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From: wollman@hergotha.csail.mit.edu (Garrett Wollman)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
Subject: Re: (ReacTor) Five SFF Works Featuring Nameless Protagonists
Date: Wed, 26 Jun 2024 17:55:31 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab
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In article <v5h7d7$ln9$1@reader1.panix.com>,
James Nicoll <jdnicoll@panix.com> wrote:
>Five SFF Works Featuring Nameless Protagonists
>
>What's in a name? 
>
>https://reactormag.com/five-sff-works-featuring-nameless-protagonists/

I immediately think of The Captain in Saunders' Commonweal.  It's not
a military thing -- all the other Standard-Captains have names.  In
Book 5 one of the other graul explains that they all, as a people,
decided to excommunicate The Captain for accepting an officer's
commission, and consider The Captain to be nameless, although this
fails to explain why The Captain wouldn't still consider themself to
have the name they were given originally.  (Given what the same book
reveals about graul reproduction it's unclear how they get their names
in the first place, or if they even know who their parents are.
Perhaps that will be revealed in book 6, if one is ever published.)

-GAWollman

-- 
Garrett A. Wollman    | "Act to avoid constraining the future; if you can,
wollman@bimajority.org| act to remove constraint from the future.  This is
Opinions not shared by| a thing you can do, are able to do, to do together."
my employers.         | - Graydon Saunders, _A Succession of Bad Days_ (2015)