Profanity in science fiction

Profanity in science fiction (SF) shares all of the issues of profanity in fiction in general, but has several unique aspects of its own, including the use of alien profanities (such as the alien expletive "shazbot!" from Mork & Mindy, a word that briefly enjoyed popular usage outside of that television show).

In his advice to other SF writers, Orson Scott Card states that there are no hard-and-fast rules for the use of profanity in SF stories, despite what may have been expected of writers in the past. The onus is squarely on the writer to determine how much profanity to use, to enquire as to each publisher's limits, and to think about the effect that the use of profanity will have on the reader, both in perceiving the characters and in possibly being offended by the story as a whole.

Card urges those writers who do decide to omit profanity from their stories to omit it completely. He regards the coinage of tanj ("There Ain't No Justice") by Larry Niven as a "noble experiment" that "proved that euphemisms are often worse than the crudities that they replace", because they make the story look silly. In Card's opinion, such nonce words simply don't work.

Ruth Wajnryb shares this opinion, stating that tanj or flarn don't work as profanities because they are not real, and are "just a futile attempt to give clean-cut stories some foul-mouthed action".

Jes Battis observes, in contrast, that the use of frell and dren in Farscape allowed the television series to get away with dialogue that would normally never have made it past broadcasting and network censorship. The words are respectively equivalent to and and are used as both interjections and nouns in the series. In the episode "Suns and Lovers", for example, Aeryn Sun says "frell me dead!" as an exclamation of surprise, much as a real-world person would utter "well, fuck me!" or, indeed, "fuck me dead!" Battis also notes that Firefly used a similar strategy, by using Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese for all profanities, also using the word gorram as a replacement for god damn, a phrase usually considered blasphemous. Likewise, dialogue in Battlestar Galactica is liberally peppered with the word frak ('fuck').

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