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.

Scott Adams
Scott Adams is the syndicated cartoonist who created the comic strip Dilbert and its eponymous character. Dilbert became something of a cultural icon starting in the mid-1990s and was heavily marketed in many ways, including on T-shirts.

In Turtledove's story "Forty, Counting Down," Justin Kloster obtains a secondhand Dilbert T-shirt in the late 2010s and wears it to allow himself to blend in with the fashions of 1999.

Poul Anderson
Poul Anderson was a prolific American author of science fiction and fantasy in the mid-twentieth century. He died in 2001.

In 2004, Turtledove and Noreen Doyle edited the anthology The Horse of Bronze. The final story in the anthology was an original, previously unpublished story by the late Anderson, "The Bog Sword." Turtledove wrote a short essay prefacing the piece in which he praised Anderson as "one of the great heroes of the golden age [of science fiction]."

See Also: Turtledove's Literary Influences

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

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

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

Turtledove's first published novel, Wereblood, and its sequels, which make up the Elabon series, share some themes with the first half of Asimov's Foundation trilogy as well as the classic standalone novella "Nightfall." 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.

Asimov himself wrote the foreword for the anthology Agent of Byzantium, an essay titled "The Ifs of History," in which he shared his musings on alternate history, which was at the time a rather novel genre.

See Also: Turtledove's Literary Influences

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
L. 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".

See Also: Turtledove's Literary Influences

John W Campbell
John W Campbell was the long time editor of Astounding (later Analog) science fiction magazine. While Campbell died in 1971, before Turtledove's writing career had begun, he did base Jim McGregor, editor of the pulp magazine Astonishing in the short story "Hindsight," on Campbell.

Geoffrey Chaucer
In In the Presence of Mine Enemies, we learn that the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, much like William Shakespeare, are studied in much greater detail in Germany than in Britain. Susanna Weiss teaches, debates, and studies a variety of Chaucer pieces throughout the novel.''

In In High Places, Chaucer died during the far greater spread of the Black Plague before he could even begin writing The Canterbury Tales.

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.

Dante Alighieri
Dante Alighieri and his most famous work, Inferno, serve as the basis of a homework assignment in The Gladiator.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Turtledove wrote a pastiche of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes in the short story "The Scarlet Band". Sherlock Holmes becomes Athelstan Helms, Dr. John Watson becomes James Walton, and Inspector Lestrade becomes La Strada. In an unusual move for Turtledove, this pastiche is actually part of the Atlantis timeline, rather than being a stand-alone work.

The novella "Nothing in the Nighttime" is a science fiction story dealing with a character who is a professor of literature influenced by the Holmesian canon.

Finley Peter Dunne
Turtledove has frequently referenced an axiom of Finley Peter Dunne's: "Trust everybody, but always cut the cards."

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.

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.

Thomas Gray
Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Courtyard lamented that "Some mute inglorious Milton" rested there. Nearly two centuries later, H.L. Mencken's answered Gray with the assertion that "There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the imaginations of poets. The one sound test of a Milton is that he functions as a Milton." Gray's Elegy and Mencken's response serve as the thematic foundation of "The House That George Built".

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 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.

Robert A. Heinlein
Robert A. Heinlein was an American science fiction writer in the twentieth century and is often called "the Dean of Science Fiction". As Turtledove states in his essay "Thank You" in Requiem: New Collected Works by Robert A. Heinlein and Tributes to the Grand Master that Heinlein was his inspiration to persist in becoming a professional fiction writer.

Turtledove also had Heinlein appear or referenced in a number of his works. Heinlein was a minor character in the Worldwar series. He was referenced by Jennifer Logan in the far future science fiction novel Earthgrip and his story "The Man Who Sold the Moon" provides Logan with a solution to her difficulties in 6+. Michelle Gordian plagiarized Heinlein's "All You Zombies" in "Hindsight." Admiral Anson MacDonald is a thinly disguised Heinlein in "The Last Word" with the plot of the story taken from Heinlein's Sixth Column.

Turtledove's inclusion of Luna among the nations participating in the Sixty-sixth Winter Games in "Les Mortes d'Arthur" may or may not have been an homage to Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. That novel does end with the establishment of an independent nation-state on the Moon known as Luna, but no details are povided that would let us judge whether Turtledove's Luna resembles Heinlein's.  The idea of a lunar nation by itself is quite generic in science fiction, as is the name Luna.

