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

These authors have had significant influences on Harry Turtledove's own career as a science fiction/fantasy author, collaborated on one or more works with Turtledove, or have created fictional universes Turtledove has contributed to.

Robert Adams[]

Franklin Robert Adams (August 31, 1933 – January 4, 1990), who wrote as Robert Adams, was an American science fiction and fantasy writer, and formerly a career soldier. He is best known for his Horseclans books, a series set in a North America that had been thrown back to a medieval level by a full-scale nuclear war.

Turtledove contributed the story "Precious Treasure" to the Horseclans world. Turtledove has also written his own works set in post-nuclear medieval North America, including "Half the Battle," "Secret Names" and The Valley-Westside War. The world of "Secret Names" has more than a few similarities with the Horseclans cultures.

Steven-Elliot Altman[]

Steven-Elliot Altman is an American author, graphic novelist, video game writer-director, producer, screenwriter and the current Chief Executive Officer of a software company called Social Impulse that services the videogame industry. In 2000, he published an anthology called The Touch: Epidemic of the Millennium. Turtledove contributed the story "The Lieutenant".

Poul Anderson[]

In 2004, Turtledove and Noreen Doyle edited The First Heroes, an anthology of short stories and novelettes set in the Bronze Ages of various historical and fantastic cultures. The final story was "The Bog Sword," a previously unpublished piece by the late Poul Anderson.

Turtledove prefaced "The Bog Sword" with a short essay in honor of Anderson, who died in 2001. In keeping with the Bronze Age theme of the anthology, Turtledove spoke of "a golden era" of science fiction, when great authors of an earlier generation caused "the motifs, themes, and conventions of the genre, in forms seminal or conclusive, [to] flourish." Furthermore, "The imaginations of these authors . . . were like the earth in the days of the Greek golden race, bearing fruit 'abundantly and without stint.'"

Turtledove names Anderson as "one of the great heroes of the golden age." He then pays tribute to Anderson's continuing influence on the writers of the later generation: "But eras rarely end with a definitive period. They tend to transform gradually, as what follows them comes from them. Poul knew this as well as any of us can."

Turtledove contributed the short story "The Man who Came Late" to the collection Multiverse: Exploring Poul Anderson's Worlds and is a sequel to Anderson's fantasy/crosstime/ novel Three Hearts and Three Lions. However, the title is derived from an unrelated Anderson story, "The Man who Came Early".

The criminals in Turtledove's "Death in Vesunna" are wary of being caught by the Time Patrol, an agency that appears in Anderson's work, although the name has been used by other authors.

Turtledove credits an Andersonian influence in "The Decoy Duck," prequel to the Videssos Series.

In The Great War, a frequently appearing American soldier is named Paul Andersen, a near homonym of Poul Anderson.

Isaac Asimov[]

Isaac Asimov was the author of some of the original classics of the science fiction genre. Two of these, the Foundation trilogy and the standalone novella "Nightfall," provided the basis of Turtledove's inspiration for his very first novel, Werenight, published under the pen name Eric Iverson in 1979. Asimov's themes continued to come up in the various sequels Turtledove would eventually write.

He was also the founder of Asimov's Science Fiction pulp magazine, a magazine which ran some of Turtledove's earliest stories, and in which he, Turtledove, continues to be published periodically to this day.

Asmov himself wrote the Forewords for two of Turtledove's early alternate history collections, Agent of Byzantium ("The Ifs of History") and A Different Flesh ("The Sorry Record"). The willingness of a giant of the field to attach his name to a young author's early projects helped Turtledove establish himself among science fiction writers of his generation.

Turtledove contributed the story "Trantor Falls" to the 1989 anthology Foundation's Friends: Stories in Honor of Isaac Asimov. Today, the list of contributors to Foundation's Friends reads as something of a Who's Who of turn-of-the-millennium science fiction's most successful and influential science fiction writers. The Asimov estate considers all stories which can be integrated into the Foundation series, including "Trantor Falls," to be part of that series's canon.

Asimov created a series called Isaac's Universe, a shared universe series specifically designed to be open to other authors. Turtledove contributed three works: "Island of the Gods", "Thirty Pieces", and "Breakups".

