Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot / Literature

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• Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. That's all you need to know.
• The story Adam the Office Ninja by Mike White is a combination of Office Space and ninjas.
• Jaspike from Almost Night is a ghost that got turned into a vampire. Nobody is quite sure how this happened or that it even could happen.
• Anita Blake Vampire Hunter, itself a blend of the literary genres of paranormal, detective, psychological thriller and romance.
  • The series' protagonist, Anita Blake is described as an abstinent, five-foot-nothing, gunslinging, racially conflicted tomboy. By profession, she animates corpses. An obscene pattern of scars reminds the reader of her additionally exciting work, as a federally recognized vampire executioner. She carries a B.A. emphasising supernatural studies, and often notes its worthlessness. This learned individual maintains a side job, on retainer for the Regional Preternatural Investigation Team (RPIT) as their freelance investigator. As an expert in cryptozoology, she was deputized by said local authorities; she serves as analyst for crime scenes. Finally, she's a necromancer, one fearful of acknowledging relevant Vudun involvement.
  • To appease a vampiric curse and status of leadership (over various "were" communities), she relents to gratuitous love affairs, and a generally polyamouric relationship status. Eventually, after enough bespelling and political obligation, she claims the title of "were" everything (wolf, leopard, tiger, lion, hyena, and pard queen); she also grants additional clans protection.
  • Anita is trapped in a romantic triumvirate, between a werewolf and an obnoxious centuries-old vampire. With the others, she assumes the role of "succubus," due to mystical sexual consequence.
  • In Narcissus in Chains, the tenth installment, details protagonist Anita's encounter with Orlando King, former lycanthrope hunter. After Anita contracts various strains of "were" (wolf, hyena, snake, lion, and leopard), Orlando lusts over her, wishing to consort, attracted to comparable chimeria-ism. As persistent shifting resulted in the development of unmanageable Dissociative Identity Disorder, Orlando turns torturous.
• By the end of the trilogy of Blood Bowl novels, one of the antagonists is a Black Orc reanimated as a vampire and then possessed by Khorne.
• The Adventures of Ook and Gluk, Kung-Fu Cavemen From The Future. Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
• Clash of the Geeks is a short-story collection (and fundraiser for the Lupus Foundation of America) themed around a picture of Wil Wheaton wielding a lance, riding a unicorn pegasus kitten, and wearing a clown sweater, while attacking an orcish version of John Scalzi.
• The Codex Alera series by the same author is full of this too. From the page description: "Magical Roman Legionnaires straight out of Avatar The Last Airbender versus the Zerg. And wolfmen with Blood Magic. And telepathic yetis. And white-haired neanderthal-elves. Riding ground sloths and terror birds..." And, later: "The political dealings of Dune meets a Greco-Roman Society powered by Pokémon." That leaves out the parts where some of the wolfmen get possessed by body-snatching aliens, the Zerg learn magic, and a Chrome Champion swordfights.
  • The aforementioned wolfmen have morals and values at least partially influenced by feudal Japan — which means that not only do we get wolfman samurai-analogues, but we also get wolfman ninjas.
• Complete World Knowledge. Hoboes, presidents, mole-men, cane swords, ferrets, giant iguanas, druids, masturbation out a window, Jonathan Coulton, zeppelins, Time Lords, a sequel to The Catcher in the Rye, samurai, thunderbirds... apparently the only thing that doesn't exist in John Hodgman's mind is Chicago.
• Tobias Buckell started writing Crystal Rain by listing all the cool things he could think of. Mongoose men fight Aztecs with zeppelins, while the pirate hero (at least he has a hook and likes to sail) battles amnesia on a steampunk quest to the frozen north to recover the secrets of their offworld ancestors. And Sly Mongoose has sky cities and space zombies.
• Sandra Hill's "Deadly Angels" series is about Vampire Viking Angels who work kinda like a Navy SEAL team under the orders of Archangel Michael. They are called vangles in-universe.
