Inventing Reality: A Guide to Writing Science Fiction

Selecting a title marks one of the most important decisions you’ll make about your story. The title blares across a novel’s cover and is listed in a magazine’s table of contents. For science fiction readers, those few words hint at the story’s meme (or subgenre, such as alien invasion, space exploration, time travel); some readers prefer certain memes over others and will pass over a story (or give it a try) simply because of the meme your title suggests.

The great problem facing writers then is to come up with a catchy – and memorable – title. There are a number of approaches authors take in selecting titles. With examples from “Star Trek: The Original Series” episodes, you could name the story after:

n Characters - “Miri” is the name of an episode about a 300-year-old child survivor of a plague that wiped out all of her planet’s adults; she’s the story’s pivotal character who must mature if the Enterprise landing party is to successfully cure the disease and prevent their own deaths from it.

n Attributes of characters - “The Enemy Within” is about a transporter accident that splits Captain Kirk into two: one that is gentle and rational, the other that is aggressive and emotional. To survive – and be a complete person - the good Kirk must reunite with the evil Kirk, or take back the “enemy within”.

n Real objects - “The Galileo Seven” is the name of a shuttlecraft that crashes on a planet in a quasar-like phenomenon.

n Conceptual objects - In “The Doomsday Machine”, Kirk and crew must stop an automated robot of immense power that consumes planets to sustain itself. The object, Kirk surmises, is like the H-bomb, a doomsday machine that’s never meant to be used in war, though this one was.

n Events - In “Court Martial,” Captain Kirk is tried in a court martial (sic) for the death of a crewman.

n Places - “The Cage” is about the Talosians keeping Captain Pike as breeding stock to develop a race of human slaves; most of the story’s action occurs in Pike’s cage.

n Times - “The Enterprise Incident” is about a specific event/time period in which the Enterprise is caught in enemy Romulan space on a spy mission to steal a cloaking device.

n Themes - “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” centers on the fight aboard the Enterprise between two members of an alien species – but they represent different races, one master and the other oppressed. Their planet’s racial conflict has left them the two last survivors of their species, though.

n Line from text - In “For the World is Hollow and I have Touched the Sky”, the Enterprise encounters an asteroid spaceship whose inhabitants believe they are on a planet rather than a spaceship. An old man tells the Enterprise landing party that he once climbed a mountain and was surprised the see it held up a roof, and then he says the line that becomes the episode’s title. A line from the story’s text also is known as a “gobbet title”.

n Twist titles - “Tomorrow is Yesterday” involves the Enterprise accidentally traveling back in time and trying to avoid altering the timeline. The decisions they make during their next day literally will create their “yesterday”.

n Scientific concepts - In “The Paradise Syndrome”, a psychological concept describing why people become intoxicated with beautiful natural settings is used to describe Captain Kirk’s taking of a wife and settling down (though the actual explanation for his decisions is he lost his memory during an accident).

Sometimes authors start with the title and build the story around it. This is called a reverse gobbet (you may recall that a gobbet is a title taken from a story’s text). James Tiptree Jr.’s novel “Brightness Falls from the Air” is an example of a reverse gobbet, with the title originally appearing as a phrase in a poem by Elizabethan Thomas Nashe (well, sort of – it’s a misread line). The reverse gobbet may seem like an odd way to write a story, but sometimes a single evocative phrase can rouse the muse.

Given the many different ways of coming up with a story title – using a character’s name, using a line from the text or drawing from a conceptual object in the story, to name a few – just about any word or phrase would seem to serve as an adequate appellation.

Not so. In fact, you want to avoid writing an “adequate” title. You want something that stands out, something that grabs your readers, something that makes them wonder what the story is about and proceed to page one. While every reader has different tastes, some titles seem to appeal to the common elements of science fiction readers’ psyches and stand out: “I, Robot”, “The Stars My Destination”, “A Clockwork Orange”, “Fahrenheit 451”, “Lord of the Flies”, “Ringworld”.

To avoid creating an adequate (or even a god-awful) title, don’t use titles that are:

n Unpronounceable - Science fiction readers like to talk to one another about what they’ve read. But it’s difficult to talk about something that they can’t pronounce. Even worse, they might want to ask a book store clerk if that title is in stock.

n Embarrassing to say – Ditto.

n Difficult for others to spell - A number of book sales today are made online. But if you’re reader can’t spell the title at Amazon.com or in a search engine, the title may not be found. (Of course, “Fahrenheit 451” is one of those titles that is difficult to spell – almost no one knows how to spell “fahrenheit”. But the word is common enough that you shouldn’t let readers’ ignorance rob you of a truly memorable and apt title).

n Difficult to remember - If the reader can’t even remember the title, forget about readers asking a book seller or search engine to find it.

n Forgettable - Ditto.