Shout Out / Literature

This page lists Shout Outs seen in Literature.

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Works with their own subpages:

• 1632
• Amagi Brilliant Park
• Animorphs
• Artemis Fowl
• The Arts of Dark and Light
• Isaac Asimov
• The Atomic Time of Monsters
• Chakona Space
• Chaos Seeds
• Ciaphas Cain
• The Cinder Spires
• Darkness Visible
• Diogenes Club
• The Dogs
• Domain
• Double Standards
• The Dresden Files
  • Storm Front
  • Fool Moon
  • Grave Peril
  • Summer Knight
  • Death Masks
  • Blood Rites
  • Dead Beat
  • Proven Guilty
  • White Night
  • Small Favor
  • Turn Coat
  • Changes
  • Ghost Story
  • Cold Days
  • Skin Game
  • Peace Talks
  • Battle Ground
• Emberverse
• The Expanse
• Fate/Zero
• The Father Luke Wolfe Trilogy
• Full Metal Panic!
• The General Series
• Grimm Tales
• Harry Potter
• The Heroes of Olympus
• Holiday Mode
• Honor Harrington
• InCryptid
• Jesus on Thyface
• Keit-Ai
• The Laundry Files
• The Locked Tomb
• Lord Darcy
• The Magicians
• The Man in the High Castle
• Moth and Cobweb
• Neverwhere
• Pondovadia
• Ready Player One
• Red Rising
• Right Hand of God
• The Rise of Kyoshi
• Rivers of London
• Ro.Te.O
• Safehold
• The Salvation War
• Skulduggery Pleasant
• A Song of Ice and Fire
• The Sopranos (Warner)
• The Spectral Chronicles
• Spectral Shadows
• The Spiderwick Chronicles
• Stuck
• Tales of MU
• The Twilight's Last Gleaming
• Whateley Universe
• Zero Sight

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Other Works:

• Older Than Feudalism: The Aeneid (written by Virgil for Caesar Augustus) contained a shout-out to Augustus's recently deceased nephew, where Aeneas is in the underworld and sees a man with a dark cloud around him. His guide goes on with a mournful speech about how Aeneas should weep for the tragic fate of his distant descendant and describes Marcellus's tomb on the Tiber.
• Angela Nicely:
  • In “Cupcake Wars!”, Spike wants a Spider-Man stall at the fair.
  • In “Pony Party!”, one of the ponies is named Bilbo.
  • In “Matchmaker!”, Maisie says that Mr. Weakly looks like James Bond after she and Angela style his hair with glue.
  • In “The Ugly Sisters!”, the Payne twins tease Angela by calling her Goldilocks.
• Alex Rider:
  • StormBreaker: In the graphic novel, one of the items Alex is given for his trip is Mario Kart DS.
  • Point Blanc: Dr. Grief's ultimate plan is essentially The Boys from Brazil taken up to eleven.
• The main character of American Psycho is named Patrick Bateman; a poke at Norman Bates, the antagonist of Psycho.
• Animal Inn: In book 2, Teddy's temporary ferret Frank is explicitly named for Major Frank Burns (AKA "Ferret-face").
• The Mass Effect novel Ascension is one long shout out. Specifically, it involves a mentally-ill girl with incredible mental powers being rescued from an Academy by a loving family member after being experimented on by a shadowy organization devoted to "improving" mankind, and takes refuge on a ship whose captain's nickname is Mal.
• Axis of Time:
  • One of the characters is mentioned to hail from Grantville, West Virginia. One of FDR's Secret Service bodyguards is even named Agent Flint.
  • Captain Mike Judge
  • Turtletaub's named after Harry Turtledove's former nomme de plume. The first mention of him is followed by a sarcastic remark about an invasion of lizard aliens.
  • There's one part where the president would no longer be surprised if a bunch of African Super Nazis rose to power or if dinosaurs from outer space began attacking.
  • Stalin to Beria in book 3: "No soup for you".
  • Two of the French characters mentioned are called Goscinny and Uderzo.
  • The 21st century Royal Navy nickname for the Metal Storm defense pods is "Daleks". Captain Halabi muses that the nickname never really caught on in the US.
    • Truth in Television: The Phalanx, a predecessor to the fictional Metal Storm, is indeed referred to this way by British servicemen. American Navy instead refers to similar systems as R2-D2s.
  • The HMS Trident's Combat Intelligence is nicknamed "Posh" and, according to Halabi, speaks with a "flawless imitation" of Lady Beckham.
  • USS Amanda L Garrett, the ship that get transported near Antartica and sunk minutes after the Transition is named after the Amanda Lee Garrett novel series, the first book taking place in Antartica.
• Isaac Asimov and Janet Asimov's The Norby Chronicles:
  • Norby, the Mixed-Up Robot:
    • The Wells family has turned a quote from Scene 1 of Henry V, "The game's afoot" into an initialism; TGAF.
    • Norby, a robot made from a barrel of nails, is assumed to be an old R2 model, borrowing from Star Wars and their R2-series astromech droids. He's actually assembled from scrap and a crashed alien spaceship.
    • The bird-watchers leader, Miss Higgens, cries out "onward Higgins's soldiers, marching for the right!", a cry based on the 19th-century English hymn, "Onward, Christian Soldiers", a song often sung in demonstrations and civil protests.
  • Norby's Other Secret:
    • Instead of monitoring the kitchen computer, Norby is reading and reciting from Julius Caesar; "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him."
    • When placed inside the Mind Probe, Jeff copies Norby's quotation, and goes on to quote several other William Shakespeare speeches to generate a shield against the robot's attempt to read his mind.
  • Norby and the Queen's Necklace:
    • Alexandre Dumas is mentioned for his fictional account of Queen Antoinette and the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, which also names this story; The Queens Necklace.
    • Norby tries to mention Charles Dickens in chapter one, but is ignored. He later paraphrases from A Tale of Two Cities; "It was a far, far better thing I did", before getting interrupted again.
    • When Marcel (from 1785) speaks to a 1896 local about Time Travel, they admit to having read the recent novel by Herbert George Wells, The Time Machine.
    • When Marcel is told about space travel, he asks if it is like the book by Cyrano De Bergerac, Voyages To The Moon And The Sun, but only names the author.
    • While offscreen and entertaining the ladies of the French court, Fargo sang Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera, The Abduction from the Seraglio.
    • While entertaining the ladies of the French court, Jeff and Fargo sing several songs, including "Yankee Doodle".
    • While interrogating Jeff and Fargo, Benjamin Franklin mentions Voltaire's Micromégas, but only names the author.
  • Norby Finds a Villain: In chapter eight, while shielding against mind reading, Jeff quotes from "Jabberwocky".
  • Norby and the Court Jester:
    • Christopher Marlowe is mentioned, as Admiral Yobo cites a line from Doctor Faustus upon seeing Xeena, "Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships, and burnt the topless towers of Ilium?", drawing a parallel between the two beauties that is persistently referenced through the book.
    • While in charge of entertainment for the planet Izz, Ing has been re-telling many stories from the past, including parts of The Iliad, such as Helen of Troy.
    • In chapter five, Admiral Yobo and Ing quote from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Yeomen of the Guard, speaking of the way a jester's role is to satirize other people, including royalty.
• Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg's The Positronic Man:
  • In chapter three, The Rubaiyat Of Omar Khayyam is one of the gifts Miss gets for her birthday.
  • In chapter thirteen, Andrew incorporates a reference to two authors who wrote about robots in the prologue of his Fictional Document, E. T. A. Hoffmann and Karel Čapek.
  • In chapter sixteen, the Director of Research for US Robots summarizes Alice in Wonderland for Andrew, calling it an absurd adventure.
• The Atomic Time of Monsters: Some of the character names reference those in other media.
  • Henry Robertson's first name is a shout-out to Henry Fairfield Osborne, who coined the name Tyrannosaurus rex.
  • Gwen Valentine's surname is an homage to Jill Valentine from Resident Evil Film Series.
• Aunt Dimity:
  • In Aunt Dimity and the Deep Blue Sea, Peter Harris, son of Lori's neighbour Derek disguises himself as a dark haired young man with glasses named "Harry Peters" to avoid hordes of reporters after his grandfather wrote a letter to The Times bragging about him. Hmm, a dark haired young man with glasses plagued by fame...
  • In Aunt Dimity and the Village Witch, a man named Brocklehurst who claims to be a pious prophet (hippie-style), yet dishonestly turns a great personal profit evokes the hypocritical clergyman headmaster and larcenous treasurer of Lowood School.
• The Baby-Sitters Club contains a plethora of shout-outs to I Love Lucy, including Stacey's last name.
• The Baccano! Light Novels have a habit of referencing American movies, particularly gangster flicks.
• In A Bad Case of Stripes, Camilla's classmates call her "Night of the Living Lollipop".
• The first book of The Bartimaeus Trilogy has Twoflower from Discworld make a subtle and brief cameo in a marketplace for magical items containing demons (Twoflower's camera, or "iconograph", is powered by a tiny demon painting pictures really fast).
  • The second book features two policemen who ask Bartimaeus and his master for their identification. Bartimaeus puts a 'glaze' on the two policemen. They then forget the object of their inquiry and move along.
  • His name is "Mandrake" and he's a "magician."
• Beastly:
  • Lots of stories inspired by the original fairytale, like The Phantom of the Opera, Jane Eyre and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. There are also several references to other fairy tales as Kyle chats with more modern people living them, such as "The Little Mermaid", "The Frog Prince", and "Snow-White and Rose-Red".
  • To the Disney version. Kyle's "servants" have their own "curses" lifted when Magda's children are given green cards and Will regains his sight.
• In The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, Esther Greenwood says that she has to read Finnegans Wake by James Joyce for one of her classes in her senior year of college.
• In Ben-Hur, when Jesus is being arrested, Judah tries to rescue him; the Roman soldiers push him away, his clothing is torn off, and he is forced to flee naked. This is based on an incident actually recorded in The Bible. (Mark 14:51-52).
• The short story "The Black Sheep of Vaerlosi" by Desmond Warzel makes reference to a mineral whose unrefined form is too sharp to handle safely. The mineral is called "costnerite"—because it's untouchable.
• A very subtle Shout-Out exists in David Gerrold's Blood and Fire. While one group of characters is preparing to engage on a dangerous mission, the captain tells them "Let's be careful out there." The protagonist mentally notes that it was a watchword on her previous ship, the Michael Conrad. A shout out to Hill Street Blues and the actor who spoke the line.
• Bridge of Clay has a lot of them:
  • Names and phrases from The Iliad and The Odyssey appear on almost every page. Justified, as Penny (short for Penelope) Dunbar used to read them to her sons.
  • Several films, including Bachelor Party, Gallipoli and Chariots of Fire all play an important role in the plot.
  • Several chapter titles are direct or indirect shout-outs: Portrait of a killer as a middle-aged man, Birthday Girl, Death in the afternoon, The Big Sleep, Love in the time of chaos, The Burning Bed.
• In The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky has several characters quote passages of The Robbers, a play by Friedrich Schiller. There are also a lot of shout outs to the works of M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, Alexander Pushkin, and Voltaire. Naturally, given the book's religious themes, The Bible is quoted very often.
• In Brothers of the Snake, a Chaos cult on a corn-producing planet calls itself Children of Khorne. An Inquisitor present even lampshades the Punny Name to tip us off.
• Brown's Pine Ridge Stories not just only drops a reference to Bonanza, but the outcome of a particular episode involving Ben Cartwright preventing an extrajudicial hanging from taking place is discussed when one of the characters suggests seeking retribution on some careless joyriders.
  • There is also a less obvious reference to a 1973 film in the form of naming a brand of whiskey "Old Harper's".
  • And then in the twelfth chapter, there is a mention of My Little Pony!... But, sadly my fellow Bronies, it is a subversion as it was merely a coincidence.
  • In the eighteenth story, Gary at first says that he "felt like Superman," but later comes to compare himself with Charlie Brown when he finds out his attempted "rescue" of a woman and the children in her care from a fire ended up destroying her house over a burnt pot roast.
