Planets, Stars, Ships and co. - Naming Conventions in Science Fiction

[Molyfar]

How do sci-fi writers invent names like Spock, Neytiri, or Muad'Dib?

It's not random. They use a few tricks:

1. Make a rule. Pick sounds that culture likes. Harsh K,G,R for warriors (Klingon), soft vowels for mystics (Vulcan). Stick to it.
2. Sound = meaning. Our brains hear big/dangerous in low, hard sounds - Vader, Zod. Small/clever in high, soft sounds - Yoda, E.T.
3. Steal and twist. Myth, history, real languages. Lucas got Vader from Dutch for "father". Cameron built Na'vi from Polynesian.
4. Start with character. A depressed robot shouldn't sound heroic. Hence: Marvin the Paranoid Android.

For movies, there's one extra test: Can an actor SHOUT it in battle?
KHAAAN! works. Xx'chlpth doesn't.

What's the best sci-fi character name you've ever heard?

Footnote - The Star Wars Naming Myth - take 3 letters of your first name + 3 letters of your birth town = your Star Wars name
Nope — that's a myth!

The "take 3 letters of your first name + 3 letters of your birth town = your Star Wars name" thing is just a playground/internet game. Lucasfilm never used it.

If they had, Mark Hamill born in Concord would be "MarCon" — not Luke Skywalker.

How George Lucas REALLY did it:

• Phone books and maps — Skywalker was in there
• Friends' names — Biggs Darklighter was a school friend
• How it sounds — Vader = dark / invader, Sidious = insidious
• Happy accidents — R2-D2 came from an editor shouting "Reel 2, Dialog 2!"

The 3-letter formula is fun for a party, but not how Star Wars was built.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

 

[Molyfar]

No hard rule, but writers always split the job:

STARS = catalogued
They sound like serial numbers on purpose.
Kepler-452, Tau Ceti, LV-426
It says "we found it, we didn't build it."

PLANETS = colonized
How we name them tells you the history.

By number: Rigel VII, Altair IV. Feels like an empire — "we own so many we number them." — Star Trek
By settler: New Caprica, Centauri Prime, Terra Nova. "New" = who settled it. "Prime" = the important one.
By vibe: One word, sounds like the place.
Desert = hard: Arrakis, Tatooine
Lush = soft: Naboo, Pandora
Ancient = Latin: Krypton, Gallifrey

Golden rule: Pick ONE system for your universe. If you have Kepler-442b, New Earth, and Fluffy Paradise in the same chart, it feels fake.

 

[Molyfar]

Why Every Sci-Fi Ship Is Called Prometheus, Serenity, or Something Rude

No official rule, but every writer steals from real navies:

PREFIX + NAME + NUMBER
USS Enterprise, Battlestar Galactica, MCRN Rocinante. The prefix tells you who owns it.

4 names that always work:

Myth & Explorers — Prometheus, Endeavour, Discovery. Feels official / NASA-like.
Poetic & Personal — Serenity, Nostromo, Event Horizon. For small, private ships.
The AI Joke — Iain M. Banks started it: Just Read The Instructions, No More Mr Nice Guy. Now everyone copies it for smart ships.
Functional — Sulaco, Nebuchadnezzar. Sounds like it came from a shipyard, not marketing.

Golden rule: pick ONE system for your universe and stick to it.

 

[Molyfar]

Why Every Sci-Fi Ship Is Called Prometheus, Serenity, or Something Rude

No official rule, but every writer steals from real navies:

PREFIX + NAME + NUMBER
USS Enterprise, Battlestar Galactica, MCRN Rocinante. The prefix tells you who owns it.

4 names that always work:

Myth & Explorers — Prometheus, Endeavour, Discovery. Feels official / NASA-like.
Poetic & Personal — Serenity, Nostromo, Event Horizon. For small, private ships.
The AI Joke — Iain M. Banks started it: Just Read The Instructions, No More Mr Nice Guy. Now everyone copies it for smart ships.
Functional — Sulaco, Nebuchadnezzar. Sounds like it came from a shipyard, not marketing.

Golden rule: pick ONE system for your universe and stick to it.

I M Banks AI Joke

In Iain M. Banks' Culture novels, the starships are run by god-like AIs called Minds. They name themselves.
Humans told one to show a bit more gravitas, so it deadpanned and called itself:
Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall
Its sisters: Just Read The Instructions, Of Course I Still Love You, So Much For Subtlety, Frank Exchange Of Views.
Banks' point: any AI smart enough to run a utopia would be smart enough to take the piss out of us constantly.
Which is why SpaceX named its drone ships Just Read The Instructions and Of Course I Still Love You.