See Also: Turtledove's Literary Influences

Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway is featured as a character in several Southern Victory novels, though his full name is never given. 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.

See Also: Turtledove's Literary Influences

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.

Norton Juster
Norton Juster wrote the classic children's book The Phantom Tollbooth. Turtledove's short story "The Phantom Tolbukhin" is obviously a pun of that book. In fact, Turtledove has stated that the idea for the pun served as his inspiration for writing a story about Fedor Tolbukhin.

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.

Jack London
Jack London and his novel, The Iron Heel, are discussed in The Gladiator. One of the protagonists of the novel, Gianfranco Mazzilli, prefers London's short stories.

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.

Thomas Mallory
Thomas Mallory wrote Le Morte d'Arthur, considered the definitive collection of the classical Arthurian legends. The title of Turtledove's short story "Les Mortes d'Arthur" is obviously inspired by Mallory's work, but beyond that the one does not resemble the other in any way.

Turtledove's story "A Massachusetts Yankee in King Arthur's Court" makes use of rather more elements of Mallory's work.

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 brought 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 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 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, on being recited verbatim, 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 to make them too dim and dull to avoid it.

H.L. Mencken
H.L. Mencken is the POV character of the alternate history short story "The House That George Built". Mencken listens to George Ruth's lamentations on several hey misfortunes over the course of his life. Ruth firmly believes that, if things had gone differently, Ruth could have been a major league baseball star. Mencken's belief that great people become great no matter what does not allow him to countinence the idea that an also-ran like Ruth could have been anything but an also-ran.

John Milton
In The Grapple, Ophelia Clemens quotes the final line of John Milton's Sonnet XIX for Abner Dowling's benefit:


 * "They also serve who only stand and wait."

Dowling mistakes the quote for a Shakesearean line.

Thomas Gray invoked Milton in his Elegy in a Country Courtyard, claiming that "some mute, inglorious Milton" rested there. H.L. Mencken dismissed this idea, believing that anyone of Milton's native ability could not help but find artistic expression. In Turtledove's "The House That George Built," Mencken used this belief to dismiss Babe Ruth's insistence that he had the talent to make himself a giant in the game of baseball, but for certain unlucky breaks in his youth.

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 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 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. 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."

Shota Rustaveli
Shota Rustaveli was a Georgian poet who lived during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Within the Georgian language, he is seen as a literary giant, holding a status equal to Leonid Tolstoy's in the Russian or even William Shakespeare's in the English. However, very little is known of his life; large parts of his biography come from dubious legends.

Turtledove named a Georgian character in A World of Difference after Rustaveli. Except for the name and nationality, the character shares almost no traits with the medieval writer. Turtledove's Rustaveli is certainly not a poet, though he does at one point discuss poetry with his comrade, Yuri Voroshilov, who does write original verse.

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
Main Article: Shakespearean Allusions in Turtledove's Work

John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck was the author of The Grapes of Wrath, which features in The Gladiator. Turtledove's "Of Mice and Chicks" is a parody of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men.

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.

Julius Streicher
Julius Streicher was a Nazi journalist who founded the Nazi news organ Der Stürmer. He also wrote three children's books about the evil ways of Jews, which Nazi educators used to brainwash children into accepting Hitler's racist ideology from a very young age. Of course, these hate-filled storybooks fell out of fashion with VE Day in OTL. In In the Presence of Mine Enemies, however, the survival and victory of the Nazi Party allowed Streicher's thomes not only to survive but to attain the status of literary classics.

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.

In the Atlantis timeline, the plant which OTL knows as tobacco is referred to as "pipeweed." This is also the name by which tobacco is called in Lord of the Rings. As this trivia was widely popularized by the Lord of the Rings movies just a few years before Turtledove began work on the Atlantis series, this is very likely a direct homage.

See Also: Turtledove's Literary Influences

Mark Twain
Mark Twain, born Samuel Clemens, is a POV character in Turtledove's How Few Remain. Turtledove casts Clemens as a newspaper editor in San Francisco. Both Clemens's editorials and his dialogue make use of occasional cribs from Twain's body of writing, and, though he did not obtain the same level of fame and immortality that he did in OTL, he is remembered fondly decades after his death, as late as the Second Great War.

Additionally, the title of Turtledove's short story "A Massachusetts Yankee in King Arthur's Court" was inspired by Twain's classic novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

The latter was perhaps the original historical novel narrated by a time traveller, a subgenre of science fiction to which Turtledove has contributed The Guns of the South and several short stories.

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.