A.T. Sayre returns to Analog for the sixth time with his novelette “Bella’s Heart”! Here is a short companion piece where A.T. discusses some of the ideas around names and what figures and events societies choose to honor
“Bella’s Heart” is the sixth story of mine to grace the pages of Analog. Which is six more times than I would have ever thought possible. And I’m as befuddled about it as you are. All I know is that it just keeps happening, and after one more publication I think I get a set of steak knives.
Living in America, you can’t help but notice sometimes how frankly unoriginal a lot of the names of the places are. In the Northeast where I grew up, everything is either named after the town in Europe the settlers got tossed out of, or the local indigenous tribe they in turn tossed out. New Hampshire, New England, the Merrimack River, Pawtucket. Narraganset Beer. You don’t really realize it when you’re younger. I didn’t, at least—it’s just what things were called. Even today it doesn’t always occur to me that Massachusetts doesn’t have a Western origin unless I think about it. And I know this kind of thing happens all over the world, and maybe it’s some kind of immediacy bias, but to me it feels far more pronounced in the US than elsewhere.
Out west there’s the same cultural appropriation going on, of course, with names like Oklahoma, New Mexico, Seattle, to name a few, but there is also the occasional ‘just slap whatever name on the place, we’re too busy trying not to starve to death right now for elaborate nomenclatures.’ So sometimes you get towns and other landmarks named after much simpler, more immediate things, like the sweet water well that saved you in the desert, or the horse that died that got you stuck there. That isn’t exactly what I’d call creative, though. It’s accurate, sure, the dead horse is why the town is there, but it’s always felt to me like naming your child Fifth Glass of Wine.
I’ve often thought about the names of things. And it always leads into thinking about the people who did the naming. Or, more accurately, how much of what those people were really like has faded over time. The grittier, more grim details of their lives, their actual character, it tends to drop away eventually, leaving a more family friendly version behind for popular consumption. How eventually they all become folklore. And how little in common it often must have with the truth, which I’ve always thought is much easier to see when looking out west, where the names can be more direct, like Pike’s Peak, and the immediacy of the history means a lot of the rough edges haven’t quite been worn away by the sands of time yet. I mean, you don’t name a town Tombstone for optimistic reasons. Yet having a place named something so obviously dark doesn’t stop anyone from making it a family friendly tourist attraction, sold with images and tales of white and black hatted cowboys—who in real life were totally not quasi or full blown psychopaths—dueling in the road at high noon, while fair maidens at the saloon—who in real life were totally not trafficked sex workers—watched on with baited breath.
A lot of our tales romanticizing a long gone era and the people in them are like that. And not just in America, plenty of places in the world have their Robin Hoods or their Kintarōs. They’re not exactly made up, at least not completely, but they are watered down, sanitized, made into a ‘better story’, and used to accommodate more immediate concerns or needs of the zeitgeist. This is also not exactly the same thing as revisionary history, where whole peoples and the horrors inflicted on them are glossed over or ignored, usually by the ancestors of the people who committed the horrors; that is a more ugly and evil thing. What I’m talking about here is much smaller, and not so overtly nefarious. Folklore as opposed to history. Those tall tales that in the back of our mind we know are apocryphal at best. Nobody really thinks Paul Bunyan was sixty-three axe handles tall. Or that Johnny Appleseed planted every apple tree in America. But the stories are fun, and while not true as such, they embody the spirit of a place and people. Besides, nobody was ever hurt by the tales of a giant lumberjack and his blue ox named Babe. So it’s okay.
But is it? Our willingness to gloss over the rough edges of Jesse James, or not think too much about what the snakes St. Patrick chased out of Ireland were a metaphor for, is part of the same mental process that can be used to claim the allied firebombing of Dresden or Tokyo was no big deal, or pretend that Belgium didn’t even have a monarch in the late 19th century. Does one lead to the other? Does accepting the mostly innocuous tall tales of folklore make accepting the horrible lies of Newspeak easier?
I don’t propose to have an answer to that. I’m just some cynical schmuck with too much free time. But it is something I wonder about. And it is what drove this story in my head to come out.
