stand on its own without
 a clutter of adverbial props.
 
 Brenda Starr dialogue.  Long sections of talk with no physical
 background or description of the characters.  Such dialogue,
 detached from the story's setting, tends to echo hollowly, as if
 suspended in mid-air.  Named for the American comic-strip in which
 dialogue balloons were often seen emerging from the Manhattan
 skyline.
 
 Burly Detective syndrome.  This useful term is taken from SF's
 cousin-genre, the detective-pulp.  The hack writers of the Mike
 Shayne series showed an odd reluctance to use Shayne's proper
 name, preferring such euphemisms as "the burly detective" or "the
 red-headed sleuth."  This syndrome arises from a wrong-headed
 conviction that the same word should not be used twice in close
 succession.  This is only true of particularly strong and visible
 words, such as "vertiginous."  Better to re-use a simple tag or
 phrase than to contrive cumbersome methods of avoiding it.
 
 Pushbutton words.  Words used to evoke a cheap emotional response
 without engaging the intellect or the critical faculties.
 Commonly found in story titles, they include such bits of bogus
 lyricism as "star," "dance," "dream," "song," "tears" and "poet,"
 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
 render auctorial lectures unnecessary.  For instance, instead of
 telling the reader "She had a bad childhood, an unhappy
 childhood," a specifid incident -- involving, say, a locked closet
 and two jars of honey -- should be shown.
 
 	Rigid adherence to show-don't-tell can become absurd.  Minor
 matters are sometimes best gotten out of the way in a swift,
 straightforward fashion.
 
 Laughtrack.  Characters grandstand and tug the reader's sleeve in
 an effort to force a specific emotional reaction.  They laugh
 wildly at their own jokes, cry loudly at their own pain, and rob
 the reader of any real chance of attaining genuine emotion.
 
 Squid in the Mouth.  The failure of an author to realize that
 his/her own weird assumptions and personal in-jokes are simply not
 shared by the world-at-large.  Instead of applauding the wit or
 insight of the author's remarks, the world-at-large will stare in
 vague shock and alarm as such a writer, as if he or she had a live
 squid in the mouth.
 
 	Since SF writers as a breed are generally quite loony, and in
 fact make this a stock in trade, "squid in the mouth" doubles as a
 term of grudging praise, describing the essential, irreducible,
 divinely unpredictable lunacy of the true SF writer.  (Attr. James
 P Blaylock)
 
 Squid on the Mantelpiece.  Chekhov said that if there are dueling
 pistols over the mantelpiece in the first act, they should be
 fired in the third.  In other words, a plot element should be
 deployed in a timely fashion and with proper dramatic emphasis.
 However, in SF plotting the MacGuffins are often so overwhelming
 that they cause conventional plot structures to collapse.  It's
 hard to properly dramatize, say, the domestic effects of Dad's
 bank overdraft when a giant writhing kraken is levelling the city.
 This mismatch between the conventional dramatic proprieties and
 SF's extreme, grotesque, or visionary thematics is known as the
 "squid on the mantelpiece."
 
 Handwaving.  An attempt to distract the reader with dazzling prose
 or other verbal fireworks, so as to divert attention from a severe
 logical flaw.  (Attr. Stewart Brand)
 
 You Can't Fire Me, I Quit.  An attempt to diffuse the reader's
 incredulity with a pre-emptive strike  -- as if by anticipating
 the reader's objections, the author had somehow answered them. "I
 would never have believed it, if I hadn't seen it myself!"  "It
 was one of those amazing coincidences that can only take place in
 real life!"  "It's a one-in-a-million chance, but it's so crazy it
 just might work!"  Surprisingly common, especially in SF.  (Attr.
 John Kessel)
 
 Fuzz.  An element of motivation the author was too lazy to supply.
 The word "somehow" is a useful tip-off to fuzzy areas of a story.
 "Somehow she had forgotten to bring her gun."
 
 Dischism. The unwitting intrusion of the author's physical
 surroundings, or the author's own mental state, into the text of
 the story.  Authors who smoke or drink while writing often drown
 or choke their characters with an endless supply of booze and
 cigs.  In subtler forms of the Dischism, the characters complain
 of their confusion and indecision -- when this is actually the
 author's condition at the moment of writing, not theirs within the
 story.  "Dischism" is named after the critic who diagnosed this
 syndrome.  (Attr. Thomas M. Disch)
 
 Signal from Fred.  A comic form of the Dischism in which the
 author's subconscious, alarmed by the poor quality of the work,
 makes unwitting critical comments:  "This doesn't make sense."
 "This is really boring."  "This sounds like a bad movie."  (Attr.
 Damon Knight)
 
 False Interiorization.  A cheap labor-saving technique in which
 the author, too lazy to describe the surroundings, afflicts the
 viewpoint-character with a blindfold, an attack of space-sickness,
 the urge to play marathon whist-games in the smoking-room, etc.
 
