Decoding the Elysians

Decoding the Elysians Names and Naming Post 1

When the chosen one thousand, none older than twenty-five, shipped out in the

starship Elysian Dawn, they knew they were making a complete break with Terra. Their voyage to Magellan Sixteen would take several generations, and none of them would ever come back. Part of their brief was to leave all unhelpful attitudes behind. Since no child was older than five, and the adults refused to talk about their pasts, the concept of Terra and its values and prejudices would soon die out.

To symbolise the new reality ahead, each single adult and each couple chose a new family name. These names reflected the hopes and concerns of the Elysians as they termed themselves.

One young couple, Markus and Anya, chose the name Arcadia, not because they were Greek, but because Anya liked golden age myths and found the word and the concept pleasing. Their three children, bearing the eclectic first names of Marianne, Aleph and Bede, were born to the new family name and none of them ever knew what the original names had been. Other chosen names included Atlantis, (a mythological island), Alder (a tree), and Atwell, (a reference to water). The Ashendens and Athertons may have chosen their names after places they had been or lived at, while the Akikkas’ choice reflected their cultural heritage.

Other names included Balm (a soothing herb), Bathsheba (a biblical name), Rain, (another water name), Shakespeare (a literary reference), Causeway, (a journey reference), Ocean (water again), Moon (a celestial reference), Cliffside, Farsee, Windward, Hope and Carpenter.

The embarking couples chose a name which they would both use, but the singles had a name each. In the first generation, a newly-married pair would retain their chosen names, and link them, using both. Hanaka Moon, who kept the genetic records for the Elysians, was a little troubled by the possible tangle lying ahead. That would never be her problem, but she was meticulous in recording the parentage of each new child. Knowing how important their gene pool was the Elysians practised formal marriage. Moon drew up the charts and suggested a good pool of possible matches to each new adult. No one was obliged to choose a spouse from this pool, but most of them did.   

The Elysians and their naming system appear in the Elydian Dawn series. The first book, Elysian Dawn was published in May 2018. Book #2, The Silvering, comes out on June 15th. The website for the series is at http://elydiandawn.weebly.com while the books can be purchased from the publisher, Devine Destinies

About the Blog

Sally is Sally Odgers; author, anthologist and reader. You can find you way into her maze of websites and blogs via the portal here.(Sally is me, by the way.)

The goal for 2017 was to write a post a day profiling the background behind one of my books; how it came to be written, what it's about, and any things of note that happened along the way. 2017 is well behind us, but I ran out of year before running out of books. As of June 2018 I STILL hadn't run out of books, but many of those still to come are MIA by which I mean I don't have copies and remember little about them. There are more new books in the pipeline, and I'm certainly showcasing those, but in between times, I'm profiling some of my characters, places and objects. Thank you so much to everyone who's come along on this journey so far!