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#138246 02/04/05 02:37 AM
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from the slightly obscure genre of science fiction (and this could be a sub-theme entire):

[the Hero of Heinlein's Glory Road finds himself camping under the unfamiliar sky of an unknown planet.]
She didn't put the light back on, so I had nothing to look at but the hurtling moons of Barsoom. I had fallen into a book...

I watched the hurtling moons of Barsoom and fell asleep.


written in 1963, this alludes to Edgar Rice Burroughs' "Mars" series, begun in 1911


#138247 02/07/05 07:12 AM
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..it's the X-Files theme.

{{the following is a blatant internet ripoff of X-Files}}
later that same day
Skinner laid there beside Mulder and let himself be petted and soothed. "The idiots," he grumbled.

"Shh," Mulder said for the fifth time. "Nothing happened to them. It's all right." So they were lying there in silence, perfectly able to hear a long, rich moan, then a flurry of coughing and some hastily smothered chuckles from the next room.

"Hell!" Skinner whispered furiously. "'Nothing' happened to them, huh?"

"What was the strange thing the dog did in the night?" Mulder quoted ruefully. It took him another half hour before he was able to calm Skinner enough to sleep.

In the morning, they said nothing about it.

A Dog in the Manger, by JiM

---

here's what "Mulder" was alluding to, from Glory Road:

"...If it hadn't been for the strange thing the dog did in the night, the busies would have nabbed us?"
"What was the strange thing the dog did in the night?"


---

could Mark Haddon's novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in Night-Time been inspired by Heinlein's line?
the story doesn't (seemingly) relate in any way at all; but I'd sure like to like to ask Haddon about that title.

[my sincere apologies to Mulder/Skinner fans; that ripoff is truly dreadful.]


#138248 02/07/05 11:17 AM
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the strange thing the dog did in the night

Which was itself taken from The Hound of the Baskervilles.

 - Moe (no relation) Obvious


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"Which was itself taken from The Hounds of the Baskervilles."



____________ From the Net ____________________________________________________

Conan Doyle first heard of Dartmoor's hounds of hell in March 1901, while staying in Norfolk with his friend Fletcher Robinson. On those cold, rainy evenings, Robinson told stories he had learned as a child living on the high moors of Dartmoor horrifying stories of a creature known as The Dewer, an amalgam of the Devil and earlier pagan nature gods, who stalked the moors in the company of a huge black dog and chased unfortunate wayfarers over rocky cliffs to their deaths on the rocks below. More frightening yet, he sometimes led a howling pack of gigantic, red-eyed hounds on 'Whist Hunts', emerging from Wistman's collection of gnarled, twisted oaks of incredible age to hunt down the souls of unbaptized babies.____________________________________________________ End



#138250 02/07/05 03:12 PM
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tsuwm Offline OP
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the fact of the matter is that Heinlein utilized a great many literary allusions in his sf.
- joe (but don't quote me) friday


#138251 02/07/05 03:23 PM
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Why, Milo, I'm shocked! A rigorous scholar like you using the amorphous, generic "net" as a source?!


#138252 02/07/05 05:42 PM
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Smile. I'm afraid you misunderstand AnnaS, I use the net when it pleases me. Regrettably I can't remember why it pleased me at that particular time and juncture of my oh-so-busy life, but it did.

Maybe it was to one-up Faldage. Maybe it was to help Mr. tswum with his project. I can't be sure.
But what I do know is that afterwards I felt soiled and dirtied; a lower man than before my rogue fingers asked Google to find.

I will hereby promise not to use the net until my next birthday and my birthday is not until December. I make this commitment in a faint hope to regain my own self-respect, so please wish me luck.

And so I repeat...

I, Milum Milo Amemeba, will not visit the World Wide Web for the purposes of gathering information until late next December, except, of course, for finding definitions when I play a game of Hogwash.

___________________________________________________________________


#138253 02/07/05 06:08 PM
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tsuwm Offline OP
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never mind, milums. my project is foundering(!), as we speak, anyway. I'll just salvage what I can from this and transition to collection mode, wherein the debris will lie moldering amongst much other wwftd flotsam.

! - kinda sorta crossthreading


#138254 02/07/05 11:04 PM
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Heinlein utilized a great many literary allusions

Stranger in a Strange Land.


#138255 02/07/05 11:27 PM
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a person could make a career (and a poor one) out of disallusioning TP.


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