Since FilkTheBlue never answered you, it is from 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. (iIRC the concept was either mistranslated into English or misused by Murakami originally and what was being described was a cocoon, not a chrysalis.)
I’m not sure why I never got a notification on the question 
.
There is a line in the book, during one of the Tengo chapters, where specific mention is made that Tengo thinks that Fuka-eri should have used the word cocoon instead of chrysalis. So it isn’t an issue of translation, at least not from Japanese to English (although it might be a translation issue between Little People speech and Japanese).
ETA. The implication seemed to be that the reason chrysalis was used instead of cocoon was due to the Little People having a lack of full understanding of human languages.
During the Reagan administration, National Lampoon, as a gag, created the cover for a joke book called 50 Watts, attacking the former Secretary of the Interior who was “anti-environmentalist.” The jokes were “selected” by James Watt and involved cruelty to animals. The cover depicted a woman cowering in her bed while the husband, baseball bat in hand, has just dispatched an intruder. The cops are in attendance taking his statement and the prowler is a baby seal with a huge fatal bruise on its head hanging halfway in the window. The punchline: “I thought it was a burglar! Honest!”
Thanks, DG and FTB.
I was recently reminded of the blind, jaunty poet/songwriter of Heinlein’s books, Rhysling, whose works were said to have been collected in four books: Songs of the Spaceways (published the week he died), The Grand Canal, and other Poems, as well as High and Far and UP SHIP!
How about the works of Kilgore Trout, who is referenced in several of Vonnegut’s books?
A never-successful science fiction writer whose work only ever appeared as padding to fill out pornographic magazines between the pictures…
Mentioned in post 12.
Ah. As Paul Simon says in ‘Call me Al’… I have a short little span of attention…
Just saw the George Clooney movie Michael Clayton again. His character’s son is a fan of a fantasy card game, and a book of the same name appears in the movie, but I couldn’t quite make out the author’s name.
According to IMDB:
Committed to a fully developed back story, director Tony Gilroy spent a good deal of time establishing the details of “Realm and Conquest” with production designer Kevin Thompson. Gilroy explained that right from the beginning, he knew “Realm and Conquest” was going to be a key prop. In the movie, it’s a metaphor for truth and justice. To create the details of the fictional novel, Thompson generated original visuals inspired by German Expressionistic images cut from wood blocks, and Tony Gilroy wrote the first two pages for three chapters of the book. They even designed a “Realm and Conquest” card game for a scene between Henry [the son] and Michael. Thompson said, “This detail was important to Tony because, in his own life, novels and games similar to ‘Realm and Conquest’ allow him to connect with his son in a meaningful way.”
I’ve been reading some old sf short stories.
In the 1939 John Berryman story “Space Rating,” there’s a reference to the Manual of the Space Patrol, a “thick, blue-bound volume prepared by the scientists of the Space Patrol for classroom use,” including a chapter on FTL navigation.
In the 1950 Poul Anderson story “The Helping Hand,” Cundaloan society’s epic novel Dvanagoa-Epai is regarded as so important that many from Earth learn Luaian “simply to read [it] in the original” language.
In Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books, a novel by Kirsten Miller about the comeuppance of a censorious woman in a small Georgia town, several nonexistent books are mentioned as well as numerous real ones. The authors of all but one of the nonexistent books go unmentioned: The Heroes of Troy, Georgia is a handmade book by Nahla Crump, a local child.
There’s also A Girl’s Guide to the Revolution, A Caledonian Fling, Our Confederate Heroes, A Southern Belle’s Guide to Etiquette and Taken by the T-Rex, the last of which is apparently weird paleontological porn.
In Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera series, the titular Codex apparently exists in-universe, because in the first book, a certain treasonous character says to himself something like “I have betrayed my Lord and the Codex”. I kept an eye out in the other five books to see if that was ever explained, and it wasn’t.
But it doesn’t qualify for this thread.
Huh. I checked Amazon and didn’t see it there. Thanks.
In John Kenney’s novel I See You’ve Called In Dead, we meet the hard-drinking, highly opinionated Murray Eustis, who wrote a single failed novel, A Penny For Your Thoughts Is Too Much, before taking up teaching at NYU.
I have been a reader since before kindergarten. I have hundreds of books and the more I aquire, the more books I find out about that I just have to read. Here’s some suggestions:
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has been a favorite since my mid-teens and I still love and re-read it every few years. Goofy British Sci-Fi comedy platinum, IMHO
Phillip Dick is a must read author. His stories all have some bizzare elements to them. His short stories are highly recommended, and have been the basis for both Total Recall movies, Paycheck, Blade Runner, Minority Report, and more.
older sci-fi pioneers:
Issac Assimov was one of the pioneers of modern sci-fi. His writing is highly intelligent, high level sci-fi plotlines and concepts, really cool characters, and some very witty comebacks that are easy to miss. His first books are the Foundation series. I will say the first book and a little of the second were originally from a series of short stories he wrote for a sci-fi magazine in the late 40’s. He builds up an entire galaxy at the highest technology level, but as short stories with a limited word count, the pacing seems a little off. Plus there’s huge jumps in the timeline and most of the chars are highly intelligent, but humorless, dry personalities. Still a great story, but a bit rough. About 1/3 of the way into the second book, the story becomes much longer and much more complex, that’s where it really starts to shine. I, Robot is a very cool series also (forget about the Wilsmith movie), and he has written a LOT of books over the years.
Frederick Pohl is another great modern sci-fi founder. Amazing books.
Ray Bradbury and H.G. wells are two of the very first sci-fi authors.
If you’re into the more modern cyber-punk style, I’d recommend Phillip Palmer (Version 43 was awesome), Neil Stephenson and William Gibson have a lot of awome stories to tell.
“Each book I have is a door to another world. A world in which I can lose myself, find myself, or both!” - Me (2023 or so)
Thanks, DOAC, but I’d suggest you look more closely at the first post in this thread. This is actually about non-existent books.
Your post might fit better here: Khadaji’s Whatcha Reading Thread - November 2025 edition