OceanofPDF.

com
BUILDING IMAGINARY WORLDS

Mark J. P. Wolf’s study of imaginary worlds theorizes world-building within

and across media, including literature, comics, film, radio, television, board
games, video games, the Internet, and more. Building Imaginary Worlds
departs from prior approaches to the topic that focused mainly on narrative,
medium, or genre, and instead considers imaginary worlds as dynamic
entities in and of themselves. Wolf argues that imaginary worlds—which are
often transnarrative, transmedial, and transauthorial in nature—are
compelling objects of inquiry for Media Studies.
Chapters present:
• a theoretical analysis of how world-building extends beyond
storytelling, the engagement of the audience, and the way worlds are
conceptualized and experienced
• a history of imaginary worlds that follows their development over three
millennia from the fictional islands of Homer’s Odyssey to the present
• internarrative theory examining how narratives set in the same world
can interact and relate to one another
• an examination of transmedial growth and adaptation, and what
happens when worlds make the jump between media
• an analysis of the transauthorial nature of imaginary worlds, the
resulting concentric circles of authorship, and related topics of canonicity,
participatory worlds, and subcreation’s relationship with divine Creation.
Building Imaginary Worlds also provides the scholar of imaginary worlds
with a glossary of terms and a detailed timeline that spans three millennia
and more than 1,400 imaginary worlds, listing their names, creators, and the
works in which they first appeared.
Mark J. P. Wolf is Professor of Communication at Concordia University
Wisconsin. He is the author of Myst and Riven:The World of the D’ni, editor
of the two-volume Encyclopedia of Video Games, and co-editor with Bernard
Perron of The Video Game Theory Reader 1 and 2, among other books.

OceanofPDF.com
BUILDING IMAGINARY WORLDS
The Theory and History of Subcreation

Mark J. P. Wolf

OceanofPDF.com
First published 2012
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Simultaneously published in the UK

by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2012 Taylor & Francis

The right of Mark J. P. Wolf to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by
any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying
and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are
used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Wolf, Mark J. P.
Building imaginary worlds: the theory and history of subcreation / Mark J. P. Wolf.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) 2. Imaginary societies–Authorship. 3. Fiction–History and
criticism–Theory, etc. I. Title.
PN56.C69W67 2013
801'.92–dc23
2012016677

ISBN: 978-0-415-63119-8 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-415-63120-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-09699-4 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo
by Cenveo Publisher Services

OceanofPDF.com
DEDICATION

A. M. D. G.

OceanofPDF.com
CONTENTS

List of Figures
Acknowledgements

Introduction
World-building as a Human Activity
Toward a Theory of Imaginary Worlds
1 Worlds within the World
The Philosophy of Possible Worlds
Imagination, Creation, and Subcreation
Degrees of Subcreation
Story vs. World: Storytelling and World-building
Invention, Completeness, and Consistency
Invention
Completeness
Consistency
Immersion, Absorption, and Saturation
World Gestalten: Ellipsis, Logic, and Extrapolation
Catalysts of Speculation
Connecting the Secondary World to the Primary World
2 A History of Imaginary Worlds
Transnarrative Characters and Literary Cycles
The Mythical and Unknown World
Travelers’ Tales and the Age of Exploration
Utopias and Dystopias
The Genres of Science Fiction and Fantasy
Science Fiction
Fantasy
The Rise of Mass Media
Early Cinema and Comic Strips
 Oz: The First Great Transmedial World
Pulp Magazines
Developments in Cinema and Theater
Radio and Television
Developments in Literature
and Tolkien’s Influence
The Lord of the Rings
New Universes and the Rise of the Media Franchise
Interactive Worlds
Into the Computer Age
Worlds as Art and Thought Experiments
3 World Structures and Systems of Relationships
Secondary World Infrastructures
Maps
Timelines
Genealogies
Nature
Culture
Language
Mythology
Philosophy
Tying Different Infrastructures Together
4 More than a Story: Narrative Threads and Narrative Fabric
Narrative Threads, Braids, and Fabric
Backstory and World History
Sequence Elements and Internarrative Theory
Retroactive Continuity (Retcon) and Reboots
Crossovers, Multiverses, and Retroactive Linkages
Interactivity and Alternate Storylines
The Story of the World: “Making Of” Documentation
5 Subcreation within Subcreated Worlds
Importance of the Word
Self-reflexivity
Subcreated Subcreators and Diegetic World-building
 Evil Subcreators
6 Transmedial Growth and Adaptation
The Nature of Transmediality
Windows on the World: Words, Images, Objects, Sounds, and Interactions
Transmedial Expansion
Description
Visualization
Auralization
Interactivation
Deinteractivation
Encountering Transmedial Worlds
7 Circles of Authorship
Open and Closed Worlds
Levels of Canonicity
Originator and Main Author
Estates, Heirs, and Torchbearers
Employees and Freelancers
Approved, Derivative, and Ancillary Products
Elaborationists and Fan Productions
Participatory Worlds
Creation, Subcreation, and the Imago Dei
Appendix: Timeline of Imaginary Worlds

