References in Other Fictional Works
Much science fiction, especially the planetary romances of Leigh Brackett and its descendants like the early Darkover novels of Marion Zimmer Bradley, shows a deep influence from Kim in its exoticism, its multifarious civilizations, secretive and sometimes hidden, and the relations between the Earthmen (stand-ins for the British) and the native inhabitants.
Robert A. Heinlein's novel Citizen of the Galaxy was influenced by Kim (and possibly its science fictional successors) in the exotic settings, the espionage backdrop, and in details such as the memorization technique. Poul Anderson's The Game of Empire is also inspired by Kim, including opening and closing scenes that are direct pastiches.
A novel by John Masters, The Lotus and the Wind, is also set in the Great Game, and one of its main protagonists is a character seeking some form of spiritual enlightenment.
The British double agent, Kim Philby is said to have derived his nickname from the novel.
Quotes and concepts from the novel shape significant parts of Tim Powers' novel Declare, which also incorporates the life and career of Kim Philby as part of the extensively researched background.
In The English Patient, the character Kip, an Indian sapper in the British army who is a native of Lahore and knows personally many of the locations mentioned in the book including "The gun Zamzama", several times quotes Kim, which he considers as representing the colonialist occupiers of his city and his country.
In the movie Breach, one counter-intelligence officer asks another: "Tell me five facts about yourself. I'll tell you which one is a lie." This is a likely reference to Kim's Game.
In the graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, by Allan Moore, Billy Bunter mentions that Robert K. Cherry, a.k.a. Harry Lime, learned some techniques from, and is in fact partly named after, the great spy in India, Kim.
In The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes: The Missing Years (1999), by Tibetan author Jamyang Norbu, Arthur Conan Doyle's famous detective visits Tibet and gets to meet and interact with Kipling's Huree Chunder Mookerjee.
In Laurie R. King's 2004 novel The Game, her characters (Arthur Conan Doyle's detective Sherlock Holmes and King's creation Mary Russell) are sent to India to rescue a now mature Kim, who in King's story met Holmes in his youth.
The book is mentioned several times in Anthony Price's spy novels.
Read more about this topic: Kim (novel)
Famous quotes containing the words fictional and/or works:
“One of the proud joys of the man of letters—if that man of letters is an artist—is to feel within himself the power to immortalize at will anything he chooses to immortalize. Insignificant though he may be, he is conscious of possessing a creative divinity. God creates lives; the man of imagination creates fictional lives which may make a profound and as it were more living impression on the world’s memory.”
—Edmond De Goncourt (1822–1896)
“Was it an intellectual consequence of this ‘rebirth,’ of this new dignity and rigor, that, at about the same time, his sense of beauty was observed to undergo an almost excessive resurgence, that his style took on the noble purity, simplicity and symmetry that were to set upon all his subsequent works that so evident and evidently intentional stamp of the classical master.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)