• T.C Rypel's Deathwind Trilogy has the main protagonist Gonji Sabatake who is a Samurai Viking, born when a shipwrecked Norse woman ends up in medieval Japan.
• Dinotopia gives us robot dinosaurs, a half-human half-ceratopsian god, and in one of its most popular spinoff novels, samurai Troödon.
• Certain Discworld stories.
  • Monstrous Regiment in which a Sweet Polly Oliver joins a military regiment along with a troll, a vampire, two women who happen to be in love — one of them is a pyromaniac and the other is perpetually angry, a religious fanatic who bears a strong resemblance to Joan of Arc, a sergeant and an Igor and they all fight in a war in the name of a god who is dead, and a dead mortal who is in the process of ascending to godhood. And it turns out the entire regiment is an Amazon Brigade and didn't know it.
  • Carpe Jugulum is a book about witches fighting vampires, with the help of Violent Glaswegian Smurfs, a phoenix, and a fighting priest. Also, The Virus is inverted: "I ain't been vampired. You've been Weatherwaxed."
  • Jingo is a book where a Cowboy Cop, a werewolf, a man who's secretly a king, a troll, and a zombie team up with Bedouin to stop a war in a plot borrowed from Lawrence of Arabia, but with more football. Meanwhile, two Too Dumb to Fool other cops, a Magnificent Bastard tyrant and an expy of Leonardo da Vinci are on a secret mission in a submarine. Oh, and there's a city built by squid.
• The awesome Rule of Cool nature of The Dresden Files cannot be overemphasized. A polka-powered zombie Tyrannosaurus! A cult of porn-star sorceresses! Ninja ghouls! Paladins with Kalashnikovs! Secret agent demon werewolves! A wizard with a vampire hairstylist brother! And so on and so forth.
  • And because this warrants reiteration: A Badass Longcoat-wearing, joke-cracking Private Detective wizard riding a zombie Tyrannosaurus rex powered by polka into battle against a legion of ghosts and super-zombies controlled by Necromancer Evil Sorcerers. Thank you and good night.
  • In-universe, Harry describes goblins as being "mutant Terminator serial killer psycho ninjas." He's also said that they're like Terminators from Krypton.
  • In Skin Game, Waldo Butters becomes a Batman Jedi Knight of the Cross.
• In Dune, there are a few different characters with special abilities. There are the Navigators, who can see in four dimensions. There are Mentats, essentially human computers. There are also the Bene Gesserits, magical witches that have the commanding Voice. And then there's Paul Atreides, the Kwisatz Haderach. This Troper's nickname for him is Paul "multiclasses-in-everything" Atreides, because he is essentially ALL OF THESE! The only person worse than him is his son, who even jumps species to get the extra skills he didn't already inherit from his father.
• Elizabeth Bear's Edda of Burdens series: as of book one, All The Windwracked Stars, we have a post-apocalyptic steampunk valkyrie historian, a two-headed immortal flying cyborg warhorse, magico-genetically spliced catgirl police officers with the souls of dead angels, reincarnated rentboys with superstrength, and a few completely casual mentions of battle shoggoths
• Andrey Valentinov's adventure series The Eye of Power (Око Силы) has scary recurring villain Vseslav Volkov, who looks like a tall handsome man with an unnaturally reddish skin. Really he is seven hundred years old Russian prince. And a necromancer. And a vampire. And a werewolf. And a member of an Ancient Conspiracy. And a Communist. And a Spetznaz officer. With a Name to Run Away from Really Fast. And yes, Volkov is awesome..
• Paul from Fairy Tale Novels is a flute-playing ninja clown.
• Fortunately, the Milk features a Time Traveling Mad Scientist Dinosaur Balloonist, who assists the protagonist as he fights aliens, pirates, and wumpires.
• The prose of writer Francesca Lia Block often comes off like a "girly" version of this trope. For example:
  "A kiss about apple pie a la mode with the vanilla creaminess melting in the pie heat. A kiss about chocolate when you haven’t eaten chocolate in a year. A kiss about palm trees speeding by, trailing pink clouds when you drive down the strip sizzling with champagne. A kiss about spotlights fanning the sky and the swollen sea spilling like tears all over your legs."
