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. In some cases, a work produced by an unknown author, or a large team of people, is listed by the work's title.

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 (b. 1957) 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," the elder 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.

In Supervolcano: All Fall Down, Rob Ferguson defended being in a moderately successful band like Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles because otherwise he might have found himself working in a cubicle next to Dilbert. In the same volume, Bryce Miller thought of the office cubical spaces at the Los Angeles Dept. of Water and Power as "Dilbertland".

Hans Christian Andersen
Hans Christian Andersen (often referred to in Scandinavia as H. C. Andersen; 2 April 1805 – 4 August 1875) was a Danish author. Although a prolific writer of plays, travelogues, novels, and poems, Andersen is best remembered for his fairy tales. Andersen's popularity is not limited to children; his stories, called eventyr in Danish, express themes that transcend age and nationality.

Andersen's fairy tales, which have been translated into more than 125 languages, have become culturally embedded in the West's collective consciousness, readily accessible to children, but presenting lessons of virtue and resilience in the face of adversity for mature readers as well. Some of his most famous fairy tales include "The Emperor's New Clothes", "The Little Mermaid", "The Nightingale", "The Snow Queen", "The Ugly Duckling", "Thumbelina" and many more.

In "The Mammyth", Turtledove references Andersen's "The Emperor's New Clothes" by describing an unnamed Emperor who once wore a robe made from "mammyth" skin. Turtledove implies that the Emperor was indeed naked as in Andersen's story, primarily because mammyth's don't exist. But, in keeping with the tone of the story, Turtledove does leave open the possibility that the Emperor really was wearing a mammyth robe.

Poul Anderson
Poul Anderson (1926-2001) was a prolific American author of science fiction and fantasy in the mid-20th century.

In 2004, Turtledove and Noreen Doyle edited the anthology First Heroes. 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]."

In addition, the world-building of Turtledove's The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump was influenced by Anderson's Operation Chaos. Both novels are fantasies that take place in a recognizable present-day world where magic works and is treated like technology is in our own and where social institutions are geared to regulate and control its use.

The criminals in Turtledove's "Death in Vesunna" are wary of being caught by the Time Patrol, suggesting that the story takes place in the same universe as Anderson's series of stories about an agency by that name.

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'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 series's final novel, Fox and Empire, is a clear homage to the middle book of the original Foundation trilogy, Foundation and Empire. Foundation and Empire consists of two novellas, "The Dead Hand" (or "The General") and "The Mule." The conflict which gives rise to Fox and Empire's premise is quite close to that of "The Dead Hand."

In "Someone is Stealing the Great Throne Rooms of the Galaxy," most citizens of the Galactic Empire consider Earth to be "the most insignificant planet in the galaxy." In Asimov's first published novel, Pebble in the Sky, the same concept, even the same phrasing, is attached to Earth by the majority of citizens of a very different Galactic Empire.

Asimov himself wrote the forewords for the anthologies A Different Flesh and Agent of Byzantium. The latter introduction took the form of a memorable 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

John James Audubon
In addition to his POV role in "Audubon in Atlantis", John James Audubon's skill as an artist proves helpful to a few characters in "Birdwitching", when they use his art to identify the extinct Carolina Parakeet, temporarily revived by magic.

William Averell
William Averell wrote An Exhortacion to all 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.

P.T. Barnum
P.T. Barnum (1810-1891) was an American businessman and entertainer, perhaps remembered for cofounding the largest and most successful circus (Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey). He also left a number of memorable quotes. One of them, "There's a sucker born every minute," is alluded to in The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat.

L. Frank Baum
Aside from Baum himself actually appearing as a character in the Southern Victory novel American Front, L. Frank Baum's children's fantasy tale Queen Zixi of Ix is featured in The Victorious Opposition from the same series. Both of these references are a bit questionable, suggesting that a little magic was involved in Baum's presence in the series.

In The War That Came Early: The Big Switch, a screening of the film adaptation of The Wizard of Oz is the setting of the last date of Pete McGill and Vera Kuznetsova. The film is interrupted by a terror attack by the Chinese Communist Party, which kills Kuznetsova.

Ben Ross Berenberg
Ben Ross Berenberg wrote the 1946 children's book The Churkendoose, about a misfit bird who is a chimaera of chicken, turkey, duck, and goose.

In The Hot War: Fallout, Aaron and Ruth Finch read the story of the Churkendoose to their son Leon.

Ambrose Bierce
Ambrose Bierce was the author of The Devil's Dictionary, which features in the novel In High Places. Characters from other Turtledove works also occasionally consult and quote from The Devil's Dictionary.

The Devil's Dictionary's definition of Manichaeism also provided the inspiration for The Victorious Opposition, a novel in the Southern Victory series. The definition is quoted in the novel's front matter.

Bierce is also referenced in passing in the Atlantis story "The Scarlet Band", when Athelstan Helms recites a passage from the same book.

Norman Bridwell
Norman Bridwell (1928-2014) wrote the popular children's book series Clifford the Big Red Dog. In The Valley-Westside War, the Mendoza family have a tradition of reading this series, and are reminded of it by the sight of Pots the war dog.

John Bunyan
John Bunyan (1628-1688) was an English tinsmith and veteran of Parliament's army during the Civil War (1642-1651), who later became a preacher of a "nonconformist" Protestant denomination later known as the Baptists. During the reign of King Charles II, Bunyan was often in jail for organizing religious meetings not sanctioned by the Church of England. While in prison, he wrote diaries of his spiritual thoughts (later published as several works) and began work on the novel The Pilgrim's Progress. This work, published in 1678 and revised in 1684, is an allegory of Bunyan's spiritual struggles against doubt and fear, cast in the form of a Hero's Journey where a man travels on foot from a depraved sin-filled town to a heavenly city, overcoming fantasy monsters and villains with names such as Giant Despair, Apollyon (Greek for Destruction), and Lord Hate-Good.

In How Few Remain, Abraham Lincoln (who in OTL was known to read this book over and over during his youth) reads from The Pilgrim's Progress during his stay in Utah.

Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) was one of the founding fathers of science fiction. Writing in the first half of the 20th 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 Barsoom stories.

In Days of Infamy, Jim Peterson suggests to a major that Tarzan of the Apes would have difficulty with the Hawaiian terrain. The major turns out to be a Burroughs fanatic, and pontificates upon whether Tarzan could or couldn't, before invoking John Carter and Carson of Venus.

In "Before the Beginning", the time-viewer reveals that Mars did indeed once have life, but it was all microscopic organisms, and nothing like "John Carter or Dejah Thoris [Carter's Martian wife]."

In Worldwar, Sam Yeager is fond of sf, including Burroughs' Mars epics. In Down to Earth, Sam's son Jonathan Yeager compares Kassquit, a human woman raised by Lizards from another planet, to Tarzan of the Apes. We also learn that the Race found Burroughs' Barsoom series to be ridiculously naïve.

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 the Jim McGregor in "Hindsight" on Campbell.

Orson Scott Card
Orson Scott Card (b. 1951) is an American writer of science fiction, fantasy, and alternate history. His most famous creations are the Ender Wiggin series and the Alvin Maker series. Card and Harry Turtledove have occasionally edited each other's stories for anthologies.

In the Days of Infamy series, an important supporting character is named Orson Sharp, possibly a pun: "cardsharp" is a skilled gambler.

In The War That Came Early: Last Orders, Lt. Anastas Mouradian got into a dispute with Lt. Vladimir Ostrogorsky. The two took it outside the mess tent where Mouradian attacked without warning and then gave Ostrogorsky a beating. He wished a victory as complete as possible to discourage others from mocking him much the same way the Ender Wiggin beat a classmate (unknowingly to death) to discourage others from picking on him.

Dale Carnegie
Dale Carnegie was the author of How to Win Friends and Influence People, one of the first self-help books. The book has been in print continuously since its original publication in 1936, and has sold well over 15 million copies worldwide.

In The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat, Peggy Druce describes the book as "a bunch of hooey, nothing else but." Her husband does not disagree but does point out that Carnegie made a small fortune in royalties.

Dio Cassius
In The War That Came Early: The Big Switch After learning of the death of Winston Churchill, Samuel Goldman attempts, without much success, to calm his nerves by reading a selection from the prolific Roman historian Dio Cassius in the original Greek.

Gaius Catullus
Gaius Valerius Catullus was a Latin poet of the late Roman Republic who wrote in the neoteric style of poetry. His surviving works are still read widely, and continue to influence poetry and other forms of art. Catullus' poems were widely appreciated by other poets. He greatly influenced poets and authors such as Ovid, Horace, Vergil and apparently Harry Turtledove.

In Joe Steele, after Father Coughlin is shot by firing squad on President Joe Steele's orders, the lieutenant of the firing squad says "Ave atque vale" ("Hail and Farewell") to Coughlin's garbled "ave--", a reference to a line in Catullus' famous poem 'Catullus 101'.

Geoffrey Chaucer
In addition to having had a truncated life in In High Places, Geoffrey Chaucer is referenced in other Turtledove works. In In the Presence of Mine Enemies, we learn that the works of 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.

"Gladly Wolde He Lerne" takes its title from a line in The Canterbury Tales.

Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, in addition to his political career, was well regarded as an orator and writer.

In OTL, after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Churchill stated in a speech advocating support for Joseph Stalin: "If Hitler invaded Hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons". In the novel Joe Steele where Stalin is born in the U.S. and elected President, Churchill gives a speech thanking Steele for the AH equivalent of Lend-Lease and states "If the Devil opposed Adolf Hitler, I should endeavor to give him a good notice in the House of Commons. Thus I thank Joe Steele".

Carl von Clausewitz
Carl Philipp Gottfried (or Gottlieb) von Clausewitz (1 June 1780 – 16 November 1831) was a Prussian general and military theorist who stressed the "moral" (meaning, in modern terms, psychological) and political aspects of war. His most notable work, Vom Kriege (On War), was unfinished at his death. Clausewitz was a realist in many different senses and, while in some respects a romantic, also drew heavily on the rationalist ideas of the European Enlightenment. One of his more famous aphorisms is "War is the extension of politics by other means."

In The War That Came Early: The Big Switch, Julius Lemp reflects that Clausewitz' aphorism is especially relevant to the convoluted twists and reversals to this timeline's version of World War II.

Groff Conklin
Edward Groff Conklin (September 6, 1904 – July 19, 1968) was a leading science fiction anthologist. He edited 41 anthologies of science fiction, wrote books on home improvement and was a freelance writer on scientific subjects. In 1953, he and his wife Lucy edited The Supernatural Reader.

In the short work "The Star and the Rockets", Joe Bauman is reading Groff Conklin's The Supernatural Reader the night three strange men changed his life. Bauman describes the name "Groff" as quite the handle.

Dante Alighieri
Dante Alighieri, or simply Dante (c. 1265– 13 or 14 September 1321), was an Italian poet from Florence. His central work, the Divine Comedy, is considered the greatest literary work composed in the Italian language and a masterpiece of world literature. The most famous canitca of this work is Inferno.

