The Professional Hero

July 23, 2023August 13, 2023 / Rick Ellrod / 5 Comments

Glory Road

A couple of comments by Kevin Wade Johnson in connection with my last blog post (now a long way back!) triggered a line of thought about heroes and the hero business.

Robert A. Heinlein’s 1963 novel Glory Road looks like a swashbuckling fantasy at first blush, but it turns into something entirely different. Our hero, E.C. “Oscar” Gordon, kicking around the world after leaving the military, is recruited by an incredibly gorgeous woman to assist her with a quest that involves traveling to other universes and swordfighting. This is just the kind of adventure he was craving.

As Kevin observes, the first three-quarters of the book are action-adventure, with sizable side dishes of comedy, scandalous liaisons, and cynical social commentary. At that point the quest is fully resolved—at page 208 out of 288, in my copy. What, then, occupies the rest of the book?

Gordon returns with “Star,” the beautiful woman he’s now married, to her home universe. It turns out she’s the empress of a multiuniversal polity that is in some respects a high-tech Utopia. All Gordon has to do is relax, allow himself to be fêted by the population, and sleep with anyone he finds interesting (the late Heinlein’s polyamory is fully on display here).

He hates it.

What Utopia doesn’t satisfy is Gordon’s lust for adventure. He doesn’t want to be a dilettante or a “kept man.” He wants wonder, excitement, the stimulus of danger. He likes being a hero, with all the occasional discomforts and perils of that role. The placid happy ending of a retired hero holds no attraction for Gordon.

It’s unclear whether Star feels the same way. She’s willing to consider going in on a kind of adventuring “business” with her slightly tarnished knight. But first, she says, she’d have to train a replacement for her unique position—and that would take many years.

The solution is for Gordon to head off again on the Glory Road without Star. He’ll pop back in now and then, but not to take up residence in the Twenty Universes utopia on a permanent basis. He and Star will remain in love with each other, perhaps, in some sense of the term—but not in a sense that requires fidelity on either’s part. In Heinlein’s polyamorous world-view, passing romantic involvements are just part of the adventure: “Knights errant spend their nights erring” (p. 271). Gordon’s happy ending is the continuing adventure.

The Unsettled Adventurer

This idea comes up from time to time in adventure stories: the hero (or heroine) who seeks out danger and isn’t content without it. John Carter of Mars displays a little of this, though in the violent world of Barsoom, he seems to be able to get his fill of trouble while still remaining home-based with the enthralling Dejah Thoris in her city of Helium. There’s something like this idea in the conclusion of The Good Place—boredom with utopia—as we’ve seen.

The really extreme case can be found in an old-time fantasy by E.R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros (1922). The swashbuckling nobles of Eddison’s imagined world fight the good fight against their sinister enemies, the Witchlanders. At the end of the novel, those adversaries are conclusively defeated. Cue the victory feast. And yet . . . Our Heroes are not quite satisfied. Things just won’t be as interesting without the Witchlanders constantly scheming and warring against them. At the very end, the heroes’ fanciful wish is somehow granted: a herald announces the arrival of an emissary from the bad guys—the same event with which the novel opened. (Hence the title: the legendary serpent that swallows its own tail.)

The Series Protagonist

I’ve previously expressed some doubts about whether happy endings really need to be static and boring—so let’s not adopt the Glory Road doctrine too hastily. (In its extreme form, Eddison’s circular epic, one may feel the opposite dissatisfaction in the sense that all the heroes’ striving and suffering has been for nothing.) But these examples highlight a difference among types of action heroes.

In a long-running action series, unless a hero is improbably falling into one adventure after another against their will, we have to assume that the hero likes what they’re doing. James Bond seems to be pretty content with his secret-agent life. Indiana Jones yearns for opportunities to climb out the window of his stuffy professorial office and strike out on some treasure-hunting chase—even at an advanced age, as we’ve recently seen. Captain Kirk, who’d been promoted to admiral by the beginning of Star Trek II, isn’t suited for a desk job. At the end of the three-movie cycle he’s demoted to captain again—ostensibly as a punishment for flagrant violations of Starfleet regs, but we’re to see this as a step forward for him, his best destiny. Yoda accuses Luke of this kind of unrest in The Empire Strikes Back: “Adventure! Excitement! A Jedi craves not these things.”

The same is true of almost all superheroes. Retirement is almost unheard-of. The occasional counter-example makes for an interesting tale precisely because it runs against type: Hank Pym in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Jack-in-the-Box in Astro City. In a somewhat similar way, continuing campaigns in Dungeons & Dragons or similar games tend to assume the existence of a class of professional adventurers who enter willingly into a life of battle and treasure-hunting, as distinct from an assembled-for-one-purpose group like the Fellowship of the Ring.

