Fictional Document - Television Tropes & Idioms

The Book of Mazarbul, the record of Balin's doomed Moria colony in The Lord Of The Rings
- Not to mention The Red Book of Westmarch itself.
The Encylopedia Galactica, Isaac Asimov's Foundation series.
The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, P. K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy
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).
- Bobbi Anderson is referenced in The Stand.
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.
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 jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, 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.
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 Book of Night With Moon from Diane Duane's Young Wizards series.
The excerpts from Princess Irulan's various scholarly works (and other people's, for that matter) that appear as chapter headers throughout the Dune novels.
Mr. Bunnsy has an Adventure, a Beatrix Potter pastiche from Terry Pratchett's The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents
- Pratchett is very fond of this trope; other examples include The Necrotelicomnicon aka Liber Paginarum Fulvarum (a Tome Of Eldritch Lore), 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.
- Several have been Defictionalised for merchandising purposes, including Where's My Cow? (a children's book) and Nanny Ogg's Cookbook (published in-universe as The Joye of Snackes).
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. Then there's "Why Do You Think You Think?", "The Heart is a Milkman", "The Vulture is Molting", and even a "The Future" magazine. Then there's the laws and regulations and plans, including the "Anti-Dog Eat Dog Rule" to the "Equalization of Opportunity" bill to the "Railroad Unification Plan" to the "Steel Unification Plan". There are even audio versions, with Richard Halley's works and its bastardizations.
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).
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; if by some sick, perverse twist of fate you find the actual play, do not read it.
- The version written by Thom Ryng is actually quite good, though it fails to drive its readers or players insane.
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".
In particular, the film The Navidson Record from House Of Leaves doesn't actually exist, and the protagonist tells you this in the book's introduction. Meanwhile, the meat of House Of Leaves is an academic analysis/summary of said film. A few of the people and books referred to in the analysis's footnotes are real; the vast, vast majority of them are completely made up.
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.
Everything published by Whateley Press in the Whateley Universe, including "Introduction to the Modern Theory of Mutant Powers, a Whateley Press textbook" by Filbert R. Z. Quintain, M.S., Ph.D., F.A.A.S.
Used from time to time in Sword Of Truth, mostly in the form of books of prophecy. Being prophesies, they are then promptly ignored.
The Books Of Pellinor are all written as if they are histories of the fictional land the books are based in. The back of the book even includes annotations, a bibliography, family trees and various other fictitious documents.
The Book of Ultimate Truths is about a search for the missing chapters of a book called The Book of Ultimate Truths, a book about the secrets of the world.
The Book of All Hours in Hal Duncan's duology of the same name.
And of course the aforementioned Necronomicon, spawned in the Lovecraft horrorverse but since widely exported to other canons and other media.
- Now subverted as an actual Necronomicon has been published.
Much of Karel Čapek's War With the Newts consists of fictional newspaper excerpts commenting on the situation with the Newts (and, eventually, the titular war).
This trope appears as a central theme in the book The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. In it, the protagonist girl is given a very high tech teaching book by the name of "The Young Ladies' Illustrated Primer," which also appears as a subtitle of the book.
Several of the Warhammer 40000: Horus Heresy books have characters talk about an epic called The Chronicles of Ursh. They never go into more detail about it.
Sex Is My Adventure, Josella Playton's undeservedly-infamous novel in The Day Of The Triffids.
Italo Calvino's If On A Winters Night A Traveler has excerpts from ten wildly different fictional novels, though the Reader can never get past the first chapter of each.

Close Literature

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.
In The Sandman, Dream's castle includes a library of books that were never written.
The DC Universe features "true crime" comics of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, etc.'s adventures, presumably taken from media accounts, etc.; one late 60s Batman story made use of this as its plot (Batman forced to confront the writer of his world's "Batman" comic).
Superman of course features the great metropolitan newspaper The Daily Planet.
Captain Carrot And His Amazing Zoo Crew features fictional Earth-C versions of some DC Comics characters. Captain Carrot in his alter ego works as a writer/artist for his world's DC Comics, writing stories about "Super-Squirrel", "Wonder Wabbit", "the Batmouse", and the "Just'a Lotta Animals" (though the Zoo Crew later discovered that their "fictional" comics characters were actually real, on the parallel world of Earth-C-Minus).

Close Comic Books

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.)
Blush, the fashion magazine whose offices are the setting for Just Shoot Me.
The Chronicle, the tabloid from the short-lived show of the same name.
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.
Agent McGee's novels in NCIS. Even proves to be a plot point.
Shortly after the above quote from Red Dwarf, Holly beams a hologramattic copy of the Space Corp Directives into Rimmer's hands, proving they exist. It's much thinner than you might think. The rules are apparently in small type.
In an episode of Corner Gas, at the end Brent does a "if you want to find out more, visit your local Library!" segment with the books featured in the episode. One of them he mentions is something "the prop guy made up" but is "a good read".
The Bro Code, which Barney quotes on various occasions in one episode of How I Met Your Mother. Barney claims it was written by his ancestor Barnabas Stinson on the back of the U.S. Constitution. It is heavily implied that Barney just made it all up, making this a fictional fictional document.
Richard Castle's MANY novels in Castle.
- Well, the Derek Storm novels at least. Heat Wave is being Defictionalized.
On Lost, Sawyer reads a fictional manuscript for a novel called "Bad Twin" that was later Defictionalized.
- Between season 5 and 6, a fictional documentary TV episode on the DHARMA Initiative has been released.

