And now, a few words about words

As that great old New Yorker cartoon says, "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog." Or in my case, I keep forgetting that not all of you are roughly the same age as I am and equipped with the same experience base that I have.

This came to the fore yesterday, in the discussion of Henry's review of Avatar. The reason both he and I reacted so strongly to the script's use of the word "unobtanium" is that the word is an old, old, old joke, and was old when I first ran into it in the early 1980s.

You see, unobtanium is a particular form of MacGuffin, which was Alfred Hitchcock's word for the thing that serves as an excuse to kick off the plot. A classic MacGuffin is something small, portable, rare, easily concealed, and so insanely valuable as to be worth killing or dying for: for example, the actual falcon statuette in The Maltese Falcon. In more realistic fiction a MacGuffin is traditionally a secret formula or a jewel or something on that order—for example, the diamond in the original Pink Panther or the stolen travel papers in Casablanca—but the concept is readily adaptable to fantastic fiction, to become the plans for the Death Star, the magic sword of Whachoosits, or pretty much anything Indiana Jones ever sought.

So as I said, a MacGuffin is the unique thing that serves to kick-start the plot. Unobtainium is then a specialized form of MacGuffin: it's the mineral (substance, spice, oil, resource, whatever) that can only be obtained at fantastic expense and great risk, that serves to drive the plot, and that creates a life-or-death crisis whenever it's in short supply. In Dune it was spice; in the original Star Trek it was dilithium; in Battlestar Galactica it was tylium; in Futurama it was anchovy oil. The most telling details about unobtanium are that it can only be obtained in one special place or in one extremely difficult and expensive way, that life as we know it will end if we don't have it, and that there is absolutely no close-enough substitute or work-around for not having it.

Contrast this with, say, whale oil, which in its day was the greatest real-world analogue for unobtanium—and which became nearly worthless overnight, as soon as they figured out how to drill for petroleum oil and refine kerosene.

The list of other handy terms that you should know goes on and on; for example, there's upsydaisium, which is a specialized form of unobtanium that can be worked like normal material in some state and exhibits some utterly impossible physical quality in all other states, such as, say, "reflecting gravity waves." Fortunately I don't have to explicate all of them, as some years ago Lew Shiner and Bruce Sterling collected many of these terms in the Turkey City Lexicon, an updated version of which you will find at the foregoing link.

That's today's assignment: go read the TCL. You can skip over the introductions, as they're mostly about how the lexicon came to be, but the actual definitions are worth digging through, as there are also many valuable hints about avoiding hackneyed ideas and overworked cliches to be found there. Some of the definitions I take issue with—for example, given that I think science fiction is the ghetto that Campbell built, I feel their definition of "slipstream" is far too harsh—and others I can't help but feel a tiny pang at reading, given that 25 years ago I was arguing with these same people that most official movement cyberpunk fiction of the day was far more FM than AM—

But on the whole, it's well worth becoming familiar with, so go read it, and then we'll all meet back here later for further discussion.