History Literature / ThursdayNext

Such is the universe of JasperFforde's meta-fictional masterpiece, the ''Literature/ThursdayNext'' series. The author [[LampshadeHanging hangs a lampshade]] on everything and anything relating to classic literature, the tropes of police fiction and spy fiction, and even the relationship between a work of fiction and its audience. Heavy on wordplay and [[HurricaneOfPuns puns,]] the series deals with the tireless heroine's adventures balancing her work as an agent of Jurisfiction in the Great Library and [=LiteraTec=] in the outside world, to say nothing of her responsibilities as a wife and mother.

** The Hades siblings are named after the rivers to hell (Acheron, Hades, etc.)

* ThemeNaming: Thursday's mother is named Wednesday and two of her children [[spoiler:(the only two that really exist)]] are called Friday and Tuesday.

* WritersSuck / TakeThatUs: Due to the way fiction is in this world, the least important person involved in storytelling is the '''author''', the spark of inspiration is generated spontaneously by the universe itself, the [=BookWorld=] characters act out story and maintain the infrastructure required to keep the story intact, while the reader supplies the imaginative potential required to power the whole system. The author is just a convenient pair of hands for typing the story out.

* WritersSuck/TakeThatUs: Due to the way fiction is in this world, the least important person involved in storytelling is the '''author''', the spark of inspiration is generated spontaneously by the universe itself, the [=BookWorld=] characters act out story and maintain the infrastructure required to keep the story intact, while the reader supplies the imaginative potential required to power the whole system. The author is just a convenient pair of hands for typing the story out.

* WhatDoYouMeanItsNotHeinous: Hades' little brother tries to follow in his CompleteMonster footsteps. He does things like calling to make appointments to look at people's used cars, and ''never showing up''.

* SoProudOfYou

* SeriousBusiness: Works of classic literature. To the extent that [[{{Yu-Gi-Oh}} a world revolving around a children's card game]] makes perfect sense in comparison. (Fforde says in interviews that the people in the Literature/ThursdayNext world have the same mass devotion for literature that people in our world have for sport.)

* EvenBadMenLoveTheirMamas: [[spoiler: Mr. Delamare, allowed to make any demand, has the government rename a road after his mother.]]

* [[HeWhoMustNotBeSeen She Who Must Not Be Seen]]: Jenny, Thursday's youngest daughter. The recurrent scenes that [[MissedHimByThatMuch Thursday always shows up at precisely the wrong time and miss seeing her]] is played as a rather weak RunningGag, [[spoiler: it was revealed that she is a mindworm left by Aornis Hades and does not actually exist. Her family knows this but pretends she exists and are ready with excuses when Thursday asks where Jenny was. This is to prevent Thursday from having a mental breakdown every time she realizes Jenny does not exist; Aornis created a mental block to prevent her from being able to recall this fact.]]

http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/thursdaycar2signed.jpg

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* DrivesLikeCrazy: [[GreatExpectations Miss Havisham]] and [[TheWindInTheWillows Mr. Toad]].

* ''First Among Sequels''

* ''One of Our Thursdays is Missing''
* ''Something Rotten''

In addition, there is an UnInstallment known as ''The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco'' between the fourth and fifth/sixth books, which is implied to have happened but does not exist.

** In ''First Among Sequels'', it gets even more complex. The first four books exist within the context of the story, but as much DarkerAndEdgier versions of the "real" events (i.e. what happened in the books that exist in our world), while another book in the fictional series, ''The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco'', never existed in the real series. [[spoiler:The events of the book resolve both discrepancies. ''The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco'' is destroyed in the Bookworld, causing it to cease to exist in the (fictional) real world, and presumably in our world as well. Thursday 1-4, the protagonist of the DarkerAndEdgier in-story books, is killed when the book is destroyed, and the remaining books are remade to be closer to "real" events (i.e. the books we read in our world), starring Thursday5, the protagonist of ''The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco''.]] I warned you that it was complicated.
** It doesn't get any simpler in ''One of Our Thursdays is Missing''.

* Catchphrase: A remarkably subtle and somewhat heartwarming version that's never pointed out in the text. When the top secret gathering of elite fictional agents in Bookworld breaks up, does the Bellman utter a bloodthirsty battle cry? No, he always warns his people--
-->Let's be careful out there.

* CorruptedData: The Mispeling Vyrus. It's a virus in the BookWorld that causes things to misspell, turning a parrot into a carrot, the floor into flour and other unpleasant consequences. This sounds more amusing than dangerous until you realize it can turn [[BodyHorror your bones into boons, your nose into a noose or your hands into hats]], depending on the severity of the infection. In short, if your body is infected, you are most likely going to die unless you get help ''really'' quickly. It can only be contained by dictionaries.

