Bristol Con-cludes

A report by Cheryl Morgan.

This link to the Cornell Collective podcast begins broken but maybe one day will be whole.

& Joanne Hall's report!

& Rosie Oliver's report!

& Richard Bendall's!

& SJ Higbee's!

& Peter Sutton's!

& Isha Crowe's!

& Steven Poore's!

& Dolly Garland's!

& Misa Buckley's!

& Geek-Out SW's!

& Kate Coe's!

UPDATE: An even bigger & more offish round-up of reports.

By the way, the v. fetching were-clown flash fic, from Friday's open mic, is by Mjke Wood, as-yet unpublished.

*   *   *

On Saturday I tenaciously blew up Twitter till my final follower muted me, and/or my battery died ... which is also about the time things start to go blurry.

Lemme think. I remember some amusing stuff from Peter Newman on the Bad-Ass With A Baby panel, all about the different skillsets required by the dungeons & dragons genre versus the diapers & developmental milestones genre. And then there are those slightly older kids, whose desires and hypotheses and especially whose questions have ways of re-estranging and re-enchanting what is already strange and fantastical.

Also, at one point ("wastage" + eye-twinkle) Jasper Fforde seemed to quietly but firmly imply that Peter Caveman and his kin would have been eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger.

Doc Bob presented some speculative research into the pedagogy of the Formics, the Prador et al.: since they spawn on the scale of salmon, you'd need hundreds of alien teachers per mother. How does the salmon-xenomorph culture respawn? Then somebody in the audience is all like, "Yeah, neural interface chips though?" then somebody else is all like, "Yeah, fish and chips though?" Fucking hell everyone, well done.

Doc Bob had exact stats, obv. I think it's important we don't just imagine things that don't exist, but count them. In the dystopias panel, Dave Hutchinson was I think the only panelist who found a way to provide a precise numerical answer to a semi-joking demand for one. "Exactly how many characters should you kill?" Zero. "I wouldn't kill anyone." (But maybe one or two characters would disappear).

I like that feeling when a panel discussion seems a bit off-topic and then when you think about it, no, actually that's totally on-topic. For instance, the Bad-Ass With A Baby panel talked quite a bit about the ease with which genre fiction disappears or, more likely, kills parents. It kills our protagonist's parents, just to get the ball rolling, then gives our protagonist some parental figures, then probably kills them as well. A bit of me says, Hmm, Is This The Bad-Ass Orphan Panel Or What ... but actually, it is the same topic: it's about creating a character through an origin story that suppresses social context (including familial context), as opposed to creating characters by creating that context.

There was an interesting back-and-forth between Stephanie Saulter and Jasper Fforde: on the one hand, dismembering familial structures just to get your convenient plot ingredients has the aura of a tired trope, something which deserves to be parodied, subverted and just plain ignored. The same is true of familial relationships when they are sketched in a perfunctory way: it is important to insist on the validity of the child's world, and not just use a child to illustrate something about your adult characters, or to provide a portal-fantasy-type naïf to channel your worldbuilding through. The infant is always on its own quest, and the squeaky bladder just out of reach of its fat little fingers has an epic significance equal to that of the skeleton army that's trying to eat its daddy's soul. (Although, is that true?)

On the other hand, the fantasy of the dismembered family may run its roots deep, even down through culture into neurology. Imagining away parents is a part of a process of individuation, something that is perhaps it better captured by developmental psychology than by literary criticism. Maybe in some ways it's a fantasy that's impervious to the critique of "yeah whatever heard it already."

By the way: in Debt, in his account of the rise of general-purpose money and the permeability between 'human' and 'market' economies, David Graeber writes with characteristic lucidity on what it may mean to trim away someone's familial and other social bonds: "Slavery is the ultimate form of being ripped from one’s context, and thus from all the social relationships that make one a human being [...] The slave is, in a very real sense, dead" (p. 168). The lone individual is supposed to be badass, because otherwise they'd just be a thing.

