Practicum: Fictoscience Fantasy
Alright everyone, technobabble time! ENGAGE THE SPATIODRIVES! ARGH!
Okay, we are stuck on this backwater planet, so I guess, greetings and salutations my beloved readers! It is I, your beloved Limax, Vivian Sayan! Unfortunately, our resident local expert will take over on how to deal with Fictoscience in a space fantasy setting. Well not really unfortunate, she is great! Take it on Lady Verbosa! (Anne Winchell)
Language Basics
(Anne:) Let’s go! Before we dive into our practicum, I want to explain a couple of basic things first. In Vivian’s blog on fictoscience, zhi describes the difference between technobabble and fictoscience. Basically, technobabble is language that throws together a bunch of keywords into a jumbled mess that doesn’t make actual sense (or very little sense). It’s usually used at moments of heightened tension, and it’s usually a string of these terms with little to no break between them. On the other hand, fictoscience takes its time to make sense, spreading out the fancy words and introducing them during low tension scenes so that readers actually learn the meaning–and there is a meaning to them. They make sense, and while they’re not words we might use in our world, they draw on things we understand in a meaningful way.
For example, in this blog I’ll be taking the world of Aermundi first introduced in my Practicum on Fantasy Mana Diseases and expanding upon it. The major worldbuilding element that sets this world apart are the twelve mana poles around the planet, with an additional source coming from within the planet. The poles are named after their effects and are Life, Fire, Water, Ice, Earth, Air, Metal, Electricity, Light, Darkness, Time, Space, and Void. So you might say that an area has electricity mana. But that’s a mouthful, and the people of Aermundi would definitely have shortened ways of saying it. So let’s make a fictoscience term for it! We’ll have a little fun with electricity and go with a prefix of zap-, because electricity zaps! So zapomana. It’s easy to understand (and a little playful), meaningful both in English and in their world, and if we introduce it in a quiet moment, like right now, then it avoids all of the traps of technobabble.
That’s the basics, but as I said, Vivian does a great job with it in zhir blogpost. What does this look like in practice, though? Well, we’re going to continue with Aermundi as our case study while walking through how I set up the words to represent the world. For an in-depth introduction to the world, check out the Fantasy Mana Diseases blog because I’m not going to go into quite as many details here. In addition, some of these terms are used in the various Character series posts as we follow the character of Bob, a citizen in Aermundi’s world. Basically, you might see this stuff all over the place on the Stellima blog!
Anyway, language! There are a few basic ways to build words in language, and I want to just briefly define them before moving on, so you know what I’m talking about.
Roots
The root of a word is, well, its core, I guess you could say. It’s the central part of the word, no matter whether it’s a noun or verb, or even adjectives and adverbs. It’s the most basic part of the word, the stem, without any affixes. For example, in the word unhappiness, happy is the root.
Affixes
This is some sort of element that can be added to the beginning, end, or middle of a word to add meaning. There are prefixes at the beginning, suffixes at the end, and infixes in the middle.
To take an example from Aermundi, hydrasphere has sphere as its root, and hydra- is a prefix, meaning water, so this would be a sphere made of water. The meaning of the word is clear to English speakers, and then the story adds context of how that water sphere relates to the world. In this case, it comes from the area of the world dominated by the hydramana (water magic, see the pattern in mana names?), and it is a toy that can be prodded and manipulated but won’t fall apart due to the surface tension of water that the hydramana intensifies.
A common prefix is un-, a common suffix is -ness, and an example of an infix (which are the least well known) is the wonderful addition of fucking to fantastic to make fanfuckingtastic! Here, fantastic is the root, and we’re adding additional meaning with a bit of profanity in the middle.
(Vivian: A thing to note with infixes is that they have rules on where the placement within the stem should be. When it comes to “fucking” as an infix, it is always after a stressed syllable. For example, esti-fucking-mate.)
