I've written before about naming things in fiction (or worldbuilding, if you will), and I've written, albeit somewhat narrowly about a couple specific fictional worlds, about the default whiteness of the future. Now I'm going to tie those two threads together: When dreaming up a science-fiction setting that's somewhere in our ostensible future, how should one name things and people? What kind of pitfalls are there?
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The first of the latter is obvious, already discussed in my second link above: Don't just project your own cultural context into the future. Even setting aside how unrealistic and chauvinistic this is, it's boring as hell, because writers have been doing it forever. A ton of classic SF is like this, including some of our most beloved and influential works, like Star Trek, which committed the cardinal (if not original) sin of having all humans be from Space America and using alien species to represent foreign cultures. Despite not being set in our future, Star Wars did much the same—the good humans are mostly white Americans, the bad humans are most white Brits, and (even before the most egregious racial caricatures of Japanese and Jamaican people arrived in The Phantom Menace) the aliens are foreign.
So, you know, don't do that. But what are the alternatives? You've always got “just make it up” as an option—separate your future setting so far in time or space from our world that the traces of existing human cultures are gone or at least illegible. But that's actually very difficult, because it's really hard to imagine a culture entirely disconnected from your own. Language is such a powerful vector of culture that, you know, how can you write anything in English and not bring a bunch of Anglo-American cultural baggage with you?
Easier (and consequently more popular) is to think about how we get from our present day (or maybe our past, in an alternate-timeline setting) to your future, populate your setting with people descended from the people of the present, and use their names (or names derived from those, or otherwise from their cultures, if you want to get fancy with it). And it's just good for the setting in general, for your understanding of what you've imagined, to have a sense of the transition from now to then, rather than “the future will be just like now, but with phasers and warp travel and no money.”
A couple examples of how other folks have done this:
The names of the pilots in the game Brigador communicate a lot of the backstory. It's not too strict, not too didactic, but the patterns are easy enough to see—a lot of the Nobreans have Brazilian, or plausibly Brazilian, names (Portuguese, German, Japanese, etc.); the Spacers have a bunch of Finnish and (posh) English ones. This is a universe where the Global North and Global South both went to space, but at different times and in different relationships to capital. It's sketched out pretty loosely, but it's highly effective.
The Expanse does something similar (caveat: I've watched the show but haven't read the books). To some extent, the population of the Solar System is just an extrapolation from the Earth's current population—there are people of Chinese and Indian descent everywhere, including some of the most powerful figures of the setting—but there are are some specific touches that tell part of the backstory. Indian and American (specifically Texan) influence shape the culture of Mars, and the show's casting of Belter characters makes clear, in an understated way, that the most exploited people of the future are the descendants of the most marginalized of today (the two most prominent roles for Black actors on the show are Belters, and Belter extras and minor roles lean non-white more than characters on Earth or Mars).
And there's Dune, of course, which does some bigtime handwaving about the 20,000-year gap between its publication and its setting but is still explicit (in a way that the films have, unfortunately, somewhat effaced) about the cultural descent of its characters, particularly the Fremen, who represent a purposefully, conservatively preserved Arab culture (albeit with a few other influences; “Sietch Tabr” is derived from two Cossack terms) where other people have gone through more of a melting pot. Other terms in the setting suggest the wider influence of Arabic (bashar, jihad, caid, amal, etc.) as well as Persian (padishah, siridar), Turkish (kanly), and various Western European languages (landsraad, levenbrech, faufreluches). In medicine (the Suk school), religion (prana-bindu), and science (axlotl, s'tori) we see Asian and Native American influences, but the military–political feudal hierarchy clearly has foundations built on European and Middle Eastern cultures; we also see this in family names (Atreides is Greek, Harkonnen is Finnish, etc.).
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Now, if you're imagining the future of humanity, as those examples suggest, you have a bunch of options, and they depend a little on the scope of what you're creating. You got a cosmopolitan space empire with relative freedom of movement, and you don't want to do any extra legwork? You can probably just extrapolate from Earth's present-day demographics and call it a day. Lots of Indian names, lots of Chinese names, lots of Hispanic names, you're good. And if you're looking at a fairly narrow setting, like a single colony planet, just pick a couple groups you find interesting. The colony was established by a Franco-Congolese corporation, the first wave of colonists were Congolese and Filipino, and they later brought in some Egyptian specialists to work on an agricultural project. There's a francophone elite, most people speak a new creole, there's an Arabic-speaking minority, maybe you've got some religious groupings that cut across class lines in interesting ways, etc.