* DrivesLikeCrazy: Miss Havisham.
** Also Mr. Toad.

* FanworkBan: Subverted! In book six Thursday visits the island of fanfiction, and is surprised to find it a lively place that celebrates their source material. While the locations and character are described as flat, this is stated to be a side-effect of being copied, with varying degrees of severity depending on the quality of the writer. Plus it tangentially references [[SoCoolItsAwesome Thursday and the Doctor fighting Daleks]]. Excuse me, I have some writing to do...
** Although Fforde personally does not like fan-fiction, which a few commentators found slightly hypocritical as the entire book series can be considered a classical fiction fanfic.

* FlatCharacter : [[spoiler: In the sixth book, the written Thursday visits Fanfiction, where all the characters are of various degrees of flatness]]
** And of course there are the Generics, sort of apprentice characters who need to undergo CharacterDevelopment before they're good enough to be used as main characters.

* GilliganCut: At the end of chapter twenty-five of The Eyre Affair, Victor states that there is no way on God's own earth that Thursday and Bowden are going to get him to pose as an Earthcrosser. Guess what he's doing at the beginning of chapter twenty-six?

* HideYourChildren: Jenny, for good reason. [[spoiler: She doesn't actually exist, but Aornis made Thursday think she does, and Thursday only remembers this once in a while, for a short time.]]

* NoodleIncident: Books are extremely malleable and any unexpected stress will cause the plotline to change. And once a change establishes itself, it will cause every copy of that book across all of time and space to change along with it and we will never know what the original story was about. For example, ''Theatre/TitusAndronicus'' used to be a romance until the characters therein got bored, and the oeuvre of ThomasHardy was composed of raunchy comedies until smugglers made off with all the jokes.

* NoodleIncident: Books are extremely malleable and any unexpected stress will cause the plotline to change. And once a change establishes itself, it will cause every copy of that book across all of time and space to change along with it and we will never know what the original story was about. For example, ''TitusAndronicus'' used to be a romance until the characters therein got bored, and the oeuvre of ThomasHardy was composed of raunchy comedies until smugglers made off with all the jokes.

Such is the universe of [[JasperFforde Jasper Fforde's]] meta-fictional masterpiece, the ''ThursdayNext'' series. The author [[LampshadeHanging hangs a lampshade]] on everything and anything relating to classic literature, the tropes of police fiction and spy fiction, and even the relationship between a work of fiction and its audience. Heavy on wordplay and [[HurricaneOfPuns puns,]] the series deals with the tireless heroine's adventures balancing her work as an agent of Jurisfiction in the Great Library and [=LiteraTec=] in the outside world, to say nothing of her responsibilities as a wife and mother.

* ''Something Rotten''
* ''First Among Sequels''
* ''One of Our Thursdays is Missing''

* ItGetsEasier: Most of the literary characters are extremely blasé about dying or undergoing the many indignities that the narratives puts them through. The drowned girl (who has been dying on and off for about 200 years) from the ''Wreck of Hesperus'''s only complaint was that people keep trying to save her, which just makes it harder for her to die.
** Sometimes, a character do snap under the strain and it is Thursday's job to catch them before they do too much damage and replace them with a body double.

* MegaCorp: The Goliath Corporation, which pretty much owns Britain.

* MoralDilemma: A ship on the sea of Oral Tradition is devoted to reenacting the various dilemmas that crop up in philosophy classes one after another to the end of time.

* NoodleIncident: Books are extremely malleable and any unexpected stress will cause the plotline to change. And once a change establishes itself, it will cause every copy of that book across all of time and space to change along with it and we will never know what the original story was about. For example, ''TitusAndronicus'' used to be a romance until the characters therein got bored, and the oeuvre of ThomasHardy was composed of raunchy comedies until smugglers made off with all the jokes.
* OneSteveLimit: The Echolocators are responsible for weeding out accidental repetition from texts, they are also on the lookout of identically named characters. Apparently, they once wiped out an entire Hemingway novel because all seven of the books characters share the same name.

* SeriousBusiness: Works of classic literature. To the extent that [[{{Yu-Gi-Oh}} a world revolving around a children's card game]] makes perfect sense in comparison. (Fforde says in interviews that the people in the ThursdayNext world have the same mass devotion for literature that people in our world have for sport.)

* TakeThat: Fforde sometimes slips in a few of those. Like the subplot about a bellicose general convincing the other members of the Council of Genres to invade Racy Novel, a rogue genre member of the Axis of Unreadability, after presenting sketchy intelligence about its development of a dirty bomb of gratuitous sexual content.

* NoodleIncident: Books are extremely malleable and any unexpected stress will cause the plotline to change. And once a change establishes itself, it will cause every copy of that book across all of time and space to change along with it and we will never know what the original story was about.