 

[DarthTimon]

Now I'm thinking of inventing a universe where every ship has a double entendre as the name.

'Captain, the USS Huge Package is threatening to ram us!'

 

[Christopher]

Golden rule: Pick ONE system for your universe. If you have Kepler-442b, New Earth, and Fluffy Paradise in the same chart, it feels fake.

On the contrary -- a universe where everyone names things the same way feels fake. It gives away that it's all the creation of one mind, the author, instead of many. Reality is messy.

Planet names like Rigel VII and Altair IV have nothing to do with ownership, merely to their position -- the seventh planet out from Rigel, the fourth planet out from Altair. It's a common science fiction naming convention based on the historical use of Roman numerals for the known satellites of Jupiter and Saturn (e.g. Io was Jupiter I, Europa was Jupiter II, etc.). In real life, exoplanets are named with lower-case letters in order of discovery -- the first one found is "b" (since the primary star itself is A), the second is "c," etc., regardless of their positions in the system.

And of course, many bodies will have both a catalog name/number and a vernacular name, e.g. Rigel is Beta Orionis, Altair is Alpha Aquilae, Keid is 40 Eridani, etc. Or in terms of planets, Earth is Sol III, Mars is Sol IV, etc. Realistically, we could expect stars and planets to be given catalog numbers when they're discovered, then later given proper names when they're explored or colonized. Or you might go to a planet that has a catalog name/number and find sapient natives who have their own name for their planet and its star -- and they might have their own catalog number for your home star.

By settler: New Caprica, Centauri Prime, Terra Nova. "New" = who settled it. "Prime" = the important one.

More specifically, the usual science fiction convention (started by Frank Herbert in Dune) is to use "Prime" to refer to the homeworld or capital world of an interstellar nation, e.g. Cardassia Prime is the Cardassian homeworld. "Prime" means "first," after all.

Ancient = Latin: Krypton, Gallifrey

Krypton is Greek, from a root meaning "hidden," as in cryptic, cryptography, or a burial crypt. The fictional planet Krypton was named for the chemical element krypton, which was named that because it was difficult to detect and isolate.

Gallifrey is a fictional name, coined by writer Robert Holmes, that was probably derived from "gallimaufry," a French-derived term for a ragout or hash of multiple meats, or metaphorically an absurd mishmash or hodgepodge of things. Although it does bear a resemblance to galliformes, the Latin term for "chicken-shaped," and also to "Galfridian," a faux-Latin adjective for the works of Geoffrey of Monmouth, the founder of English historiography.

 

[Rebel Scum]

How do sci-fi writers invent names like Spock, Neytiri, or Muad'Dib?

It's not random. They use a few tricks:

1. Make a rule. Pick sounds that culture likes. Harsh K,G,R for warriors (Klingon), soft vowels for mystics (Vulcan). Stick to it.
2. Sound = meaning. Our brains hear big/dangerous in low, hard sounds - Vader, Zod. Small/clever in high, soft sounds - Yoda, E.T.
3. Steal and twist. Myth, history, real languages. Lucas got Vader from Dutch for "father". Cameron built Na'vi from Polynesian.
4. Start with character. A depressed robot shouldn't sound heroic. Hence: Marvin the Paranoid Android.

For movies, there's one extra test: Can an actor SHOUT it in battle?
KHAAAN! works. Xx'chlpth doesn't.

What's the best sci-fi character name you've ever heard?

Footnote - The Star Wars Naming Myth - take 3 letters of your first name + 3 letters of your birth town = your Star Wars name
Nope — that's a myth!

The "take 3 letters of your first name + 3 letters of your birth town = your Star Wars name" thing is just a playground/internet game. Lucasfilm never used it.

If they had, Mark Hamill born in Concord would be "MarCon" — not Luke Skywalker.

How George Lucas REALLY did it:

• Phone books and maps — Skywalker was in there
• Friends' names — Biggs Darklighter was a school friend
• How it sounds — Vader = dark / invader, Sidious = insidious
• Happy accidents — R2-D2 came from an editor shouting "Reel 2, Dialog 2!"

The 3-letter formula is fun for a party, but not how Star Wars was built.

/s

 

[Kai "the spy"]

I've merged the three threads together, as they were thematically connected.

 

[Christopher]

Happy accidents — R2-D2 came from an editor shouting "Reel 2, Dialog 2!"

"Wookiee" was another accident. As I recall the story, Terry McGovern, a Los Angeles DJ (and later the voice of Launchpad in the original DuckTales), was dubbing police officers' voiceover dialogue for Lucas's THX-1138, and during a vehicle chase scene, he improvised the line "I think I just ran over a Wookiee" or something like that. Lucas asked what a Wookiee was, and McGovern had no answer, but Lucas remembered it.