  • The twentieth story, there are numerous references including: Hulk Hogan, Leave It to Beaver, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Beverly Hillbillies,^note  A woman in the story is called "Granny Clampett", though it should be noted the name of the character from the show is Daisy May "Granny" Moses. and an old slogan that had been used by the United States Marine Corps.
• Bruce Coville's Book of... Monsters: In My Little Brother is a Monster, Jason's private nickname for Dum Pling is "Bonzo", specifically identified as a reference to the Ronald Reagan movie Bedtime For Bonzo.
• In George Zebrowski's 1998 novel Brute Orbits, there's a description of life on an asteroid-borne penal colony: "You were either a bully, a toady, or one of the nameless rabble of victims."
• By the Waters of Babylon: The title is a reference to Psalm 137 in The Bible, which expresses the longing of the Jews in the Babylonian exile that they can return home, hoping Babylon will fall and its people be destroyed as well. In the story, such destruction is essentially what happened with New York City and the rest of the US due to a war.
• In Tom Kratman's Caliphate, one of the historical works quoted in the series is a fictitious nonfiction work published by Baen Historical Press.
• The Captain Underpants series of books is set at Jerome Horowitz Elementary School, who was Curly of The Three Stooges.
• Eric Flint wrote the novella "Carthago Delenda Est" as a sequel to David Drake's Ranks of Bronze, but the space battle scene invokes Uchuu Senkan Yamato:
  Again, there was an exotic combination of old and new technology. The three great turrets of the ancient battleship swiveled, just as if it were still sailing the Pacific. But the guidance mechanisms were state-of-the-art Doge technology. And the incredible laser beams which pulsed out of each turret's three retrofitted barrels were something new to the galaxy.... Only a ship as enormous as the old Missouri could use these lasers. It took an immense hull capacity to hold the magnetic fusion bottles.
• In John DeChancie's Castle Murders, one of Those Two Guys, Peter Thaxton, solves a magical murder mystery among the castle nobles. In appreciation, the king of the castle grants him a title, which entitles him to be known as Lord Peter.
• The Roman poet Catullus used the name "Lesbia" as a pseudonym for the illicit lover much of his poetry describes, a clear reference to the Isle of Lesbos, home to the Greek poet Sappho, who may well have been the Trope Maker or Trope Codifier for many of the Romantic love tropes Catullus (and for that matter, much of the Western World) used in his poetry (When he wasn't being Incredibly Explicit, that is, and even sometimes when he was).
• In John C. Wright's Fugitives of Chaos, when Quentin shows Amelia a book, Amelia says, "I can not read the faerie letters."
• Chameleon Moon contains multiple Shout Outs to The Wizard of Oz.
• The City and the Dungeon briefly mentions a ‘Side Dungeon’ full of "relatively intelligent, if senseless, Dwarves" who build Fortresses.
• The Confessions (Saint Augustine) includes quotations from Cicero's (long-lost) work Hortensius, one of the first books to actually change St. Augustine's life for the better.
• The S. M. Stirling novel Conquistador features South African villains with the same names as the South African antagonists of the Harry Turtledove novel Guns of the South. There is also a reference to a landholder named Morrison, like the titular hero of H. Beam Piper's Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen. Morrison's House motto is "Death to Styphon!," a reference to the "Gunpowder God" cult of the Kalvan stories.
• The opening paragraph of Constance Verity Saves the World— "It was date night, and Constance Verity was wrestling an alligator woman in her underwear. How the alligator woman ended up wearing Connie's underwear was a mystery she never solved." — is very similar to the famed Marx Brothers joke "One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I don't know."
• In Constance Verity Destroys the Universe, Agent Ellington calls the cursed blade Connie has in the first chapter a bat'leth.
• Countdown:
  • In The Liberators, one chopper pilot is humming Ride of the Valkyries as he prepares to launch.
  • An interrogator uses Fernandez' playbook when interrogating a journalist, and says he got it out of a book by a hack science fiction writer.
  • In H Hour, a line infantry Captain and a special forces Sergeant have an argument on weapons safety in the mess. "This is my safety," says the Sergeant, waving his trigger finger.
  • From H Hour, in response to the reactions of people at a terrorist camp the M Day people are assaulting: "Bugs, Mr. Rico. Zillions of ’em. I’m a burnin’ ’em down."
• In P. D. James's Death of an Expert Witness, there are several subtle references to the much earlier detective novels of Dorothy L. Sayers, the most prominent being a discussion of whether a man struck on the head could have regained consciousness and locked himself into a building before dying, as in Busman's Honeymoon, and a character's saying "I'd rather make love with the public hangman", as in Murder Must Advertise.
• Death to the French: In Sharpe's Escape (2004), one of Bernard Cornwell's Richard Sharpe novels (which were partly inspired by Death to the French), a rifleman named Matthew Dodd is separated from Sharpe's company in a skirmish during the Peninsular Campaign in 1810. Word of God is that Cornwell has acknowledged on his Web site that this character is intended to be the same man depicted by Forester in Death to the French.
• The Dinosaur Lords:
  • Jaume, bi knight with the title the Prince Of Flowers, bears quite some resemblance to the Knight Of Flowers from A Song of Ice and Fire. May be because the author and GRRM seem to be friends in real life.
  • When asked where he'd been, Raguel replies "walking to and fro in the world, and going up and down in it."
• Terry Pratchett loves these. For example, in The Fifth Elephant, Vimes encounters Three Sisters who are straight out of a Chekhov play of the same name. One of them want to tear down their Cherry Orchard (another famous Chekhov play). They give him the gloomy and purposeless trousers of Uncle Vanya (yet a third famous Chekhov play — and "gloomy and purposeless" tends to be Chekhov's style).
  • Discworld has the Ramtop mountain range, named after the system variable RAMTOP from the Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer.
  • In Hogfather, the conversation between HEX and The Bursar is very reminiscent of the various 'chat bots' found all over the internet.
    • More specifically, it resembles the mindlessly-chatty "ELIZA" program, which predates the internet by a few years.
  • There exist a separate wiki and a more organized website dedicated to cataloging Pratchett's shout-outs.
  • In Lords and Ladies, there's one to the song "Lucky Ball and Chain" by They Might Be Giants when Granny Weatherwax and Mustrum Ridcully are discussing how to get away from the unicorn.
  "I was young and foolish then."
  "Well? You're old and foolish now."
  • Moving Pictures references a vast number of movies...and the Cthulhu Mythos.
  • Witches Abroad:
    • The book has numerous references to The Wizard of Oz. (Always applicable to Nanny Ogg: She had red boots, she got a house dropped on her, short people showed up to take the red boots from the witch the house dropped on...)
    • Tolkien's door gets a reference:
      She struck the door and spake thusly: "Open up, you little sods!"
  • Jingo provides a very English one, in which Vetinari’s patter as a stage conjurer is obviously based upon the late Tommy Cooper
• Notable examples in Distortionverse:
  • In Sabbie, RealLifeAnime boss compares his upcoming show to both Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon;
  • In Sharoine, Eliphya compares Count Sebastien to "a gay version of Tuxedo Kamen";
  • One of the chapter names of Chapter 5 - Rumori di Fondo is blatantly called ''You can (not) retreat'';
  • Wentzel, Kramers, and Brillouin are a reference to an approximation method used in quantum mechanics;
  • Rosenmaester, the Big Bad of Chapter 2 is an outmost shout out both to Light Yagami and Adrian Veidt;
  • Werner Kroemer calls Veckert Lady Oscar on several occasions.
• Hundreds of historical, religious, and mythological figures appear throughout The Divine Comedy to help the audience have a better idea of what sin, penance, and glory look like in a person. There's generally one or two of these references per Canto/Chapter, but in the twelfth canto of Paradiso, Dante goes to the extreme of having a saint list off all the great monks and scholars that dwell within his sphere of Heaven, ranging from a commentator of Dante's favorite poet to the great theologian, Thomas Aquinas.
• Doctor Who New Adventures
  • The Also People, in addition to being one long homage to The Culture, also references a cocktail called a Double Entendre, a suspicious yellow dip that always appears at parties, Time Lords having octagons in their eyes to see into the timestream, a market trader named C!Mot and the chapter title "A Better Class of Recurring Dream". Ben Aaronovitch is clearly a Discworld fan.
  • The Sherlock Holmes crossover All-Consuming Fire, as well as multiple Holmesian references, features an appearance by The Lost World's Lord John Roxon, and references to Professor Challenger, Fu Manchu, and Kim Newman's Diogenes Club agent Charles Beauregard. It's also one of several New Adventures to have references to the Cthulhu Mythos.
  • In Death and Diplomacy, the Czan sergeant is a clear pastiche of Sergeant Major Williams in It Ain't Half Hot, Mum, to the point that at one point he responds to "Is you soldier boys?" by claiming to be a concert party. The villains result in several shout-outs to Saturday morning cartoons, at one point setting up a death-trap disguised as a village of happy Smurf-like creatures. At the end of the book, when it's revealed the villains are evolutionary-enhanced Gallifreyan rodents, one of them asks what they'll do now; another rants "We do what we always do, try to take over the universe!"
  • According to Godengine, the standard Adjudicator method for a single person to take over a building occupied by the enemy is known as the McClane Protocol.
  • In Love and War, Ace accompanies New Age Traveller Jan on a cyberspace-enhanced Vision Quest, in which they meet The Trickster. Ace starts to identify who she sees him as, but gets interrupted. However his cry of "You wouldn't let it lie!" and later comment "That's a Diana and Trickster sword" makes it pretty clear he's Vic Reeves.
  • A Long List of the aliens and time travellers and others aided by Isaac's organisation in Return of the Living Dad includes several shout outs, since the guy delivering it is a geek:
    Joel: We get all kinds. ETs, mutants, strays, greys, LGMs, BEMs, UNIT deserters, Striebs, dweebs, Stepford Wives, Midwich Cuckoos, missing persons, faraway people, peepers, buzzers, hoppers, hitchers, Leapers, Sliders...
  • Joel also compares his own Ascended Fanboy situation to the guy in the second panel of this What's New? with Phil and Dixie strip.
  • In No Future, set in the 1970s, the Doctor watches part of an episode of Professor X, the in-universe equivalent of Doctor Who; the actor playing the Professor is not explicitly identified, but is clearly Frankie Howerd in the same comic mode as Up Pompeii.
  • First Frontier, being a 1950s SF movie homage, has numerous shout-outs to those movies, including Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) (the Doctor squares himself with the American authorities by reminding the CIA of the help he gave them with an "illegal alien" problem in Santa Mira in '56), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) (including the inevitable Klaatu Barada Nikto), and even The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Doctor Von Scott has a cameo as a scientist brought in to examine UFO wreckage).
  • In the 50th New Adventures novel, Happy Endings by Paul Cornell, there are two Earth Reptile musicians called Jacquilian and Sanki who talk entirely in Palare, and are very much a reptilian Julian and Sandy, including one of yer actual Round the Horne punchlines.
• Don Quixote: Hundreds upon hundreds of them, although many would be unrecognizable to the modern reader because of Parody Displacement. Chapter I part I mentions Aristotle, philosopher widely regarded as the greatest abstract thinker of Occidental Civilization. Even he has no chance to make sense of the purple prose that plagued Chivalry Books. Also in the Chapter III part II, Don Quixote's opinion about history and poetry reflects the theory exposed in Aristotle's Poetics.
• Dora Wilk Series is filled up to brim with those:
  • The titles of the book themselves: Gods Must Be Crazy, Winner Takes it All and Exorcisms of Dora Wilk.
  • The variety of vampire pop-culture: when on masquerade party, Dora dresses up as Selena and Miron and Joshua dress up as Interview with the Vampire characters. In one scene, Dora makes a joke about sparkling vampires, which doesn't go well with a vampire king present.
  • The case in book five is described by one character as "straight from The X-Files, with Dora and Witkacy being the only candidates for Mulder and Scully.
  • Dora compares Baal's trip to Toruń to An American in Paris.
  • She also once states that undertaking a particular action is like applying for Darwin Awards in terms of expected results.
  • Her boss, Anita Black, is very similar, both in name and description, to Anita Blake.
  • In one of short stories, Witkacy asks if they've taken down the right Wicked Witch of the West.
