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Joined: 4/26/2011
Posts: 77
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One of the things I enjoy most about world-building is making up new words for new things, or even familiar things.
My enjoyment is constrained by the need to be both tolerable and, to some extent, intelligible, as well as new.
But when the choice comes down to an iffy neologism vs a cliche ("burner" vs "blaster", for example), I tend to go with the new word. I find it distasteful when an author repeats a widely-used cliche such as a transporter; he could at least find a new name.
The same reasoning applies to causation in a plot. I find it all too easy to appropriate the power of a Norse god, for example, than to come up with a more SF-oriented new idea, but that sort of writing is pretty tired these days, what with everybody doing it (writing).
What do you think of the use of neologism in SF? Does it add to your enjoyment or distract you from the story? (I'll stipulate that its use has to be in the Goldilocks Zone.)
Do you have any technobabble which you consider both well-done and original? I haven't read anything but an excerpt from Cory Doctorow, but his technobabble struck me as both.
I think technobabble in a dialog is a pretty good substitute for straight exposition at times.
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Joined: 3/13/2011
Posts: 51
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I think new terminology and colloquialisms are great, especially when it comes to worldbuilding. Hearing someone refresh a bit of SF tech, be it teleporters, hyper-drives or laser rifles, is always a sure sign they're working hard on building a new realm in which they can reintroduce you to various aspects of the genre.
That being said, I do think some terms should stay the same, or at least fairly similar. The reason for this is that it's comfortable, more than anything else. I know what a holodeck is, and I can understand how crucial a jump drive is to a stranded ship without the author having to waste countless pages on exposition.
The issue here is the lack or real originality that comes with renaming a staplemark of any genre. You're not inventing anything new, just slapping a new brand on and waiting for the praise to roll in. I say come up with the odd new word if the old one sticks out too much, but otherwise let your reader put on the SF dictionary like a pair of old slippers.
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Joined: 3/13/2011
Posts: 51
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I agree with Ted completely. I think past a certain point, it stops becoming originality and starts becoming the equivalent of SF marketing jargon.
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Joined: 3/14/2011
Posts: 49
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New words have to make sense in the context of the book. In a lot of cases, new words just lead to info-dump. When I say "transporter" 99% of sci-fi readers are going to know exactly what I'm talking about. I don't have to explain it or how it works. Same with something like "replicator" or "protein synthesizer". Sci-fi readers know what those things are.
Now, if there's something different about the transporter/replicator/synthesizer that's key to the plot, then I might name it something different and explain what it is and *why* it's different. But for the most part, if there's already a perfectly good, familiar word for something, I use it. It makes for a more fluid read and can greatly improve pacing in a lot of cases. Plus, then you can save the exposition for parts that are really important and different from most sci-fi, rather than wasting it on things that shouldn't need explanation.
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Joined: 3/12/2011
Posts: 376
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To play Devil's Advocate on this one, I had a pair of reviews, one each on a pair of shorter works, where I was panned for not explaining things. The things I didn't explain were things I considered 'genre staples'.
One example was a Steampunk novella. The characters are in the American Expeditionary Force, the enemy was the Hun, who were invading France, the 'old veterans' in the military were Civil War vets, women were expected to wear full skirts and corsetry, and March was swearing about Pershing being killed. Between all that, I figured it placed the era as solidly Edwardian; early 20th century. I got panned for not setting the time of the novel clearly enough.
My point here is that not *every* person reading your work is going to be familiar with genre staples. As more is written, fewer and fewer people will have time to read the 'classics of the genre', because they're too busy reading new work to read something that came out in the seventies or sixties.
With that in mind, be *very* sparing of neologisms, make sure they're either self-explanatory or clearly *and* succinctly explained.
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Joined: 4/26/2011
Posts: 77
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@cameronchapman,
What I object to about replicators and transporters and warp drives and the like is their very wide currency. I think they have become cliches, and they are often appropriated just because an author can't or doesn't care to come up with an original alternative. I've been reading SF all my long full life, and those ideas are very tired to me.
I'm just really grateful no cliche ever creeps into my own work!
