Wherefore Art Thou Norman Greenblatt-Vorkosigan? How to Name People, Places, and Things in Science Fiction and Fantasy (Patreon)

I thought we’d get back to basics in this, the Year of Our Cruel ChthonicTrickster Overlord Twenty and Twenty-Three and talk about one of those bedrock skills that get overlooked because, when you do it right, it doesn’t seem such a hard feat of genius and blends right into the infinite tapestry of one’s squabbling nobles and/or sad robots.

Naming all those assholes and also their dogs, hometowns, swords, ships, kinks, hairstyles, ballet moves, forks, exotic medical conditions, and/or coffee probably because you know if an SFF writer anywhere just calls it coffee instead of ķ’äff’ǣa or some shit everything will fall apart, the center cannot hold, and a lonely vegan work-from-home polar bear dies instantly.

Now, I’m pretty good at this, all told. I’m fairly known for good character names and suchlike. Naming All the Things became one of my Secret Projekt jobs because I also happen to really enjoy it, so now I have spent many months generating huge lists of linguistically-plausible names for a vast array of cultures and stories, and I don’t want to brag but some of them even got used.

But names are more important to me than most, I suspect. I literally can’t create a character or start a book without naming things first. There has to be a title, a title I would actually put on a cover, mind you, not Space Dingus Beach Bingo Fiesta, even if it doesn’t stay the title. I have to have solid, at least 99% there names for the major characters, and whenever I need a new character, the name comes first, before anything else. You can’t get to know someone if you don’t even know their name. That’s how every relationship starts! Hello my name is! I am writing a story right now that, as it’s in first person and funky, you will not know the proper name of the protagonist until literally the last word of the story and I still had to craft it perfectly before I could start writing.

And I’m reasonably certain that, psychotherapeutically speaking, all this goes back to how much I fucking hate my government name. Many of you here have probably heard, at least through some shitcanoe on wikipedia who won’t stop reverting the entry, that I have a government name that is not CMV, and no I won’t share it here, because, as stated, I fucking loathe it. It’s hard to fully express how much I despise that name and always have except to say I was four years old the first time I asked to change it. And then I kept asking over and over until my mother let me go by my then-middle name and her maiden name (hello baby Valente) when I was 13. The middle name was better but still not really me. The power of my hostility toward my own name was then so great that for a decade, until I started publishing, I let anyone I was close to call me whatever they wanted, anything was better, which is how I ended up with a vast roster of rotating nicknames, one of which was Simon.

Another was Cat.

So as someone born with a name that was just emphatically, obviously, hideously not my name, naming everything RIGHT became a bit of an obsession.

How do I know when it’s right? Well, if I don’t hate saying it out loud, that’s a good green flag. I’m gonna have to say all this crap kind of a lot through readings and publicity and such, might want to be able to spit it out without cringing. But mostly it’s a feeling, a match between persona (or object) and word that feels correct, feels like a unification of sign and signified, flows off the tongue without tripping, could be said with tenderness or fury with equal force.

And while this is a matter of personal preference, I personally would rather put a rake through my brainpan than name a protagonist (who isn’t literally Prester John and therefore I had NO CHOICE) John or Sarah or Joe or Jessica and the like. Unless they have just a really incredible surname. Even when I do write something that calls for regular-ass normal human people names, I’ll go for a Sylvia, a Martin, a Nadine, a Mira, even an Alice, and I’ll be mad about it the whole time.

(Sorry, John, Sarah, Joe, and Jessica. You guys are all super nice.)

So I’m going to open up my naming tactics to you all and tell you how I tend to do it so that you can STEAL MY TRICKS. I’m not too worried about it, names are infinitely variable and if Seanan McGuire and I never got fussed that we accidentally both made a splash in the same year with fantasy novels full of characters bearing month-names, we will all survive you guys knowing precisely how I so vigorously interfere with baby-name books.

I have five major techniques I generally use: noun names, language names, patchwork names, vibe names, and theme names. But before we dive in, you always have to ask yourself: why am I doing this?