• Dragaera:
  • Vlad remarks that "No matter how subtle the wizard, a dagger between the shoulder blades will seriously cramp his style", a Shout-Out to a much-parodied quote from The Lord of the Rings, "Do not meddle in the affairs of Wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger".
  • Once, when Vlad is warned that a sorcerous adversary could turn him into a newt, he replies, "I'd get better".
  • Jhegaala has a Shout-Out to Nero Wolfe- Vlad is bedridden and is using his familiar, Loiosh as his "legs". He comments that this could work well as an arrangement, leading Loiosh to comment that Vlad would soon end up several hundred pounds heavier.
  • The Sherlock Holmes shoutout from Jhereg:
    "I'm referring to the strange action of the bodyguards at the assassination attempt."
    "But the bodyguards did nothing at the assassination attempt."
    "That was the strange action."
• In Changer's Moon: What does this bring to mind?
  When she turned back to the Mirror, there were excited voices coming from it, a great green dragon leaped at them, mouth wide, fire whooshing at them, then the dragon went round the curve of the Mirror and vanished—but not before she saw the dark-clad rider perched between the delicate powerful wings. More of the dragons whipped past, all of them ridden, all of them spouting gouts of fire at something Serroi couldn’t see. They were intensely serious about what they were doing, those riders and the beasts they rode, but Serroi couldn’t make out what it was they fought.
• The chapters of horro novel Echo are titled after famous horror novels and stories.
• The Eisenhorn Trilogy (Warhammer 40,000) features a scene where the titular Inquisitor recounts talking with a retired Titan Princeps (commander) named Hekate during one of his travels. Princeps Hekate just happens to be the main character of the Titan series of graphic novels.
• The Novels of the Change are full of these, encompassing subjects as diverse as Monty Python and Dirty Harry. The Lord of the Rings gets so many shout-outs, even the toilet-humor National Lampoon parody figures heavily into the plot. And even though nobody in the novels has heard of Harry Potter (as only the first book came out before everything went to hell), the resident Wiccans still manage to get in a good laugh about the Sorting Hat.
• Enchanted Forest Chronicles: Naturally, to just about every fairy tale in the public consciousness, but also to some recent literature:
  • As mentioned in Dealing with Dragons, Cimorene's Great-Aunt Rose is basically Sleeping Beauty / Briar Rose, what with the sleeping curse, as said by Cimorene's mother:
    Your Great-Aunt Rose was married at sixteen […] One really can’t count all those years she spent asleep under that dreadful fairy’s curse.
  • The Fire-witch whose castle is full of petrified passersby is like the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
  • The idea that witches and wizards melt in soapy water clearly comes from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (as do a pair of ruby slippers and the magic belt that goes with them, both being offered by Gypsy Jack), though in Morwen's case it is subverted.
  • Some of the descriptions of the network of caverns under the Mountains of Morning echo those in Colossal Cave, including a maze of twisty little passages.
  • Rumpelstiltskin in Searching for Dragons, where the dwarf who's saddled with the role gets quite burdened after many children are left in his care whose mothers were unable to guess his name (though he loves them genuinely).
• Endo and Kobayashi Live! The Latest on the Tsundere Villainess Lieselotte involves a Fictional Romance Game. In J-Novel Club's localization, it was changed to Love Me Magically! a.k.a. Magikoi, in reference to the Dating Sim Majikoi! Love Me Seriously!.
• The English Dragon: The opening paragraph of chapter 14 is a pastiche of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four; in this version, Winston Smith's job now involves adding ethnic minorities to old films ("Films without cultural and racial diversity had to be re-cast. It was essential - for harmony and peace - to eradicate truth.")
• Evening's Empires by Paul McAuley:
  • He references Blade Runner by having Tannhäuser Gate as a major location in the asteroid belt.
  • He references Foundation by having Trantor as a major location in the asteroid belt.
  • He references 2001: A Space Odyssey by one of the belt's many weird cults; thy leave black monoliths of various sizes dotted around, which send a radio pulse to the galactic core when touched.
  • The book's sections are all titled after classic Science Fiction stories and novels: "Childhood's End", "Marooned Off Vesta", "The Caves of Steel", "Pirates of the Asteroids", "Downward to the Earth", and "The Cold Equations".
• Stephen King books:
  • The Eyes of The Dragon has a minor Shout-Out to H. P. Lovecraft when the narrator mentions how Flagg's spellbook was bound in human skin, written on the Plains of Leng by the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, which is the exact description in most H. P. Lovecraft stories of his famous Necronomicon.
  • Needful Things also has some shout outs to H. P. Lovecraft. The antagonist has cocaine which he claims comes from the Plains of Leng and there's some graffiti in a parking garage that reads "Yog-Sothoth rules." Also, his name is Leland Gaunt; Night-Gaunts are a fictional race in Lovecraft's work.
• Fallen Angels has a never-ending series of shout-outs to everything from Blazing Saddles to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner to specific events within science-fiction fandom.
• Family Skeleton Mysteries: Sid, Georgia and her daughter Madison are fans of various series, which get namedropped throughout the book, including:
  • Georgia is a fan of Marvel Comics, including the X-Men.
  • Madison is a fan of various anime and manga, including Dragon Ball, Naruto, Soul Eater and Yu-Gi-Oh!, to name just a few. She also enjoys Doctor Who, and owns a My Little Ponyta shirt.
  • Sid's favorite movie is The Nightmare Before Christmas, and he owns the entire Harry Potter series. He also shares Madison's love of Soul Eater. When he was alive, he enjoyed Monty Python and the Marx Brothers.
  • Near the end of books 1 and 2, after a Big Damn Heroes moment, Sid refers to himself as "The Bone Ranger".
  • In book 3, Sid and Georgia dress up as Scooby-Doo and Velma while attending the Halloween Howl at McQuaid University. Later in the book, Sid refers to himself as "Sherlock Bones" and Georgia as his Dr. Watson.
• Fancy Apartments has a bunch of outtakes at the back, which briefly reference Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, and Twilight. In the story itself, a reference is made to another one of the author's stories, involving a 'spork of transformation'.
• There's a nice shout out to The Dresden Files in the opening chapter of Benedict Jacka's Fated. "I've even heard of some guy in Chicago who advertises in the phone book under 'Wizard', though that's probably an urban legend."
• The Famous Five: In Five Go Off to Camp, the brick walls which open to reveal secret tunnels make George think of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Dick even says "Open Sesame!" when one of them opens.
• The Fault in Our Stars:
  • At one point Augustus muses that it would be awesome to fly in a super-fast jet that could follow the sun. John's admitted to being a fan of Phineas and Ferb and this was the plot of their first special.
  • "Funky Bones" is located at Indianapolis Museum of Art, where Sarah Urist Green, aka The Yeti, is Curator of Contemporary Collections. The author's wife had a major hand in bringing the sculpture to Indy.
  • Hazel and Augustus watch V for Vendetta the first time she goes to his house.
• In the novel The Fires of Paratime by L.E. Modesitt Jr. (published in 1982), the Immortals can travel nearly instantaneously in space and time, but they have no native technology and are forced to pilfer it from various technologically-advanced cultures throughout galactic history:
  Frey—Freyda's son by her fourth or fifth contract—was walking around the consoles twirling the light saber. He'd picked that up from some obscure group of galactic-wide do-gooders from near the end of back-time limits.
• Lila Gaela: The opening paragraph of Cronicas de un gato a medianoche references José María Eguren's poem "(R)eyes (r)ojos" word by word. Gaela uses it as a shortcut metaphor for weary eyes while keeping the original's Bilingual Bonus. It also makes an allusion to one of Homura Akemi's witch transformation stages in Puella Magi Madoka Magica The Movie: Rebellion —specifically, when spiderweb-bleeding red moons replace Homura's eyes.
• Galaxy of Fear: One book has a malignant AI tricking Zak Arranda, and when Zak wants its help it says "I'm afraid I can't do that, Zak."
• The Game by Diana Wynne Jones makes several shout outs to much of Greek Mythology, Russian mythology, "Hansel and Gretel", The Lord of the Rings, and many other fantasy stories from across the entire genre. She also makes a less obvious reference to the TARDIS from Doctor Who, as the characters use it at one point in the book without naming it. (Nearly every other reference has at least a name you can associate with a book or myth, but the TARDIS shout out has no way to tell unless you know about Doctor Who.)
• Garfield and the Teacher Creature: In the school gym, Max decides to pass Odie the ball so Odie can hit it into the net with his nose. He says he saw a dog do it in a movie. Odie ends up hitting the ball into Garfield's face.
• The Girl from the Miracles District:
  • Nikita says that she's picked her current name after watching La Femme Nikita as a kid.
  • Zelda is a lovely woman who has to be rescued.
  • After witnessing Robin's shooting skills, Nikita jokes that his surname should be Hood.
• Robert A. Heinlein's Glory Road.
  • The planet Nevia has "horses" with eight legs, a reference to Odin's steed Sleipnir in Norse Mythology.
  • The mnemonic for a Hideous Hangover Cure is "Eye of newt and toe of frog..." from Macbeth.
  • Star mentions a road made of yellow brick and Oscar says "Just don't make a hobbit of it.", referring to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and The Hobbit.
  • The Never-Born creature Oscar fights a duel with has a huge nose, is a superb swordsman, likes to sing poetry while fighting, and claims to have written a book, traveled to the Moon and had a house fall on him. Although he never tells Oscar Gordon his name, he's clearly based on the Real Life person Cyrano de Bergerac.
• In John C. Wright's The Golden Age, The Phoenix Exultant, and The Golden Transcedence, Heinlein's "An armed society is a polite society" is inverted into "An unarmed society is a rude society", and Harrier Sophotect's appearance is clearly modeled on Sherlock Holmes. Characters pose as figures from William Shakespeare's Hamlet, Commedia dell'Arte, and John Milton's Comus — though enough explanation is given in story for them to be understood.
  • In Daphne's dream universe, a major character is a prince named Shining. While apparently she didn't intend it as a Shout-Out, her husband, the protagonist, is named Phaethon — which means "Shining."
• In the Gone series, most of the place names seen on the map are references to works or TV shows related to the themes of the series, such as Stefano Rey National Park (Stephen King— Under the Dome), the Santa Katrina Hills (K. A. Applegate —Grant's wife), Grant Street (Michael Grant —Gone), Golding Street (William Golding— Lord of the Flies), and even the town name of Perdido Beach (Lost).
  • The illusion Penny uses on Quinn is the monster from Cloverfield.
  • In the first book, Mary reads the kids The Buffalo Storm, which is a book that K. A. Applegate, Grant's wife, wrote.
• Go to Sleep (A Jeff the Killer Rewrite):
  • Jeff is a big fan of horror films, and has seen all the Halloween movies. Throughout the story, he's worn a Friday the 13th shirt, a Michael Myers shirt, and finally a jersey of his favourite slasher, Jason Voorhees, as part of his Halloween costume, with the Jason goalie mask.
  • A senior student warns Jeff of Randy by referring to Rob Zombie's take on Halloween (since Jeff is wearing the appropriate shirt to suggest that he's seen it), comparing Randy to that of a young Michael Myers from those films.
    Senior student: It’s pretty much the same situation. Abusive father, whore mother, unstable home and siblings. Yeah, it’s a cliche but it happens in real life. It's rumored that he kills animals just for the fun of it.
  • When Randy catches Jeff wielding a hockey stick to defend himself against him, he mockingly asks if he's "trying to be Casey Jones or something".
• The prologue to The Great Divorce references The Man Who Lived Backwards by Charles F. Hall (Lewis had forgotten the author and title, though), in which the immutability of the past while living backwards in time results in Intangible Time Travel. Also, this being C. S. Lewis, there's references to lots of literary and philosophical authors including William Blake, Prudentius, Jeremy Taylor, Dante, John Milton, and of course George MacDonald.
• In Green Smoke by Rosemary Manning, Susan suddenly wonders if you need to be formal when talking to a dragon, remembering a book that said you should address a cat as "O Cat". (When she addresses the dragon as "O Dragon", he corrects her; he's R. Dragon.)