Close Live Action TV

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 is available to read on the main menu of MGS2.
- Some consider the Gamecube remake The Twin Snakes to be a video game based on the novel, which would naturally embellish certain events, explaining how Snake could kick a missle in mid-air.
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.
- And Boethiah's Pillow book is unmentionable.
- This troper found a good laugh in The Madness of Pelagius, after having read The Wolf Queen vol. 8, which describes an amulet given to Pelagius that robs the wearer of sanity over the course of years.
This troper still fumes over this trope applying to 'Jacob's Shadow' in Deus Ex.
Monkey Island 2 has an entire library of fictional documents, mostly comprised of various jokes, in-jokes, and parodies.
The Emigre Document of Shadow Hearts, seemingly based on the untranslatable Voynich Manuscript carries in it all manner of dangerous knowlege including resurrection. That part always fails in the most catastrophic ways possible, usually summoning soulless abominations from your loved ones corpse to devour them and you as well. Except for two recorded times. And in the first example, the corpse couldn't take the stress and dissolved before the process finished.
- If that is not Lovecraftian enough, also available is the R'lyeh Text, translated as Codex of Lurie, which I believe you find in a nudie mag.
In the vein of plot-important fake books is In-Laqetti, of Persona2 fame. A composition of patchwork conspiracy including aliens, Mayans, and Master-D himself, which would apparently cause the world to go bye-de-bye. Thanks to a bit of kotodama and extreme Wikiality, things start coming true.
The hugely popular novel (and later play) LOVELESS is frequently quoted by Genesis in Final Fantasy VII Crisis Core, It's apparently very moving, but we never find out what the novel is actually about.
Baldurs Gate is full of these. Some provide plot-relevant information ("The History of the Dead Three") other just notes on the setting. One is a recipe for cookies.
In Beyond Good And Evil, Jade's sidekick Double H quotes passages frequently from the the 'Carlson & Peeters' military manual, a Big Book Of War. While the player eventually does see a section of the book in digital form, most of what we know about the book is from Double H offering advice from the book as quoted passages: "If you can't go through a door, go around it!". Perhaps one of the few fictional documents which also serves as inspiration for someone's Battle Cry.

Close Video Game

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.
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 parodies of actual papers and places.
The various popular Heterodyne Boys pulp novels in Girl Genius.
The various mad science journals (including the New Journal of Malology) from Narbonic.

Close Web Comics

The Shepherd's Journal in Atlantis: The Lost Empire.
One episode of Kim Possible features the "classic novella" Lo The Plow Shall Till The Soil Of Redemption. One critic describes it thusly: "snobby, pompous, overwritten, and the pictures [are] in black and white!"

Close Western Animation

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.)
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.

Close Print Media

Mirror Mask has "The Really Useful Book" and "A Complete History of Everything"
In the original novel Frankenstein, the actual method of bringing the Monster back to life is never detailed. In the Mel Brooks film Young Frankenstein, this fact is parodied by the discovery of a book by Frankenstein entitled simply How I Did It.

Close Film

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 actually exists and was written as part of the worldbuilding for the Mirage expansion, and can be read here.
A pair of meta-examples from Dungeons And Dragons: The Book Of Exalted Deeds and the Book Of Vile Darkness, which exist as powerful artifacts in-universe and useful splatbooks out-of-universe.
- Furthermore, this editor has encountered all-too-many wizards and other book-collector type P Cs and NP Cs who have a copy of the Monster Manual or the Campaign Setting Guide to a different campaign setting among their libraries.
- Forgotten Realms uses it via its Literary Agent Hypothesis: at least Aurora's Whole Realms Catalogue and every Volo's Guide to [blank] are supposed to be "actual" books printed on Toril, and some others, like Elminster's Ecologies mostly consists of various in-'verse exposition texts.
The Ravenloft campaign setting features the Tome of Strahd, an exceedingly rare manifesto written by Strahd von Zarovich which serves as the foreword of the Ravenloft sourcebook. Also, and more popularly, there are the Van Richten's Guides, written by famed doctor and monster hunter Ruldolph van Richten. Copies of these books are published and distributed by the doctor's office and serve as guides on proper hunting techniques. Often, Dr. van Richten complains in his books that there are so many other inferior and incorrect works on monster hunting in existence that he sees it as his duty to put out properly researched guides that won't get novice hunters killed. Out of universe, the Guides exist and are written in the author's voice for the fluff sections, though it is assumed that any crunchy statistics and in-game information is ghosted out of the in-universe versions.
Much of the rich background information for Warhammer 40000 is conveyed through quotes, after-action reports, or excerpts from fictional investigations, histories, or journals. In an example of Defictionalization, one such book, The Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer, has actually been published.

Close Tabletop Games

Much of Princess Tutu's plot revolves around the fictional fairytale The Prince and the Raven.
Near the end of the Chrono Crusade manga, there's quotations from both Mary Magdalene's prophecies, and Azmaria's memoir. It's implied that at least some of the manga is "based on" the book Azmaria wrote.
DN Angel has a plotline focused around the fictional fairytale Ice and Snow—which turns out to be the edited, abridged version of the original tale, Ice and Dark.
The villain of Monster bases his identity on a brainwashing children's book. The story, along with several others, is reproduced in the series with full text and illustrations.
Chobits features a picture book which corrosponds to the main character so completely that is becomes of little wonder when its revealed that it was written specifically for her.

Close Anime and Manga

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.
- You can actually download a PDF copy of the book from its website: http://www.in-the-matter-of.com/instrument.pdf
- 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...
  - This troper heard a random reference to it in a Lets Play, dubbed "The only watchable anime" by the reviewer. Then again, he could just be pulling legs...
  - Well, as it turned out, it was eventually deleted, so it is a hoax after all.

Close Misc

The entry on the Jormungand Imperium in Open Blue's Worldbook quotes multiple fictional documents as the source of information for the otherwise completely unknown lost civilization.

Close Web Original

Main Tropes Index

Troperville

Editing Help

Tools

Toys

Examples: