I recently finished listening to the Dark Tower series by Stephen King. This is the second time I’ve listened to it, the first being about four years ago. It’s very good. At least, I enjoy it immensely. The reason I mention it here is that Mr King throughout the seven books in the series alludes to or directly mentions many, many literary figures, their books and their creations. Just by way of example, Arthurian legend figures prominently, The Wizard of Oz and Frank L. Baum are ascendant at one point, the similarities to The Lord of the Rings are unmistakable, Dr Seuss, Harry Potter, Robert Heinlein, Richard Adams… the list goes on and on. Movies and TV series are similarly referenced. Check out the series’ Intertextual References section at wikipedia. The series is a bibliophile’s (especially an SF&F bibliophile’s) trainspotting paradise.
Of interest to us here are the references to works from Gnome Press. I picked up two concrete references and one that I’m not so sure about. The most obvious example is the name of one of the organizations that the Crimson King uses as a front and that manufactured most of the technology that is now decaying in Roland’s world – ‘Northwest Positronics’. The obvious reference is to the kind of brain that Isaac Asimov’s robots have in I, Robot – they have positronic brains. Just as I write this, it occurs to me that the ‘Northwest’ part could potentially be a reference to Northwest Smith – C.L. Moore’s erstwhile gunslinging spaceman from Gnome titles Shambleau & Others and Northwest of Earth. Just now, as I wrote that, it also occurred to me that I might not be drawing such a long bow here. Northwest Smith is indeed a gunslinger unmistakeably cut from the same cloth as Roland of Giliad.
Next, Calvin Tower, obsessive book collector and proprietor of The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind, calls young Jake a ‘Hyperborean wanderer’ when Jake picks up his copies of Charlie the Choo Choo and the book of riddles. Again, this is an unambiguous reference to the Conan the Barbarian series, Hyperborea lying somewhat to the north of Conan’s homeland. This is probably also a nod to Clark Ashton Smith who is also referenced a couple of times in the series.
The third reference I detected is less direct. When Pere Callahan is telling his story to Roland’s ka-tet as they wait for the ‘wolves’ to descend on the town of Calla Bryn Sturgis, he calls his world-shifting wanderings across parallel versions of the United States, his journeys through ‘highways in hiding’. Now, if this was just mentioned once, I might dismiss this as a coincidence, but it is specifically referred to in that way at least four or five times. Too many, in my opinion, to not be a nod to George O. Smith’s 1955 book Highways in Hiding – the latest to be added to my Gnome Press collection.
There we go. Apologies for the largely unexplained references to characters and situations in the Dark Tower series, but do yourself a favor and read (or listen to) it. It’ll make sense then, and you’ll also have a ball trying to catch all those references. Not to mention enjoying a wonderful story.
The Great Gnome Press Science Fiction Odyssey 