• Guardians of the Flame:
  • The game in the books is pretty obviously Dungeons & Dragons, though the name is never used. In the story it was an invention of Professor Deighton based on the real parallel world they enter.
  • There are a number of amusing ones to other well-known fantasy works—aside from Arta Myrdhyn, Karl's warrior personality has the name Barak (Pawn of Prophecy and The Sleeping Dragon were published only a year apart), the mountain where they are traveling to get home is called Bremon (only one-letter difference from the name of Allanon's mentor), and the fact the mountain is a solitary peak in a wasteland within which a dragon sleeps is quite reminiscent of Erebor and Smaug.
  • The wasteland the party must travel through is called the Waste of Elrood. (This is also the name of one of the emperors of House Corrino.)
  • The plot of a number of characters from Earth becoming stranded in another, fantasy-themed world and having to find a gateway home would also appear in The '80s in the Dungeons & Dragons (1983) TV show, albeit involving children rather than college students and taking up the entire run of the show rather than only the first book of the series.
• Heart of Steel has a lot of shout-outs peppered throughout:
  • The title itself references and episode of Batman: The Animated Series.
  • Early on, Julia compares Alistair to a villain in a James Bond movie.
  • Several to the Jonathan Coulton song "Skullcrusher Mountain'', which inspired the novel in the first place, including a minion named Scarface and half-pony/half-gorilla chimera offered as a gift.
  • Arthur's interface drone displays a generic smiley face (or frowny face, or neutral face) to express emotions, similar to GERTY in Film/Moon.
  • One of the robots responds to a request with "By your command," in a reference to Battlestar Galactica (1978).
• Helen and Troy's Epic Road Quest:
  • When Helen tries using magic with her new wand, two of the phrases she uses include "For the honor of Grayskull" and "It's clobberin' time!"
  • Helen correctly guesses what's behind the Three Sister's challenge door — her having to fight a monster, only to reveal it to look identical to her and that the real obstacle was her all along — by citing it happening in The Empire Strikes Back.
  • Ranger Grainger mentions one of many reasons why one would poach a dragon is to literally grow invincible soldiers by planting dragon teeth like seeds, a reference to Jason and the Argonauts when King Aeëtes used the Hydra's teeth to create his skeleton-warriors.
  • Helen compares herself and Troy to She-Hulk and Wyatt Wingfoot respectively; Wyatt is this amazing adventurer and genius who could do and be with anybody, and while he dates She-Hulk on and off again, they will never stay together because "nobody wants to write that story."
• Help! My Story Has the Mary-Sue Disease:
  • One example has a character called Harry replaced by a fan counterpart, Larry, because the fan author didn't like the way Harry handled Professor Squirrel.
  • Dani the purple eyed, dragon raising princess and her shoddy knockoff Zani also make regular appearances.
  • As do the Elements of Harmonica.
  • There are also references to Indiana Jones, the borg, Jules Verne, H. P. Lovecraft, Sesame Street, Twilight, Sherlock Holmes, This Wiki, and Sue detecting devices blowing up. There may be many more.
• J. R. R. Tolkien's unfinished novel The Notion Club Papers contains several shout-outs to The Space Trilogy by his friend, C. S. Lewis.
  • C. S. Lewis himself used various names which are alike or very similar to some Middle-earth names. The Space Trilogy main character, Ransom, is also a philologist and the Martian languages bear a certain similarity to Elvish.
  • Tolkien made several self-Shout Outs in his work, arguably, quite apart from the myriad in-universe references to 'older' tales: not expecting his 'ancient histories' of Middle Earth (which often genuinely were written much earlier) to ever be published when he was writing The Lord of the Rings, he occasionally recycled names from his existing mythology into the latter. These would have remained private S.O.s, but for The Silmarillion appearing decades later and highlighting them - as well as throwing up odd inconsistencies such as a name migrating from one race to another (e.g. Denethor, Gothmog; some instances were retconned in supplementary works as in-universe Shout Outs where the later users were said to have taken their names from heroes of old - or of the The Silmarillion character Glorfindel, whose First Age death was retconned via a one-off offscreen miracle to retrospectively make him possibly/probably the same person as the LotR character of the same name.
    • All of LOTR's shout outs to Macbeth, all taken from Act IV, Scene i, when the Witches tell Macbeth their prophecies of his death. First of all, the phrase "Crack of Doom" was coined by William Shakespeare in this scene. The Ents' besiegement of Isengard and the Witch-King's defeat by Éowyn are references to two of the three prophecies—namely, that it will not happen until "Great Birnam Wood...shall come against him" and that "none of woman born shall harm" him. Of course, the trees do come to the castle when Macduff's army uses their branches as camouflage, just as the Ents come to Isengard, and Macbeth is killed by a man who was not born, but removed from his mother's womb, just as the Witch-King, who can be killed by "no living man," is killed by a woman.
    • The ents marching to Isengard is more of a Take That! to Shakespeare than a Shout-Out. Tolkien always hated the fact that the wood which came to Dunsinane was just men in disguise, so he wrote a scene with a real marching wood.
• In Henry Fielding's The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling, Fielding drops in a shout-out to his sister's novel David Simple, which Sophia Western reads in one scene.
• In The Hollows Rachel practices White Magic but is searching for something more powerful that won't bring her to the wrong side of the "force". She amuses herself with the thought, "You're not my father Darth and I'll never join you!"
• Surprisingly for such a Darker and Edgier setting and situation, the Warhammer 40,000 Horus Heresy books are not immune. Nemesis has a psychotic assassin who seems to feel emotions for guns (other than murderous hatred and contempt, that is, he feels that for everyone). When confronted with a cache of shiny weapons, his only response after taking his pick is "...I'll be in my bunk.".
• House of Leaves has shout outs mostly to the works of French thinker Jacques Derrida. The structure of the novel is reminiscent of Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, and colored text could be a subtle Shout-Out to Nabokov's synesthesia. There are also an unusual number of similarities between the house and the House of Change from Michael Ende's The Neverending Story. Jorge Luis Borges, Sylvia Plath, and Franz Kafka are also paid tribute in various, small ways throughout the book.
• Alastair Reynolds throws a pair of enormous shout-outs to The Book of the New Sun in House of Suns, though it would be a spoiler to explain exactly what they are.
• The Hunger Games:
  • Katniss Everdeen's name serves as one to Bathsheba Everdene from Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd.
  • Katniss' squad in Mockingjay is called Squad Four Five One, echoing another dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451.
  • There are quite a bit of references to Shakespeare's works. The President Evil is named Coriolanus Snow. A past tribute was named Titus, who ate the flesh of other tributes to survive. A Capitol defector is named Cressida. Annie Cresta is a half-insane woman who came from a coastal district and won her Games by managing to swim the longest.
• "Imogen's Epic Day": When Imogen splashes Safira with the Waters of Life, she asks to know how she knew it would kill her. Imogen cites The Wizard of Oz as a reference. While Safira insists that she isn't a witch, nor is water an actual weakness for real witches, she still cries out "What a world! What a world!" as she crumbles into inert shards.
• In the short story "Impossible Dreams" by Tim Pratt, Pete has the complete collection of The Twilight Zone (1959) on DVD and compares the experience of finding Impossible Dreams Video, a video store from an Alternate Universe, to a plot from the series.
• Inheritance Cycle:
  • In "Brisingr", Arya doodles something about a lonely god in the sand in reference to "Doctor Who". Paolini mentions this in the afterword. He says he did it because he's a fan of the doctor. "And to those who got the line about the lonely god, all I have to say is that The Doctor can be anywhere at any time, even alternate dimensions. Hey! I'm a fan too!"
    Eragon: "What does it mean?"
    Arya: "I don't know."
  • In "Inheritance" there's another Doctor Who reference. Angela, the herbalist, is knitting a blue hat with runes around the edge. When asked what the runes say, she responds: "Raxacori—Oh, never mind. It wouldn't mean anything to you anyway." There is a planet in Doctor Who called Raxacoricofallapatorius (it's where the Slitheen come from.)
  • Morn (who is himself a Shout-Out/parody).
  • Some people and places are named after people he knows, for example, Angela (his sister), and Palancar Valley (named after the artist who does the cover art).
  • "Barges? We don't want no stinking barges!"
  • The name of the first ever bonded dragon, which is Muad'Dib spelled backwards.
• In Paul Robinson's Instrument of God, which is a story about an Afterlife run inside a computer system, the dead people who go to orientation are given references to movies about their situation, including The Matrix, Vanilla Sky, Total Recall (1990) and What Dreams May Come. The Preface to the book mentions other stories including Robert A. Heinlein's Elsewhen and Stranger in a Strange Land, as well as The Green Mile. Also, when Supervisor 246 is explaining to a character it might not be a good idea to mention that he's from an Afterlife in another world, she agrees with him, realizing people would think she's crazy. 246 then thinks about the scene where Avery Brooks in Deep Space Nine is trying to convince the men of a mental institution that he's actually a Starbase captain.
• Isaac Asimov Presents: Great Science Fiction Stories of 1939: In Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg's introduction, multiple works are mentioned as being first published or becoming hits in 1939:
  • "The Broken Axiom" by Alfred Bester
  • Mel Brooks is singled out as still using the name Melvin Kaminsky.
  • Culture And Freedom by John Dewey
  • Famous Fantastic Mysteries
  • Fantastic Adventures
  • Future Fiction
  • The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
  • "Grey Lensman" by E. E. "Doc" Smith
  • "Hang Out The Washing On The Siegfeid Line"
  • "The Last Time I Saw Paris"
  • "Lest Darkness Fall" by L. Sprague de Camp
  • The Long Weekend by Robert Graves
  • The Man Who Came to Dinner by George Kaufman and Moss Hart
  • "Marooned Off Vesta" by Isaac Asimov
  • The New Adam by Stanley Weinbaum
  • "Night Fishing At Antibes" by Creator/Piccasso
  • "One Against The Legion" by Jack Williamson
  • The Outsider And The Others by H. P. Lovecraft
  • Planet Stories
  • "Roll Out The Barrel"
  • "Sinister Barrier" by Eric Frank Russell
  • Startling Stories
  • The Time of Your Life by William Saroyan
  • "Two Sought Adventure" by Fritz Leiber
  • Unknown
  • Violin Concerto by William Walton
  • War with the Newts by Karel Čapek
• Isaac Asimov Presents: Great Science Fiction Stories of 1940: In the introduction by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg, multiple works are mentioned as being first published or becoming hits in 1940:
  • "Emergency Refueling" is published by James Blish.
  • "Martian Quest" is Leigh Brackett's first Science Fiction Short Story.
  • Mel Brooks is singled out as still using the name Melvin Kaminsky.
  • Captain Future launches for the first time.
  • The Great Director is made by Charlie Chapman.
  • Comet Stories enters the world.
  • "Locked Out" is HB Fyfe's first Science Fiction.
  • For Whom the Bell Tolls is published by Ernest Hemingway.
  • Alfred Hitchcock does well;
    • Gaslight is considered a top film in 1940.
    • Rebecca is considered a top film in 1940.
  • L. Ron Hubbard published two novel-length stories in serial format, meaning they were published as incomplete parts over several magazine issues.
    • Typewriter in the Sky
    • Final Blackout
  • "Stepsons Of Mars" is co-authored by Cyril M. Kornbluth and Richard Wilson, and published in April 1940.
  • Medea is composed by Darius Milhaud.
  • Long Days Journey Into The Night is written by Eugene O'Neill, but won't be produced for another sixteen years.
  • Frederik Phol is name-dropped twice:
    • For launching Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories
    • For co-authoring "Before The Universe".
  • The Realm Of Spirit is published by George Santayana.
  • Science Fiction Quarterly hits the newsstands.
  • Symphony In C is composed by Igor Stravinsky.
  • "Laura Ridley" is painted by Rex Whistler.
  • Darker Than You Think, by Jack Williamson, is published in serial format, meaning it was published as incomplete parts over several magazine issues.
• Jaine Austen Mysteries: In-Universe, Jaine is deliberately named for Jane Austen. Her mother was an Anglophile; unfortunately, she was also a bad speller.
