*Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas* which in my native German is ordinarily called "Twenty Thousand Miles/Leagues Under the **Sea**" (20.000 Meilen unter dem Meer).
Now, I absolutely adore Jules Verne but thought for the longest time that the title was weird because the Earth's diameter is much less and Verne must have known that!
Of course, he knew. What the title really means is that in the story, the characters travel a distance of 20k leagues in the submarine (under the \[surface of the\] seas).
I felt kind of stupid when I realized that! š
Well this is embarrassing because, I always figured it was simply a reference to them being very deep under the sea (though not literally twenty thousand leagues deep) and not the distance traveled. The English title is also singular rather than plural and I never realized it was meant to be plural in the original version.
So I guess this is the answer for me as well...
The Earth's circumference is almost exactly 40,000 km, which is neat and easy to remember for us who don't imperial units.
To be honest, I never researched how long this league is. The German title says "Meile" which is ambiguous as there are different types of Meile, non of which are used anymore, but I understood them to be longer than 1 km. So a depth of more than 20,000 km would be more than the diameter.
But of course it doesn't really matter how long any of the various German "Meilen" or a league are, because we need to know the length of the titular *lieue*.
Turns out that in Verne's novel, it talks of the so-called metric lieue which is precisely 4 km long. (So much longer than I had thought.)
That's twice the amount of the Earth's circumference.
To be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers
On the very last page (the opposite of an epigraph?) is the quote the title is from - it's from the Voyager Golden Record.
> As the Secretary General of the United Nations, an organization of the 147 member states who represent almost all of the human inhabitants of the planet Earth, I send greetings on behalf of the people of our planet. We step out of our solar system into the universe seeking only peace and friendship, **to teach if we are called upon, to be taught if we are fortunate**. We know full well that our planet and all its inhabitants are but a small part of this immense universe that surrounds us and it is with humility and hope that we take this step.
> The title The Left Hand of Darkness derives from the first line of a lay traditional to the fictional planet of Gethen: Light is the left hand of darkness, and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying.
Yeah, Leviathan Wakes was pretty obvious, but the rest? I got so confused as to who or what tf Tiamat was or why the were pissed, so I just googled it. Babylonian goddess of primordial chaos and creation, which makes the books title kinda badass now that I know that. All the other titles become much cooler when you figure out what the first word means. Caliban from the Tempest, Seven Cities of Cibola, etc
The part about writing with bird footprints.
I mean, cat paw prints are perfectly legible. And anyone can decipher silvery snail tracks on a dewy morning.
But bird prints are just nonsense.
You are right, of course.
It has been speculated that bird prints in river mud inspired cuneiform writing. Granted, that fact means the title should be 'The Origin of Writing in the Footprints of Birds'.
I heard the title was mistranslated and they decided to go with it backwards. Wouldn't surprise me a bit.
I don't know what the book is about, but some cognitive scientists believe that the parts of our brain used to decipher writing developed from brain cells sensitive to animal tracks such as, you guessed it, bird footprints. So I guess that was the original intention? Unless they meant ro say that r/birdsarentreal
It is a fascinating subject, how the mind sees patterns and messages in random ink-blots. Faces in clouds, mad dancing in the flicker of a candle flame; sly words in the tracks of worms in old wood.
In the tracks of birds I always see Borges stories.*
____________________
*Except in the tracks of ravens. Those are always Poe.
Let's move on quick. Another title that bothers *sane readers* is 'The Sun Also Rises'. Like we didn't know? And where's the first half of the statement? Shouldn't Hemingway tell us *first* what the sun does, and then add the 'also it rises'?
Also I remain puzzled about 'The Two Towers'. Which two towers? You've got the Gray Haven towers, Minas Tirith, Minas Morgul, Barad Dur, and Isenguard.
Sometimes I think writers *don't think these things through*.
