These things in literature are 100% real. We promise.
- American Gods: The House on the Rock is a real place in southern Wisconsin and is, if anything, even weirder than described in the book. The carousel is real (but you probably won't be allowed to ride on it). So are The Streets Of Yesterday and The Drunkard's Dream. And the whale. And the Infinity Room. And the Santas, if you visit around Christmas (they vanish into the ether come January). There's also some beautiful artwork, rooms full of dolls, self-playing orchestra instruments, enough narrow dark corridors to make a claustrophobe gibber with fear, and a surprising dearth of bathrooms.
- In the Arthur book "D.W. The Picky Eater", DW goes to a restaurant for Grandma Thora's birthday which has a kids' menu with all its entrees named after nursery rhyme characters. Howard Johnson's
◊ had a similar kid's menu during its heyday. - Aubrey-Maturin:
- A black bosun onboard HMS Sophie, multiracial crews with sizable Muslim, Jewish, and Lascar minorities, and East Asian crew members all living in relative harmony sounds like Politically Correct History. As it turns out, the Royal Navy's global reach and perpetual manpower shortage meant that it would recruit whatever seamen were available, wherever they were (a fact also explained at the beginning of Billy Budd). It helps that the best captains and crews would largely ignore race—as long as you were a good seaman, you were in.
- This is an example of Eagleland Osmosis. Many modern audiences, both American and otherwise, don't seem to understand that racial segregation of the kind that existed in the United States and South Africa either didn't exist in other countries or was more loosely enforced. It didn't exist in the form we usually think of in America of the mid- to late 1700s either, according to records of the time. The War of Independence was a time of surprisingly relaxed attitudes towards sexual morality (including LGBT), interracial relationships (with not only African Americans but also Irish people), female-owned businesses, prostitution, drinking and gambling. Slavery was often for contracts of set periods of time, not lifelong, more like indentured servitude; and it was much easier for slaves, including African ones, to buy their freedom. Future president John Adams wrote at appalled length about these things.
- Autobiography of Red includes a backstory incident in which a man locked in a prison cell survives a volcanic eruption that wiped out the rest of his town; he goes on to become a circus attraction, known as Lava Man, on the basis of his experience. The oddness of this incident meshes with the Magic Realism of the book as a whole — but Lava Man is actually based on a real person, Ludger Sylbaris.
- Although it didn't reach Urban Legend level in reality, the in-story legend of the "Rail Tracer" in Baccano! has some equivalent in reality. The original Murder, Inc. rode trains and committed hits in various cities so that their crimes were essentially untraceable, as police from the cities where the crimes were committed would naturally suspect local criminals, who likely would have alibis for the time the murders were committed. Completely intentional. The train-hopping assassin is kind of important to the plot. Welcome home, Claire!
- The favored pastime of the titular mercenaries in The Black Company is an unspecified card game called "tonk". Most people would assume this is something made up for the series. In real life, "tonk" is a variant of five-card rummy which appeared in black communities in the Deep South, and remains somewhat popular to this day.
- Brown's Pine Ridge Stories: The "Brazier" mentioned in the nineteenth chapter would likely be mistaken by some readers as a made up restaurant for the story, but it does exist. Most readers, particularly those born 1990 and after, would recognize it as Dairy Queen.note
- Codex Alera had a culture that form clans based on bonding with a animal species. While some are familiar animals (Horse Clan, Wolf Clan, Fox Clan), there are also the Gargant Clan and Herdbane Clan which are elephant-sized hairy quadrupeds and 2-3-meter-tall birds with axe-like beaks, respectively. Sounds like typical made-up fantasy animals? Nope. They're the (exitinct) giant ground sloth and terror bird.
- Ignatius J. Reilly of A Confederacy of Dunces loves Dr. Nut soda, which many readers would assume is a Bland-Name Product version of Dr. Pepper. It was actually a real soft drink locally produced in the New Orleans area (and long since discontinued). Those old enough to recall the drink describe it as tasting like Dr. Pepper mixed with amaretto.