• Jakub Wędrowycz: The stories have quite a lot of references, mainly to pop culture: the protagonist villager has eaten stew from some octopus-like thing named Ktulu, stole a wand from some snotty bespectacled brat with a lightning on his forehead, and is said to have also eaten some yellow thing that wandered into his yard calling itself "Pikachu". Another example is when he comes across a zeppelin, made from a metal lighter than air - his friend explains that it's an invention of one "professor Geist", a reference to the classic Polish novel The Doll.
• In the book Jeremy Fink and the Meaning Of Life by Wendy Mass, there seems to be either an accidental Shout-Out or simply a very subtle one, as Life, the Universe and Everything are mentioned a few times in that exact phrasing. Also, the offices of Folgard and Levine are Suite 42.
• In the denouement of Matthew Stover's Jericho Moon, Kheperu tells Barra several Blatant Lies about how he'd gotten himself, the MacGuffin, and her back to the city after she was knocked out. Among these obvious whoppers is one where they're scooped up and carried to safety in the nick of time by giant eagles.
• Journey to Chaos
  • When some chaosists make noise about him walking Annala home from school, Eric pretends that he's escorting the Golden Cicacada on her journey to fetch holy scriptures.
  • Eric claims that sailors are a suspicious and cowardly lot.
  • Eric asks Tasio for Divine Intervention. Tasio replies, "What makes you I'm either inclined or capable to terminate this encounter?" He even creates a Starfleet uniform for himself.
  • Eric shanks a reaper and steals one of his abilities. What does he say after that? Now I've got your power!
• The Kitty Norville series
  • While having a Busman's Holiday experience when trying to relax in a cabin, Kitty notes that "I wanted Walden and got Evil Dead."
  • When Kitty asks her audience the identity of a Playing with Fire creature causing her trouble, one caller suggests the Golden Age Human Torch.
  • Some fairies explain they are up to a little classic mischief and Kitty wonders if they meant like A Midsummer Night's Dream.
• Mercedes Lackey:
  • Lackey pulls off a clever one in her book The Fairy Godmother. Her protagonist Elena goes to a Hiring Faire, and is the second-to-last person hired. The last person in the square, when she leaves? Mort.
  • In Home from the Sea, characters Nan and Sarah mention that they were helped out in Egypt by a woman who was called Sitt Hakim by the native people. That plus the rest of her description puts her as Amelia Peabody.
• The Last Adventure of Constance Verity:
  • After Hiro saves Connie and Tia from The Countess, Connie thinks "Of all the secret vaults in all the world, he'd have to walk into hers," a reference to the iconic Humphrey Bogart line — "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine" — from Casablanca.
  • Connie's conversation with The Engine in the climax has a lot in common with Neo's conversation with The Architect in The Matrix Reloaded; The Engine reveals to Connie that her status as The Chosen One is nothing but a byproduct of the perfect system they designed, and that by returning that byproduct to the system and absorbing it, it can complete its final equation and remake the Multiverse into the "perfect order" it designed. Connie being the one variable it can't predict with 100% accuracy, she manages to outwit all of its attempts at absorbing her.
• H. P. Lovecraft was ridiculously fond of shouting out to his other works to the point where most of the time it didn't really make any sense. The names just happened to be the same. Also, he and his circle of author friends absolutely loved shouting out at each other and shared several eldritch deities.
  • The founder of the Pickman foundation is presumably NOT the Pickman of "Pickman's Model". Lovecraft's stories tend to take place in the same small part of New England, and often concern the same kind of ladies and gentlemen from old, old families (so they can have old, old secrets). Hence, the same surnames turning up again and again is actually fairly realistic: the oldest families have a fair number of members by now, and they are fairly important to local history as well.
• The planet Wunderland, in Larry Niven's Man-Kzin Wars series, has a number of inimical animals native to it. One of these, the more dangerous for its apparent harmlessness and cuddly-toy aspect (until it bites you with venomous fangs and doesn't let go), is called a Beam's Beast. The narrator states that the etymology of the name had been lost to history, but it's a dead ringer (modulo the fangs) for H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy.
• Of all things, the children's book Lamont the Lonely Monster by Dean Walley makes a reference to Dickens: the terrible monster the title character tries to befriend is named Uriah the Heap. Interestingly this is something of an inversion to the character being referenced, as Uriah Heep started out as merely an obsequious, insincere yes-man but becomes an antagonist later in the novel while Uriah the Heap starts out seeming like a scary villain but turns out to have a good heart and just as lonely and in need of a friend as Lamont.
• The Last Dragon Chronicles:
  • In Fire World, some authors on the books bear resemblance to real life authors. A more obvious Shout-Out is to Alice in Wonderland, when David finds a book called Alicia in the Land of Wonder.
  • Earlier on in the series there's a reference to (paraphrased from memory) 'a popular series of books about a boy wizard going to school', and then in The Fire Eternal, Gollygosh conjours up a screwdriver that 'looked very similar to the screwdriver used by the time travelling hero of the dragons' favourite television programme'.
• Liv in the Future:
  • When Liv first arrives in the future, the narration comments that she’s “certainly not in Kansas anymore.”
  • The pawn shop where Liv pawns off her jewelry from Claire's has a Furby, a Pikachu doll, a copy of AKIRA, and a Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards cartridge visible in the background.
• Lizard Music:
  • Many of the Chicken Man's aliases are artists, including Vincent van Gogh and Pieter Brueghel.
  • The late-night movies Victor watches include No Celebrities Were Harmed versions of Island of Lost Souls and Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
  • Apart from the Lizard Music program, the lizards' TV shows include a quiz show modeled on You Bet Your Life.
• The Lords of the Underworld series involves a Greek woman named Haydee, who is obsessed with getting revenge on the killers of her family. Hm...
• Shaun Tam referenced a few artists in his illustrations for The Lost Thing.
• The Lotterys More or Less: Chapter 9 of the book is titled "Food, Glorious Food".
• The Magician's Nephew:
  • "In those days Mr. Sherlock Holmes was still living in Baker Street and the Bastables were looking for treasure in the Lewisham Road." The Russian translation for no discernible reason changes the reference to Bastables to reference to Father Brown from stories by G. K. Chesterton.
  • The trees of silver and of gold have analogs in the works of Lewis' longtime friend J. R. R. Tolkien.
• MARZENA: So many, so many, Hey! It's all Good Man, Bill Grannt, Hohlander the Remake, The Tetrix Movies, Househead, Zombies repeating Shtobo Mola Jit/ Myorvt Shtobo Jit over and over, Stegano?! WTF!, blue meth is so 2013, how about eating your own pig for diner (Hannibal), YEAH! HOLO CHRISTMAS!
• In Scott Meyer's Master of Formalities, Lord Jakabitus once tells a servant girl (actually, a Master of Formalities in disguise) "Shut up, Migg!".
• One of the chapters in Max is called We all Live in a Deadly Submarine.
• In the very first chapter of McClendon's Syndrome by Robert Frezza, there are bars called the Prancing Pony and Callahan's.
• Mediochre Q Seth Series: Many, most of them intentional In-Universe because Mediochre is a bit of a nerd. Of particular note: The university at which Mediochre and Joseph word is St Merlin's ("different Merlin"); the Prime Minister of Mantically Aware Britain is named Kathryn Queen, colloquially called Queen MAB; one of Mediochre's catchphrases is "I love it when a plan comes together"; Joseph responds to the tempomancer's insistence that "Time is relative" with "Lunchtime doubly so?"; and in a particularly impressive one, Mediochre mentions while captured that the chances of escape are roughly equal to the odds of Kitty Pride being a real person - which seems like he's admitting defeat unless you happen to know that the character of Kitty Pride was named after a (still living) artist from Real Life, thus making her odds of being real 100% certain.
• Monster of the Year:
  • The various monster characters are, for the most part, inspired by the title characters in the Universal Horror films (with Gadzinga as about the only exception).
  • When Igor's plane arrives, Michael remembers the film Young Frankenstein and almost expects him to correct their pronunciation of his name to "Eye-gore". (He doesn't.)
  • Jason and Freddy Krueger are namedropped as "taking over the business", along with others like them.
  • Michael and Kevver's old school is Bram Stoker Elementary, and its principal is Miss Shelley.
  • Skip Toomaloo and his daughter Lulu's names are one big reference to the children's song "Skip to My Lou", which also includes the line "Lou, Lou skip to my Lou!" in the lyrics.
• In Forests of the Night by S. Andrew Swann, the protagonist visits a bar owned by a biologically-uplifted rabbit. The name of the bar? Watership Down. The bar also contains a framed picture of what are obviously Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. The elderly lion who lives downstairs from Angel in Specters of the Dawn has a Daffy Duck blanket, and is seen watching Looney Tunes.
• The Mortal Instruments has far too many shoutouts to name, a few of which are described on its page.
  • The Herondales are a Shadowhunter family with a birthmark of a star. Jace's is on the back of his shoulder. Now, where has that been seen before?
  • Val and Luis from Holly Black's Valiant are seen at one point.
  • A badge on Clary's bag says 'Still Not King', a reference to Clare's famous The Lord of the Rings fanfic The Very Secret Diaries.
  • Best of all, two extra characters have a debate on which fictional gay wizard would win in a fair fight, Dumbledore, or Magnus.
  • A reference to Hellsing is made when Clary thinks about how a church looks like "one of her favorite anime scenes involving a vampire priest".
  • Max is frequently seen reading Naruto.
  • In City of Glass, Max is also seen reading Angel Sanctuary, a manga about a reincarnated angel who is in a romantic relationship with his sister. It has a case of Does This Remind You of Anything as well as bringing to question why a nine year old with fairly strict parents would be reading it. But then again, his parents have quite a lot of marital issues. So his reading choices likely passed largely unnoticed. Besides, they probably thought that that something called Angel Sanctuary would be clean and proper.
  • Happens often with animanga, given that Simon is characterized as a typical Geek. At one point Clary asks him if he wants to spend the evening with her watching Trigun.
  • Simon is described in the fourth book as wearing Jeph Jacques's "Clearly I Have Made Some Bad Decisions" shirt, and Cassandra Clare also mentions his in-universe series "Magical Love Gentlemen".
  • Church (the Persian cat from the New York Institute) shares his name with another famous cat.
• Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse: Natalie and an unusually snarky Monk intentionally model the questioning of a suspect after a round of Jeopardy! to make him sweat (although it turns out he only did some of the stuff they suspect him of).
  Monk: Here's another answer. To wipe your footprints off the firehouse floor. Can you tell me the question? You aren't even trying, Mr. Dumas.
  Dumas: I am, I just don't know the question. The answer makes no sense.
  Natalie: I know, I know.
  Monk: Yes, Natalie, what's your guess?
  Natalie: Why did Mr. Dumas steal the towels?
  Monk: Correct ...Natalie is winning this round, Mr. Dumas. Your going to have to guess the right question to this answer to say in the game. Here it it: Fifteen years in prison.
  Dumas: What the hell are you talking about?
  Monk: No, I'm sorry, the correct answer is: What's the combined jail term for filing a fraudulent lawsuit and committing an extreme act of animal cruelty.
• "Mr. Widemouth": The narrator compares Mr. Widemouth to a Furby.
• In Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, William of Baskerville talks about his good friend William of Ockham. Whereas the "of Baskerville" suggests a connection to another asexual detective of analytical mind.
• Name Of The Wind has a brief, blink-and-you'll-miss-it reference to Firefly when the main character travels to the "Eavesdown Docks". Patrick Rothfuss, the author of NOTW, is an acknowledged fan of Joss Whedon.
  • He included another blink-and-you'll-miss-it Firefly Reference in The Wise Man's Fear when a possibly-gay (actually bisexual) character is referred to as "Sly".
• Kim Newman loves them even more than Pratchett. The Anno Dracula series is an extended Shout-Out to every work of fiction involving vampires, ever, and any other work of fiction he likes as well.
  • Newman really does love these. His Warhammer Fantasy and Dark Future novels are crammed full of them.. Who else would make Iain Banks mayor of the Isle of Skye?
• The Warhammer 40,000 novel Night Lords has a fairly subtle shout out, but one that appeared to please the author when told it was noticed. A depleted squad of Chaos Space Marines take note of the missing seats in their transport, causing one to comment "This isn't a squad, this is bad comedy".
