Lung-Vomit

I am about two thirds of the way through reading Iain M. Banks' latest book The Algebraist at the moment.

In common with most of his SF books, it was a bit slow to start with as Banks is happy to throw in loads of invented items, places, names and titles up front and then explain them as necessary later on. Being set in a different culture in a different solar system everything is... different... and it can take a while to get familiar with the circumstances of the story.

However, once you get over that hump his books are thought-provoking and entertaining with some amazing and awe-inspiring ideas. Just about every page contains some alien name which could make a reasonable band name. For example:

• The Archimandrite Luseferous


• The Shrievalty Ocula


• The Complectors


• Formal War

There is a whole festival's worth of band names in just this passage alone:

Floating, drifting around the room were bobfruits, flossballs, chandelier-gumbushes and wobbling breezetrays loaded with sweetmeats, mood balloons, narcopastes and party-suppositories. The guests helped themselves, eating, ingesting, snorting, rubbing and inserting away as appropriate.

But the name which leapt off page 280 was in this passage:

He wondered if he could sneeze with the gillfluid inside him. Would it come splattering up out of him, some ghastly lung-vomit, ejected, left drooped over the side of the gascraft like some pale blue mass of seaweed, leaving him to gasp and choke and die?

Lung-vomit, what a great name for a band!

It does not take a lot of imagination to see Lung-vomit being a heavy metal band. Possibly a death metal band. From Norway. Its a genre with bands called Cradle of Filth, Anthrax, Biohazard, Doomsword, Sadistic Intent, Carcass, and Dead Brain Cells. "Lung-vomit" would fit right in amongst that lot.

To be honest, its a bit of a surprise to find that nobody has used the name already!