: Inventing names for Sci-Fi characters How can I invent names for fictional characters in a future-setting Sci-Fi story so they won't be connected to any existing culture? I considered the following

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In fantasy I use following types of names:

classic names (optionally with nickname) - mostly for people like humans (without any magical ability) - Gerard the Fair, Juno the Liberator
garbled classic names - for people with extraordinary magical abilities and Shining ones - Kara (Karla), Grad (Gerard), Aleta (Alžběta)
descriptive names - these names are based on any (mostly visible) property of person, but sometimes may not give a sense - Fairyeyes the Mooneyes, Mirroreyes the Cloudlessnight, Icefingers the Bloodhand
garbled descriptive names - different form of descriptive names - Sil'v'er-stri'pe-o'n-ba'ck
Flower and animal names (with nickname) - Iris the Flowerhair,
Blackwolf

In science-fiction I use following types of names:

Descriptive names
Garbled classic names

Mostly these two types of names are very neutral and they can be very easily changed and replaced with each other. So, one person can have many names, based on world where he/she lives or what is current significant behaviour.

I hope that this will help anybody.

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If your struggling for inspiration try one of the name generators: www.seventhsanctum.com/index-name.php
They generate names for people, places and things that come out logical. They have different generators and you can customize to an extent. Even if you don't use them, they may inspire you.

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I like names with meanings, so I always choose the names of major characters for their meanings. In the case of aliens this gives me an excuse to have a language they speak. One fellow who was rebelling against censorship wrote a story where all the alien names wire mispronunciations of english swear words. You can do almost anything you want if you have a reason and a methodology. If you can't remember your character's name and spell it your readers certainly won't.

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Constrained Randomness.
One fun trick is to take a bunch of names from one or more cultures with lexically interesting names, then generate random names that are different but lexically similar.

The Gibberizer.
I created a free (and open source) tool to do generate such lexically similar names:
The Gibberizer.
It's a little old, but it still works just fine.

The idea is this:
You give The Gibberizer a bunch of text (e.g. names),
and it gives you back a bunch of text that is lexically similar to the text you gave it.

You can fiddle with some of the input parameters,
such as how similar its output should be to your input.

Different but similar.
Because the generated names are lexically similar to the ones you entered,
they are more-or-less pronounceable,
and reasonably familiar-sounding.
Because they are random,
they can sometimes be weird.
You can adjust the weirdness.

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You cannot create names with no connection to any existing human culture because... you're human. What I gather you're asking is more along the lines of: How do I select names that don't sound too obviously connected to one specific language (or language group)?

At a basic level, anything you come up with is going to sound like something, or it's going to sound like crap. If you string together a few consonants and call it a day, there's always gonna be someone who thinks, "Hey, that intergalactic warlord's name sounds a lot like the Azer word for 'sneeze'!" That's fine. In fact, it's better than the alternative.

Think of your readers. Are you thinking primarily (or exclusively) about speakers of your native language? Also, is that language English? This makes a big difference. Honestly, almost anything sounds alien to native English speakers. If you pick a language that's "obscure" to English speakers, most readers may accept it as alien.

If you want to go with the stringing-together-consonants thing, try to form an idea of the kind of phonology they use. Readers notice implicitly if all Skarokii have names full of hard consonants and most Endaara have names with soft consonants and lots of vowels. If most of the male characters have personal names ending with an 'a', no reader is going to mistake them for NASA astronauts.

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I'm assuming, from your use of the word "people" instead of explicitly referring to aliens (not that they can't be people too), plus your explicit mention that some/all current Earth cultures will have vanished by then, that we're talking about future humans.

I think that the others have given some excellent advice, but I just wanted to add that in my opinion, you don't necessarily need to come up with completely new types of names, that aren't tied to any current culture. This is for a few reasons:

· While technology such as the Internet, even today, is greatly accelerating the rate of dispersion of memes and other information across previously largely disconnected cultural groups, it also serves to preserve certain things. Thus, for example, people will be watching "African Queen" on their computers and media screens practically forever, unless civilization in the large undergoes some cataclysmic reboot. Thus not only will people be exposed to American English as spoken in that movie (and all the others from a similar period and the same culture), but the names as well; some future people may name their children "Charlie" because of it, just as people imitatively name children today.

· This technological fixation can be expected to extend even more to systems of symbolic representation, and computers which store and track personal information will of course for all time be far less susceptible to transcription errors than handwriting was in the old days.

Thus especially if the customs for last-name transmission remain the same for a significant portion of society, it's not entirely out of the question that someone would be named "Bill Smith", and (when he chose to vocalize, if ever) pronounce his name roughly as you just heard it in your head, a billion years in the future. Certainly other cultures and traditions would arise over so vast a time, and would probably outnumber the ancient forms by far, but they would also have been influenced by them to some degree. I find it more likely that many languages and pidgins would contain little snippets of at least half-recognizable sounds from today, than that all cultural influence from today would have vanished.

I will update this if I think of a good example, but one approach I've seen in some cases to naming is to take some recognizable forms from today, and apply various degrees of changes to them to indicate the passage of time. Thus instead of "Bill Smith", a writer might name a character "B'yll Smit". That sort of thing always seems labored and cheesy to me if not done with an extremely fine touch.

