Suppose for the moment one is a science fiction writer. Further suppose one’s setting is on an interstellar scale and one wants to incorporate real star systems and their exoplanets. Are there pitfalls to consider?
Aside from the very obvious one with which I will lead…
There is a tendency among some SF writers to use familiar stellar names such as Rigel, Vega, or Achernar. I am never sure whether this is for marketing reasons—readers will likely have heard of at least two of those—or if the issue is that those are the only stars with whose names some SF authors are familiar.
The catch is that named stars tend to be the visible ones. Sunlike stars are not naked-eye visible beyond ten parsecs or less, a volume that contains only a handful of visible stars. Most named stars are distant, bright, and thanks to the way stars work, too short-lived to be likely hosts for naturally-occurring Earthlike life-bearing planets1.
If you are going to use the name of a bright feature in the sky, it’s a good idea to check to make sure that object is actually a star and not, say, a nebula, galaxy, or globular cluster—or at least, be aware that the bright object is a nebula, galaxy, or globular cluster. Iain M. Banks’ Use of Weapons provides an amusing (entirely intentional) example, when its protagonists go haring off to “Crastalier,” assuming that’s a planet, which it is not, and not an open cluster with half a million stars, which it turns out to be.
I should further note that the apparent positioning of the stars in the sky is dependent on one’s location. As one moves away from Sol, the relative positions of the stars will appear to change. One easy way to provide local flavor is by revealing, subtly or otherwise, that the planet of interest has created its own constellations, as Earth’s are of no relevance to what they see in their sky.
If you’re planning on incorporating constellation-based names, familiarize yourself with the nomenclature. Take Alpha Centauri, for example, the constellation in which it is located is Centaurus2. The Greek letter indicates its apparent brightness compared to the other stars of that constellation. It’s not a star called Centauri located in the Alpha constellation.
Due to the visibility issue mentioned above, only a very small number of sunlike stars have proper names. Only a few rate Greek letter + constellation names. This means there are many potentially interesting systems whose current designations are a catalog name and a number, and a few that definitely look like they were named by banging an astronomer’s head on a keyboard.
There is nothing wrong with using actual catalog names—it shows you did your homework—but it seems likely anyone living in the cd-69 2001 system will want a more euphonious name.
The current convention for naming exoplanets makes sense from the perspective of astronomers on Earth: a star’s exoplanets are given a lower-case letter designation in the order they are discovered (a, b, c, etc.). While this means the known exoplanets don’t have to be renamed every time a more inward exoplanet is found, it does mean that the lower-case letter designation provides no useful information about the position of the exoplanet within the system. 55 Cancri provides a nice example: 55 cnc b is further from its sun than 55 cnc e.
No offense to astronomers, but this looks like the sort of arrangement that ultimately forces a grand renaming, probably around the time astronomers become confident they’ve spotted all the exoplanets in a particular system. I expect such a renaming will go as smoothly as USENET’s Great Renaming3. Anyway, if you’re using the current system—again, it shows you did your homework—don’t assume “b” will be closer to its star than “c.” It might be, but it also might not.
These are just a few of the nomenclature issues inherent to using actual star systems in SF. No doubt you have your own favorites4 I’ve overlooked. Feel free to discuss them at length in comments below.
- Obviously, this is not an issue if your story does not feature naturally-occurring life-bearing planets around giant stars. You could stick a space station around Fomalhaut without attracting criticism. You could terraform a world orbiting S. Doradus, if you could protect it from S Doradus’ world-sterilizing outbursts.
- Stars move; there are stars whose apparent position from Earth’s perspective will move from one constellation to another in the not-too-distant future. I don’t know if those stars will be renamed.
- Less a pitfall than a chance for hilarious confusion: writers generally stick to the One Steve Limit, using only one instance of any given name because that is less confusing. In reality, people reuse names all the time: ask any Jennifer or Dave. This applies to place names as well. Therefore, I am convinced any future that features multiple occupied systems will see some place names reused over and over. That might be how you get naturally life-bearing worlds around “Rigel” or “Vega”: the local marketing departments of nondescript systems reused the names.
- Except for the people who don’t care about this issue, some of whom may be baffled that anyone does. To forestall the inevitable “Who cares?”—I care.
And then there’s the problem of travel time and relativity.
Sure, your colony ship left in the first wave of interstellar land rush. Every ship had its assignment and registered naming scheme.
