: Re: Potential confusion: referring to home planet as "Earth" I'm writing a science fiction story and it's based in another galaxy, colonised by humans originally on a geographically equivalent "Earth".

@Sarah872

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Rule of thumb: you want to avoid confusing the reader. A confused reader is not enjoying your story.

But, that doesn't mean "never do anything that might confuse the reader." It means, "if you want to do something that might confuse the reader, make sure to take steps to make sure it's not confusing."

It sounds as though, in your particular case, the name choice wasn't particularly crucial to your world-building, so just changing the name is a perfectly easy and simple solution. I'd like to talk for a moment about the more interesting case - where referring to the planet as "Earth" is important in some way, and the author is interested in keeping that.

First of all, there's a lot of examples in SF of appropriating words like "Earth" or "human" for other planets and races. This can be done for various reasons; I think most common is to get across that these people see themselves as normal. Aliens from planet Glooglag won't think of themselves as exotic "Glooglagians," as far as they're concerned, they're just people. They might even call themselves "Glooglagians," but that word, to them, means what "human" means to us.

My experience with such stories is that this kind of substitution can definitely work. It creates a certain dissonance, but it's really not a tough concept for a reader to wrap his head around, so as long as the dissonance is clearly the author's intention, and he makes it clear pretty much upfront that "Earth" isn't our Earth, this is definitely workable. SF readers are particularly open to unusual world-building and re-definition of common concepts; if you tell them the planet's called "Earth," then they'll usually take that in stride - particularly if the unusual naming serves some purpose which, by the end of the story, they'll come to appreciate.

So, in summary:

If you're not trying to achieve any particular effect by the "confusing" naming, it's simpler to avoid it. Just like you wouldn't arbitrarily decide to name two characters "Bob," even though in real life that'd be pretty plausible.
If you are trying to achieve a particular effect, go for it. This isn't something so confusing that it should stop you. Just make sure the reader understands what you want to be clear.
If there are interactions between "New Earth" and "Old Earth," the double-naming can actually do some pretty awesome things - much in the same way that a time story where present-time Bob meets future Bob, or a family drama where Bob Jr. faces off with his dad. In this case, you've got to work harder to make sure your readers always understand exactly who you're referring to - but, with some effort, that's usually quite possible to achieve by attention to context, additional tags that are specific to one or the other, etc. So you can decide for yourself whether the trade-off is worthwhile.

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