Surely the most celebrated new word coined in scientific discipline fiction is "robot", in the 1920 drama by the Czechoslovakian author Karel Capek': R. U. R. ("Rossum's Universal Joint Robots"). I don't cognize any Czechoslovakian but I make bold state "robot" come ups from a root similar to the Russian rabotat, to work. Here, therefore, rather than a word that is completely invented from nothing. we have got a new word form of an existent word, expressing a new idea.
"Robot" is therefore some manner along the spectrum that widens from those neologies which are merely convenient abbreviations (such as "mascon" for "concentratin of mass"), to really new words and ideas. (Of course of study a author can also contrive a new word to show an old idea, though this is usually rather pointless. I believe Larry Niven in The Ringworld Engineers invented a new word for sex, though I can't remember what the word was and I can't be bothered to look it up.)
Even if they are mostly mere abbreviations, new words can offer a new angle on previously expressed ideas.
Perhaps an illustration of this is "pauk", in Brian Aldiss' Helliconia Spring. "Pauk" intends "trance in which one can commune with the liquor of one's ancestors". Or in which one thinks one can.... for it is not clear, from the Helliconia trilogy as a whole, whether pauk is a echt phenomenon of soul-contact Oregon whether it is a mental semblance existing at a certain phase of society. The latter reading is suggested by the fact that the "spirits" of the departed apparently change in mood, from grumpy to sweet-tempered, as civilisation advances.
A vaguer, but possibly more than original term, is the Martian word "grok" in Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. If you grok, you are tuning in to some ineffable wholeness; it is a mystical concept, perhaps too indeterminate to be useful, but at least we can state in its favour, that no obvious equivalent existed previously in the English language.
Turning from the abstract to the concrete, a derivation of an existent word used for a new intent is "drainer" in Henry Martin Robert Silverberg's A Time of Changes. A drainer is a member of a despised profession, a sort of secular confessor, to whom one unburdens oneself verbally in private, in order to free oneself of stress, in a civilization which prohibits the unfastened usage of the personal pronoun "I".
Jack Vance coined new words for the old age of the hebdomad in Araminta Station, simply to avoid the jarring incongruousness of using our familiar Friday, Saturday, etc, in the linguistic context of a far planet 10s of one thousands of years in the future, even though its dwellers are human, descended from us and similar to us culturally. He was right to make so. The words he chose are beautiful improvers to the ambiance of his tale.
An interesting illustration of an writer who have got got deliberately eschewed neology is Gene Wolfe, who in an appendix to the first volume of his far-future heroic The Book of the New Sun has stated:
In rendition this book - originally composed in a lingua that have not yet achieved being - into English, I might easily have saved myself a great trade of labour by having resort to invented terms; in no lawsuit have I done so. Thus in many cases I have got been forced to replace yet undiscovered conceptions by their closest twentieth-century equivalents. Such words as peltast, androgyn, and exultant are permutations of this kind, and are intended to be suggestive rather than definitive. He's right; the consequence is very suggestive, and his determination not to travel down the route of neology is a linguistic victory leading to a munificent banquet of prose texture. But then he is writing about a far future Earth. If he had been authorship about another world, neologies would have got been more than appropriate.
The Ooranye Undertaking have establish it necessary to contrive new words for some Uranian concepts. Here for illustration are two political neologies to be establish on the giant planet:
"Lremd"has intensions of fortune and skill; it might be defined as the gift of being in the right topographic point at the right time, of being able to weave one's manner through a crowd of events without metaphorically bumping or jostling against other people. You could name it inbuilt personal radar. The Noads - metropolis rules - must possess this quality. It enables them to indulge every so often in escapades just as if they were private persons, and to maintain in stopping point touching with ordinary life. It perhaps conveys close to human race Rousseau's equivocal thought of the "general will" in Du Contrat Social, an thought which on our world is impractical for any assemblage bigger than a grouping of friends. Thanks to lremd, authorities on Ooranye can be un-beaurocratic, not only free but free-and-easy, in a manner that would be impossible on Earth!
"Arelk" is as bad as "lremd" is good. Arelk could be defined as a "political hardening of the arteries", whereby a civil order perverts into beaurocratic rigidness and eventual tyranny. Arelk is one of the phenomena most dreaded by the lremd-loving peoples of Ooranye.
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