This is very true, though there are occasional exceptions. While English likes it after stressed syllables, sometimes the infix can get shoved anywhere and still sound decent, such as regumagilation, which is regulation with -magi- as the infix. Is it the best sounding word? Not really, but I wanted an example of this from Aermundi. Regumagilation might on its own be hard to figure out, but when I break it into regulation and -magi-, you can probably figure it out. It’s magic’s regulation! In this case, it refers to the regulation of the body as mana is turned into magic, aka the regulation of creating magic, aka magic’s regulation. Regumagilation!
(Vivian: This is a good example of genitive vs adjective. Magical is the adjective form of magic and thus means “related to magic”, and in this case, using magical regulation would imply more a usage of magic to regulate, while using genitive, magic’s regulation, means that the regulation is affecting the magic itself.)
Those are just some basics which we might come back to! But affixes elaborate the root of a word, and this is where most of the interesting stuff gets with both technobabble and fictoscience. Today, though, is all about fictoscience!
Aermundi Returns
All right, time for a brief worldbuilding review! Aermundi is our beloved planet in a galaxy ruled by mana and the lifeforms that can translate that into magic. There are twelve poles in Aermundi, and various parts of the world are dominated by one of them, with some overlap between them. The only constant is Life mana, or vitamana (following the naming pattern established above with zapamana) which comes from the planet itself and, as you can probably tell from the name, is essential to life. Only things able to translate that mana into power were able to develop into living things, so everything is dependent on it. As life evolved, the ability to shield from and use mana from the other poles also evolved.
In addition to vitamana, there were originally eleven other poles, all named after their effects and understandable to use, which were Fire, Water, Ice, Earth, Air, Metal, Electricity, Light, Darkness, Time, and Space. Even though I establish this pretty well in my initial description of the world, Vivian, being a mathematician, refused to let eleven poles stand. Therefore, we added an additional pole surrounding the planet: Void. This pole drains other mana, and it becomes harder and harder for life to maintain enough mana to survive as the strength of the pole increases. At the center of the pole, it’s a completely barren wasteland. And voila! Twelve poles around the planet, just like Vivian wanted. Zhi made me a pretty diagram even. (Vivian: THERE MUST BE MATHEMATICAL PERFECTION!)
So twelve it is! In my practicum, I developed Water, Light, and Time. In the Character blogs, Vivian and I focus on Space mana for the FTL (faster than light) system. I’ll touch on a few things from those, mostly the names of the illnesses and some of the cures, since those use fictoscience, and I’m going to come back to Water mostly because I like the possibilities there, but mostly I’ll be doing some new ones, like Metal and Electricity.
I’ll focus on the humanoid people on Aermundi as opposed to any other animals. The way people survive is that their bodies turn the mana around them into magic, and their bodies use magic for energy. Complicated? Yes. Why not just draw from mana directly? Because evolution is weird, that’s why! Also because Vivian was really set on including mana, and I really wanted to use magic, so this seemed like a good compromise. Vitamagic sustains people, and then they’ve adapted to the individual pole(s) that rule the area they live in. Most of the other mana is harmful to life, so people have developed defenses, but the mana does still have uses, so some is drawn in.
If people draw in too much mana, their bodies turn it to magic but can’t change it into energy quickly enough, so people can use what I have up until now been calling “external magic.” Through a bit of fictoscience, that will now be known as “exomagic,” which is a pretty basic combination of the suffix exo- (meaning outside) with the root word magic. If you read the practicum on diseases, you’ll see all sorts of things that can go with too much and too little magic and mana, but most people have a healthy balance.
Although it’s a big world to accommodate the twelve poles, the people are generally considered one species, albeit with different adaptations. We’re going to take a fantasy approach here and call them different races, as it’s pretty common to use the term “race” in fantasy to indicate people who, despite being treated as different species with significant physical or psychological differences, would be a common species due to the prevalence of successful interbreeding. This is based on an old understanding of human races, and I want to make it clear that human races are a social construct–there is no biological basis for dividing people into what are commonly considered different races. I’m going with the fantasy version because it’s relatively easy, though. Also, this way I can give the entire species a name, plus the different people within the world who live lives dominated by each pole. So let’s get naming!
