Performance Arts References in Turtledove's Work

Like many authors, Harry Turtledove references the broad film, television, broadcast radio, live theater and their creators (or have had) on society. Sometimes, these references can give a reader insight into how a particular timeline differs from OTL. Other times, they are more incidental and designed to invoke a specific era or culture. What follows is a list of such references which can be found in Turtledove's body of work, organized by the musician, song-writer, or performer.

Note: As many homages are subtle, they can easily escape the notice of any given reader. Therefore we strongly encourage anyone who has found, or believes he has found, an homage not already on this list, or by an author not represented, to add it.

Douglas Adams
Douglas Noel Adams (11 March 1952 – 11 May 2001) was an English writer and dramatist. He is best known as the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which started life in 1978 as a BBC radio comedy before developing into a "trilogy" of five books that sold over 15 million copies in his lifetime, a television series, several stage plays, comics, a computer game, and in 2005 a feature film.

One of the continuing themes in the Hitchhiker's Guide was the number "42" which was the "Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything" and the different characters searching for "The Question" this was the answer to. In "Someone is Stealing the Great Throne Rooms of the Galaxy" the Omniscient Narrator first describes that there are any number of space drives and then corrects himself and says that there are forty-two, an allusion to Adam's work.

John Tucker Battle
John Tucker Battle wrote the screenplay of Invaders from Mars, a 1953 b-movie about the invasion of a California town by aliens with obvious zippers in their anatomy, which can only be thwarted by the cleverness of a small boy.

In the universe of A World of Difference, where Mars is supplanted in the solar system by Minerva, there was a movie entitled Invaders from Minerva. The broad description given suggests it was similar to its OTL counterpart. The only difference is that it is said to be from the late 1950s rather than 1953, although this could be an incorrect estimate on the characters' part.

Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett was the author of the play Waiting for Godot. The short story "We Haven't Got There Yet" ends with its protagonist, William Shakespeare, about to attend a performance of Waiting for Godot, wondering who Godot is and who might be waiting for him.

Mel Brooks
Mel Brooks (born 1926) is an American film director, screenwriter, composer, lyricist, comedian, actor and producer. He is best known as a creator of broad film farces and comic parodies. The Producers is a musical adapted by Brooks from his 1968 film of the same name. The story concerns two theatrical producers who scheme to get rich by overselling interests in a Broadway flop called Springtime for Hitler. In Turtledove's In the Presence of Mine Enemies where Germany won World War II, there is a similar musical about a theater owner who books a terrible play about Churchill and Stalin becoming a smash hit.

James Cameron
In "Before the Beginning" we learn that James Cameron's 1997 film Titanic is more interesting than time-viewer recordings of the sinking of the actual ship.

Casablanca
Casablanca (1942) is an American romantic drama film directed by Michael Curtiz, from a screenplay which went through several revisions by various writers. It stars Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid, and features Claude Rains, Conrad Veidt, Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre. It is set in the Vichy-controlled city of Casablanca, Morocco during World War II, and focuses on a man's conflict between (in the words of one character) "love and virtue": He must choose between his love for a woman and doing the right thing, helping her and her husband, a Czechoslovakian Resistance leader, to escape from Casablanca to Portugal to continue his fight against the Nazis.

The films is full of frequently quoted and misquoted lines, which have permeated pop culture. Perhaps the most famous is "Play it again, Sam," most often attributed to Bogart. In fact, Bergman speaks the line and it is simply "Play it, Sam." The inaccuracy of the quote has often been used as comedy fodder.

In The Two Georges Colonel Thomas Bushell walks into the lounge of the Empire Builder and hears his adjutant Samuel Stanley playing "I Remember Your Name" on the piano. Stanley abruptly stops when he sees Bushell since it was his and Irene's (his ex-wife) song but Bushell tells him to "... play it, Sam". Later in the novel, another character makes an allusion to another Bogart picture.

In The Man With the Iron Heart, the Casablanca line "round up the usual suspects" is quoted by NKVD agent Vladimir Bokov at one point.

