How to Name a Science Fictional World

Larry Niven has written about how the name of a planet can be used to illustrate the character of its inhabitants. For example, prosaic colonists may use literally descriptive planet names. Niven’s Known Space series offers some examples: Plateau, where the only inhabitable land is a plateau that rises above the dense atmosphere; and a planet renamed Canyon after a human weapon of mass destruction opened a narrow, kilometers deep crater where the thin atmosphere and moisture gather and form a breathable mix. The eponymous setting of his novel Ringworld is another obvious example.
Other authors also take the descriptive route. Robert L. Forward’s Dragon’s Egg is about an inhabited neuron star given that name because it was the remnant of a super nova in the constellation Draco and is, by our standards, smooth and featureless. Frank Herbert’s most famous world is officially named Arrakis, from the Arabic word for dancer, but everyone just calls it Dune, for obvious reasons.

The name of a world may also tell a story. In Alastair Reynold’s Chasm City, a trio of generation ships were heading for a planet that they had already named Journey’s End. But Sky Haussmann, captain of one of the ships, made what most considered unacceptable sacrifices to ensure that his vessel arrived first. As a result, his passengers settled the best region of the planet, which was rechristened Sky’s Edge.
Another possible scenario: the planet is already inhabited, and the natives feel they’ve given it a perfectly acceptable name.  As we have seen even here on Earth, the newly arrived settlers might use the existing name, but are more likely to impose their own.  In Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest, the title is literally true in the language of the natives of the planet Athshe (much better than naming your planet for dirt), but the Terran human colonists prefer to call it New Tahiti. The Athsheans and the Terrans wind up fighting over much more than just naming rights.

Occasionally you get two different worlds with the same name. In Altered Carbon, Richard K. Morgan’s hardboiled detective Takeshi Kovacs comes from Harlan’s World, named for Konrad Harlan, the leader of the expedition that colonized it. The planet is most fully explored, in the narrative sense, in the third book of the Kovacs trilogy, Woken Furies, when the name still fits, as Harlan’s descendants rule the planet’s oligarchy.
But more than 25 years before Morgan’s book was published, there was another fictional planet known “Harlan’s World.” In 1975 Harlan Ellison, SF author, screenwriter, essayist, and iconoclast, arranged a presentation at UCLA featuring a panel of SF authors working on stories set in a shared world. In the days leading up to the presentation, Hal Clement, Poul Anderson, Larry Niven, and Fredrick Pohl developed extensive specifications for the planet’s astrophysics, geology, biology, ecology, xenology, sociology, and politics. Those specs were given to the panelists, including Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Silverberg, Thomas M. Disch, and Frank Herbert, two hours before the presentation. After reading the specs and discussing them over dinner, the panelists, with Ellison as moderator, started plotting their stories in front of an audience.

Eventually all nine of the authors, plus Jack Williamson and Kate Wilhelm, wrote stories set in the shared world of Medea. In case you are wondering, Poul Anderson was the one who actually came up with the name. Medea was located in Castor, a multiple-star system that the ancients thought was only a single star. Since Castor was a figure from classical mythology, Anderson mined the same myths for names of all the stars, planets, and moons in the system. He picked Medea because, like the planet that they created, she was beautiful, mysterious, and changeable—sometimes calm, and sometimes violent. Nevertheless, in the science fiction community, it became known as “Harlan’s World” and the stories, including the story of their creation, were published in a now out-of-print book called Medea: Harlan’s World.
If you are looking to create a world and are lacking a stable of science fiction Grand Masters to help you name it, fear not. You can just go to the Planet Generator on the Sci-Fi Ideas website, which will produce a name, location, and description for as many of them as you need. (But nobody steal Gebo, the humid, swampy world in the Gebolax system… That one’s mine.)
What name would you give your SF world?