IIRC, many of the incidents in New York, New York were taken from the biography of Doris Day (and one of her movies).
I don’t think they are comparable in “inspiration”. Brooks uses a lot of tropes “everyone” in fantasy gets from Tolkien and a lot of those don’t originate with him. McKiernan put some thin paper on top of LotR and traced the whole thing. He has the Shire, he has hobbits, he has the fellowship of the ring, he has the council of Elrond, he has the mines of Moria, he has the scouring of the Shire, etc. and so forth. Oh he changes things up a little, the hobbits are Warrows, and have special eyesight for instance, but every time you think “finally, this is original stuff” the next page is back to tracing Tolkien.
I just learned that William Golding’s Lord of the Flies was inspired by R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, an 1858 children’s novel which was still popular during Golding’s childhood. The Coral Island was about three boys - named Ralph, Jack, and Peterkin - who are stranded on a tropical island. But they prosper thanks to hard work, strong Christian morals, and being British. Golding took a more pessimistic view of how a group of boys left to their own devices would behave.
I hadn’t heard of that, but Lord of the Flies also bears a strong resemblance to a Jules Verne novel – Deux Ans de Vacances, translated as Two Years’ Vacation or as Adrift in the Pacific. A crew of boys on a boat get blown off-course and land on a deserted island, where they set up their own society. Again, unlike Golding, the book ends with a pretty happy society. The book came out in 188, well after Ballantyne’s. I wonder if Verne was familiar with it. I can easily believe that Verne came up with it on his own – he was obsessed with Robinsonades, and wrote several of them (including his most famous, The Mysterious Island). He would probably have come up with the idea of castaway boys on his own. Verne’s book was also popular enough, and could have served as inspiration for Golding.
There’s an issue of Swamp Thing (issue 45 of the 1981 series) that’s based on the Winchester Mystery House.
Which would be fine. The house is interesting and the rumours surrounding it make for a fine ghost story. So if Moore had just made the Campbells the in-universe equivalent of the Winchesters, that would have been just fine.
But, then he went and lampshaded the reference by calling the Campbell rifle a ‘second-rate copy’ of the Winchester, which was a pure needle-scratch stopper, mostly serving to invite the reader to read the story as the same.
On the other hand, if the same thing happened to both the Campbells and the Winchesters, that does kind of imply that “being haunted by the ghosts of everyone killed by your gun,” is a normal occupational hazard of being a gunsmith. Which is kind of awesome, and totally believable in a Swamp Thing comic.
Well, I read the first book when it was published, a couple of years after I’d read LotR for the first time, and without having read any reviews or there being an internet outside of the DoD and military contractors, I noticed right off how similar it was…not just tropes, but character and place names. It may not have been quite to the degree that McKiernan’s was, but it was very much noticeable to a teenager.
I can’t comment on any of the other Shannara books except for Elfstones, because I had discovered much more interesting and original f/sf authors by then and stopped reading Brooks altogether.
Ooh! Does he describe how to flense a space whale? 
Avatar also owes money to the old 2000AD strip Firekind.
And I like Terry Pratchett a lot, but Interesting Times is basically an uncredited reworking of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman and the Dragon. Not just the plot - cowardly, cynical underachiever is continually mistaken for heroic saviour and shipped to China to mediate in a rebellion between a decadent, hidebound ruling class and a revolution run by a zealously sloganeering proletariat - but the observations and even some individual sentences are almost identical.
There are quite a few of these in science fiction. We’ve discussed them over the years.
One that stands out in my mind is the similarity between Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Robert Sheckley’s Dimension of Miracles – and I’m not the only one to have noticed it. Adams, who was admittedly a big fan of Sheckley, even went so far as to say that he wasn’t ripping off DoM. But the similarities are there. Maybe it was subconscious.
In both books you have a satirical look at a guy who is taken away from the earth because of a bureaucratic screw up by the aliens running the galaxy, and he has adventures going from planet to planet, encountering even more bureaucracy. Along the way he meets the aliens who built the earth as contractors. He also encounters aliens renowned as poets (although in Adams the Vogons are especially bad poets, in Sheckley the Orithi are very good poets. They’re also delicious.) Eventually, both heroes find their way back to the Earth, although that’s not quite the end of things, and they keep on wandering.
That reminds me - Paul MacAuley’s “The Secret of Life” takes many incidents from the life of Richard Feynman and adapts them for his main character.
And I strongly suspect that “Tunnel in the Sky” is also based on Coral Island.
Pat Murphy’s “There and Back Again” has an obvious inspiration in Tolkien.
Well, there’s little question it was inspired by Lord of the Flies, so you may be right by chain of influence.
Actually, I don’t think Tunnel was inspired by Lord of the Flies, which sold very few copies in the US in 1955 (fewer than 3000, per Wikipedia Lord of the Flies - Wikipedia ). I think it’s more likely that both Heinlein and Golding were responding to a famous book from their youth, than that Heinlein responded immediately to an obscure novel by a new author that very few people in the US would have even heard of.
Patterson’s bio of Heinlein says that the resemblance between Tunnel and Lord is a coincidence Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2: The Man Who ... - William H. Patterson, Jr. - Google Books and notes that Tunnel was completed in January 1955 (Lord was published in September 1954)
Yep. The earlier Punisher was very much in the mold of Reno Williams and other 80’s type action stars, and it wasn’t until around 2000 that Garth Ennis started writing him as being sociopathically cruel.
Heinlein was known to have read it at the time. He was a literary omnivore who received many early editions from his agent, publishers and others in the industry (often looking for blurbs). He was also a very, very fast writer, so where another author might have taken a year to turn out an ms, Heinlein did it in weeks, submitting the book in December 1954.
Bill’s wrong. It didn’t fit his interpretation of things, which, I’m sorry to say, didn’t often fit into a sensible framework.
Both Dorothy Uhnak’s The Investigation and Mary Higgins Clark’s Where Are The Children? are based on the Alice Crimmons case.
The author’s note for the Silver Call Duology (which was intended to be published first) explicitly states that he was trying to copy Tolkien. It’s not really “plagiarism” if you’re citing your source.
Calling it derivative or boring or terrible fan-fic or whatever is justified but “plagiarism” suggests a level of intentional deceit on the part of the author which simply wasn’t there.
The Science Fiction author David Weber admits that his character Honor Harrington is based on C.S. Foresters’ Horatio Hornblower and more than a few sequences do parallel closely.