Tom Corbett, Space Cadet
Tom Corbett was the main character in a series of Tom Corbett — Space Cadet stories that were depicted in television, radio, books, comic books, comic strips, coloring books, punch-out books and View-Master reels in the 1950s. Harry Turtledove attended LACon IV, the 2006 Worldcon which would have had Frankie Thomas, Jr. the actor who portrayed Corbett as a guest. This event had Mike Resnick commission a series of space cadet stories for an anthology and led Turtledove to write "Someone is Stealing the Great Throne Rooms of the Galaxy" as a parody of the show.

In the novel Joe Steele, Charlie Sullivan's son Pat was an enthusiastic watcher of the television program Tim Craddock - Space Cadet, a clear parody name of Tom Corbett.

Beverley Cross
Beverley Cross wrote the screenplay for the 1965 film Genghis Khan, starring Omar Sharif as Temujin, Genghis Khan.

This film features in the short story "The Barbecue, the Movie, & Other Unfortunately Not So Relevant Material." In the story, the movie, which is imperfectly faithful to known details of Khan's biography, is viewed by a historian from the distant future, which presumably will lead to inaccurate knowledge of Khan's life in the historian's time.

Walt Disney
Walt Disney (1901-1966) was an American cartoonist, movie producer and businessman who revolutionized the animated film and the theme park industry. Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck are some of his more famous mascots.

In the Worldwar series, two Lizards raised by humans are named Mickey and Donald, an obvious reference, which even causes some characters in the series to chuckle. In an unrelated chapter of Down to Earth, the POV character Dr. Reuven Russie watches a Donald Duck cartoon in a cinema and thinks it's just about the funniest thing he's ever seen.

In The Disunited States of America, Beckie Royer is a fan of The Breeze in the Birches, the novel which inspired Mr. Frog's Crazy Ride at Mortimer's World. This is a play on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride at Disney's theme parks, based on Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Mortimer Mouse was Disney's working name for the character that became Mickey; he decided that sounded too highbrow and changed it to a more "street" name, later reassigning the name Mortimer to a high-faluting bully who bothers Mickey in some of the early cartoons.

Mr. Toad's Wild Ride is also referenced in A World of Difference.

John Fletcher
John Fletcher was a younger contemporary of William Shakespeare and is widely believed, though not known, to have collaborated with the Bard on several of his final plays (namely Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and Cardenio).

Fletcher wrote the play Bonduca, which tells the story of Boudicca. Most of the lines found in the fictional Shakespearean play Boudicca are taken from Bonduca; however, the play itself bears only a distant resemblance to the play Turtledove invented for Ruled Britannia.

Also, lines are lifted from Shakespeare's Henry VIII to pad out both Boudicca and King Philip; as stated above, bardolaters have long suspected that Fletcher had a hand in Henry VIII.

Matt Groening
[[Image:Simpsons.jpg|thumb|125px|right|


 * I will not claim that The Simpsons appear in TL-191


 * I will not claim that The Simpsons appear in TL-191


 * I will not claim that The Simpsons appear in TL-191


 * I will not claim that The Simpsons appear--]]Matt Groening is the creator of the successful cartoon The Simpsons. Simpson was also the middle name of General Ulysses S. Grant. In the The War Between the Provinces series, a Grant analog is a major character. The character is named Bart in honor of Bart Simpson.

(Grant's first name, Ulysses, is the Latinized version of Odysseus, who was of course immortalized in Homer's Odyssey. However, Turtledove has not pursued a pun based on Homer Simpson.)

Christopher Guest
Christopher Guest is most widely known for having written, directed and starred in several improvisational "mockumentary" films that feature a repertory-like ensemble cast. The first of these, This Is Spinal Tap, had Guest playing Nigel Tufnel, lead guitarist of the band whose amplifier control knobs all have the highest setting of eleven. When Yellowstone National Park was hit by a series of magnitude 7.0 earthquakes just before the supervolcano erupted, Kelly Birnbaum wondered what a full eruption would feel like and thought "goes up to eleven, man" in a direct reference to Spinal Tap.

Jim Henson
Jim Henson (1936-1990) was an American cartoonist and filmmaker, best known for his innovation of combining marionettes and puppets into "Muppets," designed to be especially flexible and full of emotion. Henson's signature character was Kermit the Frog. In Turtledove's The War Between the Provinces series, the character based on the Emperor of France is named Kermit, an allusion to the humorous English custom of referring to the French as the Frogs.