Inferno serves as the basis of a homework assignment in The Gladiator. Moreover, in the short work "Clash of Arms", Stephen de Windesore is surprised to see that "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here" adorns the gates of Hell; the line comes from Dante's work. Kelly Ferguson is also reminded of the line when she visits the post-eruption Yellowstone Supervolcano. Oscar van der Kirk thought the phrase should be over the door to the "Special Case" office in the Honolulu Hale when he went there to enquirer after Charlie Kaapu.

Dick Barber and Bryce Miller also reference Dante's Inferno in the Supervolcano trilogy, where the innermost circle is a frozen lake trapping Satan in the middle, while contemplating the unusually cold winters after the eruption.

The Inferno is also quoted in "The Scarlet Band" by James Walton, who finds the grisly sights and smells of an Atlantean prison reminiscent of Dante's depiction of Hell.

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".

In The War That Came Early: Last Orders, a Kriegsmarine Kapitan zur See named Rochus Mauer mentions that he had fought in the World War II "with a slashing slide rule", something de Camp had jokingly said about his own World War II experiences in a United States Navy research facility in Philadelphia.

De Camp's Gavagan's Bar (1953) is acknowledged by Turtledove as an influence on "The Haunted Bicuspid." De Camp's bartender is named Cohan, Turtledove's is named George M. Furthermore, The Two Georges has a minor character named "Gavagan the bartender".

See Also: Turtledove's Literary Influences

Daniel Defoe
Daniel Defoe (1660 – 1731), born Daniel Foe, was an English trader, writer, journalist, pamphleteer, and spy, most famous for his novel Robinson Crusoe. The novel tells of a man's shipwreck on a deserted island and his subsequent adventures while being isolated from the rest of the world for over 30 years.

In the Settling Accounts tetralogy ending the Southern Victory series, U.S. Army soldiers trapped behind Confederate lines for long periods were referred to as "Robinson Crusoes" in allusion to the novel.

In Gunpowder Empire, Jeremy Solters compares himself and his sister Amanda to Robinson Crusoe when a disaster cuts them off in Agrippan Rome from the home timeline.

Diodorus Siculus
Diodorus Siculus was an Ancient Greek historian, who wrote works of history between 60 and 30 BC. He is known for the monumental universal history Bibliotheca historica ("Historical Library"). According to Diodorus' own work, he was born at Agyrium (now Agira) in Sicily. With one exception, antiquity affords no further information about Diodorus' life and doings beyond what is to be found in his own work.

Diodorus' universal history was immense and consisted of 40 books, of which 1–5 and 11–20 survive: fragments of the lost books are preserved in Photius and the excerpts of Constantine Porphyrogenitus. It was divided into three sections. The first six books treated the mythic history of the non-Hellenic and Hellenic tribes to the destruction of Troy and are geographical in theme, and describe the history and culture of Ancient Egypt (book I), of Mesopotamia, India, Scythia, and Arabia (II), of North Africa (III), and of Greece and Europe (IV–VI). In the next section (books VII–XVII), he recounts the history of the world from the Trojan War down to the death of Alexander the Great. The last section (books XVII to the end) concerns the historical events from the successors of Alexander down to either 60 BC or the beginning of Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars.

Diodorus selected the name "Bibliotheca" in acknowledgment that he was assembling a composite work from many sources. Identified authors on whose works he drew include Hecataeus of Abdera, Ctesias of Cnidus, Ephorus, Theopompus, Hieronymus of Cardia, Duris of Samos, Diyllus, Philistus, Timaeus, Polybius, and Posidonius.

In "Death in Vesunna", Gaius Tero uses a copy of the work of Diodorus to bait a trap for the murderers of Clodius Eprius.

Mary Mapes Dodge
Mary Mapes Dodge (January 26, 1831 – August 21, 1905) was an American children's writer and editor, best known for her novel Hans Brinker (1865), taking in place in the Netherlands. Although Dodge had never visited the Netherlands at the time, her research into Dutch culture was so perfect that the story has been adopted by the Dutch as an ersatz native legend. A subplot of Hans Brinker involves a boy who saves his town from flooding, by holding his finger in the dike. This boy is not named in the book, but in popular culture is also often called Hans Brinker.

In A World of Difference, Dr. Sarah Levitt is attempting to find a cure for Minervan mates' inevitable childbirth deaths, which would involve plugging six burst arteries at once, and metaphorically wishes that the boy at the dike had six hands.

John Donne
John Donne (1572-1631) was an English cleric and poet, considered by most to be the pre-eminent representative of the metaphysical poets of the 17th century. Arguably his most famous work, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624), includes the oft-quoted line:
 * No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

In the short work "Typecasting", Bill Williamson suddenly remembers part of the line while visiting Ashland.

In Supervolcano: All Fall Down Marshall Ferguson reads a newspaper story about a young man who committed suicide because he felt cut off from the world since the eruption. The reporter went on to quote Devotions's first line and how everyone has been thrown back on their own resources becoming islands.

Arthur Conan Doyle
Turtledove's short story "The Scarlet Band", is a pastiche of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. In Turtledove's work, 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," part of the collection Earthgrip, is a science fiction story dealing with a character who is a professor of literature influenced by the Holmesian canon.

Many Turtledove characters in a variety of Turtledove stories comment on obvious statements with variations on the aphorism "No kidding Sherlock". For example, in The War That Came Early: West and East, Pete McGill makes an obvious observation and reflects that, if he were an investigator, he would not put Sherlock Holmes out of business.

Alexandre Dumas
Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) was the author of numerous adventure novels set in French history. His best known works are Les Trois Mousquetaires (The Three Musketeers) and its sequels. In The Valley-Westside War, when Dan tells Liz Mendoza that he has become a Musketeer of The Valley, she thinks of him as resembling Athos, Porthos, or Aramis (the titular musketeers), or d'Artagnan, the young musketeer-in-training who is the novels' true central character.

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

George Eliot
Mary Ann Evans (22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880; alternatively "Mary Anne" or "Marian"), known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She wrote The Mill on the Floss, first published in three volumes in 1860 by William Blackwood. The novel spans a period of 10 to 15 years and details the lives of Tom and Maggie Tulliver, siblings growing up at Dorlcote Mill on the River Floss at its junction with the more minor River Ripple near the village of St. Ogg's in Lincolnshire, England.

In Supervolcano: Eruption, Vanessa Ferguson was stranded in a high school building in Garden City, Kansas, while fleeing the Yellowstone Supervolcano eruption. Her bunkroom was used to teach English literature, and so having nothing else to do, she read several times one of the many copies of The Mill on the Floss on a bookshelf in the room.

T.S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot (26 September 1888 – 4 January 1965) was an American-English playwright, literary critic, and an important English-language poet of the 20th century. Perhaps his most famous lines end his poem The Hollow Men:
 * This is the way the world ends
 * Not with a bang but a whimper.

In Supervolcano: Eruption, Kelly Birnbaum thought Eliot's lines missed the mark while experiencing a series 7.0 earthquakes in Yellowstone National Park the night before the supervolcano erupted. She anticipated that would end her world with quite the bang.

In Southern Victory: Drive to the East, Lieutenant Colonel Tom Colleton also thought that the lines were untrue and figured the (unnamed) Eliot must have missed fighting in the Great War, otherwise he would have never written that.

The working title of The War That Came Early: Last Orders was originally announced as Not with a Bang, presumably an allusion to the same poem.

In The Hot War: Bombs Away, Bill Staley remembers that oft quoted line from "The Hollow Men" on the eve of the outbreak of World War III. Staley is amused that Eliot could write "The Hollow Men" and "The Waste Land" and then also write silly poems about cats.

In "Topanga and the Chatsworth Lancers", Jared Tillman reflects thatthe Change ended the old world not with a bang but with a whimper, and thinks "Tough shit, Eliot!"

The punning expression "Tough shit, Eliot!" is used by countless other Turtledove characters.

Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer
Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer (10 December 1790 – 26 April 1861) was a Tyrolean traveler, journalist, politician and historian, best known for his controversial theories concerning the racial origins of the Greeks, and for his travel writings.

In "The Mammyth", the unnamed narrator repeats a fictional claim that pictures of a throne made of mammyth ivory may be found in a fictional Fallmerayer (here spelled "Fallmereyer") tome called Geistkunstgeschichtliche Wissenschaft. The narrator further repeats a rumor that someone removed every image from every copy of the Fallmerayer work; as there were only ever nine copies, this was not an impossibility.

William Faulkner
In the short story "Eyewear", Esperanza quotes William Faulkner's observation that "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past" to illustrate the fludity of time and time-travel. Esperanza initially believes that Faulkner didn't know the first thing about time travel, but then, upon reflection, allows for the possibility that Faulkner did.

CS Forrester
Cecil Louis Troughton Smith (1899–1966), known by his pen name Cecil Scott "C. S." Forester, was an English novelist known for writing tales of naval warfare such as the 12-book Horatio Hornblower series, depicting a Royal Navy officer during the Napoleonic wars. His other works include The African Queen (1935; filmed in 1951 by John Huston) which is set during World War I.

In Settling Accounts: In at the Death, CS Forrester appears to have been fused with Patrick O'Brian to create the fictional author C.S. O'Brian. CS O'Brian was marked for writing novels about naval warfare in the early 19th century, which was also the claim to fame of both CS Forrester and Patrick O'Brian.

In The Hot War: Bombs Away, Aaron and Ruth Finch see the famous film version of CS Forrester's The African Queen (which is an improbable accomplishment on their part). Aaron reflects that he loves Forrester.

Robert Frost
Robert Lee Frost (March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963) was an American poet, highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. Frost received four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry, the Congressional Gold Medal, and the post of poet laureate of Vermont. Among his more famous works is "The Road Not Taken" (1916), whose famous first line is "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood".

The title of Turtledove's "The Road Not Taken" is taken from Frost's poem. Within the story, Togram and Ransisc discuss this poem, translating the author's surname as their language's word for Hail or Snow. They use the poem as a metaphor of how two different societies go on different paths of technological discovery.

In Joe Steele, Charlie Sullivan capitalizes on the public's love for Frost by writing a novel called Two Roads Diverged.

Erle Stanley Gardner
Erle Stanley Gardner (July 17, 1889 – March 11, 1970) was an American lawyer, travel writer, and novelist, best known as the creator of defense attorney Perry Mason, who first appeared in print in 1933, and was later adapted to radio, television, and film. The best known version of Perry Mason is the 1957-66 TV show starring Raymond Burr.

In Household Gods, ambitious young lawyer Gary Ogarkov tries to imitate Perry Mason (presumably Burr's version) when speaking in public, but sounds as if he's been quaffing helium.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
German soldiers in Hitler's War reference the most famous line from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's play Goetz von Berlichingen: "mich im Arsche lecken!" This translates into English as more or less "Lick my ass!"

