Mythology Gag / Literature

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• The tagline for the first Alex Rider book was "Meet Alex Rider, the reluctant teenage spy". This is dropped in context in the ninth book (which was originally intended to be the series' Grand Finale, but a few years later author Anthony Horowitz had a change of heart and decided to write more books).
• Autobiography of Red has a case that is more literally mythological than most. In the version of his autobiography that Geryon writes in elementary school, he says that he has six arms and six legs, keeps a herd of red cattle, and gets killed by Herakles. None of these things happen in the book's main continuity; they come from the original myth.
• In the BIONICLE children's book Desert of Danger, Mata Nui first tries to defeat a sand bat by knocking off its mask, which was a very common theme back when the toy-line first started. Another character instantly points out that in this new world Mata Nui found himself in, animals don't wear masks. Even so, the book's artist did use an older bat-themed mask as a reference for drawing the sand bat's head.
• Eoin Colfer's books have a few recurring names:
  • Phonetix is a large corporation that's mentioned in both the Artemis Fowl series and The Supernaturalist.
  • Myishi is a character in The Wish List and also a corporation in The Supernaturalist.
  • Stefan Bashkir, a major character in The Supernaturalist, is also an alias used by Artemis Fowl.
  • The Artemis Fowl Files (a companion book) is dedicated to "Finn, Artemis's best friend." Finn is the surname of the main character of The Wish List, and also a false surname that gets used in Airman.
• One of the magical artifacts Lady Peril collected to harness an untapped ley line to harness its power in Constance Verity Saves the World is the helm of the lost god, a MacGuffin from the A. Lee Martinez book Helen and Troy's Epic Road Quest.
• Constance Verity Destroys the Universe: Having encountered a lot of divine enemies, Connie keeps a god-killing axe on-hand.
• Peter David loves to cross media with these. Trans-Sabal from Marvel Comics shows up in his Arthurian trilogy. And then there's Morgan...
• Demon Copperhead is a novel that is actually a Whole-Plot Reference to Charles Dickens' David Copperfield. This is acknowledged on a couple of occasions:
  • Mr. Dick flies a kite on which he writes "Never be mean in anything. Never be false. Never be cruel. I can always be hopeful of you." These are words said by Betsey Trotwood to David in David Copperfield.
  • This is more overt later when teenaged Damon, who has mostly tuned out of high school, says he liked a book by...Charles Dickens.
  ...seriously old guy, dead and a foreigner, but Christ Jesus did he get the picture on kids and orphans getting screwed over and nobody giving a rat's ass. You'd think he was from around here.
• Doctor Who Expanded Universe:
  • There's a sort of meta-Mythology Gag in the Past Doctor Adventures novel The Indestructible Man, which pastiches all Gerry Anderson's work (except Space Precinct). In UFO (1970), SHADO's front organisation was a movie company, because it meant they could save money by filming backstage at Pinewood Studios. In the book, SILOET's front organisation is the British TV and Film Corporation, based in Shepherd's Bush, meaning that if it was a real episode of 60s Doctor Who, they'd use The BBC Television Centre for the same purposes.
  • The Doctor Who New Adventures novel Conundrum by Steve Lyons made the 1960s Doctor Who comics stories a product of the Land of Fiction. (One story in Doctor Who Magazine would later feature those stories as a product of the Doctor's imagination.) It does the same with the video game Dalek Attack, with the Doctor finding it really cathartic to wander around the landscape blowing up Daleks without any doubts, in a way he'd never do in the real world.
  • The final Eighth Doctor Adventures novel The Gallifrey Chronicles hints that the Eighth Doctor's complicated timeline has given rise to three different potential Ninth Doctors, who are implied to arise from the three probably-incompatible Eighth Doctor continuities in that novel series, the Big Finish Doctor Who dramas, and the Doctor Who Magazine comics. The three potentials are further implied to be the Christopher Eccleston version from the 21st-century TV revival, the Rowan Atkinson version from the parody "The Curse of Fatal Death", and the Richard E Grant version from the webcast "Scream of the Shalka".