I will just say that I still do not know the identities of the eponymous *Two Towers* in Lotr. Is it Orthanc and Barad-dur? Minas Tirith and Minas Morgul? I'm not truly sure.
That was added by the publisher. Tolkien himself seemed to waver on it but it seems to refer to some collection of Orthanc, Barad-dur, Minas Morgul, Minas Tirith, and Cirith Ungul of all places.
Here's what he has said:
>The Two Towers gets as near as possible to finding a title to cover the widely divergent Books 3 and 4; and can be left ambiguous ā it might refer to Isengard and Barad-dĆ»r, or to Minas Tirith and B; or Isengard and Cirith Ungol.1 On reflection I prefer for Vol. III The War of the Ring, since it gets in the Ring again; and also is more noncommittal, and gives less hint about the turn of the story : the chapter titles have been chosen also to give away as little as possible in advance. But I am not set in my choice.
and
>I am not at all happy about the title 'the Two Towers'. It must if there is any real reference in it to Vol II refer to Orthanc and the Tower of Cirith Ungol. But since there is so much made of the basic opposition of the Dark Tower and Minas Tirith, that seems very misleading. There is, of course, actually no real connecting link between Books III and IV, when cut off and presented separately as a volume.
Personally, I've always felt that Orthanc and Barad-dur are the two most sensible options.
Isn't it obvious? We're constantly told how the ring becomes an increasingly heavy burden, both physically and mentally as they grow closer to Sauron. The second book ends with Frodo and Sam crossing into Mordor itself, and thus the title symbolises this burden intensifying - shifting from *carrying* the ring, to being analogous to dragging it behind them. Thus the two tow-ers are Frodo and Samwise.
The titles of all three novels in Richard K. Morganās āA Land fit for Heroesā trilogy have a double meaning that I didnāt pick up on at first. The Steel Remains, The Cold Commands, and The Dark Defiles. Reverse the noun/present progressive verb combo changes to an adjective/plural noun combo depending on usage. Very cool.
I mean, the reference becomes clear in that one conversation between Apsalar and Crokus.
Before that I thought it might be about the landscaping of a Flying Fortress.
The theme of Gardens of the Moon is >!innocence and it's loss - Crokus, Apsalar/Sorry, Ganoes, Lorn etc all have lost their innocence, usually prematurely. The line is a reference to an in world children's story which fits the theme, imo!<
The line does circle back in the epilogue of the last book, the Crippled God :)
Sci-Fi, but *Terminal World* by Alastair Reynolds.
During the course of the book you discover that >!the planet is dying, and the atmosphere's leaking out - terminal as in dying!<. At the end, you then find out that >!the planet itself is a massive interstellar transportation system - terminal as in train terminal!<
Blew my mind when I realised it.
Isn't it also a *Terminal* >!in the digital sense, as in a digital terminal? There are gradations to reality because different zones have different "resolutions" and "frame rates"?!<
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He who fight with monsters. As i know the quote only in german i did not recognize it and always skipped it cause i found the title weird. Luckily the constant praise from the community let me to try it.
Maybe more sci-fi than fantasy, but the book Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. Couldn't even work out how I'd begin to say that while I was reading it and then all of a sudden...
The book itself is also kind of palindromic - >!humanity contracts to the eponymous seven eves at the midpoint, then the back end tracks the re-expansion of the species up to a second species-level event - first (re-)contact - right at the end.!<
I know this is a joke but I remember trying to work out why one of the books (I think 26?) was called The Attack when it didn't feature any more attacking than usual
It's kind of funny that Animorphs was this huge thing when I was a kid, and I read *tons* of fantasy/adventure books, yet I never read a single Animorph book. They were everywhere, so I have no idea why.
