Creator Thumbprint / Literature

Creator Thumbprint in Literature.

---

• Joe Abercrombie likes dark and dreary settings where surprisingly realistic outcome keeps happening all over the place. Idealism is something you'd better outgrow, but at the same time, people who try to be completely cynical and self-serving can't quite shed some remaining traces of humanity either. He's also fond of darting around a scene (especially a fight scene) telling it from the point of view of one minor character after another, showing that each one is a complex and interesting person with a story of their own. And then, as often as not, having them be abruptly killed, often by the next character in the chain.
• Piers Anthony
  • Sure, the Xanth books are filled with puns, but they lurk in other books too, plus the Meaningful Names. And he loves logic puzzles; more than once has the climax of a book hinged on the protagonist figuring out a logic puzzle. This includes the Prisoners' Dilemma in the Xanth novel Golem in the Gears and the 12 Coins Puzzle in the Incarnations of Immortality novel With a Tangled Skein.
  • Macroscope involved the game sprouts.
  • A whole lot of his body of work involves depicting underage girls, anywhere from early teens to quite a bit younger, as sexually active and attractive both to boys of their age and to adults, usually knocking down a strawman who protests. It's in too much of his work to fully quantify but the Modes series has a thirteen year old and her adult prince lover from another dimension going on a road trip across the United States to find somewhere where they can get married.
• K. A. Applegate:
  • Animal facts, some of them imperfectly researched. She especially likes tigers and red-tailed hawks appearing and is very sympathetic towards elephants.
  • While her books mainly star and are about teens and kids, a Cool Old Lady (or cool middle aged lady, anyway) often appears late in a work and is regarded in the narrative as being tremendously smart and competent, if often ruthless as well. These include Eva and the Governor in Animorphs, Terra Striker in Eve and Adam, and the zookeeper in The One and Only Ivan.
  • It's not as pronounced in Applegate by herself as in books she cowrites with her husband Michael Grant, but she believes True Art Is Angsty to some degree and often includes considerable sorrow, grief, loneliness, and bewildered pain in even her solo work. Even if much of it is for kids, she said in a talk about The One and Only Ivan and the reception to its Bittersweet Ending that children know there is sorrow in the world and must be helped to learn to bear it.
  • She has a degree of horror about genetically engineered creatures - Animorphs and Eve and Adam both have characters regard strange creatures with absolute revulsion and consider their creation in the first place to be a crime worth prosecution.
• Isaac Asimov:
  • Balancing comfort and stasis against scientific progress and expansion. Advances in technology, such as robots and computers, created comforts that often made the general population risk-averse and less inclined to expand science and technology. In "Profession", Earth is the only planet engaging in scientific research because once people are taught ideas from "tapes", they stop trying to learn, but Earth secretly teaches some of their population through experimentation and repetition, encouraging them to experiment. In "It's Such a Beautiful Day", the child protagonist once walks to school instead of taking the teleporter, and then curiously starts preferring outdoor travel. A psychiatrist is consulted but concludes that maybe this isn't so bad after all. From the Robot Series and Foundation Series, the Spacers are the first explorers, their every need tended to by robot servants. The later Settler explorers eschew all robots, noting how the comfort has made the Spacers halt their exploration after only fifty worlds. The Settlers eventually dominate the Milky Way while the Spacers decay, forgotten by the rest of the galaxy.
  • The frequency of Psychic Powers. Dr. Asimov would often explore the possible results of having humans/others developing psychic abilities. This can be traced to John W. Campbell's influence, who helped encourage Dr. Asimov during his early years of writing and had been interested in psionics since the 1930s. While Dr. Asimov was a skeptic and helped start the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, he also admitted that he wouldn't want to abandon them as a storytelling tool.
  • The theme of practical versus theoretical knowledge. Dr. Asimov would invariably fall on the side of practical knowledge and experimentation being superior to armchair analysis and theorizing. "Light Verse" had a mathematician who theorized perfect works of art mathematically and failing but was invited to a party hosted by a famous artist. At a party, he repairs an old robot who had been mildly malfunctioning, and then learns the artist had actually relied upon the robot to create the art. In a short story, a scientist wrote a proof demonstrating that a certain kind of energy shield cannot be constructed, meanwhile, a hardened space captain has created just such a shield, after trial and error in the field that has cost him his arm. In "The Billiard Ball", one scientist has two Nobel Prizes while their ex-classmate is a much more famous (and rich) engineer who builds inventions based on scientist's work.