How could your contemporaries have anticipated that there would be six generations of FTL drive, a massive revision to relativity, and two societal collapses and restarts while you were on the way? Worse, how could they have anticipated that your ship would jump into legend and that your carefully assigned nomenclature would become the equivalent of “Oak Street.”
I keep trying to convince Kitchener to rename either Benton Street or Wellington after the (rather reprehensible) Prime Minister whose homes were on Benton and Wellington. Or, you know, both streets after the 10th PM. For some reason, Kitchener doesn’t want another King Street or two, esp if they intersect the current King Street.
Atlanta doesn’t seem to have a problem with multiple streets with Peachtree in the name, some of which intersect, or run parallel, or both. I think Kitchener should reconsider, since it’s endless fun for the tourists. The small town where I live now has several identically numbered streets that do not connect, but are close to each other. We cope by GPS, or by memorizing street number ranges. Presumably the rather vertical local geography, combined with the streets being named by someone who didn’t live here, is responsible.
You want to talk vertical geography? In my neighborhood in Cincinnati, on one of the steep hills overlooking downtown, Ohio Avenue terminates at its southern end in a long, steep staircase, at whose bottom is a short, very steep street that’s also called Ohio Avenue. That Ohio Avenue ends in a T-intersection with Clifton Avenue, and on the other side of Clifton is a shorter stairway that descends to a tiny, 50-yard-long road that’s also called Ohio Avenue. I think they must have named them back before the age of automobiles, so that the staircases were considered part of the avenue. (Stanley Schmidt, the longtime editor of Analog Science Fiction and Fact and the man who gave me my first break as a writer, used to live on the main, northernmost stretch of Ohio Avenue, though well before my time.)
We do at least have a pair of parallel streets that intersect three times.
Perhaps you would have more luck trying ‘William Street’ ‘Lyon Street’ and ‘Mckenzie Street’ to complete the set?
True fact – during WWII, the British built bunkers in Hong Kong, primarily staffed with British soldiers, and the extensive underground tunnels were given London street names. The British were relieved by Canadian soldiers who frequently found themselves lost.
“There is a tendency among some SF writers to use familiar stellar names such as Rigel, Vega, or Achernar. I am never sure whether this is for marketing reasons—readers will likely have heard of at least two of those—or if the issue is that those are the only stars with whose names some SF authors are familiar.”
In Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry’s scientific advisers would often point out that a star mentioned in a script would be too big and short-lived to support life, and would suggest more obscure alternatives, but he’d stick with the big names like Rigel and Vega and Deneb because they were familiar to the audience.
Your footnote 3 provide the first explanation I’ve ever seen for why, in McCaffrey’s Talent/Hive universe, “Altair” is the name of a planet, not a star, and a planet clearly in orbit around a star that is not in fact Altair (at 11 times solar luminosity, living around Altair would be visibly quite different from living around Sol).
She tried to retrofit this in later books, quite unconvincingly, as if it was so in orbit around the star Altair, even though it clearly isn’t. (Still, much less unconvincingly than the late discovery that the way to deal with insectoid invaders is gasp pheromones, presented as if nobody had ever heard of pheromones or imagined that they might have anything to do with insects before, despite decades of war against them. This makes it quite hard for me to read the later books in the series: a shame…)
(Also… naming the planet after its star feels a bit off in any case. We don’t call the sun “Earth”, after all.)
Not precisely, but there is a convention of naming the planets after their sun (e.g. Earth is often called Sol III)
edit: Hmmm… I blockquoted the text in parentheses but it doesn’t show that way for me after saving my comment
Once a book is done, I say, leave it alone. That protects me, because I can’t stand to read any of my old books. All I can do is write a new one. (Okay, maybe some exceptions, like removing a once-neutral word that is now offensive when you didn’t mean it that way.)
Or as happened to comic book writer Mark Gruenwald, reusing a legacy superhero name unaware that in its new context the name took on racist connotations. Cue sudden renaming once the issue was pointed out to Gruenwald.
In the Disco Era edition, Poul Anderson moved all the planets in The Enemy Stars from G-class giant and subgiant stars to more plausible main sequence stars (and changed the FTL comms from gravity waves to tachyons). I was a bit surprised Anderson of all people would put a naturally occurring habitable world around a giant star.
From someone’s summary of the Flandry stories and Beetlejuice (“an age of less than 10 million years” says Wikipedia):
A lot of history can happen in ten million years… even if we’re near the end of it.
