Martian Name Generator

Mars has been populated by fiction for well over a century, so "Martian" covers several distinct naming traditions. The oldest and most imitated is Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom: two short, hard names per person (Tars Tarkas, Kantos Kan, Tardos Mors), with women taking flowing single names like Dejah Thoris, Thuvia and Sola. Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles went the other way, giving his dying natives airy, vowel-heavy names (Ylla, Yll, Tirra) or absurd ones like Mr. Aaa and Mr. Xxx. DC's Martian Manhunter introduced the apostrophe style that most people now picture, J'onn J'onzz and M'gann M'orzz, where the mark stands in for a swallowed syllable.

A good quarter of the list is human. Colonists in The Expanse, Red Mars and countless space operas are a blend of Earth surnames and Mars-born given names drawn from the landscape itself: Valles, Tharsis, Hellas, Elysium, Olympia, Deimos. A Mars-born character named after a crater or a canyon instantly tells the reader where their loyalties lie.

Whether you need an ancient warlord of the dead sea bottoms, a telepathic survivor of a vanished civilization, or a third-generation dome kid who has never seen an ocean, pick the tradition that fits your Mars and the name will sound like it belongs there.