- The setting of Bram Stoker's Dracula, Transylvania, is sometimes thought of as a fictional setting, especially because so much subsequent media has used it as the stock location for vampire and monster stories. It's a real place — a region of Romania.
- In A Dollar To Die For, the Apaches, led by Banton, use maneating ants on Blondie. This method of torture seems strange and outlandish, but apparently it was true.
- The Eye of Argon features the now-infamous "scarlet emerald". There is in fact such a thing as a red emerald, though it's more commonly known as red beryl or bixbite.
- The original UK edition of The Fairy Rebel, and the audiobook version read by the author, mentions a candy bar called the Crunchie bar. Non-British children who hear the audiobook might assume this was just a made-up candy with a generic made-up name, but the Cadbury Crunchie is in fact a real British chocolate bar with a honeycomb brittle center. (The American edition replaces it with a Snickers bar.)
- In The Game (2005), Neil Strauss and his friends at one point end up taking the wrong road between Moldova and the Ukraine and end up in an unrecognized country that still uses Soviet imagery and propaganda wishing for a return to the glorious days of the USSR. That country, Transnistria, exists.
- The Gift of the Magi begins with 'One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies.' Modern readers may assume an error by the author if they are not aware that the US once minted half-cent, two-cent, and three-cent coins, any of which could be used to come up with $1.27 using no pennies. The last 2-cent pieces were issued in 1873 and the last 3-cent pieces in 1889; it's conceivable that some were still circulating in 1906, when the story was written (though Gresham's law makes this unlikely to be true for the half cent).
- Good Omens:
- Mentions the angel Aziraphale's collection of Infamous Bibles, named from errors in typesetting. Amazingly, all of these Bibles (other than the Charing Cross and the Buggre Alle This) actually exist.
These Bibles included the Unrighteous Bible, so called from a printer's error which caused it to proclaim, in I Corinthians, "Know ye not that the unrighteous shall inherit the Kingdom of God?"; and the Wicked Bible, printed by Barker and Lucas in 1632, in which the word 'not' was omitted from the seventh commandment, making it "Thou shalt commit Adultery." The Bug Bible had "afraid of bugs by night" instead of "afraid of terror by night". There were the Discharge bible, the Treacle Bible, the Standing Fishes Bible, the Charing Cross Bible and the rest. Aziraphale had them all. Even the very rarest, [...] the Buggre Alle This Bible.- It also contains the River Uck, which sounds like a river you would make up for the Horseperson of the Apocalypse Pollution to hang out next to, but is in fact completely real.
- Gotrek & Felix first met during a protest against a Window Tax, which escalated into a riot in which they were responsible for the death of some soldiers sent to put it down, getting them declared outlaws in Altdorf. Window taxes were a real thing in Europe in the 18th and 19th Century, intended as a way to tax income without the government needing to track what everyone's income was, on the theory that richer people would have bigger houses with more windows. People bricking up windows to drop their home to a lower bracket was also a fairly common tax dodge in real life. The tax wasn't very popular in real life either (though not to the point of riots), as people saw it as a tax on access to daylight and fresh air.
- In Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, there is a character who has turned his house into a miniature castle complete with moat and drawbridge. To modern readers this may seem eccentric, but this was actually quite common for wealthy Victorians. Then again, it may also seem like the act of a rich idiot who wants to impress other rich idiots, and We Have Those, Too here in the 21st century. Case in point. Another Victorian example is A. J. Cronin's Hatters Castle, and another castle-house is the titular house in the The Green Knowe Chronicles series of English children's books.
- Harry Potter:
- The American publisher's knowledge about this trope led to the renaming of the first book in the US. They believed that most Americans would be unaware of the Real Life alchemical concept of the Philosopher's Stone, and thus would misinterpret and be turned off by the title.
- Though it is assumed by many to be a fictional creation and is sold alongside other 'wizarding' candies at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter's Honeydukes stores, Dumbledore's favourite candy, Sherbert Lemon, is actually a common real-life candy in Britain. The first book culturally translated it into "lemon drop", which is... similar.
