Welcome to the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction. This work-in-progress is a comprehensive quotation-based dictionary of the language of science fiction. The HD/SF is an offshoot of a project begun by the Oxford English Dictionary (though it is no longer formally affiliated with it). It is edited by Jesse Sheidlower. Please explore the menu links to learn more.
Jonathan Maus: Police say two of 10 victims in vehicular rampage were on bikes (Bike Portland)
This casual acceptance of vehicular violence and recklessness as a random occurrence we can’t do anything about is unacceptable and must change. I’m afraid more people will die if we don’t.
Our enforcement policies need to be better at flagging high-risk drivers. Our mental and public health services need to find at-risk people and give them more support. Our transportation agencies need to fortify our streets by adding more concrete and protected spaces wherever and whenever possible. Our community needs to call out traffic violence in every form, every time; whether it’s spoken, typed, or acted upon.
I’m afraid of how we’re handling this issue; but I refuse to be afraid of our streets. So many times this past year we saw the power streets have to unite us. “Whose streets? Our streets!” isn’t just a chant, it’s an acknowledgment that we all own a piece of the responsibility to keep them safe.
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Mosi Reeves: Sample Snitching: How Online Fan Chatter Can Create Legal Trouble for Rap Producers (Pitchfork)
By publicly identifying and discussing unlicensed samples, hip-hop fans on websites like WhoSampled and YouTube may be unwittingly putting their favorite producers at risk.
Lyz Lenz: Trump Is Gone, But the Era of White Grievance Isn’t Over
The great white whine continues
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It’s tempting to say, “We made it.” But so many have not. 400,000 Americans are dead from a virus that is preventable with a face mask. A little cloth covering. 545 children have lost their families because of the Trump administration’s family separation policy that forced them apart. Heather Heyer isn’t here. Five people died in the violent insurrection. So many of us are alive, yes, but we are ghosts of ourselves. Hollowed out by loss and harassment and illness. How many more people were terrorized and are dead because white nationalism was catalyzed by the highest office in the land?
So, no. We didn’t make it. And it’s not over.
White grievance is one of the few renewable natural resources that Americans are willing to invest in. And why not? It’s good business. Fox News has made an empire of it. Look at all the journalists who have made a lot of money writing books about Donald Trump. Think about all the people who have made money writing about their time in the White House.
We are a country and an economy built on white grievance. Even after slavery as a practice was ended in 1865, it’s never really gone away. Segregationist policies and politicians, Jim Crow laws, redlining practices and suburban white flight have set the boundaries and borders of our country. During the 2016 election, writers like Dave Eggers and George Saunders bent over backward to describe the anger and pain of the white voter, going to Trump rallies and writing about the slavering hordes in a way that othered and fetishized them. This narrative allowed white grievance to flourish; after a takedown in the “liberal media”, white voters could crucify themselves on the cross of culture, claiming to be the victims and misunderstood, the poor forgotten minority.
Ta-Nehisi Coates: Donald Trump Is Out. Are We Ready to Talk About How He Got In? (The Atlantic)
It was said that the Trump presidency was the fruit of “economic anxiety,” of trigger warnings and the push for trans rights. We were told that it was wrong to call Trump a white supremacist, because he had merely “drawn upon their themes.”
One hopes that after four years of brown children in cages; of attempts to invalidate the will of Black voters in Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Detroit; of hearing Trump tell congresswomen of color to go back where they came from; of claims that Joe Biden would turn Minnesota into “a refugee camp”; of his constant invocations of “the Chinese virus,” we can now safely conclude that Trump believes in a world where white people are—or should be—on top. It is still deeply challenging for so many people to accept the reality of what has happened—that a country has been captured by the worst of its history, while millions of Americans cheered this on.
Rafi Letzter: The Milky Way is probably full of dead civilizations (Space.com)
Most of these other civilizations that still exist in the galaxy today are likely young, due to the probability that intelligent life is fairly likely to eradicate itself over long timescales. Even if the galaxy reached its civilizational peak more than 5 billion years ago, most of the civilizations that were around then have likely self-annihilated, the researchers found.
This last bit is the most uncertain variable in the paper; how often do civilizations kill themselves? But it's also the most important in determining how widespread civilization is, the researchers found. Even an extraordinarily low chance of a given civilization wiping itself out in any given century — say, via nuclear holocaust or runaway climate change — would mean that the overwhelming majority of peak Milky Way civilizations are already gone
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A Breakdown of Everything Wrong in That “Shocking Secrets of the Food Industry” Viral Video (Snopes)
Te phrase "genetic memory of honey" is lodged in my brain permanently, and here's where it comes from.
