Some of this has already been discussed in this post, or in passing in TRoAPW posts. Footnotes added where apt. [Square brackets] indicate something unfinished or unread. This doesn't quite include every piece of fiction or non-fiction or art or <Other> set in or around the Long Eighteenth Century that I've read, but hopefully there's enough.
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| Image added to break up the text - and to remind the reader that there is a Classical Antiquity for Calliste one may refer to with a different set of influences. |
Candide, Voltaire
Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon
The Island of the Day Before, Umberto Eco
An Instance of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears
A History of Henry Esmond, Esq, William Thackeray
The Luck of Barry Lyndon, William Thackeray (& Barry Lyndon, 1975, Dir. Stanley Kubrick)
The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas (& the 1973 film of the same name, Dir. Richard Lester)
Guns of the Dawn, Adrian Tchaikovsky
On Stranger Tides, Tim Powers*
Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift
The poetry of John Dryden
An Answer to the Question: 'What is Enlightenment?', Immanuel Kant
The Search for the Perfect Language, Umberto Eco
The Age of Wonder, Richard Holmes
Peter the Great, Robert K Massie
Hot Springs Island, Jacob Hurst
Qelong, Kenneth Hite
[Behind Gently Smiling Jaws, David McGrogan]
[There is therefore a Strange Land, David McGrogan]
[Ars Magica]***
The Lord Darcy mysteries, Randall Garrett
These don't necessarily inspire the world in which Calliste is set, but rather some of the magical systems and ideas behind it or offered as possibilities by TRoAPW.
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (et al), HP Lovecraft
The Blazing World, Margaret Cavendish
The Chronicles of Earthsea, Ursula Le Guin
Perdido Street Station, China Mieville
Warhammer Fantasy
Chronicles of Amber, Roger Zelazny
The Anubis Gates, Tim Powers
Tales of The Dying Earth, Jack Vance
* The 2011 Pirates of the Caribbean film differs so significantly that it will not be cited in the same breath as the book. Still, scrubbed of the franchise elements, the movie could be used as a TRoAPW plot.
** I've not been shy about my appreciation for Against the Wicked City, or employing posts like this. Of course, the clockpunk elements of AtWC don't quite cohere with TRoAPW (nor do, I should say, the Romantic elements), and there's already a thumbnail sketch of 'Europe' and expanding powers.
But none of that outright bars the various states of Calliste from existing alongside the Great Road. Honestly, I quite like the idea also that while 'Europe' is running round debating the definitions of spells schools or the use of grimoires, 'Central Asia' is tinkering and fiddling and making and doing in a thousand different workshops (and you can get clockwork prosthetics and airships and robots and The King Is Watching You Through His Statues and.....)
Maybe one day this could make Calliste ready for an explosively effective magical Industrial Revolution (Cf. Part Two of this post, in the para starting 'I'm going to tangent...') - but that hasn't happened yet.
*** Unread - see here.
**** Unread, but there's plentiful internet material on the subject.
***** An RPG references Lankhmar? Unheard of! But, of course, the reference here is less the City of Sevenscore Thousand Smokes and more of an option for magical antecedents: see here. See also McKilip's Forgotten Beasts of Eld, which I should reread.
† I guess The Gardens of Ynn and The Stygian Library should be here as well. But, well, their ability to be plugged into a game is part of their selling point.
‡ Cthonic Codex could be the 'Magic of Late Antiquity RPG'; Ars Magica the 'Magic of the High Middle Ages RPG'. Magical Industrial Revolution is, as I wrote in my review, a possible result in my mind to TRoAPW.
The world Garrett makes for his Lord Darcy mysteries is clearly Victorian in tone (gas lamps, revolvers, steam trains, evening dress) but the magicians and the laws and mores around magic make it rather more like a world in which very few of the reforms proposed by mages in TRoAPW happened (or were defanged, or overturned, or....). The Medieval elements of Lord Darcy (Western Christian practice without a Reformation, an enduring Anglo-French Angevin Empire) naturally reinforce this.
Perhaps Lamentations of the Flame Princess could be a 'Magic of the Reformation and Wars of Religion RPG'. But I think that LotFP doesn't quite counts as a fully fledged setting, and while I appreciate its use of Early Modern Europe, it's rarely consciously about that time. It may be that some LotFP publications would fit in this proposed niche.
***
Your chance, chaps. What am I missing? What is there that I really ought to read?