In between, though—say you're developing a whole sector for a Mothership (or Stars Without Number) campaign with a dozen systems, a whole bunch of planets and moons, a whole future history to think about. Who originally settled this place, and for what purpose? How many independent settlements were there? Were there multiple waves of colonization or waves of immigration to established colonies? You can get way out in the weeds on this, if it tickles you (as always in worldbuilding), and imagine secondary and tertiary cultures developing from present-day societies and then meeting on the extrasolar frontier and influencing each other in new and different ways.
But you can also keep it pretty simple. Think of that racist-ass backstory for Starlancer and Freelancer. The setting for the latter being almost entirely American, British, German, and Japanese (with a few Mediterranean pirates on the margins) may be terrible, but the mechanical premise works for quickly spooling up a playable region of space. Pick origins for three or four original colonies of whatever flavor (pure corporate feudalism, a mix of state and corporate identities, whatever—it depends a lot on where your setting lands on the continuum from hard SF to space fantasy), bring in some second- and third-wave migrants, imagine how everybody interacts and how things develop.
Personally, I think it's fun to imagine who on our Earth gets second (or third) pickings in space. Forget about all the countries (or multinational unions) that have advanced space programs right now—the Americans, Russians, and Chinese went out there first and grabbed all the plum spots near Earth; the Europeans and Japanese were right behind them. Now pretty much all of the usual suspects for cultures/names in SF are out of the picture. Who's up next? Look at projections of economic growth and send a couple rising economic powers to the stars. How about Indonesia and Brazil? How about South Korea, Mexico, and Turkey? Nigeria and Ethiopia? Or go even more speculative, and imagine Egypt getting the United Arab Republic back together, the Democratic Republic of Congo experiencing a high-tech transformation, India balkanizing and an independent Dravida Nadu going into space, or whatever else strikes your fancy.
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There's another dimension here that kind of cuts against what's future-historically probable, and might cut against what's fun and interesting to you, but that's worth considering, and that's the fact that, if you're reading this, you probably work in English, and most or nearly all of your own audience is engaging with your work in English, many of them coming from a place of English monolingualism or near-monolingualism. Diversity and historical plausibility are great for verisimilitude, but consider the phonology and orthography of the languages your names are coming from. Some are, in practice, a lot more easily grasped by your audience than others.
On the orthographic front, English speakers struggle with languages that use the Latin alphabet but include unfamiliar letters, use a lot of diacritics, or use familiar letters to represent unfamiliar sounds. Think Vietnamese or Polish. Do Trần Thanh Mẫn and Đỗ Văn Chiến sound much like those letters would in English? (Pop those names into Translate and find out!) Do Krzysztof Gawedzki and Mieczysław Grydzewski look pronounceable in English at all, at least to the average American? (My grandma was Polish, and maybe yours was too. Imagine otherwise!)
On the phonological side, native English speakers struggle with tone even when they can hear it, and there's no way to communicate tone in writing without diacritics that mean little or nothing to English speakers (Vietnamese strikes again). The singular Chinese (and Korean, and Vietnamese) name 李 gets transliterated into English in a dozen different ways (Lee, Li, Lei, Ly, Lý, Ri, Rhee, I, Yi, etc.); meanwhile, the entirely different names 羿, 易, and 伊 are also transliterated as Yi. Also 余 and 于 sometimes! And maybe 衣? (I do not speak any Chinese at all and am leaning pretty hard on Wikipedia here, bear with me.) You also see this to some extent with Wu, Wang, Liu, Chen—a lot of the most common Chinese surnames. And it's made even worse by given names (one of the most common Chinese given names, 丽, is also transliterated as “Li”).
All of which is to say that, if you're using Vietnamese names or Polish names, your readers are going to stumble over them (or just wildly mispronounce them, or both). If you're using Chinese names…well, you're not really using them, in a sense. You're only using part of the word, and you're flattening a whole dimension of sound and meaning away into nothing. So although it might work against your vision of a futurologically realistic setting, consider massaging things so that you're pulling from languages that are easy for English speakers to get their heads (and tongues) around.
Happily, if we refer back to those speculative third-wave space programs, Turkish, Indonesian, and Swahili are all, being or having been trade languages or bridge languages binding together diverse populations, among the easier non–Indo European languages for English speakers to grasp in general, not just phonologically. For languages more closely related to English, there's Spanish, of course, but also a lot of Indian languages, including Hindi/Urdu. Korean is phonologically a bit trickier than Japanese (and syllable-timed, like Japanese), but it's not tonal. Portuguese is more difficult than Spanish, but it's close enough that Americans think they get it even when they don't. Arabic and other Semitic languages (like Amharic) aren't easy for English speakers to pronounce well, but good transliteration (and familiarity via the news, unhappily) mean they don't struggle too much.
And all the major Nigerian languages are tonal. Can't win ’em all. At least they're not monosyllables!
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