• In Dean Koontz's Odd Thomas novels, Odd says of his abilities, "I See Dead People," in a knowing nod to The Sixth Sense, adding, "but then, by God, I do something."
• T. S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats
  • "Macavity, the Mystery Cat" is an extended Shout-Out to Professor Moriarty.
    He sways his head from side to side
    With movements like a snake
    And when you think he's half asleep,
    He's always wide awake.
  • A more blink-and-you-miss it one in "Blustopher Jones, the Cat About Town"; the list of Smoky Gentlemens Clubs where Blustopher takes his meals includes Drones, which he shares with Bertie Wooster.
  • "Magical Mr. Mistoffelees" is an extended Shout-Out to Mephistopheles in Theatre/Faust.
• In John Barnes's One for the Morning Glory:
  • Deacon Dick Thunder is a Shout-Out to Robin Hood. Indeed, the prime minister Cedric explicitly says they can draw him into certain plans because he wouldn't miss the chance to play Robin Hood.
  • Also, the Riddling Beast's Riddle of the Sphinx ends "And what has it got in its pockets?"
  • A ballad's main character turns out to be not a woodcutter but a butterfly who couldn't manage to dream of a Chinese philosopher.
• One Hundred Years of Solitude contains references to some earlier stories by its author Gabriel García Márquez, such as Big Mama's Funeral, and to Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch by mentioning Rocamadour towards the end of the book.
• Tom Holt's Only Human features something of a Terry Pratchett Shout-Out, in which a man sentenced to Ironic Hell for complaining to authors that their new stuff wasn't as good as their old stuff...was forced to read the same book over and over again for the rest of eternity. His final line was that he'd just gotten up to the part where "the tourist has just met the wizard".
• 6th grader Dwight Tharp of the Origami Yoda series randomly shouts "Tycho Brahe has a wax nose!" to his peers, a reference to how the late astronomer Tycho Brahe lost part of his nose in a duel and had to get it replaced. Naturally, since his peers are also 6th-graders, they have no idea what he's talking about. ^note  Although it should be noted that Brahe replaced his missing nose with a silver one, not a wax one.
• Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov has a Shout-Out for all comers. The eponymous poem's third canto has a Shout-Out to The Brothers Karamazov. The commentary to one of the lines mentions how a Hurricane Lolita has recently passed over New Wye. Charles Kinbote proposes calling the poem Solus Rex, a reference to one of Nabokov's short stories. There's a minor character named Pnin, which is also the name of one of Nabokov's other novels. Various authors and poets are mentioned, discussed, discarded at length by one of the novel's Unreliable Narrators.
• Paper Towns:
  • Q's English teacher is Dr. Holden.
• Penryn and the End of Days:
  • Laylah's eyes are describes as “Aryan”. This, combined with what she does, evokes images of Mengele.
  • Obi's spymasters Dee-Dum look, act, and talk in a manner comparable to the Weasley twins. Their name is of course a Shout Out to Alice in Wonderland.
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians: Too many shout outs to Greek Mythology to list. The author really has Shown Their Work
  • The Empire State Building's guard for Olympus apparently keeps up with Young Adult Literature fads.
    • In The Last Olympian he's reading a big black book with a flower on the cover.'
    • In The Lightning Thief he is said to be reading a huge book with a picture of a wizard on the front. One guess who this "wizard" might be.
  • Then there is Nico di Angelo's Mythomagic card game, a reference to card games such as Magic: The Gathering. This is now Hilarious In Hindsight; Magic's newest set is based on Greek mythology.
  • Nico references Spider-Man at one point: "With great power...comes great need to take a nap."
  • The books also have a character called Will. Will's namesake is a shout out to a certain play write and poet who, in universe, was said to also be a son of Apollo.
• In Peter Pan Captain Hook says he's "the only man whom Barbecue feared, and Flint himself feared Barbecue". Flint and Barbecue (better known as Long John Silver) are the leaders of the pirates in Treasure Island.
• Various ponyfication of artists in Pinkie Pie and the Rockin' Ponypalooza Party: Nine Inch Tails, Switchhoof, Neigh-Z, Coldhay, the Whooves and John Mare.
• In Primary Colors, the names "Burton" and "Stanton" (and the use of a First-Person Peripheral Narrator) are clear allusions to All the King's Men.
• Zee Rose's The Princess 99 makes several shout outs, usually through Skye who is probably from our world though Professeur Sweet does make a reference to Harry Potter and its Flying Broomstick accidents: "Unlike in the Non stories, besoms are not for riding. I repeat: do not try to ride a besom. I cannot tell you how many students have wound up with broken legs and arms because of this mistake."
• Princesses of the Pizza Parlor: From the first story, an In-Universe reference to Quidditch from Harry Potter, explaining how Princess Bianca got her broom locked away:
  there was an incident a couple of weeks ago involving some silly game with enchanted, weighted balls, and a fellow princess got sent to the infirmary with a concussion, so the broom's currently locked in a closet in the teachers' lounge.
• A recurring character in Robert Rankin's books is the "psychic youth and masturbator" Danbury Collins. This is based on Andy Collins, author of dubious New Age work The Knights of Danbury and a rival of Robert's.
• A trilogy of Warhammer 40,000 novels are entitled Ravenor, Ravenor Returned and Ravenor Rogue; a rather highbrow nod to John Updike's equally Alliterative "Rabbit" series (Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich, Rabbit at Rest and Rabbit Remembered).
• The Reynard Cycle :
  • In Reynard the Fox, The Quicksilver passes through Carcosa, a Demon city on the shores of Lake Hali. At a Bazaar of the Bizarre there, members of the crew met a thing in yellow with a mask for a face.
  • The name of the river that nearly drowns both Reynard and Hirsent in The Baron of Maleperduys? The Samara.
  • In Defender of the Crown, Reynard is introduced to a priestess named Precieuse. He comments: "That has a pretty ring to it."
• In the Rihannsu novel The Empty Chair Gurrhim tr'Siedhri comments that it will be better for the rebellion if he remains Legally Dead for the moment because his heirs will maintain control of his considerable wealth and corporate resources, which can then be used to help the Free Rihannsu. Leonard McCoy then makes a snide remark about Gurri staying dead for tax purposes.
• Roys Bedoys:
  • In one video, the family does a parody of the song “Baby Shark”. They also sing the song upon seeing a young shark in “Respect Your Elders, Roys Bedoys!”.
  • In “Roys Bedoys Loves Video Games” and "Be Patient with Your Little Brother, Roys Bedoys!", Roys plays a parody of Minecraft, called Blockcraft.
  • In “Roys Bedoys Goes to the Hospital”, Roys mentions a movie called “Toy Adventure 4”, which references Toy Story 4. This movie is also mentioned by Maker in “Don’t Watch Grown-Up Movies, Roys Bedoys!”. ** In “Behave at the Library, Roys Bedoys!”, Roys and his friends listen to a parody of The Cat in the Hat called The Hat on the Cat (which later appears again in “Read a Book, Roys Bedoys!”), and the librarian holds up a book called Don’t Let the Penguin Drive the School Bus, parodying "Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus", which is the first book in Pigeon Series.
  • In “What’s Your Talent, Roys Bedoys?”, Wen dresses up as Elsa from Frozen (2013) and sings a parody of “Let it Go”.
  • In “It’s Spirit Week, Roys Bedoys!”, Roys mentions a parody of Star Wars called “Starry Wars”.
  • In “Don’t Get Distracted, Roys Bedoys!”, Roys invents a superhero called Superbat which seems like a cross between Superman and Batman}, while Maker invents one called Captain Iron, who seems like a cross between Captain America and Iron Man.
  • In “What’s Your New Year’s Resolution, Roys Bedoys?”, Roys tries to resolve to be Spider-Man.
• Safehold:
  • The protagonist of the series is a woman whose personality is uploaded in a robotic body named Nimue. When she has to change her body's sex in order to fit into the patriarchal society of Safehold, she takes the name Merlin. Later, Merlin gives Prince Cayleb a sword that is made of advanced materials, which he names "Excalibur".
  • Weber has had fun with the series' extensive use of My Nayme Is to slip in references to pop culture. Two major secondary characters, for instance, are named Kynt Clareyk, after Clark Kent, and Nahrmahn Baytz, after the title character of Psycho. When introduced, Clareyk's second in command is even named Layn. A member of Charis's nobility is Paityr Sellyrs. A member of the Corisandian resistance movement is named Paitryk Hainree, after American historical figure Patrick Henry.
  • Place names have similar shout-outs attached to them, such as the Earldom of Gray Harbor, after earl grey tea, the Barony of White Castle, after the fast food chain, the Barony of Green Mountain, after a brand of coffee, and the Duchy of Halbrook Hollow, after a celebrity from the fifties and sixties, Hal Holbrook.
  • With the exception of the first book, most of the books in the series take their titles from the titles of hymns, such as "A Mighty Fortress" and "How Firm a Foundation", or their lyrics, such as "By Schism Rent Asunder" and "By Heresies Distressed", which come from "The Church's One Foundation".
• In the short story "Same-Day Delivery" by Desmond Warzel, the phrase "blue bolts from the heavens" appears twice; this is a direct Shout-Out to first-edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons; specifically, the Dungeon Master's Guide.
• Saturn's Children by Charles Stross, in addition to numerous Shout Outs to Robert A. Heinlein, has a MacGuffin disguised as a statue of a black bird and an organisation of robot butlers who are all called Jeeves one of whom has taken the name "Reginald"; Jeeves's first name in the books. Also, there's a colony ship called Bark for no apparent reason, which could be a mistransliteration of B-Ark.
• Schooled in Magic:
  • The plot has a strong similarity with Harry Potter, particularly in the wizarding school Whitehall. One part even seems like a direct reference to something from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, where Emily reads about different magical accidents in a book and there's a story of a girl who brewed a potion to look like someone else but accidentally used cat hair instead of the other person's, which turned her into a cat girl instead. This is exactly what Hermione does, except here it cannot be reversed and the girl is stuck that way forever. It could also be a mild Take That!.
  • Later after learning about the world's magically binding contracts, Emily wonders whether being entered into a contest like Harry Potter is in Goblet of Fire with no knowledge of it would still bind you. It turns out no, you have to be aware of it.
  • Emily notes that putting "unscrupulous creatures" in charge of your prison isn't a good idea (a reference to the Dementors of Azkaban). Plus the entire plot of Study In Slaughter is very similar to Chamber of Secrets, though the author stated this was unintentional. Even so, Emily thinks how a basilisk would be easier to kill than what they face in the book.
  • She also uses the blood test for Changelings idea from Deep Space Nine.
  • Later she wonders about whether dwarves spend their free time courting and trying to tell which one is female, like Discworld.
  • At one point she tells Frieda the story of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
  • There's also a village she visits where a beefy blacksmith doesn't seem impressed with a fishmonger who's shouting "Get your fresh fish here! Fresh fish! It's lovely", a reference to Asterix.
  • Love's Labor's Won references an alleged lost Shakespeare play by the same name, possibly a sequel to Love's Labour's Lost (though the plot is more akin to Romeo and Juliet-another reference).
  • Alassa, at one point, suggests that Emily might want to marry Baron Silver because they both have huge tracts of land. Emily cringes, even though Alassa has no idea that she's dropped a Monty Python meme.
  • When Viscount Hansel says that he doesn't have to play nice with the commoners because he has an army, Emily responds with "They have a Hulk."
• In Richard Peck's novel Secrets At Sea, one character mentions an ancestor in passing named Katinka Van Tassel, which is the name of the young woman Ichabod Crane loves in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving.
• In Seekers of the Sky, a shout-out to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry can be found: a glider pilot that has met an interesting child.
• Fyre, the last Septimus Heap book, contains at least contains two:
  • One is to the Harry Potter series and its Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans, with an Ordinary Wizard named Bertie Bott being among the deceased.
  • Another is made by Hotep-Ra, referencing the last words of Captain Oats, one of the men on Scott's Antarctic expedition.
    Hotep-Ra got out of his chair and said to his Apprentice, Talmar Ray Bell, "I am just going outside. I may be some time."
    Talmar looked horrified. "Don't say that!"
