Spiritual Successor / Literature

Spiritual Successor in Literature.

---

• George Orwell intended Nineteen Eighty-Four to be this to We.
  • Nineteen Eighty-Four is arguably this to Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here, published fifteen years earlier. Both novels depict a formerly democratic western nation that succumbed to totalitarianism. The protagonists of both novels chafe under totalitarian rule and rebel through the written word. Both men find solace in secret romantic relationships with women who are both their soulmates and co-conspirators; Winston falls in love with Julia while Doremus has a secret affair with Lorinda. Finally, both protagonists find themselves incarcerated and tortured for their rebellion against the state.
• Mary Schmich's essay "Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young" (better known from Baz Lurhmann's "Everybody's Free To Wear Sunscreen") is considered by many to be a spiritual successor to Max Ehrmann's 1927 poem "Desiderata".
• Angel in the Whirlwind by Christopher G Nuttall draws obvious influence from David Weber's Honor Harrington series. The first book is essentially a What Could Have Been of On Basilisk Station where Manticore loses, and one character even refers to a missile salvo as "a decent Weber of missiles" in the second book.
• The improbable death scenes of Another make it awfully like a Japanese Final Destination.
• Jane Gaskell's Atlan series simultaneously marks the last incarnation of "elder Earth" fantasies of the Clark Ashton Smith / H. P. Lovecraft variety and looks back to the fantasy genre's roots in Theosophy and the jungle adventure fiction of H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs.
• The first book of Bravelands is this to The Lion King (1994). Both include a young male lion cub being driven out of his pride (and leaving behind a close female cub) after his father is murdered by another male. The cub is saved by prey animals and is adopted by them, before he eventually ventures off on his own.
• A case can be made that Lew Wallace's popular and acclaimed novel Ben-Hur serves as this to Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo. Wallace had cited it as one of his favorite stories and as an influence on his own work. It is visible in the parallels between the stories of Edmond Dantes and Judah Ben-Hur. Both are good well to do men who are eventually betrayed and wrongfully have their lives stripped away from them and are imprisoned in one way or another. Both however manage to eventually "rise from the ashes" so to speak an attain their freedom and go on a mission for justice/revenge.
• It's easy to read the Captain Underpants series as being a G-rated novelization of South Park. On the surface, the two appear to mainly revolve around juvenile Toilet Humour, but underneath it, the immature jokes masquerade the two's sense of layered, insightful social commentary that appeals to older demographics.
• Thanks in large part to how the whole series was originally conceived as "Lost Roman Legion meets Pokémon," Codex Alera can be seen as basically the ancient Roman equivalent to Avatar: The Last Airbender, particularly in how in-depth the series is in examining how Elemental Powers has impacted the everyday society of the Alerans.
• The Cold Moons is the badger equivalent of Watership Down. Both novels involve British wildlife attempting to flee a genocide brought on by humans. The difference is that The Cold Moons is about badgers while Watership Down is about rabbits.
• Austin Grossman's Crooked, a horror Alternate History of the Cold War, features Henry Kissinger as an Anti-Villain Humanoid Abomination with necromancer powers and monstrous pacts. In that sense, the novel works as a prequel to The Venture Bros., where Kissinger fills the same role.
• The Divine Invasion by Philip K. Dick is a Spiritual Successor to his earlier novel VALIS: Valis appears in both books, the fictional film "Valis" exists in both, and they have similar Gnostic themes, but The Divine Invasion is not, strictly speaking, a sequel. A third novel The Owl in Daylight was going to be written by PKD as another Spiritual Successor to round out the "Valis trilogy", but he died before writing it.
  • The relationship between VALIS and its earlier version Radio Free Albemuth is actually a much more typical example of the trope, as they heavily overlap in themes but are emphatically not part of the same Verse. Or they would have been if PKD hadn't left Radio Free Albemuth unpublished during his lifetime, so that it came out about five years after VALIS.
• Simon R. Green's Deathstalker series will be immediately familiar and fun territory to any Warhammer 40,000 player.
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid is often seen as a children’s novel version of Malcolm in the Middle.