In any event, I think that your task, which depends on how far into the future your story is cast, is not really to make everything seem completely different from today's world, but rather to determine how much of today's culture remains, morphed though it may be, and what sorts of new changes and additions have occurred. So you'll need some techniques for generating new-type names that are believable in light of your future culture(s), and you'll have to think long and hard with how that meshes with the remnants of today's cultures, in light of the history that will have happened in between. The question is not just what will have happened to isolated splinter cultures, but what happened with the ones that weren't isolated but still evolved.

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Disclaimer: I've written two non-fiction books. I'm presently struggling through my first novel, which does not include aliens. So I'm speaking here more as a reader than as a writer.

As Tannalein says, I'd avoid making names that are unpronouncable. One could make a logical argument that an alien race would have an alien system for making sounds, and so may well have names that humans can't pronounce. But even if it's arguably more realistic, it makes the story hard to read. The trick is to make them strange but pronouncable.

On the other extreme, of course, you don't want your aliens to be named Fred and Sally. You could borrow from other languages, but if a reader has even a general familiarity with that language, it will be just as odd. Better to invent something.

My suggestion would be to invent at least the rough outline for a system. You don't have to invent a complete language, just sketch out a few general rules.

Like: Invent an alphabet, preferably including at least a couple of sounds that are not common English (assuming you're writing in English). Like include a sound "xh" or "jb". Don't make it too bizarre or it violates my advice about pronouncability, but make it odd.

Think about the pattern of vowels and consonants. Like if one alien is named "Tolon", another named "Fiemar" sounds plausible. But "Tolon" and "Frangmatuplen" don't look the same, because the vowel/consonant pattern is too different.

Think about length. Having one alien named "Tal" and another from the same plantet/race/whatever named "Brumaxnologoran Frambar Huvangtran" would seem distinctly odd.

Many human languages have a pattern to the names, like many names end in "son" or start with "Mc". Maybe have your aliens have a few common endings for their names. You don't need to explain what it's supposed to mean, just do it. You might even work something relevant to the plot into the names, like the elite all have names that end "-axlon" while the mechanics all end "-tanak" and the warriors all end "-brufarl" or whatever. But I wouldn't go out of my way to work something like that into the plot. If it falls out naturally, cool. But don't force it.

In general, whatever system you come up with, it isn't necessary to explain it to your readers unless it matters to the plot. Personally I always like science fiction stories where there's a lot of "background" that isn't fully explained. It gives the feel that this is a real world with a history, instead of a simplistic cartoon created just to sustain this one story.

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You want names that are entirely alien to us? Let me share a story - interestingly, an entirely real story about a species with most unique names.

Learning these names is within grasp of humans, although communicating them by anyone else than given name's bearer is nearly impossible.

The species is the horse, and the names are the scents of their breath.

You will sometimes see horses "sharing breath". They put their noses close, and exhale and inhale deeply. This is a friendly "How are you" in their language, and simultaneously getting accustomed to each other and introducing yourself. If you, a human, decide to get on "more personal" level with horses than "owner-pet", you'll fairly easily get them to greet you that way. Share breaths with a horse, feel the scent and marvel how unique they are.

So, one bears dry, cold, tomb-like emptiness. Another is summer herbs of a sunny meadow. Yet another is the scent of a frosty, midwinter day, another - sweet fruit, or a dusty road, or deep shade of forest, or stale midsummer river, or dry warmth of hot sand.

These are true names of horses. And understandably, you can't really copy these, tell them to someone else as given horse told it to you - you'd have to hold their breaths. So, humans use various silly substitutes. But smart humans will give their horses names similar to their true ones. The one with tomb-like emptiness was called Pharaoh, and the one with herbs of sunny meadow - Fairy Tale.

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Wherever your characters are from they will have their own culture and their own language. It's pretty easy to come up with some random names for characters but if you have more than one character then the naming construction for each should be similar, with similar syllable count and length. If they have a culture that respects class hierarchy then they may have other standards that append to their names to denote house or clan affiliation or just family name. For example it's common among Dutch people to have a name that is [someone] van [somewhere] like Vincent van Gogh - the 'van part just means 'from' so it means Vincent 'from' Gogh (bear in mind I'm not Dutch but you get the idea!) and it can also be spelt van de, van der or van den and it pretty much means the same thing.

Your character names have to have a common construction and it should be based on some sort of culture and language construction, even if the reader never actually gets to know about it. Also, once you have decided on a language construction it becomes much easier to write dialogue for those characters because it will be based on the language they know - even if it's not their language they are speaking - in the same way that I can often spot a non-native English speaker by sentence construction, even if the words and context make perfect sense.

For more on language construction try this guy: www.zompist.com/kitlong.html
Hope that helps.

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One further option is to have the aliens adopt "earth names" as part of the plot because their (non-verbal) method of identifying individuals is incomprehensible to mere humans. Perhaps their species all vibrate at a characteristic base frequency and each individual has an unique overtone.

You can then make the decisions made by the aliens about appropriate names form part of the explication of the characters.

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