*   *   *

I went to Peter Newman's great Getting Unstuck workshop, which almost had like a Chris Morris Dance vibe, or like, it had the vibe of one of those comic sketches where the conceit is that some genteel activity which would normally be done incredibly ponderously is done with the energy and urgency and heavy-riffing soundtrack of a brutal contact sport.

Yup, glimpses of some intriguing projects plus I think I got unstuck.

But by now, a lot of little thoughts & incidents throughout the day also secretly coalesced into a new impasse, mostly unconnected with anything I'm writing at the moment. What would a piece of genre fiction look like that really, honestly, to the max, and in an entirely contemporary and up-to-date way, did the things we endlessly aggrandize the genre for doing? -- like, expose how the civilization we live in works, and teach us how to concretely desire a better one? E.g., one corner of that is:

#BristolCon. We see lots of centralized totalitarian dystopias. Lots of no-rule-of-law dystopias. Neither fully captures OUR real dystopia

— Jo Lindsay-Walton (@jolwalton) September 26, 2015

Emma Newman's Fear & Writing small session earlier in the day was kind of splendid in its own way too, btw.

*   *   *

The Here Be Dragons panel explored the dragon as an allegory in decline from Satan to Smaug to Game of Thrones materiel -- Smaug featured prominently, but I missed mention of LeGuin's Earthsea dragons -- turned to contemplation of burping newt dragons, hardboiled steel-trammelled Tinkerbells With A Past et al., then pretty quickly disintegrated into giggles. (Btw, Here Be an older post of mine which vaguely touches on Tom Pollock's monsters). We finished with a kind of monster slam & I voted for Sarah Ash's Hennen on a technicality: the panelists were asked to provide a mythical creature, and hulders, motile haggises, penanggalan vampire ghosts and armored battle-chickens are just normal animal friends, whereas the Hennen only gets real if you detach the carrots from your shoes. I'm pretty sure motile haggis is in Genesis. I think the Hugos should adopt the "loudest cheer" system. Ben Gally seemed to hint he'd been replaced by a fey Ben Gally. By this stage Capgras Delusion had been replaced by Fey Capgras Delusion. A bonus reading from S.J. Higbee which felt like I'd swallowed a catherine-wheel. I copped Gally swag. Twitter myths came to life. The monsters multiplied and mutated all about the bar(ds). A Hennen chased me along the supermoon-lit cyclepath with a spiralizer.

Would con again.

*   *   *

UPDATE: large academic conferences don't, I think, usually have con crud in quite the same way. (Tbh, I'm not even sure music festivals do). I don't want to immediately leap to the jocky inference that fandom's aggregate immuno-response and/or hygiene lack conviction and drive. For instance, another difference is the fondled merch. For instance, Vector. Maybe the slow relentless steadiness of the boozing plays a part too? And I bet more people pull out of academic conferences when they're feeling under the weather than pull out of conventions. I wonder if there's a discernible correlation between fees (sunk costs) and con crud incidence. To do get lemsip cosplay hazmat suit innit.

Newb Maps of Hell

So my small collection of SFF reviews is free on Kindle for the next couple days. Squee!

Newb Maps of Hell (UK)
Newb Maps of Hell (US)

Haven't been reviewing so much lately. I hate reading!

How Long It Takes

"It took me nine years to write this book."

With writing a book, it's always interesting to know when someone started and finished. I think this is partly because we become different people, over time, and it's interesting to know (very roughly) how many people wrote a book.

But these statements don't generate comparable data. Someone who wrote a book in nine years hasn't necessarily worked on it longer than someone who wrote a book in one. They haven't necessarily even been stuck for longer on how to progress their books.

Besides, you know you really began it sooner than you're claiming. You probably began it before you were born. It probably began you.

So that's why I find it strange when people say, "I spent nine years writing this book."

This blog post took me three feet, nineteen degrees, a lumen, a light-year and a cow's grass to write, so you'd better listen up.

Today, Tomorrow

The short talk I gave for the Northumbria Summer Speakers Series is now up on Academia.edu (with the bits I cut out put back in) mostly about science fiction and its relationship with the future. I'm hoping to revisit some of the theoretical material here on the blog, at greater length, if not much greater rigor, before too long.

