Science Fiction's Vital Contribution to the Life of English

There's an interesting essay in The Guardian about how the science fiction genre has contributed to the health of the English language.

From the story...

Perhaps you won't be surprised to learn that "robot" is a relatively recent SF coinage. But if you're like me, you might be interested to discover it comes from the Czech word "robota", meaning forced labour. It was first used in a 1920 Czech play called RUR, Rossum's Universal Robots by Karel Capek and first came into English in Paul Selver's 1923 translation. It then appeared in the Times in the same year in the wonderful sentence: "If Almighty God had populated the world with Robots, legislation of this sort might have been reasonable."

A random trawl through the book uncovers hundreds of other such treasures. "Mutant", in the sense of genetic freak, first appeared in a 1938 edition of Astounding SF. "Alternate history" has a first citation from a 1954 Magazine of Fantasy and SF. "Fanzine" was first used by SF fans – the first citation the lovely "We hereby protest against the un-euphonious word 'fanag' and announce our intention to plug fanzine as the best short form of 'fan magazine'" from something called Detours in 1940. "Anti-gravity" appeared in 1896 in a story about Mars in the Massillon Independent; "tractor" (as in beam) in a 1931 story by EE Smith called Spacehounds of IPC. "Cyberspace" appeared in William Gibson's Burning Chrome in 1982. "Newspeak", of course, appeared in 1984, in 1949.

It's perhaps natural that a genre that deals so specifically with science and technology should have come up with so many new terms. Science, after all, is the single biggest contemporary fattener of dictionaries. But these words also bespeak active imaginations and that curious form of literary finesse that enables writers to label an object, and readers to understand that label, even though both label and object have never before been encountered.