Rename: Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap

The main name is work dependent on a really obscure work of literature, Do Androids Dreamof Electric Sheep. To get it, you'd have to have read the book and understand that electric animals are cheep synthetic copies bought because real ones are too rare and valuable. Even if you have read it, it's not really a plot point. It's got only 35 redirects, plus 2 from its own laconic and alternate title, and 40 inbounds. It already has an alternate title, Puppies Are Precious Strawberries Are Steep but that's not really very clear. Precious usually means cute, especially when talking about puppies, and steep to mean expensive only works if you say something's price is steep, not the object itself. It's not even used anywhere. Maybe if we used correct grammar and better synonyms for expensive, like costly, or expensive, or valuable. "Cats are costly and vegetables are valuable". Or "Pets are pricy and Eggplants are expensive."

Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep isn't really that obscure in that it gets references all the time, and even if you haven't read it (I haven't), the name still makes sense. It implies that of sheep, only electric ones are cheap. I don't know what an electric sheep is, but it's almost certainly not natural. In terms of the "guess this trope" game that we like to play, I guessed it pretty accurately. Despite thinking that we already had this trope under a different name. Which turned out the be the redirect, so I guess this was renamed fairly recently and likely had some sort of consensus.

edited 7th Aug '11 2:48:56 AM by Clarste

I agree that this isn't the ideal name, but it was already renamed from the far worse Puppies Are Precious Strawberries Are Steep.

Also, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep is very much not obscure, and the name doesn't depend on knowing it. It makes perfect sense if you've never heard of the book.

Well, I've never heard of the novel....

^^ You mean wikilinks, not "redirects"?

An Ear Worm is like a Rickroll: It is never going to give you up.

It does not make very much sense to me unless I read the article, but I am not sure if this one should be renamed or not.

There are too many toasters in my chimney!

IIRC, when this originally came up, it had a much much worse name. This was the best one we could hammer out that wasn't a sentence.

Fight smart, not fair.

It's a short forty-three year old novel. That counts as pretty obscure for the current generation. I do know it, but I'm a big scifi fan so that doesn't count. Wanna bet that most people nowadays haven't a clue who Philip K. Dick is?

Rhetorical, eh? ... Eight!

FYI: books besides the bible are pretty obscure unless you're a nerd.

Fight smart, not fair.

Computers Are Cheap Organics Are Overpriced?

I dunno. I'm having trouble coming up with an alliterative phrase for the inexpensive fabrications that go with the costly natural items, and just "Overpriced Organics" probably doesn't communicate the context of the cost (i.e. could be as a result of famine). In a perfect world I would have a word to go with "synthetic" or "fabrication."

edited 7th Aug '11 10:46:10 AM by Loyal2NES

I wouldn't be posting at this forum if I didn't think it a necessary step.

Hollywood seems to think he's still reasonably well-known, since they keep making movies of his works. This particular work is actually fairly well-known because it's the book that the movie Blade Runner is based on, which is still quite popular (much more popular than other SF movies of that vintage). But in the movie, it's an electric snake, not an electric sheep, and it plays a much smaller role.

Still, even if you don't know the work, the name makes a certain amount of sense. A searchable redirect might be good.

Speaking words of fandom: let it squee, let it squee.

I've heard of Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep but I've never read it and I had no idea there were literally electric sheep within the setting, let alone that normal sheep were highly expensive. I guessed that Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap had some connection to Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep, but beyond that I had no idea what it was about.

Something like Organic Goods Are Luxury Items would be so much clearer.

I like Organic Goods Are Luxury Items.

Also, can we get the title of this thread corrected so that it actually links to the article?

edited 7th Aug '11 11:18:12 AM by Loyal2NES

I wouldn't be posting at this forum if I didn't think it a necessary step.

Xtifr: being well known and being a place to steal ideas from are not directly related.

Fight smart, not fair.

True, but they often mention his name in ads for the movies.