Elsewhere: MIT Twelve Tommorows 2016 / "We've been trying to elude GHOST HARDWARE, but as Tim Maughan discovers, that's easier said than done" / Dada Data and the Internet of Paternalistic Things.

One of the other speakers at the event was the author Jane Alexander whom you'd better check out right now.

And Rasheedah Phillips, talking at Ferguson is the Future, probably sums up the whole science-fiction-as-acts-provoking-the-future thing way better than where I left it, with design fiction. "The teen mother surviving and not becoming another statistic, and not dropping out of high school, that science fictional story needs to be heard." (Panel 1, beginning at around 30:00).

Earlier: Metafuturism.

SFF names #8: Ged

Sounds a bit like "God" or "G-d" doesn't it?

But also, you know that bit near the end -- you know that bit I mean, the bit near the end? -- do you think it can be read as a critique, or perhaps even a parody, of the notion which is played straight in the rest of the book, the notion that knowledge of a True Name confers power to the knower?

After all (you know the bit I mean, right?), who has the power in that situation?

I'm really not going to say anything else.

Honestly, this comment is otherwise ENTIRELY suppressed because of spoilers. In its place, a quotation from William James:

Metaphysics has usually followed a very primitive kind of quest. You know how men have always hankered after unlawful magic, and you know what a great part in magic words have always played. If you have his name, or the formula of incantation that binds him, you can control the spirit, genie, afrite, or whatever the power may be. Solomon knew the names of all the spirits, and having their names, he held them subject to his will. So the universe has always appeared to the natural mind as a kind of enigma, of which the key must be sought in the shape of some illuminating or power-bringing word or name. That word names the universe's principle and to possess it is after a fashion to possess the universe itself. "God," "Matter," "Reason," "the Absolute," "Energy," are so many solving names. You can rest when you have them. You are at the end of your metaphysical quest. But if you follow the pragmatic method, you cannot look on any such word as closing your quest. You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed.

Earlier:
SFF names #7: Shevek
SFF names #6: Buhle
SFF names #5: Parva "Pen" Khan
SFF names #4: Beth Bradley
SFF names #3: Rumpelstiltskin
SFF names #2: Lucy
SFF names #1: Winnie

The Internet of Oh and One More Things

I'm not sure when it will be out, but I have another strange story coming out, this one in MIT Technology Review's Twelve Tomorrows which is  available for pre-order. (I took everything way too literally and put in loads of reviews of technology). There's some sweet hype from io9 here. io9 you do come from the future!

Informal acknowledgements to go with the story. The twenty-two words beginning “Mercifully, the whole thing” are from William Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum” and the forty-nine words beginning “You know how to take a book” are from Max Black’s “The Identity of Indiscernibles” (see Note). Other background reading which was really helpful included Vinyals, Toshev, Bengio, Erhan, “Show and Tell: a Neural Image Caption Generator”; Anh Nguyen, Jason Yosinski, Jeff Clune, “Deep Neural Networks are Easily Fooled: High Confidence Predictions for Unrecognizable Images”; Margalynne Armstrong, “Reparations Litigation: What About Unjust Enrichment?”; Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., “Repairing the Past: New Efforts in the Reparations Debate in America”; Brett Scott, The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money; Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English culture, 1830–1980; and Lisa Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors. And thanks to Tim Maughan for selfie drones (see my pre-emptive response to his Superflux Drone Fictions).

And really special thanks to Nathan Crock and Bradford Tuckfield for invaluable assistance in thinking through the PrivilegeCheck thing -- in way more detail than actually made it into the story -- and to Samantha Walton, Lucy Kemnitzer, Rob Kiely, Mark Bolsover, William Ellwood, & Sarah Hayden for all your help with writing & editing. And to my ma for receiving suspicious packages for me.

*   *   *

DeepDish SausageFest

Elsewhere: I think I finished this one before Google's DeepDream went viral and showed the internet what we had long suspected, that our monads are puppyslugs. But for what it's worth, this story definitely goes into DeepDream-type territory, so here's an interesting Medium piece by Kyle McDonald on more recent imagery generated through deep convolutional neural networks.

