The game from Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game is concerned with the quest for perfection of knowledge, therefore Meakin considers it "an intellectual alchemy." The list of authors who do not mention alchemy or alchemists, nor use alchemical allegory or imagery, but who use ideas which obliquely remind Meakin of alchemy include William Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Émile Zola, Jules Verne, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, James Joyce, Gustav Meyrink, Lindsay Clarke, Marguerite Yourcenar, Umberto Eco, Michel Butor, Amanda Quick, Gabriel García Marquez and Mária Szepes.[11]