Turkey City Lexicon: Difference between revisions

 

* '''[[Adam and Eve Plot|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, [[Planet of the Apes Ending|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 [[Mr. Exposition|baldly tells the protagonist what's going on]] by explaining the underlying mystery in a long bug-eyed rant. (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 irrelevant. [[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. [[Deus Est Machina|Artificial Intelligence]], [[Lotus Eater Machine|virtual realities]] and [[Nanotechnology]] are three contemporary SF [[MacGuffin]]s that are cheap portable sources of limitless miracle. Said to have been developed in ancient Greek theater, where the 'god' would be an actor suddenly thrown into the scene, without explanation, to [[Hand Wave]] glaring plot holes and/or explain a badly-written, confusing story to the audience.

* '''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 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 [[Mind Screw|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. More prosaically, a slipstream story is one where one or more characters travel, often accidentally i.e. by slipping, from the realistic modern world to a fantasy world, parallel universe, different time period, etc.

* '''[[Big Dumb Object|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)

* '''[[Flat Character|Funny-hat characterization]]:''' A character distinguished by a single identifying tag, such as odd [[Nice Hat|headgear]], a limp, a lisp, a parrot on his shoulder, etc.

* '''[[The Everyman|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)

* '''Viewpoint glitch:''' The author loses track of point-of-view, [[Switching POV|switches point-of-view]] for no good reason, or relates something that the viewpoint character could not possibly know.