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Joined: 4/26/2011
Posts: 77
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Here's some technobabble from Small Bore. What do you think? Cliches? Too opaque? Too far-fetched? Etc.
[In the 25th century, everybody has private onboard sys which supports the extended sensorium. Django Boldt, the protagonist, is talking with Aubrey "Ouch" Owsley, his professional systweak. He complained about feeling a bit disoriented, and about dropping a pseudo-object - a fold - on his right big toe. Owsley speaks:]
"Anyway, Django, let's get back to you. One reason you feel lost is that they're chasing a dead cat in the quantcomps up on Orwell, so the big sys satpix updates are intermittent. Just ignore it until they get that fixed. There're no isats around New Berkeley so you'll have to work from static images there, but at least you won't notice any geographic agnosia.
"I corrected some other minor problems - I tuned your ultraviolet spectrum equalizer, I got rid of some hum in those hot Japanese transponders you wear, I reversed a tendency to Spoonerism in your French-English translator -"
"Berci meaucoup," I interrupted.
Owsley looked at me sharply and chuckled. "Can't tweak a tweaker, Go."
"I also found the problem with your hold on that fold. There was some unscheduled cell necrosis in your left haptic-tactile organoid. It made your in virtu touch experience tend toward the slippery. I fixed that, so you should be able to feel shared pseudo-objects just fine from now on. In short, you're in top combat form."
Thanks!
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Joined: 3/14/2011
Posts: 49
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There's a difference between the ideas being tired and the words used being tired. If you're sick of transporters, come up with something different. But don't just use a different word for the exact same thing, unless there's a solid reason behind it.
Simply calling something a different term makes it no less cliche or tired than it was in the first place. But it does make exposition more necessary. I guess I'm a bit of a rarity in the sci-fi world, because I'm not a fan of exposition unless it's absolutely necessary. And nothing bugs me more than a book that makes something more complicated than it needs to be. If there's a common word, use it. If you're creating something different, then by all means call it something different.
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Joined: 3/12/2011
Posts: 376
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@cameron - one of the interesting things you can do in Sci Fi is to use a new word for something that appears normal, then reveal that the thing in question isn't normal; it's something different to what the reader expected.
In general, though, I agree with you. The only reason I'll change a word other than that is to aim for a specific feel; replacing a word or two in common parlance with a foreign loan word makes the setting feel multicultural without losing essential meaning. Firefly used that to good effect, especially with cuss words. Using slang from a particular subculture can do the same thing.
@Philip - OK, you've got me curious enough to go read Small Bore now, but... not in a good way. More in a train wreck kind of way. My point here is that if that is at the beginning of the book, you're going to lose some readers. Lemme explain... No, no, take to long, lemme sum up.
I don't, in general, read japanese sci fi. I have no problem with japanese writers. I love some of the stories they tell. My problem is that I don't speak Japanese, and most Japanese Sci Fi is never translated into English.
You've gone beyond using a few neologisms; you're using one in almost every pertinent sentence, as well as having a few in the side comments for color. I think I saw six made up or extremely uncommon words, only half of which were translatable by context. You also used two slang phrases and two made up places, I'm not sure if the place names were slang or not..
If this is later in the book, once you've taught me the langauge painlessly, you can do something like this and it's quite cool. Otherwise, I'm having to spend time translating instead of reading, and that's a HUGE turnoff.
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Joined: 3/14/2011
Posts: 49
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@Robert: See, in the cases you outlined, I would say that's something different, and there's a reason for using a different word/phrase. The Chinese slang and swearing in Firefly is one of my favorite parts of the show. But it serves a purpose, and it adds to the story. There's a reason for it (besides the fact that it allowed them to "swear" on TV). When there's a solid, story-based reason for a different word, then I'm all for it. But different for the sake of being different, with no substance behind it, is what I take issue with.
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Joined: 4/26/2011
Posts: 77
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Robert,
I quoted from the third chapter of Small Bore, but that makes no difference here. For me, it's like quantcomp is a quantum computer, of course, and a dead cat, that must be Schroedinger's, and so on. What could Orwell be but a watching satellite? Anyway, I like that sort of puzzle.
If you read Small Bore from the beginning, I'll be eager to hear what you think.