- Similar to the Maniac Magee example, Harry's line about buying Mars Bars is maintained in the American line. Blooper? Actually, no — at the time the book was published, a candy bar known as Mars was sold in the states, and prior to the Turn of the Millennium, was just as common a sight in vending machines, candy stores, and convenience stores as Mars bars are everywhere else in the world.
- Exploding Snap is obviously a wacky wizarding invention, right? Well, the "exploding" part is. Snap, by itself, is a real children's game in the United Kingdom (it's rarely played outside of primary schools though).
- Many international fans who were unfamiliar with the British education system initially thought that prefects and the house system were just another part of J.K. Rowling's made-up wizarding world. They're actually a traditional feature of many real-life schools in the UK.
- Some commentators have criticized Cho Chang's name for being an inaccurate Chinese name, or sounding too stereotypically Asian. As it turns out, "Cho Chang" is a common (or at least possible) name in Chinese-speaking regions — it's the Wade-Giles reading of "張卓," which would be written as "Zhuo Zhang" in Pinyin, the more commonly used Chinese romanization scheme today. Wade-Giles is still in official use in Taiwan, and was still not uncommon when the books were being written.
- One might think that a fumble-fingered executioner failing to sever a person's head completely was invented from whole cloth by JKR. As it happens, Jack Ketch did it twice. This was so common in the Middle Ages (usually because the Executioner had to get drunk just to deal with the stress) that Henry VIII hired a master swordsman from France to execute Anne Boleyn in a single stroke, which would have been considered merciful for the time.
- Hornbeam is one type of wood that Mr. Ollivander uses to make wands. It sounds like a Fantastic Flora, but it's a real tree closely related to the hazelnut tree.
- His Family: Roger Gale has a thriving business with several employees that consists of—people paying him to clip out and forward news articles about them. It may seem hard to believe that anyone, even in the pre-radio age, could have made a living, much less run a successful business, clipping out news articles about various people. But press-clipping services of the type that Roger runs were totally a real thing. In a different book, Jubal Harshaw subscribes to one in Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. Newspaper-only clipping services were around as recently as 1990, and in modified Internet form are still a real thing. Doc Savage also employs a newspaper clipping service, run by one of the graduates from his Crime College.
- One of the plot points in the Honor Harrington book At All Costs involves an expired contraceptive implant — a device which sounds exactly like (and is presented to the reader in the same style as) the kind of futuristic medical technology that David Weber might invent for his post-spaceflight universe, but which (in a less long-lived version than Harrington's) exists right now.
- The clovers in Horton Hears a Who! are all portrayed as large, pink fluffy flowers, which is what an actual clover flower looks like in real life. While to many people "clover" may mean only the triple (and sometimes more-multiple) leaf, the plant does produce pink or white flowers if you don't mow it down. They're delicious, by the way.
- In the Horus Heresy short story, The Last Church, the Lightning Stone that the titular church is built around actually exists on the Isle of Skye.
- In Praise Of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki:
- Readers may be puzzled when the author waxes lyrical about the old custom of ohaguro, or tooth blackening. Yes, prior to the Meiji era, Japanese women would dye their teeth black with a ferrous solution; black smiles were considered more elegant than natural, ivory-coloured teeth.
- It's also the basis of a youkai called Ao-nyōbō.
- Also, in Elizabethan England, people were really fond of sugar and had the expected dental hygiene practices of Elizabethan English (i.e. none), with predictable results for their teeth. Those who could not afford their dose of sugar sometimes coloured their teeth to gain the proper look.
- Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling:
- The bananas of the 'little short red kind' as mentioned in "The Elephant's Child" do exist in real life, although in most locations they're only available seasonally.
- Some of the fish that the whale eats in "How the Whale Got His Throat" sound like the made-up words of a Seussian poem ("He ate the starfish and the garfish, and the crab and the dab, and the plaice and the dace..."), but they all really exist.
- In "How the Whale Got His Throat" when the Mariner finds himself inside the Whale's stomach he dances the hornpipes in order to cause the beast discomfort so it will release him. Hornpipes are a style of solo dance traditionally performed by British sailors of the 18th and 19th centuries as a way of exercising and staying in shape while aboard the confines of a ship.
