History ShownTheirWork / Literature

* ''Literature/AgatonSax:'' At one point in the Swedish edition of Agaton Sax and the Big Rig, Agaton Sax is hanging from a bridge in Scotland. The narration tells us a whole lot of technical data about the bridge, none of which is plot-relevant, before moving on with the story.

* A.P. Herbert's ''Literature/MisleadingCasesInTheCommonLaw'' may seem to tick most of the boxes in ArtisticLicenseLaw, only getting away with it thanks to the RuleOfFunny. In fact, he was a barrister and MP, and the point of the book is that the cases described, while ludicrous, ''could'' happen under English law.

* There's an interesting in-story example in Creator/HBeamPiper's ''Literature/UllerUprising'' -- the heroes are able to build an atomic bomb using a well-supplied nuclear facility for parts and tools, and a trashy historical romance set at Los Alamos as their textbook. Fortunately the romance author was a demon for [[ShownTheirWork showing her work]].

* Creator/DavidWeber deserves a mention here. Although much of the [[Literature/HonorHarrington Honorverse's]] AppliedPhlebotinum is well into the "fiction" side of science-fiction, his distance, momentum, and velocity calculations are obsessively accurate, making this a slightly more literal instance of showing his work.

** This desire for accuracy comes across as particularly amusing in ''Literature/TheLostWorld'', when Ian Malcolm has a brief tangent discussing the wrongness of the belief that a ''Tyrannosaurus'' can't see you if you don't move -- a brief plot point in the preceding ''Jurassic Park''.

* Willard Price's ''Adventure'' series. Starring two brothers as zoologists traveling around the world collecting rare animals, the series includes, among other things, volcano spelunking, undersea exploration, old-school whaling expedition, and elephant hunting. Each book has a healthy sprinkling of fun facts about the locale the brothers are currently in.

* Gary Jennings' ''Aztec'' novel is a massive door stopper consisting approximately on 30% plot and about 70% info on Precolumbian cultures, their societies, religious beliefs and way of living. Administrivia/TropesAreNotBad, in part due to the rarity of creative works based on Precolumbian societies and the fact that few people know about them, a lot of people consider the investigation more entertaining than the novel itself.
** All of his novels are excellent examples of this, not only ''Aztec''. For ''Spangle'', he joined a circus. And for ''Raptor'', he traveled extensively in the Balkans.

* Mari Sandoz does this in ''Crazy Horse, Strange Man of the Lakotah''. She interviewed still-living family members and friends of Crazy Horse, combining their stories with general facts about everyday life for traditional Lakotah. Joseph M. Marshall III (a Rosebud Sioux) does essentially the same thing in even greater detail in ''Journey of Crazy Horse''.

* Björn Kurtén's ''Dance of the Tiger'' is another novel of the Ice Age which makes constant pauses in its story to relate tidbits of information on Scandinavian flora and fauna of 35,000 years ago. It also deals with the culture and society of various groups of hunter-gather Cro-Magnon and Neanderthals in great detail. Kurtén's day job was being a professor in paleontology and he wrote several nonfiction books on Ice Age and early mammals, which must have made the research easier.

* Richard Powell's ''Don Quixote, USA'' has just enough information on banana farming and the Boy Scouts to establish that the narrator knows a great deal about both.

* Noel B. Gerson's ''Double Vision'' contains a wealth of information on 18th-century daily life, geography and military history.

* Creator/ThomasPynchon actually worked for a time at a rocket plant, and in ''Literature/GravitysRainbow'', he includes many of the actual formulae used for V2 rocket propulsion systems.
** Pynchon's books are full of historical, scientific and mathematical digressions (''Gravity's Rainbow'' also contains several pages describing the processes that led to the extinction of the dodo), which is widely regarded as one of the reasons for their inaccessibility, though most of them relate to his central themes.

* Most of Philippa Gregory's novels, including the critically acclaimed ''Literature/TheOtherBoleynGirl'', are based on extensive research; she includes a fairly long bibliography and includes an author's note about what she fictionalized, what created on her own, and where she got some of her ideas (for instance, she got the idea for the men framed as Anne Boleyn's lovers at her show-trial being a circle of closeted homosexuals from the work of a historian named Retha N. Warnicke, whose work was published several decades ago). She has also visited quite a few of the castles and palaces she has written about, such as the Alhambra Palace in southern Spain and Ludlow Castle in Wales, both of which were featured in ''The Constant Princess'', her novel about Catherine of Aragon.

