Conversations

SM Stirling commented here that:

"All fiction is in conversation with all other fiction..."

Sometimes it seems that all literature is one long series:

Troy (Homer);
Rome (Virgil);
the Holy Roman Empire (the Song of Roland);
English history (Shakespeare);
the British Empire (Kipling);
forward to the Terran Empire (Poul Anderson);
sideways to the Angrezi Raj (Stirling).

In Neil Gaiman's The Sandman: The Doll's House, personified Desire looks at the symbol of her older brother, personified Dream, and says:

"Big brother...I'm watching you."

Thus, a fantasy character alludes to a dystopia - two antithetical genres both addressed by both Anderson and Stirling.