This Be The Pocket Universe: Post Here When You Realize Or Are Reminded That An SF Title Is From The Canon Of English Poetry

dick's a scanner darkly is a ref to 'for now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face' if we can stretch the canon of english verse a bit

er, from corinthians in the bible, i should have said there

time out of joint, too, roughly from Hamlet.

fp for dating to suggest there is a canon iirc

taking "canon" here to mean "all verse ever written in English" tbh

Well then, "Mimsy Were The Borogroves," "The Children's Hour," and familiar phrases that authors may or may not have primarily associated with the King James Bible or Shakespeare, for instance.

*borogoves*, sorry

All good contributions so far. Thread title was deliberately overspecific, will except verse as title source, of course, especially WS and KJB, for works of film, of sf or non.

Been waiting to post Kate Wilhelm's Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang, from Shakespeare's Sonnet 73. Like how she is referred to as "some German" in The Fifth Head of Cerberus.

Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White gets its title from a sonnet of Alfred, Lord Tennyson which appeared in his The Princess: A Medley

Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font:
The firefly wakens: waken thou with me.

just remembered Iain M. Banks's Consider Phlebas, from Eliot's The Waste Land

Had forgotten that one too. Also been meaning to post that Christopher Priest's "Palely Loitering" got its title from Keats's "La Belle Dame sans Merci":

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

This and many of the above can be found at poetryfoundation.org: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/guide/242698

Honorable Mention to Joanna Russ's "I Gave Her Sack and Sherry," which derives its title from a Henry Purcell song, "I Gave Her Cakes and I Gave Her Ale."

What has also been nagging at my unconscious for a while, that James Tiptree, Jr. also took a title from "La Belle Dame sans Merci," namely "And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side."

just remembered Iain M. Banks's Consider Phlebas, from Eliot's The Waste Land

+ look to winward, from the same bit

Tiptree:

Brightness Falls from the Air: Nashe

'Faithful to Thee, Terra, in Our Fashion': pun on Dowson
'And I Have Come Upon This Place by Lost Ways': MacLeish
'And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side': Keats
'The Milk of Paradise': Coleridge
'Through a Lass Darkly': pun on Corinthians
'Her Smoke Rose Up Forever': Revelations
'A Momentary Taste of Being': Khayyam/Fitzgerald
'She Waits for All Men Born': Swinburne
'With Delicate Mad Hands': Dowson
'In Midst of Life': Corinthians
'The Earth Doth Like a Snake Renew': Shelley

'Backward, Turn Backward': this is from a once-popular poem by Elizabeth Akers Allen (1832-1911), hardly canonical

Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" supplies the title of Ursula K. LeGuin's "Vaster Than Empires And More Slow," as well as this Star Trek fan series episode, featuring an extended performance by George Takei himself as Mr. Sulu: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l4TC5wl0IzE🔗#

so does this phenom tell us anything about anything

This issue of asimov's that i found for free has a story called "hold now behemoth" in it

Er Behold Now Behemoth

so does this phenom tell us anything about anything

so does this phenom tell us anything about anything

anchoring speculative writing in old canon might be interpreted as a need for legitimacy.

other possibilities:

1) an inherent lyricism (cosmos and humanity/what are the things that make us human) speak from 20thC SF to pre-realism romanticism and renaissance verse.

2) Parallel between New World, subject of much renaissance verse, and New Worlds. (explicitly too - pioneering as US founding principle, renewed in post WWII SF.)

3) imaginative requirement to work off cosmic or mythological fundamentals as shared base for meaningful alien worlds mean bible and biblical literature v handy.

4) well known or fundamental/proverbial phrases handy for suggesting alien familiarity - "through a scanner darkly"

5) magical and fecund thesaurus/word hoard of renaissance lit good for ideas (ie writer gets title and then thinks up plot?)

well there's probably more and some of those are prob duplicate or overlapping?

^^^ nice

^^^yes, that was great!

bank holiday weekend plus alcohol definitely a winner for ilx posting.

i guess "communication with the heavens" feels like a relevant parallel between SF and romrenbib lit too.

tho that's prob contained in 1). I'll go to bed once I've finished this wine i promise.

If only it had been dandelion wine you might have thought to post Bradbury/Whitman "I Sing the Body Electric."

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Ia-FbHxcUB4/UAniFy2P3II/AAAAAAAAAGE/Tj1b7yIUcnA/s1600/ray_bradbury_i_sing_the_body_electric_cover.8u6z4e94wq4oscok804w04ss.d28e1p3urvkkosc8o0okcc0sg.th.jpeg

Surely the title of Richard McKenna's "Casey Agonistes" is a nod to Eliot's "Sweeney Agonistes" if not Milton's "Samson Agonistes."

Couple of these in Dangerous Visions.

the weirdness of reading sonnet 73 and going oh, wait, i know that from somewhere, is a weirdness i find interesting

the whitman poem i've never been able to disentangle from what bradbury seems to want it to mean

the weirdness of reading sonnet 73 and going oh, wait, i know that from somewhere, is a weirdness i find interesting

Reading David Graham's 1979 nuclear war novel 'Down to a Sunless Sea', and it took the epigraph for me to remember it was from Coleridge

Feel a little weird about the timing of my previous screenname ott.