Kenneth Grahame
Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) was a Scottish writer of fairy tales, most famously The Wind in the Willows and The Reluctant Dragon, both of which were adapted into animated films by American producer Walt Disney. The Disneyland theme park has an attraction called Mr. Toad's Wild Ride.

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. Mortimer's World is an additional literary allusion, to Disneyland mascot Mickey Mouse, whose name almost became Mortimer before Disney decided that sounded too highbrow.

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

Harold Gray
The world depicted in The Valley-Westside War has been so devastated by nuclear war that the surviving civilizations have conflated fact and fiction rather freely. For example, the historical stuntwoman Annie Oakley is conflated with the central hero of Harold Gray's popular comic strip, "Little Orphan Annie," about the young ward of Oliver "Daddy" Warbucks. In this folklore, Little Orphan Annie Oakley was an outlaw partner of Jesse James, and escaped punishment by marrying Judge Warbucks.

The fact that musicals were written about both Annies probably didn't help.

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 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".

Edward Everett Hale
"The Man Without a Country" is a short story by American writer Edward Everett Hale, first published in The Atlantic in December 1863. It is the story of United States Army lieutenant Philip Nolan, who renounces his country during a trial for treason and is consequently sentenced to spend the rest of his days aboard ship at sea without so much as a word of news about the United States. Though the story is set in the early 19th century, it is an allegory about the upheaval of the American Civil War and was meant to promote the Union cause. When first published, many believed it to be a true story. In 1898, Hale stated that the story was inspired by the deportation of US Congressman Clement Vallandigham to the Confederate States.

In Homeward Bound, the final novel of the Worldwar franchise, Sam Yeager learns from Nicole Nichols that the United States government is intent on stranding him on Home, Yeager is reminded of "The Man Without a Country". The difference is that while Philip Nolan didn't want his country, Yeager's country doesn't want him.

Dashiell Hammett
Samuel Dashiell Hammett (May 27, 1894 – January 10, 1961) was an American author of hard-boiled detective novels and short stories, screenwriter, and political activist. He 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. It apparently starred Humphrey Bogart, who also starred in the 1941 film about the Falcon in OTL.

Sam Spade is the detective who narrates the quest for the Maltese Falcon. In The Two Georges, RAM Captain Samuel Stanley is referred to by Common Sense reporter Michael Shaughnessy as "Sam the Spade", in the context of a racialist slur.

Robert A. Heinlein
Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) was an American science fiction writer in the 20th 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 has a cameo in the Worldwar series. He is 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 plagiarizes 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 deals with the establishment of an independent nation-state on the Moon known as Luna, but no details are provided 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.

At the end of Turtledove's "Father of the Groom", we have the wedding of Archimedes Kidder and Kate, where, after the vows and before the minister could say anything else, Archie said "Kiss Me, Kate!". She did so and, if she couldn't quite "grok" why he had the smile he had, well she was only finishing up an MBA. Grok is a neologism first coined by Heinlein for his seminal 1961 science-fiction novel, Stranger in a Strange Land, and became popular in the hippie community in the years after its publication.

Turtledove's Crosstime Traffic series reportedly takes much influence from Heinlein's work aimed at juveniles. Heinlein is named on the dedication page of Gunpowder Empire, the first volume. As a further reference to Heinlein in the series, several characters from the home timeline own a fasarta, which seems to be a very desirable luxury item. The first known example of the word "fasarta" appears in Heinlein's 1951 novel Between Planets. It is also mentioned in the apparently unrelated novel The Door Into Summer (1956), this time as a "subflexive fasarta." That book's protagonist muses on the difficulties of making time travel commercially viable - especially since with the means of such travel available to him it is impossible to know if you'd go forward of backwards in time, Hence, "Imagine winding up at the court of Henry VIII with a load of subflexive fasartas intended for the twenty-fifth century". That modification to "subflexive fasartas" also makes its way into Crosstime in The Disunited States of America. Neither Heinlein nor Turtledove ever define just what a fasarta is; the ambiguity is presumably meant to be part of the fun.

In the beginning of Heinlein's "The Puppet Masters" - taking place in a 2007 where the Soviet Union still exists and the Cold War had resumed after the Americans and Soviets have gone through an inconclusive nuclear war - the protagonist muses that "Russia is too big to conquer and too big to ignore". At the end of The Disunited States of America, Justin Monroe makes precisely the same observation.

See Also: Turtledove's Literary Influences

Joseph Heller
Joseph Heller (American, 1923-1999) is best known as the author of Catch-22 (1961), a scathing satire of bureaucratic incompetence in military organizations. The book's title has entered the English language as a noun which can be defined as a paradoxical conundrum caused by contradictory rules and limited options, or perhaps the proverbial spot between the devil and the deep blue sea.

In The Man With the Iron Heart, Toby Benton and Lou Weissberg find themselves in such a situation, and speculate that someone will write a popular novel about such a predicament and give it a memorable name. Weissberg says "It's a heller, all right."

Ernest Hemingway
In addition to his direct appearances in Turtledove works (although sometimes he's identified only as "Ernie"), Ernest Hemingway is discussed on other occasions. In The War That Came Early: Two Fronts, Chaim Weinberg reads For Whom the Bell Tolls and discusses both the novel and its author with Mike Carroll.

Turtledove's 2013 short story "Running of the Bulls" is a science fiction pastiche of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.

Graham Lee Hemminger
Graham Lee Hemminger (1895-1950), was promotion director of the Topics Publishing Co. and a member of its board of directors. While student editor of Froth at Penn State University, he wrote a short poem to fill some empty space:
 * Tobacco is a dirty weed,
 * It satisfies no normal need,
 * It makes you thin, it makes you lean,
 * It takes the hair right off your bean.
 * It's the worst darn stuff I've ever seen.
 * I like it.

In "Hindsight", Pete Lundquist quotes this poem when Michelle Gordian asks him not to smoke inside her house. She replies "More fool you" but waits outside with him as he finishes his smoke.

Herodotus of Halicarnassus
Herodotus was an ancient Greek historian who was born in Halicarnassus, Caria (modern day Bodrum, Turkey) and lived in the 5th century BC (circa 484 – 425 BC). He has been called the "Father of History", and was the first historian known to collect his materials systematically, test their accuracy to a certain extent and arrange them in a well-constructed and vivid narrative.

From his Histories, Harry Turtledove quoted "When Darius was king, he summoned the Greeks who were with him and asked them for what price they would eat their fathers' dead bodies. They answered that they wouldn’t do it for any amount of money. Then Darius summoned those Indians who are called Callatiae, who eat their parents, and asked them (the Greeks being present and understanding through interpreters what was said) what would make them willing to burn their fathers at death. The Indians cried aloud, that he should not speak of so horrible an act. So firmly rooted are these beliefs; and it is, I think, rightly said in Pindar's poem that custom is king of all". Turtledove used this as the title of a short story foreshadowing the twist ending and cited the quote in his introduction.

Colonel Thomas Bushell also quoted "custom is king of all" to Captain Samuel Stanley when the latter wondered how the Russians could drink tea without milk. Bushell then wondered to himself whether the North American Union remaining bound to the British Empire was custom as well and if it had become independent would its inhabitants also consider it natural. He concluded that wasn't the same thing, unknowingly proving Herodotus correct.

Herodotus's account of how Peisistratos used trickery to become tyrannos of Athens is the basis for Turtledove's short story "Goddess for a Day".

Throughout the Hellenic Traders series, the scholarly Sostratos remembers the writings of Herodotus (or Herodotos in the Greek) on various occasions. In Over the Wine-Dark Sea, for example, Sostratos is astonished to learn that peafowl are from India, as Herodotus limited his writings about India to clothes made from tree-wool, enormous ants that mined gold, and the people themselves, with their blacks skins and black semen, but neglected to mention the peafowl.

Frank Hewlett
Frank West Hewlett was an American journalist and war correspondent during World War II. He was the Manila bureau chief for United Press at the outbreak of war, and was the last reporter to leave Corregidor before it fell to the Japanese.

Hewlett's limerick poem, "the Battling Bastards of Bataan" came to symbolize that campaign:


 * We're the Battling Bastards of Bataan,
 * No Mama, No Papa, No Uncle Sam,
 * No aunts, no uncles, no cousins, no nieces,
 * No pills, no planes, no artillery pieces,
 * And nobody gives a damn!

During an equivalent Japanese attack on Bataan in the novel Joe Steele, Charlie Sullivan reflects on the Battling Bastards and recites the limerick to himself while not remembering who wrote it.

Hieronymus of Cardia
Hieronymus of Cardia (354?-250? BC), Greek general and historian from Cardia in Thrace, was a contemporary of Alexander the Great (356–323 BC). After the death of Alexander he followed the fortunes of his friend and fellow-countryman Eumenes. He was wounded and taken prisoner by Antigonus I Monophthalmus, who pardoned him and appointed him superintendent of the asphalt beds in the Dead Sea. He was treated with equal friendliness by Antigonus' son Demetrius, who made him polemarch of Thespiae, and by Antigonus Gonatas, at whose court he died at the age of 104. He wrote a history of the Diadochi and their descendants, embracing the period from the death of Alexander to the war with King Pyrrhus of Epirus (323–272 BC), which is one of the chief authorities used by Diodorus Siculus (xviii.-xx.) and also by Plutarch in his life of Pyrrhus.

He made use of official papers and was careful in his investigation of facts. The simplicity of his style seemingly rendered his work unpopular to people of his time, but modern historians believe it was very good. In the last part of his work he made a praiseworthy attempt to acquaint the Greeks with the character and early history of the Romans. He is reproached by Pausanias (i. 9. 8) with unfairness towards all rulers with the exception of Antigonus Gonatas.

No significant amount of his work survived the end of the ancient world. Like the even more famous lost history of Alexander by Ptolemy I of Egypt, not one book, not one chapter has seen the light of day.

In "Death in Vesunna", one of Hieronymus' lost works is used as bait by Gaius Tero to catch the killers of Clodius Eprius.

Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes (5 April 1588 – 4 December 1679) was an English philosopher, whose famous 1651 book Leviathan established the agenda for nearly all subsequent Western political philosophy. In it, Hobbes described life in the state of nature as "nasty, brutish, and short."

This line supplies the title for the short work "Nasty, Brutish, &. . .". The story, set centuries in the future, is set in a bar bearing Hobbes name, located on the distant planet Rapti. Patrons who use Hobbes' famous phrase are entitled to a free drink.

Homer
Homer is the generic name given to the unitary author of the early Ancient Greek poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. It is now generally believed that they were composed by illiterate aoidoi (rhapsodes) in an oral tradition in the 8th or 7th century BC. It is unclear whether the traditional biography of Homer was based on one man or several. Homer's works began the Western Canon and are universally praised for their poetic genius. By convention, the compositions are also often taken to initiate the period of Classical Antiquity.

