Trope-a-Day: Naming Your Colony World

Naming Your Colony World: Examples of most of them exist in various places, although the Imperial Grand Survey works really hard to discourage people from naming anything New Anything, to the point of refusing to register the names, on the grounds that in deep time, eventually naming things New New New New New Whatever is too damn silly for words.

Beyond that, most of them are literary or mythological references, with a smattering of egopoli and symbolic names.  Numbered names are generally reserved for unexplored systems (most of them beyond the periphery of the Associated Worlds), and star names are generally not found per se, although generally, settled systems tend to be referred to, even on star charts, by the name of the primary settled world/main habitat in the system, rather than that of the star; which is not to say that the star doesn’t retain its own name separate from that of the world in formal usage, of course.

4 thoughts on “Trope-a-Day: Naming Your Colony World

    • Well, for a start, they’re much more likely to name the star, give the planets roman-numeral designations based on that, and then insist on using it whatever anyone else might think including/especially the people who live there.

      (Bureaucratic mentality. Doesn’t matter where you go in the Galaxy…)

      • For whatever reason, I had gotten the impression that they were naming planets, but using the roman numerals as a translation convention of for New, New New, New New New… e.g. there was a Vontok, Vontok II, Vontok III, etc etc buried in their 8000 worlds.

        As for bureaucratic mentality, there is actually an excellent book on the history of the topic, and how it has influenced history. If you have not read it, I recommend it to your attention: “Seeing Like A State”

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