Influence and Parallels
Keeler has influenced science fiction writers such as Neil Gaiman and Futurama producer Ken Keeler (no relation); Ken Keeler says in the DVD commentary for "Time Keeps On Slippin'" that the story "Strange Romance" from the book Y. Cheung, Business Detective was an inspiration for the episode. In the late 1930s, British writer John Russell Fearn gave credit to Keeler for inspiring his experiments with webwork plots in his pulp SF stories.
Writer Jack Woodford wrote the article Tale Incredible: The True Story of Harry Stephen Keeler's Literary Rise about Keeler.
Keeler's webwork technique anticipates the so-called hysterical realism of later novelists such as Thomas Pynchon. Gabriele Rico in Writing the Natural Way advises aspiring writers to practice a form of webwork, which she calls "clustering", to encourage associational thinking which can be used to create characters and plot lines.
Films that exhibit probably unwitting similarities to Keeler's work include Murder Story (1989), in which Christopher Lee plays a Keeler-like character who keeps a large collection of newspaper clippings as part of his "Willard Hope Technique" for writing novels, which closely resembles Keeler's "webwork novel" technique. R. Kelly's series of music videos Trapped in the Closet shows a number of parallels to Keeler's style.
In 2010, Harold S. Karstens published De Sciencefictionschrijver, a novel about one man's obsession with Keeler.
Read more about this topic: Harry Stephen Keeler
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