Due to the degree in which the Homeric canon has permeated international culture, similar to Shakespeare and the Bible, numerous characters in Harry Turtledove works with a post-700 BC POD make passing allusions to The Iliad and/or The Odyssey. Turtledove has written a few stories set in Greek mythology, with "The Horse of Bronze" being especially Homeric in its treatment of geography and biology.

Only "Death in Vesunna" has a plot-relevant reference to Homer himself, where Gaius Tero studies Homer to learn the Greek language. During his reading, Tero wonders aloud what Hektor would have thought if a modern Roman legion surrounded the walls of Troy, a thought that eventually leads him to the killers of Clodius Eprius.

In Household Gods, one scene takes place at the performance of The Judgment of Paris, a play based on scenes from the Iliad.

In Thessalonica it is noted that the enduring popularity of Homer, also among Christians, gave a kind of half-life to the old gods, since it was impossible not to believe in them at least a little bit while reading or listening to Homer's poetry.

John Bell Hood
John Bell Hood (June 29, 1831 – August 30, 1879) was a Confederate general in the American Civil War. Hood had a reputation for bravery and aggressiveness that sometimes bordered on recklessness. Arguably one of the best brigade and division commanders in the Confederate States Army, Hood gradually became increasingly effective as he was promoted to lead larger, independent commands late in the war, but his career and reputation were marred by his decisive defeats in Georgia and Tennessee. In his retirement, he wrote his memoirs, entitled Advance and Retreat,in which he sought to defend his most controversial command decisions in the American Civil War.

Turtledove's novel Advance and Retreat--the final book of the The War Between the Provinces trilogy, which fantastically reimagines the Civil War--covers many of those controversial decisions by Hood's Detinan alter ego, Bell. Turtledove acknowledges the same title in the "Hysterical Note" at the end of the novel. There he insists that the identical titles are purely coincidental. However, he is very obviously being tongue-in-cheek at that point.

Hood is also directly referenced in The Guns of the South, where Robert E. Lee thinks of the look of implacable purpose on Hood's face and his boldness to match. However, Lee also reflects that Hood was hopeless with any larger command, and would attack whether attack was called for or not.

Richard Hooker
Hiester Richard Hornberger Jr. (February 1, 1924 – November 4, 1997) was an American writer and surgeon who wrote under the pseudonym Richard Hooker. Hornberger's best-known work was his novel MASH (1968) and its sequels, based on his experiences during the Korean War and written in collaboration with W. C. Heinz. It was later used as the basis for a critically and commercially successful movie (1970) and television series (1972–1983). MASH, sometimes rendered M*A*S*H*, recounts the comic misadventures of Benjamin "Hawkeye" Pierce and other prank-loving U.S. Army surgeons from the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital.

The Hot War: Armistice features a brief appearance by a character named Hawkeye who is a U.S. Army surgeon in an alternate version of the Korean War. While the name Hawkeye is common among literary characters, this particular combination of details makes clear that this is a specific reference to MASH.

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.

A. E. Housman
Alfred Edward Housman (1859–1936), was an English classical scholar and poet, best known to the general public for his cycle of poems A Shropshire Lad. Lyrical and almost epigrammatic in form, the poems wistfully evoke the dooms and disappointments of youth in the English countryside.

The Hot War's Cade Curtis was trying to reach American lines during the Korean War when he recalled two lines of Housman's poetry that reflected how he felt:


 * I, a stranger and afraid
 * In a world I never made.

Robert E. Howard
Robert Ervin Howard (January 22, 1906 – June 11, 1936) was an American pulp writer of fantasy, horror, historical adventure, boxing, western, and detective fiction. After a relatively brief but prolific career, Howard committed suicide. Howard's home in Cross Plains, Texas is now a museum.

His most famous creation is Conan the Cimmerian.

Conan of Venarium is Turtledove's authorized prequel to the Conan series.

Prior to that, Turtledove wrote "The Boring Beast" featuring Condom the Trojan, a loving parody of the same character.

In American Empire: 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, he is from Cross Plains and apparently has a Howardesque style of plot structure.

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.

Victor Hugo
Victor Marie Hugo (26 February 1802 – 22 May 1885) was a French poet, novelist, and dramatist of the Romantic movement. In France, Hugo's literary fame comes first from his poetry and then from his novels and his dramatic achievements. Among many volumes of poetry, Les Contemplations and La Légende des siècles stand high in critical esteem. Outside France, his best-known works are the novels Les Misérables (1862) and Notre-Dame de Paris (1831, known in English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame). He produced more than 4,000 drawings, and also earned respect as a campaigner for social causes such as the abolition of capital punishment.

In The War That Came Early: The Big Switch, Luc Harcourt confronts a soldier named Boileau, whom Harcourt suspects is seriously considering attempting a mutiny. Harcourt warns Boileau that mutinying, disobeying orders, and inciting his comrades-in-arms to mutiny are all capital offenses under the French code of military justice. Boileau, a communist, attempts to harangue Harcourt, whom he judges to come from a proletarian background, to join him in mutiny if it were to come to that, ending his appeal by saying "To the barricades!" and pumping his fist in the air. Harcourt tells him to stop trying to sound like Victor Hugo, presumably in reference to his Les Misérables, whose climax takes place amidst the June Rebellion of 1832.

In Joe Steele, Mike Sullivan is assigned the number NY24601 after he is arrested and imprisoned by the tyrannical United States government. Jean Valjean's number in Les Miserables is 24601, the name by which Javert refers to him throughout the novel.

Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) was a British novelist best known for the dystopian future of Brave New World (1932). In The Valley-Westside War, Liz Mendoza recalls reading this book.

W.W. Jacobs
William Wymark Jacobs (8 September 1863 – 1 September 1943) was an English author of short stories and novels. Although much of his work was humorous, he is most famous for his horror story "The Monkey's Paw".

In "News From the Front", an AP reporter asks Sgt. Leland Calvert (who believes that the mystery meat eaten by his starving regiment includes monkey) if he knows of the monkey's paw story, but he's never heard of it.

Jerome K. Jerome
Jerome Klapka Jerome (2 May 1859 – 14 June 1927) was an English writer and humourist, best known for the comic travelogues Three Men in a Boat (1887) and Three Men and a Bummel (1900), whose central characters are Jerome's own fictionalized alter-ego, his friends George and Harris, and Jerome's dog Montmorency.

Turtledove's pastiche "Three Men and a Vampire" has the Three Men and the dog accompanying Bram Stoker's heroic Professor Abraham Van Helsing on the hunt for a vampire. They are set to encounter a werewolf in the upcoming "Three Men and a Werewolf."

In In the Presence of Mine Enemies, Susanna Weiss agrees with Jerome K. Jerome's view of Richard Wagner: "A lone, lorn woman stands upon a stage trying to make herself heard. One hundred forty men, all armed with powerful instruments, well-organised, and most of them looking well-fed, combine to make it impossible for a single note of that poor woman's voice to be heard above their din."

In The War That Came Early: West and East, Peggy Druce agrees with Jerome's assessment of German political culture, as laid out in Three Men on the Bummel. She is chilled by how accurately Jerome seemed to have predicted the disaster which would befall Germany upon the ascension of the Nazis and wondered if he had either a crystal ball or H.G. Wells' Time Machine.

Norton Juster
Norton Juster wrote the classic children's book The Phantom Tollbooth. Turtledove stated that "The Phantom Tolbukhin" was inspired by the pun of Tollbooth and Fedor Tolbukhin.

Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a German-language writer of novels and short stories who is widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work, which fuses elements of realism and fantasy, typically features isolated protagonists faced by bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible social-bureaucratic powers, and has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity. His best known works include Die Verwandlung ("The Metamorphosis"), Der Process (The Trial), and Das Schloss (The Castle). The term Kafkaesque has entered the English language to describe situations like those in his writing.

In The War That Came Early: The Big Switch, Samuel Goldman describes his daughter Sarah's efforts to navigate Nazi bureaucracy in order to obtain a marriage license as being like Kafka's works. He speculates that Kafka would not have wanted to live to see his futuristic visions come true.

Omar Khayyam
Omar Khayyám (1048 – 1131), was a Persian mathematician, astronomer, philosopher, and poet, who is widely considered to be one of the most influential scientists of the middle ages. He wrote numerous treatises on mechanics, geography, mineralogy and astronomy. Outside Iran and Persian-speaking countries, Khayyám has had an impact on literature and societies through the translation of his works and popularization by other scholars particularly the Rubaiyat.

In Bombs Away, U.S. President Harry Truman quotes four famous lines from the Rubaiyat to George Marshall when the latter hesitates in telling him of the Soviet bombing of the Panama Canal:


 * The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
 * Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
 * Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
 * Nor all thy tears wash out a Word of it.

Stephen King
Stephen King (born 1947), American writer from the state of Maine, is the author of dozens of fictional works, many of which have been made into movies. King's preferred genres and horror and fantasy, although he has occasionally dabbled in science fiction and alternate history as well. (His epic series The Dark Tower combines all four.)

In the version of the 21st Century presented in Crosstime Traffic, King's name is treated as a verb for meditating on morbid situations like the ones he wrote about. In The Disunited States of America, Justin Monroe travels past a series of remote, out-of-the-way small towns and imagines that visitors who enter will not come out again. According to the text, "[o]nce Justin started stephenkinging, he had a hard time stopping."

In Eruption, Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles are traveling through Maine in a snowstorm. When Justin Nachman mentions to Rob Ferguson that he keeps expecting a St. Bernard by the side of the road, Ferguson replies to be careful, it might be Cujo since they are in Stephen King country. He then added that there might be vampires from Salem's Lot around since the blizzard hid the sun well enough let them come out in daylight.

Rudyard Kipling
Joseph Rudyard Kipling (30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936), a British writer born in India, wrote exotic adventure stories set in various lands and in the Atlantic Ocean, and poems praising the British Empire. Some of his entries in the latter genre have become quite controversial.

"Recessional," which Kipling composed for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee (1897), contains the line "Lo, all our pomp of yesterday, is one with Nineveh and Tyre!." In Supervolcano: Eruption, Vanessa Ferguson thinks of this line (but doesn't remember that Kipling was the author) when ash from the Yellowstone Supervolcano threatens to make Denver as extinct as Nineveh and Tyre. In the same novel, Kelly Birnbaum reflects on a parody of Kipling's poem "If-" namely if you keep your head then you don't understand the seriousness of the situation and Gabriel Sanchez recites the key line of Kipling's "Gunga Din."

"Tommy", an 1890 poem, addresses the ordinary British soldier of Kipling's time in a sympathetic manner. It is written from the point of view of such a soldier, and contrasts the treatment they receive from the general public during peace and during war. It contains the line "O it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' 'Chuck 'im out, the brute'; But it's 'saviour of 'is country,' when the guns begin to shoot." In Gunpowder Empire, Amanda Solters thinks of this line when hearing the citizens of Polisso complain about the uncouth habits of the soldiers who protect them from Lietuvan invaders.