    Hotep-Ra smiled at his Apprentice. "Why ever not?"
    "It's bad luck," she said. "Someone said it once and never came back."
    "I'll be back," said Hotep-Ra.
    "Someone said that once too."
• A Series of Unfortunate Events:
  • Numerous allusions to literature, history, and mythology, among other things.
  • Why will no-one call me Ish?
• Shaman Blues:
  • Upon seeing his old flame standing in the door, looking for help, Witkacy immediately thinks of Film Noir.
  • The book itself is named after The Doors song.
  • Witkacy, in his pale coat and with blonde hair, not to mention the ability to see ghosts, is a clear John Constantine reference.
• Shaman of the Undead: When the main character starts to see ghosts, she says "I see dead people".
• In Sharpe's Tiger, Sharpe briefly sees (and is warned not to steal) the Moonstone from, well, The Moonstone.
• Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Was Not: Some of the other Holmes and Watson pairings seen in "The Final Prologue" include one where Holmes is Dracula and Watson is the Frankenstein Monster, and another where Holmes is The Joker and Watson is The Penguin.
• The Silerian Trilogy: The Honored Society, a play on the “Men of Honor” name the Mafia uses for themselves, and they are even worse. They're “honored” by people because otherwise they'll remove your water and leave you to die of thirst.
• In the Spider-Man: Sinister Six Trilogy, the Gentleman visits The Machiavelli Club, a special society for the Wicked Cultured. His table has on it a welcome back card from an "elegant lady thief of his acquaintance, Carmen." Other members of the Machiavelli Club (setting aside established Marvel Comics villains; they're Continuity Nods) include Hannibal, Auric, the Gruber brothers, Lex, Herr Taubmann, Ra's, Soze, Napier, Randolph and Mortimer Duke, Mr Glass, and Ernst. The Gentleman has also worked with Casper Gutman.
• Peter David's Sir Apropos of Nothing contains a shout-out to The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle. When Apropos and Princess Entipy encounter a herd of unicorns, Entipy cautions Apropos, "You must never run from anything immortal, it attracts their attention." This is word for word what the Unicorn told Schmendrick to discourage him from running from a harpy.
• The Sister Verse and the Talons of Ruin has a massive amount of obscure references to film, video games, books, anime, and philosophy for the purpose of making the world feel artificial — which it is.
• Gordon Korman's Son of the Mob and it's sequel, Hollywood Hustle, contain several references to Monty Python:
  • In the first book, when Vince's date opens the trunk of his car and finds Jimmy the Rat unconscious and bleeding (Vince is, after all, the titular mob prince), the only response the horrified Vince can think of is "a line from that old parrot sketch from Monty Python": "He's not dead, he's resting."
  • In the second book, Vince mentions that a girl named Willow could "turn on a guy in a hovercraft full of eels and can recite Monty Python and the Holy Grail in its entirety from memory.
• The Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries have a Shout-Out to Anne Rice; her books are actually books one can buy and read in The 'Verse the series takes place in, and is why vampires are considered somewhat chic. There's also a shout out to Ann Landers.
  • The short story "Bacon" from the anthology Strange Brew contains one for The Dresden Files:
    "Actually, a girl can't make a living at full-time sorcery anymore," Kathy [a witch] said with a brave smile. "Not with so many of the supernaturals trying to do things the official, human way. The only sorcerer who's gone public is in Chicago, and I hear he's struggling."
• Special Circumstances:
  • In Queen of Wands, there's mention of "a group of Asatru covering the Caucasus [for Special Circumstances issues]. Led by a demon-possessed former SEAL."
• Dozens in Michael Flynn's Spiral Arm series:
  • To the play, The Mikado: a harper begins with a bit of self-mockery, in the "ancient tune", "a wandering minstrel, I"
  • routes through interstellar space include an Electric Avenue, a Yellow Brick Road (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz), Champs-Elysees, Grand Trunk Road, Route 66, the Palisades, and the Silk Road.
  • Little Hugh being asked "Will ye no come back again?"
  • a quote from The Bible and G. K. Chesterton both,
  • a snippet of a Francis Thompson poem,
  • Little Red Riding Hood
  • The Fudir thinks of treachery as accepting thirty pieces of silver, and tells Hugh not to hide talents under a bushel.
  • A pirate defends his attack as "The strong take what they can, and the weak suffer what they must." Fa Li throws it back at him when he complains of an ambush he suffered, losing his spoils.
  • The Fudir explains a bombing after a pirate attack as "Better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven".
  • A plan is explained as someone having to be Br'er Fox
  • "You may forget about politics, but politics will not forget about you."
  • and many more.
• Split Heirs:
  • The main plot parodies The Prince and the Pauper using three (mostly) identical triplets who get switched and mixed up.
  • Remulo and Rommis, two boys raised by a wolf in a story from Odo. They're based on Romulus and Remus, legendary founders of Rome pretty clearly.
• Star Carrier: Deep Space introduces an Earthlike planet orbiting 40 Eridani A, which In-Universe was dubbed "Vulcan" after the planet in Star Trek. For the uninitiated, while no canon Star Trek work has ever flat-out stated that Vulcan orbits 40 Eridani A, that is a Gene Roddenberry's statement and near-universal (one or two works identify it as Epsilon Eridani instead) in the Star Trek Expanded Universe, and is supported by mentions of Vulcan's distance from Earth in two Star Trek: Enterprise episodes.
• Star Trek Novel 'Verse:
  • In the Star Trek Alternate Universe novella Seeds of Dissent by James Swallow, the deceased members of the Botany Bay crew are all named after Doctor Who companions.
  • In the first four books of Peter David's Star Trek: New Frontier series, he's able to sneak in the first and/or last names of all the actors who played the main characters of his TV Series Space Cases.
    • Later, he gives a more thorough one to Jewel Staite by putting a "Catalina City" on a moon of Saturn.
  • In the Star Trek: Enterprise novel The Romulan War: To Brave the Storm, the character of Trip at one point calls himself "Michael Kenmore" which is a Shout-Out to Stargate Atlantis, where the actor for Trip, Connor Trineer, played Michael Kenmore, the rogue Wraith turned human.
  • The Novelization of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan contains an extended in-universe Shout-Out to Lewis Carroll, as two of the scientists on the Genesis Project discuss the discovery of the sub-elementary particles they named "snarks" and "boojums". Just as quarks come in different "flavours" with odd names like "strange" and "charm", snarks and boojums are sorted by "five unmistakable marks" which the scientists call "taste", "tardiness", "humor", "cleanliness" and "ambition" ... all straight from Fit the Second of the nonsense poem. (The scientists names, incidentally, are Madison and March.)
  • Star Trek: Destiny has a blink-and-you'll-miss-it example: when Worf reports to Picard on an upcoming shift change, the two officers he mentions are named Lynley and Havers.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • In one novel, Han Solo points out "It's not the years, it's the parsecs." Not quite an Actor Allusion to Indiana Jones, because it's a book and Harrison Ford can't say the line himself, but close.
  • Also in the Star Wars novels, Han, and later Corran Horn, have used the fake identity "Jenos Idanian", an anagram of Indiana Jones.
  • In another Indiana Jones reference, during the climax of Star Wars: Scoundrels, Han goes charging down Villachor's lawn in Powered Armor, swinging an electrified whip through the air, ahead of Villachor's enormous round rolling safe.
  • Death Star has a conman who's managed to sneak on board the Death Star setting up a fake ID under the name of Teh Roxxor.
• In Super Minion, Olson is frequently sent on what would normally be considered suicide missions because of his ability to return from death. His costume includes a red shirt
• The Sword of Saint Ferdinand: Reclusive hermit Agatín cites Horace (Pulvis et umbra sumus, meaning We are dust and shadows, Ode IV, 7, 16) and Salustius (Vita est brevis, meaning Life is short, Conspiracy of Catiline (1,3))
• In Swords of Exodus, the sequel to Dead Six, the commanding officer for Mike Valentine when the latter was in the US Air Force, was Colonel Christopher Blair, the Player Character from the Wing Commander game series.
• The scene in Tailchaser's Song where Tailchaser has an audience with Queen Sunback is a parody of the scene in The Lord of the Rings where the hobbits meet Galadriel.
• "Talma Gordon":
  • Dr. Thornton quotes Hamlet while giving his thoughts on intermarriage to illustrate that he believes it to be inevitable.
    We may make laws, but laws are but straws in the hands of Omnipotence.
    "There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
    Rough-hew them how we will."
    And no man may combat fate.
  • A writer watching Talma at the garden party quotes Tennyson's "Madeline" to express his admiration.
    "Smiling, frowning, evermore,
    Thou art perfect in love-lore,
    Ever varying Madeline,"
    quoted a celebrated writer as he stood apart with me, gazing upon the scene before us.
• The Theirs Not to Reason Why series is full of these:
  • There is a mention of a bar called The Scottish Cactus.
  • Ia goes to boot camp with a recruit named Spyder who has multicolored hair and a criminal background
  • A warship named the Ackbar
  • Star Trek: Human habitable worlds are called M-Class (with a note that it was so embedded in popular culture at the beginning of space travel that scientists just went along with it), while an apparently unwinnable training scenario is called 'a Kobayashi Maru'
  • Repeated mentions of people being Big Damn Heroes.
  • "Space is huge. I mean Really Really huge. You may think it's a long way down to the...Okay, all right, that shtick has been done before."
  • The third book introduces a Lieutenant Rico. The use of corporal punishment in the future military is also a reference.
• The Thirteenth Tale contains shout-outs to Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Rebecca.
• This Is Where It Ends: Before the school shooter kills Jordan, he says "Bang, bang, you're dead.", which is the title of a one-act play about a school shooter who is psychologically tormented by his victims.
• This Side of Paradise: Early on in chapter 2 of Book 1, during a discussion about literature, a freshman mentions that he just finished reading The Picture of Dorian Gray and lets Amory borrow a copy of it so he can read it himself.
• In the BIONICLE book Time Trap, the Shadowed One responds to the notion of cutting off hands as punishment for failure with the line "I think enough hands have been removed this year", a reference to Star Wars's fondness of having its characters lose their hands, and specifically to the movie Revenge of the Sith, which came out the same year as the book.
• The children's picture book The Tobermory Cat by Debi Gliori includes a picture of Tobermory bookshop in which all the books in the window are other picture books about cats, including Goodbye Mog by Judith Kerr and Fred by Posey Simmonds.
• The time-travel novel To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis is one big shout-out to Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat (subtitle: To say nothing of the dog). Each of its major dogs is introduced by name several pages before the author makes it clear that the name belongs to a dog—just like Montmorency in the original. In one brief scene, the narrator even meets Jerome K. and his two friends (to say nothing of the dog) and exchanges a few words.
• The Tough Guide to Fantasyland:
  • "[Cursed rings] must be returned from whence they came, preferably at over a thousand degrees Fahrenheit, and the curse means you won't want to do this."
  • Some of the Other Tough Guides include The Tough Guide to Transport in the Multiverse (Mostly by Telephone Box) (Doctor Who and possibly Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure) and The Tough Guide to Flat Worlds (Flatland or Discworld, depending what is meant by "flat").
  • The Invisible College sounds not unlike Unseen University. Although it could be related to the source of the Unseen University, the actual Invisible College.
  • The entry on Elves says that they claim to be fading into the West, then adds a reference to Mercedes Lackey's SERRAted Edge by explaining that what this means is that they're heading to California to race motorbikes.
  • The entry on Fanatic Caliphates says that they "do not consider it cheating to cheat outsiders and unbelievers". This is taken almost verbatim from an entry on Baghdad and Iraq in another semi-fictional travel book.
• Every book in the Tough Magic trilogy has an outtake section in the back where shout-outs abound, including ones to Star Wars, Dragon Ball, Looney Tunes, Finding Nemo, The Wizard of Oz, Harry Potter...
• Trollhunters has one to the infamous Troll 2. When asked by Tub if there are any vegetarian trolls in existence, Blinky mentions a tribe called the Nillbogians that tried to subsist entirely on plant matter. Unfortunately this only lasted nineteen days before the entire tribe dissolved into green sludge.