• Dale Brown was a former bomber crewman, so most of his Cool Planes are bombers.
• The Arthur writer, Marc Brown, has put the names of his children in several places that need text. And some that don't.
• Steven Brust is another writer with a taste (pardon the pun) for Food Porn. He also has a thing (taken from Hungarian folklore IIRC) for canny coachman characters. There's a couple in the Dragaera series, and in Freedom and Necessity, the protagonist disguises himself as a coachman at the beginning of the novel. Brust was also previously involved in music, so there are a number of musician characters in his books and one book has a lot of carefully disguised allusions to the Grateful Dead.
• Lois McMaster Bujold loves riverboating on the Ohio, and more than half of The Sharing Knife: Passage focuses on this pastime. Also horses and gardening.
• James Lee Burke uses references to scent in his descriptions of people and places to a noticeably unusual degree.
• Jim Butcher has a thing for snark, badassery, Guile Heroes, and Gambit Pileups involving all of the above.
• Karel Čapek was fond of long lists.
• Agatha Christie:
  • Her second husband was an archaeologist. Several of her novels in the 1930s and '40s involve archaeology.
  • Early in her career she also accompanied her first husband on an around the world trip to promote the 1925 British Empire Exhibition. Both marriages likely inspired her love of setting stories in exotic locations.
  • During the First World War, she was a nurse working in a pharmacy full of bottles of different poisons. Small wonder that thirty of her murder victims are struck down by poison - more than by any other mystery writer.
• A lot of Mary Higgins Clark's novels have this in common:
  • A strong-willed and intelligent heroine who gets caught up in sinister goings-on, especially murder mysteries, and launches her own informal investigation (either because It's Personal or because she just can't shake the feeling something ain't right). She'll usually have a career in either law or the arts.
  • A romantic subplot with some level of relevance to the main plot; how closely they're linked varies. The love interest is usually some bloke who helps the heroine with her investigations and/or acts as a support person, enabling them to grow closer over the story. Occasionally, the love interest will be a suspect in the central crime, creating conflict between him and the heroine, only for the heroine to realize she has misinterpreted the situation. On rare occasions though, the love interest (or one of two love interests) does turn out to be the villain.
  • The villain tends to be someone known to and trusted by the heroine.
  • Scenes taking place in Big Fancy Houses, especially out in the countryside (they may even form the main setting); dinner/cocktail parties are optional, often used to stage some important exposition or revelations.
• All of Ernest Cline's books to date, Ready Player One, Armada and Ready Player Two, feature nostalgic fandom of '70s and '80s pop culture as running themes. This can even be seen with hindsight in his 2009 screenplay for Fanboys.
• Eoin Colfer and Ireland. Also lots of snarking.
• Bruce Coville has specifically 2-inches-tall people as a recurring pattern. The Monsters of Morley Manor? Two inches tall. The aliens in the Rod Allbright Alien Adventures series are two inches tall when shrunk, and in book 2 (I Left My Sneakers In Dimension X) the kids are described to be two inches tall compared to the monster Smorkus Flinders if he was human size. I Was a Sixth Grade Alien's second book (The Attack of the Two-Inch Teacher) includes the protagonist and his teacher subjected to a shrink ray that makes them two inches tall, at which point they are put inside a desk. In the third book, the classroom's two-inch tall hamsters turn out to be evil.
• Michael Crichton: Absurd amounts of Info Dump, either within character conversations or as asides (well-researched, although Science Marches On). He also made a point of kind-of-sort-of averting This Is a Work of Fiction as a gag, because many of his books are written in the style of interviews gathered after the fact and he acknowledges the characters in the book's preface).
• Clive Cussler (Dirk Pitt Adventures) almost always has a cameo of himself assisting the heroes in some way.
• Roald Dahl loved nostalgia for his childhood, and food. Almost all of his books revolve around food in some way, and most of the Happy Endings his heroes get are based on food in some way. He also hated abusive adults, and his child protagonists often end up getting comeuppance against the child haters in their lives. TV was also a pet peeve of his.
