Masha du Toit: We Broke the Moon and reinventing the family unit

In my new book, We Broke the Moon, I had to come up not just with names, but  surnames for my characters. This was tricky, because they had to fit in with the made-up history of the story-world that I was creating. 

Surnames, or family names don’t just exist in a vacuum, they are part of our history and a reflection of how our families are structured.

The setting is a spaceship, the Tohorā, a “generation ship”, that is, people live aboard her for their entire lives, for multiple generations. The designers of the Tohorā didn’t just build the physical ship. They believed they could design a new kind of society, planned according to feminist principles. With the relatively small population aboard the ship, they had to ensure that the gene-pool remained healthy. They also wanted to free women of the burden of pregnancy and childbirth which they saw as the root of the oppression of women.

They honoured the importance of parenthood and child raising, recognising these skills as just as important as any other kind of work. To achieve these aims, children aboard the Tohorā would be created by combining healthy genetic material, and gestated in mechanical wombs, not in a pregnant woman’s body. These babies would be raised by professionally trained parents.