I'm totally down with a clearer name.

Speaking words of fandom: let it squee, let it squee.

Stratadrake: I have no clue what I mean. I'm new at this.

There is now a single proposition rename crowner for this trope here.

"irhgT nm0w tehre might b ea lotof th1nmgs i dont udarstannd, ubt oim ujst goinjg to keepfollowing this pazth i belieove iN !!!!!1 d

No knowledge of the book is required to understand the title, even though the title references it - it can be taken literally on its own and get at least close to the trope meaning. (I don't remember that the subject comes up much in the movie.) I was in the minority that liked the old title. But both then and now, it's been going along for a long time without posing a problem. The low-ish usage count can easily be explained away by the fact that it's pretty exclusively a science fiction or at least speculative fiction trope. Renaming it again isn't likely to help it any,

edited 7th Aug '11 5:31:10 PM by Elle

I have twenty times more issues with the "Only" in the title than with fears that the name could be obscure (any work is obscure enough generations past its time, so that's no solid argument for me) or that it could require understanding the reference (which it doesn't, and strangely, the "only" helps with that). I mean I got the trope at the first attempt, but when I read the title the second time, the first thing that came to my head was "what about cloned ones?".

Neutral in this one until I see more discussion on the matter, just wanted to leave the thought here for consideration...

Fanfic Recs orwellianretcon'd: cutlocked for committee or for Google?

The obscurity of the referenced work isn't a factor one way or the other: we generally don't assume the reader has specific work knowledge. The title needs to make sense by itself without it.

I think while the the current title can be decoded with only a little work, it it needlessly convoluted as a consequence of keeping the work reference in there.

The current title both uses metonymy and a kind of implication by inversion. That is, it uses "Electric Sheep" in place of all artificial substitutes for natural products. Then "Only" provides an inversion: the reader needs to consider the rest of the Venn diagram once they have subtracted out artificial substitutes: natural items. "Only" then links to the "Cheap": they must be expensive.

It can work, but seems needlessly complicated.

I've also got a question about scope: do we include cases where there is no artificial equivalent, or is that outside this trope?

edited 8th Aug '11 12:08:46 AM by Camacan

I disagree that the title makes sense if you don't know the book. What's an electric sheep supposed to be, anyway? Does it provide wool or meat, wander around aimlessly unless chased by an electric dog, or does it merely exist to electrically cut the grass?

"Electric" only means "powered by electricity". It probably was a cool and mystically-sounding word forty years ago but now it's just weird.

Rhetorical, eh? ... Eight!

The answer to your question about the purpose of the sheep is: yes. :)

Speaking words of fandom: let it squee, let it squee.

You are right about the one-time mystical-sciencey role of the word "electric". I guess now we'd call 'em iSheep. Presumably the lambs would Gambol+

Just from reading the title with no context, you can't tell whether the only refers to "electric" (As in "Only electric sheep are cheap; natural sheep are expensive.) or "sheep" (As in only electric sheep are cheap; electric owls are expensive.) or the whole phrase "electric sheep" (As in Only electric sheep are cheap, everything else in the whole world is expensive.)

And even if you correctly guess that only refers to electric you still have problems. As was said above, the trope name only makes sense if you realize that "electric sheep" is supposed to be a stand-in for "inorganic substitute for organic good." Which, if you're not familiar with the work, is not at all clear.

I honestly have a hard time believing that "electric" was a mystical-sounding word in the 60's. In any case, the novel Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep certainly didn't use it in that manner; real animals were a religiously-motivated status symbol, and robot animals were just for people who couldn't afford the real thing.

"I sing the body electric". "We're gonna rock down to electric avenue". Or even the song "I am electric" from Starlight Express. I'm sure there's more examples.

What the book calls "electric sheep" we would now call "mechanical sheep" or "bioengineered sheep" or "artificial sheep".

Rhetorical, eh? ... Eight!