  • In the New Series Adventures novel At Childhood's End by Sophie Aldred, during a flashback to Ace travelling with the Doctor she has a vision of multiple possible futures, including meeting Benny and becoming a Dalek Killer in the New Adventures, becoming a Time Lady in Big Finish Doctor Who, and even her death in the DWM comic strip "Ground Zero". None of which are compatible with the same flashback's portrayal of how things really ended between her and the Doctor.
  • The Doctor Who Novelisations version of "The Star Beast" names the street leading to the Camden steel works from the TV version as "Blackcastle Passage", because the original Doctor Who Magazine comic strip was set in the fictional town of Blackcastle.
• The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me:
  • The Monkey is characterized similarly to Muggle-Wump the monkey, who is a central character in The Twits.
  • Among the products Billy's sweet-shop sells are Wonka confectionaries.
• Much like in the A. Lee Martinez novel Divine Misfortune, The Fates in Helen and Troy's Epic Road Quest have given up controlling fate and destiny because a large enough population made controlling anyone's destiny too big of a mess to bother.
• A Hellblazer novel features John going on a ramble about Alternate Universes, and mentioning one where he's a dark-haired American, who nonetheless went through a version of the "Dangerous Habits" arc.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy
  • The new novel, And Another Thing...... opens with Arthur, Ford, Trillian and Random experiencing false lives, before learning they're still on Earth, and it's still being destroyed by the Grebulons (as seen in Mostly Harmless). When describing her hallucination, Trillian claims they were rescued from Earth by the Babel Fish, which transported them to Milliways. This was the bonus "they're not really dead" ending of The Quintessential Phase of the radio series.
  • The wonderfully meta introduction to said book may also count, as it alludes to the "trilogy in six parts", as well as the franchise's radio, television, film and stage productions.
• James Bond
  • In On Her Majesty's Secret Service, the first Bond novel after Dr. No, the first James Bond movie, Bond is revealed to have Scottish heritage as a nod to Sean Connery. Also, Ursula Andress, who played the Bond girl, is mentioned as a guest at Blofeld's ski resort.
  • When a subject of peoples interests come up in No Deals, Mr. Bond regarding Bond's comment to would-be defector Smolin about him having a cover name of a nineteenth century politician, Smolin mentions that some might even read the works of Margaret Drabble and Kingsley Amis, latter whom wrote the Bond continuation novel Colonel Sun.
  • As Bond in Scorpius watches The Untouchables as an in-flight movie, narration notes that his favourite actor plays a Chicago cop in it.
  • A character in Death Is Forever complains about the use of the Textual Celebrity Resemblance trope, telling Bond that an author whose book he is reading constantly uses it to describe people. Bond then notes that someone once told him that he "looked like Hoagy Carmichael with a cruel mouth", which is how he was described by Ian Fleming in Casino Royale.
  • In COLD, Bond receives an audio message from his past fling Beatrice di Ricci, which icludes the phrase "I want to win. I don't want lose or die." The phrase references the title of Win, Lose or Die, the novel where she and Bond met.
• Stephen King often inserts Mythology Gags in his novels, making brief, casual, and usually vague references to events or characters from a previous novel that might not have absolutely nothing to do with the current novel whatsoever, but that fans of King who have read most of his novels would easily be able to recognize.
  • For example, the novel Needful Things includes bully Ace from the novella "The Body" and references to the novels Cujo and The Dead Zone. This makes sense as all of these events occur in the same (fictional) town.
  • In The Dark Tower novels, elements from many of his earlier books appear, with such frequency that by the end of the series the reaction has accelerated into full-blown Canon Welding.
  • Dolores Claiborne is possibly the strangest example of this, as the titular character experiences a brief psychic connection with the protagonist of Gerald's Game, to whom she has no other connection at any time.
    • This connection happens on July 20, 1963, during a total solar eclipse, which makes it a real-life Shout-Out to an actual total solar eclipse that went across Maine on July 20, 1963.
  • Insomnia contains a good deal of this, including numerous references to The Dark Tower, but the one that stands out the most is when the protagonist finds a pair of shoes belonging to the little boy who died from Pet Sematary.
  • Pet Sematary itself contains a passage where a character mentions that it used to be legal to keep animals like raccoons as pets in the area, before there was an incident involving a rabid dog.
  • In The Tommyknockers, one character hallucinates Pennywise the Clown from IT while driving through Derry.
  • And in IT, a scene involves Dick Halloran, the cook from The Shining.
    • Also in Dreamcatcher, one of the main characters heads to Derry and finds the phrase "Pennywise lives" scrawled on the monument dedicated to the Loser's Club, which was the title the main children gave themselves in IT.
  • In Bag of Bones, it's revealed that Thad Beaumont, the protagonist of The Dark Half, committed suicide.
  • In Misery Annie talks about a photographer she once knew who took pictures of an old hotel whose caretaker went crazy and burned it down.
  • Desperation and The Regulators were published simultaneously (by King and his alter ego, Richard Bachman), and thus the characters, settings and plot are connected and have a lot of overlap. However, both novels also feature a character called Cynthia Smith, who mentions briefly in Desperation that her nose was broken by a bad man. Cynthia was a secondary character in King's previous novel Rose Madder, in which the assault took place.
  • The villain of The Eyes of The Dragon is Randall Flagg of The Stand, using a different name.
  • References between stories in Different Seasons: Andy Dufresne from "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption" is mentioned in "Apt Pupil" as helping Dussander assemble his stock portfolio.
  • Skeleton Crew:
    • The narrator of "Nona" recounts his run-in with Ace Merrill from "The Body" and Needful Things.
    • "The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands" is another tale of the uncanny told at the same brownstone men's club in Manhattan where "The Breathing Method" takes place.
    • The four ill-fated kids in "The Raft" are students at Horlicks University in Pennsylvania. The Cunninghams, Regina and Michael, were professors there in Christine. (The events of "The Crate" took place there as well.)
    • This one may overlap with Genius Bonus. In "The Jaunt," the first man to take the Jaunt wide awake (only to emerge insane and die as a result) is a convicted killer named Rudy Foggia. As King aficionado Tyson Blue points out in The Second Stephen King Quiz Book, Rudy Foggia's initials may mark him as another incarnation of Randall Flagg; in The Stand, Flagg's aliases all have the initials "R.F." (Richard Freemantle, Russell Faraday, etc.)
• In novel The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly, Michael Haller Jr. reflects on how his father, a high-powered lawyer, had a soft spot for "women of the night" and often defended them for free. Readers of prior Michael Connelly novel The Black Ice would have known that LAPD Detective Harry Bosch, hero of a good two-thirds of Connelly's novels, is the son of Michael Haller Sr. Bosch's mother was a prostitute that Haller Senior defended in court for free.
• Modesty Blaise novels:
  • In A Taste for Death, Steve mentions having read something in the Evening Standard, which is the newspaper that originally ran the Modesty Blaise comic strip.
  • In "Cobra Trap", the short story that serves as a Distant Finale to the series, one of the characters remarks on the fact that Modesty looks decades younger than she really is, hanging a lampshade on the fact that the comic strip ran for decades without Modesty visibly aging.
• Mr Men And The Tooth Fairy opens with Little Miss Curious asking what a tickle looks like, while we see Mr. Tickle's extraordinarily long arm in the background. It's a reference to the very question that prompted the creation of Mr. Tickle in the first place.
• According to The Muppets Character Encyclopedia, the reason the Gogolala Jubilee Jugband was replaced by Lubbock Lou and his Jughuggers between seasons one and two of The Muppet Show was due to a dispute over putting a hole in a washtub — a reference to a completely unrelated Henson production jugband.
• Kim Newman:
  • In the horror novel Bad Dreams, a composer is shown a vision of a potential future in which he lives a long and happy life but never creates any more great music. One of his hypothetical collateral descendents, an artist in a medium that hasn't been invented yet, has the same name and occupation as the protagonist of Newman's earlier science fiction novel The Night Mayor.
  • In The Night Mayor, there's a minor character named John Yeovil who's pointed out as having achieved critical and financial success, in contrast to the protagonist who's still building up her reputation and is best known for a contribution she made to an IP owned by someone else. When Kim Newman writes contributions to others' IPs, such as his Warhammer novels, he uses the pseudonym "Jack Yeovil" to distinguish it from his creator-owned work.
