My new WIP is a fantasy which takes place on a world other than earth, where visitors from other worlds come to visit. This will be my first bit of non-Terran world-building, and of course I need to make it believable and intriguing, all the way down to the name of the planet itself.
In a lot of ways, naming a planet can be just as challenging as coming up with a setting for an urban fantasy. I mean, you don’t want to use something that already been used, lest your reader (or agent, editor or publisher) immediately reject your story as derivative. You don’t want a used planet, do you? Particularly anything from Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate, Babylon 5, Fireball, Firefly, Transformers, Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles, Halo, Worlds of Warcraft, Doctor Who, the DC Universe, The Marvel Universe, The Big Bang Theory (the planet Sheldor), or previously mentioned by authors such as Cherryh, Lovecraft, LeGuin, Herbert, Heinlein, Adams, Niven, Bujold, Card, Turtledove and countless others.
There are also the already-named space objects to avoid, which have used just about every known name from mythos and folktales, heroes from the works of Shakespeare, Pope, and comic books, famous astronauts and scientists, and villages of earth with populations of 100,000 or less. I found myself wasting time working on a list of what NOT to name my planet, which was not getting me any closer to my goal.
Ultimately, I’ve decided to invent a rudimentary language based on phonics, much like Edgar Rice Burroughs did for the planet Barsoom in his Princess of Mars/John Carter series. Setting up a linguistic naming convention for my world, characters, and key words and phrases (such as oaths or idioms) isn’t new; and while I have no intention to develop an entire language such as Klingon, Dothraki, Na’vi, or any of the languages of Middle Earth, I do want my brave new world to feel fully realized and authentic to readers. Just as every new world needs geography, flora and fauna; every new culture requires belief systems, myths, rules of magic, commerce, law, and language.