• In the extras to the DVD of Dreamcatcher, Stephen King notes that the book (and subsequent film) can be seen as a Spiritual Successor to The Body/Stand By Me.
• The Dresden Files is probably the closest thing people will ever get to a novel series adaptation of Old World of Darkness. Alternatively, it works as a pretty damn good book series adaptation of Angel (albeit being made even Darker and Edgier than Angel already was, along with having a less adversarial perspective on religion).
• David Eddings' various works were made of this, being all High Fantasy epics told from a slightly different slant. The Belgariad was a basic coming-of-age story; The Elenium followed a loosely similar plot but was Darker and Edgier with a world-weary adult hero; The Redemption of Althalus was largely the story of that universe's Belgarath-equivalent; and The Dreamers was the most out-there, being told from the perspective of the gods.
• Fables From the Fountain by multiple authors is openly intended as a spiritual successor to Tales from the White Hart, being a series of Tall Tales about unlikely inventions, told in a pub full of scientists.
• Isaac Asimov's Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain is a... complicated example. The name indicates that it is an actual sequel (which would disqualify it), but as it turns out it is essentially a remake: taking the basic concept of Fantastic Voyage (miniaturization technology as a potentially crucial part in the Cold War and an attempt to use it to save the life or knowledge of someone who has made a critical breakthrough but failed to communicate it before falling into a coma), and then writing his own story around it, free of the constraints he was acting under when he wrote the novelization to the movie and able to update the science to 1980s standards.
• Fifteen Rabbits, by Felix Salten of Bambi fame, is one of the earliest serious xenofiction novels about rabbits. Years later, Watership Down retreaded and expanded upon the concept.
• Joe Haldeman's Forever Peace is, as the name implies, a Spiritual Successor to The Forever War despite taking place in a very different setting and, indeed, having very different basic assumptions about the setting. It reads as a more "mature" attempt to understand war by probing questions about the inevitable results of technological advances in warfare in the future that The Forever War glossed over so that its sci-fi war could be a clearer parallel to Vietnam.
• Frost Dancers is similar to Watership Down, but with hares instead of rabbits. They're similar xenofiction works from the POV of lagomorphs.
• The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng is a spiritual successor to Tan's first novel, The Gift of Rain. They have a similar structure (narrator looking back in old age and recounting their life), setting (Malaya during World War 2), and focus on memory. Garden also has a blink-and-you'll-miss-it mention of the Huttons (the protagonist's family in Rain), suggesting they're set in the same universe.
• Lois Lowry's book Gathering Blue is a "companion novel" to The Giver; it's another postapocalyptic novel which may be in the same universe, but shows a society that has gone the opposite direction.
• The Girl With All the Gifts may as well be the novelization of The Last of Us, only with the setting transplanted to England. Both are stories about a Zombie Apocalypse caused by a fungus in the cordyceps genus jumping to humans, in which a young girl who is immune to the fungus and lives in a symbiotic relationship with it is being transported across a post-apocalyptic wasteland filled with zombies and human bandits to a safe zone where scientists will likely slice her brain open to study her immunity. Two of Melanie's protectors in The Girl With All the Gifts, Miss Justineau and Sergeant Parks, each correspond to different aspects of the protagonist Joel's personality in The Last of Us, with Justineau being the loving, adoptive parental figure and Parks being the badass killer who develops a grudging respect for Melanie. And both end with the protagonist destroying humanity's hope for a cure for the infection, while implying that the search for a cure was a lost cause to start with.
• Glamorama is a Spiritual Successor in many ways to American Psycho. While Bret Easton Ellis has often been accused of writing about the same subjects repeatedly (shallow, drug-addled rich people in stories full of over-the-top violence that satirize mindless consumerism), Glamorama has a very similar surreal style comparable to American Psycho that his other books don't have since they're more grounded in reality.
• Frank Herbert wrote four short stories, published later as "The Godmakers", that shared theme and concepts with his masterpiece Dune.
