Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Scifi Takes on Coen Brothers Movies
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2017 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
Leonard writes scifi novels, and one of them (that a publisher is currently considering) has the working title Situation Normal, a followup to the previous working title, Explosion of Honor. It's witty military scifi -- like Star Trek as directed by the Coen brothers, as I told some folks at MergeSort. A few of them didn't care for the title Situation Normal and didn't get a "this has humor" vibe from it, so I told Leonard.
"OK, here's a title suggestion. 'Bargo," I said. "It's, like, short for 'embargo' but it'll remind people of Fargo."
"I got some bad news for you. It did not remind me of Fargo. Also there is no embargo in the book."
"Oh there isn't?"
However we did start thinking of more scifi takes on Coen brothers movie titles:
- Green Blood Simple
- Intolerable Cruelty To Robots
- The Man Who Wasn't There Because He Got Teleported
- True Grid
- A Serious Spaceman [or, A Sirius Man]
- O Brother Where Art Thou? Venus
- Hail, God-Emperor!
- The Hudsucker Epoxy
- The Amazing Colossal Lebowski
- No Planet For Old Men
- Inside Llewyn Davis [unchanged]
- @bartonfink
- Literally Raising Arizona
- Burn After Scanning
- The Ladyreanimators
Comments
Leonard
01 Apr 2017, 9:04 a.m.
Brendan
03 Apr 2017, 16:34 p.m.
This is perfect.
My dissenting opinion: "The Hudsucker Proxy" is a better sci-fi title than any modified version of it.