Now, I’ve discovered that I’m really bad at coming up with names for a humanoid species and related races. I’ve just been sitting here thinking of possibilities and frankly, they’re all terrible! So I’m going to do what I usually do in fantasy, and that’s come up with some fun neowords, or more specifically, a neo-affix. There will be a blog on neowords eventually, don’t worry! Basically, these are new words that you invent specifically for your world. I’ll keep them somewhat related so you can see where they come from, but they’ll be invented.
People Terminology:
Manalins: the overall people of Aermundi, the species itself, taking Mana and adding -lins, which is the suffix that now refers to people when the root word ends in a vowel. This is plural, hence the -s at the end.
Hydralins: the people who live in areas dominated by Water mana, from Hydra, water, and -ins, which is now the suffix when the root ends in a consonant.
Lurgalins: the people who live in areas dominated by Metal mana, from metallurgic, relating to metal, but just taking part from the middle to make it less predictable, and -ins.
Zappadrins: the people who live in areas dominated by Electricity, since the term we’re using for this is Zap as described earlier, and then it just kinda goes bonkers, though it does end in -ins! No one quite knows where this one came from; it just evolved into a weird form as people spoke it. Recently, some have started to use Zapdrin instead, but this is not yet their official name. It’s causing quite the generational divide, with young people starting to use zappadrin as a slur against the older generation. (By the way, want more slurs? Check out the blogpost we made on them!)
That gets us started with the people! You’ll see some of this come back, and one thing with fictoscience is that the terms are introduced in a moment of quiet, like now, and then repeated so that you, the reader, get used to them and understand them in context. We’ve already introduced quite a few terms throughout this post! So I’ll keep using them, you’ll get used to them, and soon you’ll be talking about the Manalins like that’s the most ordinary word you’ve ever heard!
Technological Advancement and Language
We’ve got the people down, and we’re narrowing down to three poles in particular (plus we’ll deal with vitamana because that’s universal). Let’s get into technology now. Society is quite advanced on Aermundi. They have FTL, after all! As described in the Character blogs, FTL is accomplished through what Vivian describes as an “obelisk system,” where ships with a Space Mana Engine (SME) can jump from one to another because of the runes and mana on and in them. Traveling like this drains mana, especially impacting a person’s life magic, so it can be fatal if it isn’t calculated correctly. Going outside the system is possible, and you basically aim at a large mana source–generally a vitamana source–and hope you make it alive.
For another example of a fictoscience term, there are things in Aermundi called microbelisks. It’s fairly easy to break this down. Micro and obelisk, with the two O’s combined into one. Clearly, this is a very small obelisk, and has something to do with spatimana (Space mana). If you’re wondering why SMEs have Space mana spelled out, it’s because that’s the old-fashioned, formal term for it, not the commonly used casual term. Society is complex, and the language has to reflect little quirks and oddities!
So we have technology, both scientific and magic. Because of this, there are going to be some root words and affixes that are used regularly to mean certain things. Just like we have words that we associate with certain things, so do they. There’s even overlap, since you the reader speak English and I the creator want you to understand without too much difficulty. That’s a key part of fictoscience: you can definitely have neowords or neo-affixes, but you want to limit them so you don’t overwhelm your reader.
I remember in the first draft of my dark fantasy novel, I introduced Trinité, Élóra, Jahl, Amati river, Vadeel, and Élse… all on the first page! Yes, I explained if they were characters or races, and I defined who they all were, but that’s a lot to dump on the reader. When you’re creating your worlds, don’t do this! Space it out, just a word or two at a time, and make sure it’s clear what they mean either through a brief definition or the context. In this post, I’ve given you quite a few terms by now, and I’m about to give you more, but I’ve been spacing them fairly evenly.
Anyway, let’s see what the Manalins have come up with in terms of their technology, both scientific and magical!
Technology Terms
The world that Vivian and I are creating is science fantasy, which is a fun blend of science fiction with some fantasy as well… Hence the name. This list is going to combine the hard, set-in-stone types of things we associate with science here on Earth, and the whimsical terms relevant to the magic system of this world. Some will be familiar, as some terms are just necessary for the level of technology they have.