  -Weetzie Bat
• Though only an example from a modern perspective the original novel Frankenstein passingly mentioned the creature to have had a large number of firearms on his person.
• In the Franny K. Stein book The Frandidate, Franny's first attempt at convincing her class into electing her for class president has her bring over a monster combining her peers' interests. The creation is a cat/clown hybrid with soccer balls for eyes who coughs up puppies and has cake leaking out of its ears.
• The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway. How to describe it? An After the End Catch-22 cowritten by Thomas Pynchon and Douglas Adams by way of Fight Club with heroic Hazmat troubleshooters vs the evil megacorp. And oh yeah, ninjas vs kung fu mimes
• In Good Omens Adam describes a story he once wrote:
  'It was about this pirate who was a famous detective (...) 'Specially the bit in the spaceship where the dinosaur comes out and fights with the cowboys'
• The first book of The Grimnoir Chronicles ends with a ninja/pirate/zombie battle (also with knights, wizards, zeppelins, Tesla superweapons and hints of an Eldritch Abomination). The next book immediately introduces robots from Ceska Robotica. Almost as if the author read this trope page.
• Sean Cullen's Hamish X series is about a robot orphan with gold eyes who wants to Become a Real Boy and Turn Against His Masters. It contains a zeppelin, cheese, cheese pirates, a Lost World that is Beneath the Earth in Switzerland and populated entirely by orphans, ninja orphans, a Hive Mind of robot raccoons named George, Bedouins, a mammoth, giant snow monkeys, and an evil assimilating robot MIB with candy-related names. And yet, when a minor character is seen reading a comic called Vampire Cat Robot, the narrator makes fun of him for it.
• Gemma Files's The Hexslinger Series: An Alternate History, Weird West adventure with a gang of outlaws and robbers led by a Hard Gay couple, one of whom is a former corrupt preacher turned dark sorcerer, the other of whom is an expert sharpshooter and potential sorcerer who becomes the vessel of an an Aztec god, who aid in the resurrection of a power-hungry Mayan goddess. The series also features a Navajo medicine woman, real-life historical figure Allan Pinkerton leading a secret group that scientifically studies the workings of magic and sends spies to monitor the sorcerous outlaws, and an evil Chinese albino sorceress who is also a child prostitute. And the genuinely pious minister who is implied to have been resurrected by an angel in order to fight the evil sorcerers. All of this is just from the first book.
• His Dark Materials has the Panserbjørne, the Guardians of the Svalbard archipelago, a race of armor-clad warrior polar bears (in fact, "panserbjørne" is Danish for "armored bears"). As a matter of fact, the author gleefully tells us that This Is The Coolest Thing Ever.
• Jonathan Moeller's Hyperspace Demons includes evil robotic spiders with zombified human heads.
• Isaac Asimov's novel I Robot features a telepathic robot.
• S.M. Sterling's Island in the Sea of Time has a black lesbian Coast Guard samurai with a katana-wielding teenage girlfriend from Bronze-Age England.
• Jasper Jones.
  • Jeffrey Lu, upon learning that his friend Charlie had a nightmare about the Wizard of Oz: "Really? But there are so many cooler things to have nightmares about. Like sharks. Communist sharks, with razor-sharp fins that can walk on land."
  • An obviously best-selling novel that Jeffrey and Charlie wrote together was about an ex-cop turned archaeologist called Truth McJustice who, among too many other awesome exploits to mention, discovers the Holy Grail and does martial-arts battle with an imposter Pope.
• The Kingdom Keepers: The first battle in the first book is against Audio-Animatronic Pirates of the Caribbean riding space cars that shoot Frickin' Laser Beams.
• Grete Ravenhallow from The Kindness of Devils is a regular werewolf, until it's revealed that Hardestadt is her father, thus making her part demon and angel as well, and a Twofer Token Minority to boot.
