For good reason, though. You need the readers to be able to keep the characters straight.
Yep. In fact, one of the things I learned in a writing seminar taught by a best-selling author was that you should avoid even giving your characters names starting with the same letter unless you have a good reason. That’s because readers skim, and they look at the first letter of a character’s name to identify him/her.
Naturally this doesn’t work if you have a whole stable of minor characters, but at least for major and secondary characters, it’s a good practice.
Also it kind of falls down if you have more than 26 characters. But I’ve been using this same exact rule without knowing it was a thing, so that’s good.
While writing a play many years ago, I named two different characters Beth, for precisely this reason.
(Confusion wasn’t an issue. Very different characters, never on stage at the same time, etc.)
I just use the names of girls that dumped me when I was dating. For the guys, I give the masculine version of the name. Julie becomes Julian, Pat becomes, well, Pat, Winnie becomes Winston, etc. I then change a couple letters in the last name.
As many times as I was dumped, I figure I have about 5,321 names to go. It was a tough year.
Some particular thing about a character can give you an idea. If he is involved in communications, Tele-Dor might be good. An aggressive leader could be Thoron. You probably wouldn’t want to give a masochist a “strong” name unless you plan on using the twist somewhere down the line. (Like, the name doesn’t seem to fit at first but later…hoo boy!)
But 30 years ago, “Chiwetel” would have been considered a weird alien name and subject to the same criticism. Names are made up all the time: consider Zasu Pitts from around 1900. And when I was typing up Census data from the 1930s, I came across names like Tekla, Alsondra, Oseia, Feebie, Ozite, Elowiat, Yudemis, Zoel, Ullas, Coyt, Xorge, Elida, Melzar, etc.
The origin of the name doesn’t matter. You’re assuming that no new names will be made up in the future, except as variations on existing ones. That’s not going to happen.
I use the random button on wikipedia.
Look for my upcoming novel, Sean Mac Feorais Ngulugulu, Master of the Aircraft Kit Industry Association.
Oh, I agree that major characters should have distinct names, and that’s not even a stretch: If two people who often interact share a name in the real world, they’ll generally develop nicknames to distinguish between them, and an author can just use those nicknames. But when they all have different names, right down to the secretary that’s seen in one paragraph on one page, it jars me a little.
That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m basically getting at is that most names in the future will be current names or fairly close variations. Yes, names like say “Ethel” or “Floyd” may go the way of “Ethelbert” or “Osmund”, but it’s unlikely that the majority will change too much.
So why go out of your way to pick names (or weird variant spellings) like Xorge, Ozite or Melzar for human characters? To me, it smacks of the literary equivalent of giving everyone in the future some weird hair or clothing like they do in pulp sci-fi.
It depends on what kind of future. If you’re talking about the DISTANT future – the Eloi and Morlocks from H.G. Wells – it’d be silly to call them Bill and James. If you’re talking about a mission to Mars in A.D. 2110, then, yeah, it would be silly to have Commander Z’Rax and systems Engineer Rapiladanch.
Agreed. I was actually thinking about this on the drive home, and that’s more or less what I came up with- if we’re talking far, far distant future- as in tens of thousands of years in the future where Earth is at best a legend, then crazy fancy names are fine. Or after say… some sort of cataclysmic event and a fall of civilization, then that would be another mitigating factor
But if it’s something say… 500 to 1000 years in the future (or maybe more), with all the high tech that would bring, and (most importantly) an unbroken thread of civilized society to the present, then it’s reasonable to think that the names wouldn’t be very far off, based on current historical precedent. It’s not unlikely to think that there might well be a guy in 3013 AD named Hubert Farnsworth, for example (Futurama continuity glitches notwithstanding).
When I write fiction, I use whatever name pops into my head at the moment I’m writing, but will change it later if I think of something better. I have a file of names that I consult now and then (including donor lists for the orchestra), crossing off the names as I use them.
If I need a good foreign name, I look at the Wikipedia article of either that country’s legislature or its Olympic team, and use one that isn’t already too famous, making sure (if there’s any doubt) that it’s of the right gender.
For alien names, if inspiration eludes me, I’ve shaken up Scrabble tiles or Boggle cubes and gotten some bizarre and/or interesting combinations. Tweak to taste - the aliens won’t mind.
That’s assuming that the way the culture handles names doesn’t change in the intervening period. While it’s certainly possible that it won’t, there’s also a chance it could, even given continuity of civilization. After all, look at us here–we don’t address each other by “real” names. That spills over into physical space as well; when the DFW Dopers hung out regularly, we consistently called each other by our handles. A future version of our society with centuries of modern communications behind it could move entirely to a use-name system, perhaps with “real” names being only a vestige manifested in official documents and used until a child is old enough to choose their first handle. That would make for a setting with potentially very odd names.
For that matter, all of that could happen, and you might still find a guy called Hubert Farnsworth…because he chose an ancient literary reference for his handle.