One nice thing about creating a language and fictoscience is that you don’t have to define all of your words, and you don’t even have to introduce all of them. You just have to establish a structure and make sure people know the meaning of the units, and people can fill in the blanks. For example, I’ve established that the different types of mana are the word “mana” preceded by the term for that pole. As long as the term for the pole is obvious or is used in other contexts, people can figure it out. So if I refer to a lumasphere as a light source, you can infer that it’s from the Light pole, which means that luma is the term, so lumamana. (I’m just realizing that looks a little odd, but the two instances of “ma” in the middle are pronounced differently so it works out loud (Vivian: My dear Mama!). As you can see, the reader can figure it out and make up their own words, so even if you never use the word lumamana, if a reader wanted to talk to someone else about it, they would know the word.
Roots
The roots used are pretty basic, but if you’re using unusual neowords, just make sure to establish the meaning first. In this post, I’m using pretty standard roots, so I don’t think I need to define them.
Affixes
Now some fun ones that might require a little explanation! Here are some affixes to be added at random! Just kidding. Randomly slamming a bunch of these together will get you technobabble. We’re going to carefully craft words that will give us a feel for Aermundi. But here are some to get started!
Magi-: Of or pertaining to magic or mages
Man-: Of or pertaining to mana
Electro-: Of or pertaining to Electricity mana
Zap-: Of or pertaining to Electricity mana
Hydro/a-: Of or pertaining to Water mana
Ferro-: Of or pertaining to Metal mana
Lurgi-: Of or pertaining to Metal mana
Spati-: Of or pertaining to Space mana
Polar-: Of or pertaining to the poles
Bio-: Of or pertaining to Life mana
Vita-: Of or pertaining to Life mana
Luma-: Of or pertaining to Light mana
-anamic: Of or pertaining to the mana particles
-lin/in: Of or relating to people
Nece-: Necessary for life
Physio-: Related to physicality
Ultra-: An immense amount
Multi-: Multiple
Mono-: Single
-itis: Of or pertaining to a disease
Hyper-: Above the usual
Hypo-: Below the usual
Macro-: On a large scale
Micro-: On a microscopic scale
Fictoscience in Practice
Now that we have a bunch of these, let’s start putting them together in the context that people actually live in. Some terms are common, and everyone in Aermundi knows them, but some are more specialized. To help us understand how these work in real life, I’ll set up a scene so that you can see how it plays out. Remember that in fictoscience, everything appears slowly, but since I don’t have too much space in this blogpost, it’ll move a little faster. I’ve done my best to establish as many of these as I could previously in this post, which is what I would have been doing throughout the story if this were a full-fledged story.
We’re not going to use Bob, since he’s off on an adventure of his own. Instead, we’re going to take a Zapdrin from Aermundi named Linya (Vivian: THIEF!), meaning child of the people. Beautiful name, very meaningful, hence it also being the name of one of Vivian’s characters. 😛 And so pretty! She’s in her early thirties, right on the brink of the age shift of using zapdrin versus zappodrin. From an early age, it was clear she was an electromage whose body required less mana to function, leaving her with an excess that she could channel into exomagic. That adds a little more fantasy to our story! However, she’s a hard-working doctor who uses her exomagic to help others while also relying on traditional technology and medical equipment.
The following scene occurs at the climax of this story, so all of these terms have been well-established at this point. However, I choose this point so that you can see how integrated the language can become once you’ve introduced it and used it. Fictoscience is just the way that they speak, and many of these words are everyday occurrences. Others are more specialized, as Linya has knowledge that the other characters don’t about the scientific side of things. You, as the wonderful reader, have access to everything! So enjoy the first longer scene, and we’ll discuss after!
Sample Scene 1: The Day Everything Changed
The sweet scent of vitablooms filled the hallway at the Zaponelle Hospital, and Linya inhaled deeply, pausing to peek in at the room where a loving parent brought the flowers every day. Legend said that the flowers helped with regumagilation of the body as the vitamana was translated into magic for the body. No evidence supported this theory, but it persisted.
“Are you coming to visit me?” A child’s voice piped up from inside, and a soft smile crossed Linya’s lips.
“Of course!”