• Peter David has a number of these. Many of his Star Trek books at least once mention Alexander the Great, for instance.
• If McCoy appears in a Diane Duane Star Trek novel, you can reasonably expect him to be awesome. This may or may not be related to the fact that the good doctor is smokin'.
• A Messianic Archetype, a Nietzsche Wannabe, a Casanova / Casanova Wannabe / Dirty Old Man, and a Tsundere walk into a Russian salon. They then proceed to debate the meaning of life for 1000 pages. One of them gets killed. Congratulations, you have the plot of any Fyodor Dostoevsky novel.
• Every single book in James Ellroy's L.A. Quartet has a different Serial Killer and a different incestuous relationship. Ellroy is pretty upfront about his mental baggage: his beautiful mother, to whom he was sexually attracted, was brutally murdered when he was a child. They never found the killer. He has a memoir about this.
• Catherine Fisher has dark-haired, scarred men in long coats as her classic character type, abundant references to myths and legend, a characteristic manner of giving every chapter an epigraph (typically from an in-universe source), and making two characters share motifs so as to metaphorically imply that they are the same character.
• Robert Forward's Camelot 30K is a hard science fiction novel that exists merely to showcase his elements-pooping one-eyed shrimp aliens and their Expy Arthurian Legend society. Characterization, writing, pacing, dialog, and plausibility are all sacrificed just so Forward can play with his Starfish Aliens.
• Everything by Leo Frankowski has both sexual and non-sexual Author Appeal. Especially Conrad's Time Machine, a book whose plot is as follows: Two Author Avatars hang out together inventing a time machine, and spend the majority of the book whisked away to a tropical island where they become fabulously wealthy, enjoy the services of an Unwanted Harem, and finish inventing their time machine. It's also filled with quotes from Frankowski's own favorite authors, especially Robert A. Heinlein.
• Robert Frost:
  • He loves nature, and can or will not, in particular, shut up about trees.
  • He also had a thing for iambic meter, but that's possibly more a stylistic choice than Author Appeal.
• An in-story example: The Gordon Korman novel Son of Interflux has an art student who always includes a camel in his paintings, no matter what it's a painting of. His teacher finds it immensely irritating.
• Neil Gaiman:
  • Many of his stories involve talking cats, imposter mothers, and Eye Scream.
  • The Hecate Sisters often make an appearance.
  • His main (male) characters usually start as incompetent This Loser Is You and level up through the story (seen in Neverwhere, Anansi Boys, American Gods, Good Omens).
  • On a more "meta" level, he is also very, very fond of playing with the inside/outside aspect of things (i.e. what you thought was outside was really inside something bigger, or you were the one being inside all along - and not just in spatial terms) as well as the concept of stories within stories. For example, one Sandman book has the protagonist telling a barman the story about a time he got stranded in a strange inn, where people told each other stories to pass the time. One of the travelers tells a story about a boat voyage, during which Hob Gadling tells the protagonist of that story another story. That's 4 levels of indentation, 5 if you count "Neil Gaiman telling the reader the story of that guy telling the barman...". And in that same Sandman book, a character the protagonist of the book met is telling a story about a meeting he had with someone, who told a story about his mistress, who in THAT story started telling many stories... one of which was a story about a bunch of travelers stuck at an inn, telling stories to pass the time. Yes, it was recursive to that extent, and boy, was Gaiman proud of managing to include the moment. Gaiman's also a huge mythology nut and loves to reference a huge range of tales from almost any culture you can think of, particularly if at some point they were bowdlerised and the original forms were much darker and more gruesome. The Fair Folk are treated as the trope describes, the original (and deeply squicky) tale of Red Riding Hood makes an appearance and a thematic point in Sandman, American Gods and Anansi Boys are probably set in the same continuity and are all about myths being real and alive (and trying to stay that way), and William Shakespeare himself and his King's Men perform A Midsummer Night's Dream for the entities it was based upon, during which some members of the audience have to be reminded not to eat the performers.
