© 2005 by John Varley; all rights reserved

Varley with Val & Ron Ontell and Colleen Kelly Burks

Bill Wu, Varley and Sheila Finch

Stephen Potts, Varley, Kage Baker and Vernor Vinge

Varley, Dr. Christine Carmichael and Jonathan Vos Post

Gregory Benford, Kathy Maher, Elizabeth Benford and Varley

The three rules I know about public speaking are: one, start off with a joke, two, don’t read your speech, and three, keep it short. I’m going to have to break two of those rules right off the bat, because I’m no good at winging it, and because there’s something I have to say publicly that won’t really fit anywhere else but right here at the beginning. And it’s not a joke.

Not long ago I published a book called RED THUNDER, which was my tribute to the most influential writer in my life, Robert A. Heinlein. A lot of people noticed that it had some structural resemblance to Heinlein’s first juvenile novel, ROCKET SHIP GALILEO. It was well-received, and I decided to do a sequel.

By Christmas time I had a good start. The book is called RED LIGHTNING, and part of it deals with a fairly large object travelling just under the speed of light impacting the Earth, about 30 years from now. I studied some maps, and decided to have the thing hit in the Indian Ocean, not far from Indonesia. I figured this thing would produce a tsunami on a scale not seen in historic times. I had written about the impact and was researching what such a wave might actually do, what would it look like, what would the aftermath look like. There wasn’t much information. I knocked off and we went to Las Vegas to spend the holidays with my mother and sister.

You all know what I woke up to the morning after Christmas. To say I was stunned doesn’t even come close to what I was feeling.

When I got home I got out the maps and compared them to the maps that were all over the TV news, showing the epicenter of the quake, and the animation that traced the spread of the wave. It turned out that the point of impact I had chosen for this high-speed object was about 500 miles from the quake epicenter. I had had the wave devastating Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, and Bangladesh. I had thought Indonesia and Bangladesh would have borne the worst of it. Bangladesh is basically one big river delta, all of it low-lying. I figured the tsunami would roll through the dense population there with nothing to stop it. Turns out the shallow sea in the Bay of Bengal leading up to Bangladesh dissipated most of the wave’s energy.

Other than that, I’d gotten it horribly right. I felt like a prophet, and I didn’t WANT to be a prophet.

I don’t believe in prophecy, mystics, psychics ... ANY of that stuff. What I do, as a science fiction writer, is extrapolate, speculate, prevaricate, and try to make it all convincing. I am unimpressed by the well-known examples trotted out by the faithful to show that science fiction writers are good at prediction. I’d prefer to take a look at the much, much longer list of things that we missed entirely. It keeps you humble.

Recall, for instance, that Heinlein had people flying into space using slide rules to calculate their courses. I mean, you couldn’t take a computer! Computers are HUGE, they fill entire buildings!

Anyway, now I was facing a quandary. I gave some thought to abandoning the whole novel. This book would be coming out in early 2006, and it was going to look like the worst sort of cashing in on human misery. And yet, I still felt the idea was a good one. I may even have thought of something that no one else had considered about space travel, and it was too good an idea to waste.

One decision was easy. The object would no longer be hitting the Indian Ocean, or anywhere near it. I wasn’t about to put those people through the same thing again, even in fiction. So I moved the impact site ... and it turned out to have improved the story immensely. The other thing I decided was that I’d have to include an afterword to the book that laid out the story pretty much as I’m telling it to you now. And I figured it wouldn’t hurt to start getting the word out publicly.

I can’t PROVE this story, I didn’t tell anyone about the plot before all this happened, so I can’t put out a sign in my front yard with an all-seeing eye on it and become a rich psychic, but I don’t want to anyway.

And I won’t tell you where I moved the impact site. However, considering my track record on tsunamis, if I lived on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States I might consider moving to higher ground. In about 30 years.

ê ê ê

Now on to less serious matters.

