mundane n. 1

a non-imaginative story

Rare.

Fancyclopedia


SF Fandom

  • 1943 J. Speer Items From My Scrapbooks in Sustaining Program Fall 10 page image Jack Speer

    And finally, as you’ve mentioned, some hack stories, like gotta-fix-the-spaceship’s [sic], are not dressed-up mundanes, even if they do stink.

  • 1946 H. Warner, Jr. in Horizons (vol. 7, iss. 4, whole no. 27) June 1 page image Harry Warner, Jr.

    Not all the stories in this book are fantasy. ‘Asaph’, ‘His Wife’s Deceased Sister’, ‘A Piece of Red Calico’, and the inevitable ‘The Lady, or the Tiger?’ are mundanes, and definitely inferior in literary worth to the remainder of the volume.

  • 1959 R. H. Eney Fancyclopedia II 48 Dick Eney bibliography

    Dressed-up Mundanes, hackwork in which fantastic elements could be replaced with non-fantastic ones without changing the plot essentially.

Research requirements

antedating 1943
Earliest cite

Jack Speer
Research History
Fred Galvin submitted a 1959 cite from Fancyclopedia II.
Bee Ostrowsky submitted a 1946 cite.
Jeff Prucher submitted a 1943 cite from Jack Speer.

Last modified 2026-05-05 13:01:54
In the compilation of some entries, HDSF has drawn extensively on corresponding entries in OED.