What’s in a name? “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet…” Juliet declared to Romeo that their names were not as important as their love. But I disagree, and apparently so did Shakespeare or things might have ended differently for them. When I first read Jerry’s SlingStar Myth, all his characters had very short names. For example, the Blue captains were Na and Ek, the commander was Gort, and the villain was Sort. Very confusing, I could hardly tell them apart.
I soon learned that all seven of the Blue crew were named after Jerry’s grandchildren, using childhood nicknames or the last letters of their first names. Very sweet, and easy to type. But such short names do not help the reader to identify with or even distinguish the characters.
So, one of the first tasks we tackled during my San Diego visit was assigning names to the characters. This turned out to be surprisingly difficult. I gained an immense appreciation for all authors, some of whom solved this problem in very creative ways. What if Tolkien had written The Hobbit and called Bilbo Baggins, say, Tom Smith? Tolkien’s names identified the culture as well: Aragorn son of Arathorn, Gimli son of Glóin, Legolas of the Woodland Realm…Remember Anne McCaffrey’s Dragon Riders of Pern who substituted an apostrophe for a vowel when they bonded with a dragon? Brilliant.
Names are inherently dependent upon the culture they come from. We define and classify a person’s cultural heritage from their name. “Donna Dion” identifies me as an English speaker of French descent, clearly different from Ana Maria Perez Garcia. At the very least, the names we choose for characters must be consistent within the various civilizations that participate in the story, a daunting task for us.
Plus, Jerry had wanted to create an “Easter Egg” with the names of the Lithe, without making it too easy to solve. Laura liked that our Blue crew did not have common names, while our alien Lithe had very normal first names. Our story doesn’t have the cultural diversity of George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, which by the way, all takes place on one planet. We had other things to offer. But we did have several different civilizations, all of which should have consistent names. We needed to work harder on them.
In addition, Jerry really wanted to use CamelCase Notation in honor of his many years as a programmer. (It means joining multiple words with no spaces and capitalizing the first letter.) Since I shared that background, we decided to maintain it for all things related to Lithe technology and the MultiVerse concepts. Non-programmers might find it weird, but we thought it was very cool. Of course, keeping the names consistent requires effort. I can hardly imagine how authors wrote before the invention of spellcheck…
Another essential consideration with names is the popular fantasy tradition of granting power over someone by knowing their secret name. Calling someone by their true name gives you a magical advantage because you can understand the essence and origin of the inner self and divine how to defeat them. The first fantasy series I ever read, Witch World by Andre Norton, introduced me to this concept. Patrick Rothfuss in The Name of the Wind also based his magic system on this principle.
So, names matter. But good names are very difficult to invent. One of the best name designers is J. K. Rowling who imagined an entire magical universe of characters and creatures and spells in the Harry Potter series. I am sure she devoted a lot of thought and research to all of them.
If you are an aspiring author, and you find it challenging to create the perfect name for your characters, I sympathize with you. I think it is much harder to choose a name than to select personality traits and backstories for our characters.
It’s not Shakespeare, but Johnny Cash sang a song about “A Boy Named Sue” whose entire life was defined by the name his father gave him, a boy with a girl’s name who grew strong by fighting those who ridiculed his name. Names really do matter.
