What's the Deal with Borrowed Book Titles? Quiz

Answer: John Donne

The novel is part one of Farmer's "Riverworld" series and focuses on the English explorer Captain Richard Burton and his quest to find out who is responsible for creating the Riverworld and why they resurrected long dead people. The title is derived from the 7th of Donne's "Holy Sonnets", which fittingly concerns the doctrine of bodily resurrection:
"At the round earth's imagin'd corners, blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go."

In the novel, resurrection is accomplished through advanced technology rather than divine intervention, though.

Answer: Moby Dick

"The Unreasoning Mask" is a remarkable novel that blends religious and mystical themes with science fiction concepts. For example, the novel's protagonist Hud Ramstan sees an apparition of a mysterious figure in a green robe several times, which he initially mistakes for the prophet al-Khidr from Islamic legend, but who ultimately turns out to be an alien woman who is billions of years old, who guides him on a quest of cosmic urgency. The novel's title is drawn from the following passage from "Moby Dick" by Herman Melville:
"All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event-in the living act, the undoubted deed-there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!"

In the novel, it is not a whale that Ramstan is hunting, but something much more sinister: a monstrous artifact that travels between universes destroying planets inhabited by technologically advanced lifeforms.

Answer: Bhagavad Gita

"Destroyer of Worlds" concerns an alien race who are fleeing catastrophic supernovae at the galaxy's core, and leaving a wake of destruction in their path, and the efforts of a civilization known as the Fleet of Worlds to counter the threat posed by them.

The "Bhagavad Gita" is a famous Hindu scripture that revolves around a dialog between an Indian prince named Arjuna and his charioteer, Krishna, who is an avatar of the supreme god Vishnu. There is a dramatic scene in which Arjuna asks Krishna to show him his true divinity, which Krishna does in a marvelous manner, at one point stating "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." J. Robert Oppenheimer, the "father of the atomic bomb," famously quoted these words upon seeing a nuclear explosion for the first time at the Trinity nuclear test.

Answer: Salvador Dali

"Persistence of Memory" is the fifth novel in the author's "Den of Shadows" series, and concerns a 16-year-old girl who has an alter ego, who happens to be a vampire, with whom she switches places whenever she feels stressed. Perhaps surprisingly, the psychotherapists she has seen have been unable to help her with this problem.

The painting of the same name by Spanish artist Salvador Dali is probably his most famous work and is notable for its dream-like depiction of melting watches.

Answer: Hamlet

"Time Out of Joint" concerns a man who thinks he is living in a quiet suburb in 1959 and who makes his living by repeatedly winning the cash prize in a local newspaper contest called "Where Will the Little Green Man Be Next?" Turns out, however, that the town he lives in was built just for him, and that what he is actually predicting in the newspaper contest is the location of the next nuclear strike by rebellious Lunar colonists.

The title comes from a line in "Hamlet" that the title character says after being visited by his father's ghost, who reveals that his uncle Claudius murdered him: "The time is out of joint; O cursed spite! /That ever I was born to set it right!" Like the line in the play, the title of Dick's novel refers to having one's perception of reality disrupted after receiving a shocking revelation that alters one's life.

Answer: Macbeth

The novel deals with themes of good versus evil, and of how people can be tempted by their selfish desires, and of the purity of heart needed to resist such temptations. The line in Macbeth that inspired the title is, "By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes," spoken by one of the witches who tempt Macbeth to give in to his murderous ambitions that ultimately lead to his own downfall.

Answer: Aldous Huxley

The line that inspired the title was spoken (ironically) by Miranda in "The Tempest":
"O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't."

The people in Huxley's novel, also ironically, are not particularly brave, as they live in a society that is carefully designed to produce people who are maximally content and seek happiness through sensual pleasure, and in which intellectual inquiry or genuine love are discouraged.

Answer: Ernest Hemingway

"The Sun Also Rises" concerns a group of American and British expatriates in Paris in the 1920s, who travel to Pamplona, Spain, to watch the running of the bulls and the bullfights. Hemingway uses this context to explore themes of love, death, and masculine identity.

Many critics regard this as the greatest of his novels. The title alludes to a verse from Ecclesiastes, that reflects on the transience of human life in the larger scheme of things: "One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.

The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose."

Answer: Julius Caesar

In the book, the industrialist, named Manson, plans to install a puppet ruler who will allow him cheap access to the country's platinum deposits in return for a bribe. Zangaro's dictator is successfully overthrown. However, his intended replacement is also assassinated by one of the mercenaries, who installs an African academic in his place instead, who announces that Manson must pay market price for the platinum.

The novel was made into a film of the same name in 1980 starring Christopher Walken and Tom Berenger.

The title is a line from Shakespeare's play "Julius Caesar" that is spoken by Marc Antony after Caesar's assassination, in which he plots his revenge, and imagines the ghost of Caesar returning to proclaim: "Cry, 'Havoc!', and let slip the dogs of war."

Answer: Abraham Lincoln

The novel was written in 1938, and the manuscript was believed lost for many years until it was rediscovered in a box left in a garage, and finally published in 2003. The story concerns a man who has an apparently fatal car accident in 1939, yet somehow finds himself reawakening in 2086, under circumstances that are never properly explained.

The title was inspired by a line in Lincoln's famous Gettysburg Address in which he says, "It is for us the living..." which refers to the great tasks faced by the survivors of the American Civil War.

The title of the novel is apparently ironic, as the people in Heinlein's novel do not seem overly concerned with performing great tasks, as they are rather complacent on the whole.