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

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

In 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".

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

In 2004, Turtledove and Noreen Doyle edited the anthology 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 The final story in the anthology was an original, previously unpublished story by the late Anderson, "The Bog Sword."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]."

See Also: Turtledove's Literary Influences

In addition, the style 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.

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

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

P.T. Barnum
Phineas Taylor 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.

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

In 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.

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 novel The Victorious Opposition. The definition is quoted in the novel's front matter.

Bierce is also referenced in passing in "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.

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

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

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 Turtledove's Last Orders, he has a Kriegsmarine Kapitan zur See named Rochus Mauer mention that he had fought in the ATL World War II "with a slashing slide rule", something de Camp had jokingly said about his own WW II experiences in a US Naval research facility in Philadelphia.

See Also: Turtledove's Literary Influences

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

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 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 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
After learning of the death of Winston Churchill in The Big Switch, 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 the novel Joe Steele, after Father Coughlin is shot by firing squad on President'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 In the Presence of Mine Enemies, we learn that the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, much like William Shakespeare, are studied in much greater detail in Germany than in Britain. Susanna Weiss teaches, debates, and studies a variety of Chaucer pieces throughout the novel.

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

Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill was a British politician known chiefly for his leadership of the United Kingdom during World War II. He served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955. He 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 Big Switch, Julius Lemp reflects that Clausewitz' aphorism is especially relevant to the convoluted twists and reversals to his timeline's version of World War II.

Dante Alighieri
Dante Alighieri and his most famous work, Inferno, serve 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 as it does in Dante's work.

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.

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 Return Engagement 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.

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.

In 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. Many other characters in many other stories also comment on obvious statements with variations on "No kidding Sherlock".

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 (September 26, 1888 – January 4, 1965) was a 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.

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.

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 title of the sixth volume of The War That Came Early series was originally announced as Not with a Bang, presumably an allusion to the Eliot poem. The novel was subsequently re-titled.

In 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.

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).

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

In Bombs Away, Aaron and Ruth Finch see the famous film version of CS Forrester's The African Queen. Aaron reflects that he loves Forrester.

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's answered Gray with the assertion that "There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the imaginations of poets. The one sound test of a Milton is that he functions as a Milton." Gray's Elegy and Mencken's response serve as the thematic foundation of "The House That George Built".

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

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

In Turtledove's Crosstime Traffic 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, two United States Army men of the immediate post-WWII period find themselves in such a situation, which they describe in detail, and they realize that no one has yet written a book providing an easy-to-remember name for such a problem. This lack of nomenclature is said by one of them to be a "hell of an" inconvenience, and the other agrees that "it's a heller."

Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway is the central character in the story "Cayos in the Stream", in which Hemingway's patrols for German U-boats in the Carribean actually manages to catch one.

He is also featured as the character "Ernie" in several Southern Victory novels, though his full name is never given. Both his spoken dialogue and his written words invoke Hemingway's famous, distinctive writing style of short, clipped sentences.

Chaim Weinberg reads For Whom the Bell Tolls and discusses both the novel and its author with Mike Carroll in The War That Came Early: Two Fronts.

Turtledove's 2013 short story "Running of the Bulls" is a pastiche of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Naturally, Turtledove's work involves more fantasy elements than Hemingway's.

Herodotus of Halicarnassus
Herodotus was an ancient Greek historian who was born in Halicarnassus, Caria (modern day Bodrum, Turkey) and lived in the fifth 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.

John Bell Hood
Confederate General John Bell Hood was the author of Advance and Retreat, his memoirs, 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.

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, usually known as A. E. 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.

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

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

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

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

See Also: Turtledove's Literary Influences

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

Victor Hugo
In 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 harrangue 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 novel Les Miserables, in which several protagonists became involved in the June Rebellion of 1832.

In the novel Joe Steele, Mike Sullivan is assigned the number NY24601 after he is arrested and imprisoned by the 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.

Jerome K. Jerome
Jerome Klapka Jerome (2 May 1859 – 14 June 1927) was an English writer and humourist, best known for the comic travelogue Three Men in a Boat (1887).

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-organized, 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 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 a crystal ball or H. G. Wells's 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.

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 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."

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.

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.

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. 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 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.

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

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

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 War": "do not call up that which you cannot put down."

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

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

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

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

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

In West and East, Mike Carroll of the Lincoln Brigade is fond of Mencken despite Mencken's being politically incorrect for a Communist. Carroll quotes Mencken to Chaim Weinberg: "I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries."

