Defictionalization / Literature

• Old Mortality: Tillietudlem, Lady Margaret's castle, is fictional but possibly inspired by Craignethan Castle. Years later a railway station and a small village in South Lanarkshire were named after Tillietudlem.
• A few things in Discworld had since been turned into actual products. These include the Where's My Cow?? and The World of Poo children's books, and various badges (City Watch, Guilds, Überwald Blood Donor Group...)
  • The stamps introduced in Going Postal, and mentioned in later books. Which now exist, complete with sports, rare limited editions and a quarterly magazine for "flatalists".
  • Pterry mentions an example himself in the Author's Note to Wintersmith: a group of fans who danced the Dark Morris for him in Chicago.
  • The card game Cripple Mr. Onion has been turned into a playable game by fans. Several times over, in fact, because the rules seen in the books are vague enough to allow for a lot of interpretation.
  • You can also buy Nanny Ogg's Cookbook. Not entirely defictionalization, as this is not the same book as the one she wrote in Maskerade, which was called The Joye of Snackes.
  • You can get the Thud game. Thud was based on real life Tafl Games, although the rules were altered a bit. And the game appeared in real life first and then got added to the books.
  • Terry Pratchett's coat of arms contains an Egyptian cross and an owl (compare Ankh-Morpork coat of arms), as well as the motto "Noli timere messorem", or "Do not fear the reaper" (compare Mort's motto in Latatian, "Non timetis messor") and two books in red (i.e. "read").
  • The CD From the Discworld by Dave Greenslade, which mostly consists of Disc-themed instrumental peices, has two songs. One is an original song about Ankh-Morpork. The other is a defictionalisation of Nanny Ogg's second-favourite song, "A Wizard's Staff Has a Knob on the End". (It could have been worse; it could have been her favourite song.)
• In The Mortal Instruments and The Infernal Devices there was a book called The Shadowhunter Codex which was a textbook for new Shadowhunters with information about Shadowhunter life. Cassandra Clare later really wrote the book as a companion to the other books in The Shadowhunter Chronicles.
• Around the time the movie adaptation of John Irving's novel A Widow For A Year came out, the children's book A Sound Like Trying Not to Make a Sound (featured in the novel and the movie) was published for real.
• A George Orwell essay describing the "Moon Under Water", his idea of a perfect British pub, inspired (at least in theory) the creation of the J.D. Wetherspoon chain. A number of Wetherspoon's pubs are indeed called the Moon Under Water, and others have "Moon" themed names.
• One of the novels of Kurt Vonnegut's fictional author Kilgore Trout was Venus on the Half-Shell. Philip José Farmer later wrote an actual novel title Venus on the Half-Shell that he published under the pseudonym Kilgore Trout. ^note Some critics thought Kilgore was Vonnegut and the book a "worthy addition to his canon" pissing off Vonnegut no end, even though he had given permission to Farmer to use the name.
  • In a lesser case, an Ice-9 was discovered, even if not as lethal as the one from Cat's Cradle.
• In Time Enough for Love by Robert Heinlein, the Framing Story is that the main character, Lazarus Long, is reluctantly recounting his life story. The computer recording his recollections is instructed to select quotable portions and compile them into a book of his quotes. These are presented within the book in interlude sections. However, in 1978 and 1988 actual books were published of only the quotes.
• H. P. Lovecraft:
  • It's quite easy to obtain Miskatonic University attire. Go Cephalopods!
  • The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society has some very impressive reproductions of assorted blasphemous idols, pages from the Necronomicon, and Professor Angell's Box, a very expensive, detailed and exhaustively complete copy of the box of documents and props from "The Call of Cthulhu".
  • The Necronomicon is listed in the Ohio University Library card catalog. L. Sprague de Camp, fantasy author and linguist, acted as Abdul Alhazred's "translator".
  • There are even a few published books calling themselves the Necronomicon. Most are little more than black-magic occultism books that will make passing references to Cthulhu at best, and no reference to Lovecraft at all at worst. The most famous is the Simon Necronomicon, but one that is closest to what the fictional Necronomicon contained is probably Necronomicon: the Wanderings of Alhazred, as written by occult writer Donald Tyson.
