In a sort of recursive example, her short story "Nad and Dan and Quaffy" is about a science-fiction author with a coffee addiction who tends to write all her main characters as having an addiction to whatever the in-universe equivalent is.
And in her novel Deep Secret, the character Nick is completely incoherent and can't even open his eyes in the morning until he's had four cups. (This is apparently based on Neil Gaiman's real-life morning routine as witnessed at a convention.) In the sequel, The Merlin Conspiracy, Nick admits that he completely exaggerates his difficulties waking up, so that people won't bother him until he's feeling less grumpy.
In a somewhat milder example, in Dark Lord of Derkholm, Finn, one of the minor characters, mentions how he asked to be paid in coffee beans for serving as a wizard for one of the Pilgrim Parties that tears through his world on a regular basis, since the stuff normally only comes from Earth. Derk, who specializes in breeding all sorts of unique plants and animals, has managed to cultivate his own crop, which delights Finn to no end.
In the Catteni series, by the last book the aliens are hopelessly addicted to Coffee and it serves as a major trade and diplomacy item.
In The Ship Who Sang, when Helva brings a physical therapist to address a plague that has left survivors paralyzed, an immune local health official boards her and exclaims to find that she has coffee. Despite immediately drinking some he's so exhausted by the situation that he instantly falls asleep when offered a bed, and when leaving takes as much as he can carry. After that incident Helva stocks three times the normal amount of coffee.
In The Ship Who Searched Tia's brawn Alex takes a long time to wake up, even with coffee. She likes to schedule her three hours of mandatory sleep for mornings, after he's awake enough to keep an eye on things but before he's worth chatting with.
At the start of The Ship Who Won, Carialle and Keff dock at a friendly Space Station after a long, depleting trip, but have to cut "shore leave" and resupply short to avoid an Obstructive Bureaucrat, jetting out again with food and fuel at only thirty percent of maximum. Despite that, Carialle reassures her brawn, she'd managed to get his coffee restocked first thing and even procured a little chocolate.
Elizabeth Vaughan's books use this trope in a mostly-rural fantasy setting. Kavage makes everything a little more bearable, and most characters wouldn't think of going a day without it.
One of the first things the time-displaced Americans do is arrange to import coffee. Then they start exporting coffee-houses.
In the first book, it's noted that bothering the high school vice principal, Len Trout, before his third cup of coffee in the morning is a very bad idea, comparable to taunting Cthulu in inadvisability.
Dr. Harvey, the guy who discovered the circulation of blood, wins friends for life when he presents the Granvillers with a couple of pounds of coffee and tells them where and how to get more.
Harvey: "I've never seen grown men cry like that, and over a beverage!"
Anita Blake: Anita can't live without her coffee and looks down on other coffee drinkers who don't prepare it the "right" way (i.e., her way). She has a personalized coffee mug with "Give me decaf and I'll rip your head off" written on it.
Asta's Book by Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell; first published in the U.S. as Anna's Book) is about a Danish woman living in 1905 London. In her diary, she says Danish people need coffee more than food and talks about drinking three cups in the morning even when they're short on money and have to be careful. As an old lady living with her daughter, one of her catch phrases is "Do I smell the good coffee?"
Rather subtle in the Aubrey-Maturin series, but it's there:
The title characters are often seen sharing an entire pot of coffee. At several points, it's noted that neither is fully human without their morning coffee, and there's a minor crisis in Post Captain when upon moving to a new command Jack Aubrey discovers, much to his horror, that there is no coffee.
Or in The Mauritius Command, when, upon being informed that rats have eaten all of their coffee beans, Jack says to his steward "Killick, you may tell Mr Seymore, with my compliments, that you are to have a boat. And if you don't find at least a stone of beans among the squadron, you need not come back." This to a man who, at this point has served him loyally for over a decade.
It is also mentioned in passing that Captain Aubrey takes his coffee with a splash of cream, and keeps a goat on ship specifically to supply said cream.
Bloodsucking Fiends: Jody is an inveterate coffee drinker in life. She mostly sees her forcible transformation into a vampire as being Cursed with Awesome, but is profoundly disappointed to realize that she can't stomach coffee anymore. When she learns that she can keep it down by spiking it with blood, she immediately moves for the coffee maker.