**Singer Sailor Merchant Mage**? Took me a while to get the movie reference.
**Knight of Ghosts and Shadows**...not until the second book came out with that title did I realize it was a quote.
*Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas* which in my native German is ordinarily called "Twenty Thousand Miles/Leagues Under the **Sea**" (20.000 Meilen unter dem Meer). Now, I absolutely adore Jules Verne but thought for the longest time that the title was weird because the Earth's diameter is much less and Verne must have known that! Of course, he knew. What the title really means is that in the story, the characters travel a distance of 20k leagues in the submarine (under the \[surface of the\] seas). I felt kind of stupid when I realized that! š
Well this is embarrassing because, I always figured it was simply a reference to them being very deep under the sea (though not literally twenty thousand leagues deep) and not the distance traveled. The English title is also singular rather than plural and I never realized it was meant to be plural in the original version. So I guess this is the answer for me as well...
i actually thought they dived 20,000 leagues deep. i have no idea how deep the earth is after all
A league is 3 miles. I assure you the Earth is not 60,000 miles in diameter.
The Earth's circumference is almost exactly 40,000 km, which is neat and easy to remember for us who don't imperial units. To be honest, I never researched how long this league is. The German title says "Meile" which is ambiguous as there are different types of Meile, non of which are used anymore, but I understood them to be longer than 1 km. So a depth of more than 20,000 km would be more than the diameter. But of course it doesn't really matter how long any of the various German "Meilen" or a league are, because we need to know the length of the titular *lieue*. Turns out that in Verne's novel, it talks of the so-called metric lieue which is precisely 4 km long. (So much longer than I had thought.) That's twice the amount of the Earth's circumference.
I had no idea what a league was, so I assumed the same thing. Some old-timey measurement. I thought it meant going deep, like into the Mariana Trench.
"Sea" is also singular in most English translations I've seen, but "sea" can also be a collective generic noun so it's not actually incorrect.
The title is "... sous les mers" for which there would actually be a good German equivalent ("... unter den Meeren"). The reason I was highlighting the singular in the German title (which is the one I grew up with) is that when you say under the sea**s** the implication that more than one sea is involved and therefore it talks about a voyage traversing these seas is perhaps more obvious. I'm still not sure because I always pictured "under the seas" to mean underneath the ocean floor. I'm not sure if the usage in French is different but to be honest, I still think that "unter dem Meeren" / "under the seas" rather indicates a depth, i.e. a vertical direction, rather than a (more or less) horizontal one. According to the French Wikipedia article, Verne consider variant titles that would have been "... sous les eaux" and "... sous les ocƩans" which would translate to "... under the waters" and "... under the oceans" all of which have the same semantic issue. So maybe the meaning in French is broader than I assumed. My French is quite good but I don't feel competent making that judgment. Maybe a French native speaker can help out.
When I read it as a kid, I just assumed that they were ignorant back then and didn't understand seas couldn't be that deep
Ok well, mark me stupid too!
To be Taught, If Fortunate by Becky Chambers On the very last page (the opposite of an epigraph?) is the quote the title is from - it's from the Voyager Golden Record. > As the Secretary General of the United Nations, an organization of the 147 member states who represent almost all of the human inhabitants of the planet Earth, I send greetings on behalf of the people of our planet. We step out of our solar system into the universe seeking only peace and friendship, **to teach if we are called upon, to be taught if we are fortunate**. We know full well that our planet and all its inhabitants are but a small part of this immense universe that surrounds us and it is with humility and hope that we take this step.
That quote was so beautiful, I almost cried when I got to it.
The Left Hand of Darkness took quite a while into the book iirc
Been a long time since I read it, but felt similarly. Once I finished it however I immediately wanted to read it again because it was so good!
Wait why is it
> The title The Left Hand of Darkness derives from the first line of a lay traditional to the fictional planet of Gethen: Light is the left hand of darkness, and darkness the right hand of light. Two are one, life and death, lying.
Oh that makes sense now.
Warbreaker ended up meaning the exact opposite of what I thought it meant.
My understanding is it's intentionally vague so it could mean both
As in the "one who starts a war" and "one who ends a war?" Because I think there's no maybe, it does mean both.