• Michael Chabon likes this kind of thing:
  • In the novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, the protagonists create a comic book series called The Escapist. Then a 6-issue miniseries came out, printing various comic book stories from The Escapist, from the '40s through the present, with explanatory articles by real important figures in the comic book world, about the series' various publishers, and its place in the changing trends and values in the history of comics.
  • Telegraph Avenue had a record store featured in the book defictionalised as part of the book's advertising campaign. An article on the campaign even cites this page.
• The The War Against the Chtorr series features the Mode Training, which is kind of self-help training on acid. Guess what? David Gerrold, the author, is building an actual Mode Training program. Oddly, one of the books has him set aside some pages to point out that Mode Training is fictional and he never wants to see anyone creating "Mode Training" and charging people money for it, because it was rather dangerous. Perhaps this meant other people.
• Several segments of the titular play of Robert W. Chambers' short story collection King in Yellow have been later written by other authors. Thom Ryng is the possibly the only one who has not only written the whole thing, but also had it actually played on stage. No reports of insanity have been made of the readers, but save for a few anachronisms in language and style, it's a very good and suitably bleak story of how You Can't Fight Fate in a world inhabited by monsters.
• The Dragonlance Chronicles and subsequent campaign setting use the Inn of the Last Home as a starting point, which is known for Otik's famous spiced potatoes. Enthusiastic Dragonlance fans have created several recipes for the potatoes and one such recipe was listed as a notation in the Annotated Dragonlance Chronicles.
• In Dragonlance: The New Adventures, Sindri writes a guidebook titled A Practical Guide to Dragons, which is mentioned In-Universe in the Suncatcher Trilogy. It was published in real life just after the first book of that trilogy.
• Around the World in Eighty Days inspired real people, like reporter Nellie Bly, to see if they could circumnavigate the globe in eighty days or less. (She could, and did, and wrote her own book, Around the World in Seventy-Two Days.)
• A fan organization of Imperial cosplayers — the 501st Legion, Vader's Fist — was reverse-defictionalized first by Timothy Zahn, who wrote of the Empire's finest, the 501st, Lord Vader's personal legion. Others in the Star Wars Expanded Universe followed suit. The clones who marched with pre-Mustafar Vader to massacre Jedi in Revenge of the Sith? The 501st. Needless to say, the cosplayers are very pleased.
  • They were Cannonized. Ba-dum tiss.
• Andrea Camilleri's books are set in Vigata, a fictional town in Sicily, which is based on Porto Empedocle (Camilleri's birthplace) and Licata. In 2003, the city administration of Porto Empedocle added the fictional name to the tourist signs, which would then read Porto Empedocle Vigata, without actually changing the city's name. The decision has been reversed as of 2009.
• Fans have created real-world playable rules and decks for Sabacc, a card game played in the Star Wars Expanded Universe.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy — The Guide itself, envisioned by Douglas Adams as a digital collaborative resource encompassing life, the Universe, and everything and contributed to by countless independent researchers, was created as a real-life online encyclopedia by Douglas Adams himself in 1999. It can be seen as a spiritual predecessor to That Other Wiki (due to the broadness of content) and even TV Tropes (due to its similarly casual tone) itself.
  • Fan-made recipes for the series' "Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster" drink have been circulating since the start.
  • When the Kindle was released with full web access, especially access to That Other Wiki, most people understood that meant The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy had been truly defictionalized. XKCD points this out. Also, some people went and customized their Kindle to look more like the 'real' thing.
  • The film Boys & Girls Guide to Getting Down is in a strangely similar format.
• Orson Scott Card wrote a book called Speaker for the Dead, in which the speaker researches the life of the deceased, then tells the deceased's life story as they would have told it. According to OSC, people have started doing this in real life, and apparently, it is a very emotional experience.
• The Twilight Saga - The Bella Italia restaurant in Port Angeles, Washington, started serving mushroom ravioli only after fans started requesting it, since Bella orders it during a diner with Edward.
• "Poohsticks", introduced by that name in A. A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh ^note and portrayed in the Disney short A Day for Eeyore is a simple game doubtless imitated by many readers/viewers who come across it: Drop two sticks (or fir cones as were first used) into a river on one side of the bridge, first one out on the other side wins). Who'd have thought it could lead to an annual World Poohsticks Championship though?