Earlier: I read TT 2014, by the way, and it has some great work in it (two of which are mentioned in my economic speculative fiction listicle. Speculonomics. Fictisticle.).

Later: There is more to story to tell about that world (because it's this world) so hopefully there will be some kind of sequel / prequel / interquel before too long.

Note: I figure NeurodiversiME partly works by scraping and sculpting content, so a few micro-plagiarisms are appropriate. Max Black ICE or whevs, come at me, orbs.

Jonesing

Jonathan Jones's Guardian clickbait reminded me of Jupiter Jones's early precursor to clickbait, cluebait.

People cannot help but ask Jupiter Jones what the three question marks stand for, even when they've got a lot of important stuff to be doing today.

“It's a very impressive card, young man. But may I ask what the question marks stand for?”  

The three had been waiting for that question. Hardly anyone failed to ask it when they saw the card. 

“The question mark, otherwise known as the interrogation mark,” Jupiter said, “stands for things unknown, questions unanswered, mysteries unsolved, riddles of any sort.” 

(The Mystery of the Fiery Eye)

Earlier:

On Terry Pratchett 

Nugget of Pratchettology

A funny little article popped up in The Guardian today to say, "I haven't read any Terry Pratchett, but I know he's mediocre, not a genius. Everyone stop liking him!"

I don't think it's deliberate clickbait, really. It's more a sign of how saturated we are with clickbait: clickbait becomes a form through which you can channel a little temper-tantrum, whose shape would otherwise have been a harrumph, or going to wait in the car.

Anyway, if The Shepherd's Crown is one of the columnist's least favourite books he's never read, I thought I should share a listicle of my Top Ten Favourite Books I've Never Read:

1) Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain
2) John Crowley, Little, Big
3) Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
4) Stevie Smith, Novel on Yellow Paper
5) Flaubert, Bouvard et Pécuchet
6) Lydia Davis, The Collected Stories
7) Shea and Wilson, The Illuminatus! Trilogy
8) M. John Harrison, Nova Swing
9) Terry Pratchett, Going Postal
10) Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

I can recommend them all unreservedly. Really unreservedly. I know you'd love them and I know I would too.

If we read them, they would change our lives. Everything does.

I want to be fair to Jonathan Jones. For reasons I won't frighten you with now, I actually think there's a lot to be said for exceptionally-fleeting engagements with books. There is an art of not-reading, just as there is an art of reading. Maybe there should be poetics, polemic and literary criticism of not-reading too.

But the article's silliest assumption (and Jones knows he's being a doofus) is its broad-brush division between "mediocre" and "genius," as if most people wouldn't want to place Pratchett somewhere in the middle.

And even if we do place him somewhere in the middle, that's only as a shorthand. Because literary value doesn't exist on some kind of spectrum or leader-board. There isn't a top spot. There isn't really any such thing as "genius." (Except maybe getting a double-headed blackbird to live on your hat: that's pure genius).

In 2005 Pratchett declined a Hugo nomination for Going Postal. Maybe it was because he wanted the Hugo Awards to be run as efficiently as Ankh-Morpork's postal service. Pratchett loved a well-run institution, and he didn't need that Hugo.

Literally a knight?

Pratchett also didn't really need literary criticism, but literary criticism does need him. It's worth talking about Pratchett's writing in an academic mode and/or in a fannish mode -- just not in a pontificating arbiter-of-taste mode. It's important to go beyond merely evaluating, and to really explore and interpret Pratchett's writing qualitatively. So with that in mind, here are some pointers to finish with, suggestions for both Further Reading and maybe even Further Writing.

The Pratchett meta-text is enormous, and bits of it are watchable, wearable, playable, etc. I have been a little surprised by how scant the core academic literature on Pratchett actually is, although I bet that's going to change. A lot of what's out there so far is also a bit . . . odd, idiosyncratic, rough-around-the-edges, though I really don't mean that pejoratively. I think this has to do with: (a) an oddness which always crops up in any literary criticism on comic writing; (b) academics who aren't primarily literary scholars, but who are Pratchett fans and manage to find a bridge to his work; (c) quite a lot of theses put online rather than adapted for publication, and quite a lot of undergraduate work.