Notes
Glossary
Index

OceanofPDF.com
LIST OF FIGURES

1.1 An example of world documentation without narrative: typical pages

from the enigmatic Codex Seraphinianus (1981) by Luigi Serafini (image
courtesy of Luigi Serafini, Codex Seraphinianus, Milano, Franco Maria
Ricci, First Edition, 1981).
1.2 Evidence of plant life on Tatooine. In the top image alone, one can find
nine instances of plant life growing in the Lars homestead. In the center
image, Aunt Beru holds a large vegetable (actually fennel) which she
uses for cooking. In the bottom image, one can see a fringe of greenery
growing in the valley along the path over which Luke’s landspeeder
passes as Tusken Raiders watch from above. All images from Star Wars
Episode IV: A New Hope (20th Century Fox, 1977).
1.3 World details in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (20th
Century Fox, 2002). Staging in depth results in suggestive glimpses of
distance objects and locations (top), while background details and events
reveal further consequences of story events, like the flying droids seen
outside Padmé’s apartment that replace the window which was broken
during the attack of the night before (bottom).
2.1 Examples of the 119 woodcut images that accompanied the 1481 edition
of The Book of John Mandeville (circa 1357): a cockodrill of Silha (top
left); an ox-headed man (top, right); the two-headed wild geese of Silha
(center, left); a Blemmyae (center, right); a giant cyclops (bottom, left);
and an Ethiopian with one foot (bottom, right).
2.2 Maps of Thomas More’s island of Utopia, from 1516 (left) and from 1518
(center), both attributed to Ambrosius Holbein; and from 1595, drawn by
cartographer Abraham Ortelius (right).
2.3 Map of Madeleine De Scudéry’s Tendre, from 1654, which appeared
with her novel Clélie, Histoire Romaine (1654–1660) and was designed by
De Scudery and her friends, with the engraving of the final image
attributed to François Chauveau.
2.4 Albert Robida’s detailed drawings helped to illustrate his novels, which
were visions of what life would be like in the 20th century, including an
aerial rotating house (left) and a restaurant and coffeehouse atop an
ironwork structure (right).
2.5 Typical pages from Little Nemo in Slumberland, including Befuddle Hall
(left), which demonstrate McCay’s attention to background detail and
visual world-building.
2.6 A section of the map drawn by George Annand showing Sinclair
Lewis’s Winnemac, and where it is located in the American Midwest.
2.7 Warren Robinett’s Adventure (1979) for the Atari VCS 2600 was the first
video game that cut screen to screen as the player–character moved
through the game’s world.
2.8 Meridian 59 (1995) came packaged with a map (top) and featured a first-
person view (bottom), and today is considered the first MMORPG.
3.1 Two very different maps of Mayberry, North Carolina, by Mark Bennett
(top) and James L. Dean (bottom), extrapolated from the visual
information provided on The Andy Griffith Show (Mark Bennett, Town
of Mayberry, 1997, Lithograph on Rives BFK paper, 24.25 × 36.25 inches,
Courtesy of the artist and Mark Moore Gallery) (Map of Mayberry
courtesy of James L. Dean).
3.2 A detail of the Capital Region from Adrian Leskiw’s map of the Isle of
Breda, as it changed over time. The top image represents the land in 2002,
the middle image in 2004, and the bottom image in 2040. The top and
middle images were created in 2003, and the bottom one in (images
courtesy of Adrian Leskiw).
3.3 A Nsana (top) and a steam engine (bottom) from Arde, the two-
dimensional world of A. K. Dewdney’s The Planiverse (images courtesy
of A. K. Dewdney).
3.4 The Utopian alphabet and a quatrain in the Utopian language, from
Thomas More’s Utopia.
4.1 The view from the dock looking up the hill in Myst (1993) and in
realMyst (2001). While Myst was made up of pre-rendered still images
with 8-bit color, realMyst could render its images in 32-bit color in real
time and allowed free movement through its three-dimensional space,
allowing for greater interactivity in the exploration of the world’s
spaces.
5.1 Commander William T. Riker enters the holodeck during a jungle
simulation in “Encounter at Farpoint” (Season 1, Episode 1) of Star Trek:
The Next Generation (1987–1994).
5.2 Nightly reshapings of the city performed by the Strangers in Dark City
(1998): buildings shrink and grow into new forms (left, top and bottom),
while the city’s inhabitants have their memories reset and find
themselves in new lives the next morning (right, top, and bottom).
6.1 Examples of the machinery encountered in Myst III: Exile (2001) which
players learn about through examination and interaction.
7.1 Some of the noncanonical appearances of Darth Vader allowed by
Lucasfilm: in a 1994 Energizer battery commercial (top, left); in a 2009
promotional ad for Star Wars on the Space Channel (bottom, left); on the
golf course in a 2008 Star Wars ad on the Spike Channel (top, right); and
in a 2004 ad for Target (bottom right).

OceanofPDF.com
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has been in development longer than any other academic work of
mine, and has afforded me some very enjoyable research. Portions of this
material have appeared in other works and presentations over the years as it
was developing, including the presentation “Subcreation: Imaginary Worlds
and Embedded World-Views” solicited for the Cranach Institute Spring
Speaker Series at Concordia University Wisconsin in 2002; the essay “The
Subcreation of Transmedia Worlds” solicited by the editor of the Media
Culture issue of Compar(a)ison: An International Journal of Comparative
Literature of Fall of 2005; an invited keynote address entitled “A Brief
History of Imaginary Worlds” given at the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in
Education Conference, held on-line in Second Life in 2010; “World Gestalten:
Ellipsis, Logic, and Extrapolation in Imaginary Worlds” solicited by the
editor of Projections for the summer 2012 issue; and two papers given at
conferences of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), “The
Subcreation of Transmedia Worlds” in 2006, and “Video Games in the
Imaginary World Tradition” in 2011. The material in these essays and
presentations was from the research for this book, and I am grateful to their
audiences for a chance to debut the material. For suggestions, answers to
questions, and research assistance, I would also like to thank Angus Menuge,
Douglas A. Anderson, Christian Himsel, Thomas Krenzke, Reid Perkins-
Buzo, Brian Stableford, Christine R. Johnson, Sally Canapa, Gaylund Stone,
Mark Hayse; manuscript reviewers Kevin Schut, Marie-Laure Ryan, and
Henry Lowood; and all the other friends, colleagues, and students who
brought things to my attention. For various permissions, I would like to
thank Adrian Leskiw, Franco Maria Ricci, Mark Bennett and the Mark
Moore Gallery, James L. Dean, Richard Watson, Michael O. Riley, and A. K.
Dewdney. I am also grateful for the enthusiasm and encouragement of
Matthew Byrnie and Erica Wetter at Routledge. Thanks also to my wife
Diane and my sons Michael, Christian, and Francis, who put up with me
during the years while I was working on this book. And, as always, thanks
be to God, the Creator of all subcreators.

OceanofPDF.com
INTRODUCTION

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even
glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is
always landing.

—Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism1

Like most Americans my age (with access to books), I spent a good deal
of my youth in Baum’s Land of Oz. I have a precise, tactile memory of
the first Oz book that came into my hands. It was the original 1910
edition of The Emerald City. I still remember the look and the feel of
those dark blue covers, the evocative smell of dust and old ink. I also
remember that I could not stop reading and rereading the book. But
“reading” is not the right word. In some mysterious way, I was
translating myself to Oz, a place which I was to inhabit for many years
while, simultaneously, visiting other fictional worlds as well as
maintaining my cover in that dangerous one known as “real”. With The
Emerald City, I became addicted to reading.
—Gore Vidal, “The Oz Books”2
All my movies are about strange worlds that you can’t go into unless you
build them and film them. That’s what’s so important about film to me. I
just like going into strange worlds.