• Sherlock Holmes famously lived at 221B Baker Street, which was turned into an actual address and is now a museum for Holmes fans. (Originally, Baker Street didn't extend far enough to have a #221, which is no doubt why Doyle chose that number.)
• Michael Muhammad Knight wrote a book called The Taqwacores about a then-fictional Muslim punk scene. The idea struck the fancy of a number of punk-minded Muslim kids who proceeded to actually bring the Taqwacore scene into existence.
• Icehouse, the game and game system from Looney Labs, started out as an idealized fictional game in Andrew Looney's short novel The Empty City.
• Goosebumps: Goldberger Doll corporation started manufacturing and selling real Slappy the Dummy ventriloquist dolls after getting a request from a young fan.
• The Arthur C. Clarke novel The City and the Stars begins with our heroes playing a virtual reality adventure game. This wasn't a new concept, even in 1956 when the book was published. However, two small details indicate that Clarke thought the concept through more than his colleagues: the game contains a bona fide Quest Arrow showing our heroes where to go; and Alvin causes the game to crash by attempting Sequence Breaking. After the game crashes, the other players (who are each in their own apartments, connected together by a telecommunication link) accuse Alvin of constantly crashing their games. He honestly wants to see the scenery outside the dungeons they were adventuring in, but nobody thought to implement that, since Alvin is the only non-agoraphobic man in the city.
• U.S. Robotics, a company that manufactures dialup modems, took its name from the fictional U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men corporation featured in I, Robot, though the company has never manufactured robots itself.
• The Niven & Barnes novel, Dream Park has experienced two such attempts:
  • The Dream Park, a holographic LARPing theme park, was built as a fan-created corporation intended to establish the titular park. The organization unfortunately went bankrupt in 1999.
  • The novel's game-regulating organization, the IFGS, actually has been Defictionalized into a LARPing club that stages its games outdoors.
• An in-universe example in Poul Anderson's "Critique of Impure Reason" — Tunny and Janet fake up a novel and its criticism to persuade the robot to go to Mercury and mine. But other people get wind of it, and at the end, Tunny rolls out the book for popular reading and hopes of a new fiction rennaissance.
• In World War II, the US Navy took the idea that became the Command Information Center "specifically, consciously, and directly" from Doc Smith's Lensman novels.
• In Snow Crash, the main character Hiro Protagonist uses a program called Earth, which later was an inspiration for Google Earth
• It's possible to get mockingjay pins inspired by The Hunger Games series.
• Fan merch for the Dragaera novels includes copies of the menu at Valabar's, as per the dining scenes in Dzur. Fans of the series have sometimes attempted to reproduce the recipes as well, albeit with substitutions for things like goslingroot or rednuts.
• Clarice Bean: Clarice is a fan of "Ruby Redford" books about a schoolgirl super-spy. Due to reader demand, Lauren Child has since written several Ruby Redford books.
• The popular sixteenth-century Spanish novel Las sergas de Esplandián described a strange, mythical land inhabited by beautiful Amazons. The name of this place? California. Spanish explorers named what they thought was an island (present-day Baja California) after the book. And five hundreds years later, California does have a reputation for being a strange land with beautiful women, though sadly not Amazons.
• Robinson Crusoe: In the 1960s one of the islands near South America was named Robinson Crusoe Island as a homage to the novel in which Crusoe is stuck on a tropical isle.
• Inventor and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk named two of the company's autonomous spaceport drone ships Just Read the Instructions and Of Course I Still Love You, after ships from Iain Banks' novel The Player of Games and a third was named A Shortfall of Gravitas, inspired by the ship Experiencing a Significant Gravitas Shortfall in Look to Windward.
• Paper Towns:
  • The nerdfighters have made real-life versions of many things in it, like go-fast bars and the shopping list, as partially documented in this VlogBrothers episode.
  • Also, Omnictionary was once made into a real website; it was a wiki for John Green and the activities and history of Nerdfighteria, although it's now disbanded.
• Catherynne M. Valente's novel Palimpsest featured a fictional children's novel within the story called The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. Valente subsequently wrote the novel in real life, and several sequels.