* KangarooCourt: Thursday was put on trial for changing the plot of ''Jane Eyre'', which occured in Kafka's ''The Trial'' and the trial of the Knave of Hearts from ''AliceInWonderland''. Also subverted in that she managed to out-Kafka the judge and prosecution (having read the book beforehand) and got the prosecutor arrested instead.

* GreenAesop: The Short Now, caused by convenience in working with natural resources over responsible planning, depleting them, all the while claiming that there is not enough proof that the problem may be man made instead of natural - let's just say it bears some resemblance to political topics of the day. Similarily, the Stupidity Surplus.

* OneSteveLimit: The Echolocators are responsible for weeding out accidental repetition from texts, they are also on the lookout of identically named characters. Apparently, they once wiped out an entire Hemmingway novel because all seven of the books characters share the same name.

Thursday Next lives in an {{alternate history}}. In her world, {{time travel}}, cloning, and genetic engineering are commonplace; resurrected dodos are the household pet of choice. The obscenely powerful [[MegaCorp Goliath Corporation,]] which nearly singlehandedly reconstructed England after [[WorldWarTwo World War II,]] now runs the country as a virtual police state. And literature, particularly classic literature, is very, very, ''very'' {{serious business}}. Writers are revered with nearly spiritual devotion, controversial claims about books and authors can be criminal, and an entire police squad, the [=LiteraTecs=], exist to keep the literary scene in order. Thursday works for just such a unit in Swindon, with her friend and colleague, the exceedingly polite Bowden Cable.

In an effort to rescue her {{gadgeteer genius}} uncle Mycroft from international arch-criminal [[NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast Acheron Hades,]] a [[CardCarryingVillain gleefully evil]] individual with supernatural powers, Thursday discovers the Great Library, a sort of pocket dimension that exists within the pages of all works of literature, where all literary characters live. They're self-aware, acting out their roles when a person reads a book but chilling out and living their own lives as soon as they close it. the Great Library is governed by the Council of Genres and kept in line by Jurisfiction, ''another'' police force whose task it is to make sure the plot of every book stays the same every time someone reads it.

Jasper Fforde has also written the NurseryCrime series, which employs many of the same ideas and has a similar style. (The connection between the series is explained in great detail in ''The Well of Lost Plots''.) In this world, GenreSavvy detectives try to deal with suspicious goings-on, often involving {{nursery rhyme}} characters while trying to be both efficient ''and'' readable. This is a world where it's customary for DaChief to [[TurnInYourBadge suspend a detective]] at least once a case, and detectives gain credibility for having novel cars, lost loves, and drinking habits.

* AudienceParticipation: In-universe, the audience at the performance of ''{{Richard III}}'' behaves very much like ours at ''[[TheRockyHorrorPictureShow Rocky Horror]]''.

* [[ICantBelieveItsNotHeroin I Can't Believe It's Not Heroin]]: Thursday's cheese-smuggling activities.

* {{Literary Agent Hypothesis}}: The entire setup of the series seems to suggest this, especially the article in ''Well of Lost Plots'' that casually mentions that characters fool the author into believing that he or she is writing the story, whereas in reality their role is minimal. Chapters often open with quotes from Thursday and others, written long after the fact. Although it's also subverted - in ''First Among Sequels'', Thursday needs to visit her previous books, so she goes to the sixth floor of the great library, where all the "F" authors are stored...

* [[{{He Who Must Not Be Seen}} She Who Must Not Be Seen]]: Jenny, Thursday's youngest daughter. The recurrent scenes that [[MissedHimByThatMuch Thursday always shows up at precisely the wrong time and miss seeing her]] is played as a rather weak RunningGag, [[spoiler: it was revealed that she is a mindworm left by Aornis Hades and does not actually exist. Her family knows this but pretends she exists and are ready with excuses when Thursday asks where Jenny was. This is to prevent Thursday from having a mental breakdown every time she realizes Jenny does not exist; Aornis created a mental block to prevent her from being able to recall this fact.]]

** Even though [[spoiler: time travel turns out to never have been invented after all, and the Chronoguard and related paraphenalia RetCon themselves out of history when it becomes apparent that it never will be invented]], many traces are still left behind. For example, a car buried in prehistoric strata, carrying in the glove box a newspaper from the day after its discovery, ''which announces the discovery of the car''.
*** Actually, [[spoiler: with time travel never having been invented, just how did Granny Next wind up dying in front of her younger self? {{Fridge Logic}} much?]]

* {{UnInstallment}}: The 'also in this series' page at the start of ''First Among Sequels'' mentions an unavailable book in between ''Something Rotten'' and itself, ''The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco''. The reason why this is the case is revealed towards the end of the book itself: [[spoiler: Thursday destroys the book from under her EvilCounterpart]].