 False Humanity.  An ailment endemic to genre writing, in which
 soap-opera elements of purported human interest are stuffed into
 the story willy-nilly, whether or not they advance the plot or
 contribute to the point of the story.  The actions of such
 characters convey an itchy sense of irrelevance, for the author
 has invented their problems out of whole cloth, so as to have
 something to emote about.
 
 Wiring Diagram Fiction.  A genre ailment related to "False
 Humanity," "Wiring Diagram Fiction" involves "characters" who show
 no convincing emotional reactions at all, since they are
 overwhelmed by the author's fascination with gadgetry or didactic
 lectures.
 
 White Room Syndrome.  A clear and common sign of the failure of
 the author's imagination, most often seen at the beginning of a
 story, before the setting, background, or characters have gelled.
 "She awoke in a white room."  The 'white room'is a featureless set
 for which details have yet to be invented -- a failure of
 invention by the author.  The character 'wakes' in order to begin
 a fresh train of thought -- again, just like the author.  This
 'white room' opening is generally followed by much earnest
 pondering of circumstances and useless exposition; all of which
 can be cut, painlessly.
 
     It remains to be seen whether the "white room" cliche' will
 fade from use now that most authors confront glowing screens
 rather than blank white paper.
 
 PART THREE:  COMMON WORKSHOP STORY TYPES
 
 The Jar of Tang.  A story contrived so that the author can spring
 a silly surprise about its setting,  For instance, the story takes
 place in a desert of coarse orange sand surrounded by an
 impenetrable vitrine barrier; surprise!  our heroes are microbes
 in a jar of Tang powdered orange drink.  (Attr. Stephen P. Brown)
 
 	When done with serious intent rather than as a passing
 conceit, this type of story can be dignified by the term
 "Concealed Environment."  (Attr. Christopher Priest)
 
 The "Poor Me" Story.  Autobiographical piece in which the male
 viewpoint character complains that he is ugly and can't get laid.
 (Attr. Kate Wilhelm)
 
 The Grubby Apartment Story.  Similar to the "poor me" story, this
 autobiographical effort features a miserably quasi-bohemian
 writer, living in urban angst in a grubby apartment.  The story
 commonly stars the author's friends in thin disguises -- friends
 who may also be the author's workshop companions, to their
 considerable alarm.
 
 The Shaggy God Story.  A piece which mechanically adopts a
 Biblical or other mythological tale and provides flat science-
 fictional "explanations" for the theological events.  (Attr.
 Michael Moorcock)
 
 Adam and Eve Story.  Nauseatingly common subset of the Shaggy God
 Story in which a terrible apocalypse, spaceship crash, etc.,
 leaves two survivors, man and woman, who turn out to be Adam and
 Eve, parents of the human race!!
 
 Dennis Hopper Syndrome.   A story based on some arcane bit of
 science or folklore, which noodles around producing random
 weirdness.  Then a loony character-actor (usually best played by
 Dennis Hopper) barges into the story and baldly tells the
 protagonist what's going on by explaining the underlying mystery
 in a long bug-eyed rant.  (Attr.  Howard Waldrop)
 
 The Tabloid Weird.    Story produced by a confusion of SF and
 Fantasy tropes -- or rather, by a confusion of basic world-views.
 Tabloid Weird is usually produced by the author's own inability to
 distinguish between a rational, Newtonian-Einsteinian, cause-and-
 effect universe and an irrational, supernatural, fantastic
 universe.  Either the FBI is hunting the escaped mutant from the
 genetics lab, or the drill-bit has bored straight into Hell -- but
 not both at once in the very same piece of fiction.  Even fantasy
 worlds need an internal consistency of sorts, so that a Sasquatch
 Deal-with-the-Devil story is also "Tabloid Weird."   Sasquatch
 crypto-zoology and Christian folk superstition simply don't mix
 well, even for comic effect.   (Attr. Howard Waldrop)
 
 Deus ex Machina or "God in the Box."  Story featuring a miraculous
 solution to the story's conflict, which comes out of nowhere and
 renders the plot struggles irelevant.  H G Wells warned against
 SF's love for the deus ex machina when he coined the famous dictum
 that "If anything is possible, then nothing is interesting."
 Science fiction, which specializes in making the impossible seem
 plausible, is always deeply intrigued by godlike powers in the
 handy pocket size.  Artificial Intelligence, virtual realities and
 nanotechnology are three contemporary SF MacGuffins that are cheap
 portable sources of limitless miracle.
 
