How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?Follow Mahmud El Sayed on Instagram.
Memory is definitely one of the meta-themes of the story (“what must this crew, so far from Earth in years and light-years, remember and why?”) so hopefully quite a bit. TROM was not the book’s original title (or even the second or third version) and it came about via a process with my editor and their publishing team. When I won the Future Worlds Prize in 2023, the novel was called ‘What the Crew Wants’ (probably it’s third title by then) in reference to a popular Arab Spring protest chant and I still have a soft spot for that one. However, having gone through so many titles before, it was easy to accept changing it. For myself, I always thought of it simply as “The Book.”
What's in a name?
TROM is multi-POV and while I’m not Dickensian in my character naming there are definite reasons why characters are named as they are. Given that the book is set on a generation ship that is divided by language...[read on]
The Page 69 Test: The Republic of Memory.
Q&A with Mahmud El Sayed.
--Marshal Zeringue
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