A title of a work of fiction is usually a noun or a phrase referring to a single person or thing. For example, the titles of the installments in Poul Anderson's Technic History begin with "The Saturn Game" and end with "Starfog." Thus, here we have a game and a fog, either of which
could have been the subject or object of a sentence although they usually do not play that grammatical role when part of a title.
Poul Anderson has at least four titles which are complete sentences:
Orion Shall Rise
There Will Be Time
"Peek! I See You!"
"I Tell You, It's True"
- two in the future tense and two with the first person singular pronoun as their subject.
Does this prove anything significant? I doubt it. Good night.
Addendum, next morning: Also, The Stars are Also Fire. See combox.
7 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
There's also THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE and THE FLEET OF STARS, from the HARVEST OF STARS series. And shorter works like "Tiger by the Tail," from the Technic series. And I could easily list many other titles that reads like sentences, such as THE ENEMY STARS and "The Adventure of the Misplaced Hound" (Anderson./Dickson).
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Paul!
Sometimes real life barges into SF! On Saturday, Oct. 10, an unfortunate, possibly deranged man climbed into a tiger pen in Yorkshire--and was mauled to death by the animal. And the tiger was named Altai, the name of the planet we see in Anderson's "A Message in Secret."
If the zoo-keepers have any sense that tiger will be put down. It's very dangerous to keep a tiger near people once it's gotten a taste of human meat.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE is a sentence. The others that you cite are not. They have no verbs. A sentence is a subject and a predicate, not just a subject.
Paul.
THE ENEMY STARS would become a sentence if it were rephrased as THE STARS ARE ENEMIES.
Kaor, Paul!
I sit corrected! "The Adventure of the Misplaced Hound" would need to be revised as "My Adventure With the Misplaced Hound" to be a sentence.
Ad astra! Sean
No. It would have to be something like: "I Had An An Adventure With A Misplaced Hound." A predicate has to include a verb or something serving the function of a verb. "Down With Big Brother" is a sentence because the prepositions, "down" and "with," mean the same as a verb like "LET him be brought down."
Kaor, Paul!
Ha, my goofs can be absurd! I'm simply going by experience when I write sentences, instead of verbally thinking out the technicalities needed for writing them.
Ad astra! Sean
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