Tim’s online alter-ego, pseudonym, original anonymized identity… but now the veil is lifted.
Where’s the name originate?

Hahleq (actually full name is Ghurney Hahleq, though I only use Hahleq as nickname), comes from a character from the Dune science fiction series of books.  I read this in my early teens and it really wow’d me as it was the first set of books I’d ever read that set out a fully functioning and believable world where economics, politics, religion, mysticism, science, etc. were all dealt with and worked believably.  Meaning that the story was big, everything was interconnected and mattered such that ramifications in one realm rippled over to the others just as it does in “real life”.

You can read a bit on the character who’s name is actually spelled Gurney Halleck on Wikipedia here:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurney_Halleck

I changed the spelling of the last name, as even 10 years ago when I first decided to take this as my online non de plume, the name “Halleck” was taken everywhere I went.  So I messed with the spelling to get names on all the online sites I wanted to use so that I could have a name without any numbers in it, such as Halleck2342, Halleck09841, etc.  Thus Hahleq was born… and if I say so, it’s much cooler looking <grin>, though it does seem to cause people more difficulty in pronouncing than I’d have thought.  Seems to me that “hah” and “leq” should come out “hah-lek” or something pretty close to “hall-lek”, right?  However, a lot of people first seem to go with “hay-lek”… go figure.

Funny thing is that though I really like the character of Halleck in the Dune novels, he’s not actually my favorite character.  If you read them you can try and guess which character is my favorite and no, it isn’t Paul either <grin>.

Hahleq has a middle name too, but no relation to any characters from the novels.  I’ll save that to explain another time.

If you do decide to try out the Dune books, I’d start with the originally published trilogy:  Dune, Dune Messiah and Children of Dune by Frank Herbert.  I’d suggest reading them all in order of publishing as that has been very satisfactory as a reader and I suspect that many of the flashback reveals would obviously be spoiled if you read them in chronological order.  Also, many don’t feel the later books by Frank Herbert’s son, Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson quite hold up to Frank’s quality and I’d hate for you to miss out on Frank’s writing since the books he wrote fall at the end of the chronology.