Game of Thrones
Harry Potter
Various Warner Bothers Cartoons
Breaking Bad
True Blood
Supernatural
Captain America: the Winter Soldier
Warhammer 40K
Star Trek
X-Men 2
Johnny Mnemonic
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
The Simpsons
Casablanca
Predator
The Walking Dead
US Marshalls
Sherlock Holmes
No this isn't my Netflix history: this is a list of all the pop-cultural references in Peter Clines' new book, The Fold. Now before we go any further, I should say that I'm not criticising The Fold, in fact I quite enjoyed it (you can see my Goodreads review here). However, it was notable for the sheer number of nods it makes to other books and recent movies. I've seen this in quite a few novels: there was Ready Player One and more recently The Martian, but Clines' book really took it to the next level and asked myself what authors think they gain from referencing other works in their stories.
Posatives first... It is a useful shorthand. If you say your hero looks like a young Severus Snape, many readers will get the picture without long paragraphs of description. It also places your characters firmly in the here and now. They watch the same movies and read the same books as your readers and that spark of recognition, of camaraderie, can help to forge a quick bond between your readers and your characters.
The downsides are that it will date your work. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card is still consistently at or near the top of the sci-fi charts, but I wonder if that would still be the case if it was stuffed to the gills with references to Ender watching old episodes of Moonlighting and Street Hawk between exercises at Battle School.
It also leads to a certain laziness. For example in The Fold, Peter Clines describes the noise made by one of his pan-dimensional aliens as being similar to the Predator. That's too obvious a comparison and runs the risk that people will start to see someone else’s story play out in their head rather than Clines'.
But the biggest downside for me is that it makes the story bland. Because the authors are using these references to form a the quickest possible bond with the maximum possible number of people, it inevitably places the stories squarely in the middle of the mass market. They all have the same cultural tone. It's the literary equivalent of every CGI company using the same teal and orange colour wheel. Stories stop being unique creations and everything starts to read like the front page of Buzzfeed. I'm not saying that authors can't still write enjoyable stories, but they are unlikely to invent a new Bond or a Holmes.
In short, by over-referencing other works, your story becomes a remora, swimming alongside many others under the great shark of the zeitgeist. You might quote others, but no-one will ever quote you.
Harry Potter
Various Warner Bothers Cartoons
Breaking Bad
True Blood
Supernatural
Captain America: the Winter Soldier
Warhammer 40K
Star Trek
X-Men 2
Johnny Mnemonic
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
The Simpsons
Casablanca
Predator
The Walking Dead
US Marshalls
Sherlock Holmes
No this isn't my Netflix history: this is a list of all the pop-cultural references in Peter Clines' new book, The Fold. Now before we go any further, I should say that I'm not criticising The Fold, in fact I quite enjoyed it (you can see my Goodreads review here). However, it was notable for the sheer number of nods it makes to other books and recent movies. I've seen this in quite a few novels: there was Ready Player One and more recently The Martian, but Clines' book really took it to the next level and asked myself what authors think they gain from referencing other works in their stories.
Posatives first... It is a useful shorthand. If you say your hero looks like a young Severus Snape, many readers will get the picture without long paragraphs of description. It also places your characters firmly in the here and now. They watch the same movies and read the same books as your readers and that spark of recognition, of camaraderie, can help to forge a quick bond between your readers and your characters.
The downsides are that it will date your work. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card is still consistently at or near the top of the sci-fi charts, but I wonder if that would still be the case if it was stuffed to the gills with references to Ender watching old episodes of Moonlighting and Street Hawk between exercises at Battle School.
It also leads to a certain laziness. For example in The Fold, Peter Clines describes the noise made by one of his pan-dimensional aliens as being similar to the Predator. That's too obvious a comparison and runs the risk that people will start to see someone else’s story play out in their head rather than Clines'.
But the biggest downside for me is that it makes the story bland. Because the authors are using these references to form a the quickest possible bond with the maximum possible number of people, it inevitably places the stories squarely in the middle of the mass market. They all have the same cultural tone. It's the literary equivalent of every CGI company using the same teal and orange colour wheel. Stories stop being unique creations and everything starts to read like the front page of Buzzfeed. I'm not saying that authors can't still write enjoyable stories, but they are unlikely to invent a new Bond or a Holmes.
In short, by over-referencing other works, your story becomes a remora, swimming alongside many others under the great shark of the zeitgeist. You might quote others, but no-one will ever quote you.