Writers referring to their own works in their fiction

Victoria Silverwolf

Victoria Silverwolf

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I happen to be reading Bright New Universe (1967) by Jack Williamson, and this bit of self-reference shows up in dialogue early in the novel.

This odd old book about the prefect machines, the humanoids, smothering men with too much perfection.
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This is obviously a reference to Williamson's own novel The Humanoids.

Ever see something like this elsewhere?
 
Danny McG said:
Most Stephen King books
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Guttersnipe said:
In The Tommyknockers, apparently, there's graffiti that reads "Pennywise Lives."
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King's Universe

I suppose I should just make a Spoilers Likely Warning first, just in case... This is an idea I thought of while replying to another post in this here forum. At first I thought about doing it just for The Dark Tower series, but then decided, to hell with it, let’s do all of King’s work...
www.sffchronicles.com www.sffchronicles.com
 
I'm pretty sure one of the characters in Billy Summers was either watching or reading Cujo. He even references his works as fiction.
 
In the famous anime Macross and its sequels, the 2 hour film adaptation of the original series is later used as a historical film in later series.
 
AnyaKimlin said:
It's not a book (or a writer referring to their own works but it feels like it) but there is a scene in NCIS when Gibbs is asked what Ducky looks like when he was younger. Gibbs responds that he looked a bit like Illya Kuryakin from Man From Uncle.
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I heard that Castle dresses up as a Space Cowboy. :p I don't think I've encountered it in literature.
 
I remember in Richard Morgan's Market Forces there's a scene where the protagonist is waiting to meet someone and idly picks up a book to read which is not named but clearly Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon and reflects that he thinks the book is a bit implausible and over-the-top (or something similar).

For an example within a book, the different sections of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas feature characters reading or watching the earlier parts of the book.
 
I think something like Terry Pratchett's Discworld could apply to this because the books are all in the same world and sometimes the same places. I'm not sure to be honest, it depends whether you mean books that aren't obviously connected but reference each other. Books in the same wider world might not fall into that because there's a connection with their locations at the very least.
 
Oh gawd, I just remembered the first story that I spent much time on. I think I still have the notebook in a box somewhere. Basically it was a self-insert and the characters from a lot of my other story ideas could come through portals from their own stories to live on the same island. The same principle as On the Couch by Surly Queen.
 
Outside books, in the SF TV show Wild Palms, there was a moment where a character claimed that history had shown that Oliver Stone's JFK was correct - Stone was a producer on Wild Palms. Also, in Spike Lee's Bamboozled a character alludes to an argument that Lee had with Quentin Tarantino.
 
If we are including films, then the latest Matrix movie is very significantly self- referential.
 
Doesn't Jeff Vandermeer do this in "Shriek"? I seem to remember one of the Shriek siblings reading a "trashy melodramatic novel" that's recognisably one of the novellas from "City of Saints and Madmen".
 
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