This character trait does make things convenient for the writers. They have a believable rationale for the main character’s continuing adventures. Otherwise, after a while it would start to seem implausible for one person to keep getting drawn into danger purely by accident.

The Hero By Trade

The Star Trek captains, and other officers, illustrate a type of case where the character really is a professional hero—one who’s taken up a profession or vocation where danger and challenge, and hence the opportunity for heroism, come with the territory. Anyone pursuing a military or quasi-military career fills that bill. Honor Harrington, for example, reflects more than once that she’s good at war; it’s her calling, what she was born to do. Professional police officers, firefighters, or rescue workers—first responders generally—also fall into this category. (John McClane of Die Hard fame, mentioned above, is in a danger-prone profession, though it’s probably rare for a cop to run into the kinds of major crises he does.) Unsung heroes like medical personnel may find themselves in the same position. They may not categorize what they’re doing as heroism (it looks better on them if they don’t); but they are putting themselves “in harm’s way” where acts of heroism are constantly called for.

This is why military SF lends itself so easily to long-running series like Honor Harrington’s. (The same is true outside the SF genres, as we can see, for example, in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin sea stories.) The same is true of private detectives, secret agents, and the like.

The Reluctant Hero

But not all heroes are professional heroes. An equally perennial favorite is the reluctant or accidental hero—the person who answers the call to adventure, but does wish to return to a peaceful life afterward.

Jim Butcher’s Introduction to Jim Butcher & Kerrie L. Hughes, Heroic Hearts (NY: Ace Books, 2022), puts it this way:

Real heroes . . . [are] the everyday humans who happen to be standing there when something bad happens, and when there is a sudden need for skill, courage, or intelligence. They’re the regular people in irregular circumstances who find themselves considering others first and standing up to do whatever needs to be done.” (p. xi)

Some do manage to go back to their ordinary lives after the crisis has passed. Cincinnatus, and George Washington, are famous for pulling off the transition: they took over the reins of the state when they had to, but willingly ceded power afterwards. On a more modest scale, the “citizen soldier” concept, as in the American National Guard, aims at the same thing. It’s part of the mystique of the American World War II armies, the so-called “Greatest Generation” model. You rise up to serve when necessary, but happily return to civilian life when it’s done. Contemporary discussions are more likely to emphasize post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the difficulty of the return to civilian life; but it remains an ideal with considerable drawing power.

In fiction, the contrast between heroic acts and ordinary life provides rich soil in which to grow interesting stories and characters. Tolkien, for example, gives us some characters who do manage the return to everyday existence—Sam Gamgee—and others who find it impossible, such as Frodo. Of course Frodo does in the end find peace in Valinor, but that requires a literal removal from the circles of the world, a transcendence not available to the average hobbit-in-the-street.

The situations can become fairly complex. In the Song of Roland, after the heroic deeds of the story are finished, a weary Charlemagne at the end finds himself called back unwillingly to new conflicts. In the TV series Chuck, the eponymous Chuck Bartowski is initially appalled to find himself embroiled in spy activities, but the sheer coolness of it all grows on him, and by the fifth season he wants to start his own secret-agent business. Scott Lang (Ant-Man) at the beginning of Quantumania is resting comfortably on his laurels, and has to be dragged back into action in the name of helping others.

Detectives in mystery stories fall into both camps. We have professional private eyes like Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe. But then we also have amateurs like Chesterton’s Father Brown and Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, who always just seem to be in the right place at the right time.

The Author’s Choice

If we want to write a heroic adventure story, one of the early decisions we have to make is what kind of hero we want to feature. Sometimes the tale may call for someone who’s automatically in a position to encounter danger, like a military officer. Sometimes we may prefer to drag the hero into action against their wishes, or by happenstance. The whole point of Roger Thornhill’s predicament in North by Northwest, for example, is that he has no desire to become involved in skulduggery and is baffled by the strange things that are happening to him. Like so many other accidental heroes, however, he rises to the occasion. This is a narrative arc that may be both more interesting and more inspiring than that of the professional hero; because most of us live relatively ordinary lives and can only hope that if called upon, we too could become the kind of hero we admire.

The Phantom’s Lighting Contractor

May 3, 2020 / Rick Ellrod / 10 Comments

I never saw Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical The Phantom of the Opera on stage. But I am fond of the 2004 movie. I can’t compare the two formats, so I’ll have to duck quietly out the back door if people want to debate their relative merits. But the movie does bring up an entertaining, if minor, point.