I think Jack Campbelll’s “Lost Fleet” hero John Geary has had a few episodes of reflecting that the star systems that he fights in will still be star systems when humans no longer exist, although I don’t think he has a specific cataclysm in mind. It’s probably not A.I., they’ve tried that and it rarely works in that universe. Captain W.E. John’s air pilot hero “Biggles” used to have similar feelings about Earth geography, though I think he also had anxiety about deserts expanding – not sea level though, although he visited at lest one rapidly sinking island.
One of the alien species glimpsed in Star Trek: The Motion Picture‘s recreation-deck crew briefing scene was called Betelgeusians (they’ve since been revived in Discovery, albeit with a modified design). In my TMP-sequel novel Ex Machina, I established, borrowing from Douglas Adams, that they were actually from “a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse.” They’d abandoned their homeworld for a nomadic life among the stars once they realized the nearby Betelgeuse would soon go supernova and lethally irradiate their planet, so they were native to the Betelgeuse sector in general rather than a specific world within it.
Of course, Trek puts many planets around unlikely giant stars like Rigel, Vega, Regulus, Arcturus, and the like, and I’ve sometimes tried to rationalize in my Trek novels how those star systems could have inhabited planets.
Writers of historical fiction don’t always get to obey the One Steve rule, of course. Hillary Mantel’s Wolf Hall books include Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Wolsey, Thomas More, Thomas Wriothesley, Thomas Howard, the other Thomas Howard, Thomas Boleyn, Thomas Cranmer, Thomas Wyatt and Thomas Seymour. Tudor parents seem to have been unimaginative in the matter of names.
I grew up in a small town in a sparsely populated part of Canada. Our families weren’t very imaginative with their children’s names.
Once, when my brother (Rob) and I (Steve) were young adults, I decided to visit him at his nearby community college. My friends, Steve and Rob, came along. Brother Rob wasn’t home, but he left a note saying he was at the pub with his friends Steven and Roberta. Beer fuelled hilarity ensued.
The next morning, after a restful night sleeping on a dorm floor, we called our mom, Roberta, to say we all had a great time playing board games. I don’t think she believed us.
I don’t know… Given that the Tudor period equivalent of Elon Musk (in wealth, blatant corruption and general obnoxiousness) was named Richard Rich, they could be pretty apt in naming, if not imaginative.
Whoa, there was a real-life Richie Rich?
He sold his soul for Wales, per A Man for All Seasons. It was his perjured testimony that got Thomas More beheaded, and got a Welsh office for it. He eventually “became Chancellor of England, and died in his bed” (unlike many of the other major characters), says the end of the play.
He’s a recurring character in C.J. Sansom’s Shardlake novels, unfailingly duplicitous, grasping and malevolent. I think that Sansom used him to exemplify the New Men of Henry VIII’s reign, commoners who accumulated wealth and power by grabbing the properties of dissolved monasteries. Something like the way the Russian oligarchs got their starts during the collapse of the Soviet Union.
E. G. Withycombe, The Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names, 1977, p. xxviii. From baptismal records in England, from 1550-1799 over half of all males were named William, John, or Thomas (peaking at 62.5 percent in 1650-99).
In 1600-1799, over half of all females were named Elizabeth, Mary, or Anne, except it dipped to 46.5 in 1650-99.
Fluctuating levels in the 15%-20% range for each.
I did a complete Shakespeare binge last year, and in the history plays, it was often hard to keep track of the multiple characters in a single play named Henry or William or Edward or Richard, or the fathers and sons called by the same surname, or the cases where more than one person was referred to by the same noble title (e.g. the Earl of Warwick in Henry VI Part 1 is based on an earlier holder of the title than the Warwick in Parts 2-3, though the BBC production I saw treated Warwick as a single character throughout). It did make for some suspense in the Henry VI trilogy, since I didn’t know the history well enough to know which of the two rival Edwards would end up being King Edward IV.
Someone did a frequency analysis of names in C16th wills a while back. Approximately 50% of men were called John.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Maybe that’s the origin of the British custom of men addressing each other by their last names.
My reading of boys’ boarding school books (thanks, Kipling and Wodehouse) showed boys with the same surname being called by numbers as well as names. I recall a ‘Dickson Four’ in Stalky and Co.
Having “Minor” appended to their last name was something that boys with older brothers in the same school had to endure as well.