*** Definitely a case of doing and then ignoring the research. In TOBG, for example, although some scenes can be downright unnerving in how faithful to the historical record they are, other things are obviously not. For one, Anne could not have returned to England with Mary Tudor as stated in the novel, since she is known to have been at the court of King Francis, who succeeded the old king that Mary had married. As for Mary Boleyn's backstory, that's noted above.

* A key reason Creator/ArthurHailey was a huge best-selling author in the 1970s and early '80s was the incredible research he put into his novels. From the airports to the hotels to the banking and automotive industries, Hailey was brilliant getting into the inner workings of such places and making them relatable for the common reader. That was especially true with complex works like ''Overload'' on the power industry or ''The Moneychangers'' and its inside look at banking as Hailey's research is what makes this novels feel so believable for readers. ''The Moneychangers'' alone shows incredible depth of knowledge into banking, the stock market, credit cards (something still new in the late 1970s), counterfeiting and even prison life.

* Historical romance novelist Creator/GeorgetteHeyer's research in general is meticulous and for the most part is woven seamlessly into her stories -- Georgian manners, customs, attire and cant appear accurately and organically. Her 1937 novel ''An Infamous Army'' was so accurate in its depiction of the Battle of Waterloo that extracts from it were used to teach military strategy.

* The ''Kay Scarpetta'' novels go into a lot of detail about forensic pathology. And psychology. And guns. And motorcycles. And citrus canker. And just about everything else Patricia Cornwell wants to shoehorn in. That's just ''one'' book, by the way (''Predator'').

* Creator/JamesMichener's books feature this. ''Centennial'', for example, includes an appendix at the end of each chapter just to show off some of the research that didn't make it into the main body of the text.

* ''Mortal Coils'' by Eric Nylund features an extremely detailed description of how chocolate is made. It includes lavish prose about cocoa butter oozing from roasted beans into crystal dishes and the gorgeous smells of all kinds of ingredients. Barring the partcipation of Satanic monk confectioners and choirboys singing hymns in a desecrated chapel, it's very accurate FoodPorn. This is especially striking considering how relatively little attention is paid to descriptions of women who are supposed to be supernaturally gorgeous. They get a few sentences; the chocolate gets an entire chapter.

* It's pointed out in Chapter 8 of Grady Hendrix' ''Literature/PaperbacksFromHell'' that Jaron Summers' ''Below the Line'' "spends enough of its time laying out film financing and tax shelters in enough detail for any wannabe [[Creator/JerryBruckheimer Bruckheimer]] to follow."

* Dudley Pope's ''Ramage'' series also appears as if it was written at the time. It helps that there's at least one young midshipman around, eager for instruction in the art of seamanship, and so exposition can be disguised as lessons and/or important instructions given in the heat of battle.

** In ''Temple'', he manages to cram a surprising amount of Inca factoids into an intense action novel. ''Real'' Inca too, not {{Mayincatec}}.
** In ''Six Sacred Stones'', he includes a bibliography.
* Kim Stanley Robinson's ''Literature/RedMarsTrilogy'' is a smörgåsbord of Done Research, sometimes to the detriment of the story's pacing.
** Among other things, he even traveled to UsefulNotes/{{Antarctica}} to research how people lived in cold environments -- research he also showed off in his later novel, ''Antarctica''.

** This didn't stop critics from claiming that her novels were "bad history" because [[RealityIsUnrealistic she didn't adhere to the tropes of her time]]. She had to add author's notes to the second editions of so many of her early novels that eventually she gave up and began adding author's notes to her first editions as well to forestall the critics. One example is in ''Funeral Games'', where she was attacked for showing Alexander the Great's body not decomposing for 48 hours after his supposed death, despite the fact that the incident is part of the historical record (and surprisingly plausible, given the circumstances).

* Creator/RobertLForward's ''Rocheworld'', a.k.a. ''Flight of the Dragonfly'', is built on a rock-solid foundation of plausible details about space travel and physics -- since Forward is a physicist and aerospace engineer, he probably ''wrote'' most of the research. [[{{Sequelitis}} The sequels, however...]]

