Sense of wonder
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Frequently invoked in discussions of science fiction, the "sense of wonder" is an experience unique to the genre. It is an emotional reaction to the reader suddenly confronting, understanding, or seeing a concept anew in the context of new information. John Clute and Peter Nicholls associate the experience with that of the "conceptual breakthrough" or "paradigm shift" (Clute & Nicholls 1993). In many cases, it is achieved through the recasting of previous narrative experiences in a larger context. It can be found in short scenes (e.g., in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, it can be found, in a small dose, inside the line "That's no moon; it's a space station.") and it can require entire novels to set up (as in the final line to Iain Banks's Feersum Endjinn.)
It is occasionally referred to as "sensawunda" by fans and readers of the genre, (Clute & Nichols 1993). Academic criticism of science fiction literature (Robu 1988) identifies the idea of the sublime described by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant -- infinity, immensity, "delightful horror" -- as a key to understanding the concept of "sense of wonder" in science fiction.
The sense of wonder is related to, but not identical to, the concept of the numinous as experienced by readers of gothic horror; the numinous, in this case, is the understanding that there is something not directly comprehensible, but large and entirely other, in the world. The sense of wonder, by contrast, is the understanding that there is something that one had not fully comprehended — or perhaps had not even recognized that there was something to be comprehended — until that point. The concept of the "other" is still an important part of the sensation, but it is a route that leads to understanding, not fear.
This is not to say that the sense of wonder requires complete comprehension — indeed, the single most famous example of "sensawunda" in all of science fiction involves a word that not only had not appeared in the work in question prior to its mention at the end, but was, in fact, a neologism, and had not previously appeared in the English language before — the word in question appears in A.E. Van Vogt's The Weapon Makers, and is widely known in the science fiction community. (Clute & Nichols 1993, Moskowitz 1974)
