Coming up with names for characters in my short stories and novel has always been a challenge. There’s the desire to avoid names with feel too ‘common’ and lack their own sense of character, the Bobs and so forth, but going too far afield into actual names that are exceptionally rare feels false. This is a hurdle I have to overcome with every piece of fiction, no matter how long or how brief and can be magnified if the character in question is an alien because before I can name the character I have to devise a naming system for his culture because after all individual name plus family name isn’t even universal among humans.
For my novel being published next month I managed to make this difficult task even harder.
The set-up in the novel is that when the Earth is threatened with destruction by a rouge brown dwarf passing through the inner solar system humanity launches hundreds if not thousands of automated arks loaded with self-replicating machines, artificial wombs, and banks of sperm and egg to establish new human colonies. Some of these arks were programmed with very specific goals of persevering certain cultures, nationalities, and religion and so forth, some were designed to have a greater degree of freedom in the care of the generations of humans that were to follow.
For the colony of Nocturnia where the novel takes place the demographic percentages of the later 21st century America were used to create the racial make-up of the colony and the names were taken from the U.S. Census but in drafting the outline and creating the character I faced a decision that swung me back and forth for quite some time.
Should the character names be tied to their character’s ethnicity?
These characters had never in any sense at all be a product of the cultures that their names derived from for all intents and purposes they were faux-Americans. With their ark’s designers fixated on an idealized American culture that never truly existed would that have programmed the artificial intelligences to force names to match ethnic background or simply have left the assignment of names to the A.I. own randomness?
I liked the idea that the names were randomly assigned but I was concerned that the readers might be lost of confused. I wanted to avoid leaning too heavily on reminding the reader just what each character’s ethnic heritage was and if I kept the names tied to their heritage I could side-step the challenge. But once I hit on the idea of the randomness of the names I really really liked it.
In the end I went the character names that do not map to their racial appearance. Now with the book coming out next month and should reviews and feedback come back my direction I will learn if I met the challenge or faceplanted.