Richard Levinson and William Link
Richard Levinson and William Link were a pair of mid-20th century American television writers. They created, among other programs, the crime drama Columbo, and correspondingly created the title character as well. This character provided the inspiration for the character Garanpo in Homeward Bound. Also, a TV Reporter in Supervolcano: Eruption mispronounces the name of Maria Peterfalvy as "Mrs. Peterfalk", an allusion to Peter Falk the actor who played Columbo.

Christopher Marlowe
Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) was an English dramatist, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era.

Marlowe is a major character in Ruled Britannia. He is seen as both a friend and rival of William Shakespeare as well as a co-conspirator in the book's main plot point, the plot to restore the imprisoned Queen Elizabeth to the throne of England.

Marlowe, who lived several years longer in this timeline than in OTL, is on some level resentful of Shakespeare's having eclipsed his fame as London's greatest playwright. This theme is brought up several times throughout the novel. Marlowe is seen as particularly jealous of Prince of Denmark (i.e., Hamlet) which he believed to have outclassed anything in his own canon and which set him on a mission to write a greater play still--the result being a ficticious play about the legendary doomed lovers Tristan and Isolde, of ancient British lore. He appears to have failed to have one-upped Hamlet with the play.

Marlowe's literary influence is felt in the novel. At one point a minor character unintentionally identifies Marlowe to Lope de Vega by mentioning that a fleeing man had made an unusual comment--which, on being recited verbatim, is in fact a lengthy excerpt from Marlowe's The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. (A line from the same excerpt is invoked by Peggy Druce under very different circumstances in West and East; however, Peggy is unable to recall the author who wrote it. Likewise Vanessa Ferguson recalls the line but not the author after the supervolcano erupts, covering Denver in ash. )

Otherwise in Ruled Britannia, Marlowe's (fictional) play Cambyses, King of Persia is performed by Lord Westmorland's Men one day, and a number of lines were lifted from Tamburlaine the Great to pad out Shakespeare's fictional play Boudicca.

Marlowe is also mentioned, posthumously, in "We Haven't Got There Yet." Shakespeare is reminded of "poor dead Kit" when a performance of Tom Stoppard's time-displace play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead makes him think that even Dr. Faustus's situation was better than that of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Faustus chose damnation; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were predestined for it, because they were at the mercy of an author who was pleased to make them too dim and dull to avoid it.

The Marx Brothers
The Marx Brothers - Chico, Harpo, Groucho, Gummo, and Zeppo were an American family comedy act, originally from New York City, that enjoyed success in vaudeville, on Broadway, and in motion pictures from 1905 to 1949. Margaret Dumont was the comic foil to Groucho in seven of the Marx Brothers films.

In All Fall Down, when the salvage crew which includes Vanessa Ferguson arrives in Fredonia, Kansas, she begins to sing "Hail, Hail, Freedonia" from the Marxes' Duck Soup, much to the annoyance of her teammates.

In The Big Switch Pete McGill mocks communism by attributing it to Groucho Marx rather than Karl Marx.

In Southern Victory there is a popular vaudeville troupe called The Engels Brothers who make a few brief appearances in different volumes. Their name is a metaphysical in-joke, as Friedrich Engels was the writing partner of Karl Marx.

Anne Nichols
Anne Nichols (November 26, 1891 – September 15, 1966) was an American playwright. Among her most famous works was the farce Abie's Irish Rose, which centers on the marriage of a Jewish man to an Irish woman. In the novel Joe Steele, Jewish-American Esther Sullivan muses to her Irish-American husband Charlie that they are right out of Abie's Irish Rose, except with the genders reversed.

Dudley Nichols
Dudley Nichols wrote the screenplay of The Bells of St. Mary's, which features in The Man With the Iron Heart.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone
Trey Parker (b. 1969) and Matt Stone (b. 1971) are Colorado cartoonists and comic actors in television and cinema, and also writers of theatrical plays. They are best known for their animated series South Park, first aired in 1997. Justin Kloster, hero of two Turtledove stories, is by his own admission a South Park fan.