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Joined: 4/26/2011
Posts: 77
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Here's some magickal technobabble from Cory Doctorow's new story, Shannon's Law:
At BINGO, we do all of the above, whatever it takes to drop a node in where a customer will pay for it. Our tendrils wend their way out into the Borderlands. At the extreme edge, I've got a manticore trapper on contract to peer into the eyepiece of a fey telescope every evening for an hour. He's the relay for a kitchen witch near Gryphon Park whose privy has some magick entanglement with the hill where he sits. When we can't get traffic over Danceland in Soho because the spellboxes that run the amps and the beer fridges are fritzing out our routers, our kitchen witch begins to make mystic passes over her toilet, which show up as purple splotches through the trapper's eyepiece. He transcribes these--round splotches are zeroes, triangular splotches are ones--in 8-bit bytes, calculates their checksum manually, and sends it back to the witch by means of a spelled lanthorn that he operates with a telegraph key affixed to it with the braided hair of a halfie virgin (Tikigod's little sister, to be precise). The kitchen witch confirms the checksum, and then he sends it to another relay near the Promenade, where a wharf rat who has been paid handsomely to lay off the river water for the night counts the number of times a tame cricket sings and hits a key on a peecee in time with it.
All that is comprehensible to me, despite the fact that I have no idea whatsoever what a manticore trapper is, or a spell box, or a kitchen witch or a spelled lanthorn or even a peecee (without some presumption).
I like it. What do you think?
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Joined: 3/12/2011
Posts: 376
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@Philip - I'm reading Small Bore now, and honestly, it *does* make a difference that the conversation is that far in. A certain amount of understanding slang is being immersed in the culture, and three chapters in we're at least waist deep and wet all over, if not completely immersed.
For me, and for a lot of readers I've spoken with, thinking about individual words isn't why we're reading. Some of us *will* stop and stare at a particularly beautiful word construction, the way someone might stop on the side of the road and stare at a particularly beautiful sunset, but literary grotesqueries are more like a car accident; there's nothing good to see, and they make you late for work.
Something I have to tell myself over and over (and over) when writing; the purpose of writing isn't to show how clever you are. It's to entertain the reader. You're writing a novel, not a puzzle book, and your audience *will not know you*.
Quantcomp - Quantitative Computer. Quantitative Compensation. Quantico Compensation. Just to name a few, but this one's mostly a lead in for:
Dead Cat - Dead Cat Bounce and 'Swing a Dead Cat' are BOTH more prevalent in the common lexicon than Schroedingers.
As a proper noun, Orwell could be a planet colonized by rabid pro OR anti-government fanatics. As a non-proper noun, which wouldn't be capitalized 500 years later unless the object was designed by Orwell *and* still produced by him or his company, an orwell might be an oppressive government overseer, a filtering proxy server, or a human to beaureacrat translator.
See, the problem is that you're using them to reference one another, all in close proximity, so contextually we can't be certain what you mean. If you look at Doctorow's piece, there are a lot more *words* there, and the made up or redefined words are either surrounded by real-word context OR are in non-word positions. Forex, if I say a wugiesnukums wrangles block and tackle, you may have no idea what a wugiesnukums IS, but it doesn't matter, so long as your area of concern is the block and tackle. Wugienukums is in a 'non-word' position in that case, its meaning is irrelevant, aside from the fact that it wrangles block and tackle.
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Joined: 3/12/2011
Posts: 376
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@Ted - I like 'smartwaiter', for what it's worth.
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Joined: 4/26/2011
Posts: 77
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Ted,
I'm not sure why I didn't like "smartwaiter" (I said that?). Sounds fine to me now.
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Joined: 4/26/2011
Posts: 77
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Robert,
Thanks for your comments, and for reading Small Bore. I hope you'll post a review at least as long and insightful as mine was for XLI.
I could get all defensive here - I did so in earlier instantiations of this reply - but I think it comes down to a matter of taste. You may well be correct that this sort of stuff doesn't appeal to most readers, but it appeals to some (e.g. me), and I like writing it.
Do you use any technobabble in your own work? I don't clearly recall any from XLI (and that's a disadvantage rather than the opposite).
