Your fictional namesakes

There was a much lauded novel that came out in the 80s that was entitled with our family’s name. But I think it was used in reference to its definition (in Maori), not as a character’s name.

No namesakes I know of, and as far as we know my name+lastname combo is also unique in history, but there is a song dedicated to my firstname and it’s been covered in multiple languages. It is so weird, hearing someone sing their love to you(r namesake) in a language you don’t speak!

Musicians, superheroes, aliens, shapeshifters, and many more besides. My personal name and surname are quite common; in both fiction and real life, my namesakes are legion.

Last name isn’t super common but isn’t uncommon. A Bond villain has it (and no, it’s not Goldfinger).

What then? Scaramanga? No? Blofeld? Oddjob? :slight_smile:

OTOH I’m quite sure my given name and surname could easily pass for some bondish super villain.

Not nice of your mom to call your dad an SOB! :wink:

My family name is fairly common and ordinary; but it has yielded one fictional namesake which I’ve always found pleasing. Occurs in Kipling’s ballad The Rhyme of the Three Sealers – about rival American ships and crews which all defied the laws of Tsarist Russia by poaching seals for their fur, in Siberian waters. The ballad tells of three of these outfits falling out with each other over the pursuit of their quarry, and engaging in a mini-sea-battle. One of the captains concerned, is called Tom Hall – which was my late father’s name. Dad was an extremely honest and upstanding citizen; but I suspect that a little bit of him would have, wistfully, liked to be a piratical swashbuckler.

Not at all fictional: my last name is carved into stone at the foot of Napoleon’s tomb.

Does it count if I won a contest to be put in the book? Because my first and last name (but not “me”) are definitely in a book, but I won a contest with the author to be put there.

Otherwise, I would be berry berry surprised to see my last name anywhere. My first name is getting more and more common. I share it with the son of a comic-book time traveler and a certain anarchist who may-or-may not be real

I was always bummed that the only Stephen King character to be named Julie was that skank from The Stand…“more akin to crawly things found among tree roots than a real human being” or something like that. There may have been another Julie in his work since then but the damage is done!

John Jones?

My middle and last names are the same as a very good cozy mystery writer. And I know someone named “Stephen Hayes”–the name of one of the men in that ghastly Connecticut home invasion.

But I’ve never seen my name in fiction.

That reminds me. I have a novel I wrote a few years back. Not published (yet?), but I asked dopers if anyone wanted to loan their names, and plenty said yes. I even took requests for how they would be portrayed. Some day, you’ll all be famous!

I have a bookmark in the page where I’m listed because it’s fun to show people.

It’s one of my Jeopardy bits.

I almost forgot that, in World of Warcraft, there is a rogue class trainer NPC named “Osborne the Night Man”, and a gnome NPC named Ozzie Togglevolt.

My surname is fairly rare, but we’re descendants of a Union general who was “lampooned” by using the family name for the carpetbagging “Evil Senator Stoneman” in Birth of a Nation (the 1915 one; not the 2016 one). Being mocked by a horribly racist movie wasn’t a bad thing, and it was kind of a cool nickname for a couple months after we watched it in high school.

There’s also a Will Stoneman in Iron Will. I’m pretty sure the character is wholly fictitious, though.

Lightray, Gen. Stoneman is also mentioned in the lyrics of The Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”:

I have never come across my full name in any fictional context, and have seen my last name used fictionally only twice, in related works.

My last name is actually Summers, and I am descended from a group that includes the Victorian author Montague Summers, writer of The Vampire: Its Kith and Kin, and other dark and ponderous works of folklore. Buffy Summers, of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was named for him, so she’s more-or-less a fictional relative.

I actually went to the part of Georgia that Gen. Stoneman burned down on Sherman’s March to the Sea. I had a brief moment of panic when they first question they asked me was "So, you a good ol’ boy or are you a Yankee?

Apparently they’d finally forgotten some of the Civil War details by that point*, though, so I escaped unscathed. Guess I’m lucky they weren’t fans of The Band.

  • Except Sherman. They still took potshots at Sherman, even when the topic wasn’t the Civil War.

I have a surname that’s hard to tell how to pronounce when you read it, and hard to tell how to spell when you hear it. A friend of mine who’s a comic book writer once used my name for a character, but he had to change the spelling to make it readable.