I mean, generally, isn’t that how we start our days here in the End Times? Wash face, brush teeth, eat food product, stare into middle-distance and ask why am I doing this?

But specifically: for a character, why is this character named what they are? Before you’ve even picked one: why? Because their parents wanted to express something about their child or their hopes for it? Because it’s a cultural tradition? Because it sounds cool (extremely legit reason)? Because they named themselves something to more closely reflect who they are? Because it’s a nickname earned via a specific event, circumstance, physical feature, or deed of prowess? Because it fits with the period/vibe of the story? There’s a million reasons for a name to be exactly what it is, but knowing will help you narrow down your options.

And if you’re naming a place or a thing or a concept or, well, coffee, you have to ask all the questions above about it but also: why am I not just calling it coffee? Because, my darlings, let me assure you, with a full heart, clasped hands, and reassuring eyes, it is okay to just call it coffee. Or tea. Or the ocean. Or the internet. Or sex. Or literally anything. We know. We understand it’s space/magic coffee/tea/ocean/sex/internet you mean. In exchange, you must understand that with any given SFF book, learning a certain number of new terms and phrases is expected work, but real talk…you only get so many per book, and the maximum number is a secret. You have to guess. And it’s different for every reader. So don’t blow a precious new word on something that isn’t a new concept.

Looking at you, Mr. Stephenson. No judgement, though, it’s all in the game.

If there’s too many new words to learn, the book starts to feel like work and our brains start to wander off to look for an index or something, and when we find it, if ķ’äff’ǣa is literally just fucking actual coffee with no meaningful difference, we get annoyed. In any kind of SF or F that isn’t set in the present day, present time, on Earth, with human people doing regular things, the conceit is already that they’re probably not actually speaking the language the book is printed in. So you can just say coffee, because in the sentence “Please enjoy this coffee, it is a tradition among my people,” there’s no reason for “coffee” to be the only word translated back into High Dingusese when the rest of the nouns, pronouns, verbs, and adverbs weren’t spoken in English either, because both characters were sentient preying mantises with footballs for heads or whatever their situation is.

But if it isn’t coffee, if it is a hallucinogenic concoction decanted from the sap of the holy football-tree in the sacred forest of Manchesternoymus and that fact is going to be in any way important to the story or world building or character, well then, ķ’äff’ǣa it is and EVERMORE SHALL BE.

Also, a note about apostrophes.

The note is: probably just don’t.

Oh it’s so terribly tempting. Apostrophes make things look alien! Or magic! Or cool! You said cool was a legit reason!

And I did. But apostrophes, apart from being WAY overused, are bad party guests. I got pulled up for this by my first editor on the first Orphan’s Tales book, and the light of her rightness was so blinding I was ashamed, took them all out, and for the most part, unless you really, really want it, you should too.

In English, an apostrophe either means there’s a syllable or letter there that’s not being pronounced because it’s a contraction or other abbreviation, or it indicates possession when used in a very specific part of the word: the end, before or after what is usually going to be an s. In other languages, yes, apostrophes DO have other uses. In Ancient Greek it denotes a “rough breath” which makes, among other things, the HHHUH sound we represent in English with the letter H. In Turkish, it can be used to separate case-endings from the word itself. In Ukrainian, to change the sound of other letters. There are many languages in which it indicates a glottal stop.

Okay. Does your apostrophe represent a contraction? Does it make the aliens say HHHHUH? Does your elven tongue have a case system? When you made that apostrophe, were you thinking the word should be pronounced with a glottal stop, or any dentalized non-consonant sound? If so, wonderful! You may have your apostrophe back. If not, we have some lovely parting gifts for you, (but also feel free to tell me to fuck off and name somebody ‘’’’’’’’’) please remember these are all meant to be words entities with mouths (I mean, for the most part, statistically, they probably have some kind of mouths?) to actually say out loud pretty regularly, so any kind of diacritical mark should mean something and not just be there to look “exotic.”

NOW.

LET’S MAKE LIKE ADAM AND NAME SOME SHIT.

Noun (and Verb) Names

This is your Septembers and Novembers, your Solace and Sorrows, your Tetleys and Maruchans, your Decibel, Oort, Bonk, Oubliette, Seven, Saturday, and so on.

I like noun names.

Now, it’s important to note that people have noun names in real life! Daisy, Hope, Pearl, Hunter, Clark (old noun, but it checks out), Archer, Autumn, Brooke, Cat, and every single flower and gem you can think of. Hell, the Puritans were all about that shit, isn’t that right, Oh-Be-Joyful-the-Lord-Has-Come-At-Last? To be fair, now that I look these up, I notice how much more common noun names are for girls than for boys. (I do not have a theory…yet.) But at the same time, of my four nephews, three are named Banjo, Ryder, and Cole, and one is Oliver, a single letter off its nouny-root. And to be the most fairest, in some sense, most names are noun names in one language or another, unless they’re adjective names. That’s why we have baby name books to interfere with: because names mean things. It’s just that sometimes they mean things in the language used by the namers and names.

POINT IS, a noun name doesn’t have to be a weird name.

But it’s pretty fun if they are.

The thing you have to remember about giving a person a noun name is that you are strongly implying, unless otherwise stated, that that person’s parents chose that name specifically and on purpose out of the thousands, if not millions available. So they either had a reason, personal or cultural, were feeling fancy and/or iconoclastic, picked something they could see from where they were sitting when they had to decide, or were just super high and never thought twice about decisions made when in said state. Do I say that having named a protagonist September, a name wildly inappropriate for the period in which the story ostensibly takes place? Yes, I do. Sometimes when a name is either cool enough or means enough to you personally, you shrug and assume the parents were big weirdos and move on.

I tend to go looking for these to indicate something about the character’s nature or to generate a specific vibe (November in Palimpsest is alone and isolated, depressed and hopeless, so I named her after a bare and lightless month when people go outside less) outside the knee-jerk associations people have with names they might actually have encountered. Even among the frequently-used noun-names, hell, I went to school with a girl named Autumn Gardner (I know) and she was a stone-cold bitch. So I have an instant association with the name even though it’s my favorite season and I love the word. More unusual names avoid these instant, unavoidable connections. You never know who’s met an Autumn who’d cut your mother, but not that many people have ever met a November. (Me. I’ve met a November. Like a year after Palimpsest came out. It was eerie.)

They also tend to sound out of the ordinary and a little magical. They tend to get your attention. So deploy them for load-bearing characters, because people will notice when you name a kid Bauble, and if that kid is a walk-on you never hear from again, something in the back of everyone’s mind will wonder why, because that mind knows it’s supposed to pay attention to things with unusual names.

Language Names

Well, now, of course every name imaginable is technically in this category. Either a name means something in English or it means something in another language, very few names are nonsense syllables that mean absolutely nothing to anyone, no matter how they’re spelled.

But you can also pull words from other languages that are not traditionally used as names. I did this in Space Opera and remains one of my biggest delights as a namer/writer. Every non-human person, location, concept, machine, company, etc in Space Opera and Space Oddity are words in languages used by Eurovision-participating nations. I made myself some rules at the outset: if said nation ever participated in Eurovision, even if it was only one year, then it would get at least one name to represent it. (What’s up, Morocco?) English had to also be used because English isn’t special. (An esca is the luminous proboscis of an anglerfish.) But Welsh, Irish and Scots Gaelic, Australian indigenous languages, and after 2022, Breton, also needed to get their honors. Every language that qualified had to be used at least once, and if a nation had more than one official language, each of them had to have their moment, because it was about honoring the nations that built the contest.

And thus the Voorpret and many more were given life. So to speak.

You have to be a bit careful here, because you can’t go grabbing names from other real human languages willy-nilly if they aren’t used as personal names without being a whole bin-bag full of offensive. And people from one specific culture tend to have linguistically-unified names (not always, look at us) and naming traditions. Don’t go taking a First Nations name because it sounds cool and giving it to a white character with no reason to be named that. The rule of cool does not pay for all. And you probably want to be aware of the colloquial meaning of any names or words you choose, to avoid puns and other mishaps others will find hilarious and you will not. If you are constructing a name entirely from another tradition, because the character is from that tradition (Anakin and Padme ask: the character is from that tradition, right?) I highly recommend googling to see if that personal + family name combo has ever actually been used to name a person from that culture. Most societies are not quite as Makaeighlynn about naming their kids as we’ve gotten of late, and it is entirely possible for an outsider to construct a name very wrongly, even as simply as where the family name falls in the line-up.

But generally, if used for a reason and with reason, it can be fun to Easter-Egg meaning in a name this way, to reference mythologies and technologies and other cultural artifacts this way. If you like languages enough to be making one mostly from scratch, you can encode meaning similarly in your cool new dialect to help with world building and make everything feel like it has depth and history.

This is also probably where most “regular” names fall. Sarah means princess in Hebrew, it is a noun name, but it’s also a language name. We don’t really consciously refer to the meaning when we say the name unless it’s an English noun name, if then, because you’re not really often thinking of a daisy blossom specifically when you scream for Daisy to come help stop the water coming out of the pipes, but the meanings are all there anyway. This is also true in other languages, many of whose traditional names are from ancient sub-dialects in the first place. So does it MATTER that your love interest is named something sopping with deep meaning? I guess not really BUT IT MATTERS TO ME. I KNOW. I ALWAYS KNOW.

I personally care about the meanings of the names because I like making more work for myself. You do not have to. But parents do when naming their kids, and it can help to narrow your search even if you’re looking for the most normal name imaginable for the culture you’re writing about.

But seriously, care about the cultures you’re writing about, especially if they are real ones that real people care profoundly for. Make them coherent and internally consistent. Use names to build your world within that matrix of respect. Don’t be a dick. Or a magpie, snatching bits of culture because they’re shiny. People get named the things they do for reasons. Understand the reasons. Understand everything you can.

And remember that if you aren’t writing about real cultures, all naming bets are off. Even here on good old idiot ball Earth there are hundreds of ways to construct personal names through societies and eras that aren’t First Name Sometimes Middle Name Sometimes Two If You’re Nasty Family Name. Hell, right here on this tiny island there is a woman who legally fucking changed her name to Nancy 3. Yes, the numeral 3. No surname. She won’t tell anyone why. I asked if she was a secret cyborg and she just kept playing her accordion and if you think I’m making this up, hi, it’s very nice to meet you, my name is Cat and this is my Patreon! Of course, probably the most well known to westerners is the number of Asian cultures in which family name comes first. Well, that says something about the history and values of those cultures, doesn’t it? Your names should say something, too. Romans had generationally-passed-down nicknames called cognomens that people called each other quite often in lieu of personal names because there were only like 15-20 personal names anyone ever used so no one wants to go around screaming Gaius when fucking everyone is called Gaius. Much easier to say Caesar, you know? It’s pretty weird to call people by their middle name, which is actually a nickname given to their grandfather for being a fat stupid pig (what’s up, Porcinus). You can at least out-weird that if you’re making aliens or fairies or robots.

Patchwork Names

Okay, this one is SUPER fun. It’s one of my favorites, really, because it makes names that sound plausibly originating from primate tongues, but with that air of unfamiliarity that makes them great.

So you just go grab a basic middle America Velveeta name off the Social Security most popular names list, or even better, a funky fusty old fashioned name (at the moment, trends being what they are, those lists are pretty similar) that was popular in 1910, and start LOPPING OFF AND GLUING ON PARTS.

Steven, Evelyn, Kristin, Catherine, Reginald, Ichabod, Theodore, Hazel, Josephine, Hilary, and Alexander headed to the mall?