I mean itt

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/cf/2f/c3/cf2fc3e9112e4290350630c3522a0573.jpg

was really pleased with that visual pun for 5 seconds, now realise probably makes no sense

C. L. Moore's "No Woman Born" presumably gets its title from Macbeth.

Thread of missing this cover
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/62/Her_smoke_rose_up_forever.jpg

Ah, I just came across an academic discussion of this:

An intriguing epiphenomenon of the paradoxically absent omnipresence of lyric in narrative science fiction is the prevalence of lyric intertexts and paratexts in SF novels and short stories.  Paratexts and intertexts are themselves paradoxical spaces:  a book’s title, for instance, is at once central to the book and overtly peripheral; an intertextual allusion is neither fully here nor exclusively there yet definitely present in both texts simultaneously.  Such paradoxical textual spaces are frequently the same places where the absent presence of lyric manifests itself most explicitly in narrative SF.  Titles of SF narratives, for example, often allude intertextually to specific poems.

SCIENCE FICTION AND LYRIC POETRY, by Seo-Young Jennie Chu, in Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction, edited by Leigh Ronald Grossman . Wildside Press LLC.

Which is in fact excerpted from this book: http://harvardpress.typepad.com/hup_publicity/2011/03/do-metaphors-dream-of-literal-sleep.html

John Brunner:

The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
But, swoll'n with wind and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread

So that's makes at least two from that poem.

So now Norman Spinrad's "No Direction Home" I guess. *ducks*

lol

That article I mentioned points out that Philip José Farmer get a title from John Donne's Holy Sonnet VII
http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/holysonnet7.php

From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go

and Ray Bradbury got "There Will Come Soft Rains" from a Sara Teasdale poem with the same title
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/there-will-come-soft-rains

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

Reverse engineering: Hamlet's "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" had to be used by someone. Sure enough, Charles Sheffield wrote a novel called "Tomorrow and Tomorrow," and Kurt Vonnegut used all three tomorrows for the title of a short story.

Anyone can do this. "All our yesterdays"? Yup, a time-travel novel by Cristin Terrill.

Not Hamlet, Macbeth. Christ.

Anyone can do this. "All our yesterdays"? Yup, a time-travel novel by Cristin Terrill.

They used "dagger of the mind" on Star Trek too.

This is getting ridiculous. There's the movie "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country," and the Star Trek TNG novel "Perchance to Dream."

Upthread is a link to a webpage with a list of Star Trek Shakespeare references.

If we broaden the parameters to include science fact, we get this newly eligible entry:
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/5149pA0D6DL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

New parametrization also allows:
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41ZMxkoWAQL._SX328_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

The Dry Salvages, by Caitlín R. Kiernan, derives its title from the T.S. Eliot poem of the same name, which is quoted in the beginning.

Tiptree: Brightness Falls from the Air: Nashe

― alimosina, Saturday, May 7, 2016 8:38 PM (ten months ago)

Margaret St. Clair also has a short story by that title. I bought her Best Of collection recently, thinking that I was vaguely familiar with her work due to the inclusion of that story and 'The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles' (a pastiche of Dunsany's 'How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art upon the Gnoles'). turns out it's all new to me, but I'm not complaining.

Fritz Leiber's Our Lady of Darkness (from De Quincy's 'Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow')

*De Quincey

Sinkah to thread

> just remembered Iain M. Banks's Consider Phlebas, from Eliot's The Waste Land

"O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you."

"Look To Windward" also...

Ah, Moon of my Delight who know'st no wane,
The Moon of Heav'n is rising once again;
How oft hereafter rising shall she look
Through this same Garden after me -- in vain!

will except

On reading this thread I wondered about Out of the Silent Planet, and came upon this from Wikipedia about That Hideous Strength:

The novel's title is taken from a poem written by David Lyndsay in 1555, Ane Dialog betuix Experience and ane Courteour, also known as The Monarche. The couplet in question, "The shadow of that hyddeous strength, sax myle and more it is of length", refers to the Tower of Babel.

Out of the Silent Planet itself sounds like it alludes, but its source eludes me.

what a great thread

so does this phenom tell us anything about anything

It tells us why the title is sometimes far better written than anything else in the story.
― Why You Wanna Treeship Borad? (James Redd and the Blecchs), Sunday, May 29, 2016 5:56 PM (three years ago) bookmarkflaglink

otm

i noticed three book titles while watching joel coen's "the tragedy of macbeth" the other week.

only one applies here: ray bradbury's "something wicked this way comes"

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/cb/61/0b/cb610bf1517467f26647d82bf44617c7.jpg

(the other two were faulkner's "the sound and the fury" and javier marías's "a heart so white")

the line before 'something wicked this way comes' is an agatha christie book (but not SF, obv)

Sort of the opposite of this phenomenon: I think it's interesting that Station Eleven starts with a performance of King Lear, and one of the main characters is in that performance and ends up part of a traveling theater troupe that performs Shakespeare plays, and yet the quotation she has tattooed on her arm - "Survival is insufficient," which becomes a kind of unofficial tagline for the book - comes from Star Trek, even though there is a famous quotation from Lear that makes exactly the same point.