• Are you the protagonist of a David Gemmell novel? Then your life will resemble the following description: A usually older man who used to be a warrior but has turned his back on war after seeing and committing horrible acts. He has retreated to a place of solitude, like a monastery or a cabin in the mountains. This character will debate the morality of killing and war with himself and other characters. He might wonder if there really is a god in Heaven. Then, something terrible will happen and our hero once more takes up his sword and fights, but this time it's for a good cause! This is followed by him cleaving his way through enemies like a one-man army. Dying at the end of the story is optional.
• Simon R. Green seemingly can't write an Urban Fantasy series without his love of The '60s cropping up.
• Isuna Hasekura, author of the Spice and Wolf novels, has a serious thing for economics. It features prominently in both of his works to date. In fact, he took the prize money he got for his first novel to the stock market and wrote Billionaire Girl and World End Economica which are about day trading.
• Robert A. Heinlein:
  • Starship Troopers is one of the oft-most cited literary examples, with almost all of the authority figures in the main character's life having page-long monologues that consist of Heinlein's own philosophies, such as his views on nuclear weapons, the military, and matters of national defense — at least, at that time (his political views changed drastically over the years). The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Stranger in a Strange Land also feature such monologues.
  • See his entry in Food Porn.
  • Many of his books include scenes where a man spanks a woman. Or at least threatens to do so.
• Frank Herbert's consistent themes: hallucinatory experiences as a spiritual journey of discovery (usually by means of some substance) and resentment toward/competition with a father figure.
• Brian Jacques fills his Redwall novels with pages upon pages of descriptions of the food the characters eat. So many different kinds of scones. There are also incredibly archaic riddles bordering on Moon Logic Puzzle and lots and LOTS of songs, the stories themselves being recounted by a storyteller/historian that has a connection to it and having two stories that switch focus until they're both tied up in the end.
• Diana Wynne Jones and Wales/the Welsh language. There's also a lot of magical or quasi-magical cats to be found in her work.
• Stephen King:
  • His obsession with going into absurd detail with characters getting diarrhea, periods, and wet trousers (possibly deliberate Squick).
  • He also seems bent on almost all his stories being in Maine. And if they aren't set there, they will definitely include some passing reference to the state at some point. If it's not somewhere around Maine, it's in Colorado.
  • King also has a great fondness for protagonists who have either a dead sibling or a dead spouse.
  • A significant portion of his work involves Psychic Children (typically without explanation).
  • Domestic abuse in its many forms keeps turning up, either as a major plot point and source of horror or as background.
  • Odious fat women. If a fat woman appears in a King story, it can almost ^note ("almost" since Hearts in Atlantis does contain a female Big Fun character) be guaranteed that she'll be a selfish, venal, emotionally stunted bitch and - if she has children - either a negligent mother or a smothering and overbearing one.
  • Religious people are always one-dimensionally evil. Well, if they're Protestants. Occasionally we'll get some Catholics who can be nuanced protagonists. You can probably guess what church King was raised in. Abigail Freemantle and David Carver are Protestant exceptions, though. Lester Coggins toes the line.
• Mercedes Lackey
  • She loves to include birds and intelligent avian creatures in her fantasy novels. Valdemar has gryphons, tervardi, and the Tayledras ("Hawkbrothers") and their semi-intelligent bond birds; the Free Bards books all have bird-themed titles and one features an eagle man; and The Black Swan has a minor character who's interested in falconry, who later received a short story of her own. Plus the raven and parrot Familiars in the Elemental Masters books.
  • Horses as well, or beings shaped like horses. You can tell a person is heroic in a Lackey novel if, after a hard ride and great exhaustion, they either insist on taking care of their horse before themselves or have to be dragged away and protest at length that their horse needs care and have to be told that someone else has it taken care of.
  • Something like 80% of her villains are rapists, and usually the most Depraved Bisexuals imaginable.
  • She also loves to reference music and the performing arts, and many of her protagonists are professional or amateur entertainers. Bardic Voices is the most obvious example, but three of the Elemental Masters novels focus on the world of turn-of-the-century show business and another includes Magic Music as a major plot device. Vanyel Ashkevron wanted to be a Bard as a kid and sings and plays the lute for the enjoyment of it, something that helps him bond with a Love Interest who actually is a Bard. Lackey was a filk musician for many years before she wrote her first book.