Phantom Candles

If you’re not familiar with the story of Webber’s musical, check the Wikipedia link at the top of this post. What we need to know here is that around 1870, a reclusive villain haunts the Paris Opéra House; he’s obsessed with a young singer named Christine Daae, who is in turn mesmerized by the Phantom’s music; and the partially-masked man lives in extensive caverns under the opera house, which form the backdrop for scenes in the movie.

When I say “caverns,” you may be picturing some dark, gloomy retreat. Not at all. The Phantom’s lair is not only pretty plush; it’s brilliantly lit by what seem to be thousands of candles.

The Phantom’s well-lit lair

My family was watching the movie one time and started speculating about exactly who manages these candles. To begin with, someone has to have lighted them all before the Phantom spirits Christine away to his hideout. Did the Phantom himself spend a couple of hours going around with a Bic lighter beforehand? It’s not as if he has a crew of minions to do it for him. The Phantom is strictly a one-man operation.

Nor is it enough simply to turn a light on, as might be the case for, say, a gas lamp. Candles burn down and have to be replaced. One imagines the Phantom singing the languorous lyrics of “The Music of the Night” while breaking off every few lines to change out a guttering candle for a fresh one. It would kind of ruin the effect.

It gets worse. Where do all the candles come from? Even if we assume the mystery man can afford them (he demands regular protection money from the opera in exchange for not killing people), remember that this is a secret hideout. If a big lorry pulled up outside the cellar doors every week—“Order of 5,000 candles for Mr. P.”—someone would eventually notice.

Of course, The Phantom isn’t exactly a model of realism, and we don’t begrudge the producers another minor lapse in logic in exchange for the visual spectacle. It’s an example of what TV Tropes calls “Fridge Logic”: the plot holes that occur to you half an hour after the movie is over, as you’re rooting around in your refrigerator.

Still, it’s surprising how common this particular anomaly is.

Richelieu’s Firepots

In Disney’s 1993 version of The Three Musketeers (still my favorite version), the primary villain is Cardinal Richelieu, hammed up to the hilt by Tim Curry. He too has an underground lair: a dungeon somewhere near the palace, which can only be reached by rowing a boat across a subterranean lake.

The path to the dungeons is lighted by plenty of torches; no doubt the Cardinal’s numerous henchmen can take care of those. But in addition, there are firepots spaced strategically around the lake, presumably with wood or coal feeding their bonfires.

Cardinal Richelieu’s underground lake

I suppose there must be minions whose sole job is to row around the lake, periodically replenishing the firepots’ fuel. And I expect they are under strict orders to skedaddle off the lake whenever the Cardinal himself comes to take a boat across, lest their mundane tasks interfere with Richelieu’s august progress. Still, it seems a rather elaborate, not to mention wasteful, setup.

It might well be more economical, instead, for Richelieu to hire a contractor to come in and handle the job. That method would solve the minionless Phantom’s problem as well. Clearly, there’s a market niche here in providing this key service for villains.

But why shouldn’t heroes also get in on the game?

Carroll’s Oil Troughs

In National Treasure (2004), Our Heroes spend most of the film searching for a fabulous hoard of valuable artifacts originally collected by the Knights Templar, passed on to the Masons, and eventually hidden by Charles Carroll, one of the Founding Fathers of America. They finally discover this treasure in—you guessed it—an underground cavern, this one under Trinity Church in New York City.

This vast array of shining gold would be unimpressive if it were lighted by a single torch. Fortunately, Our Heroes find that the designers of this particular display hall have run troughs filled with oil down from the entry and across the whole expanse. All Nicolas Cage has to do is touch his torch to the basin of oil at the top, and flames race along the entire network of open tubes, providing them, and us, with a wonderful view of the goodies.

Treasure cavern in National Treasure

This neat bit of eighteenth-century construction still works perfectly after all these years, reminding us of the kind of Durable Deathtraps Indiana Jones is always running into; except that this isn’t a deathtrap, just a convenient lighting effect. At least we don’t have to imagine fires that have been burning continuously for two and a half centuries. We needn’t worry about plausibility as long as we don’t wonder why the oil hasn’t evaporated or leaked away long since.

If those fridge thoughts do occur to us, however, clearly the answer has to be that Carroll got in touch with the Phantom’s lighting contractors to renew the oil supply every so often. The movie has already presented us with several secret societies functioning for centuries; what’s one more?