L. Sprague de Camp[]

Lyon Sprague de Camp wrote Lest Darkness Fall, which was first published as a pulp science fiction serial in 1939, and was first printed as a full-length novel in 1941. Lest Darkness Fall is considered to be the first alternate history novel written for mass market consumption in the modern era. Thus, de Camp is widely hailed as the founding father of that genre.

Turtledove has stated that Lest Darkness Fall inspired his interests in both alternate history and Byzantine history.

In 1990, Turtledove wrote "The Pugnacious Peacemaker", a sequel to de Camp's Wheels of If, featuring multiverse traveler Allister Park aka Ib Scoglund. Turtledove's 2023 story "Through the Roof of the World" features characters named "Ib", "Scog", and "Lund".

In 2005, Turtledove edited a volume of short stories called The Enchanter Completed, which celebrated de Camp's writing. In addition to an introductory essay, Turtledove contributed the short story "The Haunted Bicuspid".

De Camp and Fletcher Pratt's Tales From Gavagan's Bar is emphatically parodied in the aforementioned "The Haunted Bicuspid," and made flesh in The Two Georges as the minor character Gavagan the bartender. The Gavagan story format is used in the Earthgrip story "Nasty, Brutish, &. . .", while that series' longest installment, "The Great Unknown," names de Camp as an object of Professor Jennifer Logan's studies.

Turtledove wrote "The Fake Pandemic" as a sequel to Lest Darkness Fall, and Lest's narrator Martin Padway appears in the story. A minor character in Through Darkest Europe is named Martino of Padua, a remarkably similar name.

In "The Maltese Elephant," one of the mystery ships investigated by Miles Bowman is the Golden Wind from India, which shares a name with de Camp's 1969 historical novel set partly in that country.

In Or Even Eagle Flew, a minor character named Lyon Sprague "decamps" from an airplane.

Noreen Doyle[]

Noreen Doyle (b. March 20, 1965) is an archaeologist specializing in Ancient Egypt, and an academic and science fiction author who co-edited the anthology First Heroes with Harry Turtledove.

Richard Dreyfuss[]

Richard Stephen Dreyfuss (born October 29, 1947) is an Oscar-winning American actor best known for starring in a number of films, television and theater roles since the late 1960s. He is probably best known for his roles in the films Jaws, The Goodbye Girl, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Always, Mr. Holland's Opus, and American Graffiti.

Dreyfuss teamed up with Harry Turtledove in 1995 to write the novel The Two Georges.

Philip José Farmer[]

Philip José Farmer (January 26, 1918 – February 25, 2009) was an American author known for his award-winning science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories.

Farmer is best known for his sequences of novels, especially the World of Tiers (1965–93) and Riverworld (1971–83) series. He is noted for the pioneering use of sexual and religious themes in his work, his fascination for, and reworking of, the lore of celebrated pulp heroes, and occasional tongue-in-cheek pseudonymous works written as if by fictional characters. Farmer often mixed real and classic fictional characters and worlds and real and fake authors as epitomized by his Wold Newton family group of books. These tie all classic fictional characters together as real people and blood relatives resulting from an alien conspiracy.

Turtledove's short story, "Two Thieves" is set on Farmer's Riverworld.

Bill Fawcett[]

William "Bill" Fawcett is an American editor, anthologist, game designer, book packager, author, and historian. Turtledove contributed the short work "The Mrem Go West" to Fawcett's anthology Exiled: Clan of the Claw.

Robert A. Heinlein[]

Robert Heinlein was the author of many classic science fiction short stories, novels, and anthologies.

Turtledove contributed an essay titled simply "Thank You" in the collection Requiem: New Collected Works by Robert A. Heinlein and Tributes to the Grand Master, published shortly after Heinlein's 1988 death. In the essay, Turtledove touchingly describes how it was Heinlein who inspired Turtledove to persist in his goal of establishing himself as a professional writer of fiction.

