Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot/Literature

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot in Literature include:

  • In the 11th book of The Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries, Sookie and Eric visit a vampire-owned night club that was bondage/Elvis/whore-house themed.
  • Vampirates, a book series about you-guessed-it.
  • His Dark Materials has the Panserbjørne, the Guardians of the Svalbard archipelago, a race of armor-clad warrior polar bears (in fact, "panserbjørne" is Danish for "armored bears"). As a matter of fact, the author gleefully tells us that This Is The Coolest Thing Ever.
  • 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Pirates, a nuclear Steampunk submarine, giant underwater monsters, and a mad scientist.
  • Peter Pan is an early version of this: flying immortal juvenile delinquents fight pirates, Indians, and demonic crocodiles in a bizarre fantasy land inhabited by mermaids and fairies--which makes this Older Than Radio.
    • The Disney animated adaptation has said juvenile delinquents wear full-body animal skins, which just pushes the awesomeness past the red line.
    • In the 1991 Steven Spielberg spinoff Hook, those same delinquents are now multiracial punk skateboarders who fire catapults full of eggs.
  • The Princess 99 has an alien punk rocker from the future fighting zombies, elves, and wizards in a mixed up Clock Punk fantasy setting that's based on 1920s New Orleans...but with wizards!
  • In one story told by the Author Avatar in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, he can't make up his mind as to which more stereotypical Chivalric Romance villain to use: a giant or a Saracen, so he makes the villain of his story a giant Saracen.
  • Certain Discworld stories might count as this, considering just how many bizarre concepts tend to be packed into one novel.
  • In Dune, there are a few different characters with special abilities. There are the Navigators, who can see in four dimensions. There are Mentats, essentially human computers. There are also the Bene Gesserits, magical witches that have the commanding Voice. And then there's Paul Atreides, the Kwisatz Haderach. This Troper's nickname for him is Paul "multiclasses-in-everything" Atreides, because he is essentially ALL OF THESE! The only person worse than him is his son, who even jumps species to get the extra skills he didn't already inherit from his father.
  • Sean Cullen's Hamish X series is about a robot orphan with Eyes of Gold who wants to Become a Real Boy and Turn Against His Masters. It contains a zeppelin, cheese, cheese pirates, a Lost World that is Beneath the Earth in Switzerland and populated entirely by orphans, ninja orphans, a Hive Mind of robot raccoons named George, Bedouins, a mammoth, giant snow monkeys, and an evil assimilating robot MIB from the Uncanny Valley with candy-related names. And yet, when a minor character is seen reading a comic called Vampire Cat Robot, the narrator makes fun of him for it.
  • In Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, a French chef named Armand Allegre is pursued by an Implacable, Invisible, Clingy, Jealous, Killer ClockPunk robot duckwith a speech impediment and a fully functional digestive system who wants him to find her Currently Genderless Beta-Copy or else she will take Revenge for all the ducks he has cooked.
    • There's also the overarching story about a depressed widower astronomer and a womanizing, land-surveying Quaker studying the orbit of Venus while snarking all over Dutch people and then measuring borders IN AMERICA while discussing dragons. And that bit is true. Less true are the talking dog who knows everything, the Chinese fung shui master who is afraid of turning into a Spaniard, the rabbi secret agents trying to track down rogue golems, golems built by Jesus, the Swedish conspiracy, the Spanish Inquisition's involvement, the ghost, and some witches. And it's all written in Antiquated Linguistics.
  • Another Pynchon novel, Vineland, involves hippies, The Mafia, The Men in Black, ninjas, and a possible Kaiju attack.
  • Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy is the story of humans fighting back against an invasion by dead souls possessing the living to escape a horrible living death afterlife and gaining superpowers in the process unleashed when an alien made of pure energy interrupts a satanic ritual and nearly winning until Al Capone comes back and takes over whole star systems then the dead take some planets to over universes except one is a horrific nightmare realm with an enemy made up of a squillion different species liquefied and mashed together into a blob of pure scary and then the guy who started it all summons the scary blob to our universe and everybody nearly dies but someone else saves the day by piloting a living starship to where a god hangs out and talks it into helping. The impressive part is this is actually done in such a way that every premise is plausible and the impacts they have on the world are realistic.
  • Elizabeth Bear's Edda of Burdens series: as of Book One: All The Windwracked Stars, we have a post-apocalyptic steampunk valkyrie historian, a two-headed immortal flying cyborg warhorse, magico-genetically spliced catgirl police officers with the souls of dead angels, reincarnated rentboys with superstrength, and a few completely casual mentions of battle shoggoths.
  • Surfing Samurai Robots is about an Alien that has a big nose and has come to Earth in order to be a detective. Also, there are some Surfing Samurai Robots, and it turns out that the whole thing was set up by the Femme Fatale's dad, who is a lizard. Once again...
  • Complete World Knowledge. Hoboes, presidents, mole-men, cane swords, ferrets, giant iguanas, druids, masturbation out a window, Jonathan Coulton, zeppelins, Time Lords, a sequel to The Catcher in The Rye, samurai, thunderbirds... apparently the only thing that doesn't exist in John Hodgman's mind is Chicago.
  • Pride and Prejudice And Zombies, the classic Jane Austen romance retold with the addition of, well, not to put too fine a point on it, ultra-violent zombie mayhem. And ninjas.
    • Followed by Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, which features mutant lobsters, rampaging octopi, and pirates. And apparently Davy Jones.
    • Followed by Mansfield Park and Mummies, which features spirits of ancient Egyptian pharoahs, vampires, collections of ancient Egyptian artifacts, and mummies.
    • Followed by Emma and the Werewolves. Stand by for the next two -- no doubt it will be a short wait...
  • Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. That's all you need to know
  • The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway. How to describe it? An After the End Catch-22 cowritten by Thomas Pynchon and Douglas Adams by way of Fight Club with heroic Hazmat troubleshooters vs the evil megacorp. And oh yeah, ninjas vs kung fu mimes
  • Among the other contents of Un Lun Dun's Hurricane of Puns are trash bin ninjas called "Binja."
  • Tobias Buckell started writing Crystal Rain by listing all the cool things he could think of. Mongoose men fight Aztecs with zeppelins, while the pirate hero (at least he has a hook and likes to sail) battles amnesia on a steampunk quest to the frozen north to recover the secrets of their offworld ancestors. And Sly Mongoose has sky cities and space zombies.
  • The Crazy Awesome nature of The Dresden Files cannot be overemphasized. A polka-powered zombie tyrannosaurus! A cult of porn-star sorceresses! Ninja ghouls! Paladins with Kalashnikovs! Secret agent demon werewolves! A wizard with a vampire hairstylist brother! And so on and so forth.
  • The Codex Alera series by the same author is full of this too. From the page description: "Magical Roman Legionnaires straight out of Avatar The Last Airbender versus the Zerg. And wolfmen with Blood Magic. And telepathic yetis. And white-haired neanderthal-elves. Riding ground sloths and terror birds..." And, later: "The political dealings of Dune meets a Greco-Roman Society powered by Pokémon." That leaves out the parts where some of the wolfmen get zombified (or maybe "possessed by body-snatching aliens" is a better description), the Zerg learn magic, and a Chrome Champion swordfights.
    • The aforementioned wolfmen have morals and values at least partially influenced by fuedal Japan - which means that not only do we get wolfman samurai-analogues, but we also get wolfman ninjas.
  • Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series (and the related Nursery Crimes series) focus on the titular protagonist's adventures in Book World, where all characters in fiction are the roles played by Book World actors. Gully Foyle of The Stars My Destination polices Science Fiction. The Racy Novels genre is in a border dispute with Feminist. Her uncle Mycroft, a mad inventor, is sought by a multinational corporation for his latest invention, the Book Portal (which started the whole mess), so he hides in the backstory of the Sherlock Holmes series - as Sherlock's elder brother. If a reference sounds vaguely literary, it is. In the "real world", things are even stranger - cloned Neanderthals, dodos, and thylacines exist, as do time travel, werewolves, and the radical Bacon Society, which claims Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays, and is willing to start riots in the streets to prove their point. If you plan to visit, bring a clear jar filled with lentils and rice, and shake it every once in a while. If the mix starts clumping as if something was sorting it, watch out, entropy's going backward.
  • In Good Omens Adam describes a story he once wrote:

