Names in The Orchid's Spine

It’s a common trope in speculative fiction: to show how alien their world is from ours, we need to call them weird names, hard to pronounce species, place names with entire lore books. That works for a lot of stories. That’s not how The Orchid’s Spine works.

First off, just stating the obvious: in their world, they’re not speaking English. At least not an English we would recognize. They’re all humans, living on space stations spread across multiple star systems, in a galaxy so old they’ve forgotten their own ghosts. So all of the dialogue is already being translated to our contemporary language. There’s no reason their names wouldn’t be translated as well. The point is not about how utterly alien their world is. They’re not meant to feel different from us. The future is strange enough already.

The stations are strange. The politics are strange. The quantum flux array is strange. Anna doesn’t need to be named Xy’ra Tal-Vesh to communicate that. She’s just Anna. Those names are already thousands of years old today. And thousands of years from now, I expect someone, somewhere, will still be named Michael. Or Jacob.

The Orchid’s Spine is a story about ordinary people living in an extraordinary universe.