  • The protagonists of the alternate history novel Anno Dracula meet again for the first time in "Sorcerer Conjurer Wizard Witch", which isn't an alternate history (or at least is clearly not the same alternate history as Anno Dracula). It includes a lot of nods to Anno Dracula, with the two wondering what might have happened if they'd met under other circumstances and a bunch of references to events in Anno Dracula that didn't happen or happened differently in this timeline.
  • Life's Lottery is a novel in the form of a gamebook that lets the reader explore the many alternate paths Keith Marion's life might take. "Cold Snap" is a novella about a group of Differently Powered Individuals trying to save the world — one of whom is named Keith Marion and has the ability to see into alternate timelines. The novella includes specific nods to some of the more memorable timelines featured in Life's Lottery.
• B.J, Novak's One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories is a series of otherwise unrelated stories, but occasionally one will turn out to set up another: One story is about "The Girl Who Gave Good Advice", and in another, the main character asks a friend for advice, who turns out to be that same girl. Also, one story is about the main character meeting potential dates by always wearing a bright red t-shirt, then searching for the terms "red shirt" in the "Missed Connections" section of classified ad sites — another story is a long elaborate "missed connection" post, and the very last sentence mentions the subject wearing a red shirt.
• Paradise Lost: When he realizes that Eve has Fallen from grace, Adam wonders aloud whether the whole human race is now doomed or whether God will create a second wife for Adam to replace his first, evil wife. The whole idea of God replacing an evil first wife of Adam comes from the medieval folk legend about Lilith, a biblical demon that folklore says is the damned soul of Adam's original partner.
• The Peacock Party, the first sequel to Alan Aldridge's The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper's Feast, opens with Sir Percival de Peacock criticising "that terrible theme from the Butterfly Ball". In the accompanying illustration, a string quartet of mice have the sheet music to "Love is All", from The Butterfly Ball Animated Adaptation and Concept Album.
• Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg's The Positronic Man: In order to tie this story more explicitly to other stories in The 'Verse of Dr Asimov's Robot Series, Alfred Lanning, Peter Bogert, and Susan Calvin are mentioned by name in chapter two. The Robot Names and nicknames from the stories collected in I, Robot are also mentioned, such as RG and QT being nicknamed Archie and Cutie. The company itself is declared to have been founded in 1982, confirming the introduction of I, Robot.
• Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Was Not: In "The Locked Cell Murder", Holmes busts up a cult that sounds suspiciously like the one defeated by the teenaged Sherlock Holmes in the movie Young Sherlock Holmes.
• The fourth volume of A Song of Ice and Fire mentions several statues of various gods of death in the House of Black and White, including that of Bakkalon, also known as the Pale Child. Fans of the author's other works might recognize this as the name of a deity in his "The Thousand Worlds" setting, in particular the 1975 novelette "...and Seven Times Never Kill Man!"
  • In the North, there is a river called the Fever River, located in the southern swamp area known as the Neck that connects the North to the rest of Westeros. GRRM wrote a book called Fevre ^note pronounced the same Dream about vampires in the Deep South.
    • And injured POV characters often have fever dreams induced by their infected wounds.
• In Star Trek: Ex Machina, McCoy, exasperated by the sheer diversity of aliens on the refit Enterprise, sarcastically asks what’s next — hortas and glass spiders? Those readers familiar with the works of Diane Duane will get the joke (a reference to two of her characters, crewman Naraht and K’t’lk).
• The novelization of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake reveals Erin's last name is Hardesty, which was the surname of the heroine from the original 1974 film.
• The Time Ships, the official sequel to The Time Machine, includes several references to older and/or discarded draft of the original.
  • The Time Traveler's middle name — Moses — and Nebogipfel the Morlock are a reference to Dr. Moses Nebogipfel of The Chronic Argonauts, Wells' earlier (and unfinished) Time Travel story, considered a precursor of The Time Machine.
  • At one point, the Traveller recalls "details [he] didn't even tell his friends" about his journey to the far future at the end of the first novel. What he describes is the content of "The Grey Man", an extra chapter added due to Executive Meddling and usually left out of modern prints.