 Just-Like Fallacy.  SF story which thinly adapts the trappings of
 a standard pulp adventure setting.  The spaceship is "just like"
 an Atlantic steamer, down to the Scottish engineer in the hold. A
 colony planet is "just like" Arizona except for two moons in the
 sky.  Space Westerns and futuristic hard-boiled detective stories
 have been especially common versions.
 
 Re-Inventing the Wheel.  A novice author goes to enormous lengths
 to create a science-fictional situation already tiresomely
 familiar to the experienced reader.  Reinventing the Wheel was
 traditionally typical of mainstream writers venturing into SF. It
 is now often seen in writers who lack experience in genre history
 because they were attracted to written SF via SF movies, SF
 television series, SF role-playing games, SF comics or SF computer
 gaming.
 
 The Cozy Catastrophe.  Story in which horrific events are
 overwhelming the entirety of human civilization, but the action
 concentrates on a small group of tidy, middle-class, white Anglo-
 Saxon protagonists.  The essence of the cozy catastrophe is that
 the hero should have a pretty good time (a girl, free suites at
 the Savoy, automobiles for the taking) while everyone else is
 dying off.  (Attr. Brian Aldiss)
 
 The Motherhood Statement.  SF story which posits some profoundly
 unsettling threat to the human condition, explores the
 implications briefly, then hastily retreats to affirm the
 conventional social and humanistic pieties, ie apple pie and
 motherhood.  Greg Egan once stated that the secret of truly
 effective SF was to deliberately "burn the motherhood statement."
 (Attr. Greg Egan)
 
 The Kitchen-Sink Story.  A story overwhelmed by the inclusion of
 any and every new idea that occurs to the author in the process of
 writing it.  (Attr. Damon Knight)
 
 The Whistling Dog.  A story related in such an elaborate, arcane,
 or convoluted manner that it impresses by its sheer narrative
 ingenuity, but which, as a story, is basically not worth the
 candle.  Like the whistling dog, it's astonishing that the thing
 can whistle -- but it doesn't actually whistle very well.  (Attr.
 Harlan Ellison)
 
 The Rembrandt Comic Book.  A story in which incredible
 craftsmanship has been lavished on a theme or idea which is
 basically trivial or subliterary, and which simply cannot bear the
 weight of such deadly-serious artistic portent.
 
 The Slipstream Story. Non-SF story which is so ontologically
 distorted or related in such a bizarrely non-realist fashion that
 it cannot pass muster as commercial mainstream fiction and
 therefore seeks shelter in the SF or fantasy genre.  Postmodern
 critique and technique are particularly fruitful in creating
 slipstream stories.
 
 The Steam-Grommet Factory.  Didactic SF story which consists
 entirely of a guided tour of a large and elaborate gimmick.  A
 common technique of SF utopias and dystopias.  (Attr. Gardner
 Dozois)
 
 
 PART FOUR:  PLOTS
 
 Idiot Plot.  A plot which functions only because all the
 characters involved are idiots.  They behave in a way that suits
 the author's convenience, rather than through any rational
 motivation of their own.  (Attr. James Blish)
 
 Second-order Idiot Plot.  A plot involving an entire invented SF
 society which functions only because every single person in it is
 necessarily an idiot.  (Attr. Damon Knight)
 
 And plot.  Picaresque plot in which this happens, and then that
 happens, and then something else happens, and it all adds up to
 nothing in particular.
 
 Kudzu plot.  Plot which weaves and curls and writhes in weedy
 organic profusion, smothering everything in its path.
 
 Card Tricks in the Dark.  Elaborately contrived plot which arrives
 at (a) the punchline of a private joke no reader will get or (b)
 the display of some bit of learned trivia relevant only to the
 author.  This stunt may be intensely ingenious, and very
 gratifying to the author, but it serves no visible fictional
 purpose.  (Attr. Tim Powers)
 
 Plot Coupons.  The basic building blocks of the quest-type fantasy
 plot.  The hero collects sufficient plot coupons (magic sword,
 magic ring, magic cat)  to send off to the author for the ending.
 The author decrees that the hero will pursue his quest until
 sufficient pages are filled to complete a trilogy.  (Attr. Dave
 Langford)
 
 Bogus Alternatives.  A list of plot-paths that a character could
 have taken, but didn't.  In this nervous mannerism, the author
 stops the action dead to work out complicated plot problems at the
 reader's expense.  "If I'd gone along with the cops they would
 have found the gun in my purse.  And anyway, I didn't want to
 spend the night in jail.  I suppose I could have just run away
 instead of stealing their squad car, but then...."  Best dispensed
 with entirely.
 
