sfnal adj.

BoBloch’s first sfnal effort wasn’t so turribly [sic] good. However, I expect him to improve in time.

The…text contains a number of the old English classics which have sfnal undertones. Beowulf, Macbeth, Paradise Lost, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, ‘Markheim’ by R. L. Stevenson, ‘Poison’ by Roald Dahl, etc. So, you see science fiction is beginning to make a decided movement toward overall acceptance as a separate and individual form of literature.

‘What Happened to Nick Neptune?’ by Dick Lupoff in F&SF—In its own way, this is the worst of the three stories. It has an sfnal element, all right; part of the story takes place after the entire Earth has been reduced to cinders by an alien race and 90% of the Earth’s population has been evacuated to the asteroids. But... this sfnal element has nothing to do with the story! NOTHING! [...] What the story really is, in fact, is faan fiction, dealing with the rabid collectors, the completists, in fandom.

On a more SFnal level, it concerns a fascinating theory about resurrecting ghosts of the past through modern science.

Others…seem shoehorned in on the argument that some aspects of some of their works seem vaguely sf-nal.

This morning as I ate breakfast, I read the ‘Shouts and Murmurs’ section of the May 30th New Yorker in which Charlie Varon postulates how our reading habits will change when most of us read the Times on-line. His fake articles are sfnal and his point is as biting as any science fiction story’s can be.

‘Must and Shall’…might be thought of as historical fiction with an SFnal twist: change one thing, extrapolate as rigorously as possible, and see what happens. I'm just as well pleased this particular change remains fictional.

Much of Kurzweil’s material—nanotechnology, uploaded minds, virtual reality—will be familiar to sf readers. But there are some ideas that haven’t been much treated in fiction yet (quantum computing, evolutionary algorithms, etc.), and Kurzweil’s discussion of these concepts offers just the kind of sfnal kick I had expected.

The pair created many shows for TV, the most popular being…The Flintstones, and the most SFnal, The Jetsons.

Her comments on Le Guin, noting a duality between ‘two major parallel universes,’ i.e. the fantastic and sfnal elements in her work, are perceptive and useful.