Is there anyone else out there who likes to read in such a "foreign" language?
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Joined: 5/4/2011
Posts: 9
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I don't. Most of the sci-fi books I read mostly don't have it. i. e. vor series by bujold, safehold series and prince roger series by david weber, skolian empire series by catherine asaro, C. J. Cherryh. Elizabeth Moon. It's all pretty heavy on the space opera though.
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Joined: 4/26/2011
Posts: 77
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Sonia,
Interesting! I've read all those authors, but never more than one book - they just didn't appeal to me. What do I like? Let's see, A Fire Upon the Deep, The Steerswoman Trilogy, and I can't think of anyone else offhand. I'll try to get back on that.
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Joined: 5/4/2011
Posts: 9
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I guess you wouldn't, if you like the puzzle aspect and new technical words, since they don't have a lot of that. I think a fire upon the deep was one of those books I couldn't finish and I never heard of the other one.
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Joined: 3/12/2011
Posts: 376
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@Philip - it's been a rough week; I lost the flash drive my current WIP lives on, and I'm scrambling to try and get it back. I mention that only because it's why I haven't finished and commented on Small Bore. I'm planning on doing so later this week, sorry about the delay. To continue the digression from my main point, although there are one or two rough spots, I've liked it so far.
That said, I completely understand some things being a matter of taste, and I also understand writing what you want to read. Honestly, if you're writing what you want to read, you'll write a better book. I speak from personal experience when I tell you there are going to be problems marketing it, but once you've got the novel ready, you'll find a market. My feedback to you on jargon use, if that's what you like about novels, is to be careful to provide enough context for any new piece of jargon.
On the 'taste' thing, my best friend likes books for new ideas. I like ideas myself, but for me execution is the thing. I'll take a redone idea *IF* it's done well, and I prefer a half baked idea done well to a classic idea done poorly.
In XLI, I tried to be sparing with jargon and explain when I used it. I also didn't actually *create* any new jargon of which I'm aware. My current WIP actually has a fair amount of jargon, comparitively. I'll ping you when I post it. 
To give you an idea of what I've had feedback on about XLI -
- Some readers didn't immediately grok the idea of a space elevator. Just not part of their lexicon. Using it without explaining it confused them.
- Some readers wanted to know how the pocket drive worked, or what the reference to a pocket was.
- Some readers were totally confused about what a Protector is.
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Joined: 4/26/2011
Posts: 77
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Robert,
Sorry to hear about the drive failure! Good luck. And I'm looking forward to your review, as well as your WIP jargon. Thanks for the kind words in advance.
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Joined: 3/13/2011
Posts: 412
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Looking at it from a classic vie, I've been rereading the Lensman novels, hich are from the 40's. things that project a beam as a weapon are "beam projectors". tractor beams? tractors and pressors. Sheilds? Screens, because they are screen's of force.
That said, and here is where I think a lot of people fail, blasters are called DeLamters. Invented by Mr. DeLamter. warp drives? Bergenholms. They eren't invented by, but were made better and a household name by, Mr. Bergenholm. Even in the future, things will mostly be known by their BRAND names, not by a technical term.
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Joined: 4/26/2011
Posts: 77
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Alexander,
The Lensman novels may have been the seed of my affection for technobabble. I still find the 1940's to be a rich source of inspiration for it, but who could top Enigma?
I really like to name weapons. I have a burner which is a Husqvarn Paroxys. Husqvarn makes fine weapons. The Paroxys can carbonize a steak on the moon.
Yes, yet another raygun, an old thing, but made mine own, complete with an SF rationale for its effect. Its range is often exaggerated, as here.
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Joined: 2/27/2011
Posts: 353
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Bumping this up for the new members to see. Good thread!
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Joined: 6/14/2012
Posts: 194
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A few points...
1) If you ask people who don't read SF why they don't, you will most often hear complaints about names they can't pronounce and words they don't know/can't say. If you show them SF with names they can pronounce, and much less technobabble, they start reading SF by writers who suit their taste. People who write those books are often bestsellers. (When I found this out--by asking the people who said "Oh, I never read science fiction" what they didn't like about it, and got these answers...I changed how I named things. And started converting nonreaders of SF to SF by finding what they liked to read and pointing them to writers doing an SFnal riff on similar themes. Increasing market share is a good thing.)
