In Space, No One Can Hear You Mispronounce Their Name

I'm going to talk about names. Weird names, specifically.

I have a lot of opinions on weird names. They tend to crop up in sci-fi and fantasy, and sometimes, they're terrible. If I'm considering reading a book, I will turn right around if the characters have stupid names. I get a newsletter or whatever for free or cheap e-books, and I have seen some awful names. As in, they took a perfectly normal name threw it in a blender and hit puree. They were trying to make something exotic, probably, but you can still tell what name they started with.

Also, names that are unpronounceable. I narrate everything in my head, so it's important that my brain can articulate a name. And if everyone in a story has weird, unpronounceable names, especially if any of them are similar to each other, I'm going to continually forget who is who. That's why I haven't read The Kalevala yet. It's Finnish mythology, which I'd like to know more about, but Lemminkäinen is the only name I can ever seem to remember.

So here I am, trying to create characters for my epic space story, and I'm walking that fine line between "names that sound like they're in a space story" and "names that sound like names." And since I only have one character with a name, Elsbeth is setting a bit of a precedent. Now, that is an actual name, or was, at least, two hundred years ago. But, within the setting of the story, I'd like to think that it started out as Elizabeth, but after five hundred years of human mumbling, it was shortened down to Elsbeth.

How might this happen to other names? Currently I'm trying to name her son, because I think what she chose to name her child would say something about her. And I could sketch out a little backstory for her if I can give him a name.

I'm starting to venture into the realm of too many/not enough vowels, and apostrophe's in the middle of words. I think the ship she (and possibly everyone else) is on is called the Astr'alé, which has an etymology, but I'm not going to get too detailed on it, in case it's wrong. It should mean, in its compressed futuristic form, something along the lines of "star wandering." My ancient Greek is super rusty, and I'm trying to make it not obviously Greek. I'm not JK Rowling over here, just naming people what they are except in Latin. Also, I'm not totally sold on the apostrophe in the middle. I put it in there last night because it made sense at the time. I'm not so sure anymore. Thoughts on that?

There is a lot of history happening in the course of character creation, and not just Elsbeth's personal history. I need to get an idea of how people came to be where they are now. How did humanity reach this point? That's going to influence how they name their children, and how they keep their calendar. What kind of holidays or festivals do they celebrate?

See, this is why my characters don’t get very well developed. I get distracted by everything else.

Another thing I'd like to try, that's sort of adjacent to names, is words. I'd like to create a fictional language someday,  maybe for this story, maybe another. My subterranean occult detective romance was actually supposed to have one, the language of the lost underground civilization, but I never made any more than a few words. Maybe in the rewrites. I don't know if I know enough about how languages form to create one of my own. I might need a few more Rs as middle initials to pull it off.

But names are sort of a subset of language, so maybe that's the place to start. I don't want to just create wacky sci-fi names like Zyneroplox or Kaashadrm. I want names with purpose, names that make sense in the world.

What do you think, readers? How do you feel about wacky sci-fi and fantasy names?

I'll see you Friday.