Today’s Guardian has a worrying story about the risks of character naming. Author Jake Arnott faced a very expensive libel suit when a character in his latest book turned out to have the same name and a very similar background to a real person. I guess this is a good reason for writing SF. It is much harder for someone to claim that a star fighter pilot or xeno-biology expert is based on them.

By the way, the Guardian article also includes a quote from Shakespeare that I had forgotten but resonates rather a lot with me these days:

“He who steals my purse, steals trash. But he who steals my good name, steals all that I have.”

Yep, that’s the way it is.