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Quintaglios:
Far-Seer
Fossil Hunter
Foreigner

Only a few of my novels ended up being published under the titles I originally had in mind when I started writing them. Here are the titles of my novels in the order in which they became "official." Titles marked with "(p)" were the publishers' suggestions.

• Starcology Argo
• JASON and the Argonauts (I gave up on this one because there was no way to be sure that the title would appear with "JASON" in all caps to indicate an acronym but all the other words in mixed case)
• Golden Fleece

• Face of God
• Dinosaur Moon (p) (boy, I hated this . . .)
• Tyrannosaur Moon (p) (and this was no improvement . . .)
• Far-Seer (this was my brother Alan's suggestion, obviously perfect in retrospect)

• Natural Selection
• Survival of the Fittest
• Fossil Hunter

• First Impressions (too confusing for the third book in a trilogy)
• Foreigner (fits the F*ER template established for the first two volumes, but obviously I'd never have used it if I'd known C.J. Cherryh was going to have a book with the same title coming out about the same time . . .)

• End of an Era (this title turned out to be a mistake, since many people mistakenly assumed because of the "End" reference that it was the end of the Quintaglio series, rather than an unrelated standalone novel about dinosaurs; End of an Era was actually written before Far-Seer)

• Hobson's Choice (the title under which Analog serialized it)
• Soulwave
• Mindscan
• The Terminal Experiment (p) (this is a better title than it seems at first glance — the novel is about simulating death ["terminal"] on a computer workstation ["terminal"]; still, if I had it to do over, I would have fought harder for Soulwave, which was probably the most appropriate title for the book. By the way, the Nebula Award trophy has both Hobson's Choice and The Terminal Experiment engraved on it.)

• Critical Density (possibly gave away too much)
• The Grand Old Man of Physics (I still think this is a great title, but no one else likes it . . .)
• Starplex

• Screening (only considered for a few days while creating the outline)
• Frameshift (the perfect title, I thought)
• Helix (my then-agent's suggestion)
• Frameshift (returning to my personal favorite)

• Illegal Alien (finally a title that everyone — author, agent, and editor — thought was perfect right off the bat)

• Psychospace (the title under which I submitted a shortened version to the UPC SF Award; it won the Grand Prize
• Mind Over Matter
• Matter Over Mind ("Overmind" — get it?)
• Factoring Humanity

• Glimpses (I knew I could never actually call it this — Lewis Shiner had already used this title on another book)
• Slice of Life
• Mosaic
• Flashforward

• Parameters
• Source Code (abandoned because it might be confused with Paul Levinson's The Silk Code, also published by Tor)
• Evolving God
• Calculating God (I still have reservations about this, because it sounds to me like a sequel to Factoring Humanity)

• Infinite Faculties (a paraphrasing from Hamlet, with the sequels to be Noble Reason and Quintessence of Dust)
• Divergence of Character (a phrase from the concluding passage of Darwin's On the Origins of Species)
• Hominids (with the sequels to be Humans and Hybrids)

• Noble Reason (from Hamlet)
• Humans

• Quintessence of Dust (from Hamlet)
• Hybrids

• Skins
• Action Potential (a term from neurophysiology)
• Mindscan (originally a working title for The Terminal Experiment, adopted for this book because Tor's marketing department disliked the title Action Potential)

• Or Die Trying (a quip from my friend Spider Robinson: "I'm going to live forever, or die trying")
• Rollback

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