In reading a book called Montaillu, a description of a French Pyreneen village of the same name, compiled from Inquisition records, mentions a house where Guillaume and Raymond lived with their sister Raymonde. Raymonde married Raymond (a different one) and moved out, so the brothers hired a servant named Raymonde to do the housekeeping. Raymonde then married Guillaume (not that one), and moved out. So they hired a woman named Raymonde to replace her. Their other brother, Alain, was visiting, and he proposed to his brothers’ servant Raymonde, but she turned him down, so instead he married his brothers’ servants Raymonde (a different one, not previously mentioned). Then the description moves on to the household of Guillaume (a different one, not previously mentioned), and his wife Guillaumette.
The famous historical figure Vlad the Impaler was not the same person as his father Vlad or his brother Vlad.
If possible, don’t get anywhere near Egypt’s Philopater dynasty. Ouch!
“I am Vlad. This is my brother Vlad and my other brother Vlad.”
Blood brothersVlad brothers.…sharing blood in more ways than one…
I’m working Front of House on a production of Teneile Warren’s Beyonsea and the Mothers (tickets still available). At one point, Beyonsea’s neighbour asks Beyonsea’s mother Simone why she named her daughter Beyonsea. Simone wanted her daughter to have a unique name. I think the next two lines are “Do you know how many Simones there are?” to which the neighbour replies “You’re talking to a Michael.”
I was once on a panel where of the six panelists, three were named James…
In total we had 54 people between 1968 and 1975 in my (then) boys’ school year group. At our 40th anniversary in 2015 I noticed we had mostly common old British first names. In multiples we had two Simons, two Daniels, two Georges, two Johns (and a Jonathan), two Williams, two Alans, two Marks (not counting Marcus), three each of Christopher and Timothy, four Andrews and no fewer than five Richards. So Richards alone were almost 10% of our cohort, and 28% of us shared only four names.
The most unusual names (apart from a Malaysian kid) were Marcus and Guy. Other singletons were Jeremy, Adrian, Charles, David, Edward, Nicholas, Philip, Geoffrey, Michael, Hugh, Neil, Joseph, Stuart, Roger, Robert, Paul, James and, as it happened, only one Steve. Easily a mediaeval play character list full of knights, kings, priests and saints, and most still pretty common at that time in society at large.
New male entrants listed in the then latest school magazine, 2014 (girls arrived a few years after I left) included lots of in-our-day unusual names like Louis, Oscar, Oskar, Jake, Jack, Milo, Benedict, Owen, Joshua, Igor, Seb, Samson, Franco. Not many duplicates at all, but there were four Bens, two Benedicts and and Benjie (NB this is new entrants at all years, not just one class). Some trad names were still in the mix: Edward, Charles, George, Henry, and Stephen. But of our 28% Big Four names in 1975 there was in 2014 no-one called Richard, Christopher or Timothy, and only one Andrew.
I went to a very small primary school of about 30 pupils. In my year there was six of us, of which, three were called Tom.
“Thomas”, “Tom”, “Tommie” problem solved :D
That’s exactly how my first-grade teacher (I think it was first) did it with the three Roberts in my class — they became Robert, Robbie, and Rob.
Usually, in my teaching, I’ve not had multiple students with the same first name. On the other hand, I’ve had a class with three Anthonys and an Antonio. I also have a student, Ana, whose sisters are both named Ana.
The “one Steve” rule cannot apply to “realistic” fiction.
Regrettably, the exoplanet naming convention reserved “a” for the primary (the star being orbited). As Wikipedia notes, ‘the parent star is considered to be “a” … the first planet – 55 Cancri b …”. If you hated numbering things starting with 0, you’ll be infuriated by starting numbering with 2! I gather that “a” for the primary is never used in practice; I speculate on no evidence that they included that only so computer databases could have a non-empty string if the primary were listed.
It also quotes someone writing that the system “utterly failed with the discovery of circumbinary planets”.
I care too :)
I firmly believe that my dyslexia gives me the right to be angry about the ongoing Endor / Andor kerfuffle.
My dad tried to teach me the names of the constellations and of the brighter stars and planets. For the longest time I thought he was just making stuff up. It took us a little while to realize that his eyesight was much better than mine.
Now, through the wonders of modern science, I can hold my smartphone up to the sky and read the names that he was trying to teach me all those years ago.
