Science fiction and fantasy are full of invented words, but what works and what doesn’t? Ninth City Burning author J. Patrick Black weighs in.
About ‘Ninth City Burning’
Cities vanished, gone in flashes of world-shattering destruction. An alien race had come to make Earth theirs, bringing a power so far beyond human technology it seemed like magic. It was nearly the end of the world — until we learned to seize the power, and use it to fight back.
The war has raged for five centuries. For a cadet like Jax, one of the few who can harness the enemy’s universe-altering force, that means growing up in an elite military academy, training for battle at the front — and hoping he is ready. For Naomi, a young nomad roaming the wilds of a ruined Earth, it means a daily fight for survival against the savage raiders who threaten her caravan.
When a new attack looms, these two young warriors find their paths suddenly intertwined. Together with a gifted but reckless military commander, a factory worker drafted as cannon fodder, a wild and beautiful gunfighter, and a brilliant scientist with nothing to lose, they must find a way to turn back the coming invasion, or see their home finally and completely destroyed.
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | Goodreads
The use of invented words in science fiction and fantasy
by J. Patrick Black, author of ‘Ninth City Burning’
“Let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around.” — George Orwell
Whenever I pick up a piece of science fiction or fantasy, I go in expecting to run across a few words I’ve never seen before — not necessarily because I slacked off on my vocabulary flash cards in fifth grade (we won’t talk about that), but because a major part of speculative fiction has to do with introducing readers to worlds beyond the real.
When you’re traveling in foreign territory, you need a way of talking about the things you find there, things that exist in this other place but not in the world we know. This alien planet is host to a unique variety of fruit — what do we call it? This alien culture has a social ritual unlike anything on Earth — what is its name?
Every speculative writer finds her or his own way to tackle the problem. We might refer to something an earthly reader might more easily recognize (“assassin vine”) or simply describe the idea In Capital Lettering (“the Choosing Ceremony”). Douglas Adams, in Restaurant at the End of the Universe, describes the major problem of time travel as one of grammar. And sometimes — often — writers will just invent a new word for the thing they’re trying to describe.
The great example is Tolkien, who populated his world with fictional languages, complete with specific pronunciations and even customized scripts for each. Words and phrases from the various dialects of elves and dwarves pepper his works — the most famous probably being the inscription on the One Ring, in the language of Mordor, which any Tolkien an will have seared into their memory.
But inventing your own set of vocabulary and grammar isn’t always the way to go, especially if you don’t already happen to be a scholar of written language, as Tolkien was. The wizards of J.K. Rowling’s books don’t communicate in any secret, arcane tongue — they’re just fine with good old English (and occasionally French). Rowling’s inventiveness shines in the details of her world — such as the magic words students at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry use to work their spells. The invocations appearing in the Harry Potter books don’t seem to have any central source — many have a ring of Latin to them, but others stem from languages like Aramaic, or simply from Rowling’s own imagination. What they have in common is the ability to summon up the impression of the spell being cast simply by their sound alone.
Still another brand of invention is the composition of jargon, a popular method in science fiction. The term “ansible,” coined by Ursula K. LeGuin to describe a method of instant communication across long distances, has become a sci-fi staple, memorably used in Ender’s Game (among others). Some such terms eventually find their way back into our world — like “robot” (first seen in the works of Czech writer Karel Čapek) and “cyberspace” (introduced to fiction courtesy of William Gibson).
One thing all of these writers have in common is that they’re sparing and careful with their invented words, even when they’ve got whole dictionaries of them on hand. And with good reason: no reader enjoys being bombarded with unfamiliar vocabulary. But how much is too much? When does it make sense to blast away and come up with something new?
A good rule of thumb, I think, can be found in “Politics and the English Language,” an essay by George Orwell. As the title implies, Orwell’s essay is about the language of politics, not literature, but at least one of his guidelines, in my opinion, works pretty much anywhere. It’s this: Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. If you’ve got a collection of paper pages bound between two covers, probably best to just call it a book. If you’ve got a way to communicate in real time over interstellar distances, it might be time to invent a word (and call the patent office).
Orwell was himself a great maker of fictional words. In his classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, he shows us a society that runs on Newspeak, a truncated and jargon-filled version of English intended to limit freedom of thought. The book isn’t written in Newspeak, however — words like “doublethink” and “upsub” are used to illustrate Orwell’s vision of a dystopian society, where peoples’ minds have become as strictly policed as the streets they walk.
Tolkien loved inventing languages, but he only used them in his fiction when the story called for it — to invoke the ancient terror of the One Ring, for example. Possibly my favorite Rowlingism, “muggle,” describes something common to a lot of fiction — a non-magical person — but in a way that’s unique and appropriate to her particular world.
Yes, I like making up words, too — probably not as much as Tolkien did, but enough that I sometimes have to rein myself in. My new novel, Ninth City Burning, features a force that looks and acts a lot like magic, but which goes by the name “thelemity.” Orwell probably wouldn’t have approved of that word’s fictional origins: it has a Greek root, which he despised, and a definite ring of the scientific. In the case of thelemity, though, that’s exactly the point: in the world of the story, this near-omnipotent force is only newly discovered, and people have done all they can to understand it scientifically. At the same time, it isn’t actually magic — not exactly. It’s the potential for magic, something primal and elemental, like electricity or gravity.
What I tried to do — and what the authors above all accomplish so well — is just what Orwell advises near the end of his essay: “let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around.”
About the author
J. Patrick Black has worked as a bartender, a lifeguard, a small-town lawyer, a homebuilder, and a costumed theme park character, all while living a secret double life as a fiction writer. While fiction is now a profession, he still finds occasion to ply his other trades as well. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts, where he likes to visit the ocean. Ninth City Burning is his first (published) novel. He is at work on his next book.