Trojan Horse / Literature

Trojan Horses in Literature.

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• In the novel Beyond Varallan by S.L. Veihl, the protagonist hides warriors onboard shuttles that were supposed to be carrying refugees away from the titular planet in order to take over the enemy vessel and hand them over to the other enemy vessels in order to save their world.
• Parodied twice over in the Discworld series:
  • In Eric, the Tsorteans immediately see through the ruse and surround the wooden horse with soldiers. It turns out that the Ephebian commander expected that to happen, and merely intended the horse to distract the defenders while he and his men got into the city another way.
  • In Pyramids, war breaks out again between Ephebe and Tsort. Both the Ephebian and Tsortean armies build several giant wooden horses. Facing each other. The Tsortean officers get one with rockers.
    Ephebian Sergeant: Look, soldier, anyone bloody stupid enough to think we're going to drag a lot of horses full of soldiers back to our city is certainly daft enough to drag ours all the way back to theirs. QED.
  • Played straight in Carpe Jugulum, when Agnes and Oats sneak into the castle by hiding in two vacant coffins that are being delivered there.
• In The Divine Comedy, three different people are damned to the Eighth Circle for the Ur-Example Trojan Horse that fooled the Trojans into their demise. Ulysses/Odysseus and Diomedes burn with the false counselors in the Circle's eighth ditch for their fraud to the Trojans while Sinon suffers from excruciating disease at the very last ditch of deceit for his falsification of words.
• Nathanael West's 1931 novel The Dream Life of Balso Snell has its protagonist encountering a variety of characters inside the actual Trojan Horse.
• Invoked Trope by Octavian in The Heroes of Olympus, who uses the "beware Greeks bearing gifts" line to try and incite conflict with the Greek demigods and so maintain his own power. It's not exactly a horse though, and nor is that actually the plan.
• In the Perry Rhodan reboot Perry Rhodan Neo, the nearly immortal Atlan hints that he was one of the men inside the horse.
• Red Storm Rising features this tactic with the Soviet invasion of Iceland in which they disguise an invasion ship as an American flag cargo vessel. It manages to work until they start launching hovercraft.
• Briefly mentioned in Skulduggery Pleasant, in which the eponymous detective says "never to look a gift horse in the mouth, unless it's made of wood."
• Star Wars Legends:
  • In Wraith Squadron, the titular squadron uses a captured pocket carrier to ambush a Star Destroyer.
  • In Heir to the Empire, Thrawn uses one in a clever application of a cloaking device. The (realistic) weakness of cloaking devices in his stories is that they are double blind and therefore difficult to use properly in conventional combat. He comes up with a clever solution: cloak the cargo bay and fill it with TIE fighters. Scanners would show the bay is empty and once they got into range the fighters could launch inside the enemy shipyard. It is only partially successful thanks to the timely intervention of Wedge and Rogue Squadron as well and Han, Luke and Lando.
• In David Gemmell's Troy Series, the Trojan Horse is actually an elite unit of Trojan cavalry led by prince Hector. In the final book, the unit is wiped out in an ambush and the Greeks dress up in the distinct armor worn by the cavalrymen. They then fool the Trojan defenders into thinking that survivors of the Trojan Horse are retreating toward the city and a gate is opened to let them in. The gate defenders are slaughtered and before reinforcements can close the gate, the rest of the Greek army storms in and sacks the city.
• Release That Witch: Iron Axe gives a rival clan a giant statue to commemorate their (underhanded) victory and genocide of his tribe. The leader, who knows a variation of the story, laughs at the obvious attempt to ambush them in their castle and sets the statue in the middle of their barracks, rallies his men, and then unleashes hell upon the insides - which are revealed to be explosives. Moral of the story: just throw the horse down a ravine.
• In the Colin Forbes thriller Year of the Golden Ape a conspirator always meets with a group of terrorists in a three-vehicle convoy, with him traveling in a different vehicle each time as a precaution against assassination. The real reason is so he can use these three vehicles to bring in a large number of soldiers when the terrorists need to be eliminated.

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