2) Making up names for things that do not exist in your imaginary world is one thing...renaming something that is familiar because you want to sound more creative is...another. Don't call a rabbit a smerp. Don't call a hammer a hitter--or, worse, a far'kktk't. If a concept has been done before (like, oh, tractor beams, spaceships, FTL drive, etc.) and you need it for your story, don't change the name and then explain it...having to explain it reveals that it's the same concept and you're trying to pretend you made up something new. It will appeal only to a minority of the total SF readership. (Some editors will even say "That's the same thing as so-and-so's whatsit...why don't you just call it a whatsit? Then you can cut this paragraph of infodump.")
3) Common names v. brand names. In common usage we have both common names (car, wrench, washing machine, jeans, soda) and brand names (for instance Chevy, Craftsman, Maytag, Levis, Coke.) Things in the future are likely to be manufactured by more than one company, and thus have more than one brand name, and both brand names and common names are likely to be used. Giving a common object a brand name may seem to make it more "real" but there's a catch--the person who always speaks of everything he/she uses by its brand name sounds...incredibly pretentious. I knew a guy, married to a friend of my mother's, who could not talk about fishing without giving the brand name of his rod, his reel, his fishing line, his lures, his dad-blasted creel. Oh, and his clothes, which were impeccable and from somewhere halfway across the country. Needless to say, the other guys laughed at him behind his back. Yes, they sometimes talked about their stuff in detail..but not using the brand name to replace the item's common name. When the brand name is used, it says something about the character and the situation--be sure what that something is.
4) If you love technobabble yourself--if you like to read stories loaded with abbreviations and acronyms and so on--then you'll write that kind of story and attract that kind of readership. If you like a particular kind of jargon/neepery, you'll be tempted to force it into stories where it might not go (an editor once had to tell me that most readers of the space adventure/military SF story really would not appreciate the extra pages on fly-fishing.) There are jargon/neepery communities...and those not in them can be more annoyed by them than you think. If those whose hot button is, say, fly fishing neepery (or gun neepery, or sword neepery...) are reviewers, then you are in a tough place.
5) Agree totally with writing the books you want to read, and then finding the right market for them. There are corners of fiction so dense with one or another kind of jargon that I can't get through a page. Even jargon I know and like (one mystery writer stopped in the middle of an exciting horseback chase to explain how horses are measured. NO! I thought at the writer. NOT NOW!) But those writers are getting published--they don't need me, obviously. Equally, don't diss writers who use less, or none...they're writing to please themselves too, and they will find a different readership. That's OK. There are--what, 7 billion now?--people in the world, and more than enough room for different readerships.
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Joined: 2/27/2011
Posts: 353
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Elizabeth -
First, let me thank you for taking the time to spend in here with all the Book Country members! It's wonderful to see a published writer of your caliber giving back to the writing community!
Second, I agree with everything you said in the comment above. Great response!
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Joined: 4/26/2011
Posts: 77
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Elizabeth Moon,
I've read your work, and thanks for it.
I agree, to some extent, with almost all you say. For me, it always comes down to how well the issue is executed. For example, I could call a ray gun a ray gun, but that's just not what people in my story want to call them. Fortunately, what my chars want to call a ray gun is a burner or a sungun, and not a fzzt-flinger or something. And the guns aren't really blasters or lasers or phasers or anything like that. For one thing, they're semi-autonomic weapons. I should clarify that the rationale I mentioned for how a burner works is entirely absent from the story - it exists only for my own benefit.
I take your points about brand names. In my ~30k words, brand names appear only a few times, and their referents are - I hope - obvious from context. The big objection to brand names is that no reader can be expected to recognize one from the future in the same way that we can recognize, say, Armani, or Ford. I wish I could devise an equivalent shorthand that would work in the world of my story, but that seems entirely beyond me, so I pretty much avoid them, with some exceptions, because they just don't function like our well-known current brands.
