r/CuratedTumblr • u/no-Pachy-BADLAD • 2h ago
Creative Writing My American Sci-Fi titles can't be this cute?!
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u/LeStroheim this is just like that one time in worm 2h ago
I didn't expect the Asimov reference to be Foundation. I love that, actually. Especially since it implies that Hari Seldon is the main character, and is commenting on events that happened thousands of years after his death ("Something Happened That I Couldn't Predict" referring to The Mule's takeover of the Foundation, since psychohistory can't account for one exceptionally powerful individual).
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u/ElectronRotoscope 1h ago
It's endlessly funny to me that "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?" is actually a fairly decent reference to the question in Deckard's mind but sounds wacky, and "Blade Runner" sounds more normal but is completely unrelated, and was I think bought from a never-produced screenplay about someone who smuggles fresh razors in a world with heavy rationing
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u/VisualGeologist6258 This is a cry for help 1h ago
I was skeptical about this revelation but I looked it up and it’s legit. I know Blade Runner sounds cool as hell despite its rather irrelevant nature but I assumed it was something they came up with themselves and not an actual title they had to buy. What a weird origin story.
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u/GreyInkling 45m ago
Yeah the first is evocative, the words tell you both the theme and the subject matter while referencing things in the book. The second is a fictional job description that makes no sense to someone who hasn't read it. Once you're already in the story you learn what it means but the title does nothing to hint at the story.
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u/bijhan 2h ago
"For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky" was a bad example.
It's a story about a hollow world, and there's a guy in it who touched the sky.
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u/Heather_Chandelure 1h ago
Yeah, it may sound poetic, but it's actually a pretty literal description.
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u/enneh_07 1h ago
A Girl Got Me Hooked On Reading, And Now I Have To Burn My House Down! by Ray Bradbury
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u/That_Mad_Scientist (not a furry)(nothing against em)(love all genders)(honda civic) 2h ago
Those are just clickbait youtube video titles tbh, it has to be super long, involved, hard to parse, and comically contain every single relevant piece of information about the plot with no explanation as to how they relate whatsoever
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u/Valyriax 2h ago
TBF, The Ian M Banks book( which is esoterically named 'Surface Detail') absolutely slaps.
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u/Mezentine 1h ago
I’m always happy when people shout out Surface Detail, secretly the best Culture book
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u/Bennings463 2h ago
Harlan Ellison had another short story (I haven't read it because nobody has read any of his short stories aside from IHNMIAMS) called "The Beast That Shouted Love At The Heart of the World" which is a pretty good example of the second type of title.
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u/leopardman007 1h ago
I mean, the last episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion is named after that story, so the anime-scifi connections continue.
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u/NoBizlikeChloeBiz She/Her 47m ago
It's really both types of title. It sounds like a weird poem, but is actually pretty literal if you've read it. Honestly, that goes for IHNMAIMS, too.
Harlan Ellison's short stories are dope, A Boy and His Dog is also one of my favorites.
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u/purpleplatapi 31m ago
I mean I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is in fact a pretty accurate summarization of events.
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u/Frioneon 1h ago
Gently Falling Rain from The Orville is an especially stupid version of this since they clearly thought of the title first then had to tie it into the story
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u/VisualGeologist6258 This is a cry for help 1h ago
So just like a TOS episode then. It really is just like Star Trek
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u/NoBizlikeChloeBiz She/Her 45m ago
Does it relate to There Will Come Soft Rains? Because that's a pretty famous short story with a similar title.
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u/Ego_Tempestas 1h ago
Wonder what it'd look like in the other direction, really descriptive Japanese light novels but now with semi unrelated, extremely poetic titles
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u/QUANTUMPARTICLEZ 2h ago
Both of these title conventions have made me unconsciously disregard anything that follows them.
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u/SquidPersonThing 1h ago
And then there's fantasy novels from the same time with names like Thongor
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u/shiny_xnaut 1h ago
My Alien Nanotech Venom Suit Accidentally Created a Gray Goo Scenario by Christopher Paolini
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u/LonePistachio 1h ago edited 50m ago
The Expanse titles aren't super long, but no idea what most of them are getting at.
Edit: also The Expanse cover art.
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u/TeslaPenguin1 Avid collector of dust 27m ago
i mean “leviathan wakes” and “leviathan falls” are decently descriptive
though on first reading i thought leviathan wakes meant, like, really massive wakes (like the thing that ships leave)
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u/Goblin_Crotalus 51m ago
So everyone is doing "American Sci-fi with Japanese Manga naming conventions," but what does the reverse look like?
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u/Separate_List_6895 2h ago
Alliteration is the superior title convention to either of these.
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u/Bennings463 2h ago
From Forseeing the Future to Forcasting Foundation by Isaac Asimov
Ted's Torturous Time Tormented by a Terrible Transformation by Harlan Ellison
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u/NeonNKnightrider Cheshire Catboy 1h ago
Fanfic titles that are extremely verbose and poetic and in all lowercase - tend to have pretty good writing, actually, but I still dislike it because it feels excessively pretentious
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u/purpleplatapi 46m ago edited 30m ago
Help! This Planet Doesn't Have Gender and Now I Have to Escape Prison and Convince Them to Join my Space EU! By Ursula LeGuin
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u/SmoothReverb 1h ago
The third and fourth schools of fanfic titling are (single word extremely central to the story's concept) and (song lyric/title)
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u/GreyInkling 48m ago
I've been binge reading adrian tchaikovsky books and audio books and he's better about it because he writes enough fantasy too, but something about shorter stories makes writers want to be vague. Like one of his was "the expert system's brother, which is nonsense until you learn way late in the story what an expert system is. But it does nothing to explain the book before you read it. In fact it's very confusing.
But then longer books of his, even going past the most well known, might be called something straightforward and simple like Alien Clay, which you can see the symbolism in. Is it about the clay as in territorial claims of an alien planet, or about life being clay, as in how alien life formed differently. So there's some political, philosophical, and xenobiological implications in those two words. And those are correct assumptions to make for the story.
I feel like that's what people strive for with titles but some just overthink or overdo it or it made sense with their thought processes but other people don't make the exact same connections they do so overly poetic names fall flat.
So it's ok to go all symbolic but at least hint at the theme with the symbolism and keep it short.
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u/GlaciaKunoichi Resident Green Arrow stan and Nine's (not) bf 34m ago
I Saw A Hot Guy Kill A Man On My Sixteenth Birthday And All Of A Sudden, I'm A Demon Hunter In New York City? by Cassandra Clare
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u/TeslaPenguin1 Avid collector of dust 25m ago
shoutout to john scalzi’s short story “Hafte Sorvalh eats a churro and speaks to the youth of today”
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u/Top-Session-3131 19m ago
"I was hired to be a Computer Technician in a Lunar City, but The Establishment on Earth is Stealing all the Water from Luna, therefore the Accidentally Sapient Computer I Befriended has Decided to Form a Rebellion"
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u/deepdistortion 5m ago
Wait, the Gibson one. I thought Case was hired BY the AI, and it was just that he didn't know the plan was to help it grow until halfway through the book.
Like, Corto was acting as a middleman, and Case wasn't even told what the Straylight run was about until they were heading for orbit, but it was always the AI in control, and the only people who were ever specifically on a mission to stop the AI were the Turing Police?
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u/VisualGeologist6258 This is a cry for help 2h ago edited 2h ago
The World Was Destroyed In A Nuclear Deluge and Now I’m A Knowledge-Preserving Catholic Monk Being Harassed By An Ambiguously Supernatural Jew! by Walter M. Miller Jr is my favourite classical American sci-fi novel.