Robert E. Howard[]

Robert E. Howard was a prolific writer of fantasy and other genres of fiction in the early 20th century. Despite dying at 30, he was able to leave behind a large body of work, which has remained popular through the years (due in part to the efforts of L. Sprague de Camp to keep it in the public eye).

Turtledove has said many times that he is a fan of Howard's work. Howard's influence can occasionally be seen throughout the Turtledovean canon, and especially in Turtledove's several homages to Howard. Conan of Venarium is an authorized novel of Howard's best-known creation, Conan the Cimmeranian. Turtledove had previously spoofed the character as Condom the Trojan in "The Boring Beast," co written with Kevin R. Sandes.

MacKinlay Kantor[]

Benjamin MacKinlay Kantor (February 4, 1904 – October 11, 1977) was an American journalist, novelist and screenwriter, best known for his historical fiction related to the American Civil War, and the story for the World War II-related film The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Among his less conventional writings was the alternate history novella If the South Had Won the Civil War (1961).

In 2001, Turtledove edited a reprint of If the South..., and wrote an introduction acknowledging that he cribbed some plot elements from this short work for the Southern Victory series. The Guns of the South also appears to channel Kantor's novella at times.

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. Turtledove has 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, Lovecraft is tuckerized as ill-fated author Howard Phillips.

Elaine O'Byrne[]

Elaine O'Byrne was a pseudonym used by Harry Turtledove's first wife, Betty J. Turtledove. She has co-author credit on the short story "Death in Vesunna".

Jerry Pournelle[]

Jerry Eugene Pournelle (August 7, 1933 - September 8, 2017) was an American science fiction writer, essayist and journalist who contributed for many years to the computer magazine Byte. His early SF was published as "Wade Curtis", in Analog and other magazines. Among his many works is the CoDominium Universe series. Turtledove has contributed several short works to the War World Series sub-universe and has collaborated on novels with other authors, including S.M. Stirling, Susan Shwartz and Judith Tarr.

Fletcher Pratt[]

Murray Fletcher Pratt (April 25, 1897 – June 10, 1956) was an American writer of science fiction, fantasy, and history. He is best known for his works on naval history and on the American Civil War, and for fiction written with L. Sprague de Camp. This last genre includes the "Gavagan's Bar" and "Harold Shea" series.

At his death, Pratt left several planned works of fiction unwritten, including a novel about a modern woman who finds her mind occupying the body of a woman from the 2nd century CE.^[1] In 1999, Household Gods by Judith Tarr and Harry Turtledove used this exact premise, acknowledging Pratt on the dedication page.

In The Two Georges, the minor character Gavagan the bartender is named after one of Pratt and Camp's main characters.

Mike Resnick[]

Michael Diamond Resnick (March 5, 1942 - January 9, 2020) was an American science fiction author. He collaborated with Harry Turtledove on the short story "Before the Beginning." Resnick also edited Turtledove stories for the anthologies - Alternate Kennedys, Space Cadets, This is My Funniest, I, Alien, Stars: Original Stories Based on the Songs of Janis Ian, and On the Train.

Fred Saberhagen[]

Fred Thomas Saberhagen (May 18, 1930 – June 29, 2007) was an American science fiction and fantasy author. His first work was published in 1961, but it wasn't until 1975 that Saberhagen took up writing full time. He produced a substantial body of work during his career, embracing a variety of different genres, including his "Berzerker" works, a series of novels and stories about a war between humans and the Berzerkers, self-replicating war machines that are determined to destroy all life. Saberhagen also wrote a series of novels about the vampire Dracula, recasting the character as a more heroic and misunderstood creature.

In 2011, one of Saberhagen's novels, The Mask of the Sun (1981) was reprinted along with seven new stories set in the novel's elaborate cross-timeline continuity, under the title Golden Reflections. Turtledove contributed "Eyewear" to the collection.

Kevin R. Sandes[]

Kevin R. Sandes is a friend of Harry Turtledove's. He collaborated with Turtledove on the short story "The Boring Beast". Turtledove admits alcohol consumption was involved in the crafting of the story.

Kazuhiko Sano[]

Kazuhiko Sano (1952, Tokyo, Japan - 31 May 2011) was a Japanese-American artist who designed the jacket covers of Gunpowder Empire and Curious Notions.

