Ryk E. Spoor
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All-Patron Reward: Not-So Obvious References 6
🕑 Added 2020-04-10 00:26:48 +0000 UTCThese seem to be holding interest, so why not continue?
1) In Princess Holy Aura, Holly/Holy Aura sacrifices herself to save the world. Afterward, it turns out that her sacrifice wasn't entirely irreversible, although she certainly thought it was at the time. If I had had reason to expect that there would be a sequel in reasonable time, I might have left her dead at that point, to have her resurrection happen at the beginning of the sequel. Either way, however, I knew how she was coming back, and that entire scene is a reference to one of the single most influential works of my youth: the Lensman series by E. E. "Doc" Smith.
At the end of Children of the Lens, Kimball Kinnison is missing and presumed dead or, at least by Mentor, so far gone from all knowable time and space that he might as well be; that even Mentor himself cannot find or recall Kinnison home. But the Children -- and their mother -- refuse to accept that possibility. And they find a way to call their father and husband home, against all the odds of the Arisian fusion and all the final efforts of Eddore and Ploor.
That recall effort is very deliberately echoed in the way in which Holly's soul and self are recalled to our world.
1a) That same event is referenced from the other point of view in Legend, when Ragnarok ejects Legend from our time and space; his trip through multiplicities of realities deliberately echoes Kinnison's perceptions of a similar journey, even if his exile was to be somewhat more pleasant than Legend's.
2) In Phoenix In Shadow, we meet the various representatives of Kaizatenzei, of which the Lights are the most powerful and important. One of these is Tanvol, a great black-bearded cheerful warrior who speaks with a booming voice. Tanvol is of course a scrambling of Voltan, which is a one-letter change from Vultan -- Prince Vultan, the chief of the Hawkmen in Flash Gordon. The similarity is completed, in bittersweet fashion, when after a last heroic act Tanvol dies in Phoenix Ascendant, with his last line being "Who wants to live forever?"
3) In Castaway Resolution, the scene in which Sergeant Campbell finds himself face to face with a tree kraken, only to discover that both of them are merely eating the same berries, is a reference to a number of such incidents in fact and fiction, but the earliest I ever encountered, and the one that sticks with me, is from the children's book Blueberries for Sal, in which it's a little girl encountering a bear.
4) In Challenges of the Deeps. Sun Wu Kung wins the Racing Chance Challenge, but the Vengeance demand an explanation for how Wu Kung could do the things he did without some form of cheating. Wu responds by demanding the Arena show the two Vengeance representatives the truth behind his existence, and there is a brief summary of the rise and fall of Project Hyperion shown. This gives quick glimpses of a number of the Hyperions we have not and will never meet. Some of these will be obvious, some less so. In one particular portion, we see: four children in strange costumes fighting alongside an assortment of gray-skinned, orange-horned creatures that were, themselves, children, and the blood all around was purple, blue, green, brown, and even red;
This is a reference to the massive netcomic-writing-magnum-opus called Homestuck, and the four children are the original protagonists of Homestuck and the gray-skinned children are the "trolls" that are their opposite numbers and, eventually, friends.
5) The Death of Terry Austin in Challenges of the Deeps was a paid appearance from my Polychrome Kickstarter. What is interesting is that it was done exactly as Terry, who was a notorious Usenet troll himself, requested: lyinched to death for trolling by an alien mob. Terry was, of course, not the only Tuckerized appearance in my writing; a number of other characters have come from either saluting people in my own life, or from requested appearances, from that Kickstarter (and others to come from the Shadows of Hyperion Kickstarter), but in some ways he was the most amusing. No one else asked to die, let alone to die so spectacularly.
