Literary Allusions in Turtledove's Work

Like many authors, Harry Turtledove periodically pays homage to other authors in his work. What follows is a list of such homages which can be found in Turtledove's body of work, organized by the author (or other creator of fiction) whose work is invoked.

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.

Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov  has long been considered one of the giants of the field of science fiction writing. Harry Turtledove has been both inspired by, and contributed to, the works of Asimov.

Asimov falls victim to a time-traveling plagiarist in the short story "Hindsight."

Turtledove also contributed the story "Trantor Falls" to the 1989 anthology Foundation's Friends: Stories in Honor of Isaac Asimov.

Turtledove's first published novel, Werenight, and its sequels, which tell the tale of Gerin the Fox, are very loosely based on the first half of Asimov's Foundation trilogy. The title of the final story of Gerin, Fox and Empire, is taken from the middle book of the original Foundation trilogy, Foundation and Empire.

William Averell
William Averell wrote An Exhortacion to als English Subjects, several lines of which were borrowed by Turtledove to pad out the script of the fictional Shakespearean play Boudicca in Ruled Britannia. As Exhortacion had been written in prose, Turtledove rewrote the borrowed lines in iambic pentameter himself.

L Frank Baum
Aside from Baum himself actually appearing as a character in Walk in Hell, L. Frank Baum's children's novel Queen Zixi of the Ix is featured in The Victorious Opposition.

Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett was the author of the play Waiting for Godot. The short story "We Haven't Got There Yet" ends with the main character about to attend a performance of Waiting for Godot.

Ambrose Bierce
Ambrose Bierce was the author of The Devil's Dictionary, which features in the novel In High Places.

The Devil's Dictionary's definition of Manicheism also provided the inspiration for the novel The Victorious Opposition. The definition is quoted in the novel's front matter.

Bierce is also referenced in passing in "The Scarlet Band".

Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Rice Burroughs was one of the founding fathers of science fiction. Writing around the turn of the twentieth century, his most memorable creations include the stories of Tarzan of the Apes and John Carter of Mars.

Turtledove has used the latter to name characters twice. In Advance and Retreat, the historical Confederate officer John C Carter's alter ego is John of Barsoom (Barsoom having been the local name for the planet Mars in Burroughs's story). In In at the Death, the character Jack Carter is originally introduced as "Carter of Tarkas Estate, or maybe it's the other way around." Tars Tarkas was the name of one of Carter's staunchest Martian allies in the early John Carter of Mars stories.

Lyon Sprague de Camp
Lyon Sprague de Camp was an American author of science fiction and fantasy books, non-fiction and biography. Turtledove's interest in writing alternate history was sparked by de Camp's novel, Lest Darkness Fall.

In 1999, Turtledove wrote The Pugnacious Peacemaker, a sequel to de Camp's Wheels of If which was published in Down in the Bottomlands and Other Places. In 2005, Turtledove edited a volume of short stories called The Enchanter Completed, which celebrated de Camp's writing. Turtledove's own contribution was "The Haunted Bicuspid".

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.

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 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.

CS Forrester
In In at the Death, CS Forrester appears to have been fused with Patrick O'Brian to create the fictional author CS O'Brian, whose name is obviously a portmanteau of the two historical authors' names. CS O'Brian was marked for writing novels about naval warfare in the early nineteenth century, which was also the claim to fame of both CS Forrester and Patrick O'Brian.

Matt Groening
Matt Groening is the creator of the successful cartoon The Simpsons. Simpson was also the middle name of General Ulysses S. Grant. In 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.)

Dashiell Hammett
Dashiell Hammett was the author of The Maltese Falcon, of which Turtledove's short story "The Maltese Elephant" is a pastiche.

In the Southern Victory universe, Hammett himself may have titled the work The Maltese Elephant. At any rate, a film by that name was produced in the United States some time in the late 1930s or early 1940s.

Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway is featured as a character in several Southern Victory novels. Both his spoken dialogue and his written words invoke Hemingway's famous, distinctive writing style of short, clipped sentences.

Anthony Hope
Anthony Hope was the author of the 1894 novel The Prisoner of Zenda, which tells the tale of a commoner being mistaken for a king. The book was adapted into a film in 1913--the same year that German acrobat Otto Witte popularized his fanciful tale of having briefly reigned as King of Albania. Skeptics of Witte's unconvincing if amusing story pointed out that large parts of it seemed to have been lifted from that film.

Witte's story, in turn, provides the basis for Turtledove's novel Every Inch a King.

Robert Howard
Robert E Howard was a prolific American writer of short stories despite dying at the age of 30. Turtledove is a known fan of Howard's work.