Glaring at my bookshelves doesn’t allow me to remember the name of a story in which interstellar explorers name new solar systems after books they are reading, giving the planets names of characters in that book. For example, the star will be named Snow White and the planets will be named after the dwarfs.
I still want to live on Planet Claire in the B-52’s system. I’ve heard there is a vacation asteroid called Rock Lobster where everybody’s rocking.
In an episode of The Mandalorian, the bounty hunter is seeking a miscreant who “owes someone important money.”
Having heard that line I immediately came up with an idea for a new variation on The Littlest Hobo: “The Grammarian” would travel the galaxy, helping beleaguered language nerds by correcting linguistical errors.
Sadly, no one at Lucasfilm is keen on this project.
Old man: “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.”
Stormtrooper: “Call the Grammarian. The old man just ended a sentence with a preposition.”
Shortest movie of the three trilogies.
I also wonder what the Grammarian would make of the whole 12 parsecs thing.
Ending a sentence with a preposition, like splitting an infinitive, is perfectly legitimate English grammar that was stigmatized a couple of centuries ago by grammatical prescriptivists who artificially imposed Latin-style grammar rules on English out of the false belief that English should function like a Romance language.
And Han’s “12 parsecs” line was clearly stated in the script to be erroneous, with Obi-Wan rolling his eyes at Han’s obviously nonsensical bluster, but the eye roll is barely visible in the final edit of the scene, so it didn’t come across to the audience.
The phrase “owes someone important money” is a bit awkward, but not erroneous. It clearly means “owes money to someone important.” After all, the word “important” often applies to people, but you don’t hear it used to modify the word “money.”
Oddly I read it as clearly applying to the money. It’s an unusual adjective for money but well within the terms of a scriptwriter’s creative licence. You don’t engage a bounty hunter to collect small change.
They owe me three credits? Forget it.
What? They owe me three billion credits? Send a debt collector after them. That’s important money.
I see what you mean, but lack of clarity does not make something grammatically incorrect, just awkwardly phrased. There are plenty of cases where a sentence can follow grammar rules to the letter but still be confusing to the ear, because rules alone don’t solve every problem.
I wasn’t saying it was grammatically incorrect, I was saying that (based on my interpretation) it wasn’t even awkward. I read it as a creative variation on “serious money”. The interpretation depends on how the lines were spoken on the show, and as I don’t have a Disney+ subscription I can’t answer that.
It was The Second Secondary Second who asserted that the phrase was a “linguistical error.” That’s what I was responding to. It’s not an error, but a technically valid construction that is nonetheless ambiguous.
You are quite correct.
The phrase is not so much erroneous as it is ambiguous.
My dyslexic brain dislikes ambiguity and I often feel that ambiguous phrasing is poor phrasing, perhaps even erroneous phrasing.
Perhaps I’ll rewrite to my proposal to Lucasfilm and suggest that The Grammarian pursue grammatical ambiguities throughout the galaxy far, far away.
The Andorians’ home planet was renamed Andoria in Enterprise, perhaps to avoid confusion with Endor.
Anyway, technically the Ewoks live on the Forest Moon of Endor, so Endor is implicitly the name of the gas giant the moon orbits rather than the moon itself. Although the tendency is to refer to them both as Endor. To add to the confusion, Andoria is a Jovian moon as well, though the name of the Jovian has not been officially established.
That’s one of those ambiguous grammatical constructions; it could be read as “that moon orbiting Endor, which is forested” or as “the forested moon called Endor” (as in The City of London”).
Yeah, that’s the root of the problem. But visual-effects storyboards from Return of the Jedi labeled the gas giant as “Planet Endor” and the moon as “Forest Moon.” So that was the original intent, although later works have tended to name the moon Endor, and the Ewoks animated series called the gas giant Tana.
My gripe is with SF authors – mostly in movies and TV – who imagine that something worse than a catalog name will be the name of large volumes of galaxy. Large chunks of Earth, for instance, have names like ‘Africa’. But in SF, huge chunks of galaxy always have names like ‘Sector Seven’, or worse, “Quadrant J”. At least Joe Haldeman, when doing a Star Trek novel, had the 3-D decency to call them “Octants”, as volumes would be.
And there was no reason for Star Trek to arbitrarily divide the galaxy in four, to start with. Surely dividing it into galactic arms, or radial distances from the core, or something, would be less dismissive and simple. Admittedly we do this with the Earth, a little bit, though we at least call it the “Western Hemisphere”, not “Hemisphere Alpha”.
