Oolite Bulletins

The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner - is that poetic enough?

Cody wrote: ↑Sun Feb 10, 2019 1:46 pm

The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner - is that poetic enough?

Yes - the title comes from Milton's "Lycidas". Two down, three to go!

Disembodied wrote: ↑Sat Feb 09, 2019 11:47 am

Okay, time for another set of five: five SF books or films whose titles are drawn from (or inspired by) works of poetry. An example (which doesn't count towards the five, but which is a fairly mahoosive clue to another possible answer): Consider Phlebas, by Iain M. Banks, which comes from a line in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land.

Well, I'm not proud... Look to Windward by Banks, also from The Wasteland

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

ffutures wrote:

Well, I'm not proud... Look to Windward by Banks, also from The Wasteland

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

That's the one! Two to go …

A clue: there's a notable series of books which takes its name from an incomplete early 19th-century epic poem, and draws its structure from a famous medieval collection of stories in verse …

Another one - Tiger! Tiger! by Alfred Bester, alternative title of The Stars My Destination, from The Tyger by William Blake.

... there's a notable series of books which takes its name from an incomplete early 19th-century epic poem, and draws its structure from a famous medieval collection of stories in verse …

That's the Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons - probably the weightiest paperback I've ever seen.

A group of pilgrims while away the time by telling each other stories.

Gorgeous series, Hyperion, nearest I have come to liking poems

Alfred Bester's Tiger! Tiger! makes four, and Cody takes the win with Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos - which takes its title from an unfinished poem by Keats, and its structure from Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.

Other possible answers could have been Joe Haldeman's Worlds Enough and Time, which is a take on a phrase from the poem "To His Coy Mistress" by Andrew Marvell, or two short-story collections by Ray Bradbury: The Golden Apples of the Sun, from Yeats' "The Song of Wandering Aengus", and I Sing the Body Electric, from a poem of the same title by Walt Whitman. And - although it stretches the definition of "science fiction" a bit - I've just realised that all the titles in Michael Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time trilogy (An Alien Heat, The Hollow Lands, and The End of All Songs) are all from poems too.

Anyway: over to Cody!

Another possible answer would be To Your Scattered Bodies Go (from John Donne).


Right, better oggify some music - back soon.

Name the tune*, name a well-known Cobra Mk III, piloted by one of the best couriers in the Eight.



*It's an instrumental, so you get the whole track.

Hmm... guess I'll pose an alternative question.


The Sun's getting too big. Solution: move Earth to Alpha Centauri. Name the movie!

Cody wrote: ↑Thu Feb 14, 2019 1:14 pm

The Sun's getting too big. Solution: move Earth to Alpha Centauri. Name the movie!

The Wandering Earth, 1st Chinese SiFi movie, based on a story of Liu Cixin, just recently released

<lobs coconut at montana> Correct - over to you, sir!

Cody wrote: ↑Thu Feb 14, 2019 2:27 pm

<lobs coconut at montana> Correct - over to you, sir!

Thank you Sir, its an honor.

In which German SiFi novel series, the attempt to save the Earth from invaders from another Galaxy by moving it for 40K LJ to the center of the Galaxy ended in an distant area of the universe, roughly 501 M LJ away from the original destination ?