Terra
(Did you mean a fanzine by Patricia K. Adams or a club?)
Terra is the planet Earth, as commonly named in science fiction. A person from Earth is therefore a Terran, which sounds much better than Earthling, likely the reason sf writers adopted it.
The use, in English, of the Latin word for land as an alternate name for this planet has been traced to the 19th century. Terra Mater, however, was a primeval Roman earth goddess, so it stands to reason that this direct translation to Mother Earth was in use much earlier.
The earliest use anyone has found, according to the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, is in an 1871 lecture, “Science & Revelation,” by Robert Payne Smith, an Oxford don and Anglican priest:
Now, let us suppose ourselves philosophers come, we will say, from the planet Jupiter, on a mission intrusted to us by the Jovians, to examine and report upon the nature of the creatures which people the four inferior planets, Terra, Venus, Mercury, and Mars.
His use suggests his audience would have been familiar with the name.
The earliest stfnal use of Terrawas in “Visit to Moon” by George Griffith (Pearson’s Magazine, March 1900): “Well, after all, if you find the United States, or even the planet Terra, too small for you, we’ve always got the fields of Space open to us.”
- Terra entry at the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction.
- Terran entry at the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction.
- Earthling entry at the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction.
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