Writing the Language of the Future

by Michael A. Burstein

When you’re inventing a future, you need to create terms to describe the contents of that future - and so almost from the genre’s inception, writers were coining new words and phrases, including terraform and hyperspace. New concepts require new language, and science fiction has developed its own.

Those of us living in the dawn of the twenty-first century know this from experience, as we are now living in the future. Go back in time twenty years, and you’ll discover that words such as PDF, website, iPod, transfat, hip-hop, truthiness, grunge rock, and Internet were either nonexistent or unknown to the general public. Today most people know what those words mean, but that just shows how quickly the future envelops us when we’re not looking.

And it’s not just that new words are developed, but also that old words change their meaning. Who remembers when “computer” described a person, usually a young woman, hired to do calculations on a slide rule?

If we’re going to create a realistic future, it therefore follows that we need new words for that future. But how do we as science fiction writers create new words that work for our stories? Here are five simple rules I’ve used when creating new words for my stories.

1. Don’t create a new word unless it’s absolutely necessary.

James Blish used to call this the “calling a rabbit a smeerp” problem. He bemoaned the number of stories in which writers created exotic-sounding terms, simply to make their stories sound science-fictional, even though the new terms were unnecessary. Call a cigar a cigar.

Gardner Dozois has noted this problem as well. A few years back, he pointed out that many amateur writers put the prefix “space” in front of every other word to make it sound futuristic. (“The spacefarmer walked into the spacebarn to milk her spacecow.”) In the 1980s, writers were doing the same thing with the prefix “cyber,” even for stories that had nothing to do with cyberpunk. Combined, however, these two commonly misused words form the term “cyberspace” (created by William Gibson). But cyberspace, the one-word term, is a legitimate neologism. More on that later.

As Orson Scott Card once noted, the future equivalent of a modern curse word is the same curse word. If you want your readers to react emotionally to your stories, you need to keep them as accessible as possible.

2. Make your words logical.

Let’s say you’ve made it past the “smeerp” problem and believe you have a brand new concept in your story that necessitates a brand new word. A lot of writers seem to enjoy making up new words for the stories just for the fun of it. One envisions them tossing scrabble tiles into a bag and pulling out letters at random.

But words come from places; in particular, words come from other words and roots. “Cyberspace,” as I mentioned before, is a legitimate new word because it was meant to describe a new concept, the artificial world that exists inside computer networks. But both “cyber” and “space” had meanings beforehand, meanings that fit the new concept quite well, so the new word had a logical provenance. In a way, it was similar to the word “scofflaw,” which was coined by Henry Irving Dale and Kate L. Butler independent of each other in 1923 as a response to a contest for a new word to describe someone flouting Prohibition. “Scofflaw” has obvious roots; it was meant to describe someone who scoffed at the law. And the word has survived until today, even though it’s now used mostly to describe people who don’t pay their parking tickets.

It’s best if your new terms have obvious roots, even if you keep the roots hidden from your readers for a while. For example, in their novel The Space Merchants, Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth created a word for a member of a particular political movement: Consie. Reading the book, you come across the term well before they explain what a Consie is, but that makes sense; the characters in the story all know what a Consie is, and they’re not going to stop what they’re doing to explain the concept to the reader. Eventually, out of a natural discussion, it becomes clear that the Consies are part of a radical conservation movement, and the mystery is solved. Given that our own culture created the term “hippie” in the 1960s and “yuppie” in the 1980s, a word such as “Consie” isn’t so far-fetched.

3. Make your words pronounceable.

This issue comes up a lot with writers who create alien races, because aliens need languages and names of their own. As aliens have been a part of science fiction from the beginning, you would think people would get it right by now. But it’s as common as not to see a writer give all the aliens names that can’t be pronounced by a human throat.

I’d be the first to admit that if we ever do meet aliens, they most likely will have a language that we can’t pronounce (assuming we can even understand them). But you’re not writing for aliens, you’re writing for other humans. Just as we write aliens whose motivations are understandable by humans (or else people don’t want to read about them), we need to make sure that their languages and names are somewhat tractable as well.

Many other writers disagree with me on this piece of advice. In fact, I once collaborated with one of them. We were writing a story with aliens in it, and he wanted to make the alien names as different from human names as possible. From his perspective, that helped play up the difference between the alien race and the humans. I, on the other hand, wanted easily pronounced names so the readers wouldn’t get stuck on them. We ended up compromising; the names we used were spelled very oddly, but could still be pronounced aloud if need be.

When readers run across an unpronounceable alien name like “Xrtmwpf, it’s going to kick them right out of the story. Better to go with names that contain vowels, like “Grackwat.” It’s also better if the pronounceable names you do develop have logical connections. Think of the ethnic names that exist on planet Earth. It’s not too hard to tell from someone’s name if their background is European, Asian, or African, for example. You can do the same with alien names, especially if you want to establish a cultural hierarchy among your alien characters. If your human protagonist meets two aliens with the same surname, that could imply those aliens have a connection. As with human names, the endings could distinguish male from female. Such differences provide a shorthand way to help readers distinguish between the two sexes, but it also helps portray the alien’s culture. You could also allow names and titles to reflect virtually any other values held by your aliens: rank, age, fertility, family size, wealth, size, numbers of past kills (or children), even smell. The list goes on.

4. Have fun with the words you invent.

Writers tend to enjoy playing with language; otherwise, we probably wouldn’t be writers. My wife and I often have fun creating new words, sometimes by “verbing” a noun or by combining two nouns to create a new concept. Language is fun; why not play with it? I consider this one of the more plasmic and cromulent rules of the five I follow. (Plasmic? Cromulent? Look them up.)

5. Finally, remember that your readers are looking for a story, not a language textbook.

The futuristic or exotic words that you coin are there to serve the story, not the other way around. Unless you’re C.J. Cherryh or J.R.R. Tolkien, it’s doubtful you have a readership that is fascinated by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and the diagramming of sentences. They want to read a story, not a treatise on language, so keep your focus on the plot and characters and not on the neologisms.

Of course, if you are a writer like Tolkien, you’ve probably been studying linguistics much of your life in an attempt to create your own fictional languages. So, keeping in mind that it might limit your readership to those of a technical linguistic bent, go with it. But for the rest of you, keep the new words short and brief, and as rare as you can. A new word in a story has much more impact if it’s the only oddity in a sea of familiar faces.

And who knows? Maybe, if you’re lucky, like Robert A. Heinlein you’ll find yourself immortalized in the Oxford English Dictionary for inventing a new word that has passed into general usage. You grok?

For more on word and language construction, see:

RE contributor Evelyn Browne’s own take on language, future and past.

A Conlang FAQ

Predicting New Words: The Secrets of Their Success, by Allan Metcalf

Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, by Jeff Prucher

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©Michael A. Burstein

Michael A. Burstein has been nominated for ten Hugo awards, three Nebulas, one Sturgeon, as well as winning the 1997 John W. Campbell award. His latest story, "The Soldier Within," is one of a collection in Future Weapons of War, edited by Joe Haldeman and Martin Harry Greenberg.