She entered the room and drew the blinds so the light could fill the dank space. The polaffect of lumamana was weak here, but there was still some benefit. Besides, who wanted to sit in a dark room all day?
The child crossed their legs and clasped their hands together, looking at her eagerly. “Whatcha got for me today?”
Carefully, Linya retrieved a microbelisk and handed it to them. “Be very careful. This is what the spatilins use to travel between obelisks.”
Their face lit up. “Could I travel, too?”
She laughed. “No, this is far too small. But I thought you might enjoy it. See the runes?”
For the next few minutes, she showed them the day’s present. Before long, though, the present was set with the others: a zapolace meant to be worn around the neck to protect against excess zapomana, a hydrasphere she traded from a Hydrin to cheer up her small charge, a set of ferrodice with numbers engraved in the Lurgic alphabet. Nothing could distract them for long, and soon the child sighed.
“When will I get better?”
“Hypozapitis is a long-term condition,” Linya said, letting her hand travel over the zapolace before turning to face them. “We’re only now learning the electanamics of it. The other day, I–”
She stopped, seeing the child’s eyes already glazing over. They had heard enough of her research. They just wanted some monocure that would treat everything all at once and be done with it. Unfortunately, it wasn’t that easy.
A knock at the door interrupted her attempts to talk about something more casual. The parent gestured for her to come into the hall. She obeyed, heart sinking. As usual, they clutched a bunch of vitablooms and even a biocharm. Nothing could convince them that it wasn’t the vitamagic that was the problem.
They narrowed their eyes. “You haven’t found anything, have you? Why are you here, not researching? You’re the top electromage in the field, and you’re wasting your time bringing presents to my child?”
“Interacting with patients is part of my Necelin Vows,” she snapped. “I will do what is necessary for life, and that includes protecting my patient’s emotional state.”
The parent scowled. “I can do that. You go do your job.”
This wasn’t an argument she could win, she knew from bitter experience, so she headed up to the lab, flipping on the lights with a flash of exomagic. If she didn’t use her excess magic, she would suffer the smallest hints of hyperzapitis, the opposite of her patient whose body desperately needed more zapomagic but couldn’t produce it on its own. Fortunately, Linya’s condition could be easily solved with exomagic: just expel the excess magic into the outside world and let the body return to a balanced state.
She pulled out her microscope and slid a section of her latest sample underneath to study the electanamics of the cells as the zapomana stubbornly resisted the body’s efforts to regumagilate it. A spark leapt from her hand, and she gasped as her exomagic surged, charging everything around her for a brief moment until it faded. Good thing no one was around! She hadn’t lost control like that since her teenage years.
Returning her attention to the slide, she noticed an oddly charged vitanamic element. Normally, particles were monopolar, but this was definitely absorbing lumamana, and it was definitely exuding zapomagic.
Her breath caught. That discharge… Could it be? Could it indicate multipolaranatrons? The particle was known to change mana types and had been observed elsewhere, but never with electricity. As she watched, the reactions continued to regumagilate enough zapomagic to restore the health of the sample.
Hands trembling, she stared, and plotted, and soon knew exactly how to replicate this on a large scale. Whatever force had led her exomagic to explode right then, she would never know, but this promised to be a turning point in all Zapdrin history.
Analysis
So that’s our scene! Nice, right? How confused were you? Probably a little, because that was a lot of fictoscience terms stuffed in together, but almost all had already been introduced, and the few that hadn’t hopefully either had obvious meanings or were given enough definition to make sense. I mostly wanted to show how, if you introduce things well, you can really load up on your terms. Now, parts of this would veer into technobabble if the terms hadn’t been introduced, the patterns or words and the roots and affixes hadn’t been explained, and if you first said a lot of this really rushed together right at the climax.
Notice that I do introduce a new term right at the climax–multipolaranatrons–but the various parts of that word should be established by now or easy to figure out. Multi-, well, everyone should know that, polar, relating to poles, and the new one, -anatrons, relating to mana particles as a noun. This multipolaranatron is a brand new particle that’s never existed before, so it’s fitting that it should get a brand new word, but it has to be based on your existing system of naming. Don’t be afraid to use fictoscience in climatic moments, just make sure it makes sense.