—David Lynch, filmmaker3

Since the advent of daydreaming, imaginary worlds have drawn us away

vicariously to fantastic realms culled from endless possibilities. The allure of
such wayward speculation, conjuring new wonders, strange terrors, and the
unexplored byways of beckoning vistas, has grown stronger over time along
with our ability to render them into concrete forms, albeit mediated ones.
Books, drawings, photographs, film, radio, television, video games, websites,
and other media have opened portals through which these worlds grow in
clarity and detail, inviting us to enter and tempting us to stay, as alive in our
thoughts as our own memories of lived experience.
Yet, imaginary worlds, which rank among the most elaborate mediated
entities, have been largely overlooked in Media Studies, despite a history
spanning three millennia. Imaginary worlds are occasionally considered
tangentially, either from the point of view of a particular story set in them,
or a particular medium in which they appear, but in either case the focus is
too narrow for the world to be examined as a whole. Often when a world is
noticed at all, it is only considered as a background for stories set in it,
rather than a subject of study in itself. At the same time, a world is more
difficult to encapsulate in a description or analysis than a particular story,
character, or situation, making it easier to overlook.
Imaginary worlds, built of words, images, and sounds, can be tremendous
in size; for example, as of summer 2012, the Star Trek universe consisted of
over 500 hours of television shows, 11 feature films, and hundreds of novels,
not to mention several decades worth of video games, comic books, and
other books including technical manuals, chronologies, and encyclopedias.
And since it is an open-ended and still-growing universe, more Star Trek
material appears every year. Worlds of this size, even closed ones that are no
longer being added to (though they may still be adapted and interpreted),
can often be difficult to see in their totality, and much time must be spent to
learn enough about a world to get an overall sense of its shape and design.
In this sense, an imaginary world can become a large entity which is
experienced through various media windows; but quite often, no one
window shows everything, and only an aggregate view combining a variety
of these windows can give a complete sense of what the world is like and
what has occurred there. Experiencing an imaginary world in its entirety,
then, can sometimes be quite an undertaking.
Besides the amount of time required for their study, another reason for the
scholarly neglect of imaginary worlds might be due to the ways that
imaginary worlds differ from other media entities. First, the construction of
most narrative media entities, be they novels, films, television programs, and
so on, is usually strictly determined by the narrative line (or lines) they
contain; that is to say, the determination of which details and events will
appear is motivated by whether or not they advance the story, which is
given primary importance in traditional storytelling. For works in which
world-building occurs, there may be a wealth of details and events (or mere
mentions of them) which do not advance the story but which provide
background richness and verisimilitude to the imaginary world. Sometimes
this material even appears outside of the story itself, in the form of
appendices, maps, timelines, glossaries of invented languages, and so forth.
Such additional information can change the audience’s experience,
understanding, and immersion in a story, giving a deeper significance to
characters, events, and details. Audience members and critical approaches
that center on narrative, then, may find such excess material to be
extraneous, tangential, and unnecessary, while those that consider the
story’s world will find their experience enhanced.
Another way that imaginary worlds differ from traditional media entities
is that they are often transnarrative and transmedial in form, encompassing
books, films, video, games, websites, and even reference works like
dictionaries, glossaries, atlases, encyclopedias, and more. Stories written by
different authors can be set in the same world, so imaginary worlds can be
transauthorial as well. Worlds that extend and expand across multiple media
are now common, and a world may even become something of a brand
name or franchise, with new stories, locations, and characters continually
being added. In some cases, an imaginary world’s opened-ended and work-
in-progress nature can work against the sense of closure often desired for the
purposes of analysis and scholarship; an essay written about the 1977
version of the film Star Wars may no longer apply to the 1981 re-release, the
“Special Edition” re-release of 1997, the DVD version released in 2004, the
Blu-Ray version released in 2011, or the 3-D version of the film promised for
2015 (and, probably, a 3-D home video version after that).
Finally, imaginary worlds may depend relatively little on narrative, and
even when they do, they often rely on other kinds of structures for their
form and organization (see Chapter 3). Imaginary worlds are, by their
nature, an interdisciplinary object of study, and thus likely to either fall
between the cracks between disciplines and sub-disciplines or receive only a
partial examination according to which features are considered salient
according to the analytical tools being applied. Yet, the study of imaginary
worlds is occurring in a variety of fields (such as philosophy, film studies,
psychology, video game studies, economics, and religion) and the research
regarding them is gradually converging, suggesting that the study of
imaginary worlds can easily constitute its own subfield within Media
Studies. I am hoping that this book will represent a step in that direction.
Such a field of study is necessary, since visiting and creating imaginary
worlds are likely to remain common and popular activities.

