On sci-fi and fantasy names
Although a few authors like to try for names from scratch, that are nearly unpronounceable, most authors tend to base their characters' names off of real names.
Sometimes they just find a really obscure name (ie: tydaeus is a German surname, and is also the name of an ancient Greek King... but I didn't take it from there, I just tried to make it up from the letters TYD).
Another common method is to take a normal word or name and rearrange the letters, adding or taking away a few letters in the process, or changing the spelling. ie: the villain in my RPG is named Siyall Nefreet. Siyall is just a scrambled version of Sally, and Nefreet is Ifreet (a sorta demon-type creature) with an 'N' in front of it and the 'I' changed to 'e'.
Other examples of this method: Hari (Harry) Seldon from Isaac Aasimov's Foundation series, Xris (Chris) from a book I forget the name of, Sectry (Secretary, used as a first name) Murphy from Larry Niven's The Integral Trees, and many others.
A few basic name conversions: Michael -> Mikel, Kevin->Keavyn, David -> Vida.
Another method I've contemplated is just taking some of the most common name syllables, and putting together random combinations. I.E. Dav-, Mik-, and Kev- as first syllables, combined with -el, -id, and -in as second syllables, would yield, David, Mikel, Kevin, Davel, Davin, Mikid, Mikin, Kevel, and Kevid. Not all combinations work well, of course, and sometimes switching to phonetic spellings makes the task easier.
Or you could just steal some names from TV shows you've seen, or books you've read, or even just choose some random dictionary words, as Dragonball Z appears to have done (piccolo, trunks), although I don't particularly like the results of that method.
