Science In My Fiction

Elena looked out over the savannah-like plain. A full scientific team would have to come develop a full taxonomy for the organisms of this world, but Elena enjoyed making up names for the mobile and sessile organisms she saw, the animals and plant equivalents of this world. Maybe some of her names would stick, though it was more likely that the eventual colonists would come up with their own names.

It was traditional that a geographic feature be named after the first survey pilot, but other than that new colonies were free to call things what they wanted. Elena thought the big lumbering herbivores with the purple stripes and trifurcated tails were certainly heffalumps. The tall purple foliage swayed in the breeze, its angled stems somehow aligned: zigzag grass. And the oiltrees, glistening softly here and there among the grass, some showing black where the heffalumps had rubbed against them. Elena added each her report, linking images and video to her new names.

So you’ve found (invented) a new world of your own, created some geography, put the biomes in their proper places, and thought up some really exotic plants and animals and others. But what to call them? Will your names blend seamlessly into your new world, sucking the reader in? Or will your names needlessly puzzle or annoy or frustrate your reader, destroying the illusion you’ve worked so hard to create? Names are important, and it’s worth paying some attention to them.

There are two kinds of names: what scientists call things in formal speech or writing, and what everyone calls things in regular conversation. Scientists have two goals for their names: each species has one and only one name, and that name not only provides a unique species identifier but also reflects evolutionary relationships.

The first part is simple: there are formal committees to keep track of names and make sure that each new name is unique, and that each new species has only one official name. These names are usually Latin or Greek descriptions of the most important plant characters (you’d be surprised how many plants are named some variant of “fuzzy”), or named for a person or place.

Renaissance scientists used long descriptions as their formal names. This was an unwieldy system, to say the least, and Linnaeus came up with a bright idea in the 18th century: the binomial system. Each species gets two names, the genus and the species. Canis familiaris, for example. Canis is the genus, and is always capitalized. You can think of it as the family name, and the species name familiaris as the individual name (not usually capitalized). Just as you can look at my name — Sarah Goslee — and assume that I’m probably closely related to other people named Goslee, but not the same person as John Goslee, you can assume that Canis familiaris is closely related to Canis lupus.

Here’s the complicated bit. Many of these formal names were assigned in the 18th century, a hundred years before Darwin. Linnaeus and his colleagues looked at the anatomy of organisms, and assigned the same genus name to species that looked the most alike. As scientists learn more about evolutionary relationships, they rename species to match their improved understanding. This can be very frustrating: one species I work with has changed genus name four times in the past ten years.

Most species are more stable. Many of them even have the original names that Linnaeus came up with. The domesticated dog in my previous example? Taxonomists have decided that dogs are so close to wolves that they don’t even get their own species name anymore. Dogs have been reclassified as Canis lupus familiaris, the domesticated subspecies of the gray wolf.

The scientific name doesn’t matter at all to everyday usage: we all still call them “dogs” and “wolves”. These common names are what people generally use in conversation, but they don’t always make for good communication. When I say “wolf,” one person might think of a timber wolf, and another a gray wolf. It gets worse: not only can one common name apply to more than one species, sometimes those species are very different. My favorite example: spikerush, bulrush and woolgrass are all sedges rather than rushes or grasses, but broomsedge is a grass and not a sedge.

To make it more confusing, a species can have lots of common names. Linnaria vulgaris, a yellow flower, is called both “butter-and-eggs” and “yellow toadflax” depending on where you are. Lots of species don’t have distinctive common names. (For database purposes these have usually been assigned common names that are translations of their scientific names.)

Many common names describe the species in some way. People name things for what they look like, what they remind you of, what they do. This seems to be especially true for plants. Dandelion – lion’s tooth, for the jagged edges of the leaves. Lungwort – believed to heal lung diseases. Eyebright – believed to heal eye diseases. Tearthumb – just what it says. Turtlehead – flowers look like a turtle’s head peeking out from under its shell. And so on.

These would be great starting places for naming your own assortment of species: does it look or act like something familiar? Or have some obvious distinguishing characteristic that could be used as a name? Does it affect people in a good or bad way? Even if your POV character is an alien, these are good default ideas for naming organisms. Unless you have some need to use a different system, this approach will make sense to your reader even if the referents are non-terrestrial. If you have POV characters of different species or from separate areas, you could both separate them and show their differences by having each use slightly different names. Don’t get so carried away that you confuse your reader without good reason, though.

I’ve been tempted, but have managed to restrain myself from naming examples of bad worldbuilding in previous essays in this series. Good examples I’m not at all reluctant to discuss. Undertow by Elizabeth Bear uses species names effectively for worldbuilding and for characterization.

The novel is set on the wet planet Greene’s World, and takes place in and around water and marshes. For “background” species, those groups that set the feel of the place, Bear uses the same names we do: fish, birds, biting flies and noseeums, reed. Human colonists would be likely to use those familiar terms anywhere that those kinds of lifeforms are found, and the reader knows just what it meant without needing any thought. Paramangroves are named for similar terrestrial plants, but are important enough to have a distinctive name.

Then there are the more evocative species names: silverling, cutthroat weed, waxflowers. Can’t you picture a mudskitterer based solely on the name? Or a nessie? Reaverbirds and redcaps too are named for what they do and how they look. None of Bear’s names are complex or unfamiliar-sounding, even the ones that are not used for terrestrial species. Instead, they add depth to the worldbuilding. Even without reading the book you probably already have a mental image of the marshes based just on the species names.

The alien sentient species in Undertow is vaguely frog-like, so it is called a “ranid” in formal conversation. But different characters at different times refer to them as “frog” or “froggie”, the usage reflecting how the speaker views these aliens: respectfully or dismissively.

Bear is not the only author to have a way with names. “Samlon” will always stick with me. Have you encountered any worldbuilding with particularly evocative or memorable species names?

[Note: this is part of a series on the science of worldbuilding. Previous installments have covered climate and biomes and looking at habitable planets from orbit, and plate tectonics.]