Probably the most famous new word coined in science fiction is “robot”, in the 1920 work of the Czech writer Karel Capek ‘: RUR (“Rossum’s universal robots”). I do not know any Czech, but I dare say that “robot” comes from a root similar to Russian. planer, to work. Here, therefore, instead of a word that is completely made up out of nowhere. we have a new form of an existing word, which expresses a new idea.
“Robot” is therefore a path along the spectrum from neologisms that are mere convenient abbreviations (like “mascon” for “mass concentration”), to really new words and ideas. (Of course, a writer can also invent a new word to express a old idea, although this is usually pretty useless. I think Larry Niven in Ringworld engineers I made up a new word for sex, although I can’t remember what it was and don’t bother looking for it.)
Even if they are mostly just abbreviations, new words can offer a new bias on previously expressed ideas.
Perhaps an example of this is “pauk”, in Brian Aldiss’ Helliconia Spring. “Pauk” means “trance in which one can communicate with the spirits of his ancestors”. Or in which think one can … because it is not clear, from the Helliconia trilogy as a whole, if pauk is a genuine phenomenon of soul contact or if it is a mental illusion that exists at a certain stage of society. The latter interpretation is suggested by the fact that the “spirits” of the deceased apparently change their moods, from bad mood to bad-tempered, as civilization advances.
A more vague term, but possibly more original, is the Martian word “grok” in Heinlein. Stranger in a strange land. If you assimilate, you are tuning into an ineffable fullness; It is a mystical concept, perhaps too vague to be useful, but we can at least say to its advantage that there was previously no obvious equivalent in the English language.
Moving from the abstract to the concrete, a derivation of an existing word used for a new purpose is “draining” in Robert Silverberg A time of change. Drainer is a member of a despised profession, a kind of secular confessor, to whom one verbally ventures in private, to get rid of stress, in a culture that prohibits the overt use of the personal pronoun “I”.
Jack Vance coined new words for the days of the week in Araminta Stationsimply to avoid the incongruous incongruity of using our Friday, Saturday, etc. familiar, in the context of a distant planet tens of thousands of years in the future, despite the fact that its inhabitants are human, descendants of us and culturally similar to us. He was right to do so. The words you chose are beautiful additions to the atmosphere of your story.
An interesting example of an author who has deliberately avoided neologism is Gene Wolfe, who in an appendix to the first volume of his epic of the far future The book of the new sun has declared:
By translating this book – originally composed in a language that has not yet come into existence – into English, I could easily have saved myself a great deal of work by resorting to made-up terms; in no case have I done it. Thus, in many cases I have been forced to replace yet undiscovered concepts with their closest 20th century equivalents. Words like peltast, androgynous, and jubilant they are substitutions of this type and are intended to be more suggestive than definitive.
He is right; the effect is highly suggestive, and his decision not to go down the path of neologism is a linguistic triumph that leads to a lavish feast of prose texture. But then he’s writing about an Earth in the distant future. If he had been writing about another world, the neologisms would have been more appropriate.
The Ooranye Project has found it necessary to invent new words for some Uranian concepts. Here, for example, there are two political neologisms found on the giant planet:
“Lremd” has connotations of luck and skill; It could be defined as the gift of being in the right place at the right time, of being able to fight your way through a multitude of events without metaphorically bumping into or jostling other people. You could call it built-in personal radar. The Noads, rulers of the city, must possess this quality. It allows them to occasionally indulge in adventures as if they were private persons and to stay in close contact with everyday life. Perhaps Rousseau’s ambiguous idea of the “general will” in Of the social contract, an idea that in our world is impractical for any gathering larger than a group of friends. Thanks to the lremd, the Ooranye government can be non-bureaucratic, not just free but free and easy, in a way that would be impossible on Earth!
“Arelk” is just as bad as “lremd” is good. Arelk could be defined as a “political hardening of the arteries”, whereby a system of government degenerates into bureaucratic rigidity and eventual tyranny. Arelk is one of the phenomena most feared by the Lremd-loving Ooranye peoples.