• Knaves on Waves has Captain Carnage. He's a giant, crimson-skinned Super-Soldier, who also happens to be a pirate.
• In the German e-novel "Magicalogen" the main characters are wizards, scientists and Uplifted Animals. (The last one is except for the one who is a dragon.) Except that he isn't actually a dragon but some kind of lizard man in disguise. And a spy. Over the course of the novel they invent a time machine, a space ship and a magical computer.
  • There's also Kräik. He's a gardener and a hitman but likes to appear as a pirate. He's also a cannibal.
  • In his next book "Wettstreit der Schwarzen Schreiber" the same author gives us a wizardry student who happens to be a vampire, a wannabe-goth and a unicorn. Or, fort short, Ebony as a unicorn.
• The T'lan Imass of the Malazan Book of the Fallen are undead Neanderthals, basically. And the T'lan Imass Bonecasters^note shamans are undead Neanderthal shapeshifters.
• The Martian: Mark Watney — Astronaut/Mechanical Engineer/Greatest Botanist On This Planet/MacGyver/Space Pirate/Iron Man.
• In Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, a French chef named Armand Allegre is pursued by an Implacable, Invisible, Clingy, Jealous, Killer ClockPunk robot duck with a speech impediment and a fully functional digestive system who wants him to find her Currently Genderless Beta-Copy or else she will take Revenge for all the ducks he has cooked.
  • There's also the overarching story about a depressed widower astronomer and a womanizing, land-surveying Quaker studying the orbit of Venus while snarking all over Dutch people and then measuring borders IN AMERICA while discussing dragons. And that bit is true. Less true are the talking dog who knows everything, the Chinese fung shui master who is afraid of turning into a Spaniard, the rabbi secret agents trying to track down rogue golems, golems built by Jesus, the Swedish conspiracy, the Spanish Inquisition's involvement, the ghost, and some witches. And it's all written in Antiquated Linguistics.
• The Midnight Dancers has Paul Fester, a juggling, flute-playing ninja clown.
• Miya Black, Pirate Princess is both pirate and princess.
• Zombie cyborg soldiers with blades hidden in their fingers would qualify for this trope alone, but later books introduce Stalkers that are based on animals, making such lovely things as zombie cyborg soldier giant spiders and zombie cyborg soldier crows.
• Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy is the story of humans fighting back against an invasion by dead souls possessing the living to escape a horrible living death afterlife and gaining superpowers in the process unleashed when an alien made of pure energy interrupts a satanic ritual and nearly winning until Al Capone comes back and takes over whole star systems then the dead take some planets to over universes except one is a horrific nightmare realm with an enemy made up of a squillion different species liquefied and mashed together into a blob of pure scary and then the guy who started it all summons the scary blob to our universe and everybody nearly dies but someone else saves the day by piloting a living starship to where a god hangs out and talks it into helping. The impressive part is this is actually done in such a way that every premise is plausible and the impacts they have on the world are realistic.
  • Hamilton does this. Fallen Dragon is about mercenaries in organic Power Armor sent to colonies by the corporations that set them up. One planet refuses to bow and using unknown artifacts called Dragon Pearls are able to mount La Résistance. They find that the Dragon is the remains of an engineered race of living starships/recorders built by Sufficiently Advanced Alien Neglectful Precursors that are able to rejuvenate the hero and send him back through time so he can get his girlfriend back.
  • Pandora's Star is about an empire of far-flung planets connected by trains that has been infiltrated by aliens that escaped from a Dyson Sphere before its completion by Sufficiently Advanced Aliens that moved on to bigger things. One hero's quest is guided by elves who triggered the Earth tales of The Fair Folk, who seem to be unconcerned with the fate of man and who travel between planets by walking. There's also a lot of sex.
• In the Fictional Video Game in which Noob is set, undergoing a Bio-Augmentation process basically means becoming a super-Magically Inept Fighter in a world where everyone is born with a potential to do magic. In the fourth novel, it turns out that someone with a natural magical Master of All ability got Bio-Augmentation. Instead of getting completely cut off from the magic system, he got demoted to a magical Jack of All Trades while getting the perks from the procedure.
