Cultural Allusions
Merlin's landlord "Mr. Mulligan" is an allusion to Buck Mulligan from James Joyce's Ulysses.
Merlin tells Luke that Ghostwheel's operations involve "a lot of theoretical crap involving space and time and some notions of some guys named Everett and Wheeler." The Everett-Wheeler theory of quantum mechanics proposes a "many worlds" interpretation in which the universe instantly fragments into a bundle of alternate histories each time the quantum state of any particle in the universe changes via interaction.
At the conclusion of this volume, Merlin is imprisoned in a crystal cave, just like his namesake from Arthurian legend.
Read more about this topic: Trumps Of Doom
Famous quotes containing the word cultural:
“The rumor of a great city goes out beyond its borders, to all the latitudes of the known earth. The city becomes an emblem in remote minds; apart from the tangible export of goods and men, it exerts its cultural instrumentality in a thousand phases.”
—In New York City, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)