"[Admiral] Desplains took a revivifying sip of fresh-brewed. Ivan wished he could remember which famous officer had once said, The Imperial Service could win a war without coffee, but would prefer not to have to."note A paraphrase of American Naval officer and military historian's statement that "The Navy could probably win a war without coffee but it wouldn't like to try."
Ivan's citizenship bride complains that Immigration, the cops and a friend out to warn them all arrived first thing in the morning 'Before anybody had drunk any coffee.'
Ciaphas Cain: Cain served with a Valhallan regiment; as a result, he always tries to keep a supply of tanna leaf (an expy of a very strong Russian tea) nearby. He even jokes that he fought his way across half a planet and an ork Waaagh! (warboss included) for it. At one point, an overworked Cain is sleeping in his office when Broklaw, the regiment's second in command, comes in and snarks at him about it... but he brings hot coffee, so Cain spares him. His editor is quick to point out that Cain's joking... she thinks. In one book he is left without a supply of Tanna and has very limited access to coffee. He starts suffering from withdrawal, exacerbated by general dehydration.
Colt Regan: Whether coffee is fresh and hot, cold and stale, or a horrible mix of both, Colt will still drink it, because it's still coffee.
In Monstrous Regiment, Maladict is a vampire who has replaced cravings for blood with cravings for coffee. When the coffee runs out, the vampire starts to go a little nuts, acting like a character from a Vietnam War movie ("Charlie's tracking us!" "Who's Charlie?"). Otto Chriek gives Polly dire warnings of what will happen if Maladict doesn't get coffee, and mentions that vampires have been known to hallucinate so vividly that other people experience them. Later in the book, the regiment hears helicopters overhead, which (unless Leonard of Quirm's air-screw from The Last Hero counts) don't exist on the Discworld. Eventually, the regiment roasts some acorns as a temporary substitute (and one with historical precedent).
Commander Vimes, with his insistence on working all the Watch shifts in an emergency, frequently needs coffee, which in Thud! he thinks of as "a way of stealing time that should by rights belong to your older self".
Dragaera: Vlad will drink normal coffee if he must, but he prefers "klava," a fictional beverage made from coffee and several other ingredients filtered through eggshells. It seems to be the only thing about Dragaeran society that Vlad likes. Just about every book includes scenes of Vlad fussing over his need for klava.
Dragonriders of Pern: According to Dragonsdawn, the first two things a group of humans will actively try and find on a new planet are: something that they can ferment into alcohol, and something they can turn into a coffee substitute. (Much to the dismay of the colonists, coffee bushes won't grow on Pern - or any other planet humans have colonized.) The brave ones drink klah (a beverage made from a type of native tree bark, which is implied to have a sort of cinnamon taste) instead, but one colonist plots to steal a ship and leave, partly because they've run out of coffee.
Zig-zagged: Enoa is forced to kick her caffeine habit, because coffee is almost impossible to find since global destabilization.
Played straight with Orson and his frequent all-nighters. Thankfully he acquired a huge coffee stash through one of his protection jobs.
The Dresden Files: The Afterlife Antechamber has a station for souls who want to work to protect people before moving on to What-Comes-Next. Their leader Colin is always in a bad mood, because their incorporeal existence makes it impossible for him to get his much-needed morning coffee.
When Rose first meets Uncle Alec in Eight Cousins, he (being a doctor) is extremely dismayed to learn that she's given a cup of strong coffee every morning because it "tones [her] up". He decries the beverage as being responsible for her poor sleep pattern and frequent headaches, pours it out the window, and starts her on a regimen of drinking fresh milk every morning instead.
The Expanse: James Holden really, really likes coffee.
"In thanks, you can have all my stuff. I don't care about any of it anymore." "Including the coffee maker, sir?" "Almost all my stuff."
In Freaky Friday, Annabel's mother needs her coffee, and gets grouchy when told she can't have it because it will stunt her growth.
Hannah Swensen usually has several cups upon waking up in the morning, and has even put off talking to her own sisters before at least the first cup. Coffee has the in-series nickname of "Swedish Plasma", due to how many people in Minnesota drink it.
Honor Harrington: Practically everyone in the series except Honor herself is a "barbarian coffee drinker", as she jokingly calls them. Honor's preference of cocoa over coffee comes off as an inversion of the series' general premise of Horatio HornblowerIN SPACE!.
Horatio Hornblower: The titular Officer and a Gentleman is an avid coffee drinker, in contrast to the normal assumption that a British officer would be drinking tea. Unfortunately he usually can't afford enough to sustain him through a voyage and has to make do with a Poor Man's Substitute most of the time: burnt bread in hot water with sugar.
In the In Death series Eve lives on coffee and Pepsi. In fact, the first present Roarke ever gives her is a bag of coffee.
Inverted in Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan series, where Dr. Carolyn Ryan, Jack's wife, specifically does not drink coffee the evening before she is scheduled to perform delicate laser eye surgery. She doesn't want her hand to jitter even a little.
In Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff Josh and Biff discovered a man selling some hot black drink at the Antioch's market, for which they quickly developed quite a taste.
"He was hugging his coffee beans and mumbling to himself as he had for the whole trip. Praying, I presume."
In Leaving Home, Garrison Keillor has some immortal words about Norwegians and coffee: "He poured himself a cup of coffee, drank some, kissed his wife — in that order, he is Norwegian." Later he says coffee has been known to revive Norwegians who have flatlined.
Legends & Lattes: Averted, surprisingly for a story about an orc who opens a coffee shop. Coffee entices Viv less for its caffeine than the general taste and aroma of it. When she does drink several cups in a row out of nervousness, she gets so jittery she almost fumbles Tandri's job interview.
Beth Johannsen, one of the Ares 3 crew in The Martian, requires coffee upon waking for any functioning, not just optimal.
Empress Celene in The Masked Empire drinks so much tea every day that she has a caffeine addiction, suffering headaches when she doesn't have enough (headaches being one symptom of caffeine withdrawal). She even has a teapot that is magically heated near her most of the time.
Most, if not all, of the characters in The Millennium Trilogy seem to subsist on a lot of coffee. Apparently, writer Stieg Larsson was like this in real life as well. This led to some Values Dissonance with the books' American readers. Many American literary critics mockingly claimed that no-one should be able to consume those amounts of coffee and survive. Swedes, on the other hand, consider between six and eight cups a day to be a large consumption of coffee, but not remarkably so.
Monster of the Year: Skip Toomaloo, as an early morning DJ, relies on coffee to get him through his day. Unfortunately, his daughter loves spicing it with "extras" as a way of tormenting him.
Horace Bury is a coffee connoisseur who at one point shows off his stash to the crew of a Russian-themed warship, who favored tea. The royal family has their own reserved farm for growing coffee beans that no-one else is allowed to touch; Bury paid a ridiculous price to get his hands on some, wouldn't do it again but it was so good he doesn't regret it.
The crew of MacArthur are less than enthusiastic about exterminating the vermin infesting their ship because, among other things, they vastly improved the operation of the ship's coffeemaker and the taste of its output. In fact when their ship has to be abandoned the captain gives specific instructions for one of the officers to bring along the new and improved coffee machine despite having to abandon almost everything else. The sequel reveals that they reverse engineered it and the navy is in the process of replacing all of their coffee machines with the new type.
Myth Adventures: In Myth-Taken Identity, the Barista at the Mall is a Cafiend from Caf, the dimension where coffee was invented. Her species literallyneeds caffeine to live, and a sign reading "THE COFFEE IS THE LIFE" is displayed above her coffee shop.
In October Daye, the titular hero has an abundant dependence on coffee. At one point she is able to find the hidden princess to the realm, when she manages to notice a coffee shop near her house that she has never been to and realizes this is a physical impossibility. Later, however, she kicks the habit entirely.
Paratime: The Paratime Police force seems to run on coffee and nicotine.
Almost all of the protagonists in Peacebreakers are hopelessly addicted to coffee, which, according to Word of God, is a small jibe at the role of coffee in workplace melodrama.
Just then, Cassandra’s voice called out from the top of the stairs. "I'm coming down, so someone had better have my coffee ready..." I rolled my eyes but went and poured some coffee while Lauren snickered. I noticed that she made sure to get a firm grip on her own cup, just in case Cassandra decided it was easier to snatch hers. Cassandra came down the stairs, still looking more than half-asleep. She came straight to the breakfast nook where I placed her coffee in front of her. None of said a word until she’d emptied nearly half the cup.
The German story Rock Crystal by Adalbert Stifter has two children, Conrad and his sister Sanna, trapped in a hillside during a snowstorm doing their best to stay alive. Conrad remembers that his father told him that those who slept during a snowstorm are likely to freeze to death, and does his best to keep his sister awake, finally resorting to black coffee given to him by his grandmother in a flask, and giving a sip to his sister to keep her from falling asleep. The coffee literally keeps them alive and they take turns drinking it to stay awake during the snowstorm.
In Ranger's Apprentice, the Rangers' main drink, and one you would not want to deprive them of, is coffee.
Mary Russell's The Sparrow has an earth exploration team bringing lots of coffee along on their First Contact mission. It goes from a Running Gag to a trade item and ultimately a plot point.
In the novel How Much for Just the Planet?, by John M. Ford, it's quickly established over breakfast that "Bones McCoy was Not a Morning Person". Despite the coffee he fails to notice his grits are bright orange — though everybody else at the table does. He also didn't notice Kirk's electric blue "orange juice" until he'd finished the mug. (The food replicators were malfunctioning that morning.)
Bones: Plergb hrafizz umgemby, and coffee.note The fact that Mike Ford actually inserted the age-old SF-fannish wordplergb into a professional published work is noteworthy in and of itself.
In The Final Reflection, also by Ford, a sympathetic Klingon character is depicted as a morning coffee drinker, praising its mind-clearing effect; it's explained that he picked up a taste for it during a space voyage where the supplies ran low and all they had to drink was a case of "kafei" they'd plundered along the way.
Another novel had "coffee" that was dispensed in freeze-dried cubes, which apparently had all the taste qualities of transmission fluid. The owner of the freighter Captain Kirk is hitching a ride on says she keeps her own stash of beans so she won't have to drink that swill.
Diane Duane in her novel Spock's World has Spock and Scotty beaming coffee beans up but stopping the transport in mid-beam (like they did with the Klingons in "Day of the Dove"), storing the pattern in the transporter's data storage units. All extraneous cargo in starships on tour is now handled this way. Coffee is now a pleasant everyday thing and not just a rare and special treat. (They must have done this very early on, since we're shown people on the Big E drinking coffee practically from the first episode.)
In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Relaunch, there's Ms. DellaMonica, a refugee Ezri Dax has to deal with. The author of that book was the same author who introduced Bacco, actually...
The Crimson Shadow has significant parts of the Cardassian population addicted to Coffee due to Federation assistance in the aftermath of the Dominion War.
Star Trek: Enterprise Relaunch: Klingons take favourably to caffeine after finding some while raiding human ships. Being Klingons, they start brewing their own, which makes them even more bad-tempered and irritable (the Klingons, naturally, see this as a positive). One Klingon captain in "Live by the Code" is uncertain which is worse; dying ignominiously in a pointless fight, and thereby going straight to Klingon hell, or not having any coffee.
Throughout Star Wars Legends, various characters drink "caf" (some books call in "coffeine"), with the text describing how good they feel once they get their morning fix and how cranky they get in situations when it's not readily available.
Steel Crow Saga: Tala is stranded deep in hostile territory with only an enemy prince for backup. The absence of coffee — the locals prefer tea — is what takes the situation from bad to dreadful in her estimation.
Temeraire: When the protagonist Will Laurence, an English Officer and a Gentleman, has his first exposure to a Mildly Military Aerial Corps captain, he offers tea, only for the captain to knock back six cups of coffee instead. In fairness, the captain came straight from a seven-hour solo flight.
Titus Crow by Brian Lumley: Crow has been known to guzzle an entire pot of coffee when recuperating from unpleasant psychic contact or a confrontation with an Eldritch Abomination.
Lampshaded in the Nora Roberts book Tribute, in which the hero (a graphic novelist) leaves some coffee along with "before" and "after" pictures of her—before the caffeine bearing a strong resemblance to a drowned rat, and after the caffeine as the new Wonder Woman.