Conclusion

This particulat subtrope seems to occur mainly in the movies, since it’s primarily a matter of visual spectacle. A verbal description can more easily skate around the problems, though it still wouldn’t be quite as satisfying to write about the wonderful sight of a vast treasure if it were almost entirely shrouded in gloom.

It’s primarily in a historical context that we need the lighting contractor’s services. A story set in the present or future would face less daunting challenges if it merely had to explain long-lived electric lighting rather than candles or other fires. And of course it’s in underground settings that we tend to need the light most.

A little stretching of the imagination was always needed when visualizing exploration, not to mention swordfighting and such, in underground areas without an obvious source of light. One could stipulate that Dungeons and Dragons adventurers were carrying torches in one hand while wielding swords in the other—but at best that always seemed like something only a master swordsman could pull off. I was rather relieved when the players in my D&D campaign came up with the idea of casting Continual Light spells on coins that they could hang around their necks. The wildly shifting shadows as they darted around in a melee, lanyards swinging, would be headachy to imagine; but at least they could get rid of the dratted torches.

What really justifies (and I use the term loosely) these candles and firepots is what TV Tropes calls the Rule of Cool: we’re willing to grant some logical leeway to a storyteller to allow a really impressive effect.

But I’m still tempted to add to the traditional Evil Overlord List an additional bit of advice: If you want cool lighting effects, and the technology level is such that it’s not just a matter of making sure your utility bills are paid up, look up the Phantom’s lighting contractor.

The World Around the Corner

August 27, 2018August 27, 2018 / Rick Ellrod / 12 Comments

**The World Premiere**

I’m excited to have my romantic comedy novella The World Around the Corner in print as of last week. Or in virtual print, at least; it’s out as an e-book from the Wild Rose Press. (Details are available on the story’s page.)

Uncharacteristically for me, TWATC isn’t science fiction or fantasy. The only potential SF elements are some very minor advances in gaming technology (and perhaps in automobile design). Some parts read a little like fantasy, because there’s an online role-playing game (an MMORPG) involved. In that respect there’s a faint resemblance to Ready Player One (book and movie), where an online game plays a major part in a much more serious SF story. But TWATC isn’t really about games or technology; it’s all about having fun with the characters.

You’re Who?

I’ve always liked the kind of romance where a character has to make a discovery about who their romantic interest really is. Jasmine isn’t immediately aware that Disney’s Aladdin, when he visits the palace as a prince, is the same street urchin she’s already met—though she isn’t fooled for long. In Shakespeare’s venerable Twelfth Night, nobody is quite sure who “Cesario” (Viola) really is. The same is true in the modernized high-school variant of the Shakespeare comedy, She’s the Man. Playing around with two ways of knowing the same person is also put to good use in the case of super-heroes (or heroes generally) who have secret identities, from the Scarlet Pimpernel to El Zorro to Superman.

But in all these tales, one member of the couple has the advantage of knowing the truth. It puts the couple on more even terms if neither of them is aware of what’s really going on. There’s a whole series of variations on a single story where the main characters meet indirectly and fail to connect up the two different ways they’re communicating with the same person. This plot seems to have been invented by Hungarian playwright Miklós László in the form of a play called Illatszertár or Parfumerie (1937). It was adapted in English into the Jimmy Stewart-Margaret Sullavan film The Shop Around the Corner (1940), which in turn gave rise to a musical treatment with Judy Garland, In the Good Old Summertime (1949), and again with She Loves Me (1963). In these versions, the main characters are pen pals, and also co-workers. Nora Ephron updated the treatment by making them e-mail correspondents in You’ve Got Mail (1998).

Romance And—

When we tell the story of a romance, we’re often telling a story about something else at the same time. To be sure, this isn’t always the case. In Georgette Heyer’s Cotillion, for example, or in Must Love Dogs, and in a lot of high-school rom-coms, the personal relationships are pretty much all that’s going on. But generally, we don’t spend our lives doing nothing but looking for love. We go on about our daily business, meeting our daily challenges, and stumble upon love as we go.

So a lot of romantic tales also have a storyline dealing with something that brings the couple together. In Heyer’s The Toll-Gate, there’s an involved plot having to do with a theft of currency. The main characters in Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog are searching for the bishop’s bird-stump. (It’s a long story.) Gaudy Night is the Dorothy Sayers novel where Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey finally get together, but they do it while trying to resolve a crisis at her alma mater. The redoubtable Amelia Peabody and her future husband Radcliffe Emerson meet in the context of archaeological investigations (Crocodile on the Sandbank).