• In the 1970s, the Romanian government made efforts to attract a larger number of tourists from Western Europe as a source of hard currency. They naturally received inquiries about visiting the castle from Dracula, probably the most famous fictional work set in the country. Unfortunately, Bram Stoker had never even visited Romania, and there had never been a castle at the Borgo Pass as described in the novel. So the Romanians built a modern hotel designed to look externally like a medieval castle, and promoted it as Dracula's Castle. It still exists as the Hotel Castel Dracula. To increase the spooky atmosphere, the hotel's grounds included a genuine local graveyard.
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, published 1869, featured the fantastic idea of a high-tech submarine. In 1954, the world's first nuclear sub was named the USS Nautilus in honor of the book. It should be noted that there was at least one sub with that name before the book.
• In one story of The Cyberiad a genius constructor pitied an exiled tyrant and gave him a miniature kingdom in a box — to rule, punish and show mercy to. This toy inspired the video game Micropolis better known as SimCity — the one that created Simulation Game genre. However, the story centers not on urban planning, but on the morality of Videogame Cruelty Potential, and also suggests an outrageous Videogame Cruelty Punishment.
• One of the Captain Underpants books has a look into George and Harold's origins as best friends and creating comics. One of their comics was known as Dog Man, and years later, Dav Pilkey himself wrote and published a separate Dog Man book!
  • In the mid-2000s Scholastic sold a version of the 3D Hypno Ring from Captain Underpants through their Scholastic Book Club Service. It even included an owner's manual with the warning not to dump water on the head of a hypnotized person.
• The small French town of Illiers, near Paris, inspired Combray in childhood resident Marcel Proust's A la recherche de temps perdu. To make sure tourists know where to go for their madeleine moments, it has renamed itself Illiers-Combray.
• The protagonist of The Princess Diaries "wrote" a romance novel called Ransom My Heart, excerpts of which were included in the tenth book. Then the author published the whole thing as a standalone book.
• Ann Leckie seems to be a fan of this. When touring to promote each book in her Imperial Radch series she gave out pins to fans, like the Radchaai wear, and has offered a limited supply for sale on Etsy a few times. When promoting Provenance she signed vestiges.
• Kim Newman's novel The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School is a defictionalisation of a fictional novel mentioned in his earlier novel An English Ghost Story.
• A lot of the Spy Speak created by John le Carré was adopted by real-life intelligence agencies, most noticeably "Tradecraft" (the knowledge base necessary to be a spy) and "The Mole".
• Harry Potter:
  • The series includes a fair amount of Food Porn, so naturally some of its more interesting foodstuffs have been manufactured in the real world, including Butterbeer, Chocolate Frogs, and Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans.
  • J.K. Rowling wrote and published real-life versions of the fictional books Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Quidditch Through the Ages and The Tales of Beedle the Bard
  • Quidditch, originally a fictional sport exclusive to the series, became a real thing in 2005 when it was played in a Middlebury, Vermont game. It was originally named Muggle Quidditch to distinguish it from its fictional counterpart, and then renamed Quadball in 2021 to for copyright reasons and to distance it from Rowling's political views. It even gained its own [semi]-professional league known as Major League Quadball, which is played primarily in the Midwestern and Northeastern U.S., but also has teams in the Deep South and Ontario, Canada.
• Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl includes the fictional Simon Snow novels, an Expy of Harry Potter; the protagonist Cath writes a lengthy fan fiction about her own version of Simon's eighth and final year at school, called "Carry On, Simon". Rowell later wrote a full novel set in the Simon Snow universe called Carry On – however, the book is not "Carry On, Simon" itself: rather, it is Simon's final year if written by Rowell as herself, rather than as Cath or as in-universe author Gemma T Leslie. Carry On spawned sequels of its own, Wayward Son and the upcoming Any Way the Wind Blows.
• Walter Tevis' 1959 novel The Hustler (adapted into the 1961 film of the same name) has legendary pool player Minnesota Fats as its antagonist. Actual pool hustler Rudolf Wanderone changed his name from New York Fats to Minnesota Fats after the success of the book and film. He then claimed that the fictional character was based on him, which Tevis and the filmmakers both denied.

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