Conan of Venarium is a pastche of Howard's best-known creation, Conan the Cimmeranian.

"The Boring Beast" is a reverent parody of Howard's fantasy.

In The Center Cannot Hold, Jeff Pinkard reads a short story about aerial combat in the Great War from a pulp magazine. Though the author's name is not given, context clues imply that it is a Howard story.

Thomas Hughes
Thomas Hughes was the author of The Misfortunes of Arthur, lines of which are borrowed by Turtledove for the fictional Shakespearean play King Philip in Ruled Britannia.

Gaston Leroux
Gaston Leroux was the author of Le Fantôme de l'Opéra, a French novel originally published serially in 1909 and 1910. The first English translation was published in 1911 as The Phantom of the Opera.

The Phantom of the Opera has been adapted to performances on both stage and screen many times. The first, and widely considered the best, film adaptation was a 1925 silent film starring Lon Chaney as the Phantom.

In the Southern Victory series, a silent film titled The Phantom of the Catacombs was made in the United States in the 1920s. Like the OTL Phantom of the Opera, it starred Chaney in the lead role.

Whether the TL-191 version of Leroux has any relation to this film is unknown. However, the title clearly pays homage to the story which was originally Leroux's.

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.

Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln, who has been featured as a character in a number of Turtledove stories, is of course best remembered as the greatest President of the United States. He was also a poet. His 1846 poem "My Childhood Home I See Again," which includes the line "Where many were, how few remain of old familiar things!" provided the title for How Few Remain. Three stanzas of this poem are excerpted in the book's front matter.

H.P. Lovecraft
Turtledove paid homage to H.P. Lovecraft by naming two characters in "The Genetics Lecture" for Cthulhu and Nyarlathotep, two of Lovecraft's most famous and frightening creations.

Betty MacDonald
Betty MacDonald is the author of The Egg and I, which features in the novel The Man With the Iron Heart.

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

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 brough up several times throughout the novel. Marlowe is seen as particularly jealous of 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 lovers of ancient British lore Tristan and Isolde.

Marlowe's literary influence is felt in the play. At one point a bit player unintentionally identifies Marlowe to Lope de Vega by mentioning that a fleeing man had made an unusual comment--which is in fact a lengthy quote from Marlowe's Tragical History of Dr Faustus. Otherwise, Marlowe's play Cambyses, King of Persia is performed by Lord Westmorland's Men one day, and a number of lines were lifted from Tamburlane to pad out 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 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 by making them too dim and dull to avoid it.

Margaret Mitchell
Margaret Mitchell is best known as the author of Gone with the Wind, a novel which was adapted to the most successful movie of all time. Turtledove has invoked elements of Gone with the Wind repeatedly.

In Marching Through Peachtree, he has two characters play out a scene in Marthasville which is reminiscent of Scarlett O'Hara's flight from fallen Atlanta to Tara. One of the characters is named Thert the Butler.

In In at the Death, a Confederate civilian leader named Clark Butler makes a cameo. Butler's physical description matches that of Clark Gable, who, of course, played Rhett Butler in the film. Irving Morrell, whom Butler petitions with grievances on behalf of the white population of Atlanta, dismisses Butler's concerns with the sentence "Frankly, Butler, I don't give a damn." (This is, of course, a reference to what is perhaps the most famous line in either the novel or the film, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." In Marcing Through Peachtree, Thert the Butler also begins to quote or paraphrase this line but is interrupted.)

In Aftershocks, Mordechai Anielewicz is reminded of Gone With the Wind when he learns that his wife and children have been enslaved in the aftermath of the Race-German War of 1965.

In Homeward Bound, Gone With the Wind is, in an astronomically improbable coincidence, also the title of a classic historical epic novel in the Race's body of literature.

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

Patrick O'Brian
In In at the Death, Patrick O'Brian appears to have been fused with CS Forrester to create the fictional author CS O'Brian, whose name is obviously a portmanteau of the two historical authors' names. CS O'Brian was marked for writing novels about naval warfare in the early nineteenth century, which was also the claim to fame of both CS Forrester and Patrick O'Brian.

George Orwell
George Orwell, who plays a small offstage role in the Worldwar series, was the author of the novel 1984. 1984 has been featured by Turtledove in both "Hindsight," in which it was used as a yardstick to measure the impact of Mark Gordian's Watergate, and The Gladiator, in which it is required reading in school systems throughout the Soviet Union's sphere of influence--that is to say, everywhere.

Wilfred Owens
Wilfred Owens' poem "Mental Cases" provides the title for Walk in Hell. The verse of the poem which contains the phrase (in the line "Surely we have perished sleeping/And walk in hell; but who these hellish?") is excerpted in the book's front matter.

