I’m reading A Fall of Moondust and wondering once again exactly how I got to this age having read so little Arthur C. Clarke.
Anyway, in the book, some of the characters pass the time by reading aloud from a very trashy romance novel called The Apple and the Orange, about a love affair between Isaac Newton ("‘Call me Ike,’ said the sage huskily.") and Nell Gwyn. This novel, thank the Maker, is purely an invention of Clarke’s.
I thought it might be fun to list other works of fiction that exist only in a fictional universe, especially those that figure into the plot at least in some minor way.
Well, there’s the Necronomicon, of course, although technically it’s not fiction.
There’s The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which is a fictional alterative history within the fictional alterative history of Philip K. Dick’s The Man In The High Castle. Not only is it ficitonal fiction, it’s also self-referential and somewhat recursive (Grasshopper mostly parallels actual history and the characters in High Castle start to realize that they’re living within a novel.)
Now I have this niggling irritation that I know a lot of books that fulfill this criterion but I can’t recall them. grrrr
Nabakov’s “Pale Fire” is one. Some people really rate this book highly, but it didn’t click for me. IIRC a significant part of the book is made up of a poem written by one of the main characters, an English professor at a small US college (I think). The book describes how a deranged European, who thinks he is the king of Nova Zembla infiltrates the guy’s life. A lot of the story is written from the fantasist’s POV, so there is a huge reality gap between what is actually happening and how the fantasist interprets what is happening. I think the poem is used to illustrate that this gap exists and that the narrator is completely unreliable. Maybe someone who liked the novel better than me can give you a better description.
Ah, thanks Stranger! The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is probably my subconscious motivation for the whole thread. I just knew I’d recently read a fantastic example. It was tickling at my forebrain, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Seems like a common phenomenon!
There are several novels by TS Garp described in The World According to Garp. I can only think of the one with the professor who suffered terribly from flatulence and was cuckholded (though that might have been a collegue).
In Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, Lucien is the keeper of Dream’s library, filled with books that were never written. A few of the titles are mentioned, but don’t immediately come to mind.
The (nightime?) soap opera that Summer watches on “The O.C.”
The detective novels that JL Picard holodecked in Star Trek TNG.
Itchy and Scratchy on the Simpsons
There is an Anime (I believe it is Space Battleship Nadesko or something like that)where the charachters regularly watch anime (and those episodes are similar to the plotlines in the “outer” show)
sorry so vague
Brian
oh, and Thyme magazine in Foxtrot