History SerialEscalation / Literature

* [[MatthewReilly Matthew Reilly's]] books. Where to begin? Oh, let's go with flying a stealth plane out of a collapsing ice cave, killing ''twenty men'' with ''one grenade'', pinning a man trying to kill you while missing a leg, crushing Humvees with a plane in an underground hangar, driving said plane into an elevator shaft large enough to ''hold'' planes with the elevator over fifty feet down, hijacking a ''space shuttle'', chasing down a ''ballistic missile'' with a ''plane'', getting on the other side of a car pinning you to a tunnel wall by ''driving up the wall and flipping the car over the other's roof'', getting a boat dragged by Boeing 747, flipping a double-decker bus over a wall so that it lands on its roof and rolls the right way up, killing a helicopter with an ''enemy-driven'' jet ski, having a convoy chase down a jumbo jet on an Egyptian highway, climbing from one plane to another while both are flying, a one-winged 747 sliding down a slope of spikes, a tsunami throwing a supertanker up a mountain, one man holding off a platoon from a citadel by using trebuchets, killing your enemy by decapitating them ''with a subway'', having an fight scene beneath a descending elevator, running thirty feet on the backs of caimans, and disarming a planet-destroying bomb from inside a tank that fell from a plane 30,000 feet up.

* ''{{A Song of Ice and Fire}}'', Red Wedding. Because [[spoiler:[[HonorBeforeReason Robb]]]] broke off an arranged marriage one of his daughters, [[spoiler: Walder Frey has many of Robb's Bannerman and army massacred. [[AnyoneCanDie Then he kills Robb.]] [[UpToEleven Then he kills Robb's mother Catelyn Stark.]] Then Arya Stark is nearly killed.]]

* ChinaMieville's ''Literature/IronCouncil'' - What sort of golem is Judah Low going to whip up this time?

* ''Literature/TheDresdenFiles'': What [[CrazyAwesome mind-blowingly awesome]] trick will Harry pull this time? How many new scars can he get? How much more BadAss can Murphy become before she becomes the female equivalent of [[TengenToppaGurrenLagann Kamina]]? How bizarre and gory can the villains' tactics get? How much can we scale up the GambitPileup? How pretty can Thomas be? How's Harry going to top [[CrowningMomentOfAwesome The Dinosaur Incident]]? How much ass can be kicked? How many more mind-blowingly evil and powerful people can Harry piss off?

* The ''Literature/{{Lensman}}'' series is made of this with its LensmanArmsRace. ''Galactic Patrol'' starts with spaceships capable of ''[[FasterThanLightTravel ninety parsecs per hour]]'' and firing "super-atomic" explosives (which might be matter-antimatter explosives, since they liberate 100% of their mass-energy). By the beginning of the third book there are flotillas of armed, moving ''planets''; by the end, whole planets made of antimatter are used as faster-than-light projectiles routinely, and there is a psychic super-mind (the "Unit") capable of destroying the Eddorian planet, which "all the physical weapons of all the universes" could not harm.

** ''Literature/McAuslan'': How many people can you rope into a Highland reel? Apparently, after trying (and succeeding) for the Black Watch's record of ''sixtyfour'', the General insists that they try for three figures. Said and done, after roping in a bunch of prisoners of war, the sentries from the neighbouring garrison and a bunch of people who have come up from a nearby town to see what the hell is going on, the Regiment dances a Onehundredandtwentyeightsome Reel, a grueling process which takes over two and a half hours.

* For PaulBunyan and other TallTale characters this is pretty much the reason they exist, to make each subsequent story even bigger, more outlandish, and more absurdly implausible than the last. For example, after all the story's explaining how inhumanly large Paul is, there then come along story's like "Paul Bunyan's Cornstalk," where the eponymous stalk of corn grows so fast that, when Paul tries to chop it down, he's never able to hit it twice in the same place; by the time he makes a second swing of his axe, the stalk's grown so high that the first chop mark is over his head and out of sight!

* The ''NewJediOrder'' series: how many planets and how many billion people are we going to obliterate/kill/sacrifice today while the heroes care little?

* In terms of going figuring out who the BigBad is supposed to be, ''Literature/TheEnchantmentEmporium'' starts with Allie trying to find out what happened to her grandmother. Then she finds out there's a sorcerer in town. Except, he's waiting on the appearance of a Dragon Lord, [[spoiler: that turns out to be Jack, his son]]. Then several other Dragon Lords- [[spoiler: Jack's uncles]]- show up, split between helping and hindering the first one.[[note]]And wanting to kill the sorcerer either way, for something he did[[/note]]. Then [[spoiler:Jack's mother]], a Drangon queen, makes an appearance....

* [[FearAndLoathingInLasVegas How much drugs can Duke and Dr. Gonzo put in their systems?]] Answer: a lot.

* A RunningGag in ''Literature/LoyalEnemies'' is that the various races the heroes meet bestow on them progressively bigger armies as a gifts for favors the heroes do for them. And after they have to call those armies into the field, even ''more'' people show up.

* ''Literature/TauZero'' concerns time dilation in a slower-than-light colony ship, the ''Leonora Christine''. To begin, it flies close enough to lightspeed that a 30-something-light-year journey will only take about a decade, from the point of view of the ship...but the main reason for this is the need to decelerate. When the ship's deceleration system is damaged and [[SpaceFriction the crew need to find a safe place to turn off the engines without being shredded by interstellar hydrogen]], they need to accelerate closer and closer to lightspeed, to increase the time dilation on-ship enough to be able to survive the journey... but the faster they go, the emptier space has to be to count as a vacuum...and the faster they have to go to be able to survive the longer and longer journey to the emptier stretches of space. It's made even crazier by the fact that the ship's objective speed only changes by the tiniest fraction of a percentage of the speed of light.

