"Big Bang" was coined by supporters of the alternative 'steady state' cosmological theory, essentially as a form of ridicule, but the name stuck, even after the advocates of 'steady state' were forced to concede that their theory (essentially that, at a grand scale, the universe 'looks' the same at all times and places) was flawed.
The discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) was essentially the nail in the coffin of steady state. CMB is well explained by the "big bang" but not by steady state.
Of course, what we think of as the "big bang" has also changed over the years.
(Fred Hoyle, the principal advocate of the steady state theory wrote some interesting 'hard' science fiction, but I am not aware of any link between this and the term 'big bang'.)
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