Challenge 1137

Who’s in a Name?

In Harrison Kim’s Beyond the Light of the Valley:
1. What might be an advantage in identifying none of the characters by name?
2. How does the narrator interpret the function of the snake? Why might the snake — rather than some other animal — have been chosen as a symbol?
3. Might the narrator return if his father did not call him a “fool”?
In Mark Reasoner’s Some Things Are Universal:
1. How might the military have better dealt with the curiosity of the space-alien child?
2. Which Anklorran explorers are not allowed to procreate? Why not, would one suppose?
Richard Simonds, The Scrapbook Rebellion: What ability seems to have enabled the future artificial intelligence in the story to exceed the capacities of the AI in its earliest forms?
In Huina Zheng’s, A Name Like Light:
1. Why do readers not need to know the full meaning of the younger sister’s given name “Cidi” in order to understand her motivation to change it to another name, such as “Yin”?
2. What cultural institution is implicitly affirmed by assigning to daughters certain kinds of names, such as those ending in -di?
3. How do given names in Chinese seem to differ from those in Indo-European languages?
In Charles C. Cole’s Ode to the Midnight Cruiser: How does the story provide examples of sentiment while avoiding sentimentality?
In Shawn Jacobson’s Nullarbor: The title appears to be another name for what? And what does it mean?