Rambo movies
Rambo is a series of four films (1982, 1986, 1988, 2008) about an American soldier named John James Rambo (born July 6, 1947) who fights in the Vietnam War, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and other conflicts where he protects the downtrodden and destroys evil in an over-the-top, larger-than-life manner. The first movie was loosely based the 1972 novel First Blood by David Morrell, and the later films all created from original stories. The slang term "Rambo" has entered the language to describe a person who is reckless, disregards orders, uses violence to solve problems, enters dangerous situations alone, and is exceptionally tough and aggressive.

In "Black Tulip", Vladimir, a Soviet soldier in Afghanistan (the setting of Rambo's third movie in 1988), says "You see Rambo out there? I sure don't," to which his comrade Sergei replies "We've got our own Ramboviki right here." Incidentally, the collection Redshift which features this story, and the follow-up collection, Flights: Extreme Visions of Fantasy which features "Coming Across", also contain stories by Rambo's creator David Morrell.

Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons
Rocket "Rocky" Jay Squirrel and Bullwinkle Jay Moose were two anthropomorphic animal everymen who appeared in a series of television cartoons in the early 1960s, where the duo repeatedly went on exotic adventures, faced off against two bumbling enemy spies, made insightful jokes about current events, and broke the fourth wall. In The Valley-Westside War, two fugitive-hunting bloodhounds are named Rocky and Bullwinkle.

In Supervolcano: All Fall Down, Rob Ferguson was out hunting for moose and reflected on some of the stranger things he had eaten since the Yellowstone Supervolcano had erupted, such as squirrels and robins. He then thought about the DayGlo orange vest he was wearing to warn other hunters that he wasn't a moose or squirrel or any other refugee from The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.

Robert Rodat
Robert Rodat was the screenwriter for the World War II film Saving Private Ryan. Homage is paid to this movie in Homeward Bound when a number of characters watch a movie about the Race Invasion of Tosev 3 called Rescuing Private Renfall.

Coincidentally, Homeward Bound also features a cameo appearance by Matt Damon, who played the title character in Saving Private Ryan.

Gene Roddenberry
Gene Roddenberry was the original creator of the successful science fiction franchise Star Trek. Among the original characters Roddenberry created for this franchise is Nyota Uhura, who was played by Nichelle Nicholls from 1966 to 1991. In Homeward Bound, a character matching Uhura's description is given the name Nicole Nicholls.

Also, the Starfleet to which most Star Trek protagonists belong has a set of protocols for establishing relations with alien species which are referred to as First Contact procedures. First Contact was even the title of a feature length Star Trek film detailing, among other things, the first visit to Earth by an extraterrestrial species. The title of the novel Second Contact may be an invocation of this.

The short work "Half the Battle" was first published in Stardate, a magazine that served as a resource for science fiction role playing games, with an emphasis on the Star Trek RPG. "Half the Battle" incorporates a few references to Star Trek, as a post apocalyptic society sets about reclaiming technology. At the end, the society has built a starship based, implicitly, on designs from a work of Star Trek fan fiction. On the ship's maiden voyage, the commander orders Warp 3, musing that the ship won't go so boldly yet.

Will Rogers
The fate of journalist Will Rogers in the Southern Victory timeline is alluded to in The Victorious Opposition when one of his signature catchphrases is seen as a popular quotation throughout North America: "All I know is what I read in the papers."

In the novel Joe Steele, Roger's quote that "I am not a member of any organized political party, I am a Democrat" is recalled by reporter Charlie Sullivan while covering the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago. Sullivan was reflecting on the chaotic mass of delegates and reporters at the convention. Shortly after, Sullivan also thought that the two-thirds rule added to the disorder by making it difficult to chose the Party's Presidential nominee.

William Shakespeare
Main Article: Shakespearean References in Turtledove's Work

Steven Spielberg
Steven Spielberg is a prolific and innovative director and producer of films. This includes his 1993 adaptation of the novel Jurassic Park, about dinosaurs being resurrected by modern science. In "Before the Beginning", we learn that time-viewer videos of raptor behavior in Utah were even more exciting than Spielberg's film.

Tom Stoppard
Tom Stoppard is the author of, among other things, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. A performance of this play is the central plot device of the short story "We Haven't Got There Yet," the title of which is taken from a line of the play's dialogue.