  • Lackey's got a particular kind of pacing in most of her work. She likes a Prolonged Prologue and loves worldbuilding, taking her time to address all kinds of logistical details, plumbing included, and lovingly setting out characters' routines and exploring how they feel as they come into themselves and their powers. She doesn't tend to write a great deal of tension between her characters, so heroes usually cheerfully agree to disagree if they have dramatically different opinions, and less heroic characters are mainly out of sight. Very very often characters manage to do exactly the right thing to get through situations with little difficulty and then exclaim about being lucky, that could have been hard! Then in the last quarter or less the Cosmic Deadline looms and the pace accelerates as suddenly things aren't nigh-Slice of Life anymore, stakes accelerate, the Big Bad appears and everyone acts like he's been a problem the whole time, and things wrap up very fast.
• The authors of the Left Behind series:
  • They really, really like their telephone conversations. In fact, there's probably as much talking on the phone as there is talking face-to-face in the earlier books.
  • Their love of explaining the difficulties of getting from Point A to Point B. Over a billion people have just disappeared, but I'm going to worry about how hard it is to get to New York.
• Ian Livingstone, co-creator of the Fighting Fantasy gamebook series, seems to enjoy sailboat racing, given how he's snuck Author Avatars of himself and his teammates as minor characters in some of the gamebooks he's written. He appears as one of the crew members who can ferry the hero to Kaad in Return to Firetop Mountain, and the rest of the crew have real-life names that are spelled phonetically ("Eeyun" instead of Ian, "Ndroo" instead of Drew, etc.), and also appears as an innkeeper who reminisces about his sailing days to the hero in Armies of Death.
• H. P. Lovecraft
  • The recurring horror of ending up in an asylum is thrown into sharp relief when you know that both of Lovecraft's parents were confined to them, and both died within them, while he was still young. His father was brain-damaged by syphilis, and it's suspected that his widowed mother was merely afflicted by anxiety, which was enough for a woman at the time to be certified insane.
  • He had a list of phobias as long as your arm. His xenophobia (see "the Horror at Red Hook"), fear of the ocean, and reported fish allergy contributed to his fear of the alien and the aquatic. He seemed to have a thing about tentacles, finding them more or less the embodiment of all that is disgusting. He was a racist, hating everyone who wasn't a white Englishman, holding even English-Americans in contempt. His stories contain no strong female characters, and sexuality is always horrifying in his work, but he could describe a building more lovingly than Shakespeare describing his Fair Lord. However, while the "Lovecraft as asexual weirdo" idea is so ingrained, it may be surprising to learn that he was married for a time, and while it didn't last, his wife was explicitly quoted saying yes, they had sex, and yes, he was "adequately excellent" at it.
  • He would also faint if the temperature dropped too much (cf. Cool Air) and he loved cats.
  • Most of his protagonists are solitary men who have little or no obvious employment, yet never lack money; Lovecraft came from an upper-class family that fell into poverty while he was a child. As a result, he spent his whole life with a chronic lack of money, but unable to get work that would match his social status. There's clearly some wish-fulfillment going on.
  • The really surprising thing about Lovecraft's marriage is that his wife was Jewish. True, no particularly anti-Semitic tropes appear in his work, but it seems weird for someone so xenophobic to make an exception. Apparently, Lovecraft's wife (Sonia Haft Greene) actually remarked upon this - and Lovecraft replied that as she was "Now Mrs. Howard Phillips Lovecraft of Providence" there was no contradiction!
• Melisa Michaels:
  • Romani (Gypsy) culture appears in many of her works. In the Skyrider series, the belt has been populated heavily by Rom, and in Through the Eyes of the Dead, the murder investigation involves several Rom families living in San Francisco.
  • Hawaiian pidgin pops up regularly in her works; Melisa lived for many years on Oahu. The Translation Convention version of the Belter pidgin in the Skyrider series, for example, is strongly reminiscent of Hawaiian pidgin.
• The oeuvre of China Miéville is one great, big, twisted love letter to the city of London.
• Andre Norton: cats (AKA the "Brothers in Fur") and psychic/psionic powers (telepathy, psychometry, etc.).
• Chuck Palahniuk seems to have a thing for furniture stores and describing houses. And so far every one of his books has mentioned the color cornflower blue. Palahniuk also loves loading his books with factoids, in the original sense — little factual statements that seem reasonable, but aren't true — such as the cleaning/cooking tips in Survivor (1999).