On the other hand, when I do use a brand name, I try to come up with something that accomplishes at least a little of that telegraphic communication. Mostly I have to do it by stealing and adapting current brand names: I've got a maker of sunguns called Geiss-Glock. And even four hundred years from now, on a different planet, they still have Coca-Cola.
A never-ending challenge for me is that my world is chock full of new tech - and most of it is biotech, not old-fashioned azoic tech. There is a great deal less of that in my story than we have today, but I still have to refer to and convey all the new stuff. So I have e.g. the village of North Grove - set in a grove of giant sequoias - use a kind of elevator system called sproings. You never learn in detail how they work, but you do get to feel them vibrate and hear the characteristic sound they make, which accounts for the name, though I never say that explicitly. I think of them as a kind of living bungee cord.
I agree that new names must be easy to pronounce - but the pronunciation need not be unambiguous.
I'll take issue with your editor who cut the trout fishing. What, are all the trout extinct in your universe? It seems entirely plausible that people in the distant future would still fish, and I like learning stuff about the personal pastimes of characters. My own protagonist breeds frogs.
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Joined: 3/12/2011
Posts: 376
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@Elizabeth - sorry to be all fanboi, but *squee*. While writing the hardest scene I've ever had to write (doing horrible things to a character I'd come to like) I kept myself going by rereading the end of Deed of Paksennarion. Hearing you agree with the idea of writing what you're passionate about reading and then looking for a market makes me a lot less self-doubtful about doing so.
@Herb - there are things where the brand name has *become* the common term (Xerox, Scotch Tape, Kleenex) but those are usually frighteningly simplistic items, and if you don't tell the reader what they mean, there's no way to puzzle out what they are. Of course, tweaking real-world companies in a fictional setting is always fun. I used 'Colt-Gatling' as a company name that makes high caliber repeaters in my Iron Angel 'verse, and no one has questioned it even once.
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Joined: 2/27/2011
Posts: 353
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Robert - Believe me, it's okay to squee. =)
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Joined: 6/7/2011
Posts: 467
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I'm not personally a fan of jargon. I get lost easily, and my powers of concentration are poor enough.
But renaming can be effective even when it isn't strictly necessary. A famous example is Heinlein's "The door dilated." People make fun of it now (why should a door dilate? what's wrong with hinges?) Delany rather lovingly spoofed it by having a door 'deliquesce.' But it still works because it's both arresting (first time you see that, it makes you pay attention) and self-explanatory. It doesn't need any further description.
As far as blasters, teleporters, FTL drives, and food processors go, better be clever (and clear) if you're going to wander too far out into new coinages, or this human perusal unit may reprog his lexicator jiffy-split.
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Joined: 1/31/2012
Posts: 16
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As a data point, any time I see a novel with a made-up word (usually a name) in the title, unless it's by a writer I'm familiar with, I move that book down on my "pick up and look at" list.
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Joined: 6/14/2012
Posts: 194
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Back up the line (busy few days)...Editor didn't cut ALL the trout fishing, just something that was beginning to sound like an entire chapter of it. Aunt Grace still gets her feet (well, her waders) wet and catches a nice one. Her contact meets her on the river, and the spy side goes well.
Weaponry...well, taking names from things I admire/have admired, my protag for Vatta's War bought a Rossi-Smith which, it turned out, she needed, from a very exclusive weapons shop of the kind all fighter-types want. That was another several pages of self-indulgence. Unfortunately, I could not get her interested in blades, and had to drag myself (not her) to the other side of the shop. Swords are so much more elegant than modern firearms, but I did the best I could for her, between the Italian and American styles. It was enormous fun in one of the Familias Regnant books to have a far-future woman use fencing techniques. Aunt Grace preferred firearms too, so I designed her a custom job whose lines I could stand. (What can I say? I'm finicky about these things. Glocks are...just not to my taste. Nor broom-handled Mausers. Practical, of course. But not...as elegant.)
Brian: I don't think I've ever used a made-up word/name in the title, though a recent attempt was shot down by my editor, probably wisely. (Though I still think anyone who comes into the group on the last book is going to be dead lost anyway, so why not use a name familiar to the existing readership? Heck, I started on Tolkein with an unfamiliar word: hobbit. But it was a cool word. Mine maybe wasn't.)
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