Ring Lardner
Ring Lardner (1885-1933) was a sports columnist and fiction writer, known for, among other things, a series of epistolary fictional works written featuring bush-league baseball player Jack Keefe between 1916 and 1925. Each work sees Keefe writing a series of letters to his friend Al back home.

Harry Turtledove's short story "Batboy" is an admitted pastiche of Lardner's works.

Richard M. Lee
Richard M. Lee (1917-2011) was a United States Army General and historian, who wrote Mr. Lincoln's City (1981) and General Lee's City (1987) about the American Civil War. In The Guns of the South, a time travel paradox gives Robert E. Lee the opportunity to read these histories by a man with a similar name, and admire their fairness in dealing with both sides.

Fritz Leiber
Fritz Reuter Leiber Jr. (December 24, 1910 – September 5, 1992) was an American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. He was also a poet, actor in theater and films, playwright and chess expert. With writers such as Robert E. Howard and Michael Moorcock, Leiber can be regarded as one of the fathers of sword and sorcery fantasy, having coined the term.

In Gunpowder Empire, a pet cat in the home timeline is named Fafhrd after one of Leiber's protagonists.

Gaston Leroux
Gaston Leroux (1868-1927) 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.

In The Man With the Iron Heart, Diana McGraw is impressed by Secretary of State James Byrnes' ability to captivate the hearers of speech, remembering that of the Phantom of the Opera had a similar talent.

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 also dabbled in writing poetry. 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, the first installment of the Southern Victory series. Three stanzas of this poem are excerpted in the book's front matter.

In a number of works, characters quote Lincoln quoting a man being ridden out of town on a rail: "If it weren't for the honor of the thing, I would just as soon walk" when they faced an unpleasant task or situation.

The Gettysburg Address, arguably Lincoln's most famous piece of writing, has been quoted by characters in numerous timelines with a Point of Divergence after 1863. The most significant example comes in "Must and Shall," when Hannibal Hamlin succeeds Lincoln as President and references several passages from his predecessor's speech in his own inaugural address.

In The War Between the Provinces, not only is King Avram of Detina modeled closely on Lincoln, but his speech to his ministers in chapter VII of Advance and Retreat mostly comprises passages taken verbatim from Lincoln's State of the Union Address of December 6, 1864. Only some proper names and other plot-specific details have been changed in these passages.


 * See also, References to Historical Figures in Turtledove's Work.

Hugh Lofting
Hugh John Lofting (14 January 1886 – 26 September 1947) was a British author, trained as a civil engineer, who created the character of Doctor John Dolittle, one of the classics of children's literature. Doctor Dolittle first appeared in the author's illustrated letters to his children, written from the trenches while serving in the British Army during World War I. The first published volume appeared in 1920. Dolittle is a veterinarian who can hold conversations with his patients, and travels the globe encountering mythical creatures. One memorable denizen of Dolittle's world is the pushmi-pullyu, an antelope-like animal (portrayed in the films as a llama) with heads on either side of its body.

In The Hot War: Armistice, a piece of loading equipment reminds Aaron Finch of the pushmi-pullyu. He tries to remember where he heard of the creature, and correctly guesses it's from a Dolittle adventure he bought at a second-hand bookstore.

Jack London
Jack London and his socialist novel, The Iron Heel, are discussed in The Gladiator. POV character Gianfranco Mazzilli finds this novel boring, and prefers London's wilderness survival adventures.

H.P. Lovecraft
Howard Phillips "H. P." Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 – March 15, 1937) was an American author who achieved posthumous fame through his influential works of horror fiction. Virtually unknown and only published in pulp magazines before he died in poverty, he is now regarded as one of the most significant 20th-century authors in his genre.

In "The Genetics Lecture," a professor and one of his students are named for Cthulhu and Nyarlathotep, two of Lovecraft's most famous and frightening creations.

In The Hot War: Bombs Away, Harry Truman, horrified by the course of World War III and the prodigious use of atomic bombs, remembers a line from Lovecraft's work "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward": "do not call up that which you cannot put down." In The Man With the Iron Heart, Tom Schmidt thinks of the same line but doesn't remember where the quote is from when Congressman Everett Dirksen stirs up a crowd to a near riot with his speech.

In Supervolcano: Eruption, when the band Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles arrived at the Trebor Mansion Inn in Guilford, Maine, one member was surprised at its appearance and said it must have an "H.P. Lovecraft slept here" plaque given its spooky architecture.

Turtledove has also written three works that are set in H.P. Lovecraft's elaborate Cthulhu mythos: "The Fillmore Shoggoth," "Nine Drowned Churches," and "Interlibrary Loan". In the first one, Lovecraft is "tuckerized" as ill-fated historian Howard Phillips.

See also Turtledove's Literary Influences, Co-Authors, and Creators of Shared Universes

David Low
Sir David Alexander Cecil Low (7 April 1891 – 19 September 1963) was a New Zealand political cartoonist and caricaturist who lived and worked in the United Kingdom for many years. His works are featured in many British history textbooks. One of Low's most famous cartoons, Rendezvous, was first published in the Evening Standard on 20 September 1939. It satirises the cynicism which lay at the heart of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, depicting Adolf Hitler and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin bowing politely before each other after their joint invasion of Poland.

In Joe Steele, after a parallel invasion of Poland by Hitler, a similar cartoon appeared in a British newspaper with Leon Trotsky, the ATL dictator of the USSR in place of Stalin and with Hitler stating "The dirty Jew, I believe?".

Betty MacDonald
Betty MacDonald (1908-1958) wrote the humorous memoir The Egg and I. This is referenced in The Man With the Iron Heart as a favorite of Ed McGraw and Diana McGraw.

Niccolo Machiavelli
Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (3 May 1469 – 21 June 1527) was an Italian Renaissance historian, politician, diplomat, philosopher, humanist, and writer. He has often been called the founder of modern political science. He was for many years a senior official in the Florentine Republic, with responsibilities in diplomatic and military affairs. He also wrote comedies, carnival songs, and poetry. His personal correspondence is renowned in the Italian language. He was secretary to the Second Chancery of the Republic of Florence from 1498 to 1512, when the Medici were out of power. He wrote his most renowned work The Prince (Il Principe) in 1513.

"Machiavellianism" is a widely used negative term to characterize unscrupulous politicians of the sort Machiavelli described most famously in The Prince. Machiavelli described immoral behavior, such as dishonesty and killing innocents, as being normal and effective in politics. He even seemed to endorse it in some situations. The book itself gained notoriety when some readers claimed that the author was teaching evil, and providing "evil recommendations to tyrants to help them maintain their power." The term "Machiavellian" is often associated with political deceit, deviousness, and realpolitik. On the other hand, many commentators, such as Baruch Spinoza, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot, have argued that Machiavelli was actually a republican, even when writing The Prince, and his writings were an inspiration to Enlightenment proponents of modern democratic political philosophy.

A few characters have read Machiavelli's The Prince. In Colonization:Aftershocks, Fleetlord Atvar, follows Machiavelli's advice that a conqueror should visit the region he had conquered as soon as he could, to make the defeated people aware of their new masters, by paying a visit to Nuremberg, the hitherto capital of the Greater German Reich in the aftermath of the Race-German War of 1965. In American Empire:The Victorious Opposition, Jake Featherston follows the same suggestion by going to Louisville after Kentucky votes to return to the Confederate States.

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.

Masters and Johnson
William H. Masters (1915-2001) and Virginia E. Johnson (1925-2013) pioneered research into the nature of human sexual response, and the diagnosis and treatment of sexual disorders and dysfunctions, from 1957 until the 1990s. They jointly wrote two classic texts in the field, Human Sexual Response and Human Sexual Inadequacy, published in 1966 and 1970, respectively. Both of these books were best-sellers and were translated into more than 30 languages. The team has been inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame, and the name Masters & Johnson has become slang for someone with a possibly unhealthy interest in the science of sex.

In the opening chapter of The Hot War: Bombs Away, Turtledove names two American soldiers in Korea as Masters and Johnson, but does not develop these characters or give them an unusual interest in sex.

Herman Melville
Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. His best known works include Typee (1846), a romantic account of his experiences in Polynesian life, and his whaling novel Moby-Dick (1851), whose titular white whale has become a synonym for unattainable goals and unhealthy obsessions.

In The Two Georges, protagonist Thomas Bushell realizes that recovering the titular painting has become his "great, grey whale" in a famous novel, suggesting that some sort of Moby Dick analog exists in that timeline.

A direct reference to Melville's white whale comes in the novel Joe Steele, when soldier Gary Cunningham learns Mike Sullivan had survived time in a punishment brigade, comparing meeting Sullivan to seeing the "Great White Whale".

H.L. Mencken
In addition to his POV role in "The House That George Built", H.L. Mencken is referenced in other Turtledove works.

In The War That Came Early: West and East, Mike Carroll of the Lincoln Brigade is fond of Mencken despite Mencken's opposition to Carroll's beloved communism. Carroll quotes Mencken to Chaim Weinberg: "I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries."

Mencken once wrote "No one in the world, so far as I know, has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people." Popular culture has often misquoted this line as "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people." Variations of this line are recited by Herb Druce in The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat and Stan Feldman in Joe Steele.

A. A. Milne
Alan Alexander "A. A." Milne (18 January 1882 – 31 January 1956) was an English author, best known for his books about the teddy bear Winnie-the-Pooh and for various poems. Milne was a noted writer, primarily as a playwright, before the huge success of Pooh overshadowed all his previous work. Milne served in both World Wars, joining the British Army in World War I, and was a captain of the British Home Guard in World War II.

In the Southern Victory series, we learn that, despite the long animosity between the United States and the United Kingdom, even the U.S. enjoyed Winnie the Pooh.

At the end of Household Gods, Nicole Gunther skims through a Winnie the Pooh book translated into Latin, to prove to herself that Liber and Libera's magical gift of the language remains with her.

John Milton
John Milton (9 December 1608 – 8 November 1674) was an English poet, polemicist, man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell. He wrote at a time of religious flux and political upheaval, and is best known for his epic poem Paradise Lost (1667), written in blank verse.

Milton's Sonnet XIX ends with the line "They also serve who only stand and wait." In Settling Accounts: The Grapple, Ophelia Clemens quotes this line for the benefit of General Abner Dowling, who mistakenly attributes its origin to William Shakespeare.

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," a fictionalized Mencken uses this belief to dismiss George 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 (1900-1949) was an American writer best known for Gone with the Wind, a novel which was adapted to the most successful movie of all time. In addition to his more significant direct references to the novel/movie, Turtledove has invoked subtler elements of Gone with the Wind repeatedly. Most of these references involve the character Rhett Butler (played by Clark Gable in the film) and his signature line "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

In The War Between the Provinces: Marching Through Peachtree, two minor characters play out a scene on the flight from Marthasville (a stand-in for Atlanta) which is reminiscent of Scarlett O'Hara's flight from fallen Atlanta to Tara. One of the characters is named Thert the Butler, and his place of employment is Traa. The other character is an unnamed woman who exhibits a fiery personality similar to that of O'Hara.