• Terry Pratchett:
  • has copious amounts of Lampshade Hanging, Stealth Puns, jokes that follow a certain specific structure (it'd probably be easier to go to his quote page than try to describe it), and benign contempt for the common man.^note Also, footnotes.
  • provides an in-universe example in The Last Continent, with a literal creator god who goes around to already-finished worlds and throws down a new continent, which always has kangaroos on it. "Kind of a signature, like."
• Ayn Rand admits that the men in her novels are intended to be the ideal man, an important aspect of her writing.
• Anne Rice seems to have a thing for European culture and overall history. And she likes describing elaborate clothing. She really likes describing clothing.
• Cameos, Tuckerizations, and other inclusions of fans and family as characters can be found throughout John Ringo's work, from his very first published novel, A Hymn Before Battle, onwards.
• Spider Robinson is a huge fan of Robert A. Heinlein, and one of Heinlein's most ardent defenders. Needless to say, there are many similarities between Heinlein's work and Robinson's, particularly involving individual liberty, free love, and Shaggy Dog Stories ending in truly terrible puns. This is most evident in the Callahan's Crosstime Saloon series and its various spinoffs.
• In all the Harry Potter books, by J. K. Rowling, spiders and socks are mentioned in passing several times, and both becoming huge plot points in the second book. There's even a giant talking spider character named Aragog. She also made a whole family of red-headed heroes to counter the negative stereotypes of 'gingers' in the UK. She also made their last name "Weasley" specifically because she likes weasels and thinks they get a bad rap. By her own admission, Rowling likes odd and/or interesting names and words. She says that she "collects" them. Also, almost every character in the series has either a Meaningful Name or just an odd, medieval-style one, the titular character being one of the only exceptions. And as Stephen King once snarked, "Rowling never met an adverb she didn't like."
• Brandon Sanderson is known for magic systems with well-defined rules. Other common elements include people who become gods (or at least claim to), Gambit Pileups, and city settings described in great detail. He also seems to like putting his female protagonists in situations where they have to wear really fancy dresses. And sooner or later, someone will storm a castle.
• Keiichi Sigsawa, author of Kino's Journey and Allison and Lillia, goes out of his way to profile in entirely unnecessary detail every weapon and vehicle that comes up, regardless of whether it is important to the plot. And as if that weren't enough, even his pen name is based on a gun brand.
• Jiří Kulhánek: Pick any of his novels; chances are, it begins with The Hero, a superhuman, getting assaulted by the villains, forcing him to seek refuge amongst normal folk.
• Clifford Simak has a load of these.
  • His idea of time and time traveling is hard to describe and easy to identify, the main result of it is an infinite amount of parallel Earths existing, separated only by a fraction of time. So time travelling is going into another dimension.
  • A party of people going somewhere, disappearing one by one, the protagonist, the love interest, and usually some kind of subhuman companion staying in the end. The party very often includes some sort of a really advanced alien. Cliff is usually very fond of making those parties as wacky and misfit as possible.
  • Semantics. If someone is explicitly using advanced semantics to manipulate people, you are reading a Clifford Simak book, no exceptions.
  • World peace, pacifism, humanism.
  • American countryside.
  • Decentralized human society.
  • Ridiculously advanced alien society. One that's usually willing to teach other, lesser races, including humanity, or at least has a huge library of some sort.
  • Robot civilizations.
  • Starfish Aliens. Silent gelatinous cubes that manipulate space and time and communicate with mathematical equations is a perfectly normal thing for Clifford.
  • Virginia. Small and boring towns where something weird happens, for the first time ever.
  • Many stories are set in or near just such town Millville, Wisconsin. Simak was born there.
• Dan Simmons's novels are all love letters to his favorite literary works. The Hyperion Cantos contain an almost obscene number of references to John Keats. His Ilium and Olympus duology is based on The Iliad and Shakespeare while managing to fit in a great deal of discussion about Marcel Proust.
• Cordwainer Smith loved to include cats (including an early, Western example of the Cat Girl trope) and references to Chinese culture in his science fiction stories.