 PART FIVE:  BACKGROUND
 
 Info-dump.  Large chunk of indigestible expository matter intended
 to explain the background situation. Info-dumps can be covert, as
 in fake newspaper or "Encyclopedia Galactica" articles, or overt,
 in which all action stops as the author assumes center stage and
 lectures.  Info-dumps are also known as "expository lumps."  The
 use of brief, deft, inoffensive info-dumps is known as
 "kuttnering," after Henry Kuttner.  When information is worked
 unobtrusively into the story's basic structure, this is known as
 "heinleining."
 
 Stapledon.  Name assigned to the auctorial voice which takes
 center stage to deliver a massive and magisterial info-dump.
 Actually a common noun, as in "I like the way your stapledon
 describes the process of downloading brains into computer memory,
 but when you try to heinlein it later, I can't tell what the hell
 is happening."
 
 Frontloading.  Piling too much exposition into the beginning of
 the story, so that it becomes so dense and dry that it is almost
 impossible to read.  (Attr. Connie Willis)
 
 Nowhere Nowhen Story.  Putting too little exposition into the
 story's beginning, so that the story, while physically readable,
 seems to take place in a vacuum and fails to engage any readerly
 interest.  (Attr. L. Sprague de Camp)
 
 "As You Know, Bob."  A pernicious form of info-dump through
 dialogue, in which characters tell each other things they already
 know, for the sake of getting the reader up-to-speed.  This very
 common technique is also known as "Rod and Don dialogue" (attr.
 Damon Knight) or "maid and butler dialogue" (attr Algis Budrys).
 
 I've Suffered For My Art (and now it's your turn).  A form of
 info-dump in which the author inflicts upon the reader hard-won,
 but irrelevant bits of data acquired while researching the story.
 As Algis Budrys once pointed out, homework exists to make the
 difficult look easy.
 
 Used Furniture.  The use of a cliched genre background right out
 of Central Casting.  We can, for instance, use the Star Trek
 universe, only we'll file the serial numbers off it and call it
 the Imperium instead of the Federation.
 
 Eyeball Kicks.  Vivid, telling details that create a kaleidoscopic
 effect of swarming visual imagery against a baroquely elaborate SF
 background.  One ideal of cyberpunk SF was to create a "crammed
 prose" full of "eyeball kicks." (Attr. Rudy Rucker)
 
 Ontological riff.  Passage in an SF story which suggests that our
 deepest and most basic convictions about the nature of reality,
 space-time, or consciousness have been violated, technologically
 transformed, or at least rendered thoroughly dubious.  The works
 of H. P. Lovecraft, Barrington Bayley, and Philip K Dick abound in
 "ontological riffs."
 
 PART SIX:  CHARACTER AND VIEWPOINT
 
 Viewpoint glitch.  The author loses track of point-of-view,
 switches point-of-view for no good reason, or relates something
 that the viewpoint character could not possibly know.
 
 Submyth.  Classic character-types in SF which aspire to the
 condition of archetype but don't quite make it, such as the mad
 scientist, the crazed supercomputer, the emotionless super-
 rational alien, the vindictive mutant child, etc.  (Attr. Ursula
 K. Le Guin)
 
 Funny-hat characterization.  A character distinguished by a single
 identifying tag, such as odd headgear, a limp, a lisp, a parrot on
 his shoulder, etc.
 
 Mrs. Brown.  The small, downtrodden, eminently common, everyday
 little person who nevertheless encapsulates something vital and
 important about the human condition.  "Mrs. Brown" is a rare
 personage in the SF genre, being generally overshadowed by
 swaggering submyth types made of the finest gold-plated cardboard.
 In a famous essay, "Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown,"  Ursula K. Le
 Guin decried Mrs. Brown's absence from the SF field.  (Attr:
 Virginia Woolf)
 
 PART SEVEN:  MISCELLANEOUS
 
 AM/FM.  Engineer's term distinguishing the inevitable clunky real-
 world faultiness of "Actual Machines" from the power-fantasy
 techno-dreams of "Fucking Magic."
 
 Intellectual sexiness.  The intoxicating glamor of a novel
 scientific idea, as distinguished from any actual intellectual
 merit that it may someday prove to possess.
 
 Consensus Reality.  Useful term for the purported world in which
 the majority of modern sane people generally agree that they live
 -- as opposed to the worlds of, say, Forteans, semioticians or
 quantum physicists.
 
 The Ol' Baloney Factory.  "Science Fiction" as a publishing and
 promotional entity in the world of commerce.
.