- Andrew Greeley's novel Virgin and Martyr (1985) has much of the story set in the fictional country of Costaguana. Many of the place names are borrowed from Conrad's novel.
- In Ridley Scott's classic Alien (1979), the spacecraft is named the Nostromo; the escape vessel is named Narcissus, an allusion to another of Conrad's works, The Nigger of the "Narcissus". In James Cameron's sequel Aliens (1986), the Marine transport vessel is named Sulaco.[5] Furthermore, appearing in the video game Aliens: Colonial Marines, a vessel of the same class as the Sulaco is named the Sephora, a reference to Conrad's The Secret Sharer.
- In Dean Koontz's novel Fear Nothing (1998), the protagonist Christopher Snow visits a man named Roosevelt Frost, who lives aboard a boat named Nostromo.
- In the Warhammer 40,000 space opera franchise, "Nostramo" is a corruption-ridden city world rich in minerals, eventually liberated by a brutal tyrant named Konrad Curze, an allusion to a central character in Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness.
- Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez's novel The Secret History of Costaguana (2007) narrates the secession of Panamá from Colombia as the background story that (in this fictional work) served as Conrad's inspiration for Nostromo.
- In the USA Network series Colony, the fighters of the Resistance use copies of the book as a decoder key for their encrypted communications.[6]
- As the travel writer John Gimlette points out in his At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig: Travels through Paraguay (2003), there are many similarities to Paraguay and its 19th-century history of despotism, war, and revolution: "Conrad, meanwhile, was absorbing the Paraguayan story. His nightmarish political novel, Nostromo, emerged in 1904. It is Paraguay, seen through the prisms of his great friend's [Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham] anger – Napoleonic dictators and a Great Conspiracy. There is even 'a barefoot army of scarecrows' and a priest who becomes the state torturer." Graham arrived in Paraguay in 1873 and wrote many books on it.
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