It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:
- Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
- Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Beefcake and Babes and Le' Grande Codex.
- Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
- Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
- Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
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Because I read so much science fiction and fantasy, I am inundated with strange names. Some authors are able to come up with interesting and imaginative names. Some authors are less than skilled at inventing names. I suppose I could select an awful name from the truly abysmal Eye of Argon, such as Gringr, the central barbaric character, but that book has been reduced to a long running gag in the speculative fiction community and not regarded as any kind of serious work (plus, it is the product of an unskilled teenage writer). If I'm going to choose a name from a work by a teenager, I suppose I could pick one of Christopher Paolini's characters from the Inheritance Cycle - the evil Galbatorix for example.
Part of the difficulty in answering this question results from the intimate relationship between a character's name and the character himself. I suppose that Hari Seldon's name might be considered unusual, but I am never sure if he is memorable because his name is exceptional or if his name is just ordinary but the role he played in the Foundation series (read reviews) makes it seem exceptional. Perhaps I could go with Poul Anderson's interstellar secret agent Dominic Flandry, or one of Andre Norton's free traders like Murdoc Jern. In the end, I go back to Samuel R. Delany and his book Nova (read review) with its protagonist Lorq von Ray and the villainous siblings Prince Red and Ruby Red.
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Gringr??? Is he always grinning...lol. That is my corny joke of the day :-)
ReplyDeleteHappy FF, I'm your newest follower!
Evie@ Paromantasy
New follower! Sci fi is definitely full of unusual names! Here is my FF if you'd like to follow back: http://theonceandfuturelibrarian.blogspot.com/2012/02/follow-friday-7.html
ReplyDeleteYou do post the most interesting trivia. And hardly anyone I know, aside from you and my son, ever discuss Samuel Delany! So you make me happy!
ReplyDeleteI think what matters most is not how unique the name sounds but how well it fits the character.
ReplyDeleteFor me sci-fi can get away with a lot more in the way of weird names than other genres.
I enjoy how science fiction can get away with more than usual books. Following!
ReplyDeletePreet
AWR
If you want to read twilight, don't buy it borrow from someone
ReplyDeleteSorry a little late in posting a reply, thanks for visiting and following. Returned the favor.
My FF Here (I was Featured YAY)
@Paromantasy: No, but he does have horny palms and he falls for a barmaid/prostitute with a "lithe opaque nose". The Eye of Argon has to be seen to be believed. It is epic in its awfulness.
ReplyDelete@Kary: Science fiction has a fair number of strange names, but I think fantasy has more odd names. For some reason fantasy authors can't seem to stop themselves from throwing letters into a bag and pulling them out at random as a method for coming up with character names.
ReplyDelete@Julia Rachel Barrett: I love Samuel R. Delany!
ReplyDelete@vela-valoom: I think you're right. if a character is interesting and well-written, a good name will serve as an enhancer, and even a mediocre name will seem compelling. On the other hand, no matter how creative a name is, it won't save a dull character from being dull.
ReplyDelete@Preet: That's true, but it can lead science fiction authors to come up with names that don't work together at all. If you're writing science fiction and you have characters named Steel, Avronadipalish, and Jackson, you should have a good reason for the variety.
ReplyDelete@aparajita: I am a obsessive book collector, so I already have three of the four books in the Twilight series. The only one I don't have is Breaking Dawn.
ReplyDelete@Debdatta Dasgupta Sahay: I don't really think of names from the Lord of the Rings as being weird, because they are all so internally consistent, being drawn from the invented languages that Tolkien created.
ReplyDelete