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

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.