A couple of days back, I was reading a story where a high school teacher asks her students to write an essay on the opening line of Moby-Dick: 'Call me Ishmael'. Not on Melville's style, not on the voyage or the whale, but on the name itself. Why Ishmael? Why not Bob, or John, or any of the thousands of other names that could have stood in that place?
The next day, I remembered the phrase 'stranger in a strange land', and it pulled me straight into Heinlein's novel of the same name, with its protagonist Valentine Michael Smith. Smith, the plainest of surnames, is a mask of anonymity attached to a figure who was anything but ordinary.
Together, the two encounters left me turning over the question of how much weight a name can carry. A name is never neutral. Ishmael suggests exile, wandering, survival. Smith is just Smith, which is almost the point. Names can be riddles, or half-hidden prophecies, or sometimes just a joke slipped in by the author when you're not looking. Before we know anything of a character's deeds, their name already speaks.
And then I caught myself wondering: what is my own favourite fictional name? I remember listening to Snow Crash during my commutes, grinning every time the narrator announced 'Hiro Protagonist'. The name was so audacious, so perfectly ridiculous, that it made the Chennai traffic around me feel a little less grim. By contrast, when I first encountered Severian in The Book of the New Sun, his name struck me like something unearthed—ancient, weighty, stark. I was reading it whilst my mom lay in the hospital, her sister newly gone, though she never knew. In that silence, Severian's name became more than fiction; it felt like an invocation, heavy with memory and meaning.
Perhaps names are the oldest form of worldbuilding—and the first spell an author casts over us.