Science Fiction Device Names

This might be better in Brainstorming, but I'll chip in.

Communicators--We have walkie talkies, cell phones, mobiles, intercoms, and so on. Landlines. (Are your personal communicators analogous to aural implants or cell phones or ? )

Assuming cell phones, you could go with: air-com, chatbox, handhelds, local-vocals (locvocs).

Electric motorcycle-- We have mo-peds, harleys, hogs, motorcycles. Also bicycle, bike. Motorbike.

Assuming you want something descriptive, you could go with battery-bike (battbike), motorless carriage (mo-car), or just something like smooth ride, silent ride, two-wheel gasless, and so on.

FWIW when I asked a similar question many months back the feedback was nice, and I appreciated it, but was not really what I needed because we each are wired so uniquely. I needed to make my own names in the end and for me that meant digging around in the etymology. Look up etymological origins of the key features of your devices and see what you find.

Beware of smeerps, even technological smeerps.

If the motorcycle's essentially a motorcycle, just futuristic and without a gas or hybrid engine... just call it a motorcycle, or a bike. Let context reveal that it has a quantum drive and nuclear power and is silent and travels at mach 2. (Now, if it's some sort of hovercraft, doing something that modern motorcycles explicitly do not do, you might want a new name: skyrider or airbike or something.)

If the communicator's basically a phone or cell, call it something equally simple - even a phone, as phones these days are essentially tablet computers anyway.

People are going to be people, even in the future. They're going to call things the simplest thing possible, which often builds on previous tech; we still talk of "hanging up" when phones end communications with a screen-tap. Heck, as mentioned, today's phones bear very little resemblance to the original telephone, a clunky device with a base and handset and a bell and a human operator to direct calls. But people still call them "phones," often dropping the "cellular" or "mobile" part as they've become so ubiquitous that they've replaced landlines for many users. If your futuristic people start calling their communication devices "voice transmission boxes" or something, it's not going to read naturally and will likely trip up your reader.

JMHO...

There are electric motorcycles called "electrocycles." I was going to suggest that name, and then I Googled it and saw that it's an actual thing. I guess great minds think alike, eh?

I agree with Brightdreamer. We do often use the shortest terms possible. Sometimes we abbreviate the terms: Cellular Phone -> Cell Phone -> Phone. Other times we use an acronym: FBI, CIA for example. Sometimes we allow those acronym letters to become words, for example Laser, Radar, and Taser. For such you would only need to explain once where the name came from, if at all.

The history of the 'guitar'.
Once there was only one kind of guitar. The narrow-waisted string instrument.
Then, it became possible to electrify a guitar (for ease of amplification, I assume) and that became an 'electric guitar' to tell it apart from the usual kind. (And because the electric guitar no longer needed the sounding box to make sound, it's shape changed.)
Then electric guitars became so commonplace that they became 'guitars' and the originals needed the descriptor: 'acoustic' guitars.

So names go around and around.

You can afford to have two names for things--a more complete name, and the acronymmed or colloquial shortened version most people use.

Unless your story is really far in the future or not in the same "universe" as we live in, I would stick to normal names. Just call the communicators "coms" and the bike a "bike." Humans tend to give old, familiar names even to new things whenever they can, and it can help tie your futuristic story to people reading it today.

There are some considerations, a lot of devices are appearing on the market with novel names:
The future name of some devices may have to be invented if the device is invented for the story. I peruse Gizmodo and some of the other 'latest tech" sites for ideas.

Then there is the issue of will the reader pick up on it right away. I get annoyed at my critique group when they have to ask what everything is. I couldn't very well name my reading tablets, Kindle or Nook. So I called them readers. ... [falsetto voice: "What's a reader?" ] Sorry, where was I?

Oh yeah, considerations. I limited my future to less than two centuries because I'm not clever enough to invent far future items. Think about it, did they have motorcycles 200 years ago? Who could have imagined the internet even fifty years ago? One or two people. Gordon R Dickson (Necromancer) famously lamented not foreseeing cell phones.

The point is, can you really predict what devices the world will see in the distant future given how fast technology advances now?

If it's a familiar device like a phone, I suspect you'll find a lot of sci-fi writers calling them 'coms'. But will your reader understand P2P? I don't know what I will settle on for a name yet but P2P is an important concept in my story. Readers might just have to figure it out from context and maybe a vague familiarity with it from the Arab Spring. "Set your phasers on stun" defines phaser nicely. If only it were so easy.

Be careful not to date your piece.

Personally, for ideas I need help from sites like Gizmodo and name generators like this one: Future Tech Name Generator.


Sorry, this is a bit of rambling. YMMV

Max Burke said:

I request the help of the people of the forum, come up with names for cool science fiction devices and vehicles.

Click to expand...

The thing is, you can't force 'cool.' Good names for devices. If it were that easy, marketing departments wouldn't be working so hard to figure out where to stick their i's. 'Good enough' is not going to leave scratching their heads trying to figure out what it is.