For me, typically, when choosing a character name, it has to lay at the intersection of three values. That is:
- It has to be appropriate for the setting/time/culture/etc.
- It has to sound good. (At least for the character—not too boring, or too extravagant, or silly, or ugly sounding—and this is admittedly subjective.)
- It has to be a joke.
That last one’s probably the eyebrow raiser, if nothing else. Let me demonstrate, with a couple of examples.
First, a minor character in a fantasy story of mine—a Marine lieutenant aboard an an airship in a sort of late-preindustrial fantasy setting. At the moment, he’s Lt. “Fleishhacker.”
Now, in the world of the story, he’s from a culture that’s a sort of Franco-German fusion. The surname is of German origin, so that’s covered.
Second, I just liked the sound of it—I came across it by chance, IRL, as it turns out that was the name of a San Francisco philanthropist, who founded the SF Zoo, and has his name on some of the buildings.
Third…it translates as “butcher.” Awesome. 
Ironically, the Lt. is probably one of the LEAST bloody characters I’ve planned in this particular, so far. Let’s look at another one: A sharpshooter on the same ship, “Karol Rittgers .”
“Karol” is a Polish/Slovak name—which I think I first heard in a cheesy old scifi movie “The Invisible Invaders.” Which is actually appropriate for the regional analogue he’s from. It’s a form of the name “Charles”…or “Carlos”.
“Rittgers” is in honor of Sarah Rittgers, a Smithsonian museum specialist in weapons, who’s shown up on a few History Channel documentaries on guns. And, apparently, a prize winner at the National Muzzle Loading Rifle Association match.
It gets worse. In a scifi story I’ve tinkered with, off and on, an android US Navy officer has the name “Tarr.” Obviously, an unusual (although not actually made up) name, vaguely robotic or mechanical sounding—and possibly indicating that it was some kind of designation a machine might adopt as a name, if they weren’t actually designed and named as a person, but only gained their freedom. A theme in the story.
But, actually, I just added an extra “r” to one of his namesakes, Tar, for reasons of simple aesthetics, and to make it slightly less overtly silly sounding. Also, to help cover up the fact hat he’s a…jolly Tar. (He’s actually not that jolly.)
That’s my kind of in-joke. So meticulously twisted, that no one will even notice it’s there.
I’ve even done it in fanfic, a couple of times, though I actually don’t create too many original characters (I try not to)—one exception, though, was a character from an “Evangelion” AU/Crossover, one “Yuriko Sanrei.”
In case you haven’t seen the show…[spoiler]Yuriko is a genetic duplicate of Rei Ayanami, who herself is a half-clone of the alien demigod Lilith.
“Yuriko” is an actual Japanese given name…meaning “Lily Child.” (Get it?) And, as it happens, this character had a hint of onscreen “chemistry” with another woman.
“Sanrei” isn’t a real Japanese surname…just as the character isn’t really Japanese born or raised. It is, however, a crude compound of the Japanese words for “Zero” (Rei) and “Three” (San).[/spoiler]
Ba-dum-bum.
Alien names, I’ve fiddled about with on occasion, in different ways .The most recent, for a more-or-less thought experiment in worldbuilding, was with a species I called the “Huul” (or possible “Hul” with an appropriate diacritic)—properly pronounced by jerking in your gut while you said it, or by making a sound while being punched in the stomach. The concept being that their language (or at least, the language of the dominant culture) was largely unpronounceable by humans—pitched too low, and dips into radio at points—but was actually pretty well translatable.
For names, a low birthrate (among other factors) lead to their simply adopting their birthdate as a given name (the numbered day of the seasonal subdivision/“month,” more or less inspired by the old semi-translations of Mayan rulers, such as “18 Rabbit”), followed by the family name. The family names being created more or less the same way they have been in western societies—an ancestor’s trade, derived from pato- or matronymics, etc.
So, for the prototype character, his given name translated literally as “12 Cold”—he was born about a third of the way through one of the winter months. (There are varying and more poetic translations of the name “Cold,” but that’s a pretty faithful translation as it is—they’re a very prosaic people.) His family name came from one of his ancestors, apparently, being a metalworker. Probably with iron.
So…“Smith.” Which was the whole joke to begin with. 
(Well, technically, it could be translated as “of the Smiths,” “Smiths” or “Smith,” representing how plural forms would be rendered in that particular Huul script.)
There ya have it. My horrible, horrible method for character names.
FWIW this is exactly what you DO want to do if you don’t have names already. Finish the story and then go back and find the names - don’t let a detail like that hold you up from completing what you’re writing.
Once you complete the story, go back and read it aloud - to yourself (sounds weird, but this is a trick for any writing, at any level, that works) and you’ll find that your characters may “name” themselves. Give it a shot.
For the record, I came up with a pair of physicists that developed the first practicable FTL drive that I have yet to find a decent story to put them in. Sarah Paige and Hoshiro Turner.
Yes - they invented the Paige-Turner drive.
But not the Bachman-Turner Overdrive?
That’s about 100 years down-line in the history of that particular universe.