'It was about this pirate who was a famous detective (...) 'Specially the bit in the spaceship where the dinosaur comes out and fights with the cowboys'

  • There is a children's book in which the Loch Ness Monster teams up with little green men from Mars to fight evil spider aliens.
  • Isaac Asimov's novel I Robot features a telepathic robot.
  • In Asimov's Prelude to Foundation we find that Hari Seldon is not only a Mathematician but also a fist fighter.
  • Though only an example from a modern perspective the original novel Frankenstein passingly mentioned the creature to have had a large number of firearms on his person.
  • Dinotopia gives us robot dinosaurs, a half-human half-ceratopsian god, and in one of its most popular spinoff novels, samurai Troödon.
  • Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash features as its main character Hiro Protagonist, a ninja computer-hacker pizza delivery boy, who invented the Matrix.
  • Clive Barker's "Son of Celluloid" stacks real-life Body Horror on fantasy horror, in that the villain of the story is a sentient, mind-manipulating, reality-warping undead cancer tumor.
  • The first battle in the first Kingdom Keepers book is against Audio-Animatronic Pirates of the Caribbean riding space cars that shoot Frickin' Laser Beams.
  • The prose of writer Francesca Lia Block often comes off like a "girly" version of this trope. For example:

"A kiss about apple pie a la mode with the vanilla creaminess melting in the pie heat. A kiss about chocolate when you haven’t eaten chocolate in a year. A kiss about palm trees speeding by, trailing pink clouds when you drive down the strip sizzling with champagne. A kiss about spotlights fanning the sky and the swollen sea spilling like tears all over your legs."

