My wife is sick this week, and in her boredom she pulled up the Stellar Map to count the known (named) star systems in the This Corner of the Universe galaxy. She came up with 76, and I’m sure I’ve dropped a few names in the books that haven’t made it onto the map. You can imagine how hard it is to come up with themes for naming that many star systems.

I’ve previously written about the naming system starting with the moons of Saturn in Book 1: Titan, Skoll, Skathi, etc. Book 2 drew on the moons of other planetary bodies in our solar system: Jupiter has 50 named moons, including Praxidike, Sponde, Kale, Helike, and others. With some exceptions, I’ve used Jupiter’s moons for the Brevic Republic’s “Western” border, Saturn for the “North,” Uranus for the “South” and Neptune for the “East.”

The Hollaran Commonwealth systems broke the moon theme and are generally named after Roman deities. Dea Dia is a Roman goddess of growth, Picus in Roman mythology was the first king of Latium, and so on.

So in Book 4, I needed yet another theme, this time for the corporate systems. As a nod to one of my beta readers as well as to my wife, the corporate systems are named after characters they’ve invented for our weekly Pathfinder and Dungeons&Dragons game. Syntyche, Seshafi, Sade, Lagrin, and even IaCom and AmyraCorp all originate from there. Those games are a good exercise in storytelling, so it seemed fitting to memorialize those characters in my books.