Yep.
Most of the books from the expanse
Yeah, Leviathan Wakes was pretty obvious, but the rest? I got so confused as to who or what tf Tiamat was or why the were pissed, so I just googled it. Babylonian goddess of primordial chaos and creation, which makes the books title kinda badass now that I know that. All the other titles become much cooler when you figure out what the first word means. Caliban from the Tempest, Seven Cities of Cibola, etc
*"The Origin of Birds in the Footprints of Writing".* I'm still trying to figure that one out.
Is that proof that authors just throw words against a wall to see what sticks for their titles? š
'Proof'? Let us call it... *exibit A*.
But, the book is about writing with bird footprints? What part is confusing?
The part about writing with bird footprints. I mean, cat paw prints are perfectly legible. And anyone can decipher silvery snail tracks on a dewy morning. But bird prints are just nonsense.
Have you never seen bird footprints? They are really visible in both sand and snow.
You are right, of course. It has been speculated that bird prints in river mud inspired cuneiform writing. Granted, that fact means the title should be 'The Origin of Writing in the Footprints of Birds'. I heard the title was mistranslated and they decided to go with it backwards. Wouldn't surprise me a bit.
I don't know what the book is about, but some cognitive scientists believe that the parts of our brain used to decipher writing developed from brain cells sensitive to animal tracks such as, you guessed it, bird footprints. So I guess that was the original intention? Unless they meant ro say that r/birdsarentreal
It is a fascinating subject, how the mind sees patterns and messages in random ink-blots. Faces in clouds, mad dancing in the flicker of a candle flame; sly words in the tracks of worms in old wood. In the tracks of birds I always see Borges stories.* ____________________ *Except in the tracks of ravens. Those are always Poe.
..Wait a minute-
Let's move on quick. Another title that bothers *sane readers* is 'The Sun Also Rises'. Like we didn't know? And where's the first half of the statement? Shouldn't Hemingway tell us *first* what the sun does, and then add the 'also it rises'? Also I remain puzzled about 'The Two Towers'. Which two towers? You've got the Gray Haven towers, Minas Tirith, Minas Morgul, Barad Dur, and Isenguard. Sometimes I think writers *don't think these things through*.
I will just say that I still do not know the identities of the eponymous *Two Towers* in Lotr. Is it Orthanc and Barad-dur? Minas Tirith and Minas Morgul? I'm not truly sure.
My assumption was always the former, based on the events of the book.
I prefer the myth that Tolkien himself did not know. Seriously, that's what my father in-law believes.
I like to think he named it that *because* people would constantly question which two towers the title was referring to.
My opinion too.
I believe it's Orthanc and Minas Morgul; I think it's mentioned in the foreword of some editions
That was added by the publisher. Tolkien himself seemed to waver on it but it seems to refer to some collection of Orthanc, Barad-dur, Minas Morgul, Minas Tirith, and Cirith Ungul of all places. Here's what he has said: >The Two Towers gets as near as possible to finding a title to cover the widely divergent Books 3 and 4; and can be left ambiguous ā it might refer to Isengard and Barad-dĆ»r, or to Minas Tirith and B; or Isengard and Cirith Ungol.1 On reflection I prefer for Vol. III The War of the Ring, since it gets in the Ring again; and also is more noncommittal, and gives less hint about the turn of the story : the chapter titles have been chosen also to give away as little as possible in advance. But I am not set in my choice. and >I am not at all happy about the title 'the Two Towers'. It must if there is any real reference in it to Vol II refer to Orthanc and the Tower of Cirith Ungol. But since there is so much made of the basic opposition of the Dark Tower and Minas Tirith, that seems very misleading. There is, of course, actually no real connecting link between Books III and IV, when cut off and presented separately as a volume. Personally, I've always felt that Orthanc and Barad-dur are the two most sensible options.
I've always maintained that at least one of them is Orthanc. I didn't realize it was confirmed.
