Ryk E. Spoor
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All-Patron Reward: Less-Obvious References 5
🕑 Added 2020-03-08 17:10:58 +0000 UTCWe continue this series of glimpses into in-jokes, hidden Tuckerizations, and references in my various works!
1) In Legend, there are quite a few references and nods. One of ones that was probably more subtle is the character who calls herself "Natural Selector", who is referenced a couple of times and makes an entrance in the final battle with a crystalline portal that releases a trio of T-Rexes against Fenris. She is a direct reference to the series "Primeval", which had a character named Helen Cutter who finds a way to control the various cross-time portals that are the main plot drivers of the series, and who apparently had decided that mankind wasn't the best result of evolution and was going to use the portals to change that.
2) The Prime Monitor has two references built in. First, the title "Prime Monitor" popped into my head without my remembering the origin at first, but after I had been writing for a while, I realized that the title had come from the leader of the cybernetic fanatic faction in John F. Carr's The Ophidian Conspiracy. The Monitor's name, Shagrath, is a reference to a dark spider-god from David Hargrave's Arduin Grimoire series of RPG supplements.
3) Every one of the Six Minds that lead the Blessed To Serve in the Arenaverse has their own name: Thilomon, Dellak, Locasus, Tynenousan, Nysket, and Pelarinshar. What may not be obvious at all is that each of these represent a technological terror that rebounded upon its creators, just as the Minds did to the Blessed. Four of them are from other authors, one refers to a threat in my main universe that has not yet been seen directly. The latter is Thilomon -- aka MONOLITH. Dellak is the most obvious, as it is "Dalek". Locasus is Colossus, the computer that decided it was a better ruler of mankind than mankind itself. Tynenousan is a scrambling of Nine Thousand, as in poor HAL-9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Nysket is, of course, Skynet, who took Colossus' logic one genocidal step farther. And Pelarinshar is Sharon Apple, singing supercomputer with hypnotic powers that nearly destroyed a world.
4) The "Gemcalling" discipline seen and described in Phoenix in Shadow is a direct reference to the "Materia" seen in Final Fantasy VII.
5) In the Castaway Planet series, one of the main viewpoint characters in the second book is Tavana Arronax. His name is a double reference; his first name is part of "Tavana Nui", which was the name of the father of the hero Mafatu in Call It Courage by Sperry Armstrong, and his last name from Pierre Arronax, the protagonist of Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea; Verne, of course, was also the author of the sequel to that novel, Mysterious Island, which was one of the main inspirations for the Castaway series.
