If you loved how Brave New Words let you wander from “ansible” to “cyberspace” to “grok” via layered citations, you’ll savor the way Dictionary of the Khazars becomes a narrative through its cross-referenced entries. Like tracing Brave New Words’ trail from Le Guin’s instantaneous communicator to Gibson’s net to Heinlein’s Martian verb, Pavić’s lexicon invites you to hop between red, green, and yellow “sources,” assembling meaning from scholarly fragments, marginalia, and contradictions. It’s the joy of research-as-adventure, where the form itself is the plot.

The mock-reference voice that makes Brave New Words so fun—glossing how “space opera” evolved, or how “terraforming” shifted from Williamson’s coinage to mainstream usage—finds its comic counterpart in the in-universe Guide entries that punctuate The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Adams turns the lexicon into punchlines: the Babel fish as a living translator, “Don’t Panic” as a meta-slogan, and absurd redefinitions of cosmic commonplaces. If the wry taxonomies and usage notes in Prucher’s book made you grin, this will make you laugh out loud.

Reading the etymologies and citation chains in Brave New Words—from Čapek’s “robot” to Gibson’s “cyberspace,” from Campbell-era “first contact” scenarios to modern riffs—primes you for this deep-dive into how SF’s core effects work. Csicsery-Ronay unpacks the poetics behind ideas you traced in the dictionary, showing why neologisms stick, how cognitive estrangement functions, and what cultural work these concepts perform. It’s the same thrill of following a term’s lineage, now expanded into a rich critical framework.

If you enjoyed dipping into Brave New Words one entry at a time—finding a new spark in each definition and citation—Cosmicomics offers that same modular delight in story form. Each tale starts from a scientific premise (the birth of the moon, the expansion of the universe) and spins a dazzling vignette around it, much the way a dictionary entry blooms from a headword into a web of influences and examples. It’s the pleasures of selective browsing, but narrativized and wondrous.

Following how Brave New Words documents the evolving usage of “time travel” or the slippery practice of the “retcon” sets you up perfectly for Charles Yu’s meta-adventure. As a time-machine repairman who literally steps into his own manual, Yu treats tropes like entries that define his life, annotating his reality with footnotes and callbacks. It’s the same self-reflexive pleasure you get from Prucher’s curated quotations—only now the lexicon talks back.