In Settling Accounts: In at the Death, an Atlanta politician named Clark Butler makes a cameo. Butler's physical description matches that of Clark Gable. Irving Morrell, to whom Butler expresses horror over the idea that interracial marriage might become common, dismisses Butler's concerns with the sentence "Frankly, Butler, I don't give a damn." (In Marcing Through Peachtree, Thert the Butler also begins to quote or paraphrase this line but is interrupted by a punch from his female companion.)

In Joe Steele, Charlie Sullivan reads and enjoys Gone With the Wind a few years after its release. He mentions his enjoyment of the novel to Stas Mikoian, who wonders how a black waiter might have felt about the book. Sullivan allows that the waiter might want to punch Margaret Mitchell in the face.

Mother Goose
Mother Goose is the imaginary author of a British series of fairy tales and nursery rhymes. Mother Goose is generally depicted in literature and book illustration as an elderly country woman in a traditional Welsh tall hat and shawl, but is sometimes depicted as a semi-anthropomorphic goose wearing a bonnet.

One Mother Goose rhyme is "Humpty Dumpty", whose text is the following:


 * "Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
 * Humpty Dumpty had a great fall,
 * All the king's horses and all the king's men,
 * Couldn't put Humpty together again."

Since the 18th century, book illustrators have interpreted the title character as an anthropomorphic egg, even though there is no egg mentioned in the text, which seems to identify Humpty Dumpty with the king.

The Hot War: Armistice had the working title of All the King's Horses from the rhyme. Within the novel, the "Humpty Dumpty" rhyme is referenced several times to indicate how difficult rebuilding from the destruction inflicted by the nuclear Third World War would be. President Truman is quoted using the rhyme in a public statement to General-Secretary Lavrenti Beria when offering peace terms. Truman later repeated the rhyme to General Dwight Eisenhower in a private meeting. On both occasions, it was to indicate the impossibility of repairing the destruction if the war persisted or restarted.

Ogden Nash
Frederic Ogden Nash (August 19, 1902 – May 19, 1971) was an American poet well known for his light verse, of which he wrote over 500 pieces. With his unconventional rhyming schemes, he was declared the country's best-known producer of humorous poetry.

In "Topanga and the Chatsworth Lancers," Jared Tillman reads Nash's four-line piece "The Middle" from an old paperback and reflects on how it perfectly describes the Changed world.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher, cultural critic, poet, composer, and Latin and Greek scholar. He wrote several critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy, and science, displaying a fondness for metaphor and irony.

In the Atlantis story "The Scarlet Band", Athelstan Helms and James Walton begin a discussion about scientific discovery and its impact on theology. When Helms wonders if humanity is in a "parlous state" because of reason or despite reason, Walton suggests Helms consult Nietzsche, who'd written works on that question.

In Joe Steele, Mike Sullivan reflected how after several years in a labor encampment he was in harder, more muscular shape than he had ever been in his life and how it proved Nietzsche's idea that "whatever didn't kill you, made you stronger".

Andre Norton
Andre Alice Norton (born Alice Mary Norton, February 17, 1912 – March 17, 2005) was an American writer of science fiction and fantasy, who also wrote works of historical fiction and contemporary fiction. She wrote primarily under the pen name Andre Norton, but also under Andrew North and Allen Weston. She was the first woman to be Gandalf Grand Master of Fantasy, first to be SFWA Grand Master, and first inducted by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.

Gunpowder Empire, the first Crosstime Traffic novel, names Norton on the dedication page.

Alfred Noyes
Alfred Noyes (16 September 1880 – 25 June 1958) was an English poet, short-story writer and playwright, best known for his ballads, "The Highwayman" and "The Barrel-Organ".

In The Man With the Iron Heart, Everett Dirksen recites lines from "The Highwayman," which Tom Schmidt recognizes, although he can't remember who wrote it.

Patrick O'Brian
Patrick O'Brian, CBE (1914–2000), born Richard Patrick Russ, was an English novelist and translator, best known for his Aubrey–Maturin series, a series of sea novels set in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars and centred on the friendship of English naval captain Jack Aubrey and the Irish–Catalan physician Stephen Maturin.

In In at the Death, Patrick O'Brian appears to have been fused with C.S. Forrester to create the fictional author C.S. O'Brian, whose name is obviously a portmanteau of the two historical authors' names. C.S. O'Brian was marked for writing novels about naval warfare in the early 19th century, which was also the claim to fame of both CS Forrester and Patrick O'Brian.

George Orwell
In addition to his direct appearances in a few novels, and the special significance of his masterpiece 1984 in others, George Orwell is referenced often in additional Turtledove works.

In Supervolcano: All Fall Down, Colin Ferguson, his son Marshall, and Colin's second wife Kelly, discuss tyranny, revolutions, and their aftermaths. Kelly quotes "All animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others" which Marshall was surprised to be able to identify as coming from George Orwell's Animal Farm.

In The Hot War: Bombs Away, Lt. Cade Curtis is familiar with Orwell's works, having read the inevitable 1984 and Animal Farm as well as the lesser known Homage to Catalonia.

Wilfred Owen
Wilfred Owen's 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 Pangborn
Edgar Pangborn (February 25, 1909 – February 1, 1976) was an American mystery, historical, and science fiction author. While popular within his own lifetime, his work fell into obscurity after his death, but was rediscovered in the early 21st century.

In "The Star and the Rockets", Joe Bauman reads Edgar Pangborn's "Pick-up for Olympus" (which is called "Pick Up From Olympus"--whether this is Bauman's mistake or Turtledove's is unclear).

In In High Places Turtledove depicts a world where a new martyred Savior overshadows Jesus, and his followers use a "sign of the wheel". This idea may reference Pangborn's book Davy, about a theocratic movement following a nuclear war.

Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Parker was an American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist.

In Joe Steele, when reporter Mike Sullivan asks a fellow reporter named Hank for a "cure" for humanity, Hank quotes from Parker's poem "Resumé": "Guns aren’t lawful/Nooses give/Gas smells awful/You might as well live."

H. Beam Piper
Henry Beam Piper (March 23, 1904 – c. November 6, 1964) was an American science fiction author. He wrote many short stories and several novels. He is best known for his extensive Terro-Human Future History series of stories and a shorter series of "Paratime" alternate history tales. The Paratime Police are a law enforcement outfit from a parallel world which has learned how to move between timelines.

Turtledove's Crosstime Traffic series uses a premise vaguely similar to Paratime, and Piper is named on the dedication page of Gunpowder Empire, the first crosstime volume.

Plato
Plato (Platon) (427?-327? BC) was one of the three most highly regarded philosophers of Ancient Greece, along with his senior Socrates and his junior Aristotle. His doctrine of Platonism stated that our world is only a weaker copy of an ideal heavenly world. For this reason, he was highly regarded in Christian Europe of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, although not as much as Aristotle.

Plato's most enduring contribution to the wider popular culture is the myth of Atlantis, an idealised society which nevertheless fell afoul of higher powers and was destroyed by inundation. He claimed to have received the story from a few centuries' worth of retellings, but no earlier Atlantis reference has ever come to light. It may be an exaggerated account of the Fall of Crete. Beginning in the late 19th century, other philosophers, charlatans, fiction writers, and conspiracy theorists have expanded on the idea of Atlantis, with varying interpretations.

It is unclear whether Plato regarded Atlantis as fact or fiction, and it is often supposed that he made up the story. If that is true, it is unclear whether he sought to deceive his readers, or trusted them to understand that it was a work of fiction.

In Turtledove's Atlantis series, 15th-century English fisherman Edward Radcliffe, being familiar with Plato's legend, gives the name Atlantis to a newly discovered small continent west of Europe. However, the continent does not resemble conventional depictions of Atlantis in any way, instead developing in Turtledove's alternate history as an analog of the United States, but with fauna resembling that of New Zealand.

In Turtledove's science fiction detective story "Death in Vesunna," a Roman police chief name Gaius Tero believes murderous gun-slinging time-travelers to be men from Atlantis, but Kleandros, a Greek coroner, insists that Platon's tale was a work of fiction.

In "The Daimon," Plato appears under his original name Aristokles when he's only 12 years old.

Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe (born Edgar Poe; January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American writer, editor, and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States and American literature as a whole, and he was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story. Poe is generally considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre and is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.

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.

In The Guns of the South, Robert E. Lee references Poe when describing reading a book on how the American Civil War carried out in the OTL, saying the truth is almost as frightening.

Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope (21 May 1688 – 30 May 1744) was an 18th-century English poet. He is best known for his satirical verses Essay on Man, The Rape of the Lock, and The Dunciad, as well as for his translation of Homer. Famous for his use of the heroic couplet, he is the second-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations after William Shakespeare.

The Two Georges primary character Thomas Bushell is fond of Pope's writings, which he quotes from, several times throughout the novel.

Anthony Pratt
Anthony Ernest Pratt (10 August 1903 – 9 April 1994) was an English musician and the inventor of the detective-themed board game Cluedo (first edition 1949, marketed as Clue in the United States and Canada). Using tropes from the writings of Agatha Christie, players draw cards and roll dice to identify the murderer of Dr. Black (Mr. Boddy in the American version), with the list of suspects in the original version being Miss Scarlet, Colonel Mustard, Mrs. White, Mr. Green, Mrs. Peacock, and Professor Plum.

In Liberating Atlantis, a high ranking officer in the Atlantean Army is a Greek immigrant named Colonel Balthasar Sinapis. Sinapis is the Greek word for a type of mustard plant, so the character's named is effectively Colonel Mustard.

François Rabelais
François Rabelais (c. 1494-1553) was a major French Renaissance writer, doctor and humanist. He was regarded as an avant-garde writer of fantasy, satire, the grotesque, dirty jokes and bawdy songs.

In The United States of Atlantis, Victor Radcliff and Custis Cawthorne prove to each other how smart they each are by quoting extensively from the works of Rabelais.

Mary Renault
Mary Renault (4 September 1905 – 13 December 1983) born Eileen Mary Challans, was an English writer best known for her historical novels set in Ancient Greece. In addition to vivid fictional portrayals of Theseus, Socrates, Plato and Alexander the Great, she wrote a non-fiction biography of Alexander.

In Supervolcano: Eruption, we learn that Bryce Miller found and read a secondhand copy of Mary Renault's The Persian Boy while he was in high school, which sparked his interest in the Hellenistic age of Ancient Greece, which, in turn led to his academic studies and attempt to make a living as a PhD in the era.

Miller's story is similar to Turtledove's own discovery of L. Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall which led to his interest in the Byzantine Empire.

Robert Ripley
Robert Ripley (1890-1949) was a journalist and showman who created the column "Believe It or Not," which ran in various mediums, starting in 1918, and reported very hard-to-believe phenomena which purported to be factual. Although some of his claims turned out to be fraudulent or mistaken, Ripley's reputation was not harmed, and some of the fact-finding groups and museums he founded continue to this day.

