Oregon, a ship in the Oregon Files series of books by author Clive Cussler, has a magnetohydrodynamic drive. This allows the ship to turn very sharply and brake instantly, instead of gliding for a few miles. In Valhalla Rising, Clive Cussler writes the same drive into the powering of Captain Nemos Nautilus.'
The film adaptation of The Hunt for Red October popularized the magnetohydrodynamic drive as a "caterpillar drive" for submarines, a nearly undetectable "silent drive" intended to achieve stealth in submarine warfare. In reality, the current traveling through the water would create gases and noise, and the magnetic fields would induce a detectable magnetic signature. In the film, it was suggested that this sound could be confused with geological activity. In the novel from which the film was adapted, the caterpillar that Red October used was actually a pump-jet of the so-called "tunnel drive" type (the tunnels provided acoustic camouflage for the cavitation from the propellers).
In the Ben Bova novel The Precipice, the ship where some of the action took place, Starpower 1, built to prove that exploration and mining of the Asteroid Belt was feasible and potentially profitable, had a magnetohydrodynamic drive mated to a fusion power plant.