- After the 'Stute Fish has convinced the Whale to try eating a man he tells the Whale that he'll find a castaway sailor that he can sample at Latitude 50 North, Longitude 40 West. These are real-life coordinates for a location in the Atlantic Ocean about 550 miles east of Newfoundland, Canada.
- The Kane Chronicles has one exchange between Carter and Sadie, wherein a restaurant has chicken and waffles — that is, fried chicken, served with waffles and maple syrup. Sadie, who was raised in the UK, is unsurprisingly confused (and somewhat disgusted) at this combination — similar to most people in the United Kingdom. Truth be told, until the mid-2010s, most Americans would have been weirded out by the combination, as it was historically limited to the Southern and Soul Food (i.e. Black) culinary traditions,However though some national chains did have it on their (voluminous) breakfast menus. Around 2013, though, Lay's Potato Chips included a "Chicken and Waffles" flavor in their "Do Us A Flavor" competition; while the flavor didn't win, it raised the profile of the combination enough that Americans (though nobody else) would regard it as unsurprising.
- Sleepy Hollow, from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving, is a real village in Westchester County, New Yorknote and it resembles the story version in most ways, except for the actual existence of a Headless Horseman. The town certainly celebrates the tale's lore though, especially around Halloween. The Van Tassel family, including Katrina, were real as well. Ichabod Crane was the name of an army captain that Irving met before writing the story. This example is somewhat of an inversion, however, as it was not until 1996 that the village of North Tarrytown was officially named Sleepy Hollow, largely due to the popularity of the Washington Irving tale. Some sources also claim that it was the nearby town of Kinderhook that actually inspired Irving's story.
- The fourth book of The Lightbringer Series, The Blood Mirror, has a point of drama that hinges on a recently married couple unable to consummate their marriage because of a disorder on the wife's part that causes her vagina to reflexively close during the act. Author Brent Weeks devotes the book's afterword to explaining that this is a real disorder called Vaginismus that more than one of his friends suffered through, yet even many trained gynecologists haven't heard of it.
- The first Narnia book, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe mentions a delicacy called "Turkish Delight". For many in the Americas, east Asia, and even some younger and more modern readers in the UK, this was thought to be made up. It wasn't actually — it's a real Turkish candy, called "lokum" in its native land, consisting of fruit-, spice-, or rosewater-flavored jelly squares filled with nuts and coated in powdered sugar. In fact various adaptations often provide real candies for the actors to eat.
- The presence of pneumatic rubber tires on carriages in the Lord Darcy series may seem like Alternate History Schizo Tech, but such tires were actually invented decades before motorized vehicles began supplanting horse-drawn transport, and were commonly installed on high-end coaches and bicycles. In fact, they're still used today on Forklifts.
- Maniac Magee:
- Butterscotch Krimpets are made to sound so delicious that many kids reading the book thought they were made up. They aren't, they were just a regional snack (made by Philadelphia’s Tastykake, one of Pennsylvania’s absurd variety of local snack manufacturers).
- Mars Bar Thompson got his nickname because he loved to eat Mars Bars. At the time the book was published, Mars Bars were still being sold in the United States. American kids have to be reminded that such a candy existed before the Turn of the Millennium. However, one thing that some people get wrong is the fact that Mars bars (in the United States at least) actually used to have almonds in them as their defining feature — in most of the world, Mars bars are just nougat and caramel.
- Butterscotch Krimpets are made to sound so delicious that many kids reading the book thought they were made up. They aren't
- In Micromégas, it is difficult to determine whether the author is lampooning or simply reproducing the flavor of contemporary scientific discourse.
- The Jetlag Travel Guides Spin-Off Molvanîan Baby Names describes names given to Molvanîan children, like Agpovertetnyk (meaning "lowly paid foreign worker"), Dburjoffynd ("repeat offender") and Dkurtiklof ("exceptionally unfit"). In Slavic countries, names with meanings like that were not too uncommon in the old times, because a beautiful name was considered to be Tempting Fate by drawing demonic attention. The surname Nekrasov, coming from the name meaning "The Unsightly One", is still common enough in Russia.