Some of you may know that I used to attend science fiction conventions fairly regularly. Then I stopped for some years. It wasn’t so much a case of getting away from it all as a feeling that it was all getting away from me. By that I mean that the reason I had gone to conventions in the first place, to discuss the reading and writing of science fiction with those who wrote it and read it, was becoming a smaller and smaller part of conventions. I went to some cons where it was hard to find a book in the dealers room that didn’t have pictures in it.

I’ve got nothing against comics, or costuming, or gaming, or regency dancing (though I never quite figured out what that was doing at science fiction cons). I just don’t know anything about them or care for them at all. I don’t have anything against media fandom, though I remember those pre- Star Wars and Star Trek days when media programming consisted mostly of a 16mm projector in a dark out-of-the-way room that no one went to but insomniacs who didn’t like to party.

Now there is so much media programming that I can’t even keep track of it all. The questionnaire I was sent before coming here included topics I couldn’t even identify, much less talk about. The last convention I attended, I shared the guest of honor spot with that talking gumball machine from Mystery Science Theater 3000. He got bigger crowds than I did.

I don’t want to sound too sour grapes here. I love movies, even a few science fiction movies, and I know a bit about screenwriting, and I’ve talked about it at cons in the past. But I felt the field had moved on, at least the part that got together yearly at cons like this. That’s okay. There were still enough people out there buying and reading my books that I could make a living. I stopped going to cons entirely.

Now I’m back, and faced with the subject of what to talk about. That’s nothing new, I had the same problem when I was a regular, as I know myself to be a generalist, not much of an authority on anything literary, fannish, academic, or historic. I hate to admit this, but I’m not even very good at talking about my own works, since once I finish them I seldom go back and read them. Details get hazy on something you wrote 25 years ago. It can get embarrassing when somebody asks you a question about a story you wrote and you don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.

The one thing I do know something about is writing, but I don’t have any great theories about it, except that I believe that good writing cannot be taught, but it can be learned. However, writing is such a vast topic that the problem becomes which part of it to talk about. Today, I’ve selected one tiny area, one very tiny detail, and that is names.

The most important thing I can say about names is that I know a good one when I see it. Until then, I can be stymied for weeks. I have the situation, the setting, the plot, the complications. I have the characters. What I don’t have is the names. I can try writing the story calling somebody Bob or Mary, but if it doesn’t feel right, if I know in my heart that this person isn’t a Bob or a Mary, it just won’t come alive.

And that’s for a story set in the present day. If things are farther in the future, it can get even tougher.

I’ve taken a very informal look at names in SF. Broadly, there are two types.

There’s names of human beings in the future, and there are the names of alien beings.

Aliens are problematic. We’ve all seen the extreme examples, names with three consecutive k’s or j’s, names littered with enough consonants to choke a Polish person, names with so many apostrophes they’d drive a Hawaiian crazy.

I love the Hawaiian language. It’s very pleasant to the ear. Plenty of glottal stops, every vowel we’re used to, and only a few of those pesky consonants. A Hawaiian typewriter keyboard could get along with only twelve keys. It would be easy to use, mahalo you very much, especially if you had two extra fingers. But then you run into a word like humuhumunukunukuapoa’a, which really is a species of fish.

We know the human throat is capable of many more sounds than are used in English. I don’t have the chutzpah to try to pronounce most of them, but consider a man with the name N!xau, who starred in a wonderful little movie called THE GODS MUST BE CRAZY. The exclamation point is what is known as a click, and the speech of the bushmen of Namibia is littered with them.

If humans can make all these sounds, what might we expect from the voice boxes of beings who aren’t even shaped like us? The answer is, just about anything. The first SF book I ever read, RED PLANET by Robert Heinlein, had a character called Willis (not his real, Martian name), a Martian roundhead, essentially a hairy basketball with lots of useful extrusions. His speaking apparatus was a diaphragm, like in a stereo speaker. That meant he could literally say anything, from repeating a conversation like a tape recorder, to a Dizzy Gillespie trumpet solo.

