Grace first encounters Blip-A at the end of chapter 6, and a third of the way into chapter 7 he has established there is likely intelligent life on board. In 08.173 he decides to call them Eridians after the cylinder reveals to him they are from 40 Eridani.

Grace’s first visual encounter with Rocky isn’t until 10.014 when he sees movement through the clear hex and then what he thinks is a rock in 10.022. He quickly realized it’s actually an Eridian claw before deciding in 10.030 that he’ll call it a hand. In the next paragraph, Grace describes the skin as looking “like brownish-black rock”.

In 10.047 Grace decides to gender the alien with masculine pronouns and in 10.048 calls him “Rocky”.

The name “Rocky” appears 472 times making it the most common proper noun in the novel (“rocky” is also used as an adjective 8 times). Grace uses it 24 times in direct speech and the other 448 occurrences are all in narration.

Rocky’s direct speech consists of 805 quoted passages, 5,501 tokens, and 936 unique words.

We’ll explore his unusually frequent and infrequent words in a separate beanbag!