Ryk E. Spoor
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All-Patron Reward: Some Less-Obvious References
🕑 Added 2019-11-09 03:39:58 +0000 UTCIn a lot of my work, there are nods to the works of other authors, movies, games, and shows that have inspired me in one way or another. Many of these are pretty obvious, the most blatant being of course the character of Marc C. DuQuesne (from E. E. "Doc" Smith's Skylark series), and others somewhat less glaringly obvious but still pretty easy to pick up on, such as the strange world-reshaping method of travel Khoros uses when traveling with Kyri in Phoenix Rising, that he calls "shadestriding" (from the Chronicles of Amber, where the Amberites will "walk in Shadow").
Others, however, are far more subtle and/or difficult to catch, either because I have carefully obfuscated the reference, or because the source material is itself obscure due to limited audience, age, or both. I thought it might entertain you to see a list of a few of these -- with the understanding that this is in no way a complete list!
Note, of course, that there are SPOILERS likely in this list, so beware.
1) In Princess Holy Aura, Prince Twilight Dawn's power is stated to come from the Queen of the Aili, Ruloa. It is later revealed that while the power truly came from Ruloa, the one who called herself Ruloa when gifting the power to Twilight Dawn was the main villain, Lady Nyarla. The reference here is that the name is a scrambling of Luroa, the beautiful but deadly artificial human of Jack Williamson's One Against the Legion. She, too, had a living model, the kind-hearted but equally dangerous Stella Eleroid, and the question of which he truly faced was vital to the life of the hero Chan Derron.
2) In the course of Khoros and Kyri's travels mentioned above, they temporarily stop in a deserted, open area... and at night are attacked by almost formless, black with glinting-crystal horrors that float on air and seem to fear nothing but light. These are the Dark, from Barbara Hambly's The Time of the Dark, first volume of her Darwath series.
3) In Paradigms Lost, and later seen (in an earlier incarnation) in Demons of the Past: REVOLUTION, we meet with Raiakafan, adopted son of Verne Domingo (V'ierna Dhomienka). While he can appear human, in his natural form he is a rather short, strongly muscled humanoid with some semi-catlike features, light golden fur, and a golden tail, who is a master of martial arts, and said to have come from a species of almost unstoppably vicious warriors who are now mostly extinct; unlike them, having been raised on Earth, he is reasonably civilized and controlled. If you follow all those characteristics, you can probably see that he is a reference to Dragonball's Son Goku.
4) In Threshold, many readers picked up on the fact that General Hohenheim's name was a reference to Fullmetal Alchemist. Rather fewer, however, realized that Nebula Storm was a reference to another anime, Saint Seiya; the "Nebula Storm" is Andromeda Shun's most powerful attack.
5) In Castaway Planet, most readers familiar with the literature at all recognize that the whole story is a reference to two of the most famous castaway stories, Mysterious Island by Jules Verne and Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss. What may not be quite so obvious are two references in the names seen in the series. The perhaps-more-obvious is the name of the planet, Lincoln. While the in-universe explanation is a reference to Robin Hood and "Lincoln Green", due to the planet's very green coloration, it is also a reference to Lincoln Island, the island of the title in Mysterious Island. Second is the name of our first family. The "Robin" part of "Robinson" means "Bright Fame"; this is also the meaning of the name "Kimei" in Japanese. Another reference-in-reverse is that in Swiss Family Robinson, the family was comprised of all men with a single woman (the mother); in Castaway Planet, the family is all women with one man, the father -- plus, of course, one alien, since this is science fiction.
6) In Demons of the Past, the Thovians are a double reference, first to the massive bearlike Dilbians in Gordon Dickson's Spacepaw, and also to the ursoids pictured in the obscure space RPG Other Suns.
7) In Legend, when Legend himself is catapulted through spacetime, past but not through uncountable other realities, this action is directly referencing a similar event that happened to Kimball Kinnison in Children of the Lens. Several of the universes he glimpses are references, of course, with the final universe -- a flat world with the ocean pouring off the edge, with a vision of incredibly great mountains beyond -- being a direct salute to the Chronicles of Narnia and the vision seen by Reepicheep and the others at the End of the World.
If these have been of interest, I may do a few more of these posts. :)
