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Science Fiction Writer  ROBERT J. SAWYER  Hugo and Nebula Award Winner SFWRITER.COM > Novels > Title Changes   Title Changes   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; the "era" in question is, of course, the Mesozoic era — the age of dinosaurs) 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 Webmind Wake (styled as WWW: Wake on the US cover to avoid confusion with a young-adult novel called Wake. The titles for the sequels, Watch and Wonder, were locked in prior to the publication of Wake; those books never had any other working titles) Displaced Persons (problematic from the start, because a highly touted debut novel came out in 2010 with that title) Triggers The Great Martian Fossil Rush (neither the publisher nor the sales force at Ace Science Fiction liked this, although I personally loved it) Red Planet Blues (suggested by four of my fans)   More Good Reading   Novel outlines by Robert J. Sawyer Press releases   Twitter Feed   Home Novels About Rob For Book Clubs Blog Search Short Stories Press Kit How to Write Facebook Buy Books Nonfiction E-mail Rob Canadian SF Twitter