You've heard the moral of this story before.

[mrissa]

I had a sudden and horrifying realization about the naming of the two male main characters in Thermionic Night. Our library sends out e-mail updates about what new books they've bought each month, and at the top of the nonfiction update, I read, "American Prometheus: the Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird." Huh, I thought, I should probably read Oppie's bio before I revise Sampo.* And then I thought, though to be completist I should also get a bio of Edward oh shit.

Yes. My subconscious named the main male characters of my big ol' fantasy series after Oppenheimer and Teller. Which is totally not appropriate. Well, maybe a little bit appropriate. Well....

Damn.

You know how I keep telling you about how you can take the girl out of the lab but you can't take the lab out of the girl? And also how you shouldn't listen to writers because they don't know what they're talking about anyway? Yah. Well. That. Again.

*For those of you who have read Thermionic Night and may now be wondering: no, there is not a uranium nor a plutonium nor yet a hydrogen bomb in Sampo. It's thematic, arright?

Comments

[merriehaskell.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, Edward and Robert are just, well, really Englishy names. It's ok. Plus, they can't call each other Ned and Robin if you name them something else, and I've grown quite attached to them by their nicknames.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh, I wasn't about to try to change it at this juncture. I believe the absolute last name change was Lucy, who used to be Laura.

We were talking about "nice" characters in this book (that is, we were talking about the fact that there aren't any in it), and I said, "Well, Laura's nice." timprov gave me a baffled look: "Who's Laura?" Me: "Oh. Um. Lucy. [pause] She was much nicer when she was Laura."

Anyway, yes, their names are their names. It's just the seekrit-from-me origins of their names that are alarming me.

[lexiphanic.livejournal.com]

I used to dabble in short-story writing (I have since thought better of it, I am not the right sort of person for it.) One of the clues that I wasn't really the writer type was that I discovered after the fact that I had used the same two main character names in no less than three stories, and thought they were new every time. Those must be the names I'm supposed to use for my hypothetical children.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It gets hard when you write a lot of fiction not to have repeats. Especially for male characters: there's a wider bell curve for female names.

[cadithial.livejournal.com]

Ahh, but I see a yet in there :P Thermiotic Nights go boom :)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

No, no, no. I have very good quantum mechanical reasons why they can't enchant a nuke in Thermionic Night or Sampo, and the unenchanted kind are boring.

[seagrit.livejournal.com]

Umm, for us non-physics geeks, could you tell us who the real-world Edward and Robert are? Sorry, my physics education was severly lacking, despite my many math courses.

[zunger.livejournal.com]

Perhaps the next two male characters should be named Wernher and Henry, to keep the theme going?

(Did I ever tell you about Robert [not Oppenheimer] and my discussions of trying to write "Teller: The Musical!"?)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

J. Robert Oppenheimer was one of the main architects of the fission ("atomic") bomb. Edward Teller was also heavily involved in the Manhattan Project. When the time came to work on the fusion ("hydrogen") bomb, Teller helped to edge Oppie out of classified work on (rather shaky) political grounds, and was the only scientist to claim Oppie was a security risk. Oppenheimer had his security clearance stripped -- the man who organized the Manhattan Project! Honestly! Oppie wasn't perfect by any stretch, but it was pretty pure McCarthyism. Teller also attempted to edge Stanislaw Ulam out of his share of the credit for the fission bomb design.

As you can see, having read TN, the similarities are not direct.

As you may not be able to tell, I am highly biased on this subject: I think Edward Teller was a total jerk and absolutely indefensible on numerous points, and I got extremely fond of Oppenheimer from the very first time I read The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Which, by the way, I recommend very highly.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Err, no, you never told me about that.

Alas, but there are very few Finns named Wernher or Henry.

[merriehaskell.livejournal.com]

Something about this whole "She was nicer when she was Laura" thing just amuses me so deeply...

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, she was.

[zunger.livejournal.com]

It may be best not to know. That last suggestion came from the planned line-dance number with Teller, Kissinger and von Braun, singing about East European gentlemen taking over the world...

(And wait, are there lots of Finns named Edward and Robert?!)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

No, there are two major British characters and no source for more of them later in the plot.

There's a source of an American character in the third book, but he's already named Karl.

[lexiphanic.livejournal.com]

yes but mine were all consecutive stories, pretty much, and it was three out of like five total stories. I wouldn't have minded that much if I had reused one or the other name elsewhere, but using them both over and over seemed like a bad sign. Ah well. I don't miss writing, so it can't have been the thing for me to do.

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

At least one of your characters isn't named "Oppie".

(Or is he?)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

No, just Robert.

I suppose Orvokki is as close as one gets to Oppie, in terms of sound in this book.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Not everyone is a writer. Important fact of life. Some people lose sight of it. Not all fans are writers. Not all interesting people are writers. Etc. I'm glad you know it; I wish I could tattoo it in mirror-writing on some people's foreheads.

I know and love someone who has been working on the same novel for my entire lifetime and is not willing/able to move on to another book, declare this one defunct, or finish it. This person's self-concept relies on Being A Writer. It's confusing to me.

[stillsostrange.livejournal.com]

My Orvokki seems to have fallen out of the story she was in. I'm glad yours is still here to carry on.

Maybe mine will turn up somewhere when I clean out my closet.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I couldn't do without this Orvokki. She is the only sensible person in this whole book. Well -- the others are minor characters. One of them will be sensible in the next book, though, which is a relief of sorts.

[marykaykare.livejournal.com]

Um. You know, this is one of my buttons. I've done a lot of reading on that time and I have this weird fondness for Teller (I fell deeply in love with Bohr, but that's another story). I think he honestly believed the things he said in the hearings. He was a very complex and deeply conflicted personality and I think he was treated rather more badly than he deserved -- mostly because people needed a scapegoat for what happened to Oppenheimer. Who displayed some of the worst judgement imaginable in his choices of behavior and friends. He probably shouldn't have had his clearance pulled but he was in really the wrong place at the wrong time.

MKK

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

If it was just a matter of Oppenheimer's reputation, I might agree with you. But Teller also may have "honestly believed" that he should have all the credit for an idea Ulam started, and "honestly believed" a lot of far-right nut-job nonsense, and at a certain point whether he honestly believed it is less the question for me than whether it was right and/or justified. And it seems like a lot of Teller's honestly held beliefs at that point would be aimed at getting Edward Teller ahead.

I can imagine much worse judgment than Oppenheimer's in choices of behavior. Many of the people involved in the security clearance trials displayed it. But you're right that he was not the wisest smart man ever, nor pure as the driven snow.

I understand about having idiosyncratic reactions to readings about physicists in history, though: Bohr is more a favorite-uncle figure than a romantic figure in my brain, but it's a similar principle.

[marykaykare.livejournal.com]

I understand about having idiosyncratic reactions to readings about physicists in history, though: Bohr is more a favorite-uncle figure than a romantic figure in my brain, but it's a similar principle.

What can I say? I'm a physics groupie. :-)

MKK

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Heh. Well, part of my head is still adjusting to the idea that the appropriate pronoun for physicists from me is "them" and not "us." Hard to be a groupie for a band you were in, even on the minor level.

[carbonel]

I believe the absolute last name change was Lucy, who used to be Laura.

My first thought was that you moved her from the Secret Country to Narnia.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I can't firmly say that she is like either of them, or was, but I can't say wholly unlike, either. If Laura Carroll was in her early 20s and had lived through the Blitz as a teenager, who knows? And if Lucy Pevensie was allowed to be a grown-up person with personal interests and love affairs, who knows?

I like my L. either way, though, and I feel faintly guilty about her fate, which is not something I feel about anyone else in this series.