The True Story
An Alternative Backstory
Offered without apology.
In the early days of this project, before the site had a name or the novel had a published title, two post-graduate students were brought in to assist with the work. They had come from a university in the city. They were diligent, capable, and — as it turned out — constitutionally unable to pronounce a particular consonant in the actual writer's name.
The consonant in question was an L.
This is not unusual. The lateral approximant sits awkwardly between certain phonological systems, and no amount of goodwill on either side resolved the difficulty. The writer's name, as spoken by the two post-graduates, came out as something else entirely — something that rhymed, approximately, with Cameron Strange.
"We just started using it. It seemed rude to correct them. And then it seemed too late."
The name stuck. The mythology followed, as mythologies tend to do — the recovered manuscripts, the London address, the boxes in the attic, the death in 1995. All of it is true in the ways that matter. The bones of the story are solid. Only the name required a certain amount of creative reinterpretation.
Cameron Strange did not exist until two young researchers from Shandong made him necessary. He has existed ever since.
This is, in the end, how most things get their names.
The official account of Cameron Strange and the origins of Shredded Time is available on the backstory page. It is, on the whole, more plausible than this one.