choosing a title

[mmcirvin]

Coincidentally, given that I just read Clarke's 3001 and Rucker's Frek and the Elixir back to back and compared them, it turns out that Rucker briefly considered titling his wildly entertaining novel 3003, but thought better of it, as detailed in this excerpt from his working notes, available as a gigantic PDF on his Frek page:

I just don’t think 3003 will work. It’s too tainted by Clarke, the guy hogged the year-name thing too much, he even did write a 3010 [sic], I think. If I call it 3001, people will just think it’s sharecropped spin-off of the Clarke franchise.

Wise, I think. He'd have found it even wiser if he'd read 3001, and wiser still considering that there's an upcoming comedy movie from, I think, Mike Judge called 3001, whose premise sounds to me like nothing so much as C. M. Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons".