Fictional Document - Television Tropes & Idioms

All the books, magazines, and newspapers that exist only within a fictional world, from the Necronomicon to the mysteries of Jessica Fletcher. They are more common in Speculative Fiction, but not restricted to it.

They serve two main narrative purposes: verisimilitude and exposition. Jessica is supposed to be an author; it would be bizarre if no trace of the books she writes existed. Reading the Necronomicon may frighten the protagonist half to death, but it also gives the reader an idea of the backstory.

Fictional documents are also used to comment on literary tropes, and as aids to characterisation. Characters comparing their own predicament with their favourite book can get very sarcastic about how unrealistic it was, while few things so embarrass the Action Girl as having her little brother read aloud a few choice passages from her favourite romance. Sometimes, however, you may just have to Take Our Word For It.

Common types of fictional document include the Book Of Shadows and its evil twin, the Tome Of Eldritch Lore.

If your story is made entirely of Fictional Documents, it's a Scrapbook Story (so please list it there rather than here); if the paratext quotes from these, it's quoting the Encyclopedia Exposita.

Examples:

The Book of Mazarbul, Balin's journal in The Lord Of The Rings
The Encylopedia Galactica, Isaac Asimov's Foundation series.
The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, P. K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle
The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy
Mr. Bunnsy has an Adventure, a Beatrix Potter pastiche from Terry Pratchett's The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents
Stephen King occasionally has characters in one book reading a book written by a writer who was a character in another book, such as Rose (Rose Madder) reading Paul Sheldon (Misery), or Jo (Bag of Bones) reading William Denbrough (IT), or Darla (Lisey's Story) listening to an audio book by Michael Noonan (Bag of Bones).
- I'm pretty sure someone either reads some Bobbi Anderson (Tommyknockers) or at least makes reference to a female writer of Westerns who lives in Haven, but I can't remember the specifics. Bobbi's neighbors, however, compare her favorably to "that other writer" from Maine, who writes the stories with all the monsters and cursing (King himself).
Speaking of Stephen King, a large percentage of Carrie is excerpts from books, magazine articles, or investigative reports relating to various characters and events.
- King does it again in The Regulators (under pen name Richard Bachman), interspersing narrative with newspaper clippings, letters, diary excerpts, etc.
Dean Koontz frequently has sections or chapters headed with quotations from the Book of Counted Sorrows. This has been slightly subverted, since Koontz has since actually published the book in question. Much less frequently, he also quotes the Book of Counted Joys.
The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four.
Jorge Luis Borges LOVED this trope. The biggest example is the collection of short stories called El Jardin donde los senderos se bifulcan, where all the stories were are fictional books
David Eddings loves these. The prologues of nearly all his books take the form of a fictional document detailing what has gone on before. This editor suspects that each of his worlds possesses a university just so he can justify these documents' existence.
Juliet McKenna likes them even more; she prefaces nearly every chapter with a fictional document. Some of them are only tangentially relevant.
Bones makes frequent reference to the novels that Brennan has written, and one episode includes a series of murders that imitate those in one of her books. (In a playfully meta note, the books have the same title scheme as the Kathy Reichs novels that the series is based on, and "Kathy Reichs" is the name of Brennan's fictional forensic anthropologist.)
Any number of texts found within The Elder Scrolls games, ranging from popular histories such as The Real Barenziah and A Brief History of the Empire, through religious texts such as For My Gods and Emperor and 36 Lessons of Vivec, to novels such as A Dance in Fire and The Wolf Queen. Many of the histories presented within the game are contradictory and at odds with each other, leaving it up to the reader to piece together the history of Tamriel for him/herself.
- This editor's personal favorite is Oblivion's The Lusty Argonian Maid. It's... umm... a novel.
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pirates is frequently quoted in Schlock Mercenary. This includes such gems in its rules as:
- 4. Close air support covereth a multitude of sins.
- 12. A soft answer turneth away wrath. Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head.
- 35. That which does not kill you has made a tactical error.
- 37. There is no "overkill". There is only "open fire" and "I need to reload."
Gunnerkrigg Court: While researching the minotaur, Antimony was unimpressed with Gainsbury World Mythology and Mythology 4 Kidz! as sources. Later, she's seen reading Tannhauser Gate, and Kat borrows Important Stuff (Like Science) from the library.
The Princess Bride is a real novel written as if it were the annotated 'just the good bits' version of an even longer novel about the history and culture of the fictional nation Florin.
Craig Thomas has used this at least twice in his novels, such as Wolfsbane and Firefox.
The Shepherd's Journal in Atlantis The Lost Empire.
Calvin And Hobbes has Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooey, as well as Chewing, a magazine about chewing gum. (Also, Commander Coriander Salamander And 'Er Singlehander Bellyander, the sequel to Hamster Huey is mentioned once.)
Blush, the fashion magazine whose offices are the setting for Just Shoot Me.
The Book of Night With Moon from Diane Duane's Young Wizards series.
The excerpts from Princess Irulan's various scholarly works that appear as chapter headers throughout the Dune novels.
The Necrotelicomnicon aka Liber Paginarum Fulvarum, a Tome Of Eldritch Lore from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. Pratchett is very fond of this trope; other Fictional Documents in his works include The Joy of Tantric Sex with Illustrations for the Advanced Student, by A. Lady, The Book of Going Forth Around Elevenish, The Little Folks' Book of Flower Fairies, The Bumper Fun Grimoire, How to Dynamically Manage People for Dynamic Results in a Caring Empowering Way in Quite a Short Time Dynamically, Wellcome to Ankh-Morporke, Citie of One Thousand Surprises, and many more, usually parodic versions of real books. The Discworld Companion includes a full list.
Under the Hood, Hollis Mason's autobiography, and a Tales From the Black Freighter comic in Watchmen.
- Also parts of Dr. Manhattan's back story.
About half of each the books in The Pendragon Adventure is journals from Bobby Pendragon himself, detailing his stays and attempts to save the Territories.
Extracts from Thursday Next's autobiography are scattered throughout the series of the same name. Extracts from others characters' jottings/memoirs also feature prominently.
In Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, one of the so-called intelligentsia writes an article titled "The Octopus" which slams Henry Rearden.
Peanuts made reference to a whole series of books starring The Six Bunny-Wunnies on various adventures, authored by one Helen Sweetstory. Over a dozen titles were given, each usually mentioned only once, but The Six Bunny-Wunnies Freak Out is the most widely remembered for having been banned by the local school board and subsequently championed by Linus.
In The Sandman, Dream's castle includes a library of books that were never written.
This troper has yet to find any evidence that Instrument Of God exists outside this wiki.
- This troper found some red links to Instrument Of God in the entry for the Great Gazoo on The Other Wiki.
- Similarly, this troper has yet to find any evidence that the anime Goro Goro Iki exists other than on The Other Wiki and in lists of anime series that might just be copied from it. The page has been up for some time without getting deleted...
The novels and short stories of Kilgore Trout, a failed science fiction author who's a recurring character in several of Kurt Vonnegut's novels. His 117 novels and 2000 short stories were published by a disreputable porn company and used as filler material for trashy erotic magazines though, so only a handful of other characters have ever heard of Kilgore Trout. His novel Venus On The Half Shell ended up making the transition from fictional document to real book when sf writer Philip José Farmer wrote and published it under the name Kilgore Trout (Vonnegut was apparently not amused, and the byline in later editions was Farmer's own name).
Harry Potter has stacks of these, from trading cards to school textbooks to government pamphlets to wizarding comic books.
- Not to mention JKR's predilection for turning some of them into published works (Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them, Quidditch Through The Ages, The Tales of Beedle the Bard)
Several games have used fictional documents as part of the documentation. Well-known examples include text adventures from Infocom and Ultima series.
Metal Gear Solid has a few books mentioned in the game. Most notably one called "In the Darkness of Shadow Moses", a novelization of the events of the first game which was mentioned in the second.
Speculative Fiction author Bruce Sterling's short story Our Neural Chernobyl was written as a review of a fictional monograph (a non-fiction book on a specific real-world topic) about the "neural Chernobyl," which described the development, release, and consequences of a retrovirus that caused massive growth in brain complexity in almost all mammals, something catastrophic for humans as the process makes humans massively intelligent, but effectively burns out the brain after a while. The story even touches on the book's exploration of the controversial topic of non-human uplifting from the virus, where many animals became much more intelligent, to the point cats developed torture devices to use on mice.
The King in Yellow, a fictional play script from the book of short stories of the same name. This editor can wholly recommend you to read the book, but NOT the play.
This troper still fumes over this trope applying to 'Jacob's Shadow' in Deus Ex.
Used extensively in Jack Vance's The Demon Princes series. A lot of the chapters, in fact, start with more or less related quotes from various invented works. Titles mentioned include the many-volumed "Life" by Baron Bodissey or the "Scroll from the Ninth Dimension". Also quite prominent in the story is a fictional magazine named "Cosmopolis".
Mirror Mask has "The Really Useful Book" and "A Complete History of Everything"
In particular, The Navidson Record from House Of Leaves doesn't actually exist, and the protagonist tells you this in the book's introduction.
The French sci-fi writer Bernard Werber frequently uses this device. The Ants trilogy has fragments from his fictional character Edmond Wells's Encyclopedia of Relative and Absolute Knowledge, which was later published in paperback form under Werber's name. This last detail is egregious since Wells explains in his atypical encyclopedia that he thinks he is turning schizophrenic and the paperback makes it sound as if it were Werber's voice (moreover, Edmond actually dies just before the beginning of the first novel and only appears through flashbacks and the Encyclopedia, and he's a bit of a Mad Scientist at that). Also, the Thanatonautes series has fragments from a character's collection of world myths and legends concerning life after death. Yes, you know what it means.
In part 2 of the Lebanese comic Malaak: Angel of Peace, a collage of fictional newspapers is used on one page to suggest that the heroine has piled up missions and has been noticed by the general public. The papers' titles and contents (ads included) are all subversions of actual papers and places.
Monkey Island 2 has an entire library of fictional documents, mostly comprised of various jokes, in-jokes, and parodies.
The Chronicle, the tabloid from the short-lived show of the same name.
Magic The Gathering has numerous fictional documents that are quoted in cards' flavor text and in some of the novels and comics. Some of the notable ones include The Antiquities War, an epic poem about the Brothers' War that the comics and novel are supposedly based on; Sarpadian Empires, whose first six volumes are quoted in Fallen Empires flavor text and whose seventh volume was printed as a card in Time Spiral; and The Underworld Cookbook, which is only quoted on three cards (one of which is from the self-parody expansion Unhinged), but whose author's name, Asmoranomardicadaistinaculdacar, is the longest word ever to appear on a Magic card. The Love Song of Night and Day is a subversion, as the complete poem actually exists and was written as part of the worldbuilding for the Mirage expansion.
The hints and tips on Battle For Wesnoth's main game screen are attributed to various Fictional Document sources, including tactical manuals and characters' journals.
The fat sci-fi paperback Stephen Colbert's Alpha Squad 7: Lady Nocturne: A Tek Jansen Adventure is, inexplicably, not popular with publishers. Colbert eventually decided to self-publish in the form of comic books and animated shorts, both of which do exist in Real Life.

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