{"id":7530,"date":"2013-04-30T19:36:56","date_gmt":"2013-04-30T23:36:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/?p=7530"},"modified":"2013-04-30T19:44:59","modified_gmt":"2013-04-30T23:44:59","slug":"baby-names-of-the-science-fiction-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/2013\/04\/30\/baby-names-of-the-science-fiction-future\/","title":{"rendered":"Baby Names of the Science Fiction Future"},"content":{"rendered":"

I just finished reading Pure<\/a>, by Julianna Baggott. It’s apocalyptic\/dystopian fiction, and although it’s not young-adult fiction I’ll bet there was a lot of hemming and hawing about whether it should be.<\/p>\n

One thing that caught my eye was the names. I remember seeing a special on the making of Star Wars, and whoever was being interviewed about costumes\/hair\/make-up said that the key to making changes was to not make them TOO crazy: a subtle shift made for a more realistic and believable world than a major change did. He said you should be able to picture how a hairstyle got from here to there. The names in Pure reminded me of this.<\/p>\n

The main character’s name is Pressia. I’d be interested to know how it’s pronounced (PRESH-shuh? PRESS-see-ah? preh-SEE-ah?), but what interests me more is that it’s not eye-rollingly weird. It has a familiar double-S and the -ia ending of many girl names. It looks a little like Priscilla, Patricia, Portia, Alicia, Jessica, Tessa, Marissa. Until I was looking at it now, I didn’t realize it also looks a little like Princess, Precious and Messiah—all of which could be appropriate for the themes of the book.<\/p>\n

Other girls are named Lyda and Illia and Aribelle and Silva, which could be \/ are used here and now. Boys names such as Silas, Ellery, Ivan, and Vic add to the feeling that name fashions have just changed gradually over the years as they usually do, not been completely abandoned and recreated from scratch (“Hello, I’m Ahxwzd”).<\/p>\n

Another main character’s name is Ripkard: it’s similar to Richard and Ripley. But he’s nicknamed Partridge, which doesn’t make sense to me as a nickname, and it also seemed somewhat girlish; I kept getting him confused with Pressia.<\/p>\n

Partridge’s brother has another successful name: Sedge. It’s new, but it worked as a name.<\/p>\n

More names (because of names such as Ivan, Silas, and Vic, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that some or all of these names are familiar names in other countries):<\/p>\n

Avna – female
\nAlgrin – male
\nBradwell – male
\nDurand – male
\nFandra – female
\nGar – male
\nGorse – male
\nHalpern – male
\nHelmud – male
\nOdwald – male
\nOtten – male
\nTyndal – male
\nVedra – female<\/p>\n

I think the most successful ones are the ones that take a familiar piece of name and add something else: the Al- in Algrin; the -andra and -dra of Fandra and Vedra; Odwald and Otten that are so similar to Oswald and Otto.<\/p>\n

Overall I thought it was neat to think of the effort involved in choosing character names that need to communicate a future Earth: recognizable but believably futuristic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I just finished reading Pure, by Julianna Baggott. It’s apocalyptic\/dystopian fiction, and although it’s not young-adult fiction I’ll bet there was a lot of hemming and hawing about whether it should be. One thing that caught my eye was the names. I remember seeing a special on the making of Star Wars, and whoever was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-1Xs","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7530"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7530\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7537,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7530\/revisions\/7537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}