Now, some clever people will have noticed that -anamic refers to particles, and, well, you can’t see particles in a microscope. Yeah… um… Vivian pointed this out because zhi’s smart like that, and I didn’t even notice. I was too wrapped up in the scene and what I envisioned, and I didn’t even realize that my chosen affix didn’t actually fit what I was trying to say. That can be a major problem when you’re dealing with unusual affixes! I wrote this fairly quickly, so hopefully I’m excused from that lapse, and it illustrates something vitally important: revision! If you can, get other people to read your work so they can tell you if they can follow the terms. They sometimes spot errors a lot better than you can, because the definitions are so fresh to them. Or you can ask someone knowledgeable like Vivian to edit your work (zhi helped with a few other things, too). At the very least, study your words and affixes, and check when you use them. Be careful!
(Vivian: Yepp! An important thing when you do fictoscience is to understand the general ideas involved in the fields you dab into. You are of course under no circumstances rquired to follow it precisely because… the ficto- bit. But if you for example talk about particles visible to the eye in a microscope, and you don’t give it the treatment it deserves, such as how extraordinary it truly is, most will see your own ignorance on display. As I often recommend, a good wikipedia research session helps a lot!)
So aside from me bungling that, what else can we tell from this scene? First, there’s a distinction between the everyday words she uses with the child and parent and the more specialized words she uses on her own, and this shift is marked when the child’s eyes glaze over once she starts using those terms. That’s a clear indication that the language is getting outside of the listener’s ability to understand, and a pretty easy one, too. The differences in language (other than that brief moment) are also reflected in location and who she’s with. Out in the hospital with ordinary people, she uses ordinary terms. In the privacy of her lab, she gets more technical.
Now, do we the reader necessarily know the terms are casual or formal just from looking at the words themselves? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Here, we see -anamic showing up in the privacy of the lab and in the context of her sample. This is a more complicated suffix and less obviously linked to our world. I got it based on atomic, and switched the “ato” from atom to “ana” from mana. But that’s not as clear as hydra- or vita-, and because of that, it’s a little more obscure and fits the formal, scientific set of language. Casual words should be easy to understand, but if you’ve got a specialist talking or thinking, you can get technical.
The main thing I want you to take away from this is how easily people use terms from their world. You don’t have to contort yourself trying to avoid the terms just because you worry your audience won’t understand them. Establish them, yes, but then have some faith in your readers. Besides, after reading the same word in a couple of different contexts, they’ll figure it out! If it’s something people in your world would say or a term they would use–and this is generally true for any common word or concept–then you should have it in your story without hesitation. Just don’t load it on too quickly, make sure your words have meaning in our world and theirs, and above all, be consistent. You can have exceptions to the rule (like zappodrins/zapdrins), but they need to clearly be exceptions to a rule that is established. If you have too many exceptions, people will have no clue what you’re trying to do and be unable to piece together your meaning. As I tell Vivian all the time, consistency is vital.
(Vivian: A thing that always helps establish words or affixes is the said pattern and continued repetition of it. Exceptions should generally be established well after the consistency is established. Also, ANNE IS MEAN! 😩😜)
Sample Scene 2: A Quiet Moment
Crimson gold flared along the horizon as a streak of zapomana flashed through the air, accompanied moments later by the familiar fieragun crack of thunder that slowed into a deep rumble ricocheting between the trees like aeromana fleeing from the deep vibrations. Linya wrapped her arms around her torso and leaned against the rough bark of a physipine, sitting in the hollowed out place in its elevated roots that she had found as a child, feet dangling until her toes grazed the earth and absorbed the faint echoes of the thunder’s wrath. The wide, round leaves huddled in shelved layers above shielded her from the rain beginning to fall.
She came here to clear her mind, to let the vitamana wash through her, and this time was no different. The long days were getting to her. Time passed like a chronostone skipping over the inky still surface of the void. The repetitive nature of life was getting to her: meeting after meeting, punctuated only by formal dinners as everyone fell over themselves to congratulate her in tones of barely disguised jealousy as sharp as the fangs of the ferrowolves.
