Written in 1950, when he was thirty, Isaac Asimov’s first book was Pebble in the Sky.
The Russian-born writer has over 400 books to his credit, including science fiction, science nonfiction, mystery, textbooks, and a guide to Shakespeare.
In Robert Browning’s poem, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” (1855), Childe Roland is a knight errant in search of the Dark Tower. When he reaches it he blows his horn, the poem ends. The title comes from a piece of a song in Shakespeare’s King Lear (act 3, scene 4).
Kugelmass has an affair with Emma Bovary in Woody Allen’s short story “The Kugelmass Episode”. The Great Persky projects the bored professor into Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856) and Emma Bovary into modern Manhattan.
“And so, as Tiny Tim observed, ‘God Bless us, Every One!’ “
Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” (1681) is the source of the title of Robert Penn Warren’s World Enough and Time.
Roland and Orlando are the same character. Roland, knight of Charlemagne’s court, is the hero of The Song of Roland, an eleventh-century French epic. Orlando is the Italian form of Roland’s name; he appears in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1532).
The sequel to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward is Equality (1897).