This may have come up before, but I believe Ascian comes from the Latin for "no shadow" as the Ascians are supposed to be near the equator. Wolfe says as much in an interview somewhere.
Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it. Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.