- In No. 6, Nezumi is crossdressing in a performance of a Shakespearean play and is well known for it. Those who aren't familiar with Shakespeare will think that this is just Fanservice aimed at Yaoi Fangirls, but Shakespeare's plays were originally written for all-male theatre companies since women weren't allowed to act on stage during his lifetime, so every female role was played by a man.
- As discussed in this article, the Philip Marlowe novel The High Window contains a puzzling-to-modern-readers reference to synthetic crowd noise at a Dodgers game broadcast on the radio, particularly given that the novel is set in California and was written well before the Dodgers left Brooklyn. As the article explains, between the 1920s and the 1950s there was an industry in re-creating baseball games for same-day delay broadcasts, and sportscasters (including future president Ronald Reagan) would mimic details such as crowd sounds and the noise of the bat in order to provide listeners with a realistic experience, when in fact they were reading the feed from a news ticker.
- Terry Pratchett loved this trope. Generally, if something sounds bizarre-but-not-implausible, even odds it was actually real, or only a mild exaggeration of the truth.
- The joke about the "Plague of Frog" ("It was quite a large frog") from Pyramids is based on actual debates over the translation of Exodus 8note .
- In Feet of Clay, Vimes is unamused to find that much of the heraldry at the Ankh-Morpork College of Arms is composed of visual puns. This is actually based on real-life examples of canting arms, which depicted puns or rebuses based on the name of the bearer. Appropriately, Sir Terry's own arms demonstrate canting.
- The Last Continent: You'd think that meat pies floating in pea soup wouldn't be eaten by anyone. Apparently it is a common late-night, drunk-food dish in Adelaide. Also commonly eaten by sober people during the middle of the day in other parts of south Australia.
- Also in The Last Continent, the regatta where people run along a dry river bed carrying boats is actually happens in Alice Springs, Australia. The Henley-On-Todd, as it's called, is even cancelled if there is water in the river.
- Vampire pumpkins and watermelons, as mentioned in Carpe Jugulum, are actual (if somewhat apocryphal) folklore.
- The exploding billiard balls that appear as a gag in Men at Arms happen to be real too, based on the use of a highly-flammable early plastic as a substitute for ivory.
- In Mort, one of the early books from Albert's life is from "back before they invented spelling." Terry Pratchett isn't just being funny here: prior to the rise of dictionaries, words were just spelled phonetically, with no real regard to consistency. There were cases of people spelling the same word differently each time they wrote it. (Notably, the myriad ways William Shakespeare wrote his own name.)
- The "Clacks" system — long-distance communication using semaphore towers — was totally real, although the real examples never quite reached the sophistication of the Discworld version. France had over 3,000 miles of semaphore network, and the first ever telecoms scam (somewhat resembling Moist von Lipwig's trick in the climax of Going Postal) was done on the French semaphore network in 1834.
- Surely the idea of a brutal war being fought over an island that's just risen from the ocean is a fantasy narrative device used by Terry Pratchett to poke fun at the idiotic nationalism of a bygone age? Nope, it's not.
- Ornamental hermits, like the one on the Ramkin estate in Snuff, were indeed a big thing in 18th century England.
- Monstrous Regiment: 'The Cheesemongers' is a silly nickname for a military unit, right? Well, yes, but it also happens to be one of the actual nicknames of the Life Guards; the senior regiment of the British Army. The Life Guards acquired this nickname when the social requirements for officers were lowered, allowing the sons of merchants to become officers, causing some of the older and conservative members to comment that they no longer soldiers but 'cheesemongers'; i.e. tradesmen. As is so often the case, it became an Appropriated Appellation.
- Moving Pictures: The "resograph," although its function is fictional (it measures disturbances in the fabric of reality), is based on a device reportedly built by an ancient Chinese scientist that reacted in a similar way by spitting metal balls in the direction of earthquakes, i.e. a proto-seismograph.
