User blog:Matthew Babe Stevenson/Literary allusions

These are my proposed additions to Literary Allusions in Turtledove's Work.

Alexander Afanasyev
Alexander Nikolayevich Afanasyev (Александр Николаевич Афанасьев) (23 July [O.S. 11 July] 1826 — 5 October [O.S. 23 September] 1871) was a Russian Slavist and ethnographer who published nearly 600 Russian fairy and folk tales, one of the largest collections of folklore in the world. The first edition of his collection was published in eight volumes from 1855–67, earning him the reputation as being the Russian counterpart to the Brothers Grimm. Most of the definitive Baba Yaga legends were first transcribed by Afanasyev. Arguably the internationally best-known example is "Vasilisa the Beautiful", wherein an indentured servant (whose biography resembles both Cinderella and Hansel & Gretel at different turns) escapes from her captivity in the izbushka with the help of small magical creatures and her own cleverness and kindness. Another character from the Yaga stories is Prince Dmitri, enchanted into the form of a hedgehog, whose story has sometimes been conflated with Vasilisa's in subsequent retellings.

A large part of Laura Frankos' "Slue-Foot Sue and the Witch in the Woods" is a retelling of "Vasilisa the Beautiful," with the American adventurer Slue-foot Sue substituting for the titular servant. Sue meets Prince Dmitri, who is confirmed to be from the House of Romanov for the purpose of rehashing a well-worn Anglo-Russian pun.

Buck Rogers
Buck Rogers is a fictional space opera hero created by Philip Francis Nowlan in the novella Armageddon 2419 A.D. (1928), subsequently appearing in multiple media, including radio, comic strip, and film. The character's far-reaching influence inspired the rival imitation character Flash Gordon, and created a renewed interest in the earlier John Carter of Mars novels. Buck Rogers was also a primary influence on Star Wars.

Throughout the Worldwar quartet, various characters use Buck Rogers' universe as a frame of reference when describing the technology of the Race.

George Barr McCutcheon
George Barr McCutcheon (July 26, 1866 – October 23, 1928) was an American popular novelist and playwright. His best known works include the series of novels set in Graustark, a fictional Eastern European country, and the novel Brewster's Millions, which was adapted into a play and several films.

In The War Between the Provinces: Sentry Peak, Graustark is an author of historical romances which are popular among Detinans. In Laura Frankos' "One Touch of Hippolyta," the fictional Massachusetts town of Graustarkton is a setting.

Edward O'Reilly
Edward Sinnott "Tex" O'Reilly (August 15, 1880 – December 9, 1946) was an American soldier, international policeman, journalist and autobiographer. Ironically, his most enduring claim to fame may be the light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek series of Pecos Bill stories (beginning in 1917), which he claimed were not his own creations, but taken from Texas folklore. No prior cultural reference for Pecos Bill and his costars has ever been found, and O'Reilly is believed by many folklorists to have created them from whole cloth as a kind of "fakelore".

Laura Frankos' "Slue-Foot Sue and the Witch in the Woods" depicts O'Reilly's characters Pecos Bill, Slue-foot Sue, Rat the snake, and Widow Maker the horse, who are all from the earliest published Bill stories. It also depicts Bean Hole the cook, who was created either by O'Reilly or James Cloyd Bowman, who took over Pecos Bill writing duty after O'Reilly moved on to other matters. Because of the checkered, haphazard publishing protocols of the magazines in which Bill appeared, the chronology of first appearances and correct credits can sometimes be difficult to determine.

Beatrix Potter
Helen Beatrix Potter (28 July 1866 – 22 December 1943) was an English writer, illustrator, natural scientist, and conservationist, best known for her children's animal fables. The best known examples of these depict Peter Rabbit's frequent attempts to trespass in Farmer McGregor's garden.

In The Great War: American Front, when Canada is invaded by the Americans, a soldier named Pierre Lapin, whose name translates as Peter Rabbit, is assigned to protect a farm whose owners are ironically named McGregor. (While later Southern Victory volumes feature a POV character named Clarence Potter, this seems to be a coincidence unrelated to the earlier Lapin-McGregor reference.)

In Laura Frankos' "A Late Symmer Night's Battle", Mr. Tod the fox, a cavalry mount in the Army of Faerie, shares his name and species with another of Potter's quasi-anthropomorphic heroes.

H.A. Rey
H.A. Rey (Hans Augusto Reyersbach, September 16, 1898 – August 26, 1977) was a German-born American illustrator and author of children's books, best known for the tales of a good-natured, accident-prone pet monkey named Curious George.

In Joe Steele, Charlie Sullivan reads a Curious George book to his son Patrick. Rather than simply recite the printed text, Charlie turns it into a game of mad libs.

Friedrich Schiller
Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (10 November 1759 – 9 May 1805) was a German poet, philosopher, physician, historian, and playwright, whose better-known works include the plays Don Carlos, Maria Stuart, and The Maid of Orleans, and the poem Ode to Joy.

In The War Between the Provinces: Sentry Peak, Thraxton the Braggart remembers that someone once wrote "Against stupidity, the very gods themselves contend in vain" (a line from The Maid of Orleans, Act III, Scene VI), and concludes that the author was describing Leonidas the Priest.

William Sherman
In addition to his direct appearances and historical references in Turtledove's work, General William Sherman's way with words is acknowledged in The War Between the Provinces: Marching Through Peachtree. Passages from Sherman's 1864 letter dictating the terms of total war to the Mayor of Atlanta are used verbatim in General Hesmucet's declaration to the Burgomaster of Marthasville, in a fantasy analog of this same historical event.

Leo Tolstoy
Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Лев Николаевич Толстой, 9 September [O.S. 28 August] 1828 – 20 November [O.S. 7 November] 1910) was a Russian philosopher, journalist, and pacifist, best known for the novels War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877). The earlier novel, set around the Napoleonic Wars, is often called one of the greatest novels ever written, and is the subject of frequent pop cultural references to its excessive length.

In the fantasy world depicted in "Of Mice and Chicks," there appears to be a similarly weighty novel called War and Pieces. The narrator laments that the people most qualified to know about war and pieces - i.e., people who were casualties of war and are now in pieces - are in no condition to write about it.

Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright best remembered for the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), the play The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), and his conviction and imprisonment under a rarely enforced British law against LGBT acts.

The phrase "No good deed goes unpunished," a sardonic commentary on the frequency with which acts of kindness backfire on those who offer them, is usually attributed to Wilde, although it appears nowhere in his published works.

In The War Between the Provinces: Advance and Retreat, Lieutenant General Doubting George thinks of the "no good deed..." line when he is prematurely removed from the from of the Detinan Civil War, due to a disagreement with Marshal Bart.