World-building as a Human Activity

Imaginary worlds are enjoyed not only by those who visit them, but also by
those who invent them, and world-building activities often occur from a
very young age onward. Little children enjoy building forts from couch
cushions and blankets, and transforming spaces into imaginary places that
they can physically enter into during their games of pretend and make-
believe. As they get older, such play shifts to tabletop playsets where smaller
physical spaces represent larger imaginary ones; pirate ships, space stations,
LEGO cities, dungeons drawn on graph paper, and so on. Time is
compressed as well as space; entire wars and the rise and fall of civilizations
can occur in a single afternoon. Such play is removed even further from
direct experience in the abstracted versions of events found in board games
and the virtual and intangible worlds of video games. And even more
common among adults are the imaginary worlds found in novels, films, and
on television (which, of course, often extend to board games, video games,
and other media as well). For many, the desire for imaginary worlds does
not change over time, only the manner in which those worlds are
constructed and experienced.
Some researchers have gone so far as to suggest that the building of
imaginary worlds is something innate and even serves an evolutionary
purpose. In Literature and the Brain (2009), Norman Holland summarizes
the work of psychologists John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, stating their
position in five points:
1. The ability to “simulate” situations (to imagine them without acting
on them) has great value for humans both in survival and
reproduction. This ability to simulate seems to occur innately in the
human species. We evolved the “association cortices” in our large
frontal lobes for just this purpose.
 2. All cultures create fictional, imagined worlds. We humans find these
imagined worlds intrinsically interesting.
3. Responding to imaginary worlds, we engage emotion systems while
disengaging action systems.
4. Humans have evolved special cognitive systems that enable us to
participate in these fictional worlds. We can, in short, pretend and
deceive and imagine, having mental states about mental states.
5. We can separate these fictional worlds from our real-life experiences.
We can, in a key word, decouple them.4
It seems only natural, then, that such abilities and activities would continue
to develop beyond their basic initial purposes and into a form of art and
even entertainment.
World-building, as a deliberate activity, can begin very early on in a
person’s life. Imaginary worlds built during early childhood are common
enough that they have been dubbed “paracosms” in the field of psychology,
and since the late 1970s, they have been the subject of a number of articles
and books. As Michele Root-Bernstein writes in “Imaginary Worldplay as an
Indicator of Creative Giftedness”:
Early research explored ties between worldplay and later artistic
endeavor. Recent study of gifted adults finds strong links, too, between
worldplay and mature creative accomplishment in the sciences and
social sciences. As many as 1 in 30 children may invent worlds in
solitary, secret play that is hidden from ready view. Worldplay
nevertheless figured tangentially in early studies of intellectual precocity.
Improved understanding of the phenomenon, its nature and its potential
for nurture, should bring childhood worldplay to the foreground as an
indicator of creative giftedness.5
Many writers, including Hartley Coleridge (son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge),
Thomas Penson de Quincey, the Brontë siblings (Emily, Anne, Charlotte, and
Patrick), James M. Barrie, Isak Dineson, C. S. Lewis, Austin Tappan Wright,
M. A. R. Barker, and Steph Swainton, invented paracosms during childhood,
and some continued to develop them into adulthood. These early worlds
were often the precursors for the imaginary worlds which they would invent
and write about during their careers.
Imaginary worlds are sometimes very important to their creators and
central to their own lives. L. Frank Baum’s last words on his deathbed were
reportedly “Now we can cross the Shifting Sands”,6 while the tombstone for