Another flash, another crack, and she tucked her feet into the tangled roots that grew in a thicket above the ground where she could be safe. She touched the microbelisk hanging around her neck. Her patient, long since healed, had given it back to her in thanks, symbolizing that space was no impediment to their bond. A moving gesture, and it gave her strength now as she gathered her resources. One more day of this, then she could escape back into her lab like lumamana slipping through the wooden slats of a traditional home to curl by the fire. All she wanted was to research on her own without pressure, but she would never have that again.
The microbelisk sparkled as a single raindrop penetrated her shelter and landed on the glazed black surface, filling the runes engraved on it. Nothing was safe, not even here. She shut her eyes, and for a long moment, wished for emptimana to take her into the void. A deep breath, then she opened her eyes.
Time to face one last day before freedom.
Analysis
Okay, I have to be honest, I added this mostly because I wanted to try out some figurative and symbolic language using Aermundi’s terms. It’s a nice little quiet moment, and most of the terms here are new, but should be understood given the rules we’ve established.
Three new types of mana and elements are introduced in this scene, though ideally they would have already been introduced. We have a fieragun, with fiera- as the prefix and fairly obviously related to fire, especially paired with gun. Chrono- should be understandable as time to most English speakers, and while you might not know what a chronostone is, you can imagine time skipping along the void, especially since I following it with repetitive days (the still surface) punctuated by events (the chronostone skittering on the surface). The last new one is emptimana, which you can hopefully infer to be empty mana or Void mana, especially when paired with the frequent use of ‘void’ throughout.
Physipine and ferrowolves are the other two new terms, but they have familiar affixes and roots along with brief descriptions to confirm guesses as to their meanings. So while we haven’t seen them before, they shouldn’t throw the reader off too much.
Using metaphors and similes in relation to your fictoscience allows you to delve much deeper into them and show connotations and relationships to other things. You can be straightforward and denotative all you want, but people crave artistic expression, and the people in your worlds will have beautiful expressions using and describing your words. Have fun with it!
(Vivian: People also talk in metaphors in general. Electricity to this day is still visualized as a fluid despite not being anything like it. This is primarily because it is close enough for the everyday general man. This can help convey your ideas for it even if it is not 100% accurate.)
Lessons Learned
From these scenes, you can see how fictoscience can be used to make your story feel more lived in. There are a couple of lessons I hope you walk away with!
Maintain Character/Narrator Voice
When you’re trying to come up with terms, don’t think of what would be cool, or what you’d like to add. Think of what the characters themselves would use when living in their world. This often requires a great deal of worldbuilding and also good understanding of how your characters speak and, if in close point of view, think. If you’re in distant or omniscient point of view, you need to know your narrator’s voice. I have a post about dialogue that covers the various elements of voice, but they’re worth mentioning here to see how they relate to your world’s terminology.
First, and most important, is context. Now, if this is the narrator, then the context is probably sharing the story in an impartial manner with the reader, so you’ll have to anticipate an average reader to know what audience you’re dealing with (even though you want to be broad, there will be some things like genre and age group that you should know, and read here for some genre conventions). For characters, look at what’s going on around them. People speak differently depending on audience and circumstance. Talking to a friend in a casual setting? You’re unlikely to use super formal, complicated words. But are they also a scientist and the two of you like to chat about work? Well, then maybe you would be talking about electanamics and regumagilation. At work you almost certainly would, but if you’re in certain professions, you wouldn’t want to use jargon.
(Vivian: Fun story, when I went to university to get mathematics degrees, I overheard some math professors talking about the latest physics discovery that was announced but using mathematics terms instead. It was funny, but unless you are familiar with the terminology, it is gibberish and not funny at all.)
I’m definitely someone for whom the math jargon would have fallen flat! For me, one of my specialties as a professor is video game pedagogy, but most people outside education don’t know what pedagogy is (it means how we teach, basically). And when I talk to instructional design professors about the subject, the conversation can quickly get abstract. When I talk to other people, I use regular language. Your characters should be making the same judgments at all times.