Susan Shwartz[]

Susan Shwartz (born December 31, 1949) is a science fiction author who wrote stories which were included in the four-author collaborative War World novels, along with S.M. Stirling, Judith Tarr, and Harry Turtledove. She also edited the anthology Arabesques: More Tales of the Arabian Nights (which includes Turtledove's own "The Banner of Kaviyan"), and Arabesques II (which includes Turtledove's "Curse of the Three Demons".)

S.M. Stirling[]

Stephen Michael Stirling (b. Metz, France, September 30, 1953) is a Canadian-American science fiction and fantasy author. His novels often describe military situations and militaristic cultures. He has created numerous works of alternate history himself, including The Peshawar Lancers, the Lords of Creation Series, The Domination of the Draka series, the Natucket Series, and its companion work, the Emberverse series. He collaborated with Harry Turtledove and other authors on two novels set in Jerry Pournelle's Co-Dominium series, Blood Feuds and Blood Vengeance.

Turtledove has contributed short stories to two of Stirling's universes: "The Last Word" published in Stirling's 2000 anthology Drakas!, which is set in the Domination of the Draka timeline, and; "Topanga and the Chatsworth Lancers" which is set in Stirling's Emberverse and published in Stirling's anthology The Change: Tales of Downfall and Rebirth in June 2015.

Stirling is referenced in-universe in the Earthgrip story "The Great Unknown", as a study subject of Professor Jennifer Logan.^[2]

Judith Tarr[]

Judith Tarr (b. Augusta, Maine, January 30, 1955) is an American author, best known for her fantasy books. She received her B.A. in Latin and English from Mount Holyoke College in 1976, and has an M.A. in Classics from Cambridge University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Medieval Studies from Yale University. She breeds Lipizzan horses at Dancing Horse Farm, her home in Vail, Arizona. The romantic fantasies that she writes under the name Caitlin Brennan feature dancing horses modeled on those that she raises.

Tarr collaborated with Harry Turtledove on the novel Household Gods. In addition, Tarr wrote stories which were included in the four-author collaborative novels of the War World Series, along with Susan Shwartz, S.M. Stirling, and Turtledove.

JRR Tolkien[]

JRR Tolkien is best known as the author of the immortal fantasy classic The Lord of the Rings. In his youth, Turtledove was an avid Tolkien fan, and, long before his first publication of fiction, he wrote an unpublished Lord of the Rings fanfic. In the 1980s, he would rework this piece into the first draft of The Videssos Cycle.

Turtledove contributed the essay "The Ring and I" to the non-fiction collection Meditations on Middle Earth dedicated to Tolkien and wrote the short story "After the Last Elf is Dead" which took the premise of Tolkien's work but imagined evil had won. Another short story, "Coming Across," features Elves whose appearance and language seem to be modeled on Tolkien's Elvish culture.

In the War World Series, many names of the Sauron Super-soldiers are taken from from Tolkien's legendarium. The notion of the rebelling planet Sauron and its defeated Super-soldiers was first created by Larry Niven in a throw-away section in The Mote in God's Eye a collaboration with Jerry Pournelle, then greatly expanded in the War World series itself with an internal justification of the Tolkienist character names.

Rachel Turtledove[]

Rachel Turtledove-Katayanagi (b. 1986) is the second daughter of Harry Turtledove and Laura Frankos. Rachel wrote "First Passage," the second and final story in the anthology On the Train. It is set in the world which Harry introduced in "All Aboard!," the story in the book's first half.

Morbidly, Rachel was the inspiration for the "evil" infant Doug Flowers in Harry's "Crybaby". On a lighter note, Rachel was the namesake of Raquel Guibert, a merry prankster in Frankos' "The Garden Gnome Freedom Front."

References[]

↑ "Fletcher and I" (1975), short essay by L. Sprague de Camp.
↑ E.g., 3xT, p. 545, HC.

[1] "Fletcher and I" (1975), short essay by L. Sprague de Camp.

[2] E.g., 3xT, p. 545, HC.

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