L-Space maintains a link list of essays and analysis (and the L-Space wiki is itself an unremittingly dope apparatus criticus. I think these people have read the books). Discworld and the Disciplines: Critical Approaches to the Terry Pratchett Works, ed. Alton and Spruiell (2014) is a recent edited collection where you could also go to for a fairly comprehensive bibliography. Terry Pratchett: Guilty of Literature (2008) ed. Andrew Butler seems to be currently the only other literary-critical collection on Pratchett, although there are useful books I think aimed at slightly more general audiences, including The Folklore of Discworld (2008) by Pratchett and Jacqueline Simpson, The New Discworld Companion (2008) by Pratchett and Stephen Briggs, An Unofficial Companion to the Novels of Terry Pratchett (2007) by Andrew Butler, Philosophy and Terry Pratchett (2014) ed. Held and South, and Pratchett’s Women: The Unauthorized Essays, by Tansy Rayner Roberts (from these blog posts). There's also the excellent Science of the Discworld series (1999-2013) by Pratchett, Ian Stewart, and Jack Cohen.  Pratchett's own 2000 article, "Imaginary Worlds, Real Stories," on the relationship of his writing to folklore, has some interesting critical reflection. Dorota Guttfeld's chapter in Ideological Battlegrounds: Constructions of Us and Them Before and After 9/11, ed. Joanna Witkowska and Uwe Zagratzki, feels like a much-needed examination of the politics of Pratchett's Ankh-Morpork strand. I don't think Discworld 'does' 9/11, does it? I also liked Janet Croft’s ‘The Golempunk Manifesto: Ownership of the Means of Production in Pratchett’s Discworld’ (2014), which you can read all of on Academia.edu. All these people are actually just getting on and having a conversation about Pratchett, not blustering about whether or not it's worthwhile having a conversation.

Any other suggestions, recommendations? If I don't find a proper sympathetic-but-critical overview of race throughout the Discworld series soonish, I may just have REF up my own QED-bike. I pray to all the spirits (but not too hard) that nobody ever feels it necessary to write about the relation of Pratchett's narrativium to Baudrillard's hyperreal.

Finally, here's one big, blunt question. Pratchett is a satirist and a moralist, whose villains are usually fundamentalists, and whose heroes often show devotion to the rule of law. So are the politics of his work simply classical liberalism, perhaps with a special love for civil society? Does anything complicate that label -- "Pratchett is a classical liberal"?

*   *   *

Mansfield Park is my favourite Jane Austen. "Sir Thomas in the house!"

Earlier: posts about Pratchett.

Elsewhere:

In Response to Jonathan Jones and his Bullshit Article about Terry Pratchett
Sorry, Jonesy, But I Can Write for The Guardian and Love Terry Pratchett
Get Real. Jonathan Jones Is Just A Professional Troll
Terry Pratchett's books are the opposite of 'ordinary potboilers'
Jonathan Jones is a sneering priggish snob shocka
On Terry Pratchett and the art of comedy
Despite What Ignorant People Say, Terry Pratchett Is Destined For Enduring Fame

Where to start:

Stupid Obvious Hugo Question

Yo. The Puppies had a go at gaming the Hugo Awards but they lost resoundingly, and (I assume?) rules will change to make Hugo Awards a bit more resilient to gaming next time round. Let's see what happens next year! Yeah! ("Hi Sad Puppies 2016. Please roll 1d4 and vote only for the corresponding name ...")

Also, the full Hugo data came out and it became (mostly) obvious who was edged out of the shortlists by the Puppies slates. And some of those authors, and their friends & fans & whoever, are probably a little sad about that, though they're probably mostly looking on the funny side, or the bright side, or some other great side -- I don't know, the halloumi-flavoured side or something. Gah!

So, I'm wondering:

Would fandom be interested in holding a kind of one-off, informal, bolt-on prize, drawing on the same data? 

Kind of to see what would have happened? A special prize, just for this one weird year, where everyone who could vote in the Hugo Awards can vote again, but on short-lists where all the Puppies-slated nominees have been removed, and other authors bumped up to fill their spots?

