The Name Was Never Mine

I found out that this site had the wrong name because two copies of a page disagreed with each other and I opened the older one.

That is not a metaphor I have arranged after the fact. I had star-rangers.org in a browser, served out of a cache old enough to be showing me something that was no longer there, and the version in front of me did not match the version I knew. So I looked into why. Somewhere in the looking, it stopped being about a cached page and started being about a 1953 novel by Andre Norton called Star Rangers, which has been in print more or less continuously for seventy years, and which I had never heard of.

There is a 1987 comic of the same name too, about a military spaceship crew in a twenty-fifth century run by corporations. That one stung more, because the premise is close enough to be embarrassing and I had arrived at mine honestly. And there are two Super Sentai series released under the title in the Philippines, and an MS-DOS game.

I want to be exact about the problem, because I spent a while being wrong about it. It is not legal. Nobody is coming. Titles are weakly protected, the properties are old, and a small interactive novel on a personal domain is not what anybody's counsel is looking at. The problem is duller and worse: I would have been permanently second in every search for the name of my own book. Not blocked. Just under. Forever, and for free, with no mechanism by which it would ever improve.

What I learned about looking

I had help searching, and the help was wrong twice in a way worth writing down.

The first pass ran queries with several candidate names OR'd together, which is efficient and produces false negatives, because a name with modest presence vanishes behind a name with none. On the strength of that I was told Slipwave was clear. It is a video game, a surf and skate brand, a YouTube channel, and a term in seismology. Then Worldwrights, also clear. It is a novel by Max Grant, and an AI tabletop-tools company, and a podcast.

Both were caught only when each candidate was searched on its own, as an exact phrase, one at a time. That is the whole lesson and it is not a sophisticated one: a combined query tells you about the loudest member of the set and nothing about the others.

The graveyard, for anyone who wants to reuse it. Cosmic Drift — clean in books and film, but several bands and albums. Five Layers — no competing work at all, and hopeless anyway, because the phrase belongs to the OSI networking model, software architecture, skin anatomy and yoga philosophy, and I would have been shouting into a stadium. Caldreth, Eirath, Aveldrin — invented, and all three already living in World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV, Forgotten Realms and World Anvil. Fantasy players have been coining names in that phonetic register for thirty years and they have covered a great deal of ground.

The conclusion I did not expect: any two ordinary English words are claimed somewhere. If you want a name that returns you, you have to make a word.

Drithane

From the Irish drithle — a spark, a glimmer. The Celtic Union's worlds inherited that language along with everything else they carried out of Earth, so the derivation is not decoration.

It also looks like drift, which I did not plan and will not pretend I did. The site opens on a station clock forty seconds wrong for eleven years. That the title carries the drift and the small light at once is luck, and I am keeping it.

If anyone asks what it means, that is the answer: a spark, and a drift, and no character in the book has ever said the word. It is not in the glossary and it is not going in. A title that stays outside the story gets to be about all of it; the moment I define Drithane in-world it becomes about one thing, and it is currently doing better than that.

What I did not rename

The Star Rangers are still the Star Rangers.

I went back and forth on this and the argument that settled it was not sentiment. The collision was on a title — the thing that competes on a shelf and in a search box. An organisation inside a story is not a title. Nobody buying a novel called Drithane confuses a chartered corps in chapter forty with Norton's paperback, because the corps is never on a cover.

And every replacement was worse. Star Wardens is a Dungeons & Dragons subclass, a Warhammer 40,000 homebrew chapter, and Jason McCuiston's The Last Star Warden. Charter Wardens is municipal election officials and a New Jersey fishing charter. I would have traded a generic name for a generic name, paid for it in three hundred edits across the canon, the Charter, the Anthem and the founding history, and gained nothing.

There is a nicer consequence, too. Now that the book is Drithane, "Star Rangers" reads the way it should have all along — as an institution inside something, the way the Rangers sit inside Babylon 5. The ambiguity that caused the whole problem was a side effect of the corps and the book sharing a name, and retitling one of them fixed it without touching the other.

The part that rhymes

The site is around one hundred and forty thousand words about people who will not close a file on a forty-second discrepancy that everyone else has agreed to live with. The Survey Archive exists because one record has to be the record. The Institute publishes what it failed to find. The Safety Corps files its own bad calls at length.

And I found out my book had the wrong name on it because an out-of-date copy of a page disagreed with a current one, and instead of clearing the cache and moving on, I read the older one.

I have written several hundred thousand words on the proposition that this is the correct behaviour and that institutions are worth building around it. It is a slightly strange feeling to discover you have been right in your own case, by accident, about something you would rather not have been right about at all.

Glad I found it now.