I like the idea of a couple’s bonding by cooperating in some shared endeavor. And we may be able to amplify that motif by having it happen twice, in parallel, like the parallel identities in the “Shop” stories.

The Camaraderie of the Quest

One of the things I’ve always enjoyed about the group quests of role-playing games, whether in D&D or World of Warcraft, is the bonding and sense of camaraderie that develops in a group working together for a common purpose. Most traditional games like chess or Risk have the players competing against each other. But the role-playing games typically pit a band of True Companions against third-party monsters or other opponents.

This is a whole different dynamic. And seeing it play out in a game makes the tone both more light-hearted and more detached than, for example, in a real-life business relationship. But for that very reason, it lacks a certain gravitas. Suppose a couple used to fighting side-by-side in a game found they had to work together on something important in real life as well?

The Fun of the Shared Adventure

All this contributed to the idea of The World Around the Corner. Other aspects also played their roles—for instance, a chance to share some favorite music and books. And let us not forget the occasional opportunity, sheerly by happenstance, to achieve a truly dreadful pun, without even setting it up on purpose beforehand. You’ll know it when you see it . . .

I hope you’ll have as much fun reading TWATC as I did writing it!

A Character By Any Other Name

April 10, 2018April 11, 2018 / Rick Ellrod / Leave a comment

Last time we talked about the complications of naming babies. Of course, parents have only a few children. But writers have to name a lot of characters. Coming up with the right names is tricky; some writers are better at it than others. Let’s look at how they meet the challenge.

The Familiar

If you’re writing a contemporary story, you’re in much the same position as a proud parent—except that you know how the person turns out, and you can pick a name that carries the implications you want for the character. Dickens can name one pleasant pair the Cheeryble Brothers and a less prepossessing soul Scrooge to underline their personalities, in case the reader needs to be hit over the head with a sledgehammer to get the point. Not all authors have to be quite so explicit about it.

As we noted, there are plenty of books and pamphlets to suggest character names, as well as sites like Behind the Names, BabyNameWizard, or Nameberry. The pamphlets have become a bit more international over the years: today’s versions contain names from more countries and languages than they used to. This can help us avoid what you might call “WASP Name Syndrome,” in which all the names tend to be blandly Anglo-Saxon.

Kamala Khan, Ms. Marvel

Consider, for example, early super-heroes, who tended to have white-bread names like Clark Kent, Lois Lane, Bruce Wayne, Barry Allen—not to mention the compulsively alliterative Marvel characters like Reed Richards, Peter Parker, Sue Storm, Bruce Banner… We see at least a little more cultural variety these days, even if it’s still hard to shake the alliteration, as with the current Ms. Marvel, Kamala Khan.

We’re still in pretty familiar territory when we visit the realm of the historic, or faux-historic—legendary figures living in real or imagined ancient times. In the Arthurian tales we get ordinary-sounding names like, well, Arthur, as well as less common names (at least at this point in history) like Lancelot, Galahad, Tristan and Isolde, which may at least be familiar through repetition. An author who wants to be (perhaps) historically more accurate as well as exotic can go for Celtic-style spellings: Bedwyr instead of Bedivere, for example. I’ve seen such imaginative renditions of “Guinevere” that you can get halfway through the book before you realize who the author is talking about. (“Gwenhwyfar,” anyone?)

The Semi-Fantastic

We can do the same thing in F&SF—name our hero Luke, our wizard Ben, pedestrian names like that. We may want the effect of the plain, traditional name for a particular character—for example, to suggest homeliness or familiarity. (“His real name is Obi-Wan, but I know him as Ben.”) This is fine if the story is set, say, twenty years from now, when you’d expect names to be relatively unchanged. But it’s harder to justify—to make believable—if we’re thousands of years in the future, or in a completely separate alternate world, as with much heroic fantasy.

Note this can also be true in SF: Star Wars looks futuristic, but we’re clearly asked to dissociate ourselves from any specific connection to the present when we’re told, “Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away…” The curious reader is likely to wonder, how did these people happen to come up with exactly the same names we use, even without any common (recent) history or heritage?

In Zenna Henderson’s stories of The People, refugees from another planet come to Earth and struggle to fit in. The stories are excellent, but the names sometimes give me pause. In a story set on the home planet, before they’ve had any contact with Earth, the characters have names such as David, Eve, and Timmy—as well as the less familiar Lytha and ‘Chell (Michelle?). Why so similar to common Terrestrial names?

