As for what titles I love, Cliver Barker always does a great job, Weaveworld, Imajica, The Great and Secret Show, you can’t say them outloud and not want to own them.

I wonder if that’s a useful generalisation, or maybe it reflects that (again a sweeping generalisation) sci-fi tends to have more “outside the box” stories than fantasy, so it’s easier to identify some unique strand to the book in question.

Sci-fi seems to have a wider range of common cliche plotlines than fantasy, and punish authors less for straying outside the cliches too.

Anyway, I found some more titles I liked:

“Newton’s Wake” and “The Cassini Division” by Ken Macleod – both of which have ambiguous multiple interpretations which are applicable in either sense, I liked that.

Steven Erikson rather neatly, IMO, takes the “X of Y” rule and does interesting things with it: “Gardens of the Moon” and “Memories of Ice”, as Marie @5 suggests, there’s a juxtaposition of nouns there, “moon” isn’t likely to be anyone’s first choice in a word association game after someone says “gardens” is it? And “memories”? In generic fantasy naming you’d expect something angsty to go with that like “memories of blood” or “memories of pain” or maybe slightly-less overdone “memories of summer”, I doubt “ice” was on anyone’s top 50 list of nouns likely to come next.

Elizabeth Moon’s “Surrender None” is a great title, and while “Liar’s Oath” is a bit too obviously intentionally contradictory it still makes it stand out. “Sheepfarmer’s Daughter” is also excellent, it at once conveys a sense of continuity with fantasy assumptions, but subverts it by suggesting that where the protagonist starts from isn’t just a fact to be forgotton 50 pages in once The Plot has got started: the person is the point, not what they do

KJ Parker with “Colours in the Steel” and “The Belly of the Bow” are interesting twists on “X of Y” too.

Oh, “Altered Carbon” by Richard Morgan is definitely another that at once tells you it’s sci-fi but lets you know it’s got An Angle.

Raymond E Feist on the other hand, I have trouble thinking of any book of his, other than “Magician”, that doesn’t rigidly follow “X of Y” or “X’s Y” format. Doesn’t seem to have hurt him any, but then you have to think that it’s clearly his name selling the book, not the title, he could name them “Untitled 2002″, “Untitled 2004″, “Untitled 2010″ and people would buy them (and if I wanted to be snarky, I’d say you could tell them apart just as well).

To briefly return to diffeerences between sci-fi and fantasy, it seems that the sci-fi cliche title is a single noun or “adjective noun” as the title: “Dune”, “Invader”, “Matter”, “Iron Sunrise”, “Redemption Ark”, ‘Ringworld”. I suppose that fits into the fact that certain types of sci-fi is trying to sound as if it’s making a bold statement in its title.

A Game of Thrones isn’t bad, but when you line it up with A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords, they start to look less and less distinctive. (Also, it took me a while to keep straight the Martin and Dorothy Dunnett’s The Game of Kings.) I heard somebody mock A Feast for Crows as “Polly want a carcass?,” which did make me grin, but that one strikes me as vivid in a way the others don’t; it evokes a specific tone (grim) and certain images (battlefields), but does so from a side angle.

Anyway, I feel you on the hatred of titles. My good titles tend be the ones I have when I start writing the story; my mediocre titles are the ones I pick out afterward. There are exceptions, but it’s a pretty reliable rule.

I disagree with Marie about GRRM, though! I love all his titles. I mean, “A Game of Thrones”? That says more than “this is a fantasy novel about war.” It says “there is all kinds of crazy politics going on in this fantasy novel about war.”

But watch, if I get my deepest wish and the attention of a publisher, I’ll end up with Les Nessman; guaranteed.

Nouns just sit there. And I have a personal prejudice against “Noun of Noun” titles, unless there’s something really interesting going on in them — The Last Argument of Kings is an example of how to do it right, as is The Secrets of Jin Shei, because at least one element piques my curiosity. Most of the time, though, they come off looking like Utterly Generic Fantasy, regardless of what the book actually is. Martin, for example, didn’t manage an interesting title in his series until #4, A Feast for Crows. You need something else in there to generate interest: an adjective, or an interesting juxtaposition of nouns, or a word that breaks expectations — “Jin Shei” says “China!,” which marks that book as different from all the other “Secrets of Whatever” titles.

As for how the title relates to the book — its first job is, as you say, to draw the reader in. Anything else is frankly secondary. But I adore a title that relates in a good way to the story, revealing itself to have a hidden meaning or whatever. If I hit the end and discover it’s essentially false advertising, I’m to some extent annoyed (that extent being inversely related to how much I enjoyed the book).

At least you didn’t bring up the most famous: Harry Potter/Doctor Doolittle/Tarzan and the….

Whereas, the Robert Jordan ones seem designed just to say ‘this is *this* kind of book’ – although by now the publishers must know there are enough people who would buy them if they just had a symbol in an unpronounceable script for the title.

As for Wolf Hall, is it meant to be a symbol of Cromwell’s aspirations…? Or a suggestion that what he really wants is always going to be out of reach…? Don’t know more than that, since it’s a ‘wait for the paperback so I can take it away and read it properly’ book…

It’s that whole damned by faint praise thing, it just screams mediocrity to me. I mean it might ok, but if that’s the level of effort they’ve put into hooking me into buying the book, I’ve probably got better things to do with my time.

Ideally a title should make you think, maybe it should make you wonder “Well, I understand what the words mean normally, but what does it mean in the context of a title?”

Some good examples of that would be Neal Asher’s “Cowl” (first throughts: “ok, I know what a cowl is, it’s a hood type thing, but why would you name a novel after one of those?”), or “Hilldiggers” (again, it makes you think, “ok, what could that be about?”), another is Alastair Reynolds with “Pushing Ice” (huh, wha?), and CJ Cherryh’s “Heavy Time”. With each of these, there’s a mystery to the meaning, which you discover in reading the book, and ever after, when you hear the title again, you remember why it’s called that.

By contrast “Seven Secrets of the Magic Gems of Generia”, well, you know the plot from the title, it might be effective in respect of telling you what’s in the box, but well duh, I knew it was a fantasy, it was in the fantasy section and there’s some guy with a sword on the cover, it doesn’t hook you with anything unique.

Then there’s titles that have a bit of poetry to them, or some reference to something else, I like Joe Abercrombie’s titles for this: “The Blade Itself”, “Before They are Hanged” and “Last Argument of Kings”, they tease at your memory “where have I heard that before?” and again it’s a little hook of curiosity to make you pick it up off the shelf in the shop.

Some great books I nearly never bought because the title was bland and generic: “Taltos the Assassin” by Steven Brust (oh boy would that have been a mistake to skip), “Assassin’s Apprentice” by Robin Hobb (yeah, books with “assassin” in the title make me think they’re aimed at 14 year old boys), “Cryptonomicon” by Neal Stephenson (sounded like too much of a bad pun).

There’s probably more but I’ve gone on too long.