• John Varley's The Golden Globe is a combination homage and spiritual successor to Robert A. Heinlein's Double Star. The protagonist in both is a highly skilled and intelligent but down-on-his-luck actor who used to be famous, and now lives partly on the wrong side of the law while still being obsessed with his craft (something drilled into him by his father). The characterizations and habits are essentially the same, and they also deliberately share a similar first-person narrative style, from the perspective of the character writing out his experiences after the fact.
• R. L. Stine said that Goosebumps was inspired by reading Tales from the Crypt comics and watching The Twilight Zone (1959) when he was young. Various books in the series also draw influence from older works, in many cases with just punny titles but also going into plot elements in some.
  • Monster Blood, about a novelty slime toy that can move around and eat anything it can envelop, is the series' take on The Blob (1958), albeit with the twist that anything that consumes the titular monster blood will grow in size. A later book, The Blob That Ate Everyone, was a more straightforward homage.
  • Say Cheese and Die!, about a Magical Camera whose photographs show the future (including the fates of people and objects photographed with it), draws its inspiration from the Twilight Zone episode "A Most Unusual Camera".
  • Night of the Living Dummy, about a Creepy Doll that terrorizes children while driving others to believe that they are acting out, is the Goosebumps version of Child's Play. Stine also said that it was inspired by The Adventures of Pinocchio.
  • Welcome to Camp Nightmare shares its twist, that the protagonists are actually aliens who will be heading off to Earth on a mission, with the Twilight Zone episode "Third from the Sun".
  • Stine has said that Piano Lessons Can Be Murder, about a piano teacher who enslaves children (or, in this case, their disembodied hands) to play the piano forever, was inspired by The 5,000 Fingers Of Dr. T.
  • Why I'm Afraid of Bees was inspired by the Robert Sheckley novel Mindswap.
  • Phantom of the Auditorium is a straightforward parody of The Phantom of the Opera.
  • Calling All Creeps! is rather like a kid-friendly version of Carrie.
  • The Haunted Car is about, well, a Sinister Car that tries to kill people, and is furthermore identified as female (it's possessed by the ghost of a girl who died when she took it on a joyride), while the protagonist is a boy who is obsessed with cars. In other words, it's a kid-friendly version of Christine, though unlike Arnie Cunningham, Mitchell Moinian doesn't become a co-villain himself.
• The Great Divorce:
  • The story is a modern(ish), less unsubtle counterpart to John Bunyan's classic The Pilgrim's Progress. Both works are allegories for the Christian faith where almost every character represents an ideology or a personal vice, and they both turn out to be dreams at the end. Lewis also wrote The Pilgrim's Regress, which was more blatantly inspired by Bunyan's work right down to the title.
  • This one is also a fairly obvious spiritual successor to The Divine Comedy. It's a dream-vision of a journey from Hell to Heaven via something not unlike Purgatory; Lewis appears as the everyman narrator of his own book; and he has a Spirit Advisor: George MacDonald represents a combination of both Virgil in Inferno and Purgatorio, and Beatrice in Paradiso (when Lewis first meets George MacDonald, he claims that reading George MacDonald's books as a teenager was for him 'like Dante's first sight of Beatrice'). Sarah Smith is always portrayed in very Beatrice-like terms, and her failed reunion with her husband is a portrayal of how Beatrice's reunion with Dante could have gone horribly wrong if Dante hadn't had the humility to accept her rebukes, and accept happiness without needing to be right.
• Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files has generated a number of spiritual successors, following the formula of a reasonably powerful First-Person Smartass hero and Destructive Savior in a world of Black-and-Grey Morality who tends to cause as much trouble as he prevents, examples being: The Hellequin Chronicles and Iron Druid Chronicles.
• Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg's The Great SF Stories: In this case, the series is intended as a spiritual antecedent to the Worlds Best Science Fiction series that began in 1965. Greenberg and Dr Asimov planned on ending the series by anthologizing up until 1963, but Robert Silverberg worked with Martin H. Greenberg to produce one more volume.
• Harry Potter is this to The Worst Witch of two decades earlier. A bumbling protagonist as a student in a school for magic, with two best friends, a well-connected goody-goody enemy, a nasty potions teacher and a kindly head of the school.
