I’m rereading “And The Devil Will Drag You Under” which is one of Chalker’s best (certainly one of the most fun, in any case) and the premise is that for reasons irrelevant to this post, our heroes are being sent to collect “plot-coupons” from various parallel worlds. In the excerpt below, our heroine has just left a world where God enforces His laws. For example, when our heroine wakes up in the new world and groggily doesn’t want to get out of bed, she’s zapped with the as a stern voice yells “SLOTH!” and she’s hyper-energetic as though she’d had too much coffee. Anyway, she’s left that world and now she’s on what so far is a generic fantasy world. She goes into a tavern. There are bunches of characters from other books there. I can get all (or almost all) but the last. My notes are in the quote box below in red
All the other stories are from the '30s (Conan) through the '50s (“Three Hearts & Three Lions”) and I’m pretty familiar with the sf/f books of that period.
Anyone have any ideas? I remember reading the book when it was new and wondering the same thing. Any info would be appreciated
Beyond the reference to Mark 15:27, I don’t know who the “tall, strikingly beautiful woman” and “her handsome and bearded companion” might be. It’s a little too generic.
Ningauble of the Seven Eyes and Sheelba of the Eyeless Face are sorcerous advisers/plot devices to Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, respectively. They send the two adventurers on bizarre, often conflicting errands and otherwise mess with them.
Yeah. Several of the characters alluded to appeared in the magazine “Unknown” so you might check other works published there. The use of Greek (Christos) is another clue; we might be looking for a Greek character, or one named Christopher (or an author named Christopher?).
That rings a bell for me, but I might just be recognising the trope rather than the actual characters, because I’m not familiar with most of the other references. The guy is a knight/paladin, a bit simple-minded or forgetful or something mentally slightly wrong with him. The woman is a sorceress/demon/person from the future, the smarter and ultimately more powerful of the two, but not a fighter.
That might be completely off-base, just what comes to mind.
Morgaine and Vanye come from Cherryh’s Alliance-Union Universe, from far past the Downbelow Station & Cyteen eras. Although they’d in theory have knowledge of Christ in their history, it’s too far back for them to be referring to him in such a way.
Plus, Cherryh doesn’t match the timeline of the other writers: Leiber, Howard, Shea, Anderson. I’d expect it to be from something by a writer like CL Moore or a contemporary.
Nope, this book pre-dates those stories ( published 1979 ).
I hope somebody has an answer. I’m 100% with Fenris on this one - it is one Chalker’s funnest books and this one always stumped me. Kind of made me feel very slightly like a dolt in days past, like reading the above-mentioned Silverlock and only getting half the references ( or less :p, though maybe I’d do better these days - it’s been decades since I last looked at it ). I’m sure it must be a classic tale of some sort.
tanstaafl: Operation Chaos, and the sequel, Operation Luna, are wonderful stuff! Darn fun! However, the Matucheks speak pretty ordinary “American” English, and I don’t think they’d indulge in the (mild) archaic language in the quote.
Also, Virginia had red hair as Anderson told us every other paragraph*
*Don’t get me wrong–I loved Operation Chaos and thought Operation Luna was good, but that was a noticable writing tic that Anderson had. FYI-She was based on Ginny Heinlein and the story is a “serial numbers filed off” sequel to Heinlein’s “Magic, Inc”
Maybe, but Silverlock is basically the same idea as The Devil Will Drag you Under, a person having an adventure and meeting a bunch of thinly disguised fictional characters.