Or take the hobbits. Alongside Sam, Bob, and Rosie we have characters like Frodo, Bilbo, Meriadoc and Pippin. Tolkien, the master linguist, can explain this—exhaustively (see Appendix F to The Lord of the Rings). From a narrative point of view, the name-mixture gives us a sense of earthy rustic culture, but also of something a little different from Merrie Olde England. Tolkien succeeds by being both quaint and quirky.

I’m less sympathetic to George R.R. Martin, who seems determined to give his characters in A Song of Ice and Fire names that are mostly familiar, but misspelled. If we’re going to have people named Eddard, Catelyn, and Rickard, why not just call them Edward, Cathleen, and Richard—or are we expected to believe that languages in Westeros evolved in almost exact parallel to ours, but not quite? (I have the same problem with the pseudo-Latin spells in Harry Potter—if you’re going to use Latin, just do it, don’t fake it—though I recently read an article by someone who’s examined Rowling’s quasi-Latin more closely than I and is more forgiving.)

Inventing Fantasy Names

If we’re going for traditional semi-medieval high fantasy, we may want names that are somewhat familiar, but have an antique ring to them. How do I come up with a fitting title for the mighty barbarian I just rolled up for Dungeons and Dragons? There are a number of tried-and-true approaches. As it turns out, TV Tropes has a gallery of naming tropes that cover much of the territory (there’s a list-of-lists at Naming Conventions).

A descriptive name picks out some distinguishing feature: Erik the Red, Catherine the Great. Or Charles the Bald, or Pepin the Short, if I’m aiming for humorous or mundane rather than grand and dramatic. If we don’t like “the,” we can fix on a name like Blackbeard. Or Bluebeard. (TV Tropes summarizes the pattern as Captain Colorbeard.)

Naming someone by place of origin (especially in place of a last name) also has a healthy yeomanlike sound to it. I fondly recall a sturdy D&D character I named John of Redcliff. A lot of ordinary last names, like Lake or Hill or Rivers, probably started out that way. If the background allows for it, we can vary the effect by using French (de) or German (von) or other languages’ equivalents.

Occupations also gave us a lot of familiar last names. “William the Farmer” (to distinguish him from the three other Williams in the village) easily becomes “William Farmer.” Some of these are less obvious than others: we may not recall that “sawyer” is what you call someone who wields a saw.

Names that indicate one’s parents—patronymics and matronymics—occur in many languages. The English have their Josephsons and Richardsons, the Russians their Petrovs and Ivanovnas.

Scorning these expedients, we can also strike off into the unknown by inventing a name purely from scratch, just for its sound. This can produce semi-random results—but not entirely random, since speakers of a given language will tend toward combinations of letters and sounds that “make sense” in their language. TV Tropes’ Law of Alien Names makes some interesting observations about how writers in different genres often approach name generation.

A doctor friend of mine, feeling he wasn’t up to the task of coining a lot of names, used a novel expedient in his D&D campaign: he used the names of drugs. This strategy works surprisingly well as long as you stick to obscure pharmaceuticals, which often seem to have been named by plucking letters out of the air (“erenumab”) or by phonetically respelling a chemical term (“Sudafed”). On the other hand, a fierce warrior character named “Xanax” is going to create some cognitive dissonance for those who know the term in question.

A Variety of Effects

Different writers take different approaches to naming, which contribute to the distinctiveness of their worlds.

At the extreme end of systematic invention stands Tolkien, who once said that he invented his stories and realms only as a place to put his invented languages. His names add noticeably to the integrity of his imagined world; they hold together so well because they really were derived from a number of separate, fully-developed languages. We have a pretty good idea whether a name is hobbitish, elven, or dwarven from the sound alone.

Or take Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom (Mars) stories. Martian heroes and heroines (especially the heroines) tend to have relatively graceful names: Dejah Thoris, Gahan of Gathol (a place-reference name), Carthoris, Llana. Male supporting characters and savage green Martians are tougher-sounding: Tars Tarkas, Mors Kajak, Kantos Kan, Xodar. Villains’ names are still less graceful: Phor Tak, Tul Axtar, Luud, U-Dor. There’s no clear linguistic background for the names, but there’s enough commonality to give us a sense that Barsoomian nomenclature does hold together on a cultural basis.

The far future of SF writer James Schmitz yields a completely different style of naming. Rather than being mellifluously Elvish, like Galadriel or Aragorn, or barbarically guttural, like Tars Tarkas, Schmitz’s names strike me as quintessentially American: with a contemporary English sound and a sort of casual feel—yet unfamiliar enough to remind us we’re not in Kansas any more. Recurring character Telzey Amberdon is a good example. “Telzey,” with the diminutive –ey ending, sounds like a nickname somebody today might bear, but as far as I know, no one actually does.