In The Disunited States of America, Justin Monroe passes by the town of Ripley, Virginia and is reminded of the column's title. But he knows that Robert Ripley either never lived or never wrote his column in this alternate world, so he resolves to keep the phrase to himself so as not to make himself seem odd to locals.

In Joe Steele, both of the Sullivan brothers invoke Ripley's Believe It or Not at different points.

Will Rogers
In addition to his contemporary appearances, Will Rogers has been referenced posthumously in a number of works.

Harry Turtledove has referenced Rogers' quip "All I know is what I read in the newspapers" in more than one work. Herman Szulc quotes it during a conversation with Pete McGill about life in China under Japanese rule in The War That Came Early: The Big Switch. Clarence Potter also quotes the line while talking to Jake Featherston, ascribing it to "a comic from Sequoyah" in American Empire: The Victorious Opposition. The comic is presumably Will Rogers or a close analog, and he seems to be still alive in 1940, although no specifics are confirmed.

Ron Rubin
Ron Rubin is credited as the author of the following limerick:

"'I'm glad pigs can't fly,' said young Sellers/ (He's one of those worrying fellas)/ 'For, if they could fly,/ They'd shit in the sky/ And we'd all have to carry umbrellas!'"

From time to time, Turtledove has had characters echo young Sellers's earthy concern.

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
'''Jerome David "J.D." Salinger''' (January 1, 1919 – January 27, 2010) was an American writer who won acclaim early in life. He led a very private life for more than half a century. He published his final original work in 1965. Salinger was the author of Catcher in the Rye (1951). Turtledove's short story "The Catcher in the Rhine" is a pastiche of this novel, with a thinly disguised Holden Caulfield wandering into the Nibelungenlied.

Even in the world of Joe Steele, Salinger was a definitive name in literature. There is no clue as to how his work in that world differs from OTL.

Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre was a French philosopher and writer. He was trapped in Paris during the German occupation in World War II. Later in life, he concluded that "Hell is other people."

When the aged Anne Berkowitz (a longer lived Anne Frank) hears this referenced in the short work "The Eighth-Grade History Class Visits the Hebrew Home for the Aging", she agrees that Sartre's observation perfectly fit the period she and several others spent in hiding.

Charles M. Schultz
Charles M. Schultz (1922-2000) was the cartoonist of the long running comic strip "Peanuts, featuring Good Ol' Charlie Brown" beginning in 1950. In The Valley-Westside War, Jeff Mendoza compares mysterious night visitors to the Great Pumpkin (an unseen hypothetical savior from the Peanuts gags) and soon afterward exclaims "Good grief!", a catchphrase which was not invented by Schultz but was popularized by him.

Dr. Seuss
Theodor Seuss Geisel (1904-1991), who wrote under the name Dr Seuss, is among the most loved children's authors of all time in the English-speaking world. Among his most famous works is How the Grinch Stole Christmas, a Christmas story set in the whimsical town of Whoville. Seuss' equally beloved Cold War fable Horton Hears a Who also features a town called Whoville, although it is never made clear whether it is the same place.

In The United States of Atlantis, Turtledove writes of a small town in Atlantis called Hooville. Ostensibly, it was named for Sir Thomas Hoo, though even the town's residents have forgotten this fact by the 18th century. Given Turtledove's penchant for puns (and the fact that the novel was released during the holiday season) it is likely that the name is meant to invoke Dr. Seuss.

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

William Shirer
William Lawrence Shirer (February 23, 1904 – December 28, 1993) was an American journalist and historian. He became known for his broadcasts on CBS from Berlin, the capital of Nazi Germany, through the first year of World War II. Shirer first became famous through his account of those years in his Berlin Diary (published in 1941), but he is probably best remembered for his book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. He dabbled in alternate history in "If Hitler Had Won WWII" published in Look on December 19, 1961.

Shirer makes personal appearances in In at the Death, The Man With the Iron Heart, and Joe Steele.

In Tilting the Balance, Edward R. Murrow reports that the Americans have built a dummy airfield as a decoy, and the Lizards have responded by dropping a dummy bomb on it. This is apparently a parody of a WWII-era joke first reported by Shirer in Berlin Diaries, involving a British wooden bomb dropped on a German airfield, which grew into an urban legend.

E. E. "Doc" Smith
Edward Elmer Smith (also E. E. "Doc" Smith, Doc Smith; May 2, 1890 – August 31, 1965) was an American food engineer (specializing in doughnut and pastry mixes) and an early Science fiction author, best known for the Lensman and Skylark series. He is sometimes called the father of space opera. Although "Someone is Stealing the Great Throne Rooms of the Galaxy" was inspired by Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, some aspects of the Space Patrol were borrowed from the Galactic Patrol of the Lensman series.

Kimball Kinnison was the protagonist of most of the Lensman novels and is described as a tall, muscular but lean man, of quick reflexes and quick mind with piercing grey eyes. In "Hindsight", when Pete Lundquist meets Jim McGregor at the airport, he is secretly disappointed that Jim looks nothing like Kinnison.

Socrates
Socrates serves as one of two POVs in the short work, "The Daimon". In addition, Turtledove frequently references the writing of Socrates in his works.

For example, in The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat, Sarah Goldman reflects that her husband and his parents, with their relative lack of intellectual curiosity, conformed with the people Socrates referred to in the Apology when he said "The unexamined life is not worth living."

In The Hot War: Bombs Away, Lt. Cade Curtis also thought of the Apology when discussing the fighting during Korean War with Sgt. Lou Klein. Just because the sergeant knew how to run an army company, he thought he could do a general's job much the way the craftsmen who knew their own business thought they knew everything according to Socrates.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is referenced directly in "Les Mortes d'Arthur". Solzhenitsyn's work A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is referenced indirectly in Joe Steele, where the supporting character John Dennison is closely based on the titular hero of that work, down to his name which is a literal translation.

Something old
"Something old" is the first line of a traditional rhyme which details what a bride should wear at her wedding for good luck: Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, and a silver sixpence in her shoe.

Usually, the last line is eliminated when the rhyme is recited in popular culture. The rhyme's origin is unknown. It dates from 1876 at the latest, and perhaps much earlier.

In "Topanga and the Chatsworth Lancers", Chatsworth Lancers headman Bruce Delgado thinks of how the rhyme applies to his homemade battle dress, which includes a fading blue police uniform made before the Change.

Sophocles
Sophocles or Sophokles (circa. 496 BC - 406 BC), Σοφοκλῆς in Greek, was one of three great Ancient Greek tragedians. He was preceded by Aeschylus, and was followed by or contemporary to Euripides. According to the Suda, a 10th century AD Byzantine encyclopedia, he wrote 123 or more plays during the course of his life. Of those, only seven of his tragedies have survived into modern times with their text completely known. Arguably, the most famous of these are the plays concerning the Theban royals Oedipus and Antigone.

In "Death in Vesunna", Sophocles lost play Aleadai was sought by time-travelers Lou Muller and Mark Alvarez. Instead, they murder its owner, Clodius Eprius, which results in their being arrested and trapped in the past.

Theodore Sorenson
Theodore Sorenson was the main speechwriter in the Kennedy Administration. Sorenson wrote the President's celebrated inaugural address, including the famous line "Let the word go forth, from this time and place, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans."

Turtledove paraphrased that line and the few sentences that followed for Upton Sinclair's acceptance speech on the night of the 1920 Presidential election, which he won. Kennedy was the first President of the United States in OTL to be born in the twentieth century; Sinclair was the first President in TL-191 to be born after the War of Secession, and thus had a claim comparable to Kennedy's of being the first President of a new generation. Also, both OTL Kennedy and TL-191 Sinclair broke records for being the youngest man ever elected to the office.

Also in The Valley-Westside War, as the war began, Westside City Council Chairman Cal paraphrased Kennedy's inaugural exhortation that the people "Ask not what the Westside can do for you. Ask what you can do for the Westside."

Sports Illustrated
Sports Illustrated is an American sports media franchise owned by Time Inc. Its self-titled magazine has over 3 million subscribers and is read by 23 million people each week, including over 18 million men. Its annual "swimsuit issue," which has been published since 1964, is now a publishing event that generates its own television shows, videos and calendars. In "Miss Manners' Guide to Greek Missology", the female warrior Andromeda says that the Gorgons, who in this version are caricatures of famous swimsuit/lingerie models, should "Try Sports Illustrated, though gods only know what sport you'd be illustrating."

John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck (1902-1968), an American novelist whose most famous writing focused on the working class people of California, wrote The Grapes of Wrath, which features in The Gladiator. Turtledove's "Of Mice and Chicks" is a feminist fantasy parody of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men.

In Joe Steele, Charlie Sullivan tries his hand at writing fiction, and negatively compares himself to Steinbeck.

Bram Stoker
Abraham "Bram" Stoker (8 November 1847 – 20 April 1912) was an Irish author, best known today for his 1897 Gothic novel Dracula, considered one of the definitive vampire novels of all time. During his lifetime, he was better known as the personal assistant of actor Henry Irving, and business manager of Irving's Lyceum Theatre in London.

Abraham Van Helsing, the heroic professor and vampire-hunter from Dracula, appears directly in Turtledove's "Three Men and a Vampire".

Turtledove has also frequently referenced film adaptations of Dracula, particularly the 1931 version; see Bela Lugosi and The Universal Monsters.

Winifred Sackville Stoner, Jr.
Winifred Sackville Stoner, Jr. (1902–1983) was an American author of educational poetry. One of her best known poems is entitled, The History of The U.S., best known for its opening line "In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue."

In the Atlantis series, Edward Radcliffe's 1452 voyage to Atlantis is commemorated by the verse "In fourteen hundred and fifty-two, Ed Radcliffe sailed the ocean blue."

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

In the The War Between the Provinces, reference is made to a comparable novel having been written in that universe, Aunt Clarissa's Serf Hut. The author is identified as female but not named.

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 tomes not only to survive but to attain the status of literary classics.

Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift (30 November 1667 – 19 October 1745) was an Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer, poet and cleric. Arguably, his most famous works are Gullivar's Travels and A Modest Proposal, but he wrote a number of well-regarded works, many of which are still read and studied today.

In American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold, John Oglethorpe calls Freedom Party men "yahoos," the savage hominoids from Gulliver's Travels.

In Supervolcano: All Fall Down, Vanessa Ferguson also thinks of her supervisor as a yahoo who didn't know what a yahoo actually was.

In "Cayos in the Stream", Ernest Hemingway quotes from Swift's 1733 poem, "On Poetry: A Rhapsody".

In Gunpowder Empire, Amanda Solters regards the patriarchy of Agrippan Rome as "a bunch of sexist yahoos." The narration then tells us that Amanda has a view of Gulliver very different from the pop cultural image of the book. "The parts of the book everybody knew, where he went to Lilliput and then to Brobdingnag, were only the icing on the cake. The real essence came later."

