#if laundry! colon was really called that does that mean the unicorns got nobby

[stainlesssteellocust]

Names in the Laundry Files books are interesting because a good chunk of them might just be made up. Total in-universe lies.

The protagonist for most of the series is explicitly using a fake name, supposedly for magical real-names-are-dangerous purposes, combined with a 'don't use your real name online' gag courtesy of the series' technomagical parody elements. He isn't actually called 'Bob Howard', that is in fact just a meme name cause he's a nerd and chose to name himself after the guy who wrote Conan the Barbarian and Kull the Conqueror. And that whole Bastard Operator thing too, but Conan's the main one.

But it's a fair bet that he does this to other people, too. Including the other leads.

If he believes there's a risk to using real names (nobody else seems to care except the elves, my draft fic compares it how he doesn't like using his name on social media either), he'd change the names of the people who come up in his stories too, right? And there's evidence - if I remember right, in one book he spends time in a police station where the guy on the desk is called Fred Colon.

Of course, doylistically, that's Stross homaging Discworld. But from a watsonian perspective, that could well be Bob homaging Discworld, because he's British and a meme loving fuck*. That cop wasn't really a Sargeant Colon, Bob just reread Feet of Clay recently. His spymaster is called 'Angleton', but James Angleton was a real guy and this bloke isn't him, he's not even...Well, spoilers. Again, cutesy fake homage-name to hide dangerous knowledge.

The other leads don't do this. Explicitly, they don't bother. And you'd think that was that, right?

Except all of the other protagonists are introduced in Bob novels. Where Bob is, presumably, giving them fake names.

Is his wife Mo O'Brien really called that? Her narration says she uses her real name when she gets a solo outing, but we met her in a Bob story where he could have just made something up to sanitise people's identities and her real name is like, Sandra or something. Maybe her book is just continuing that convention because swapping names six stories in is confusing. She never tells us Bob's real name, after all.

A mutual who I won't tag 'cause they've gone quiet for a while once picked up how there's at least four guys called Alex across the series. One becomes a protagonist who does in fact use his real name, but again, he first appeared in a Bob-narrated novel so the 'real name' he's mentioned as using in story could be totally different, and the novel is just keeping 'Alex' as...legacy code, sorta. Maybe there's multiple Alex's because it's just the first name Bob jumps to? Starts with an A, Alex, Bob, A B C...

Same goes for Mhari 'Bob's psycho ex cliche rehabilitated into an actual character through the wonders of unreliable narration' Murphy/Grey, who rounds out our core narration cast. Introduced by Bob. Again.

About the only ones I'm sure of are those who were introduced in non-Bob novels. Jim is presumably an actual Jim. Maybe that Anekka girl, because it was a combo-narration outing. Cassie is...well that's its own can of worms, she's not originally called Cassie but the girl she abducted, mind-merged with like a perfect lyctor and flung into a portal to be eaten by vampires probably was (oh Cassie you're so problematic lmao). The guys in the spinoffs I still haven't read. Etc.

Of course this is very much me thinking too hard about things, and it can be safely ignored as a snarl of the setting conceit. in my fics i ignore this; their names are their names. Similarly, I don't actually think that when the leads write their case reports in-universe they're producing novel-length and professionally edited stories with dramatic flow, or are putting in lurid descriptions of their exes sex lives to fill in the gaps, or going on pop-cultural tangents, or what have you. You can usually tell when they're 'actually' delivering a report or whatever because the style changes. None of this is real; the style and naming stuff is just a quirk of fictionalisation.

But it's fun to think about, sometimes.

*it could also be fuel for fanfic in that 'people like Fred, Nobby, Dibbler, Jackrum etc are archetypes who show up all over the world and multiverse' sort of way, of course. When he makes a joke about apes in the library, maybe that was just the Librarian taking a shortcut through L-Space...