• In Tim Powers' On Stranger Tides, historical pirate Blackbeard is a voodoo sorcerer with zombie minions, and a rival sorcerer raises a shipfull of pirates and another ship from the Spanish navy, although that was by accident as animated skeletons.
• Orion First Encounter: This book gives us Miniature Spider Attack Santas
• Pavlov's Dogs is based around the premise of genetically engineered werewolf commandos designed to hunt zombies.
• Older Than Television: Peter Pan is an early version of this: flying immortal juvenile delinquents fight pirates, Indians, and demonic crocodiles in a bizarre fantasy land inhabited by mermaids and fairies.
• In Asimov's Prelude to Foundation we find that Hari Seldon is not only a Mathematician but also a fist fighter.
• Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the classic Jane Austen romance retold with the addition of, well, not to put too fine a point on it, ultra-violent zombie mayhem. And ninjas.
  • Followed by Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, which features mutant lobsters, rampaging octopi, and pirates. And apparently Davy Jones.
  • Followed by Mansfield Park and Mummies, which features spirits of ancient Egyptian pharaohs, vampires, collections of ancient Egyptian artifacts, and mummies.
  • Followed by Emma and the Werewolves. Stand by for the next two — no doubt it will be a short wait...
• The Princess 99 has an alien punk rocker from the future fighting zombies, elves, and wizards in a mixed up Clock Punk fantasy setting that's based on 1920s New Orleans...but with wizards!
• Quantum Gravity
  • Zal is both types of elvish, demonic (not entirely by birth), and a rock star. Also, that spoiler at the beginning means he's got some failed experiment with the void going on in his background.
  • Lila is a Cyborg, who is also a spy and a bodyguard and has a dead elf necromancer in her chest for a while. Ah, the power of being around someone with harmonizing powers...
  • Tath is an elvish necromancer, which is already weird, though he is not the only one. Then the story progresses, and he also becomes part fey, and dies and is reborn. Twice.
  • Theoretical here: It appears to be possible to be a demonic, elven, fey necromancer who is/was part machine and then become a ghost while technically keeping all of the former (rock star or other training also applicable), just so long as one doesn't start out human. Because humans are passive with magic.
• Saintess Summons Skeletons: Sofia is part Saint, part Necromancer, partly converted into a demonic apostle after she performed the ritual inside her trial, can absorb light like a plant, and has been moved to the draconic area of the System. She's also a baroness with a black belt.
• The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel. It's not a Fantasy Kitchen Sink so much as a Fantasy Home Depot Plumbing Department. With an Action Girl Friendly Neighborhood Vampire, Historical Domain Characters aplenty (the villains include Elizabethan Court Mage John Dee, Billy the Kid, and Niccolò Machiavelli, while the heroes include Joan of Arc and William Shakespeare) and All Myths Are True.
• In the Shadow Ops novels Gemini Cell and Javelin Rain, the protagonist Jim Schweitzer is a Navy SEAL who got killed after an odd mission — and then returned from the dead in his own now-superhuman magically and technologically semi-preserved corpse. Thus he is now a cyborg zombie supersoldier.
• In The Sick Kids, the sequel to The Intercontinental Union of Disgusting Characters, the character Ridiculous Sword has a weapon described as a "+6 holy vorpal defender frost-brand flame-tongue sun luckblade of wounding, dancing, life stealing, disruption, slaying everything (as in the arrows of the same name), throwing, thunderbolts, red blue green black white brass & copper dragon slaying, speed, final word, and 9 lives stealing with maximum intelligence, 8 special purposes, and enough artifact powers to leave her set for life".
• Rattle from Skate the Thief is a creation Born of Magic, a disembodied apple-sized eyeball with the wings of a bat and legs of spider, making it an eyeball bat spider.
• Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash features as it's main character Hiro Protagonist, a ninja computer-hacker pizza delivery boy, who invented the Matrix.