Tacitus
Publius (or Gaius) Cornelius Tacitus (c. AD 56 – c. AD 125) was a senator and a historian of the Roman Empire, best known for the Annals and the Histories, which survive in incomplete form. Tacitus is considered to be one of the greatest Roman historians.

The Annals is an important source for William Shakespeare when he writes Boudicca in Ruled Britannia, although how much the fictionalised Shakespeare learned from it and how much he made up, is the subject of an error on Turtledove's part.

In Joe Steele, Charlie Sullivan recalls how Tacitus once said that good men can serve bad emperors. Charlie says that he has always tried to be a good man, even while serving the dictatorial President Joe Steele.

JRR Tolkien
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE FRSL (3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor who is best known as the author of the classic high-fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion.

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

The Lord of the Rings is significantly referenced in The Valley-Westside War. Also, in Supervolcano: Eruption during the eruption of the Yellowstone Supervolcano, Kelly Birnbaum is frequently reminded of the closing chapters of The Return of the King, particularly the descriptions of series villain Sauron and his domain of Mordor, which is volcanic itself. When the rescue helicopters arrive, she thinks of the arrival of the Eagles to save Frodo and Sam.

"After the Last Elf is Dead" has been described by Turtledove as a reversal of Tolkien's basic premise, positing a world where an evil demonic entity defeats the forces of good.

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.

In The Hot War: Bombs Away, Daisy Baxter was reminded of What has he got in his pocketses, a line from a children's book when she heard the word "pocket". This was a line by Gollum during the riddle game with Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit.

See Also: Turtledove's Literary Influences

Harry Turtledove
In The House of Daniel, Turtledove directs a self-deprecating barb at his own canon. When Fidgety Frank throws a silver coin to repel a werewolf, he rather reluctantly admits, with embarrassment, that he had gotten the idea from "a story [he] had read in a rag called Amazing by a hack named Iverson." This almost-contemptuous reference is to Turtledove's own debut novel, Wereblood, published under the pen name Eric G. Iverson.

In Settling Accounts: Drive to the East, a movie starring Humphrey Bogart has been made of The Maltese Elephant, the title of an earlier Turtledove story which spoofed Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon.

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.

Albert Uderzo and René Goscinny
René Goscinny was a French comic writer and editor who worked with illustrator Albert Uderzo on a number of titles, the most famous of which are the Asterix series, a cartoon slapstick portrayal of Gaulish resistance to Julius Caesar's occupation.

Early on in Turtledove's novel Through the Darkness, Zuwayzan foreign minister Hajjaj discusses Algarvian refugees in the desert kingdom of Zuwayza. He lists two in particular: "Uderzo the florist" and "Goscinnio the portraitist", a likely reference to the famous French duo.

In The Valley-Westside War, George Stoyadinovich's mustache reminds Liz Mendoza of Asterix and Obelix.

Ulfilas
Ulfilas (spelled several ways) was a Goth (or perhaps half-Gothic and half-Greek) Christian bishop and missionary in the 4th Century. Among other things, Ulfilas translated the Bible into Gothic, essentially inventing the Gothic alphabet in the process. Ulfilas' translation is alluded to by Gothic language professor Stan in the story "Something Going Around".

Vegetius
Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus was a celebrated Roman military writer of the 4th century. Nothing is known of his life, station, or military experience.

His treatise, Epitoma rei militaris (also referred to as De Re Militari), was dedicated to the reigning emperor (possibly Theodosius the Great). His sources, according to his own statement, were Cato, Cornelius Celsus, Frontinus, Paternus and the imperial constitutions of Augustus, Trajan and Hadrian.

In the Southern Victory universe, Vegetius' treatise was translated into English by US Army General William Dudley Foulke, who gives a copy to Major Irving Morrell to read on the train to Philadelphia.

Voltaire
In addition to his more significant references in Turtledove's work, Voltaire is referenced in passing in a few others.

In The War That Came Early: The Big Switch, Luc Harcourt is shot in the buttock, and Sgt. Aristide Demange jokes that he assumed the surgeons would cut the buttock off like the old woman in Voltaire's Candide.

In "The Barbecue, the Movie, & Other Unfortunately Not So Relevant Material", the time-traveler Lasoporp Rof uses a device called a pangloss to translate ancient languages for him. Dr. Pangloss, whose name means "all languages" in Greek, is a supporting character in Candide.

The short story "Clash of Arms" takes place in Thunder-ten-tronckh, a fictional German city which first appeared in Voltaire's Candide.

In The Guns of the South, Andries Rhoodie asks General Robert E. Lee of the Confederate chances of victory. Lee replies that while the North outweighs the South, they have managed to outfight them and, God willing, they would continue to do so. Rhoodie replies with Voltaire's "God is on the side of the big battalions" and then proceeds with his sales pitch on the AK-47's superior rate of fire countering the North's advantage of numbers..

In Joe Steele, after Admiral Husband Kimmel was convicted of dereliction of duty and the presiding judge explained that the death sentence was to remind other officers of their need for diligence in pursuit of their duties, Kimmel replies with Voltaire's "Pour encourager les autres" in reference to Admiral John Byng's execution.

Lew Wallace
Lewis "Lew" Wallace (April 10, 1827 – February 15, 1905) was an American lawyer, United States Army general in the American Civil War, governor of New Mexico Territory, politician, diplomat, and author. Among his novels and biographies, Wallace is best known for his adventure story of the Roman Empire, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880). The novel tells the story of Judah Ben-Hur, a wealthy young Jewish man falsely convicted of attempted murder. After surviving a period of harsh imprisonment, Judah rises to new fame and fortune as a chariot racer in the arena. He also learns a valuable lesson about life from his acquaintance with Jesus of Nazareth. In popular culture, Ben-Hur is best known from the 1959 film adaptation starring Charlton Heston.

In Household Gods, Nicole Gunther, abruptly sent by time travel magic to the Roman Empire, dimly remembers a movie that Frank Perrin was obsessed with, featuring chariot races and Charlton Heston.

William Watson
William Watson (c. 23 April 1559 – 9 December 1603) was an English Roman Catholic priest and conspirator, executed for treason. He was also the author of Ten Quodlibetical Questions Concerning Religion and State (1601), which is referenced by characters in A Different Flesh in the segment "Though the Heavens Fall".

Bill Watterson
William Boyd Watterson II (born July 5, 1958), known as Bill Watterson, is an American cartoonist and the author of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. His career as a syndicated cartoonist ran from 1985 to 1995; he stopped drawing Calvin and Hobbes at the end of 1995 with a short statement to newspaper editors and his readers that he felt he had achieved all he could in the comic strip medium.

When Rob Ferguson was complaining about being stuck in New England during an early winter after the Yellowstone Supervolcano erupted, Justin Nachman reminded him that his father had warned it was going to go kablooie just like Hamster Hughie, a fictional children's book from Calvin and Hobbes.

In the short story "Hi, Colonic", one of the alien characters is named Iffspay, which appears to be a pig-Latin version of the name "Spiff". Spaceman Spiff was one of Calvin's frequent alter-egos during the course of the Calvin and Hobbes strip.

Stanley Weinbaum
Stanley Grauman Weinbaum (April 4, 1902 – December 14, 1935) was an American science fiction writer. His career in science fiction was short but influential. His first story, "A Martian Odyssey", was published to great (and enduring) acclaim in July 1934, but he succumbed to lung cancer less than a year and a half later.

In The War That Came Early: The Big Switch, American tourist Peggy Druce is stranded in Sweden. She thinks about how cold it is, which turns her mind to the Gulf Stream, without which, Sweden would be uninhabitably cold. She remembers reading a science fiction story postulating a world without a Gulf Stream. While she can't remember Stanley Weinbaum's name, she does remember he was Jewish.

In Homeward Bound, Sam Yeager thinks of Weinbaum's notion of Venus upon seeing the Home city of Rizzaffi.

H.G. Wells
Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946) - known as H. G. Wells - was a prolific English writer in many genres, including the novel, history, politics, and social commentary, and textbooks and rules for war games. Wells is now best remembered for his science fiction novels, and is called the father of science fiction, along with Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback.

H.G. Wells' 1898 classic The War of the Worlds is referenced on a few occasions in the Worldwar franchise. In Second Contact, Glen Johnson is rereading it and reflects that Wells's Martians would have been much easier to beat than the Race. The same-named 1938 radio play by Orson Welles, based on the novel, is also referenced in the series.

Wells' 1895 classic The Time Machine is referenced in Supervolcano. Rob Ferguson compares the summer people and townies in Bar Harbor, Maine to the Eloi and Morlocks from the novel. Also, in the Southern Victory series, while Clarence Potter couldn't remember Wells' name, he wished he had a Time Machine as depicted in the story.

Calvin H. Wiley
Calvin Henderson Wiley (Feb. 3, 1819 – Jan. 11, 1887) was a North Carolina educator. He was the first superintendent of public schools in the state, as well as a novelist. In The Guns of the South, Nate Caudell uses Wiley's North Carolina Reader as a textbook, and observes that Wiley unrealistically makes the state look like an earthly paradise.

William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats (13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939) was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, he helped the foundation of the Abbey Theatre, and in his later years served as an Irish Senator for two terms and was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and others.

The titles of the novels The Center Cannot Hold (the sixth Southern Victory book) and Things Fall Apart (the third Supervolcano book) are each taken from a line of Yeats's poem "The Second Coming:"


 * Turning and turning in the widening gyre.


 * The falcon cannot hear the falconer's cry.


 * Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;


 * Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.


 * The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere,


 * The ceremony of innocence is drowned.


 * The best lack all conviction, while the worst


 * Are filled with passionate intensity.

Unlike Abraham Lincoln, Wilfred Owen, and Ambrose Bierce, whose poetry provides titles for other volumes of the same series, Yeats' work is not excerpted in the front matter of The Center Cannot Hold.

In The Hot War: Armistice, Soviet Colonel Volodymyr Petlyura quoted the lines "Things fall apart./ The center cannot hold." to Boris Gribkov after World War III ends in an armistice and the Soviet satellites try to break free. Petlyura explains that with Stalin's death the center is gone (not holding) and so the Soviet Union is falling apart.

In The War That Came Early: The Big Switch, Arno Baatz' voice is described as having "lacked all conviction," though that is not necessarily taken directly from the poem, especially since Baatz' squad did not think him as "the best".

Legend of Ys
Ys, also spelled Is or Kêr-Is in Breton, and Ville d'Ys in French (both kêr and ville translate as city), is a mythical city that was built on the coast of Brittany and later swallowed by the Atlantic Ocean. Most versions of the legend place the city in the Douarnenez Bay, and attribute its destruction to a pact which the king's daughter made with the Devil. It is similar to the Ancient Greek legend of Atlantis. Several operas, novels, comic books, and video games about Ys have been created.

In "New Hastings", the first novella in Opening Atlantis, Nell Radcliffe thinks of the legend of Ys when her husband says he has been to Atlantis. He reflects that it is appropriate that François Kersauzon, a Breton, was the man who told him how to get there.