Mundane
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- This page is about science fiction insider terminology. See Journal of Mundane Behavior for the scholarly journal. See Wiktionary for the adjective mundane.
Look up mundane in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
In science fiction and in fandom, a mundane is a person who does not belong to a particular group, according to the members of that group.
Some examples:
- In science fiction fandom, some fans classify all non-fans as "mundanes".
- In historical reenactment fandom, too, such as in The Society for Creative Anachronism, some fans classify all non-fans as "mundanes". Similarly, one's "mundane" name is the legal name they go by in the outside world. "Mundanes," sometimes shortened to just "danes," is also a term for normal everyday clothes, as opposed to historical garb.
- In the science fiction television series Babylon 5, telepathic humans classify all non-telepathic humans as "mundanes". The classification is employed mainly, but not solely, by telepathic characters who have telepath-supremacist ideologies (such ideologies being one of the issues dealt with by the series), and was deliberately chosen to mirror the classification in science fiction fandom.
- In fantasy literature the term is often used, or some equivalent, to apply to non-magical people or the non-magical society. It is used in Piers Anthony's Xanth novels, and Bill Willingham's comic book series Fables. The Harry Potter series uses the term muggle in the same context.
- In the Furry Fandom, it is used to describe non-furries, or "humans".
According to the Mundane Manifesto, mundane science fiction is science fiction which does not make use of interstellar travel or other "common tropes" of the genre.
Otherwise, within the scope of the software communities of Free Software, Open Source and open source some proponents of their respective movements classify those which do not know enough about their views as "mundanes", signifying their normalcy, their lack of being beyond the regular users of computers.