That is true, until you ask yourself ‘West of where?’ Namers always name places and directions in relation to themselves.
Also, the terms are sometimes applied arbitrarily. We refer to Europe as “the West” even though most of it is in the Eastern Hemisphere (much like how Star Trek refers to its entire primary milieu as the Alpha Quadrant even though half the Federation and the entire Klingon and Romulan Empires are in the Beta Quadrant, because the dividing plane between the quadrants passes through Sol the same way the Prime Meridian passes through Greenwich).
That’s another thing to keep in mind: when a name was applied. Europe was defined as “the West” relative to the Caucasus mountains, across which the East (Aka “Orient”) began, centuries before anyone in Europe was aware of the existence of landmasses further west than Great Britain. The Western hemisphere being now full of the remnants of colonial empires originating in Europe, we usually consider the West to encompass us as well, but in a world where that didn’t happen, West might mean something altogether different.
Similarly, in a future interstellar expansion, a region of space might get tagged as the “Centauri region ” simply because that’s the direction the first scouts/ships went. The region might or might not include any of the stars considered part of the constellation, but that doesn’t matter anymore
I had the hardest time wrapping my head around the fact that the Upper Nile is the southern part and the Lower Nile is the northern part. The ancient Egyptians applied those terms millennia before the invention of the European mapmaking convention of putting north on top of the map, and they were using “upper” and “lower” in the literal sense of altitude, since of course the river flows downhill.
That’s a thing to consider — that different cultures would base their cartographic labels on different referents and assumptions. Which is why I’m not crazy about SF universes like Star Trek where supposedly interstellar, multispecies civilizations nonetheless use Earth names for everything, and usually Western names as well. I’d like to see galactic cartography where the names aren’t based on a single planet’s constellations or star names or the like, although I guess we could assume that the human characters are just using the English/Earth translations of the alien names for things.
Also, because the Upper Nile was (and is) physically higher than the Lower Nile. Water flows downhill. Why Maine (the US state, not the old province in France) is Down East is a bit more complex.
Yes, I already said that. End of first paragraph, “and they were using “upper” and “lower” in the literal sense of altitude, since of course the river flows downhill.”
Star Trek originally created the quadrant system specifically in connection to galaxy-spanning wormholes, first in TNG: “The Price” and then in DS9. The problem was that they kept using the quadrant notation for smaller-scale matters, which, as you suggest, makes as much sense as giving directions on Earth by talking about hemispheres.
Dividing the galaxy into arms wouldn’t help much, since they’re too irregular, and contrary to what a lot of people assume, there are nearly as many stars per unit volume in between the arms as in the arms themselves. The arms aren’t made of stars, but are density waves cycling through the interstellar medium, causing star formation zones to form, so that the arms are delineated by nebulae and short-lived supergiant stars. They’re more analogous to, say, mountain ranges than continents.
Also, the arms are just too big, having the same problem as quadrants in that respect. You’d want to focus on features on a proportionally smaller scale, more in line with the distances that an interstellar civilization would be able to cover. In my Arachne trilogy, galactic civilization refers to our region of space as the Four Voids, defined by the four adjacent low-density bubbles in the interstellar medium that were formed by a wave of star formation passing through this region starting some 30 million years ago:
I figure star formation zones, supernova bubbles, and the like would be some of the main geographical features that would be used for interstellar cartography.
It’s a lost cause. Take one of the named exoplanets orbiting a named star.
The star was originally named Formalhaut but it is now named Formalhaut A because it was discovered to be in a triple star system.
The planet was the first to be directly observed in 2008 and was named Dagon.
But woe to a writer who set up a colony there because in 2020 it was discovered to be a asteroid swarm and removed from the list of planets.
Best thing to do is make them up.
A terrible exmple of the kind you name here is situated in the outer realms of the Deneb system. A star 100.000 times the luminosity of the sun with an expected residual lifetime of just a few million years. I am not naming the author here.
OT, but some astronomy in it: An – in my opinion – unforgiveable slip of a similar kind has been committed here in Germany by the translators of the Harry Potter series. Hermione is called Hermine. A female Herman instead of being named after the god of travelers, joculators, thieves, merchants, rhetoric, and of course MAGIC.
This irks me for several reasons.
First of all, it is uninformed, as all names in the Potterverse have a meaning.