(Or indeed, if possible, generating a set of shortlists for this year by running whatever rules will be used next year on the nomination data?)

Call these one-off awards the Hug0 Awards or something? Or Hugos Prime? Okay, probably those names are a bit close to the real thing, at least without some kind of official endorsement. So call them the Stalinist Disappearing Wrongthink Paint Happy Faces on Sad Puppies Awards? Whatever you called it, it might generate significant prestige! Or not! Yeah!

It would never be a perfect exercise. It's impossible to interpret and interact with the data as though the Puppies never happened at all. For instance, there's no way to figure out which Puppies-slated nominees might still have made it onto the ballot without the Puppies situation -- or at least, without full Puppies situation, with only discreet, informal bloc-building and virality effects -- and who knows, whether some of them might even have won if they hadn't withdrawn, or forged ahead all sticky and gross with Puppies licking, unable to draw love from a non-Puppies crowd. And there's also no way to be fair to whatever vaguely Puppies-friendly authors Puppies followers might have voted for who weren't included on the Puppies slates.

But you could do a pretty interesting approximation of an alternate timeline Hugos.

Is there appetite for that kind of thing? Is something like it already happening?

Probably not, I'm guessing? Better to move forward not back? Better to move left not right? Better to move mercy not nostalgia? Better to dwell in a floaty bittersweet ethereal Schrödinger's Hugos, where everyone who might have won in a way has won, and everyone on the long-list just shares in the ectoplasmic superpositioned rocket, with Noah Ward as the trustee, better that than NAIL EVERYTHING DOWN EXACTLY WITH ROCKETS? Better that than have most nominees wind up sad about losing in two timelines, and even the winners a bit disappointed that they won only on the wrong timeline?

Or maybe it'd be fun. Thought I'd ask.

*   *   *

Earlier posts: Quick Hugo Thought (in a very similar vein). Happy Puppies > ideas for reforming Hugos (which might also work for a kind of bolt-on award layer run on Hugo data).

Elsewhere: File 770. Wired on Hugos. We've Always Been Here Storify about that Wired article (which I think maybe has led to it being a bit amended?).

PS: There's a super-quick way of doing something a bit similar, which is just to assume the winner is whoever gets the most nominations but avoids being included on a Puppies slate. Or a variation: the winner is whoever the winner was except the No Awards are replaced with whoever got the most nominations but avoided being included on a Puppies slate.

PPS: Update! Doing an ickle bit of research, I come across GRRM's Alfie Awards, and the poor ol' Paranoiappies who have doxxed them as the SECRET REAL SJW HUGO AWARDS. Because, you know, a secret Hugo you can't tell anybody about would definitely be as good as a normal one. Better. Shhhhh. Also, I come across Jay Maynard's proposal for a Trust Level Trophy.

PPPS: Update! A Kickstarted anthology. Yeah that's a better idea.

SFF names #7: Shevek

Wickes: How do you choose your names? it seems to me you have a hodgepodge, or is that deliberate? 

Le Guin: I don't think you'll find too much hodgepodge in the phonemes of any language that is implied by the names in a certain island or a certain country in my books. I tried to have fairly clearly in mind what pool of sounds they used because it bothers me very much in other people's fantasies when they have a hodgepodge of sounds that don't go together. 

(Conversations with Ursula K. Le Guin, ed. Carl Freedman, p. 23)

Ursula Le Guin is sometimes given as an example of a SFF author with a rare skill for naming. (Anne McCaffrey is supposedly the other end of the spectrum. The Evil Overlady solved a pressing problem in 2007: all apostrophes in the middle of fantasy names are to be pronounced "boing").

