Quote:
Originally Posted by Graham
I'll start with thoughts on the character names. Did anyone else find them confusing?
The designations may well need a bit of tweaking. They were set in an early draft, and may not be fully appropriate now. It might be fun to look back through the process that led to these names.
Spoiler:
In the early versions, I had two 'male' androids that could pass for fully human: the Captain ("CAP") and his Deputy ("DEP"). As it's a ship, the deputy is called the Mate. I'm now wondering why I didn't originally use "MAT" here, as that would have been a real male name!
However, I realised that CAP and DEP were too similar. I also noticed that the Mate was essentially cast in the role of carer, so I changed DEP's 'gender' to 'female'. This immediately felt better to me. I toyed with changing the name, but I was wary of making her too obviously female as there's a big pitfall in that as the 'mate' of the Captain, and also 'subordinate' to the Captain, I could stray into territory that would annoy someone sensitive to feminist issues. (I'm already playing up the lantern-jawed male stereotype as part of the crux of the story.) This is also the reason why I've given the Mate a more formal mode of speech than the Captain. He's the most fully 'human'; she's more machine-like.
I'd originally had just one other character, intended to be a subject for humour, so I wanted to give him a name that would work in that context, and chose 'Kenny'. (I'm not saying all Kennys are comedic, but the name felt right for this.) To make it more obvious that this was a robot, I wanted to turn the name into an identification code of some sort, which gave me KEN-E or KEN-Y as options. I reasoned that I could explain the E better than the Y, as "Expert System", which is why that phrase is in the android model description.
Then I realised that I needed to have a plot element that allowed me to explain what was going on, and the accident to KEN-E meant that I could show the Mate reviving an inappropriate new android, The Geologist, and the plot could emerge from their conversation. (Being inappropriate gave me some conflict to play with.) I could have just made this character KEN-E, but since I'd written Mark IV Android Expert System, AND-E dropped out as obvious.
Now, AND-E was emerging as a much more interesting character than my original buffoon, KEN-E. That 'Expert System' was fun. AND-E is an expert. At Geology. Not at camerawork or landing in descent vehicles, and definitely not at thinking outside the box. He's even more machine-like and literal than the Mate. Hoorah, I thought. I've got three distinct characters.
But I had a soft spot for poor KEN-E, and my story is aiming at setting up the absurd tableau at the end, so the idea of their giving the Geologist KEN-E's face turned up. I'm unsure about this now (I'll come back to this in a later post), and it may be that I have to let it go.
I have half-justified (to myself) the KEN designation as 'ken' as in 'knowledge', but this is confusing. Really the Engineer's designation should be something more obvious like ENG-E, but that doesn't feel right.
I'm happy to change the names if a few of you think I should, but at the moment I can't think of good alternatives.
Graham |
Things often end up with names that make less sense than they should because of contingencies. The name made sense when it was created, but later doesn't, for whatever reason. Such imperfection can make the story better.