J. R. R. Tolkien and his wife Edith contains their own names as well as those
of Beren and Lúthien, the heroic husband and wife from The Silmarillion
(1977). Another subcreator, Henry Darger (who, like Tolkien, was born in
1892, died in 1973, and worked on his imaginary world for decades), was a
recluse whose life’s work was writing about and illustrating his imaginary
world, into which he even placed himself as a character. Some use imaginary
worlds for healing; while recovering from a severe beating and a coma with
injuries that include memory loss, Mark Hogancamp began his imaginary
town of Marwencol as a form of therapy, and his photographs of it later led
to a gallery show in Manhattan and the award-winning feature-length
documentary Marwencol (2010). And even when an author is less closely
associated with his or her imaginary world, it will still often occupy a
central position within the author’s oeuvre, and is usually the setting for
multiple stories.
My own interest in imaginary worlds extends back into my childhood.
Looking back, I can see that many of the things that interested me—drawing,
architecture, film, building with LEGO, animation, adventure games, and the
works of my favorite author, Tolkien—all had to do with various aspects of
imaginary worlds. Born in 1967, I grew up in the 1970s during the time
when table-top role-playing games and video games were gaining
popularity, and cinematic special effects were being developed for world-
building, most notably in Star Wars (1977). At the time, Tolkien’s work
exerted a strong influence over fantasy novels, fantasy art, role-playing
games, and video games of the adventure genre, and these collectively had
an effect on the culture in general. Amidst my own creative endeavors were
drawing and writing, making stop-motion movies, and even designing
graphics and programming games on my Texas Instruments TI99/4a home
computer. I eventually went on to film school in college, beginning at the
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and then transferring to the University
of Southern California where I was accepted into the School of
Cinema/Television (as it was called back then). While doing my Bachelor’s
degree in the Production side of the cinema school, I realized how much I
enjoyed the analytical side of film and media studies, and went on to get a
Master’s degree in the Critical Studies side of the school, while doing a
teaching assistantship in the Animation Department of the Production side.
After that, a Ph.D. seemed the way to go, and I completed mine in the spring
of 1995. Since then, I have also completed two novels (one fantasy, one
science fiction) and am looking for an agent and publisher for them.
I mention all of this because I was interested in building imaginary worlds,
and did so in various media, before I was consciously aware of how much I
also liked analyzing them. My interest in making imaginary worlds greatly
informs the way that I look at and analyze imaginary worlds, since the
maker’s perspective helps to account for much of the shape of a world; even
when one has an initial plan, much world-building ends up being the result
of problem-solving and a good dose of serendipity. Only in retrospect did I
see the research value of some of my past activities, and how they provided
a good foundation for further study. Since then, my research has become
more deliberate, and even my work in video game studies was initially done
to better understand them as imaginary worlds, and as a part of the
background research necessary for this book.
Imaginary worlds are an interdisciplinary subject and can be approached
from many angles, but Media Studies, which acknowledges and accounts for
the windows through which imaginary worlds are so often seen, provides
the best basis for examining them as entities in and of themselves, laying a
foundation for contributions from other disciplines. At the same time, as a
convergence of concerns, methodologies, and interests from a variety of
other fields (including literary theory, film and television studies,
psychology, rhetoric, linguistics, semiotics, anthropology, sociology, and art
history), Media Studies is still relatively new as a field, while the study of
imaginary worlds has roots extending back more than a century.

