Some strange tales of the author's name...

I have on occasion been pressed by folks who read my surname and raise an eyebrow at its relatively unique nature. "That's not a real name," they say, "That's just the one you write under, isn't it?" Well, actually, no... I come from a long and proud line of Swallows dating back to the Vikings (so I'm told), and James Swallow is, quite honestly, the name I was born with. As a writer, my name is pretty much my fortune, and in this rambling epistle I've collected some of the anecdotes that have attached to it over the years…

My first name actually means "supplanter" or "usurper", literally "one who trips someone up and takes their place", which kinda makes me sound a tad sinister - in fact, I'm actually named after NASA astronaut James Lovell (you remember him, he's the guy Tom Hanks played in Apollo 13) and I like to think I'm just about as lucky. James is also the designation of asteroid 2335, one of the solar system's minor planets. Perhaps with such a portentous dubbing it's no surprise I grew up to become an science fiction writer. After all, my dad built me my own space capsule.

My mother tells me stories of how I kicked hard while she watched 2001: A Space Odyssey with me in her womb, and that as a baby I was mesmerised by Star Trek on our black-and-white TV. When I grew up to discover SF and all its kingdoms, I was perhaps asking for trouble by attending a Star Trek convention; consider for a moment the opportunities for wags from a Trek fan named Jim, made even worse by the fact that my first con was spent in the company of a guy named Scott. Jim and Scotty. Oh yeah. In fact, Star Trek's been pretty good to me, with my work on or around it coining in a good percentage of my writerly earnings, but the price I have paid is to face thousands of people who are introduced to me, who then smile a little to themselves and say "He's dead, Jim!" And the saddest part is, everyone who says it to me thinks that they were the first one to think of it; I usually retort with a deadpan "That's very funny. I've never heard that before." It's bad enough to get it from some goofy fanboy, but I've even had members of the actual Star Trek cast say it to me…I wish I met the late DeForrest Kelley before he died, because I'm sure he'd have been sympathetic.

One of the more interesting things about names is to discover how many other people have the same one as you; thanks to the Internet, finding them is a little easier these days. It's a little-known fact that many web-savvy creative types sometimes indulge in what's known as "egosurfing", which Wired's Jargon Watch defines as "scanning the net, databases, print media, research papers, and so on, looking for references to one's own name."

Take a moment and try it - type your name into a search engine and watch what arises. I discovered that the owner of www.jswallow.com is an award-winning photographer in Florida, and that there are other mes who are teachers, biologists, cricketers and corporate execs. One is a noted mountaineer who tackled Everest; some other Jim Swallow also kindly paid to have our collective moniker etched on NASA's Stardust comet probe, so even if I never get to leave the planet, at least my name has. I also share my initials with Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski, which is sometimes irksome when I'm reading articles on the show that constanly refer to him as 'JMS'. The downside, at least for me, is that certain practices mean many hits with my surname in them are not exactly the kind of site I'd like to be associated with…

But by far the strangest namey thing to happen to me is the Cocktail Cigarettes story. It's an odd piece of synchronicity, almost Fortean in its gentle weirdness, and all true. Some time back, a writer friend of mine named Peter J. Evans recommended a book to me in the strongest possible terms, insisting that I read it. The Coming of Vertumnus is a short story collection by British author Ian Watson, a man whom I had never met and as far as I know, was utterly unaware of my existence; in it was a story called 'The Odour of Cocktail Cigarettes'. It's a pretty stock SF plot, about aliens arriving on present-day Earth in order to see if humankind is evolved enough to join the galaxy at large, and as the tale unfolds these beings set a test that a group of specialists must complete. These specialists include a mathematician, a spiritualist, a military cryptographer and so on, but the tale itself is narrated by a science fiction writer named James Swallow. Pretty spooky, eh? You can imagine the hairs standing up on the back of my neck as I read on. Watson goes on to use a place I've frequently visited (Las Vegas) as a setting and even gets my favourite colour right. The fictional me does smoke, while I don't, but I admit that I would light up a Sobranie if it meant saving humanity.

I've decided that one day I'll have to return the favour and write a SF author named Ian Watson into one of my stories, just for karmic symmetry. I sometimes wonder what I'd say to Ian if I met him at a party; "Hey, guess what? I'm a character from one of your stories!" I'm sure he'd retort with a deadpan "That's very funny. I've never heard that before."

© J.Swallow 2000

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