‘Things got incredibly meta’, wrote Dan Martin in a Guardian blog on the Doctor Who episode ‘Robot of Sherwood’ — and knew that his readers would understand what he meant, though it’s unlikely that they would have done 20 years ago. As a free-standing adjective rather than as a prefix, ‘meta’ crept into popular usage during the 1990s, often in blogs on cult television shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and later Lost and Battlestar Galactica. It didn’t make it into the OED until 2008, where it’s defined as ‘designating or characterized by a consciously sophisticated, self-referential, and often self-parodying style, whereby something (as a person, situation, etc.) reflects or represents the very characteristics it alludes to or depicts’.
An example that is frequently given to illustrate the use of ‘meta’ is that of a film about the making of a film — it alludes to its own subject matter; but as the words ‘sophisticated’ and ‘self-parodying’ suggest, there’s often more to it. Like ‘trope’ and ‘meme’, ‘meta’ can get thrown around a bit loosely in blog discussions, so what is ‘meta’, why is it found so often in discussion of science fiction and fantasy — and is it really as new a concept as its recent development would seem to suggest?
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