Have you ever read a fictional work and recognized the source of the plot, ideas, dialogue, macguffin, whatever?
A few weeks ago I read a short mystery/crime story set in wartime Washington DC. Within a few pages I was sure the author had just read David Brinkley’s wonderful book Washington at War. After that, I could spot chapter and verse influence, even to the order of topics.
A few years ago I read a book supposedly by a college kid who traveled with an old-school carnival for a summer, and learned all the grifter’s tricks for the various games and booths. I was disappointed, because again I could see chapter and verse from John Scarne and Darwin Ortiz’s excellent writeups on carnival fraudsters.
Anyone else had such an experience?
ETA: Tom Clancy and every military equipment manual ever written are acknowledged in advance.
Richard Condon lifted a bit of the Manchurian Candidate directly from Robert Grave’s I, Claudius. (The section in question described the sexual relationship (or lack thereof) between Johnny Islin and his wife - mirroring exactly the description of the same between Augustus and Livia.)
Well, if we’re going for the obvious homage to history, Asimov’s Foundation and Empire’s opening novella “The Last General” is a fanciful retelling of the history of Flavius Belisarius and Justinian I.
The opening of Robert Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy owes quite a bit to Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. (And it wasn’t until years after I first read it that I realized that anthropologist “Margaret Mader” was a very thinly-disguised anthropologist Margaret Meade.)
Two of Fred Saberhagen’s “Berserker” novels were not only obviously based on other influences, but painfully obviously.
Berserker White Death was a re-telling of Moby Dick, right down to the guy with one leg replaced by a prosthetic of berserker hull metal, and the defective giant evil berserker that leaked a radioactive glow. Painful.
Berserker Fury was a re-telling of the battle of Midway, again in such painful detail as emphasizing the difference between high-altitude bombers and surface-level bombers – in deep space!
Well, I’ve read The Iron Tower. Disappointingly the perfectly fair assessment of the level of LotR-plagiarism has been edited out of that Wikipedia entry to be replaced by the wishy-washy:
The genesis matters not, the book is “inspired” by LotR in so many ways that it’s barely readable.
Back in the 80’s I had a two-part Punisher comic that was a story about the title character in the Vietnam era. He was a Marine sniper engaged in a duel with a VC sniper. It took like two pages before I realized the entire story was an anecdote from the life of real-life sniper Carlos Hathcock. I just put the comic down and picked up the concluding issue, turned to the last page, and saw that it even had the exact same ending.
Nah. A little DNA there, maybe, but just a few strands.
Deathworld is perhaps HH’s only work deserving of a decent miniseries/film treatment.
Back to OP: In general, I wasn’t meaning to reference fiction influenced by earlier fiction, but fiction that had clear basis in not just general history or whatever, but a specific nonfiction book or telling.
In one of Elizabeth Moon’s Paksennarion novels, there’s a bit where our hero goes into the basement of a keep, fights an ogre-like creature, and rescues a kidnapped gnome, who expresses his thanks by giving her an iron ring signifying her as a friend to gnome-kind. This is lifted directly from a D&D module, The Village of Hommlet.
I read The Fixer by Bernard Mahmud in college. A friend later asked me what it was about. Remembering we took a Russian history course together, I said “The Bayliss Case.” He knew immediately.
It was based on a real historical event, but one few Americans knew about.
Not only that, but The Punisher, as a character, was an obvious rip-off of Don Pendleton’s Mack Bolan, “The Executioner.” Except that, over time, the Punisher stories have become the better product. One of those rare cases where the knock-off is better than the original.
When I first read Master and Commander, the first novel about Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, I understood that Aubrey was based Thomas Cochrane. When I read Cochrane’s autobiography I discovered just how closely the cruise of the Sophie was based on the cruise of the Speedy, right down to the surgeon holding the helm of the brig while everyone else boards the Spanish frigate.
In one of the later novels Maturin notes that he sees Aubrey as becoming less like Cochran.
As another example, I re-read Neal Stephenson’s Anathem. Between the first time I had read it and the second, I read Roger Penrose’ Emperor’s New Mind. I think Stephenson read it and was strongly influenced while writing Anathem–they share a thread about consciousness being a quantum phenomenon. *Anathem *also depicts a millennia-old civilization that has apparently never developed true artificial intelligence. Finally, tiling is an important subplot. Well, not a smoking gun, I suppose.