Edgar Allan Poe
Several of the short stories and poems of Edgar Allan Poe are alluded to in Turtledove's short story "The Haunted Bicuspid". The primary character, William Legrand, receives a tooth implant. Legrand is named for a primary character in Poe's "The Gold Bug". The tooth is haunted, and causes Legrand nightmares, all of which are based upon one or another of Poe's works. Turtledove even broadly hints that the original owner of the haunted tooth is Poe himself, dead for several years by the time of the story's setting.

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 Renfrew.

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. 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.

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."

JD Salinger
JD Salinger was the author of Catcher in the Rye. Turtledove's short story "The Catcher in the Rhine" is a pastiche of this novel.

William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare has been used by Turtledove many times in many ways.

Ruled Britannia
Shakespeare is one of the main characters of Ruled Britannia. The book includes extensive quotations from his actual works and from the two plays which he never wrote in our history but did write in the timeline where England was occupied by Spain - a play about King Philip II of Spain written to please the occupiers, and a play about the Briton Queen Boudicca, written to arouse a rebellion against them. Turtledove borrows several single lines from Henry VIII, Titus Andonicus, The Merchant of Venice, and King John and adapts them to fit into one or the other fictional plays.

At different points throughout the novel, Shakespeare works on a play titled Love's Labours Won. This is the title of one of his storied "lost plays;" it is believed to have been meant as a sequel to Love's Labours Lost.  The play which Shakespeare works on may be this lost sequel, or it may be Love's Labours Lost under a different title (like The Maltese Elephant, The Phantom of the Catacombs, or, in Ruled Britannia itself, Prince of Denmark.

Existing plays referred to specifically include Richard III, Hamlet (under the title "Prince of Denmark"), and Romeo and Juliet. Turtledove writes a scene in which Prince of Denmark is performed live in its entirety, with Shakespeare's fellow King's Men Richard Burbage as Hamlet and Will Kemp as the Gravedigger. Shakespeare himself plays Hamlet's deceased father.

The fictional Constable Walter Strawberry is based on Dogberry from Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing.

We Haven't Got There Yet
Shakespeare is also the viewpoint character in the short story "We Haven't Got There Yet," which revolves around him discovering that another playwright has plagiarized his work. Shakespeare attends a live performance of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, at first intending to confront Stoppard and demand he stop stealing Shakespeare's scenes and characters, then intending to compliment Stoppard on the play's cleverness, and finally learning that Stoppard is long dead from the theater company's perspective and that the actors themselves come from the impossibly distant future. While watching the performance, Shakespeare also reflects on how the conventions of Elizabethan-Jacobean theater are not observed by the play.

The story uses several Shakespearean quotes, though very few are simply slipped into characters' dialogue as so many had been in Ruled Britannia. The most heavily quoted play is Hamlet, mostly lines which also appear in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and are excerpted from the latter. At the end of the play a twenty-first century actress quotes a good-sized chunk of The Tempest for Shakespeare's benefit. The Tempest is believed to have been written in 1610 and 1611; the story is set in 1607, so Shakespeare is hearing lines which he himself had not yet written but would later, or would have, written. The implcations of this alarm him to the point that he flees the twenty-first century actors' company. It is not clear how if at all his as-yet unwritten projects will be affected by this encounter.

John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck was the author if The Grapes of Wrath, which features in The Gladiator.

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.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
Harriet Beecher Stowe was the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, whose fate in the Southern Victory timeline is outlined in The Grapple.

In the War Between the Provinces Series, reference is made to a comparable novel having been written in that universe, Aunt Clarissa's Serf Hut.

JRR Tolkein
JRR Tolkein was the author of The Lord of the Rings series, which features in The Valley-Westside War.

Furthermore, Turtledove's early career as a fantasy writer was heavily influenced by Tolkein. A first draft of what would become the Videssos series was originally written as Lord of the Rings fanfic.

"After the Last Elf is Dead" is directly inspired by Tolkein, positing a world where evil wins.

Lope de Vega
Lope de Vega is one of the main characters in Ruled Britannia. During the course of the novel, he is seen working on two plays, El Mejor Mozo de España, which is performed live at one point in the book, and La Dama Boba.  Of the two, the former is a ficticious play (meaning that the historical de Vega wrote no such play, not that it is a work of fiction) and the latter is a play which the real de Vega wrote in OTL. Or at least, he wrote a play by that title; since only a few lines are quoted from it, one cannot say to what extent if any it was changed by de Vega's different circumstances in the alternate history.

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