So a lot of writers have tried to outdo each other thinking up tough alien names. And I have to admit, I HATE that. There’s a simple reason. Though I’m a fairly fast reader, I sound out each word as I go. When I come to a word I can’t pronounce, I stumble over it. No fault of the author, not really ... but it makes Russian novels tough for me. Every time I come to some long Russian name, I stumble. Every time, until I say it aloud a few times and get it fixed in memory.

(A possibly interesting digression here. In Junior High School, when I started reading SF, my best friend was Calvin Stanley. We were both reading fanatics, but it would take me three or four days to finish a novel, and Calvin would go through two or three paperbacks a DAY. He had never taken a speed-reading class, it just came naturally to him. Not only that, you could ask him about the plot of a book three years later and he could tell you every detail. As for myself, a few months later I usually had forgotten a lot. I asked him how he did it, and what he showed me was something like scanning. I tried, and it didn’t work for me.

(Years later we both tried to write SF. I hate to say it, but his stuff was horrible. He was style-deaf. He had great ideas, great plots, but had no idea how to write them. I always wondered if it was because he didn’t take the time to savor the words, the clauses, the different ways of expressing things. I don’t know.)

Back to names. I should mention that, after Heinlein, the most influential writer for me has been Larry Niven. I read all through school, dropped out, and for about five years there I didn’t read SF. It was the time of the New Wave, and some of it was very good and some was very bad, but not much of it was what I wanted to read. Besides, I was too busy with sex, drugs, rock and roll, being a hippie, and dodging the draft.

Then one day I picked up a copy of RINGWORLD, and fell in love with it. I read all of Larry’s Known Space stories, and realized this stuff was DIFFERENT.

One of the things Larry did superbly well was names ... with one exception. His first novel, WORLD OF PTAVVS. Got no problem with the book. It’s the name that put me off. The PT ... okay, that’s fairly standard, like pterodactyl. But what’s the deal with the double V, Larry? As I said, if I don’t know how to pronounce a name, I stumble over it. Couldn’t you have thought of something else?

He sure could. He had a planet called Jinx, creatures called the bandersnatch and the runforit. That last is sheer genius. You don’t have to describe a creature called a runforit. Just let your imagination picture what sort of creature would make you shout RUN FOR IT!

He had a race called the kzinti, and a character who didn’t actually have his own name, and thus was called by his degrading job: Speaker-to-animals. That is, humans. In the book people simply called him Speaker, which is what people would do. There was a race called the Pierson’s Puppeteers, and a character called Nessus, a name from human mythology, which is what I think aliens WOULD do if their names were just about unpronounceable to humans.

I know this, because when I went to Thailand I hired a guide who told me to call him Charlie. I inquired what his real name was, and he told me, with a big grin, and it was Charlie from then on.

I haven’t dealt much with alien names in my work, but as I said, I try to come up with interesting ones for human characters.

Isaac Asimov was good at human names. The technique he favored was to spell a normal name in an unusual way. Lije Bailey. Hari Seldon. That works for me. Maybe in the future we’ll all have numbers, or bar codes. THX-1138, affectionately pronounced “thicks.” Remember Ralph 124C41+?

My generation got a little goofy about names there for a while. People were renaming themselves Sunshine, Teardrop, Rainbow, Morning Glory, Otter Gazelle. I’ve known people with all those names. Barbara Seagull is now back to Barbara Hershey. I don’t know what John Cougar Mellencamp is calling himself these days. In his usual over-the-top way, Frank Zappa burdened his kids with Moon Unit and Dweezil. Of course, these kids went on to name their kids Justin and Brittany, by the millions.

So if your story is a hundred or more years in the future, what kind of names can you use? Well, just about anything that makes you happy, I guess. I mean, who’s to say you’re wrong? Sort of like clothing, which is really more of a problem to the costume designer of a science fiction movie, since I can’t really recall many detailed descriptions of clothing in written science fiction. Still, if I say people in 2102 are going around with names like Applecore or Baltimore, who can say I’m wrong?

