The glossary.

The all-seeing face of the ruling Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four, now everyday shorthand for invasive surveillance by governments or companies.

Fiction, often science fiction, centered on climate change and how people live through, cause, or respond to it.

Critic Darko Suvin's term for what makes science fiction work: it pulls us out of the familiar world with a new idea, then follows that idea with consistent logic so we can see our own world more clearly.

Science fiction about "high tech, low life": near-future worlds of computer networks, body modification, and megacorporations, told from the street level.

The shared virtual world of computer networks, a word William Gibson popularized in Neuromancer that's now everyday shorthand for the online world.

A spectrum, not a rule: hard sci-fi sticks closely to real, checkable science, while soft sci-fi cares more about people, societies, and ideas than about how the technology works.

A persistent, shared virtual world where people meet and interact through avatars, a term that comes from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992).

Science fiction set only a few years or decades from now, in a world that's recognizably ours with one or two things pushed further.

A thought experiment from philosophy of mind: a being that looks and acts exactly like a person but has no inner experience at all.

Fiction set after civilization collapses, whether from war, plague, disaster, or something stranger, focused on survival and on what people rebuild.

Stories that blend science fiction's settings or explanations with fantasy's feel: spaceships alongside psychic powers, or dragons with a scientific backstory.

Internet shorthand for a tech company proudly building the very thing a science fiction story warned against.

Fiction that imagines a better society and asks what it would take, and cost, to get there.