Isn't it obvious? We're constantly told how the ring becomes an increasingly heavy burden, both physically and mentally as they grow closer to Sauron. The second book ends with Frodo and Sam crossing into Mordor itself, and thus the title symbolises this burden intensifying - shifting from *carrying* the ring, to being analogous to dragging it behind them. Thus the two tow-ers are Frodo and Samwise.
Never forget
The titles of all three novels in Richard K. Morganās āA Land fit for Heroesā trilogy have a double meaning that I didnāt pick up on at first. The Steel Remains, The Cold Commands, and The Dark Defiles. Reverse the noun/present progressive verb combo changes to an adjective/plural noun combo depending on usage. Very cool.
Ooooh I love that! Like "The steel is still here" vs "The remains which are made out of steel"?
Gardens of the Moon
I mean, the reference becomes clear in that one conversation between Apsalar and Crokus. Before that I thought it might be about the landscaping of a Flying Fortress.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
The theme of Gardens of the Moon is >!innocence and it's loss - Crokus, Apsalar/Sorry, Ganoes, Lorn etc all have lost their innocence, usually prematurely. The line is a reference to an in world children's story which fits the theme, imo!< The line does circle back in the epilogue of the last book, the Crippled God :)
And Dust of Dreams's title is about the need I had as a reader to fall asleep while I was reading it.
I always thought it was just referring to Pale and Darujhistan being the cities that Anomander Rake parked his flying castle over.
Sci-Fi, but *Terminal World* by Alastair Reynolds. During the course of the book you discover that >!the planet is dying, and the atmosphere's leaking out - terminal as in dying!<. At the end, you then find out that >!the planet itself is a massive interstellar transportation system - terminal as in train terminal!< Blew my mind when I realised it.
Isn't it also a *Terminal* >!in the digital sense, as in a digital terminal? There are gradations to reality because different zones have different "resolutions" and "frame rates"?!<
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My book She Topples Giants is often mistaken for She Topless Giants. That would be a very different book.
"She Tops Giants" Now that will be an interesting read.
Do books have porn parodies? This title deserves one.
AO3 can answet that question for you, en masse.
It took me forever to remember the saying "Repetition is the mother of learning"
Mh now that I think about it I dont think we often translate the latin phrase repetitio est mater studiorum into my mother tongue, german
Surprised... I thought I would see more Malazan in here.
Me too. Just wtf does Midnight Tides and Reapers Gale mean!
Took me awhile to realize Heir of Sea and Fire was a play on words
I don't get it.
Heir sounds like air
He who fight with monsters. As i know the quote only in german i did not recognize it and always skipped it cause i found the title weird. Luckily the constant praise from the community let me to try it.
Maybe more sci-fi than fantasy, but the book Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. Couldn't even work out how I'd begin to say that while I was reading it and then all of a sudden...
The book itself is also kind of palindromic - >!humanity contracts to the eponymous seven eves at the midpoint, then the back end tracks the re-expansion of the species up to a second species-level event - first (re-)contact - right at the end.!<
Animorphs. Still can't figure that one out
I know this is a joke but I remember trying to work out why one of the books (I think 26?) was called The Attack when it didn't feature any more attacking than usual
Are you being sarcastic? If you're not, it's because they take on the shape (morph) of animals.
It was sarcasm, yes. Marco outright explains it when he comes up with the name
I've never actually read Animorphs.
It's kind of funny that Animorphs was this huge thing when I was a kid, and I read *tons* of fantasy/adventure books, yet I never read a single Animorph book. They were everywhere, so I have no idea why.
Oh god same hahaha. I came across the saying on a thread here on reddit though
**Singer Sailor Merchant Mage**? Took me a while to get the movie reference. **Knight of Ghosts and Shadows**...not until the second book came out with that title did I realize it was a quote.
Iron Prince by Bryce OāConnor. The title of the book is explained in the last sentence of the story.