In Coup d'Etat, another quote is cited, this time by Herb Druce: "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." Newspaper editor Stan Feldman quotes a variation of that line in the novel Joe Steele.

Herman Melville
In The Two Georges, protagonist Thomas Bushell realizes that recovering the titular painting has become his "great, grey whale" in the famous novel. This is a reference to Herman Melville's eponymous white whale, Moby-dick.

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".

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 Kingom, even the U.S. enjoyed Winnie the Pooh

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


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

Dowling mistakes the quote for a Shakesearean line.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the novel 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.

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 Scarlet Band", Sherlock Holmes stand-in Athelstan Helms and the ersatz Doctor John Watson, 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 the novel 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".

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
George Orwell, who plays a small role in the Worldwar series under his given name Eric Blair, was the author of the novel 1984. 1984 has been featured by Turtledove in both "Hindsight," in which it was used as a yardstick to measure the impact of Mark Gordian's Watergate, and The Gladiator, in which it is required reading in school systems throughout the Soviet Union's sphere of influence--that is to say, everywhere. (The government in the novel has done a bit of reinterpretation of a novel originally written to demonise the Soviet Union, and presents it as being consistent with Soviet goals.

In Hitler's War, Orwell may be making a brief anonymous appearance as a tall, pale, skinny fellow with a dark mustache and hair.

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
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 the novel 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."

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

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

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.

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.

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 an alternate version of the town of Ripley 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, 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.

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
JD Salinger was the author of Catcher in the Rye. Turtledove's short story "The Catcher in the Rhine" is a pastiche of this novel, with a thinly disguised Holden Caulfield wandering into the Nibelungenlied.

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, 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 eighteenth century. Given Turtledove's penchant for puns (and the fact that The United States of Atlantis was released during the holiday season) it is reasonable to suggest that this is meant to be an allusion to 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.

Donald Sobol
Donald Sobol is the author of the Encyclopedia Brown series, which appears to have inspired Turtledove's approach to mystery writing. See Talk:The Scarlet Band for elaboration.

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 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."

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.

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 was the author of 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.

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

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

Julius Streicher
Julius Streicher was a Nazi journalist who founded the Nazi news organ Der Stürmer. He also wrote three children's books about the evil ways of Jews, which Nazi educators used to brainwash children into accepting Hitler's racist ideology from a very young age. Of course, these hate-filled storybooks fell out of fashion with VE Day in OTL. In In the Presence of Mine Enemies, however, the survival and victory of the Nazi Party allowed Streicher's 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 The Center Cannot Hold, John Oglethorpe calls Freedom Party men "yahoos," the savage hominoids from Gulliver's Travels.

In 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".

Tacitus
Roman historian Tacitus's the Annals is an important source for William Shakespeare when he writes Boudicca in Ruled Britannia.

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 Tolkein. A first draft of what would become the Videssos Series was originally written as The Lord of the Rings fanfic.

Further, The Lord of the Rings series was featured in The Valley-Westside War. Also, 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, 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" is directly inspired by Tolkein, 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 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 Tolkien's 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.

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
When Luc Harcourt is shot in the buttock in The Big Switch, Sgt. Demange jokes that he assumed the surgeons would cut the buttock off like the old woman in Voltaire's Candide. The time-traveler Lasoporp Rof uses a device called a pangloss to translate for him in the short work "The Barbecue, the Movie, & Other Unfortunately Not So Relevant Material". Dr. Pangloss is supporting character in Candide. The short story "Clash of Arms" takes place at jousting tournament at the castle Thunder-ten-tronckh which was a location created by Voltaire in Candide.

Voltaire is also a contemporary of the Atlantean War of Independence in The United States of Atlantis, and is quoted at one point by Custis Cawthorne. He is also held in high regard in the Nazi Germany found in "Shtetl Days".

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.

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 "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
In 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
H.G. Wells's classic, The War of the Worlds, is referenced on a few occasions in the Worldwar series. In Second Contact, Glen Johnson is rereading it and reflects that Wells's Martians would have been much easier to beat than the Race.

Well's 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
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 William Butler 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 (see above), Yeats's work is not excerpted in the front matter of The Center Cannot Hold.

Also, in The Big Switch, Arno Baatz's voice is described as having "lacked all conviction," though that is not necessarily taken directly from the poem, especially since Baatz's 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.