One way this manifests itself is in the invention of names. I don’t mean a new name for your baby, but a foreign name for a character you’re creating. You can stay on safe ground by sticking with the obvious – Juan Garcia, Erika Schmidt, Sergei Petrov. Or you can try to give your characters more distinctive names. That’s where the trouble starts.
With some of these names, you can see the wheels of the writer’s mind turning. In the case of Yvor Baloyne, I am fairly certain that Lem got the name from a relatively obscure figure, the poet and critic Yvor Winters (Lem shows a knowledge of English-language poetry in his work). Besides the poet, I have never encountered anyone with this name in real life.
The fake America invented by Lem has its counterpart in the fake Canada imagined by those other icons of Eastern European science fiction, the Strugatsky Brothers, in their novel Roadside Picnic. This is another space of the mind, having little to do with any actual country. (Shakespeare, who gave Italian names to Danes and a seacoast to Bohemia, might have sympathized.) This novel is probably most famous outside of Russia for serving as the basis for Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker. The use of the term “stalker,” not translated but borrowed directly from English, is the only surviving link to the fictitious Canada of the novel.
The characters in the film lack proper names, but the Strugatskys gave their stalker the name Redrick Schuhart. Almost nobody in North America actually has the name Redrick, and I have no idea how they stumbled across it. His wife bears the non-English, non-French name Guta, so she’s just as unconvincing as a Canadian.
Yet the nomenclature of plausibility can be an issue even when authors are dealing with familiar countries. A much better-known example than Yvor Baloyne – namely Stephen Maturin, the Irish/Catalan ship’s doctor from Patrick O’Brian’s popular “Aubrey/Maturin” series of novels – also shows the author plumbing the depths of obscurity. The name is obviously taken from the Gothic novelist Charles Maturin, author of Melmoth the Wanderer. What makes it unusual is that it’s not an Irish or even an English name. It’s French, because Charles Maturin, though a Dubliner, came from a family of French Huguenot origin.
Doing some background checks is always a good idea, as it helps prevent absurdities. Consider the Antichrist figure from the Left Behind series of apocalyptic novels – a Romanian named Nicolae Carpathia. The authors apparently decided to combine the first name of the Romanian Communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu with the Carpathian mountain range, which runs through Romania. It’s like calling a fictional American president “George Appalachia.” (An online search for this surname in the Bucharest phone book yielded niciun rezultat – zero results).
Sometimes the author’s personal experiences are a factor. August Strindberg gave the family in his play Easter the surname Heyst, because he had been staying at a Belgian resort town of that name (typically for him, he hated the place). It is not a Swedish name at all, yet Joseph Conrad – quite obviously, after reading Strindberg – gave it to his own Swedish character, Axel Heyst, in the novel Victory.
Some choices are rather mystifying. For their film Inside Llewyn Davis, the Coen Brothers gave their hero an obscure first name supposedly of Welsh origin. Llewyn resembles the common Welsh name Llewellyn, but the film contains no explanation of why the character got this peculiar name, or if it is some kind of alteration or abbreviation. We’re left in the dark – although a plausible theory holds that this may be an indirect reference to Bob Dylan, who adopted a Welsh poet’s first name as his stage name.*
Most of these names don’t pass what I used to call the “phone book test,” or what we might call the “Google test” nowadays, meaning: can you look up these names in the relevant phone books and find them? In the old days, most of us didn’t have easy access to the phone books of remote countries or cities. In the Internet age, there’s no excuse, so we can look forward to a golden age of plausible character names (perhaps).
*An illuminating discussion of the name Llewyn, including the “Dylan theory,” can be found at the blog Spastic Onomastic.