Another thing to consider is education level. This might seem obvious, but needs to be mentioned. The child in the first scene does not know about electanamics and doesn’t care. The parent doesn’t either. But the parent probably has their area of expertise that Linya would be lost hearing about. Some characters are curious and learn about all sorts of subjects, and some stick to what they need to survive. Figure out where your character falls on that spectrum to figure out what terms they would be likely to use. If it’s not something they’d know a specialized term for, use regular English, which can be assumed as the default language.
Offensive language can be a fun one to play with! In Vivian and my blogpost on the subject, we talk about making your own words and phrases, and this is a great place to be imaginative. In the world of Aermundi, what would likely be a swear word? Maybe something like zapp, since that has a nice sound to it as well, and ties into zappadrin slowly becoming a slur. Meaning-wise it works because you’re cursing the electricity part of things which I’m sure people do all the time. I’d place it as equivalent to fuck, because it has the same punch. So have fun here, but think of the words you already have and the roots and affixes you have, and draw on that so that your swear words make sense even if they’re abbreviated or otherwise altered.
Finally, we have plain old personality. Some characters are always formal, some characters always swear. Some have different comfort levels in different contexts than other characters. For example, I hate jargon, so I don’t tend to talk like that (other than the word pedagogy) even around other professors or at conferences. The papers I’ve published are in a more conversational style very unlike most papers and about equivalent to these blog posts which, while admittedly formal for a blog, is definitely not what you’d expect from a peer-reviewed journal. That’s an example of how a character’s personal preference can come into play. So get to know your characters and what language they’re likely to use regardless of other factors!
Make Everything Meaningful
You’ve hopefully figured this out, but all of your words have to mean something and develop the world in some way. Try to have some words that loosely correlate to English roots and affixes so that people can get a feel for what’s going on, but you can absolutely make up neowords and neo-affixes as long as you establish them early and often and use them consistently and in the same manner. Consistency is key! Honestly, that should be my slogan. I don’t say that nearly enough. I guess I’m not consistent about saying it. 🤔
To avoid falling into the trap of technobabble, make sure to introduce your terms early and often, but slowly! Just one or two at a time, allow a breather while you adapt, then add more. To tie this to video game design, when you introduce a new ability, you don’t immediately add another. You give the player a chance to use the ability and get used to it (or at least most good games do this; there are always exceptions). I attempted to do the same in this blog, for the most part introducing a term or two at a time until the big infodumps that were the affixes list and the scenes. You wouldn’t do a list in your book, and by the time you got to those scenes at the climax and denouement, all of those terms would have been familiar.
Your words need that consistency, but they also have to make sense within the world. Again, don’t make words for the sake of making words. They have to correlate with things people would actually have terms for. If it’s something significant to them or specific to your world, then yes, have terms. If it's something ordinary and similar to Earth, just use English. Don’t overwhelm your reader with meaningless babble. Save it for when it’s meaningful.
Summa Summarum
This is a practicum–putting something into practice, since not all of you might be familiar with that word!–so what did we get from our practice? For me as the creator, I gained a much deeper understanding of Aermundi and how things work there. I know what these characters are like, what’s normal to them and what’s specialized, and what’s specific to this world. I can talk about the world better because I have terms for things they would have terms for. Do you know how annoying it was always talking about life mana and electricity mana? Such long phrases! But vitamana and zapomana are short, simple, and clearly illustrate that these are such common things in this world that people have terms they use all the time.
When you’re developing your worlds, look to the language to help you, and take advantage of fictoscience. Aermundi is a more complex world, and future posts about it will be a lot easier to write! Whatever terms you come up with, be consistent and have fun!
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Copyright ©️ 2024 Anne Winchell. Original ideas belong to the respective authors. Generic concepts such as fictoscience, roots, and affixes are copyrighted under Creative Commons with attribution, and any derivatives must also be Creative Commons. However, specific ideas such as Aermundi, the world, the specific words and terms, the characters, the analysis, and all language or exact phrasing are individually copyrighted by the respective authors. Contact them for information on usage and questions if uncertain what falls under Creative Commons. We’re almost always happy to give permission. Please contact the authors through this website’s contact page.
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