- All of the dishes in Brian Jacques' Redwall series are real. He found out about Turnip'n'tater'n'beetroot pie from a New York restaurant, in fact.
- Several characters in the works of Robert Rankin mentioned having been trained in the art of Dimac by Count Dante, and to be able to "kill or maim with the merest pressure of a fingertip". Some people may be surprised to learn that Dim Mak is a real thing, albeit one of disputed validity, and not just a martial arts movie trope. However, pretty much everyone would be surprised to learn that Count Dante was an actual martial arts instructor who was famous for creating some very skilled fighters, advertising in comic books (probably where Rankin got the idea) and being completely bugfuck nuts.
- The Secret Life of Bees has the characters engage in a tradition of putting peanuts in Coca-Cola. While uncommon (June points out how ridiculous this combination is and the narrator even describes her saying it as like they're eating something blatantly inedible), it actually is a thing some people do in the south, especially in the time it was set in. It's thought of as having been done as early as the 1920s.
- The Selection has had some critics refer to the name of the main character "America Singer" as an Unfortunate Name. "America" is still a given name in Latin America (The author is Puerto Rican), while the surname of "Singer" is actually a real (albeit uncommon) surname. In fact, the Singer corporation making Sewing machines and upholstery was named after its founder: Isaac Singer.
- Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events: There actually is a hotel in New York City organized by the Dewey Decimal System.
- The character of John Blackthorne in Shogun is quite obviously invented by the author, surely? Well... no. He's inspired by the English sailor William Adams, who settled in Japan in 1600 and became a samurai under the Tokugawa shogunate.
- James Rollins, author of the Sigma Force series, could be said to be a fan of these. Most of his novels end with a "what's real" chapter where he breaks down what technologies and details from the book are real and what's entirely fiction.
- Harold Lauder's chocolate Payday bars in The Stand. Payday Avalanche existed for a while before the book was written, then disappeared, then came back for a while, before vanishing again.
- In the original, "cut" version published in 1978 (with the book's events taking place in the 1980s), Harold likes regular Payday candy bars, which do not feature chocolate. This led to a goof when he later leaves the smeary chocolate thumbprint Frannie finds on a page of her diary. In the "Complete and Uncut Edition" (published in 1990, with the book's events taking place in the 1990s), King changes Harold's candy bar of choice to chocolate Paydays, which did exist in the '90s, perhaps to eliminate the mistake.
- Stephen Fry's retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo is titled The Stars' Tennis Balls (or just Revenge in the U.S.), which sounds like an Intentionally Awkward Title and/or a pun on The Stars My Destination, another Monte Cristo retelling. However, the seemingly ridiculous title quotes a line from the Jacobean tragedy The Duchess of Malfi: "We are merely the stars' tennis balls, struck and banded which way please them."
- Although they aren’t shape-shifters, but Quileute from The Twilight Saga is a real tribe.
- Warrior Cats: Some cats' names are mistaken for unrealistic because they're supposedly not a part of nature. Examples include Thriftkit (named after a species of flower) and Heathertail (another flowering plant, in fact a whole family of them).
- Aluminum in Wax and Wayne is an extremely expensive metal prized for its Anti-Magic properties (it's also noted as expensive and rare in the original trilogy). While real life aluminum doesn't stop someone from magically influencing your emotions, it was more valuable than gold due to its rarity, until modern smelting techniques made it common. Basically, practical smelting of aluminum requires large amounts of electrical power; something not easy to come by before the late 19th century. Most aluminum smelting plants are built near large rivers with large-scale hydroelectric plants for this reason.
- One of the infoboxes of Worst. Person. Ever. refers to the Chewing Gum Ban of Singapore, over concerns that said gum would be used to seal keyholes and for other acts of vandalism. The punchline is that it's a real thing. Ditto for the Pacific Trash Vortex.
- The "rest cure" described in The Yellow Wallpaper was considered a proper treatment for certain mental illnesses around the turn of the 20th century. The author went through it herself, and was quite happy to learn that her story helped to discredit it as quackery.