• The Ironborn in A Song of Ice and Fire are essentially Cthulhu-worshipping Vikings.
• Clive Barker's "Son of Celluloid" stacks real-life Body Horror on fantasy horror, in that the villain of the story is a sentient, mind-manipulating, reality-warping undead cancer tumor.
• In the 11th book of The Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries, Sookie and Eric visit a vampire-owned night club that was bondage/Elvis/whore-house themed.
• Surfing Samurai Robots is about an Alien that has a big nose and has come to Earth in order to be a detective. Also, there are some Surfing Samurai Robots, and it turns out that the whole thing was set up by the Femme Fatale's dad, who is a lizard. Once again...
• Richard from The Sword of Truth is a war wizard. That is, he has talents of every other type of wizard (including prophecy and crafting). Plus Implausible Fencing Powers and Improbable Aiming Skills.
• Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series (and the related Nursery Crimes series) focus on the titular protagonist's adventures in Book World, where all characters in fiction are the roles played by Book World actors. Gully Foyle of The Stars My Destination polices Science Fiction. The Racy Novels genre is in a border dispute with Feminist. Her uncle Mycroft, a mad inventor, is sought by a multinational corporation for his latest invention, the Book Portal (which started the whole mess), so he hides in the backstory of the Sherlock Holmes series — as Sherlock's elder brother. If a reference sounds vaguely literary, it is. In the "real world", things are even stranger — cloned Neanderthals, dodos, and thylacines exist, as do time travel, werewolves, and the radical Bacon Society, which claims Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays, and is willing to start riots in the streets to prove their point. If you plan to visit, bring a clear jar filled with lentils and rice, and shake it every once in a while. If the mix starts clumping as if something was sorting it, watch out, entropy's going backward.
• The main character of Unda Vosari: Legends, Captain Vincent Lorimar, had training by ninjas in his younger years, took to the seas and became a pirate to fight his arch-enemy, Baron Calavera.
• Among the other contents of Un Lun Dun's Hurricane of Puns are trash bin ninjas called "Binja."
• Vampirates, a book series about you-guessed-it.
• Jules Verne:
  • 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: Pirates, a nuclear Steampunk submarine, giant underwater monsters, and a mad scientist.
    • The submarine was electrical, real-life submarines are actually much more steam-based than Verne's speculative version (still electrical, but nuclear reactors use steam turbines to create electrical current). Trope still applies, though, since he piled every naval/exploration fiction trope on top of speculative biology (sea monsters) with some mad science for good measure.
  • Robur the Conqueror: The Cool Plane Albatross, as this miniature model shows,◊ is a sort of giant helicopter with a ship-like hull, built from a Steampunk analogue of modern laminate/composite materials.
• Another Pynchon novel, Vineland, involves hippies, The Mafia, The Men in Black, ninjas, and a possible kaiju attack.
• Obligatory Whateley Universe example: Nex, a student at Whateley Academy who is a mutant psychic ninja assassin. Who is self-aware enough to realize he has a monologuing problem.
• The seemingly typical Medieval European Fantasy The Wheel of Time is quick (as in, they show up in the second book with only an inkling of foreshadowing in the first) to introduce the Seanchan, a civilization of Western Samurai invaders with a unique Euro-Asian (mostly Chinese and Japanese) cultural aesthetic and caste system from the survivors of a Westlands expeditionary force intermixing with the native population of the extremely hostile continent they found on the other side of the ocean they were sent across. They also ride around on dinosaurs, fight alongside Lizard Folk, and have an army of enslaved mages at their command.
  • The Aiel from the same series are a mixture of Celts, Native Americans, and Middle Eastern nomadic tribes. Like the Seanchan, they have their own unique cultural and societal practices to distinguish themselves from their influences.
• In the fourth book of the Wizard of Oz series, Dorothy and The Wizard in Oz, on the way to the surface of Oz, they encounter a village where everyone is invisible. Why are they invisible? To avoid being seen by the invisible bears!

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