Then, having held a series of lectures on the history of chemistry, I know that Hermes is the god of Alchemy, thus e.g. “sealed according to the art of Hermes” – hermetically. So powerful an art that transmutation was possible by it, and also immortality (although, strangely, not for those who tried out their tinctures supposed to grant it – or rather, they usually shortened life quite drastically).
Being an amateur astronomer, I know that Hermes and Mercury are the same, thus “merchant” as one of the groups of people protected by that god. Market is of the same pedigree.
I am named after the Christian protector of travelers, so shame on anyone committing a misnomer on my fellow guardian.
Names do of course have power in SFF. Shredding such a great name to insignificant bits is a shame in itself.
Lastly, I am a translator myself and feel put to shame by such an example.
SCIENCE – making life more confusing for mere laymen since the earliest day of “Durr?”
Science makes life a lot less confusing, if you make the effort to learn some of it. Then you actually know how things work, so it doesn’t seem as inexplicable.
That holds good in some cases, but not in others – try explaining Higher Physics to someone who can handle maths only when it involves small numbers, but not letters.
Like me, for instance.
It depends on the explanation. I majored in physics in college, but I could never get a handle on the calculus of quantum physics. What finally helped me understand quantum physics was reading Greg Egan’s SF stories about it, where I could see the principles in action and understand what they meant, even though I couldn’t follow the math.
Also, my struggles to puzzle out how to estimate where the right stars around which to anchor a ‘Pegasus sector’ a reasonable distance from Mother Earth was quite an education in the challenges of Sci Fi astrography.
Thankfully the fridge didn’t run of ice cubes, so my brain cells did not boil off out of sheer frustration.
I’m not a fan of naming sectors after constellations, because the 3D volume defined by any given constellation is essentially an irregular cone that starts at Earth and expands outward to infinity. A constellation is not a region so much as a direction.
Although I can see merit in naming a sector after the brightest star within it; for instance, various works of SF refer to the Sol system occupying the Sirius Sector. So you might have, say, an Alpha Pegasi Sector or an Epsilon Pegasi Sector, though it would be simpler to call it the Markab Sector or Enif Sector, respectively.
@ChristopherLBennett: Having done a little research into things astrographical I did, in fact, assume that those sectors closest to Earth would be named for the brightest stars (as observed from Earth) visible in that region – also that names like ‘Pegasus Sector’ would be used because they’re colourful and memorable names, whether or not they were the most technically accurate.
Like calling isles of the Caribbean “The Indies”, for example – not very good geography, but excellent branding.
(Incidentally, since this ‘Pegasus Sector’ was one originally mentioned in a WARHAMMER 40,000 product, I eventually settled the question of which star in the constellation Pegasus would become the namesake of Pegasus Sector, Segmentum Solar after learning that one of those stars – I would have to look up my notebooks to tell you which one – was close to a white dwarf. How could I NOT work in an homage to THE Warhammer magazine?).
In a setting with limited range space travel, it may be convenient to name stars near to Earth after one of Earth’s constellations, although the naked-eye stars of the constellation itself are much farther away. Convenient to an imperialist Earth, anyway. I suppose the inevitable rebellion will acknowledge that they have to be called something. A different case in Jack Campbell’s “Lost Fleet” setting is individual star systems leaving the Syndicated Worlds, which are brought together as the Phoenix Stars, which is not a “geographical” title but is local.
Conversely, the Andromeda Nebula is named after a constellation, but it turns out it is a separate galaxy – but still visible with the naked eye.
@Robert Carnegie, it doesn’t even have to be an Imperialist Earth – at least at first – if there’s nobody else in our immediate vicinity.
After all, why shouldn’t we Earthlings hand out names that make sense to US if there are no other labels already hanging from things?
Simple alternative: set one’s plot “on the frontier” and have one’s Solarian protagonist visit “a system centered on a lovely G-class star known only by an alphanumeric in the databases back on Terra and as Amaterasu by the locals, a group of diaspora era humans of mostly Terran-Japanese ancestry who had named their new world Yamato” and be done with it …
Funny, I picked Amaterasu as the name of the primary star of a human colony world named Daikoku in my 2017 Analog story “Twilight’s Captives,” although I didn’t include the star name in the final draft of the story. According to my notes, it was a K0 star known as HD 10008 or EX Ceti, though it turns out that’s a variable star, so maybe it’s just as well I didn’t specify.
