How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?Visit James L. Cambias's website.
I picked The Godel Operation very specifically because it sounds like one of a series of adventures. I plan to write other adventures in the Billion Worlds setting, involving some of the same characters, so I wanted a name with an obvious structure for future variations. So at present I'm writing another novel in the same setting called The Scarab Mission, and I just finished a short story for an upcoming Baen anthology called "The Paoshi Puzzle."
Now for short fiction I don't plan to be quite as locked into the structure of "The Name Thing" forever but since that particular short story is sort of a prequel to The Godel Operation it seemed appropriate. I have two other Billion Worlds stories which don't follow that pattern: "Calando" in Athena Andreadis's anthology Retellings From the Inland Seas, and "Out of the Dark" in John Joseph Adams's collection Lost Worlds and Mythological Kingdoms.
The title does have significance within the story. The "Godel Trigger" is the legendary MacGuffin my characters are pursuing in the novel. So one of the characters could well refer to these events as the "Godel Operation." Though they'd probably call it...[read on]
My Book, The Movie: A Darkling Sea.
Writers Read: James L. Cambias (January 2019).
My Book, The Movie: Arkad's World.
The Page 69 Test: Arkad's World.
My Book, The Movie: The Godel Operation.
Q&A with James L. Cambias.
--Marshal Zeringue
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