• Heartlight by T.A. Barron is similar in both style and themes to A Wrinkle in Time. Madeleine L'Engle herself has given the novel praise.
• There are some readers (mostly detractors) who have noted The House of Night series almost seems like an unofficial adaptation of My Immortal reworked into an original piece, due to the strange similarities between the plot, setting and characterization in both stories (e.g. the main character is a teenage vampire attending a school of magic secretly run by an evil teacher; she also befriends a group of outcasts, frequently rages against the popular kids, is juggling numerous love interests, is The Chosen One with all kinds of rare abilities etc).
• The Hunger Games:
  • To Jack London's The Iron Heel. In that book, Ernest Everhard speculates that the Oligarchy will eventually generate so much wealth from the exploitation of the labour classes that they will have nothing to do with it but engage in vast feats of engineering such as building enormous, spectacular cities. In the former the Capitol has, every year for the past seventy-five, built a forcefield enclosed arena packed with so much technology that everything is on camera, the weather can be changed, rivers can be turned off, huge parts of the arena can be made to spin, or earthquakes and avalanches can be triggered.
  • A particularly contentious assertion is that it's this to Koushun Takami's Battle Royale, a Japanese dystopian novel (better known for its film adaptation) about a group of teenagers who are forced to fight to the death by the government as a form of social control. Both novels, and their adaptations, were controversial in their respective countries for their depictions of violence against children and teenagers, and both were enormously influential on the Battle Royale Game genre of video games due to the superficially similar rulesets that they employed for their titular Deadly Games. Suzanne Collins, however, has strenuously denied taking any influence from Battle Royale, and says that she never heard of it when she set out to write her own story.
  • It's also been described as a modern, YA take on a pair of Stephen King stories written under the Pen Name Richard Bachman, The Running Man and The Long Walk. With the former, it shares the premise of a televised deathmatch that's used as Bread and Circuses, and with its film adaptation, it shares the flamboyant depiction of its dystopian future's decadent elite, albeit with the '80s yuppie influences swapped out for Reality TV. With the latter, it shares the idea of the death of teenagers specifically being used as entertainment.
• Lewis Carroll's epic nonsense poem "The Hunting of the Snark" is a Spiritual Successor to the Alice stories, and includes a number of references to "Jabberwocky."
• Infinity Ring is a Spiritual Successor to The 39 Clues as both are historical fiction books and web games for kids.
• Stephen King's It can easily be read as a literary adaptation of A Nightmare on Elm Street, albeit on a slightly more epic scale, with both IT (in the form of Pennywise) and Freddy Krueger being quick-witted, Faux Affably Evil monsters that prey on children by using supernatural powers to exploit their worst fears. IT's stomping grounds of choice are the sewers beneath the town of Derry, not unlike how Freddy's go-to dreamscape is an underground boiler room reminiscent of where he killed children in life. The 1994 film Wes Craven's New Nightmare takes the influence full-circle by having Freddy turn out to be an ancient demonic entity that latched onto the Nightmare series and took the form of its iconic villain, reminiscent of how IT is something more akin to an Eldritch Abomination. Andrés Muschietti even considered having IT take the form of Freddy at one point in the 2017 adaptation of It (both that film and the Nightmare series were made by New Line Cinema), though he decided that it would be too distracting.
• Killing Pablo is a rare nonfiction example. Written by Mark Bowden and featuring the exploits of General Bill Garrison, it reads much as a sequel to Black Hawk Down.
• Some have pointed out that Lost Souls (1992) - with its coming-of-age themes, displaced youth protagonists and attractive, trendy punk / goth vampires who spend their days engaged in violence and debauchery - can feel like a Darker and Edgier take on The Lost Boys, only set in the early 90s rather than the late 80s and with all the Ho Yay being explicitly canonical. The plot revolving around a group of drifter vampires who engage in gory mayhem is also reminiscent of Near Dark, which was released the same year as The Lost Boys, though Lost Souls is set primarily in the American South rather than the West.