Yep, sun gods and goddesses seem a simple default … and there have certainly been plenty of them in human cultures, which provides a fair number to chose from and some fairly easy markers for whatever cultural touchpoints one wants for the “colonists.”
Of course, some Prussians were poets, and some Japanese were painters, so presume one can get creative, as opposed to the defaultish “vons” and etc.
The fun part would be avoiding the “planet of hats” trope, of course. Just because it’s Amaterasu and Yamato doesn’t mean the habitable part of the planet amounts to four medium-ish islands and the people aren’t all a mix of samurai and salarymen. ;)
Though naturally a minority will be, just to make the implicit joke of the majority being Very Different more clearly-stated.
Of course, sci-fi being in the future, recursive naming is always a possibility; this planet/star is called Deneb because the survey captain was a Star Trek fan.
I expected Reactor would either turn this down or it would get one or two comments, not more than 50.
and now it’s up over 70!
Wolf 359 wasn’t even shown in Best of Both Worlds
47 Ursae Majoris interests me. The star is a bit brighter than Sol, and its gas giant is located where where our asteroid belt is located. With a big gas giant serving as a reflector—the effective insolation difference is probably that Mars.
Still, any moon orbiting that gas giant would likely still be cold..a perfect place for furry creatures to evolve like the Dilbians from Spacepaw—perfect for 47 Ursae Majoris.
Time for the inevitable Traveller comment.
There they name Star systems after the principal inhabited world. This has the amusing side effect of the Sol system being called Terra – by everyone except the Terrans!
You can always just make up a name and say it’s “on the opposite side of the galaxy” & “out of vision” from Earth…
If it’s a sunlike star (main sequence, somewhere between K and if you’re an optimist, F), and it’s more than about 5 parsecs away, the star is almost certainly going to be a catalogue number at best. As the Milky Way is more than 30 kiloparsecs across, most sunlike stars would be lucky to be a catalogue number.
Most of the stars visible to Earth telescopes, especially the ones with a reasonable chance of hosting habitable planets, have only catalog numbers rather than names. So you can make up a name without needing it to be an unknown star. Although it is convenient to postulate a star distant or dim enough to be unknown to present-day astronomers so that you can give it whatever parameters suit your needs. I’ve generally tried to pick real star systems, which takes a lot of research about the stars’ attributes and a lot of calculation of their relative distances. (There used to be a program called ChView that was great for determining distances between stars and creating rotatable 3D maps, but it doesn’t run on any version of Windows later than XP, I think.)
Is the Forest Moon of Endor a moon named Endor, a moon orbiting a planet named Endor, or a moon owned by a person or concern named Endor?
As I mentioned above, the original intent was that it was a moon orbiting the gas giant Endor, but later works have interpreted Endor as the name of the moon. Indeed, it seems to be the name of the moon, the gas giant, and the system’s star.
Perhaps writers could take inspiration from the last few decades’ explosion in variant spellings of common first names. If we can have what sounds like “Jason” spelt Jayson, Jaysen, Jahysin, Jeyshon or Jazzin, then why couldn’t there be numerous stars with names that sound very similar? Any writer accused of incorrectly depicting human-habitable worlds around incompatible stars than have any easy out. Eg, “Of course I’m aware that Formalhaut could never have earth-like planets; the star system I’ve written about is _Fourmelhort_, which in my novel is a Sun very similar to our own. It must have been changed by an over-attentive proofreader….”. Problem solved!
H Beam Piper’s naming convention is that we ran out of Greek gods/demigods/etc to name planets after and moved on to the Norse ones, and later to whatever the discoverer of the system liked (“Poictesme” in The Cosmic Computer). The only actual stars mentioned are in Uller Uprising, where Piper was given an essay laying out where the principal planets in the novel were.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/19474/19474-h/19474-h.htm#Introduction
In later books and stories there is a rough idea of how far they are from each other, but IIRC no actual known star is named.
That’s pretty close to reality, since new Solar System objects these days are given names from various world mythologies, like the dwarf planets Haumea, Quaoar, Sedna, Makemake, etc.
I have a dim memory of an assertion that, of all visible stars in the sky, the Sun is the Nth dimmest in absolute magnitude. Does anyone have a citation for N? If I weren’t so lazy, I might go thru the Wikipedia article “List of nearest stars” and assume that everything outside its limit (20 lightyears) are brighter.