• The Truth of Rock And Roll has a shout out to Streets of Fire: "(she) was made for another time and another place..."
• Sophie Bell of The Ultra Violets is extremely fond of these, to the point where many of them actually predate the target audience. (Middle-school students, 9-12, for those curious.)
• Unda Vosari has a short page of shout outs to various other works.
• Unforgiven by Lauren Kate has song titles as chapter tiles, including: Love Will Tear Us Apart, Dead Souls, Never Tear Us Apart, Sparks, Going Under, My Immortal, End of the Dream, The Weeping Song, Love's Secret Domain — and these are only the most obvious ones.
• The climax of Robert Frezza's novel The VMR Theory contains a string of Shout Outs. Among them:
  • A flock of genetically engineered dragons who enjoy going ''between''—though in this case, "between" refers to their delight in gliding between upright objects, slalom-style, and accidentally unseating their riders due to their poor spatial-reasoning skills.
  • A final showdown in the interior of a large volcano, which a signpost has helpfully designated "The Dark Tower".
  • Several items that end up being disposed of in said volcano, including a bloody glove, a "Grassy Knoll" diagram, and eighteen-and-a-half minutes of audiotape.
  • He references Isaac Asimov with a seemingly-human robot, programmed to obey and protect humans, but capable of overriding that programming for the greater good of humanity.
  • He references The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Citizen Kane by having the dying words of a character be "Forty-two" and "Rosebud" (respectively).
• The entire book, The Vagina Ass of Lucifer Niggerbastard, is a shout-out to Virgil's The Aeneid.
• In Valhalla, violent personalities are measured by the VVPS (Verhoeven Violent Predilection Score).
• Villains by Necessity:
  • It's explained early on that, following the Victory, the majority of Elves departed the known world for a paradise beyond human understanding, with only a few remaining behind. Sound familiar?
  • At one point, Sam attempts to play off his assassin's garb as the costume for a play, The Tragedy of Oswald, Prince of Volinar. Sam describes the plot as "The one where the fellow's uncle kills his father and marries his mother." He later even mentally quotes "To thine own self be true", ascribed as coming from an "ancient play".
• Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga:
  • Simon Illyan got his name from Illya Kuryakin.
  • Cryoburn has two: Miles thinks to himself "Imperial Auditor Vorkosigan; Threat or Menace" (in Spider-Man, J.J.J.'s paper, The Daily Bugle often ran headlines "Spider-Man: Threat or Menace?"). And Armsman Roic quips to a local "Don't worry, I have a license to stun." The local responds "I thought that has a license to kill?" Both, of course refer to James Bond's 00 "License to Kill".
• In French children fantasy book Les Voyageurs Sans Souci:
  • When Sébastien and Agathe look over Ted's room, they can imagine him reading Comtesse de Ségur's Mémoires d'un âne (Memoirs of a Donkey) and Georges Colomb's La famille Fenouillard (The Fenouillard Family)
  • When Agathe tells her friend Artémise Pimpante about their adventures, the latter scoffs she read a tale like that the last week in La Semaine de Suzette (The Week of Suzette, a French magazine for young girls which was published from 1905 to 1960).
• Wandering Djinn: Malik's admits he's a fan of both Sherlock Holmes and Spider-Man.
• Warrior Cats:
  • As Vicky is a Star Trek fan, The New Prophecy was originally going to be called The Next Generation. She still had files on her computer with "TNG" in the name years after the New Prophecy series was done.
  • Fuzzypelt is named after Fuzzy Felt, a toy Vicky remembers playing with when she was little.
  • The magazine Cat Fancy makes an appearance in the first volume of the SkyClan manga, on page 82.
  • One of the Adventure Game chapters in Battles of the Clans is titled "Here Comes The Sun".
  • A few character name references:
    • Macgyver in SkyClan's Destiny is named after the television show of the same name, as Vicky is a fan.
    • Nightwhisper's rogue name, Mowgli, is the same name as the main protagonist from Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book.
    • Two cats that show up together in Bramblestar's Storm are named Scarlet and O'Hara.
  • Several quotes from movies have been altered and made it into the dialogue:
    • In Moonrise, Talon's answer to how they'll lure Sharptooth to the cave - "With blood." - is a reference to Rambo.
    • In Sunset, after Hawkfrost dies, Brambleclaw hears Hawkfrost's voice in his mind, saying, "We will meet again, my brother. This is not over yet." This is a reference to the line "One day we will meet again, my brother. But not yet, not yet." from Gladiator.
    • In Ravenpaw's Farewell, the line "There is a secret that I have kept from you without meaning to: I have always been a warrior." is a reference to the line "That's my secret, Captain. I'm always angry." from The Avengers. When Vicky got the go-ahead to write a novella about Ravenpaw's final days, the original version of the line in her head was "That's my secret, Barley. I have always been a warrior." (She changed it enough so that it wouldn't be so obvious that the line was lifted from the movie.) From there she got the idea for the rest of the book, that Ravenpaw would be confronted with his warrior loyalties one last time before his death.
    • In Tallstar's Revenge, Talltail says, "You killed my father. Now I'm going to kill you." Vicky confirmed on her Facebook that Talltail was paraphrasing Inigo Montoya.
• Sideways Arithmetic From Wayside School, Wayside's think outside the box puzzle book, features in the first chapter a series of prototype algebra problems where numbers are substituted with letters. The first such problem is ELF + TOOK = FOOL.
• Welkin Weasels runs entirely on Shouting Out to various famous literature, movies, and historical events, often with an Incredibly Lame Pun or two mixed in. (See the reference to Treasure of the Sierra Madre and/or Blazing Saddles as the Talking Animal marmot sheriff faces off with an outlaw: "Badgers? We don't need no stinkin' badgers!")
• The Wild Cards series has the Indio-Irish Elephant Girl, whose real name is Rhada O'Reilly (c.f. Radar O'Reilly in M*A*S*H).
• The Witch of Knightcharm: Lauren tends to wear shirts referring to villains from famous fantasy and mythological works:
  • When Emily first meets her, Lauren's shirt depicts three singing mermaids on some rocks by a shipwreck and says, "Sirens: The Original Rock Idols."
  • When they meet again in the club, Lauren's T-shirt depicts people being trapped on a burning horizontal column and reads, "Vote for Daji."
  • When they meet while Emily is breaking curfew for the first time, Lauren's shirt features a witch turning a girl into a flying monkey and reads, "Ozian Justice."
• A Wolf in the Soul has several:
  • Main character and werewolf Greg is named after Gregor Samsa.
  • Two street names mentioned offhandedly are named Voorhees and Lois Lane.
  • Greg's therapist, who really does more mystery unraveling than psychoanalyzing, is named Holmes.
• In Wolves of the Calla, book 5 of Stephen King's The Dark Tower series, there is a manufacturing plate on a round, flying weapon which reads: "SNEETCH HARRY POTTER MODEL. Serial # 465-11-AA HPJKR. CAUTION EXPLOSIVE" JKR, of course, refers to J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series of books; the name "SNEETCH" refers to the Golden Snitch, one of the "balls" required to play Quidditch, which is similarly small, round, flying, and dangerous. "SNEETCH" may also be a reference to the Dr. Seuss book The Sneetches. The Dark Tower is full of things like this, up to and including a green city that can only be entered if you have red shoes.
  • Also a Potter reference, in one of the books is a helping robot, called a "house elf", which is named Dobby, IIRC.
  • The city that Blaine is in constantly plays a series of drums which Eddie mentions sounds suspiciously like a ZZ Top song.
    • EVERY Steven King book EVER has a long list of obscure to vague shout outs to his sixty other 900-page books.
• In The Worst Thing About My Sister, Marty and her dad watch Toy Story 3.
• As is probably to be expected from a series about a consciousness forming and awaking in the Internet, the WWW Trilogy is chock full of references to past films and novels that have dealt with the concept of AI, mostly in the form of title-dropping.
• Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt: The first chapter is written in a style that imitates Journey to the West and the last chapter has a shout out to Candide.
• In High Wizardry, a man apparently fitting the description of the fifth Doctor saves Dairine from the servants of the Lone Power chasing her.
• In Vampirocracy, Leon mentally quotes Victor/Victoria at one point, and tells a character he has no specific urge to "murder death kill."
• John Ringo tends to throw tons of shout outs to various things his works, including but not limited to:
  • In When the Devil Dances and Hell's Faire, from his Legacy of the Aldenata series, there's not only "Bun-Bun", the name for a massive mobile artillery piece, from Sluggy Freelance's Killer Rabbit, but one of those sent to repair some battle damage is the spitting image of Riff, not only in outfits (long coat and Cool Shades), but in some of Riff's signature traits, including "Let me check my notes"... and getting kicked in the crotch when saying something stupid to an attractive woman.
  • Bun-Bun also makes an appearance in the Council Wars series, as one of the few remaining AIs after a long-ago global-scale civil war.
  • Troy Rising uses a whole lot of them to other Science Fiction works, many of them intentional on the part of the characters using them.
  • Ringo is a big fan of Firefly, where Jayne and Wash used the line "I'll be in my bunk" as a sexual reference. In the Black Tide Rising series, Faith (a 13 year old girl who is a seriously badass zombie killer) finally finds a few cases of 12 gauge shotgun shells, grabs them away from the adult Marines who were stacking them, and walks out the door announcing "I'll be in my bunk". The two Marines look at each other and say "You don't think she means...?", at which point Faith sticks her head back in the room and yells "To reload my mags, you perverts!"
• S-F: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy:
  • In the introduction, Orson Welles mentions two creators by name:
    • Puppet Masters, by Robert A. Heinlein, is described as being a good Science Fiction novel; incredibly rare.
    • The Brothers Grimm are used as an example of the older fairy tales and fables that Mrs Welles is more comfortable with, and that genre is compared directly to modern science fiction, claiming that both suit the Short Story format better than Novel-length and both are tales of fantastical adventures.
  • In the preface, Judith Merril continues from the trend by Mr Welles, and compares the stories of today's Science Fantasy to Aesop.
• Avram Davidson's "The Golem":
  • The android mentions having read Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.
  • The android mentions having read R.U.R. by Karel Čapek.
  • The android mentions having read Isaac Asimov in general.
  • The old couple summarize the Jewish legend of the Golem.
• The Witchlands:
  • Early in Truthwitch, Merik uses his Windwitchery to make one of his fellow banqueters spill his drink all over himself —basically, an Airbending Sneeze.
  • In Truthwitch, Evrane opens her You Are Better Than You Think You Are speech to Aeduan with a tense "Remember who you are".
  • Ryber's story in Sightwitch is rather reminiscent of that of Lirael.
  • Ragnor is once referred to as The King in the North.
  • In Bloodwitch, the Firewitch Iseult cleaved in the previous book often tells her to "Burn them! Burn them all!".
  • In Bloodwitch, Aeduan performs his greatest feat of Bloodwitchery yet (immobilizing two armies locked in combat) while a full moon shines over the battlefield. After all, Bloodbending is always stronger under a full moon.
• Dungeon Engineer: The ability to commmit creatures to some sort of "memory" leads the protagonist to reference cataloging quest of the Pokédexes from the Pokémon games:
  What’s the point of having a creature in “memory” (My memory, the system’s memory? I’ve no clue!) if I can’t do anything with it? Am I supposed to complete a Pokédex or something?
• Sweet & Bitter Magic: There are references to classic fairy tales. One is of a wicked stepmother who had a nymph cast a spell to poison a golden apple she wanted for her stepdaughter (something like Snow White) but it backfired, poisoning an entire apple crop. Wren meets a toad who claims he's a lord turned into this by a witch, with a kiss turning him back (The Frog Prince). It turns out he's a sprite who wants to trick her though, and if she kissed him she'd turn into a toad too. There's also mention of a creature called a "[[Literature/Rumpelstiltskin stiltzkin]]" that girls can trade their names for the ability to turn straw into gold.
• Universal Monsters: In book 4, Captain Bob references Spaceballs by misquoting the film:
  Captain Bob: "Brother, just what we need — a jurist's princess."
• Wars of the Realm: Before he learns their real names, Drew Carter mentally nicknames the angel Validus Wallace and the demon Durgank Kurgan.

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