Nah, we headed to SPACE with Teven, Velyn, Rist, Atheri, Inald, Chabod, Eodo, Azel, Sephin, Ilar, and Lexun.

This is how so many Star Wars (not to mention Game of Thrones, which often just changes the spelling and calls it a good day) names work. Luther becomes Luthen from Andor so smoothly! You can do it with any name, nouns, verbs, whatever, but I find a special delight in converting something that shows up four times over in a kindergarten class into a supreme empress of space and time.

(Don’t touch Velyn, I’m using her.)

Vibe Names

For lack of a better term, this is the category into which I slot, with honor and respect, all the usual techniques for naming things and all the usual normal names you need for a book that’s set…gulp…here and now.

Baby name books, people you have known or heard of, gravestones, censuses, cruising NextDoor or other local directories in lieu of the old way, which was called “the Yellow Pages” and they are only sometimes yellow, oh ye beautiful children of modernity. Just names you like and vibe with, whether they carry any deep meaning or not.

Keep in mind as before, real names can be VERY STRANGE and/or STRIKINGLY FULL OF MEANING. I went to college with a girl named Ourania Melas, which is Greek for, no shit, Dark Heaven. In a TWILIGHT FANFIC you could not name a Mary Sue Dark Heaven and not get laughed off of AO3 and she was just living her life with that name. On this very island where I live (and we have established It Is Weird Here but still) our local directory looks like the cast of an absolutely wise and wholesome AF children’s show. The hardware store is owned by Fred Rainbow. The fuel company is the Plante brothers. Sebastian Small, Bob Baker, Hunter Letendre, surnames like Wary and Birdsall and Castle and Cuetara and Borja, it really goes on and on. There are TWO Thankful Griffins in the Puritan graveyard, and one Paryntha Salt!

We have an Elspeth! We have a Basil! We have a Breezy and a Fox!

And we have, in real life, with not a word of lie, one superlative Joan Divine-Hoar, as I live and breathe.

People complain a lot about unrealistic SFF names but…one 800 person island in Maine has names many an editor would nix.

Always ask before you use someone’s name! Especially if you intend to use it for a villain or villainous organization. People care about their names. No takesies without askies.

I DO use this technique, often to give a little gift to friends, or a Tuckerization, or to pepper my work with the world of my life. There are certainly plenty of stories where no one needs to be named Thundercloud McGee.

BUT PLENTY WHERE THEY DO.

Theme Names

This one uses allllll the other techniques to make a beautiful fractal expanse of meaning and resonance and unified thematic beauty that literally only you will ever know about!

I…uh…might do this a lot.

Space Opera I already mentioned, but I even did it in Minecraft: The End. Every character’s name either is or is derived from the word “end” or its synonyms, translated into dozens of languages. BECAUSE ENDERMEN GET IT. Also Deathless, where all the domovoy are named the words for common household items in Russian. When I wrote Mass Effect: Annihilation, I carefully went into each alien language from the game, collated the examples of vocabulary, reverse engineered likely linguistic models from Human Earth, and rebuilt names along the same theme. A good example is one of the co-protagonists, Anax Therion. She’s a Drell, we don’t have a lot of Drell names floating around, but Thane Krios is an old-time noble rank and Krios means ram in Greek/is a rammy god. So I went and got Anax, another old-timey ruler rank, and Therion, which means hot and dry in Greek, because I know what Drell like, I know what Drell want—Drell want the goddamned desert. Name sounds great and is in line with the rest of the (quite small) themed set.

I LIKE THEMED SETS AND I CANNOT LIE.

I’m just a lot happier when everything is on-theme and a cohesive aesthetic, okay? And since no one else ever, ever notices, I get to make myself happy BECAUSE GOD KNOWS IF MY BOOKS WILL MAKE ANYONE ELSE SMILE, MIGHT AS WELL BE ME.

So there you have it, my man tactics for naming everything in the whole universe! Go out, get yourself a nice piping hot cup of ķ’äff’ǣa (it's a tradition among my people) and call things Ishmael!