mundane adj. 1

At the present time, professional mediums for the publication of weird or fantasy fiction are virtually non-existent. An occasional piece of this nature crops up in mundane magazines as Argosy, Blue Book, Speed Detective, Speed Adventure, Jungle Stories, etc.; to say nothing of the steady dribble of fantasy in the slicks, children’s magazines, and the like.

Recently published and worthy of comment are three fantasies written by authors who have distinguished themselves on the lower, mundane planes. This reviewer is of the opinion that the average good writing of those planes is, literarily, superior to the average good writing found on the higher, fantasy planes.

The other two pass, barely, but are so close to mundane stories that they make me almost equally uncomfortable.

The center of attention is a young spaceman, hideously deformed by his craft; I might have missed the mundane parallel, though I felt it, if Kornbluth himself hadn’t spelled it out for me—the old used-up railroad men who congregate in a dismal bar in ‘Gandytown’.

Mundane, non-fannish. Pertaining to the Outside World.

Or they may be ‘fannish translations’ of mundane stories/conventions.

No less important to fannish than mundane drinking, this useful beverage is even given divine honors by the sect of Beeros, and worshipped either as Beer or Bheer.

I feel the science-fictional-enterprise [sic] is richer than the enterprise of mundane fiction.

Sci fi was applied to the most miserable sort of juvenile fiction, to stories about dragons on other planets, to Burroughs-type adventure fiction, to mundane fiction which the author insisted occurred in the near future, even to sword & sorcery fiction and alternate universe novels.

A ‘translation’, in the uncompromising critical vocabulary set forth by Damon Knight and James Blish in the 1950s on which I based much of my own fiction-writing aesthetic, is an adaptation of a stock format of mundane fiction into s-f by a simple one-for-one substitution of science-fictiony noises for the artefacts of the mundane field.

What I'd lost—what sf had lost—after Sputnik had stitched its way back and forth across the new mundane sky, was the old sense that space was a magic portal, a sky-hook capable of hiking us into the future.

I thought Powers was following Dan Simmons into the world of mundane, near past thrillers.