This laid-back style is characteristic of Schmitz’s Federation of the Hub. The names have a familiar contemporary sound, but they aren’t actually familiar. The first names also tend to give few gender clues—which might be related to the fact that Schmitz stories often featured strong female leads. Nile Etland and Heslet Quillan, along with the single-named Captain Pausert and Goth of The Witches of Karres or Iliff and Pagadan of Agent of Vega, all sound like people we might run into on any street—until we bypass the familiarity of sound and realize we’ve never heard these names before. The names give Schmitz’s stories a unique feel.

Consistency

We can see how the names help establish the mood and ambiance of a story. It says something about The Lord of the Rings that it contains both Gandalf the Grey and Freddy Bolger. As with other aspects of worldbuilding, the names contribute to the “willing suspension of disbelief” when they help us feel the believable solidity of a consistent background—even if it’s a consistency that includes species or cultural variation.

TV Tropes lists a number of ways anomalies can crop up. There’s “Aerith and Bob,” where familiar conventional names are mixed in unaccountably with unusual ones. If a particular character’s name is unlike any of the others, we have “Odd Name Out.” Using a mix of Earthly languages as sources for names gives us “Melting-Pot Nomenclature”—which may be justified if we envision a future in which today’s nations and ethnic groups have intermixed, as in H. Beam Piper’s future history.

The most thoroughgoing way of establishing a solid background for your names is Tolkien’s: invent your own languages. But few of us have the time, patience and talent for that kind of detail. In practice, we don’t need to go that far. It’s possible to do the same thing on a small scale by starting from the grass roots: come up with an interesting name or two and decide to emphasize certain sounds or forms for that language’s words, inventing the rules and common elements (like “de” or “von”) as we go along.

However writers may go about the business of naming, we can appreciate the distinctive flavor given to their stories by how they choose names for their “children”—and if we’re so inclined, we can try out that creative wordplay for ourselves.

Star Trek vs. Star Wars

July 17, 2017July 18, 2017 / Rick Ellrod / 1 Comment

Hatfields and McCoys, Marvel and DC, Star Trek and Star Wars. One never knows how seriously to take these deadly rivalries. Personally, I like both of the science-fiction series, so I see the Trek-Wars wars more as a difference in tastes. Sometimes you feel like a hamburger, sometimes a pizza.

The particular difference I see in SW and ST has to do with their atmospheres or sensibilities.

Good Order

The Star Trek universe—I’m focusing especially on the original series (“TOS”) and movies here—is civilized. There are plenty of things that go wrong, and going where no one has gone before frequently brings us into situations of conflict. But the Federation itself is organized and mostly decent. There’s an actual chain of command. Authority figures are typically respected.

That’s the first approximation. To be sure, Captain Kirk and his successors don’t mind defying Starfleet orders now and then. But when Our Heroes turn out to be right, they’re back on amicable terms with their superiors in short order. At the end of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Admiral Kirk, after stealing and destroying the Enterprise (among other things), is demoted to Captain again as his “punishment.” But everyone understands this as simply restoring him to the role he prefers and serves so well.

There’s enough divergence among Starfleet personnel to make the stories interesting, but actual villains in the corps are relatively rare. Starfleet and the Federation are the orderly defenders of liberty and individual (in our parochial world we say “human”) rights. That Gene Roddenberry optimism is embedded in the show’s DNA.

Fruitful Disorder

In Star Wars, it’s the villainous Vader who wants to “bring order to the galaxy” (as he says around 1:38 in this clip), and it’s the motley, disorganized rebels who fight for freedom. Our Heroes are rebels who defy the authorities. Their chain of command is informal, and pretty much anyone, even the carefree Han Solo, can become a general.

Though the swashbuckling, colorful Star Wars universe may seem lighthearted, it’s actually a rather distressing place. The nearest outpost of civilization to Luke’s uncle and aunt’s farm is Mos Eisley, a “wretched hive of scum and villainy.” Slavery has flourished on Tatooine from a generation ago (little Anakin) to Luke’s era (Jabba’s servitors)—and apparently neither the Empire nor the old Republic did anything to stop it. Intelligent droids are second-class citizens. In the latter days of the Republic, trade combines were permitted to conduct outright warfare against whole planets (Phantom Menace), with no more than tardy, ineffective intervention by the Jedi Knights. It seems a much less comfortable universe to live in than Star Trek’s Federation. Both have their flaws, but the Star Wars ’verse seems much more unstable—if colorfully so.