• Me and Earl and the Dying Girl to The Fault in Our Stars, although the two books were published only two months apart. Both are Slice of Life novels about teenagers, at least one of whom has cancer. Both are narrated in First-Person Perspective by the teenage protagonist, both combine humor and drama, and both revolve around the protagonist bonding with a teen of the opposite gender who dies in the end. Although in The Fault In Our Stars the boy and girl fall in love, while in Me and Earl... it's a platonic friendship, and in the former book, the girl is the protagonist and the boy dies, while in the latter, the boy is the protagonist and as the title indicates, the girl dies. The film versions of both books, which were released a year apart, are sometimes considered Dueling Movies too.

• It's been pointed out that The Mister bears some surprising similarities to Poldark, to the point some have speculated that The Mister is yet another work of E. L. James' that started out as a Hotter and Sexier AU fanfiction with the Serial Numbers Filed Off (her previous work, Fifty Shades of Grey, is well-known for starting out as a Twilight fanfic).
• In a rather broad sense, Mogworld is a pretty good novelization of Star Ocean: Till the End of Time in terms of both works being based around video game characters in a fantasy world Noticing the Fourth Wall.
• Monster Hunter International is a series of Action Horror novels in which the protagonists are wisecracking roughnecks who hunt monsters with an assortment of the biggest guns and explosives they can get their hands on. Barring the fact that they battle explicitly supernatural enemies, it may just be the closest translation of Tremors to the page as one can get.
• The Nina Wilde series by Andy McDermott, about a semi-reluctant Adventurer Archaeologist, obviously takes more than a few cues from (and frequently references) Indiana Jones and Lara Croft. However, the number of pitched gun battles in exotic locations and rare vehicles which inevitably explode makes it far more akin to the written form of Uncharted.
• Daniel Allen Butler's The Other Side of the Night follows on from Walter Lord's seminal A Night to Remember and The Night Lives On. Lord's books focus on, firstly, the events of the sinking of the RMS Titanic; and secondly, the wider impact of the sinking with a greater focus on the events taking place on board the Carpathia and the Californian, the other two ships most closely involved in the disaster. Butler, whom Lord had mentored for his first book on the Titanic (called Unsinkable), asked Lord if he'd ever considered writing a book focusing mostly on the Carpathia and Californian. Lord hadn't, but gave Butler his blessing; the title, The Other Side of the Night, is a clear homage to the previous two books.
• The Planiverse: Computer Contact With a Two-Dimensional World by A.K. Dewdney acts as a successor to Edwin Albott Albott's Flatland.
• The Power of Five is this to Anthony Horowitz's unfinished Pentagram series from the 1980s.
• Pride and Prejudice can almost be read as a loose retelling of Much Ado About Nothing. Elizabeth corresponds to Beatrice, Darcy is like a Composite Character of Benedick and Don Pedro, Jane and Lydia both correspond to Hero (Jane as Elizabeth/Beatrice's sweet female relative whose briefly loses her love because of a misunderstanding, Lydia as the one whose damaged sexual reputation threatens to disgrace her family), Bingley is like an Adaptational Nice Guy take on Claudio, the villainous Wickham combines aspects of Don John with the worse side of Claudio, and Caroline Bingley fills out the rest of Don John's role.
• Donald Kingsbury's Psychohistorical Crisis takes Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series to create a plot where a character has Identity Amnesia. Aside from the term psychohistory, many indirect references are made to Foundation elements.
• Judy Blume's Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing is a bit like a loose Gender Flip of Beverly Cleary's Beezus and Ramona, which was published 17 years earlier. Both books are episodic Slices of Life about an average 9-year-old protagonist dealing with the crazy antics of their Annoying Younger Sibling, whom they describe as their "biggest problem," and the climax of both involves the younger sibling destroying something that meant a lot to the protagonist (Ramona ruins Beezus's birthday cake, Fudge eats Peter's pet turtle.) Both books also spawned a series of sequels named after the younger sibling, although the Fudge books keep big brother Peter as the protagonist, whereas the later Ramona books switch the viewpoint from Beezus's to Ramona's.
• Morgan Ray Hess's epic Science Fantasy novel Rainbow is this to A Wrinkle in Time.
