A thought on true name magic...

While thinking of names, and how little sense they make, I had an interesting (to me, anyway) idea about how true name magic could work. This solution doesn't work for systems where everything has a true name, and there's a secret language in which naming is defining, i.e. the So You Want to Be a Wizard series¹.  It does work for the more traditional approach, where names have power over people / sentient beings, though.

When I read that "names have power," I always get a bit confused and worried about how one determines what their true name even is.  Is it just the first thing anyone ever called you?  A name that's somehow supplied with some magic ritual?  Or what?  Are stealth trans people particularly safe from true name magic if no one knows their dead name, or even that they have one?

Well, one thing I've noticed about having so many different things that people call me is that there's an easy way to tell if something is one of my names: does hearing it give me an reflexive mental head-jerk to look and see who is calling me?  Even if I know that they mean someone else?  This has been particularly noticeable in circles where I'm known as Lemur, but there are other people who have my birth name: my brain comes to attention whenever they are mentioned, and then I feel guilty, because it shows I still think of that name as me.

What if true names have power because of this reflexive response?  Presumably the "someone is talking about me!?" mental response has psychic/magical reverberations that a spell can grab hold of.  This might even be used with the true names of groups or organizations, or pronouns...my brain still jerks with recognition for "he" but not "ey," even though I'd much prefer to be called the latter than the former.  So a spell that targeted people by the pronoun "he" would perhaps grab me, along with every male-identified English speaker?

This also makes the gambit of hiding your true name for magical protection not work so well.  If you never see or think about or hear a name, it will stop getting that reflex and stop being true.  But if you use a nickname all the time instead, it will end up with the reflexive response and magic will attach to it.  Your only hope, then, is to be really inconsistent in what people call you, and give a different name each time you're introduced, so that you can't remember what is and isn't your name and don't get a reflexive reply to anything!




¹ I'm a little embarrassed that despite loving the first book in the series as an epsilon, I never realized that there was a series until someone mentioned it to me in grad school, and even then I failed to actually read the rest of them. I should do something about that.

Thoughts on Star Maker, by Olaf Stapledon

It is...hard to figure out what exactly to say about or make of this book. I could try to evaluate it as Golden Age science fiction, and note that the outdated science and the obsession with telepathic unity and perfection--which it shares with Last and First Men--do seem characteristic of one of the ways science fiction was going at that time, albeit not a way I find appealing. After all, I hated Clarke's Childhood's End even though that is generally celebrated as one of his greatest books.

Or I could judge it on the basis it has usually been recommended to me: as, along with Last and First Men, the first great work of future history. By this standard, it is rather interesting. The first half had quite interesting world-building, and I can see a number of worthwhile settings to play around with, even if I wish Stapledon had developed them more. In that regard, it did seem like his focus on "higher" and "higher" civilizations weakened the future history, since it made it harder for him to describe anything in much useful detail.

But Star Maker is something different from an attempt at world-building, or even an attempt to write a mythology, like the Simarillion. It appears to be an attempt at a theological exercise, and one that I'm not certain I'm actually qualified to evaluate. Stapledon builds up societies of increasing levels of "perfection" as a way to work towards a final revelation of a Theistic-seeming creator god. I think it's accurate to describe his theology as Platonist--perhaps that's the main legacy he gets from Christianity (though he was an agnostic)--combined with a Hegelian-Marxist understanding of history.

Stapledon's theology and understanding of the cosmos is vastly at odds with mine, but it was certainly interesting to read, and he made me more interested in learning about how Platonism became embedded in Christianity and (I believe I've been told) Judaism. I still don't understand how Platonism can make conscious sense to people, and yet I'm also not sure my subconscious isn't partly contaminated by it.