List of fictional colors

Identified fictional colors

This is a list of fictional colors which were invented for a work of fiction.

• Actinic is a new use of an older word by Larry Niven in The Ringworld Engineers for the human sensation of color in vision-damaging ultraviolet light – for example, as seen in welding-torch light (see Actinism). The term "actinic light" was also used in E.E. Smith's Lensmen series to describe UV light, and in the novel Forlorn Hope to describe the effect of a military laser weapon upon a cloud of mercury droplets. Actinic was also mentioned in Ambrose Bierce's short story The Damned Thing (Short Story) published in 1898. It simply referred to a color that humans cannot see.
• Ultra Indigo was a color and plot point in an episode of the television series Eureka, possessing the power to decelerate other photons and distort time.
• Amarklor and Kalish are colors in the ultraviolet range seen by Klingons in the Star Trek novel Pawns and Symbols by Majliss Larson. In this story, Klingons see amarklor between violet and kalish, but see the color red as black.
• Garrow  and Infra-White  – colors invented in the Nebulous episode "Madness Is a Strange Colour". Both colors affect the human mind in odd ways, either destroying or creating sanity. Professor Nebulous claims that he discovered Infra-White by looking underneath and behind the visible spectrum.
• Fuligin – both a color and a textile having that color, associated with the Guild of Torturers in Gene Wolfe's book The Shadow of the Torturer. The color is defined as "the color that is darker than black" and also as "the color of soot". In comparison, see the real colors super black and vantablack.
• Grue and bleen – colors that change after an arbitrary, but fixed time; coined by philosopher Nelson Goodman to illustrate what he calls "the new riddle of induction."^[1]
• Mull and glow – an infrared and an ultraviolet color seen by futuristic humans in Victor Emmanuel's The Messiah of the Cylinder (1917).
• Hooloovoo – a superintelligent shade of the color blue in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams. In Life, the Universe, and Everything, Adams mentions Agrajag's lair as being painted in "the whole spectrum of eye-defying colours from Ultra Violent to Infra Dead, taking in Liver Purple, Loathsome Lilac, Matter Yellow, Burnt hombre and Gan Green on the way."^[2]
• Octarine – the color of magic in the Discworld fantasy novels, described as resembling a fluorescent greenish-yellow purple.
• Squant – a fourth primary color publicized by the experimental band Negativland in 1993.
• Jale, Ulfire and Dolm – Two new primary colors (Jale and Ulfire) and a compound color of ulfire and blue (dolm) from A Voyage to Arcturus (1920) by David Lindsay. Jale and Ulfire are described as "Just as blue is delicate and mysterious, yellow clear and unsubtle, and red sanguine and passionate, so he felt ulfire to be wild and painful, and jale dreamlike, feverish, and voluptuous."
• The colors tang and burn are colors in the infrared range seen by the albino mutant Olivia Presteign (whose vision only functions in the infrared) in the 1956 science fiction novel The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester.^[3]
• Berl, Crynor, Nusp, and Onsible are colors from the Star Wars universe. They are said to be somewhere in the ultraviolet spectrum, which can be seen by Hutts and Kaminoans and some others.
• Htun is a color similar to black only seen by gnomes in the book Fairest by Gail Carson Levine.
• Sangoire is a color of red 'so dark and saturated it [is] almost black', it is also described as 'the color of blood spilled in moonlight', seen in the Kushiel's Legacy Series by Jacqueline Carey.
• Gloxym is a fictional color coined by Kibo on his FAQ. He describes Gloxym as the true color of the sky.
• Smaudre is a color from the fairy world in Jack Vance's Suldrun's Garden. The fairy folk find it lovely, but to the human eye, it appears colorless.
• Rawn and Pallow are colors associated with circles of magic beyond white, black, purple and green in Jack Vance's Green Magic.
• Plaid is one of the colors outside of the natural human spectrum visible to large intelligent arachnids in Vernor Vinge's novel A Deepness in the Sky.
• Shattan is said to be a fourth primary color for Yalia people in Wonderland Online. It is said to have calming properties and appears to humans as a combination of golden and infraviolet colors.
• Flange is "every color of the rainbow, all at once" in the book The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles by Julie Andrews Edwards.^[4]It is used by the Whangdoodle to impress his bride and it is stated that it is very hard to do. The Whangdoodle is also capable of turning colors such as crash pink, some of which may or may not exist.
• Apocyan, Cosmogone, Gant, Irrigo, Peligin, Violant, and Viric, collectively known as 'the Neathbow', are colors found only in the subterranean Neath of Failbetter Games' Fallen London universe. They are impossible shades of existing colours: apocyan is a bright pale aqua, irrigo is brilliant purple, violant has been depicted multiple ways but is usually an iridescent wine-red, cosmogene is golden yellow, gant is beige with a slight reddish tinge, peligin is an extremely dark blue-gray that's almost black, and viric is emerald green. Most of them also have supernatural properties: irrigo causes forgetfulness, violant improves memory, cosmogone and viric are heavily associated with dreams. Gant is the colour that "remains when all other colours are eaten".
• El Gris/Gray is considered the "third" and an unreal color in La Historia de los Colores/The Story of Colors by Subcomandante Marcos. It only exists so the black and the white don't bump into each other so hard – it does so by painting the dusks and dawns.
• Gloze and Flush are infrared colors mentioned in the book Neverness by David Zindell.

Unnamed fictional colors

• The Colour Out of Space – a vaguely described alien hue, from the story of that name by H. P. Lovecraft (1927).
• In The Golden Key, an 1867 fairy tale by George MacDonald, a boy sees additional colors in a rainbow in Fairyland: "He could count all the seven colours, and could see shade after shade beyond the violet; while before the red stood a colour more gorgeous and mysterious still. It was a colour he had never seen before."
• In the Martian (Barsoom) novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the spectrum is divided into nine colors rather than the earthly seven, and the two unearthly colors are called "the eighth ray" and "the ninth ray". John Carter describes the additional colors as "... two beautiful rays which, to me, were new and nameless. I cannot describe them any more than you could describe red to a blind man. I only know that they were beautiful in the extreme." The eighth ray exerts an anti-gravity force and is trapped in tanks by the Red Martians to levitate and propel their flying craft. The ninth ray is processed by the great atmosphere factory to create breathable air for Barsoom.
• In the 1942 novel Perelandra, C. S. Lewis describes the colors of angelic beings when they manifest themselves: "We think that when creatures of the hypersomatic kind choose to 'appear' to us, they are not in fact affecting our retina at all, but directly manipulating the relevant parts of our brain. If so, it is quite possible that they can produce there the sensations we should have if our eyes were capable of receiving those colours in the spectrum which are actually beyond their range." (Chapter 16)
• In Stephen King's From a Buick 8, the characters encounter an alien plant with an unearthly color, which the narrator describes as "corpse white".

See also

• Impossible color

References