jmcgready’s misc universe

Turkey City Lexicon:

From Bruce Sterling’s foreword:

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 “mailto: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.

sample entries:

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

Plot Coupons

The basic building blocks of the quest-type fantasy plot. The “hero” collects sufficient plot coupons (magic sword, magic book, magic cat)

to send off to the author for the ending. Note that “the author” can be substituted for “the Gods” in such a work:

“The Gods decreed he would pursue this quest.”

Right, mate. The author decreed he would pursue this quest until sufficient pages were filled to procure an advance. (Dave Langford)

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