* How many potential murderers will reveal to [[TheFatherLukeWolfeTrilogy Father Wolfe]] their motives and opportunity to commit the crime in ''Father, Forgive Them''?

** ''Literature/MacAuslan'': How many people can you rope into a Highland reel? Apparently, after trying (and succeeding) for the Black Watch's record of ''sixtyfour'', the General insists that they try for three figures. Said and done, after roping in a bunch of prisoners of war, the sentries from the neighbouring garrison and a bunch of people who have come up from a nearby town to see what the hell is going on, the Regiment dances a Onehundredandtwentyeightsome Reel, a grueling process which takes over two and a half hours.

* In Literature/{{Harry Potter}} about [[spoiler:twenty-something people]] die, including [[spoiler:Harry Potter himself, sort of.]]) How many people can you kill of in a seven book series?

* ''TheDresdenFiles'': What [[CrazyAwesome mind-blowingly awesome]] trick will Harry pull this time? How many new scars can he get? How much more BadAss can Murphy become before she becomes the female equivalent of [[TengenToppaGurrenLagann Kamina]]? How bizarre and gory can the villains' tactics get? How much can we scale up the GambitPileup? How pretty can Thomas be? How's Harry going to top [[CrowningMomentOfAwesome The Dinosaur Incident]]? How much ass can be kicked? How many more mind-blowingly evil and powerful people can Harry piss off?
* And on that note, ''CodexAlera'': How outnumbered can the heroes be? What ridiculously over-the-top awesome plan is Tavi going to pull off next?

* In {{Harry Potter}} about [[spoiler:twenty-something people]] die, including [[spoiler:Harry Potter himself, sort of.]]) How many people can you kill of in a seven book series?

* The ''{{Lensman}}'' series is made of this with its LensmanArmsRace. ''Galactic Patrol'' starts with spaceships capable of ''[[FasterThanLightTravel ninety parsecs per hour]]'' and firing "super-atomic" explosives (which might be matter-antimatter explosives, since they liberate 100% of their mass-energy). By the beginning of the third book there are flotillas of armed, moving ''planets''; by the end, whole planets made of antimatter are used as faster-than-light projectiles routinely, and there is a psychic super-mind (the "Unit") capable of destroying the Eddorian planet, which "all the physical weapons of all the universes" could not harm.

* Let's put it this way: there's a reason one trope got named ''{{Lensman}}'' [[LensmanArmsRace Arms Race]].

* The longest sentence ever written in a story is apparently from a 2001 book called "The Rotters Club" which contains ''13,955 words''.

*** Actually, [[spoiler:At least fifty people die, in The Battle At Hogwarts alone. Harry sees their bodies in the Great Hall, separated from Voldemort's]]

* For PaulBunyan and other Tall Tale characters this is pretty much the reason they exist, to make each subsequent story even bigger, more outlandish, and more absurdly implausible than the last. For example, after all the story's explaining how inhumanly large Paul is, there then come along story's like "Paul Bunyan's Cornstalk," where the eponymous stalk of corn grows so fast that, when Paul tries to chop it down, he's never able to hit it twice in the same place; by the time he makes a second swing of his axe, the stalk's grown so high that the first chop mark is over his head and out of sight!

* {{A Song of Ice and Fire}}, [[HighOctaneNightmareFuel Red Wedding]]. Because [[spoiler:[[HonorBeforeReason Robb]]]] broke off an arranged marriage one of his daughters, [[spoiler: [[CompleteMonster Walder Frey]] has many of Robb's Bannerman and army massacred. [[AnyoneCanDie Then he kills Robb.]] [[UpToEleven Then he kills Robb's mother Catelyn Stark.]] [[HolyShitQuotient Then Arya Stark is nearly killed.]]]]

* ''TauZero'' concerns time dilation in a slower-than-light colony ship, the ''Leonora Christine''. To begin, it flies close enough to lightspeed that a 30-something-light-year journey will only take about a decade, from the point of view of the ship...but the main reason for this is the need to decelerate. When the ship's deceleration system is damaged and [[SpaceFriction the crew need to find a safe place to turn off the engines without being shredded by interstellar hydrogen]], they need to accelerate closer and closer to lightspeed, to increase the time dilation on-ship enough to be able to survive the journey... but the faster they go, the emptier space has to be to count as a vacuum...and the faster they have to go to be able to survive the longer and longer journey to the emptier stretches of space. It's made even crazier by the fact that the ship's objective speed only changes by the tiniest fraction of a percentage of the speed of light.

* For PaulBunyan and other TallTale figures this is pretty much the reason they exist, to make each subsequent story even bigger, more outlandish, and more absurdly implausible than the last. For example, after all the story's explaining how inhumanly large Paul is, there then come along story's like "Paul Bunyan's Cornstalk," where the titular stalk of corn grows so fast that, when Paul tries to chop it down, he's never able to hit it twice in the same place; by the time he makes a second swing of his axe, the stalk's grown so high that the first chop mark is over his head and out of sight!

* In {{Harry Potter}} about [[spoiler:twenty-something people]] die, including [[spoiler:Harry Potter himself]]. ([[IGotBetter He gets better]].) How many people can you kill of in a seven book series?