Science Fiction

Roles: speculative-technology, fictional-world, thought-experiment, alien-encounter, utopia, dystopia, time-travel, artificial-being

Imagined worlds, technologies, and scenarios that extrapolate from current science and social trends. Science fiction is an unusually productive source domain for metaphor because it manufactures concrete, vivid objects (tricorders, holodecks, warp drives) that stand in for abstract concepts still lacking literal vocabulary. Many sci-fi terms have crossed into general usage with their fictional origins fading — “grok,” “cyberspace,” “robot” — becoming dead metaphors whose source domain is a novel or film rather than a physical experience. The genre also generates thought experiments (paperclip maximizers, three-body problems) that function as mental models for reasoning about real risks and tradeoffs.

As Source Frame (34)