 

[Mudd]

• Calder
• Rosamunde
• Sekpoli
• Xotik
• Genecia
• Cervantes
• Minoa
• Cloudleap

 

[Mudd]

No hard rule, but writers always split the job:

STARS = catalogued
They sound like serial numbers on purpose.
Kepler-452, Tau Ceti, LV-426
It says "we found it, we didn't build it."

PLANETS = colonized
How we name them tells you the history.

By number: Rigel VII, Altair IV. Feels like an empire — "we own so many we number them." — Star Trek
By settler: New Caprica, Centauri Prime, Terra Nova. "New" = who settled it. "Prime" = the important one.
By vibe: One word, sounds like the place.
Desert = hard: Arrakis, Tatooine
Lush = soft: Naboo, Pandora
Ancient = Latin: Krypton, Gallifrey

Golden rule: Pick ONE system for your universe. If you have Kepler-442b, New Earth, and Fluffy Paradise in the same chart, it feels fake.

The problem is that all of this feels fake these days, as well as cliche.

One of the enjoyable things about Niven's Known Space stories was that he had quite a variety of names, many of them pretty eccentric. People don't name places by one set of rules. History - both institutional and personal - politics, economics and various aspects of language enter into the process.

Despite Snopes, I have it from people who live in Yreka that no one quite knows for sure where the name came from or what it means. But there are more than a couple of popular stories. And what's it doing next to Gazelle and Weed?

 

[Vagabond Elf]

PREFIX + NAME + NUMBER
USS Enterprise, Battlestar Galactica, MCRN Rocinante. The prefix tells you who owns it.

Two thoughts.

First, "Battlestar" is not a prefix, it's a ship class. It doesn't tell you anything about who owns the Galactica, though it does tell you what the ship can do. In real world terms, this would be akin to using "Fleet Carrier Illustrious" or "Destroyer Haida" to refer to HMS Illustrious and HMCS Haida.

Second, it's worth noting that the use of prefixes is (mostly) an English convention that usually isn't found in other languages. The "prefixes" are just abbreviations, usually initialisms. So United States Ship becomes USS, His/Her Majesty's Ship becomes HMS, His Majesty's Canadian Ship becomes HMCS, and so on.

Non-English uses of the prefix almost always come down to "His/Her Majesty's Ship" in the local language - Zr.Ms, used by the Dutch, is literally HMS translated into Dutch. This leads to viewpoint specific prefixes like HNLMS for the Dutch (His/Her Netherlander Majesty's Ship) or HNoMS (His/Her Norwegian Majesty's Ship) for the Norwegians. I'm not aware, offhand, of any non-English speaking navy that uses a prefix that isn't "His Majesty's Ship."

Other prefixes are pure inventions by English speakers to make everything fit in the box. KMS Bismark, MN de Gaulle, or IJN Yamato are all only used in English; in their actual navies, the ships were/are just Bismark, de Gaulle, and Yamato.

Historically, civilian ships with British Empire registry has a prefix that indicated the propulsion system: MV for Motor Vessel, SS for Sailing Ship, and so on. The rules around that were never very rigid and mostly disappeared by the 20th Century. Today, civilian ships get prefixes because English speakers think they should, but there's no system and so it's all pure random chaos.

Finally, you can also have pedantic rules; for example, until well into the 1960s it was wrong to use HMS for a British submarine, because a submarine isn't a ship. The proper nomenclature was HM Submarine or HM Sub. Why it changed I can only speculate, but I expect it's part of the general trend away from meaningful abbreviations into short initialisms or letter codes that took place across the back half of the twentieth century - similar to how the official abbreviation of Alberta changed from Alta. to AB.

 

[Christopher]

Other prefixes are pure inventions by English speakers to make everything fit in the box. KMS Bismark, MN de Gaulle, or IJN Yamato are all only used in English; in their actual navies, the ships were/are just Bismark, de Gaulle, and Yamato.

And of course, Japanese ships (excluding warships, except historically) often append Maru (circle) to the name, for unclear reasons. Which is where Kobayashi Maru comes from, so the tendency of some non-canonical works to call it the "SS Kobayashi Maru" or "ECS Kobayashi Maru" is kind of redundant.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

I thought Demora Sulu's first name was Japanese, but according to Memory Alpha, originally her character was Chekov's daughter, same first name. Apparently it means "delay" in Spanish. Perfect for a ship that's waiting until Tuesday.

 

[Christopher]

Hmm... I guess there's no phonetic reason why "Demora" couldn't be a Japanese name, but it isn't one.