There’s nothing wrong with this as a story setting. A varied world full of dangers makes for more exciting stories than a placid utopia. But the Star Wars setting calls out to a different kind of fan than that of the Trekkies.

Vader’s desire for order actually has good character-based reasons—one of the things the prequel trilogy got right. In a world where you’ve been held as a slave, your mother has been tortured to death by barbarians, and your beloved is menaced by assassins at every turn, a desire for law and order is extremely understandable. But it’s the lively Rebels with whom the viewer’s sympathies lie. In this democratic milieu, quirky individuals and inspired improvisation flourish.

Both the SW and ST approaches represent ’60s sensibilities, but one is slightly later than the other. Roddenberry’s Star Trek expresses the firm American optimism of the Kennedy era (1960-1963); it isn’t accidental that in the follow-up movies, Roddenberry kept wanting to tell a story about time-traveling to meet JFK. Star Wars, on the other hand, evokes the counterculture of the late ’60s, which distrusted authority and prized rebellion—not to mention colorful chaos.

The Abrams Factor

It’s instructive to see how J.J. Abrams handled the two, since he has had the opportunity to reboot both Star Trek and Star Wars franchises. My sense is that he’s handled SW much better than ST. Abrams’ Star Trek movies show us a distinctly grittier, more chaotic world than Roddenberry’s. It is, in fact, more like the Star Wars universe. And I don’t think I’m alone in feeling that, entertaining as Abrams’ ST movies may be, he doesn’t quite “get” what Star Trek is about. His Star Wars continuation, The Force Awakens, however, is to my mind an excellent (if not flawless) extension of the SW universe.

In other words, making Star Wars more like Star Wars is a good thing, right up to the point where it begins to get slightly repetitious. Making Star Trek more like Star Wars runs the risk of losing the very things that makes Roddenberry’s creation distinctive. Both are good things; but they’re not good in quite the same way.

Alignment

One of the interesting things about the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) game system is the notion of alignment. D&D is built on ideas from a whole range of fantasy stories. Many of those stories involve a conflict between good and evil. Some, however, make the central conflict one of law vs. chaos. D&D’s creators took the surprising step of adopting both oppositions, but keeping them distinct. The result is a three-by-three, nine-cell matrix. A character’s personality and ethical stance can be lawful good or chaotic good, or straddle the two as neutral good. The being can also be lawful or chaotic evil—the evil of 1984 or of Beowulf, let’s say—or an intermediate neutral evil. Finally, someone can be lawful neutral (think an OCD personality), chaotic neutral (low impulse control), or “true neutral” double-neutral (an unprincipled pragmatist, perhaps). The range of combinations allows for shorthand expression of quite an array of character types.

I wouldn’t necessarily buy into this particular classification of famous fictional characters . . . but it gives us an idea how the alignment scheme works in practice.

The alignment chart also yields a neat way to encapsulate the ST/SW difference we’re examining. Star Trek honors the lawful good: the interstellar police force, the scientific explorer, the careful defender. Star Wars admires the chaotic good: the lovable rogue, the solitary guru, the loosely organized band of allies.

Political theory

Here’s yet another way to put it. Science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle, whose doctorate is in political science, laid out in 1963 a map of political “alignments” with two axes, producing a far more useful classification of positions than the usual left-right continuum. (Pournelle’s 1986 essay provides a detailed explanation.) The two dimensions in Pournelle’s scheme are “attitude toward the state” (from state as evil to state worship), and “attitude toward planned social progress” (from rationalism to irrationalism).

If we think of these axes as applying to the character of a culture, not necessarily to politics per se, we can express the ST/SW divide in Pournellean terms. I’d put TOS-era Star Trek somewhere around 3/4’ or 3.5/4’ on the chart, believing pretty strongly in reason and ambivalent about state power. Star Wars, by contrast, seems to live in the 2/2’ region, not far from the “American ‘Counter Culture’” to which I compared its ambiance above. Each milieu will tend to attract viewers who are sympathetic to the points of view expressed in its neighborhood on the grid.

Civilization

What it comes down to, I think, is whether we see the best conditions for free and fruitful lives primarily in order or in disorder. Both are arguably necessary. But is what’s best for people a basically orderly society with a healthy modicum of chaos; or a wild-and-crazy culture with just enough organization to hang together?

The Star Trek/Star Wars contrast thus leads us up to the question of what makes for a good society, a true civilization. There’s a good deal more to be said about this, and I’ll take another crack at it next time.

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