—Weetzie Bat

  • Andrey Valentinov's adventure series The Eye of Power (Око Силы) has scary recurring villain Vseslav Volkov, who looks like a tall handsome man with an unnaturally reddish skin. Really he is seven hundred years old Russian prince. And a necromancer. And a vampire. And a werewolf. And a member of an Ancient Conspiracy. And a Communist. And a Spetznaz officer. With a Name to Run Away from Really Fast. And yes, Volkov is awesome.
  • Quantum Gravity
    • Zal is both types of elvish, demonic (not entirely by birth), and a rock star. Also, that spoiler at the beginning means he's got some failed experiment with the void going on in his background.
    • Lila is a Cyborg, who is also a spy and a bodyguard and has a dead elf necromancer in her chest for a while. Ah, the power of being around someone with harmonizing powers...
    • Tath is an elvish necromancer, which is already weird, though he is not the only one. Then the story progresses, and he also becomes part fey, and dies and is reborn. Twice.
    • Theoretical here: It appears to be possible to be a demonic, elven, fey necromancer who is/was part machine and then become a ghost while technically keeping all of the former (rock star or other training also applicable), just so long as one doesn't start out human. Because humans are passive with magic.
  • Gemma Files's Hexslinger series: An alternate history/dark fantasy/Wild West adventure with a gang of outlaws and robbers led by a Hard Gay couple, one of whom is a former corrupt preacher turned dark sorcerer, the other of whom is an expert sharpshooter and potential sorcerer who becomes the vessel of an an Aztec god, who aid in the resurrection of a power-hungry Mayan goddess. The series also features a Navajo medicine woman, real-life historical figure Allan Pinkerton leading a secret group that scientifically studies the workings of magic and sends spies to monitor the sorcerous outlaws, and an evil Chinese albino sorceress who is also a child prostitute. And the genuinely pious minister who is implied to have been resurrected by an angel in order to fight the evil sorcerers. All of this is just from the first book.
  • The Adventures of Ook and Gluk, Kung-Fu Cavemen From The Future. Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
  • Clash of the Geeks is a short-story collection (and fundraiser for the Lupus Foundation of America) themed around a picture of Wil Wheaton wielding a lance, riding a unicorn pegasus kitten, and wearing a clown sweater, while attacking an orcish version of John Scalzi.
  • Fairly easy way to explain the Bene Gesserit: Eugenicist Psychic Ninja Slut Nuns
  • In On Stranger Tides, historical pirate Blackbeard is a voodoo sorcerer with zombie minions, and a rival sorcerer raises a shipfull of pirates and another ship from the Spanish navy, although that was by accident as animated skeletons.
  • Jasper Jones.
    • Jeffrey Lu, upon learning that his friend Charlie had a nightmare about the Wizard of Oz: "Really? But there are so many cooler things to have nightmares about. Like sharks. Communist sharks, with razor-sharp fins that can walk on land."
    • An obviously best-selling novel that Jeffrey and Charlie wrote together was about an ex-cop turned archaeologist called Truth McJustice who, among too many other awesome exploits to mention, discovers the Holy Grail and does martial-arts battle with an imposter Pope.
  • The main character Unda Vosari: Legends, Captain Vincent Lorimar, had training by ninjas in his younger years, took to the seas and became a pirate to fight his arch-enemy, Baron Calavera.
  • The T'lann Imass of the Malazan Book of the Fallen are zombie-shapeshifting-cavemen and their spiritual leaders are zombie-shapeshifting-werecreature-cavemen.
  • Miya Black Pirate Princess is both pirate and princess.
  • The Midnight Dancers has Paul Fester, a juggling, flute-playing ninja clown.'
  • The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel. It's not a Fantasy Kitchen Sink so much as a Fantasy Home Depot Plumbing Department. With an Action Girl Friendly Neighborhood Vampire, HistoricalDomainCharacters aplenty (the villains include Elizabethan Court Mage John Dee, Billy the Kid, and Niccolo Machiavelli, while the heroes include Joan of Arc and William Shakespeare) and All Myths Are True.
  • By the end of the trilogy of Blood Bowl novels, one of the antagonists is a Black Orc reanimated as a vampire and then possessed by Khorne.
  • The Ironborn in A Song of Ice and Fire are essentially Cthulhu-worshipping Vikings.
  • The Samurai Cat series (not to be confused with the Samurai Pizza Cats Anime series) not only parodied everything under the sun, it mixed and matched them: as a result, Miyowara Tomokato ends up facing gangster Trolls armed with rotary cannons, Darth Shatner, a division of S.S. Tyrannosaurs, Mongols armed with nuclear weapons, and the Stalinwolf. And that was Before going to Hell.
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