None of the items described in the video could accurately be described as either shocking or secret.
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Jeremy Gordon: Is There a Cure for Burnout? (The Nation)
Millennials have been screwed. We’re the first generation to have a worse economic outlook than our parents. We control less than 5 percent of US wealth, despite making up the largest chunk of the workforce, and plenty of millennials won’t make up that difference after their parents die.
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“Most burnt-out millennials I know have arrived at that point of calling those expectations into question, but it didn’t happen right away,” she writes. “Instead, it’s taken decades: Even after watching our parents get shut out, fall from, or simply struggle anxiously to maintain the American Dream, we didn’t reject it.”
I want to stress how much I empathize, because I know a political awakening requires more than a list of facts. But as a reader, these types of generalizations are unsatisfying because they rely so heavily on trusting she has had a representative experience. Who are her friends? What’s the work they wanted to do? You don’t have to look far to find a social world of millennials who didn’t require decades to realize the American dream was flawed, internalized that lesson as teenagers and young adults, and adjusted their worldview accordingly. There are plenty of comparably broad observations dredged from specific experience. Referring to Alexandra Robbins’s The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids, a 2006 book about overworked teenagers trying to get into the college of their dreams, Petersen notes, “multiple people told me they read it as a sort of instruction manual.” If I polled the teens I knew in 2006, most of them would have taken it as a warning guide against being too much of a nerd.
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It’s her book, but it’s impossible to cultivate a position of objective expertise from such memoiristic subjectivity, especially given her rarefied work trajectory: academia to media, where she has built a sizable brand and audience. (She recently left her job at BuzzFeed to work full-time on her paid Substack newsletter—a choice that only a small fraction of writers could make.) An easy conclusion would be that the millennial experience is too broad to generalize in any direction, beyond pointing to the hard metrics about our average net worth (or lack thereof), consumption patterns, voting habits, and so on, but Petersen’s book, rather than decentering its writer, makes her experience a heuristic and projects her assumptions onto the world.
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Setting aside the fact that teachers are wildly underpaid, only a workaholic could envision better work as the solution to bad work, despite her calls that a profound restructuring of the economy is crucial for anyone, not just millennials, to have a future. It’s true that a psychic reorganization could ameliorate the cumulative effects of burnout, as “The hell with this—I won’t play by your rules” remains a satisfying way of reclaiming one’s agency within a broken system. But all jobs, not just cool ones, are subject to the ongoing degradations levied by venal politicians and corporations. None of the problems she describes happened by chance; they were all products of specific decisions made over the decades, meant to maximize profits at the expense of people.
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But does looking at Instagram really lead to burnout? Is not wanting to take a vacation always a sign of burnout? Or not mowing the lawn? Couldn’t that be just an aversion to yardwork or simply—gasp—laziness? The last decade has seen no shortage of catchy concepts popularized in millennial circles as a shorthand for one’s personality, such as imposter syndrome, the Myers-Briggs test, and adulting. Burnout is positioned here to become another one, and by default, this book makes Petersen a burnout expert, a nice job for someone to have.
It’s not that burnout isn’t real, though its classification as a medical diagnosis should give anyone pause before blithely declaring it’s what ails them. But its credibility dissipates with every enthusiastic invocation and the ingrained belief that many of our problems are either explained by it or lead to it. The insistence on grafting burnout onto every discussed topic transforms a technically informative, unfortunately bland book into an advertisement for the author’s grand theory of life, a theory that, given the evidence, is highly up for critique. Toward the end, Petersen insists she wants to avoid prescribing any solutions, before showing her hand: “Actual substantive change has to come from the public sector—and we must vote en masse to elect politicians who will agitate for it tirelessly.” This isn’t entirely untrue, but coming at the tail end of so many dire anecdotes and data points, it’s as satisfying as a Democratic National Committee talking head reminding us to vote every time Donald Trump opens his mouth.
In some ways, this book’s timing dramatically underscores that lack of political imagination and casts it as one of those self-help books she sought to avoid. Current events can dramatically expose the need for societal reforms: Witness the sudden shift in support for universal health care during the Covid-19 pandemic and for police reform after George Floyd’s killing. Greater investment in local politics or mutual aid or the normalizing of mass protests against unabashed wrongdoing have all emerged as necessary shifts in our collective political thinking, which is why it’s disappointing her book stops short of imagining specific action beyond a broad citation of platitudes and that benign call to vote. Like Petersen, I want things to change, and I also know that change requires broad support across all demographics. I’m just not sure if we should take direction from someone who took this long to put the pieces together, because it means there’s plenty more the person won’t see coming.