• Universal Monsters: Invoked by the film-escapees, who tend to recreate aspects of their original films in the modern world in this series. Examples from specific books include:
  • Dracula:
    • In the original film, Dracula arrives in London on what seems to be an abandoned ship, having fed on and killed the crew. In book 1, he's first seen on a similarly abandoned ship, having again fed on the crew.
    • In the original film, Dracula's base in London was the abandoned Carfax Abbey. In book 1, his base in Florida is the abandoned Carfax Hotel. This gets lampshaded in book 2 when Joe, Captain Bob and Nina are recapping what they know about the first monster in the hopes of figuring out how to deal with the Wolf Man.
  • The Wolf Man:
    • In the original film, Larry Talbot has his fortune told by the gypsy Maleva, who sees the pentagram on Jenny (a friend of Larry's love interest)'s palm and tells Larry to leave her tent. Soon after, Larry saves a woman from a werewolf via beating it to death with a silver object (his cane) he bought to impress a woman, but is bitten and becomes another werewolf. In this book, Don Earl Abernathy has his fortune told by Wilma Winokea, an Ocala shaman, who sees a pentagram on his forehead and tells him to leave her tent. Soon after, Don Earl saves a woman from a werewolf via hitting and driving it off with a silver object (the belt buckle) that his girlfriend won earlier, but is likewise bitten and becomes a werewolf himself.
    • In the original film, Larry has come back to his father's home in Wales, Great Britain. In the book, the Wolf Man manifests in Wales, Florida. This gets lampshaded when the teens are putting the facts together.
  • Frankenstein:
    • In the original film, Fritz tries to steal a good brain, but drops and breaks it, so he takes a criminal brain instead. In Young Frankenstein, Igor does the same, but claims the brain came from one "Abby Normal" (really "Abnormal"). Captain Bob does a deliberate Shout-Out to this when he explains that Fritz did the same thing all over again — he claims the stolen brain came from a "De Viant". When Nina doesn't recognize the name and Captain Bob starts snickering, Nina catches on and even lampshades it — "Fifty thousand comedians out of work and you think you're Mel Brooks!"
  • Creature from the Black Lagoon:
    • While looking for the Gill Man, Joe, Captain Bob and their friend Skylar run across a house owned by a man, Ben Browning, whom they think might be the human form of the Gill Man. He's not (in fact, he turns out to be Dr. Mark Williams — also escaped from the film — instead), but he shares the same name as Rico Browning, who played the Gill Man in its underwater scenes.
    • Near the end of the book, the characters suddenly realize that Rita Crockett shares her name with the boat that the film characters used to travel down the Amazon River.
  • Bride of Frankenstein:
    • Dr. Pretorius's assistant Karl has memories not only of his own life, but of Herr Frankenstein's hunchbacked assistant Fritz's. In real life, they were both played by the same actor, which Joe, Nina and Captain Bob mention.
    • At one point, Dr. Pretorius paraphrases one of his lines from the movie — "To the world of gods and monsters!"^note The original line was "To a new world of gods and monsters!"
    • The adventure ends when the Bride rejects the Creature, prompting him to let the heroes escape before the mansion blows up, taking all the monsters and the two mad scientists with it, just as happened with the lab where the Bride was made in the movie.
• Wicked, in novel form, makes a lot of minor references to the oft-ignored rest of the Baum series. Perhaps most notable is naming the deposed Ozma (there's more than one in the series) "Ozma Tippetarius": Tippetarius, or Tip for short, being the name of the gender-bent disguise of Ozma from The Marvelous Land of Oz.
• Michael A. Stackpole based the Redemption Scenario in Rogue Squadron on an infamous level of the X-Wing PC game.
• Farnham's Legend, the novelization of X: Beyond the Frontier, has a moment of Self-Deprecation regarding the combat AI's tendency to crash into things (known to X fans as the "auto-pillock").
  Yayandas: We are about to calibrate the newly installed, super-responsive inertial damper. You will never again feel the slightest shake, and never once be torn from your sleep, even if you are rammed head-on by a Xenon.
  Nopileos: Rrrr... do they do that?
  Yayandas: So one hears...

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