• The Rainbow Magic series is receiving one in the Magical Animal Friends series, written by the same author. This series revolves around Jess and Lily, who enter the mysterious Friendship Forest and rescue animals from the wicked witch Grizelda and her Boggit servants.
• Similarly to the Whirlwind series above, David Drake's RCN series is essentially a Serial Numbers Filed Off version of the Honorverse in origin, with With the Lightnings (the first book) having grown out of an Honorverse short story Drake wrote for an anthology.
  • Per Word of God here, the Leary-Mundy books are "a SF version of the Aubrey-Maturin series" (which, like the Honor Harrington series, is a spiritual successor to Horatio Hornblower).
• Ready Player One by Ernest Cline could be considered one to Conor Kostick's 2004 novel Epic, as both follow a very similar plot and themes: in a post-apocalyptic Crapsack World where the entire world plays a virtual reality MMO and your station in life is most likely dependent upon your in-game prowess, a poor boy and his friends pursue the game's ultimate quest, become rich and famous along the way by noticing things others don't, and end up as enemies of a powerful Corrupt Corporate Executive who will stop at nothing to get what he wants.
• The Red Dwarf novelizations were once considered to be this to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Both series of books were second drafts of their stories, and thus many preferred them to the original (in the case of Hitchhiker's the radio serials, in the case of the Red Dwarf the TV show). However due to the advent of digital media the TV show is much more well known than the books, whereas the Hitchhiker's books are still considered the definitive version of its story.
• "The Red One", a short story from From a Certain Point of View about R5-D4, the astromech that was almost purchased in place of R2-D2, can be considered a serious version of "Skippy the Jedi Droid" from Star Wars Tales.
• A Japanese publisher licensed the basic premise of a Cut Short Shoujo mystery Light Novel called KZ Shonen Shoujo Seminar for a series of Middle Grade Literature. The result, Tantei Team KZ Jiken Note, is far more commercially successful, to the point that Seminar author wrote one of the latter work's spinoffs.
• In many ways, "Sixth of the Dusk" is Brandon Sanderson's version of After Earth (a film which his friend Howard Taylor notably disliked for plotholes). The idea of an environment completely dedicated to killing everything is the same, though the predators are telepathic rather than having the ability to smell fear (which was one of Taylor's suggestions for improving the movie).
• Spinning Silver isn't a sequel to Naomi Novik's previous book Uprooted, but it is very much in the same vein. Like Uprooted, it takes a fairy tale for the base of its story, in this case Rumplestiltzkin. It also takes place in a Fantasy Counterpart Culture of Eastern Europe (Lithuania, instead of Poland) in which the heroine has to deal with an implacable but misunderstood immortal force on the borders of her home in order to save it.
• Solea Razvan's A Symphony of Eternity series is a mashup of Discworld and Flashman set in a universe akin to Legend of the Galactic Heroes only where magic instead of technology is used in this epic Galactic War.
• John Christopher's The Tripods trilogy is, as the name suggests, a Spiritual Successor to H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds.
• Warrior Cats:
  • The series has many similarities to The Book of the Named - so much that people were claiming that the Ratha series copied Warriors, until it was pointed out to them that Ratha's Creature was written in the 1980s and Into the Wild came out in 2003. They both start Partially Civilized Animal felines and have similar levels of Family-Unfriendly Violence.
  • People were also drawing similarities to Felidae. They're both violent series about cats, though Felidae is not aimed at children.
  • The first arc in Warriors is very similar to the 1980s novel Tailchaser's Song. Both are xenofiction works about feral cats in Britain (or, Warriors was at first) who live in colonies referred to as "clans". They both start off with an orange tabby tomcat kitten — Tailchaser and Rusty/Firepaw — who goes to become a legendary hero. Even the portmanteau Animal Naming Conventions of the series are similar to one another.
• Jack London's White Fang is the spiritual successor to his The Call of the Wild. Both are xenofictional stories about dogs on the edge of civilization, one about a wild dog being tamed and the other about a domestic dog going feral. They're generally even published together in a single volume, as if the former were an actual sequel.

---