Well, it’s been a few years, and I’m curious again—there’s surely been ample creative work done in the intervening period, new faces have joined us, people might have missed the original, etc. So, I thought the time might just be ripe to revisit the subject.
So, I’m asking again…for those writers here who’ve created fictional ships, what have you named them?
Marine vessels, airships, and space/star ships all count.
As for myself, I’m afraid, the only one that immediately comes to mind is from an online alternate history story I’ve collaborated a bit on, and is a simple renaming…the IJN’s carrier Akagi, sold to a foreign navy in the early 1940s (under somewhat exotic circumstances), and now serving as the HMAS Newcastle. Ba-dum-bum.
I’ve only once written a short story that contained a vessel. It was a sail boat, and I named it Easy To Slip after one of my favorite Little Feat songs.
I’m fond of Renaissance music, especially the English “nymphs and shepherds” cycle, so, in some of my starships and empires SF, I’ve had ships with names like “Philomela,” “Fair Phyllis,” “Daphne,” and the like. I had two fighter-carriers named “Tegula” and “Later” – Latin for “bricks and mortar.”
In a role-playing-game, a friend of mine named her Free Trader starship “Penny Lane,” after the Beatles song. When I wrote up the game as a story, I changed this to “Coinroader.”
I also invented a fictional Trafalgar-class British nuclear submarine, and named it the Tobruk. In the same book, there was a fictional Italian destroyer named Lago di Garda.
The current book has a schooner called the Brazenface. Besides being too 18th-century to resist, it’s listed as a synonym of Adventuress, the real-life schooner that inspired it.
Slight diversion, but a fairly well-known sff writer named the commander of a ship after me. Bad things happened to said commander. (I think the ship was eaten by a singularity shortly after the cameo.)
Author didn’t mean anything by it, just reached for the first name at hand and we’d been arguing on FIDOnet or Usenet.
It was never published (because it was crap), but I once wrote a science fiction short story featuring a starship called the Tennyson. IIRC, the entire class of warships was named after poets.
A seagoing trader that often filled its hold with sugar: Honeybee
A swift, small seagoing messenger ship/small warship (schooner): Seaspray
A swift warship (brig), in pursuit of Seaspray: Daggerfish
The last four are all age of sail ships.
A huge, cylindrical spaceship, rotating to provide artificial gravity, carrying the first colonists outside of Earth system on a decades-long journey to another star system: Aotea
Aotea is a mythical canoe that carried the first Maori settlers to New Zealand, in Maori mythology.
Fictional ship-writers - Here’s a chance to turn fiction into reality.
The Sydney Harbour ferry fleet is taking on six new vessels and is running a naming competition. Apart from Ferry McFerryFace I - VI, which I suspect will make a strong showing, some of the suggestions above would make mighty fine names to be crossing the greatest harbour in the world.
