Names are super important. They subtly shape our perception and experience of the world around us.
They’re a critical piece of worldbuilding for the same reason.
Not only can they carry inherent meaning through their definitions, but also through context cues, their etymology, cultural similarities, and on and on. Heck, even the shape and feel of words themselves are significant.
To make a world live and breathe in reader’s minds, all the made-up shit inside it needs good names. But what in blazes makes a good name?
There’s an additional challenge that speculative fiction writers need to battle: explaining what the fuck those names mean. That’s another topic altogether, but it’s a critical consideration.
Another rule I have for my names is that they must be easily pronounceable. This one can be overlooked by writers, but a name that’s difficult to pronounce is also difficult to read. And difficult to read = speed bump.
I like my fiction to fly off the page. An overabundance of apostrophes falls into this category, too.
All these factors feed into my naming the stuff that inhabits my created worlds.
But let’s get practical with some examples.
Sunscraper
We’ll start easy. You know what this is already, don’t you?
The question is: why not just call it a skyscraper? We already have a word for that.
Simple. Because the world of The Slip Saga is full of vampires. They live in a city under a protective dome, ever afraid of the sun. They don’t give a fuck about the sky (they only see it in virtual reality), but they sure as shit care about that massive flaming ball of gas, because if its rays touch their skin, they’re cooked.
Changing the name of skyscrapers to sunscrapers is, in my mind, akin to a flourish of paint on a canvas. It accentuates the world, makes it richer, nudges the reader’s experience in a particular direction.
Sloid
Another one from The Slip Saga. Even if you’re not familiar these books, you already have a sense for what this is, am I right? Only a sense, though, without additional context or explanation. But often that’s enough to assist.
This is a portmanteau of slip and android. Sloids are the physical avatars of slip users, allowing them to navigate the real world while cocooned in the virtual reality of the slip.
I like using blended words like these in cases where it’s a word that likely would’ve been modified through usage over the course of time. If society started out calling these avatars slip androids, what’s the bet we’d shorten it to something like sloid?
Godstar
Compound words (two of the suckers stuck together), are also great. Godstars feature in my new series, The Verser Volumes.
But … what exactly is a Godstar?
We don’t know from the name itself, despite it containing two words we’re very familiar with. However, those two words give us strong cues, don’t they?
God is a religious term (duh). Both god and star are celestial in nature. Both connote awesome size and power.
So without explaining anything about what this concept is, we already have strong feelings about it. Since we don’t know exactly what they are, Godstars remain tantalisingly mysterious.
And tantalising mysteries are the stuff of page turners 😉
All from seven little letters.
Noturus Saa
One of my favourite techniques is to take a word that has the right meaning or connotation, then slightly modify it. The fun thing about doing that is the new word carries the shape and feel of the original word.
Noturus is my modification of notorious. In this case, Noturus Saa is a planet featuring in Verse for the World-Weary, a world quarantined because it’s so dangerous. I added the Saa because on its own, Noturus feels unfinished, and the sibilance of Saa helps to drive the feeling home.
I could have called Belotu Four. Or Rookoss Kib. Or Jub Jub Wullabub.
But Noturus Saa feels sinister, because it’s reminiscent of that original word, notorious.
You’ll probably see a bunch of examples of these techniques in my books now. The thing these names all have in common is that they carry some degree of meaning without any additional explanation.
Naming characters is a similar process, though I think there’s a lot more instinct involved there. Sometimes character names pop out of nowhere and they just feel right to me. Other times, I struggle to find the right one, swapping them in and out through different drafts of a book.
I’m often told by readers that they like how I name things, but not everyone will like them. Some will even hate them.
The funny thing is that people care about fabricated names for fabricated things. Weird, right?
That’s the subjective squishiness of fiction that I love.
I hope you found this interesting 😊