List of authors referenced on Friends at the Table

The following is a list of real-world authors whose works have been referred to in an episode of Friends at the Table or who have been specifically highlighted by a cast member as a touchstone/point of inspiration for the podcast.

Jane Austen

In the first episode of the Good Society Live at the Table arc, Austin and Janine discuss Austen as an inspiration for character-focused storytelling, humanizing mistakes, the tension of being caught between desire and obligation, and banter that doesn't sound like Marvel Cinematic Universe banter.

Paul Auster

In the Bluff City season one postmortem, Paul Auster's New York Trilogy (City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room) is brought up in response to a question about books and other influences on Bluff City.

Jorge Luis Borges

In Twilight Mirage, the Divine Memorious is named after the short story "Funes the Memorious", whose titular character is cursed with perfect memory after an accident.

Sangfielle is described as "cosmic horror by way of Borges instead of Lovecraft" at the beginning of the season. Later in the season, the painting Duvall hopes to acquire is titled "Remembering the Zahir" as an homage to Borges's story "The Zahir", about an object which creates an obsession that will come to crowd out the afflicted person's experience of reality.

In the Bluff City season one postmortem, Borges is described as an influence throughout a bulk of Friends at the Table.

Octavia Butler

In Twilight Mirage, Dre references Butler's Xenogenesis books (also known as Lilith's Brood), referring to the way in which the gene-trading aliens called Oankali have an obsession or hunger toward the human capacity for cancer.

Robert W. Chambers

Chambers's The King in Yellow (a collection featuring several short stories connected by the common element of a forbidden play called The King in Yellow that obsesses and perhaps dooms those who read it) was mentioned by Art as part of the "season seven reading list" that he went through in preparation for Sangfielle.

John Darnielle

In the Bluff City season one postmortem, John Darnielle's Wolf in White Van and Universal Harvester are brought up in response to a question about books and other influences on Bluff City.

Philip K. Dick

In an episode of Sangfielle, Keith compares the shift in title between Roadside Picnic and its adaptation Stalker to the way Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was given the title Blade Runner when adapted to film.

Charles Dickens

Dickens is mentioned during the Drawing Maps episode in which Austin and Jack discuss character and setting concepts related to Pickman and the Shape in preparation for Sangfielle.

Dave Eggers

In the COUNTER/Weight world generation episode, the players discuss the idea of a fully networked society with "voting being as casual and popular as Buzzfeed quizzes", which reminds Dre of Dave Eggers' The Circle.

Michel Foucault

In the Twilight Mirage postmortem, Austin discuses Michel Foucault's concept of biopolitics & biopower (an idea which Foucault introduces in the final chapter of The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: An Introduction).

Austin mentions getting sidetracked thinking about Foucault while discussing time zones and the imposition of standardized clocks during the intro of an episode of Sangfielle.

William Gibson

In the COUNTER/Weight world generation episode, Austin refers to the fact that cyberpunk author William Gibson dislikes Shadowrun for featuring magic. Later on, when transferring characters to The Sprawl, the character Molly Millions from Gibson's Sprawl trilogy is referred to as an archetypal character emblematic of the Killer, the playbook for a character who "uses bleeding edge technology to commit violence".

During a scene of the Tales from the Loop in Bluff City's second season, Austin describes an overcast wintry sky as having "taken on the character of static—not to bite William Gibson too much here". This refers to the opening sentence of Gibson's novel Neuromancer: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

Frank Herbert

In the COUNTER/Weight world generation episode, Nick mentions Dune as an example of a science fiction story where characters have superhuman abilities akin to magic but explained through concepts such as advanced genetic technology.

Robert Jordan

Early in Sangfielle, Austin mentions learning the word "balefire" for a type of signal fire but not wanting to use it in anything because it had already been used in the popular Wheel of Time series.

Franz Kafka

In Winter in Hieron, the New Archives are described as "a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare".

A scene of the protagonist Josef K. leading two men through town at the end of The Trial is referenced in Spring in Hieron.

In the Bluff City season one postmortem, Kafka is described as an influence throughout Friends at the Table.

Stephen King

During Sangfielle's game of The Ground Itself, King is referenced when the players discuss the idea of a group of young people getting together to recognize and fight a curse that the older generation cannot discuss. Keith later references (though not by name) King's book Duma Key when discussing examples of mystical or cursed paintings.

During a scene of Tales from the Loop in Bluff City's second season, as Austin discusses euphemisms for how travel between realities via the Tunnel Project can go wrong, Jack references King's science fiction short story "The Jaunt", in which a technology allowing for teleportation has become ubiquitous in spite of a severe drawback—going through the Jaunt while awake causes unbearable mental trauma, as despite seeming instantaneous, "it's eternity in there".

Victor LaValle

LaValle's The Ballad of Black Tom (a reworking of H.P. Lovecraft's "The Horror at Red Hook" from the perspective of a black protagonist) was mentioned by Art as part of the "season seven reading list" that he went through in preparation for Sangfielle. Austin previously discussed this novella at length on an episode of Waypoints.

Ursula K. Le Guin

“

We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings.”

– Ursula K. Le Guin, 2014 National Book Awards speech

Le Guin was an inspiration for some of the questions of utopianism in Twilight Mirage, with Austin tweeting one interview quote about decentering conflict in storytelling from her beforehand (while TM was still being referred to as 'Season 6') and quoting her National Book Awards speech during its premiere episode.