• S. M. Stirling:
  • His many books consistently feature detailed descriptions of subjugation and slavery; ridiculous amounts of detail about weaponry (guns or bows and arrows depending on the setting). However, if you're writing adventure fiction in which the main characters are warriors or soldiers, and do a lot of fighting, this is pretty well inevitable. Not only does the situation demand it, but specialists whose careers and lives depend on their trade tend to be interested in their gear — contemporary US soldiers even have a slang term for guys who spend a lot of their own money on non-issue equipment because they're perfectionists: geardo. It's like writing about Pre-Raphaelite painters; they're going to be thinking about paint, canvas, lighting, models, and perspective a lot. Another thing is that if you're writing about pre/post-gunpowder warriors, you're writing about professional athletes; the superior ones will have exceptional physiques and they will work very, very hard at conditioning and training. In a way, it's like writing about rugby or basketball players, only with edged weapons and more maiming and death. And cannibalism, but that depends on whether there's an extreme famine going on.
  • Much of Stirling's work is a homage to the "heroic Mighty Whitey explorer" genre of pulp fiction, so this is a cross between Author Appeal and Shout-Out.
  • Another common vein in Stirling's works is the prevalence of "survivalists." In the Terminator novels, they were the few survivors of Skynet's attack on humanity, and in the Emberverse most survivors were people who lived off the grid.
  • He also seems to be very fond of the concept of the country squire, whether in the form of a Draka landholder, a Prime of one of the Thirty Families of New Virginia (from his novel Conquistador), a Commander of post-change Britain in the Emberverse, a zamindar of the Angrezi Raj, or a Hereditary Supervisor of the Civil Government.
  • However, his real thumbprint is his Food Porn. It occurs in all his books, from the fifth millennium to the Emberverse.
• Nagaru Tanigawa, author of Haruhi Suzumiya, is a math/physics buff. Most of the ridiculously hard to understand math and physics found in the novels can attest to this, and the novels' anime adaptation even includes the characters running with complex formulas in the background for the second season's opening.
• J. R. R. Tolkien liked nature, which came with a direct correlation to his dislike of the encroachment of the ever-expanding industrial England into the English countryside. Trees just put up a better fight than flowers. Tolkien also nearly died as a child due to a bite from a spider, while he said he had no memory of the event, it seems likely that there's a connection to the fact that every story set in Middle-Earth has at least one Giant Spider/quasi-Eldritch Abomination... things as enemies.
• David Weber seems to have a thing for baseball. It's one thing when it shows up on Grayson, but it is also the favored sport on Safehold. The latter is especially bizarre, given that Safehold is at a Renaissance tech level. Weber also seems to have a thing for hexapodal mammalian and reptilian creatures, see the six-legged animals of the planet Sphinx in the Honor Harrington series and most of the native fauna on Safehold.
• This may be Jacqueline Wilson's leaked book formula:
  • Categorize life's hardships.
  • Give at least one to each of your protagonists (more optional) (divorce, death, cancer, attempted rape, abuse...).
  • Have those characters consciously or unconsciously deal with them through imagination and creativity.
  • Concoct a Bittersweet Ending.
  • Throw at least one Alpha B*tch in for seasoning.
• Robert Anton Wilson
  • His novels are an excuse to write extensive analyses about his personal philosophies, and explore various schools of mysticism he's been involved with - however, he manages to do it in an entertaining and amusing manner. He also occasionally lampshades his tendencies to this with characters commenting about books that start telling a story and end with an essay of philosophy.
  • He also loved James Joyce's books, and several times included them, or the man himself into the plots of his various books. In Schroedinger's Cat trilogy he even features a utopian alternate universe where Joyce became the Pope, changed the entire nature of the Catholic Church to a more modern value-system, and prevented World War II!
• Roger Zelazny really has a thing for martial arts, especially fencing, tying things into mythology, and having the protagonist be a smoker. This comes from his own life, as he managed to be both a heavy smoker and study a number of the fighting arts. When he quit smoking in the '80s, his characters stopped as well. Vehicle accidents (much of his short fiction), immortality (Lord of Light, "And Call Me Conrad", etc.), twisting myths into interesting shapes (especially the Faust Legend, but most of his books are centered on one mythology, examples including Vedic, Egyptian, Greek, Norse, Zoroastrian, and Lovecraftian) and a world ruled by robots after the death of the human race (too many short stories to count.)

---