* Creator/HarryTurtledove's ''Literature/TalesOfTheFox'' series incorporates descriptions of chariot combat, feudal societies, god myths and social customs ranging from the Bronze age to Greco-Roman to early Medieval, etc. Since Gerin the Fox is said to be a former scholar and a bit of a pedant, it doesn't even slow the story too much when certain details are elaborated on. It helps a lot that Turtledove has a [=PhD=] in history.
** Turtledove's Ph.D. focused on Byzantine history, which he used to his advantage in creating a series of novels set in Literature/{{Videssos}}, a FantasyCounterpartCulture of the Byzantine Empire.
* Lawrence Block's Evan Tanner series had a fair bit of information on everything from a particular Lithuanian ruler to UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler's distaste for ''Theatre/TheThreepennyOpera''.
* Creator/TravisSTaylor does this sort of thing fairly often, sometimes putting portions or explanations of the formulas in the book, but mostly leaving them for the afterword. He gets away with it on the rare occasions where it takes over the plot because he happens to have a Ph.D. in the physics involved.
** There's at least a few things he's gotten wrong, because his work deals with astrophysics rather than nanoscience. He gets rather upset when you bring them up. Specifically ''Von Neuman's War'' has him handwaving the effect of an {{EMP}} on the [[RecursiveCreators Von Neuman Machines]] by saying they are hardened for space and are thus immune. For the sake of tropers outside the field, if something can send and receive signals on a specific wavelength, it will absorb energy on that wavelength. So if you use Wi-Fi frequencies to send your commands, an electronic bomb that disables Wi-Fi will at the very least disrupt the Von Neuman machines communications on the same frequencies.

* There's an interesting in-story example in Creator/HBeamPiper's ''Uller Uprising'' -- the heroes are able to build an atomic bomb using a well-supplied nuclear facility for parts and tools, and a trashy historical romance set at Los Alamos as their textbook. Fortunately the romance author was a demon for [[ShownTheirWork showing her work]].

* Creator/JulesVerne would include physics formulas in his science fiction to demonstrate their general plausibility, as in ''From The Earth To The Moon'', which only ignored the limits to the thrust a living human can withstand. This created problems when translating his work into English back in the day, as Verne used the metric system, which few English-speaking readers were familiar with at the time. Many just replaced "kilometers" with "miles", etc., rendering the numbers nonsensical.

* The ''Witches' Chillers'' series by Silver [=RavenWolf=] replaces OminousLatinChanting with the kind of spells she and her coven would use in real life. The books even go so far as to include a short passage at the end where AuthorAvatar Ramona teaches a spell to the readers.

* Tony Rothman took the Clement approach in his novel ''The World Is Round'', with an extensive appendix giving the equations he used to work out how energy could be extracted from the central black hole and a graph showing the height of the sun above the horizon as a function of time (this was important because the world rotated so slowly that it made humans effectively crepuscular, spending most of the season-long "day" and "night" in underground caverns).

* ''Literature/ChanceAndChoicesAdventures'' shows off a lot of historically accurate items and ideas from its setting (1830s-1840s Arkansas) including some remarkably obscure things like the [[CoolGuns Lefaucheux 20-Shot revolver]].

* The main character of Creator/TimDorsey's books, Serge A. Storms, is a Florida history buff. Expect him to go off on multi-page lectures about obscure points of Florida history between (and in some cases during) his highly inventive and often karmically appropriate murders. Several times a book. This is in addition to all the trivia that gets mentioned in smaller doses, such as the exact hotel room that Jill Masterson was in while she helped her boss cheat at cards in the movie ''Film/{{Goldfinger}}''.

** When writing the character Keladry who uses a BladeOnAStick, Tamora Pierce took naginata lessons herself.

** Less obviously, he used a British Army manual on forced marches to make sure that his characters didn't travel further than possible. He exaggerated endurance a bit, to account for how no-one in the Fellowship is an ordinary human being. His depiction of siege warfare is also realistic, with grappling hooks used to climb the walls and catapults not trying to destroy the walls, but hurling things above them