It is interesting, therefore, that the founders of Le Guin's ambiguous syndicalist anarchist utopia in The Dispossessed (1974) seem to care so little for names. Parents do not give names. Names are randomly generated and assigned by a computer:

“Shevek,” he said mildly. “No ‘doctor.’”
“Is that your whole name — first and last?”
He nodded, smiling. [...]
“Is it true that you get your names from a computer?”
“Yes.”
“How dreary, to be named by a machine!”
“Why dreary?”
“It’s so mechanical, so impersonal.”
“But what is more personal than a name no other living person bears?”
“No one else? You’re the only Shevek?”
“While I live. There were others, before me.”
“Relatives, you mean?”
“We don’t count relatives much; we are all relatives, you see. I don’t know who they were, except for one, in the early years of the Settlement. She designed a kind of bearing they use in heavy machines, they still call it a ‘shevek.’” He smiled again, more broadly. “There is a good immortality!”
Vea shook her head. “Good Lord!” she said. “How do you tell men from women?”
“Well, we have discovered methods...”
After a moment her soft, heavy laugh broke out. She wiped her eyes, which watered in the cold air. “Yes, perhaps you are uncouth! ... Did they all take made-up names, then, and learn a made-up language — everything new?”
‘The Settlers of Anarres? Yes. They were romantic people, I suppose.”
“And you’re not?”
“No. We are very pragmatic.”
“You can be both,” she said.
He had not expected any subtlety of mind from her. “Yes, that’s true,” he said.

(Chapter 7)

This isn't really indifference, of course. The founding utopians were very interested in linguistic determinism, the idea that language enables and constrains the possibilities of thought and experience.

The founding utopians knew that names were a special kind of language, and they recognised the danger of names. Unless names are constantly redistributed, they start to accumulate reputations. Names become markers of status or faction. Shevek marvels at Dr. Atro, a hawkish conservative from the neighbouring capitalist society of A-Io:

Atro could trace his genealogy back for eleven hundred years, through generals, princes, great landowners. The family still owned an estate of seven thousand acres and fourteen villages in Sie Province, the most rural region of A-Io. He had provincial turns of speech, archaisms to which he clung with pride. Wealth impressed him not at all, and he referred to the entire government of his country as “demagogues and crawling politicians.” His respect was not to be bought. Yet he gave it, freely, to any fool with what he called “the right name.” In some ways he was totally incomprehensible to Shevek — an enigma: the aristocrat. And yet his genuine contempt for both money and power made Shevek feel closer to him than to anyone else he had met on Unas. 

(Chapter 5)

So how many bi-syllable, non-hodgepodge, non-bong! names are possible? Well it all depends, but let's assume a monosyllable can have one of about 80 onset phonemes, one of 12 vowel phonemes, and one of 100 coda phonemes. That might work out to about 9.2 billion, which is interestingly where some demographers see world population peaking some time this century. I'm sure my math is at least as dodgy as theirs.

But the proposition is not only mathematical: it is also cultural. The preoccupation with scale and boundary is inscribed into all Annareans names. Every new Annarean you meet reminds you of the permutational plenitude, the almost -- but not quite -- endless diversity contained within certain inflexible shared limits. Shevek meets a Shevet: they fight. How would Shevet have felt had he met a Shevet?

Somewhat relatedly, anthropologist Eduardo Kohn shares this in How Forests Think:

Another common form of perspectival joking in Ávila, as well as in other Runa communities, occurs when two people share the same name. Because I share my first name with a man in Ávila the running joke was that his wife was married to me. [...] His older sister jokingly addressed me as turi (sister’s brother), and I addressed her as pani (brother’s sister). Similarly, a woman who shares my sister’s middle name called me brother, and one with my mother’s name called me son. In all these cases shared names allowed us to inhabit a shared perspective. It allowed us to create an aff ectionate relationship despite the fact that our worlds are so different.

Despite the huge number of possible names, and despite the Millennium Bug style fixes we can imagine for Annareans's naming computer, this utopia (in sharp contrast for instance to the constitutively imperialist utopia dreamed up by Iain M. Banks a decade later) has an inner commitment to the enclave form. It is a utopia that doesn't think it can be endlessly scalable. Okay, maybe this is a utopia that could be for everyone. But perhaps only for certain values of "everyone."

Earlier:
SFF names #6: Buhle
SFF names #5: Parva "Pen" Khan
SFF names #4: Beth Bradley
SFF names #3: Rumpelstiltskin
SFF names #2: Lucy
SFF names #1: Winnie