If you’re anything like me, reading the above will have felt like walking across broken glass. The conspicuously ‘futuristic’ word (henceforth known as a FutureWord) is one of the laziest shortcuts in the science-fiction writer’s toolbox: look, it screams, we’re in THE FUTURE! No worldbuilding or subtlety needed – if people see two words mashed awkwardly together, they can safely assume that the story they’re reading takes place at least 50 years from the present.

I wish I could say that this kind is thing is used only by less talented writers of speculative fiction, but even luminaries like Margaret Atwood have resorted to it. I had to try hard not to roll my eyes every time I came across the word ‘Econowife’ in The Handmaid’s Tale, while Oryx and Crake is so stuffed full of FutureWords that it becomes difficult to read in places.

What I find particularly baffling about all of this is that it seems to have become a near-universal SF trope without anybody noticing; in the future, we have collectively decided, goofy compound words will be all the rage. Does your dystopian future run on a synthetic oil substitute? It will of course be called ‘SynthOil’. Do the people keep in touch with some sort of wireless communication device? Hey presto: call them wi-coms. Video screens, which we already have a name for, will become (God help us) ‘vidscreens’.

I have no idea why so many people do this. Think of recent technological developments today: all right, ‘e-reader’ could have come straight out of a SF novel, but where else is that the case? ‘Bluetooth’ hardly sounds like something that lets computers and phones and keyboards interact wirelessly. ‘Wi-fi’ actually is a shortening of two longer words, but it isn’t descriptive; if you heard it for the first time out of context, you probably wouldn’t immediately guess what it is. Electric cars are apparently going to be referred to as ‘EVs’ as opposed to, say, Elecars or Ecars. And what the hell would you assume a ‘Blu-ray’ was if nobody told you? It sounds more like some sort of cheesy laser gun. (Oh, there’s another one: ‘lasgun’. Cringe.)

There is no reason why your futuristic vocabulary must sound explicitly ‘futuristic’. For one thing, it might not make sense in context – if your story takes place in a post-apocalytpic wasteland, it’s unlikely that your characters will speak as if they ingested a year’s worth of Wired magazine. They’re also not necessarily going to have ‘futuristic’-sounding slang. The main character of The Knife of Never Letting Go uses the word ‘ruddy’ constantly, even though it’s a distinctly old-fashioned British term and he lives on another planet. Isaac Asimov did something similar in one of his Foundation novels, in which he envisions a particular planet developing a kind of retro-future Victorian society following the collapse of a galactic empire. Sure, they have holograms and spaceships and all manner of other advanced technology, but they also have gentleman scientists running around saying things like ‘We’ll all be comfortably in our graves by then’. In both of these cases, the characters’ vocabulary and speech patterns just work; all right, it might not make perfect linguistic sense for the word ‘ruddy’ to come back into fashion on an alien planet, but it works perfectly given what the rest of the planet’s culture is like. Weighing down your dialogue with a lot of FutureWords has the exact opposite effect, because it feels artificial and forced.

(And while we’re on the topic of swearing: please, just have your characters say ‘damn’ if you want them to use a mild expletive. Nobody will mind.)

So the next time you’re trying to come up with a name for something in your SF story, stop and ask yourself two questions: first, is it necessary to rename something we already have a perfectly good word for (in the vast majority of cases I’d say ‘no’), and second, does the new word I’ve come up with sound like something people would actually say?

Who knows, we might be able to get rid of those pesky FutureWords once and for all.