The reader can, of course, refuse to buy a character named Baltimore Applecore, and when the reader doesn’t buy it, you’ve got a problem. Doesn’t mean the reader is right, in a factual sense, but you’d have to wait a hundred years to prove that. Take costumes again. What if I’d written a story in, oh, 1965, that said male high school students would be going to class in overalls riding down so far on their hips that six inches of their Calvin Kleins (who?) were showing, and the crotch of the pants would be worn down around the ankles? And that girls would wear their underwear on the outside, in the far distant year of 1985? No one in America would have accepted that, so it would have been a poor choice to use in a story, even though it turns out to have been correct.

I’ve been fairly timid about names, myself. I try to stick to names that, while they may be evocative in some way, I could at least imagine a reasonable human being hanging on another, younger human being. That allows a good bit of leeway, luckily. Remember, Tony Soprano’s daughter is named Meadow. What on earth led Carmella to that one?

But I’ve been thinking ... what’s in a name, after all? Among, English-speaking people, not very much, usually. But it’s there if you look. My own full name is John Herbert Varley. I have no idea what Varley means. Maybe a corruption of Barley? Were my ancestors farmers, brewers, publicans? Maybe just drunks. Herbert means something like “general of the army.” John means “God is gracious,” or “Gift of God.” But who knows that? I don’t particularly want to be called “General,” but that Gift of God business ... I could get used to that.

So what I’ve been thinking is, why don’t we start giving ourselves names that we like? Not Brittany and Justin, please, but something that says something about us?

The people I know of who are best at this are American Indians. I’ve written down some of the more interesting ones, as possible inspiration for future names. Of course, it is the names that have been translated into English that are the most fascinating. Geronimo, Powhatan, and Sacajawea are all interesting names, but I have no idea what they mean. And one is at the mercy of the translator.

The man most of us know as Chief Joseph was actually named Thunder Rolling in the Mountains. Or take Quanah Parker. Quanah means "Fragrant" in Comanche, or possibly "Smells Sweet." Parker, of course, means "Guy who takes your keys and drives off in your Lexus.”

Please understand, I know it is a fallacy to speak of “Indians,” which is about as useless a word as “Europeans.” Different tribes had different customs, and I’m not going to identify which tribe the following names came from. And I’m not making fun, though many of these names are funny to our ears. I LOVE these names.

The first time I realized that Indians could have names quite a bit more complex than Running Bear and Little White Dove was when I read the book and saw the movie of Little Big Man, by Thomas Berger. (Well, I had heard of a brave named Rain in the Face, but assumed it was a joke. But there really was such a fellow.) In the book, I met Cheyenne Indians named Old Lodge Skins and one of his wives, Doesn't Like Horses. Then there was Burns Red in the Sun, Shadow That Comes in Sight, and Buffalo Wallow Woman. Wonderful names!

Take the Bear brothers, for instance (not really brothers, just all named after one aspect or another of bears): There was One Bear, Two Bears, and Ten Bears. Standing Bear and Stumbling Bear, Lean Bear and Fat Bear, Conquering Bear, Crazy Bear, and Encouraging Bear. (I'm not making this up.) Kicking Bear, Hiding Bear, Medicine Bear, Bear on the Water, and Chased By Bears.

Bulls? The famous Sitting Bull. Then, One Bull, Jumping Bull, White Bull, Red Bull, Short Bull, Mere Left Hand Bull, and just plain Bull. No bull!

In most tribes a male might have several names during his lifetime. He'd get a name from his parents at first, from something they saw or experienced when he was born.

Of course this could go wrong sometimes, as in the case of the young Indian man who went to his grandfather and asked how people were named. His grandfather said that he was in charge of assigning names. How he did it was, when a child was born, he would step out of his tent and look around. “When your older brother was born,” he said, “the first thing I saw was an eagle, so his name is Soaring Eagle. Your sister’s name is Snowflake, because it was snowing the day she was born. But tell me, Horse’s Rear End, why do you wish to know?”