Stop asking sane people to lovingly accept those who cheered on a man who has done grave and permanent damage to this world. It’s outrageous that half the country should be asked to exhibit mercy while the other half is permitted to wallow in its criminality and ignorance.
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Americans have a sliver of a chance to demonstrate that there is some conscience left among us by requiring those who did harm to apologize, and if they do not, to be denied any further role in public life. And obviously, it’s incredible that this needs to be said, but those who are guilty of crimes must be prosecuted (just for a change!) The absence of accountability means condoning wrongdoing, as a glance at cable TV news, with its parade of war criminal guests, can show you.
Demanding accountability is what being ‘reasonable’ requires of us. Being ‘empathetic’ means empathy for those who’ve been harmed, before we begin even to think of empathizing with those who’ve done harm. It’s an insult to every family broken by ICE, an insult to George Floyd, to ask that Trump voters be forgiven in the absence of a total and credible apology from them, and a repudiation of all the wrong they’ve done.
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Jamelle Bouie: Don’t Fool Yourself. Trump Is Not an Aberration. (NYT)
Many of the worst things the president has said and done were said and done by his predecessors.
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For as much as it seems that Donald Trump has changed something about the character of this country, the truth is he hasn’t. What is terrible about Trump is also terrible about the United States. Everything we’ve seen in the last four years — the nativism, the racism, the corruption, the wanton exploitation of the weak and unconcealed contempt for the vulnerable — is as much a part of the American story as our highest ideals and aspirations. The line to Trump runs through the whole of American history, from the white man’s democracy of Andrew Jackson to the populist racism of George Wallace, from native expropriation to Chinese exclusion.
And to the extent that Americans feel a sense of loss about the Trump era, they should be grateful, because it means they’ve given up their illusions about what this country is, and what it is (and has been) capable of.
There is very little about Donald Trump or his policies that doesn’t have a direct antecedent in the American past. Despite what Joe Biden might say about its supposedly singular nature (“The way he deals with people based on the color of their skin, their national origin, where they’re from, is absolutely sickening”), the president’s racism harkens right back to the first decades of the 20th century, when white supremacy was ascendant and the nation’s political elites, including presidents like Woodrow Wilson, were preoccupied with segregation and exclusion for the sake of preserving an “Anglo-Saxon” nation.
Jasmin Mujanović: 'Borat 2' misses the mark because it perpetuates cruel stereotypes and is a vehicle for mockery (Insider)
In an attempt to expose American prejudices about the "savage East" and the country's perceived drift toward illiberalism, Baron Cohen has actually helped repopularize an Orientalist view of what some still generically refer to as "the former communist states." His work, therefore, fails as the critical cinema it purports to be.
While the film is doubtlessly a satire of US politics, it is just as much a vehicle for the mockery of Kazakhstan and its people. Because the country that is (not actually) depicted in the film is almost entirely alien to most Americans, Baron Cohen becomes the architect of its popular image in the West. And that image is cast in brownface.
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By trafficking in centuries-old anti-Romani tropes and imagery in his films, while also liberally borrowing from various anti-Muslim themes, Baron Cohen gives his audience license to indulge in these sentiments too — whether they fully understand who or what they are laughing at or not. Those who see these depictions as satire may feel they are in on the joke, but, doubtlessly, a far larger portion of the audience is laughing at Baron Cohen's portrayals of "Kazakhstan."
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Accordingly, the issue with "Borat 2" is not that it's "offensive" — comedy almost always is to someone, somewhere. Nor should the intent be to "cancel" Baron Cohen. The matter is altogether more straightforward: Baron Cohen is clearly of the belief that comedy is a tool to be used to afflict the comfortable. That is an enviable objective, but only if one does not further stigmatize those who are already afflicted.
Tom Breihan: Linkin Park's Debut Album 'Hybrid Theory' Turns 20
In the early days of Linkin Park’s dominance, a lot of us made fun of the band for being whiny suburban kids in love with their own anguish. Today, it’s tragically clear that Chester Bennington had always had real demons — a history of sexual abuse and substance dependency that he’d discuss at length whenever anyone asked. Hybrid Theory was a product, a laser-calibrated angst-engine sold to America’s teenagers in the closing days of the CD era. But every album is a product. Listening to Hybrid Theory today, I’m struck by the thought of how many kids found real solace and relief in an album like that, and how Linkin Park had a plan to get it to them.
