Inlanders by Stephen Reese

I haven’t had a good chunk of uninterrupted time in the weekday evenings to knuckle down on the rewrite (I’d rather spend my unpaid hours Monday to Friday ripping around the park on my mountain bike, or stomping a 5 or 8k around the block - it being summer, and lovely out). But I’ve been picking away at some small nomenclature changes that affect Inlanders nonetheless.

So I wanna yabber about the art of naming for a moment.

One of the things that bothers me about, let’s call it…established fantasy fiction, is the proliferation of weirdass, made-up names for people and places. At its worst, the practice becomes a comic act, turning out multi-syllabic über-appellations broken up only by strategically placed apostrophes or other extraneous punctuation. In my opinion, before a casual reader even gets near the end of a sentence such as Yll’trathanagarr Moribundix Gildrantothalosis El’Etten entered the eastern Half-Palantirs of Frightenbarrow Earthensward on Upper Elderloft, they’ve likely moved on to a fiction that offers instead as its novelty the mere repositioning of recognizable nouns within sentences they’ve never read before.

That is to say, fantasy already requires one challenging leap sideways from reality, one conspicuous level of remove, one willing suspension of disbelief, to get the reader outta their comfort zone and into an alternate world in the first place. Why add insult to injury and complicate the transition by giving our unfamiliar objects, creatures and locations needlessly alien names?

It alienates the reader!

Ahem.

What I’ve tried to do with Inlanders is keep the fantasy-naming to an absolute minimum. The characters aren’t called Patrick and Jennifer, but their given names are at least related (phonetically, spelling-ly), to the patterns of some existing human languages. And those names aren’t twenty syllables long, either.

Too, I’ve specifically avoided appending fantasy monikers to locations, objects, creatures and ‘races’ in the Inlanders world, with the exception of cases where there’s no existing correlative in our language and experience - namely, no similar concept or process that exists in the real world we call home.

What I’m getting at here is, I want to draw a reader closer to my weird tale, by any means possible - not push them farther away. I’m willing to make a number of concessions to ease that seduction from the everyday into the fantastic, and one genre affectation I have no hesitation to cast aside is invented nomenclature.

Don’t get me wrong; I LOVE making up names, especially when they’re played for laughs. But in this day and age, I feel the technique has become a cliché, and it’s very tricky to pull off in full seriousness unless you’re China Miéville (i.e., cool enough to come up with something as fun to say aloud as New Crobuzon), or if you’re willing to close doors to people who might otherwise find something human and interesting to relate to in your fiction, if they could just get past all the made-up words.

- Stephen Reese