Ann Leckie

During the Road to PARTIZAN's game of For the Queen, Austin mentions that he has been reading Leckie's Imperial Radch series and says it is good at having tense scenes before fights. Austin also recommends PARTIZAN for fans of the series during the Sports are Just Numerology bonus episode.

H.P. Lovecraft

Sangfielle is described as "cosmic horror by way of Borges instead of Lovecraft" at the beginning of the season. Keith also describes the Junk Mage class in Heart as coming "out of nowhere" with Lovecraft-style cosmic horror aspects in a number of its major abilities, which he often had to reflavor to fit with Lyke and Sangfielle.

George R.R. Martin

Austin mentions Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series during a bit about the game Deadly Premonition in an episode of Autumn in Hieron.

Arkady Martine

Austin recommends PARTIZAN for fans of Martine's A Memory Called Empire in the Sports are Just Numerology bonus episode.

Gregory Mcdonald

In the Bluff City season one postmortem, Keith somewhat jokingly mentions "the novelization of the movie Fletch" (which was an adaptation of a book by Mcdonald) as a callback to an earlier discussion of the film when a question is asked about books and other influences on Bluff City.

Herman Melville

Melville's novel Moby-Dick is mentioned during the Drawing Maps episode in which Austin and Jack discuss character and setting concepts related to Pickman and the Shape in preparation for Sangfielle.

Mike Mignola

Mignola's Hellboy and Batman: The Doom That Came to Gotham were mentioned by Art as part of the "season seven reading list" that he went through in preparation for Sangfielle.

Alan Moore

Art mentioned starting some Alan Moore comics based on the work of H.P. Lovecraft in preparation for Sangfielle but bouncing off them.

Haruki Murakami

In the Bluff City season one postmortem, a number of Haruki Murakami works (Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore, "The Elephant Vanishes", and A Wild Sheep Chase) are brought up in response to a question about books and other influences on Bluff City. Austin describes Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World in particular as "influential for everything I've done as a GM, and notes the Polyphony episodes of Twilight Mirage as a particular example.

Nicholas Pileggi

During a scene of Tales from the Loop in Bluff City's second season, Keith and Austin riff about Agent Clark and Agent Bailey of The Concern arguing over their favorite Martin Scorsese movies, deciding that Clark's favorite is Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and Bailey's is Casino. Keith jokes that Clark prefers the book of Casino to the film. Casino was based on Nicholas Pileggi's nonfiction book Casino: Life and Honor in Las Vegas. Pileggi also wrote Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family, which was similarly adapted into Scorsese's earlier film Goodfellas, and cowrote both screenplays with Scorsese.

Terry Pratchett

In an episode of Autumn in Hieron, while discussing how Lem's musical pattern magic may change depending on the environment it is being performed in, Jack contrasts it to Pratchett's more absurd style of fantasy, saying "It still sounds like a violin [...] this isn't like a Terry Pratchett thing where all of a sudden you're on a airplane." Later in the same season, Austin compares a story Nick tells about a previous D&D campaign he ran to Pratchett, to which Nick agrees, "all of my fantasy stuff is basically just really just Discworld."

Thomas Pynchon

The name of Tristero from Autumn in Hieron was chosen by Austin as a self-described "unintentional/unconscious" allusion to Thomas Pynchon's novella The Crying of Lot 49. In Pynchon's story, the protagonist finds herself unraveling a possible conspiracy around the existence of Tristero (also spelled Trystero), a centuries-old underground postal service and secret society.

Pynchon and The Crying of Lot 49 are also mentioned as influential during the Bluff City season one postmortem.

Matt Ruff

Ruff's Lovecraft Country and its TV adaptation were mentioned by Art as part of the "season seven reading list" that he went through in preparation for Sangfielle.

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

The Strugatsky brothers' book Roadside Picnic is mentioned several times as a touchstone near the beginning of Sangfielle.

J.R.R. Tolkien

During Autumn in Hieron worldbuilding, it was established that pre-Erasure Hieron once resembled Tolkien-style traditional fantasy. Tolkien continues to show up as a reference for fantasy tropes which the podcast tries to complicate, subvert, or move through in search of what parts are salvageable. Players also discuss pipeweed and joke about getting sued by the Tolkien estate for saying "hobbit".

Jeff VanderMeer

During an episode of Twilight Mirage, Austin mentions that VanderMeer's book Annihilation has been an influence both on The Wound from that season as well as The Buoy and the strata and laminae in Winter in Hieron.

Annihilation is mentioned again as a touchstone in the first episode of Sangfielle. A move that Duvall takes later on in the season is called Annihilation, presumably as a reference to the book and/or its film adaptation.

Oscar Wilde

While brainstorming ideas for mystical or cursed paintings in Sangfielle, Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray is mentioned as something Austin doesn't want to replicate. Dorian Gray does, nevertheless, return later as a point of comparison for one of several miscellaneous exhibits in a gallery Duvall visits in Sapodilla while looking for information on his chosen painting.

Gene Wolfe

While playing A Visit to San Sibilia, Austin twice refers to Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun, first mentioning its use of "alcalde" as a term for a magistrate (Book of the New Sun frequently uses terms that are archaic or obscure in modern English, ostensibly as means of "translating" concepts from its far-future setting that have not been invented yet) and later referring to the final scene of The Shadow of the Torturer, which takes place amidst the chaos of a crowd passing through the gates of a massive wall, as a comparison for a commotion outside the walls of Concentus.