Discussions: Book of the Month

Anna Lewis replied in The Martian Ambassador

Hi Alan – am going to post this in the discussion rather than message board so it is associated with your book!

“Good question (I love talking shop!). I think it’s important with this type of fiction to come up with names that sound pleasingly strange, but which aren’t so bizarre that they cause the reader to stumble over them. They should stick in the mind, especially in a story like The Martian Ambassador, which has rather a lot of characters.

Lunan R’ondd, for instance, has only three syllables and trips easily off the tongue (and random apostrophes are always good for alien names!). It was actually inspired by the Silver Surfer’s real name Norrin Radd.

Since The Martian Ambassador is a steampunk story, and steampunk is renowned for its metafictional elements (just look at Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), I also like to play little games with names and terminology. So, the Ambassador’s assistant is actually named after the Russian city of Voronezh, which was the site of a famous UFO landing in 1989 (allegedly!). And the De Dannan system which allows Thomas Blackwood’s Victorian computer (or “cogitator”) to operate is named after the Tuatha de Danann, the powerful beings of Irish folklore.

The same goes for Indrid Cold, the villain of the story. Indrid Cold is actually the name of the entity encountered by the inhabitants of Point Pleasant, West Virginia in the late 1960s, described by John Keel in his wonderfully bizarre book The Mothman Prophecies.

I hope you’re enjoying the story, and please feel free to come back with more queries and comments!"

Great – I love all the nods to other works of fiction or events. It’s that kind of thing that often means that I read something more than once, because once I’ve read more around the topic/theme/genre I can go back and discover other levels to the writing.

Am going to read a bit more and then will come back with some more thoughts!