But actually, an Indian male would likely change his name later if he didn't like it. Then he might change his name again if he did something heroic or notable. There were Indians named Plenty Coups, Many Arrows, Leader Charge, Attacked Toward Camp, Killed At Night, Kills Two, Caught the Enemy, Runs the Enemy, and Brings Down the Sun!

Women usually kept the same name for life, and it sometimes had the word "woman" in it, as in Snake People Woman, Little Handsome Woman, Brown Weasel Woman, or Buffalo Bird Woman. Some others: Laura Takes The Gun, Emma Don't Mix, Marie Pretty Paint, Winona Plenty Hoops, Vera Not Afraid, and my personal favorite, Elk Hollering in the Water.

Some of the names don't sound particularly flattering to English speakers. How about Bacon Rind, Porcupine, Gall, Buffalo Meat, Shakes, Crooked Neck, Rotten Belly, Wooden Leg, and Old Crow? A few sound downright insulting: Young Man Afraid of His Horses, Moves Slowly, Small Ankle, Hairbrush, White Man, Lawyer, and (I swear!) Little Big Mouth. And some just sound bizarre: Full Mouth Buffalo, Rolling Pony, Blue Whirlwind, High Backed Wolf, Returns Again, and the oddest of all, Particular Time of Day.

Most Indians today seem to have compound names: a first name taken from the white world, and a "last" name like European families. Thus, today there is a Leonard Crow Dog and a John Lame Deer. The chief of the Cherokee Nation (or she was a few years ago) is named Wilma Mankiller. Whew! THAT ought to bring the boys swarming around her.

Now, without any numbers to back me up, I think that modern-day Indians are probably slightly more likely to be involved in outdoor pursuits than your average non-Indian person. Some few live lives significantly more primitive than most of us are used to, such as the Navajos on the reservation who herd sheep and dwell in hogans pretty much as their ancestors did.

But many if not most Indians today live not too differently from anyone else. They hold prosaic jobs, drive cars, shop in supermarkets, watch television, go online, etc. From time to time many of them will attend pow-wows around the country, put up a tipi and live in it for a weekend ... but there will be a laptop in the tipi and maybe a satellite dish outside.

Seems to me it's high time the Indians--- and heck, why not the rest of us, too?--- updated our names to reflect the present day, when almost nobody hunts buffalo.

In the course of our ordinary lives not many of us will encounter bears and bulls and wolves and eagles. But we all deal with cars. So why not name yourself Little Deuce Coupe, or Giddyup Giddyup 409? The possibilities are as endless as the makes and models of cars themselves: Red Corvette, Blue Studebaker, Chevy Convertible, Rolls Royce Silver Cloud, Two Jeeps, or for an interesting irony, Jeep Cherokee, or Pontiac.

There's the Pickup clan: Parked Pickup, Three Pickups, Rolling Pickup, Big Wheel Pickup, Monster Pickup, and Doesn't Like Pickups.

Or you could be named for things one does with a car: Changes His Own Oil, Gets Good Mileage, Totaled a Mercedes, Burns Plenty Rubber. Or parts of a car: Bent Roll Bar, '48 Cadillac Hubcaps, Rich Corinthian Leather. Blue Fuzzy Dice.

One enterprise a lot of Indians are involved in these days is gambling, from bingo to full-blown casinos. So ... we could have twins: Hits on Sixteen, and his brother, Stands on Seventeen. The problem gambler, Johnny Twelve Step. Seven Come Eleven. Pays Plenty. Pulls the Handle.

Keno Runner Girl. It even sounds a bit athletic and outdoorsy.

Or how about Keno Sabe?

Then there's Dubya Dubya Dubya Dot Apache, Sam Version4.0, Runs Win98, Forty Gig Hard-drive, Billy Hypertext Markup Language, Hates the Internet, Many Websites, Little White Mouse ....

So I wouldn’t be surprised if my next science fiction story had characters named … oh, how about Blue Jovian Moon? Johnny Hyperdrive and Linda FTL. Many Clones. Looks Like R2-D2.

Or Larry Likes Ptavvs.

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