Stoppard returned to the bardolatrous scene in 1998 when he and Marc Norman wrote the screenplay for Shakespeare in Love. One scene of that movie shows Shakespeare working on a draft of a play tentatively titled Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter. Turtledove's 2007 novella "Avalon" includes a memorable character who is both named Ethel and a pirate's daughter.

The Three Stooges
The Three Stooges were an American vaudeville and comedy act of the early to mid–20th century best known for their numerous short subject films. Their hallmark was physical farce and extreme slapstick. In films, the stooges were commonly known by their first names: "Moe, Larry, and Curly" and "Moe, Larry, and Shemp," among other lineups.

In Hitler's War, while fleeing the Balmoral-Osborne Hotel de Luxe in Marianske Lazne, Czechoslovakia during a German bombardment of the town in September 1938, Peggy Druce observes two men near the front desk punching and kicking each other and poking one another in the eye, and is reminded of a Three Stooges two-reeler. One of the men is a Czech, the other a German.

The Universal Monsters
Turtledove has invoked directly or indirectly several of the monster movies produced by Universal Studios. Bela Lugosi and his famous alter ego Dracula are referenced several times throughout the The War That Came Early. In "Shtetl Days", Veit Harlan has an epiphany after watching Frankenstein. Lon Chaney's turn as The Phantom of the Opera is referenced directly in The Man With the Iron Heart and indirectly in Southern Victory (see Gaston Leroux, above).

While many of these films were based on novels, Turtledove's characters appear far more familiar with the film versions.

Lope de Vega
Lope de Vega is one of two alternating POV characters in Ruled Britannia, along with William Shakespeare. During the course of the novel, Vega is seen working on two plays, La Dama Boba and El Mejor Mozo de España, which is performed live at one point in the book. Both plays were written by Lope de Vega in OTL, although years later than in the novel. The first one is a romantic comedy and the second a nationalist historical piece that, despite being named after King Ferdinand II of Aragon, actually lionises Queen Isabella I of Castile. In a way, both reflect on aspects of Lope de Vega's role in the novel. The first because Lope pursues selfish romantic interests and has to deal with a useless servant like many characters in the play's genre. The second because he is a member of the Spanish occupation army in England who keeps the country under another Queen Isabella, and oversees Shakespeare's crafting of a similarly lionising play for a Spanish king, King Philip, only to discover later that Shakespeare has been secretly writing another lionising, nationalistic play about a queen of his own country's past, Boudicca.

At one point, de Vega, who is a fluent though not a native speaker of English, contributes four iambs to Shakespeare's King Philip, and Shakespeare is inspired to create the fifth and add the line to the existing script.

Maurine Dallas Watkins
Maurine Dallas Watkins was a journalist with the Chicago Tribune in the 1920s. During that time, she covered the murder trials of Belva Gaertner and Beulah Sheriff Annan. Both women were convicted. Watkins used these trials as inspiration for her play, Chicago (also known as Roxie Hart), which was adapted into a musical in the 1970s. In the novel Joe Steele, Turtledove directly references the Gaertner trial by making his Americanized version of Andrey Vyshinsky one of the prosecutors in the matter. He also notes that one of the reporters, implicitly Watkins, wrote a play based on the trial.

Matthew Weiner
Matthew Weiner is the creator the cable series Mad Men, about the employees of an advertising agency in the 1960s. In the short story "The Eighth-Grade History Class Visits the Hebrew Home for the Aging", Anne Berkowitz notes that in a black-and-white photograph, her late husband looks Mad Men-y in a suit.

Orson Welles
George Orson Welles (1915-1985) was an American actor known for his cinema films including Citizen Kane (1941) and Falstaff (1965). Prior to that, he broadcast an adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel The War of the Worlds over the radio in October 1938. So realistic was the acting in this play about Martians attacking the United States, that audiences tuning in and catching snippets out of context, believed that a real invasion was occurring on a news program. The legends surrounding this broadcast have likely been exaggerated in the degree of how many people listened and what they believed; it is more probable that they took the enemy as very real Nazis rather than make-believe space monsters.

The Worldwar series' point of divergence comes when an actual alien invasion occurs just four years after Welles' broadcast. Sam Yeager references Welles' play and tells Mutt Daniels that "The Martians have landed, for real this time."