Toward a Theory of Imaginary Worlds

Before the field of Media Studies existed in academia, the making of
imaginary worlds was discussed and theorized by writers and poets like
George MacDonald, J. R. R. Tolkien, Dorothy L. Sayers, and C. S. Lewis, and
later discussed as a practice in “how-to” books on world-building for writers,
like Orson Scott Card’s How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (1990) or
Stephen L. Gillett’s World-Building: A Writer’s Guide to Constructing Star
Systems and Life-Supporting Planets (1995). Lin Carter’s Imaginary Worlds:
The Art of Fantasy (1973) was one of the first book-length studies devoted to
examining imaginary worlds, though it was mainly limited to novels within
the fantasy genre. Tolkien in particular thought about imaginary worlds and
worked on them his entire adult life, revising and adding to his own
subcreation, as the posthumous 12-volume History of Middle-earth series,
which documents over five decades of his work on his world, can attest. It
was from Tolkien’s famous essay on imaginary worlds, “On Fairy-stories”,
that the term in the subtitle of this book was taken; “subcreation” was
Tolkien’s word for the making of imaginary worlds, the “sub” prefix
designating a specific kind of creation distinct from God’s ex nihilo creation,
and reliant upon it (thus “sub”, meaning “under”).
As poets and novelists, the authors mentioned above were mainly
practitioners creating their own worlds and theorizing what they were
doing, resulting in analyses concerned with authorial invention and
limitations, and the experience of the audience. From the 1960s onwards,
fictional worlds were studied from a philosophical point of view, using
“possible worlds” theory and modal logic, which consider the ontological
status of fictional worlds, the nature of their functioning, and their
relationship with the actual world. These ideas have been combined with
literary theory, setting the foundation for the study of imaginary worlds.
Philosophical writings on fictional worlds consider mainly questions of
language, with most of their examples taken from literature, thereby
neglecting imaginary worlds that are audiovisual in nature; Media Studies,
then, must pick up where they have left off.
Of course, scholarly work exists examining such things as The Lord of the
Rings (1954–1955), Star Trek, Star Wars, and the worlds of video games.
However, most approaches tend to be, at their core, either medium-oriented
(looking at a particular medium, and its form) or narrative-oriented (where
the focus is on story, or content), or some combination of these. While the
first approach considers the windows through which the world is seen, the
second comes only a little closer by examining stories set in the world,
rather than the world itself. Over the years, however, Media Studies
approaches have been drawing ever closer to the world as an object of study.
The notion of “media franchises”, for example, appeared in the early
twentieth century and dealt with more than a single medium or story, but it
was more concerned with the commercial impetus behind the production of
the world, which in earlier franchises was generally built around characters
(for example, the studio film franchises built around Tarzan, Andy Hardy,
Ma and Pa Kettle, Superman, and so on). Some of these franchises began to
be transmedial as well, appearing in comic books, serials, animated shorts,
radio dramas, and feature films.
Going beyond the idea of franchises, Marsha Kinder’s notion of a
“supersystem of entertainment”, introduced in her book Playing With Power
in Movies, Television, and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtle (1991), began to acknowledge the transmedial nature
that worlds often have, though it did not focus on the worlds themselves:
A supersystem is a network of intertextuality constructed around a
figure or group of figures from pop culture who are either fictional (like
TMNT, the characters from Star Wars, the Super Mario Brothers, the
Simpsons, the Muppets, Batman, and Dick Tracy) or “real” (like PeeWee
Herman, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Madonna, Michael Jackson, the
Beatles, and most recently, the New Kids on the Block). In order to be a
supersystem, the network must cut across several modes of image
production; must appeal to diverse generations, classes, and ethnic
subcultures, who in turn are targeted with diverse strategies; must foster
“collectability” through a proliferation of related products; and must
undergo a sudden increase in commodification, the success of which
reflexively becomes a media event that dramatically accelerates the
growth curve of the system’s commercial success.7
Like the idea of a franchise, the supersystem is mainly defined by
commercial concerns, and the figures at the center of a supersystem do not
need to have an entire world built around them. The “several modes of image
production” requirement rules out purely literary worlds, while
commodification and commercial success rule out other types of worlds. The
notion of a supersystem does acknowledge that a “network of
intertextuality” is needed, which worlds usually provide, and that these
phenomena are often transmedial ones. However, not all supersystems
qualify as worlds, and probably the majority of imaginary worlds would not
be considered supersystems according to Kinder’s criteria.
In Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (1997),
Janet H. Murray moved closer to examining imaginary worlds by noting
how they were being encouraged by new media and the changes in
consumption due to them. Describing nonlinear, continuing stories which
she calls “hyperserials”, she writes:
Probably the first steps toward a new hyperserial format will be the close
integration of a digital archive, such as a Web site [sic], with a broadcast
television program. Unlike the Web sites currently associated with
conventional television programs, which are merely fancy publicity
releases, an integrated digital archive would present virtual artifacts
from the fictional world of the series, including not only diaries, photo
albums, and telephone messages but also documents like birth
certificates, legal briefs, or divorce papers…. The compelling spatial
reality of the computer will also lead to virtual environments that are
extensions of the fictional world. For instance, the admitting station seen
in every episode of ER could be presented as a virtual space, allowing
viewers to explore it and discover phone messages, patient files, and
medical test results, all of which could be used to extend the current
story line or provide hints of future developments.… In a well-conceived
hyperserial, all the minor characters would be potential protagonists of
their own stories, thus providing alternate threads within the enlarged
story web. The viewer would take pleasure in the ongoing juxtapositions,
the intersection of many lives, and the presentation of the same event
from multiple sensitivities and perspectives.8
Murray’s prediction has come true, and what she describes is significant in
that it reflects the shift in audience attention from the central storyline to the
world in which the story takes place, where multiple storylines can
interweave in a web of story. This idea is taken a step further in Lev
Manovich’s notion of the “database narrative” discussed a few years later in
his book The Language of New Media (2001). In a section entitled “Database
and Narrative”, Manovich writes:
 As a cultural form, the database represents the world as a list of items,
and it refuses to order this list.… Some media objects explicitly follow a
database logic in their structure whereas others do not; but under the
surface, practically all of them are databases. In general, creating a work
in new media can be understood as the construction of an interface to a
database. In the simplest case, the interface merely provides access to the
underlying database.… The new media object consists of one or more
interfaces to a database of multimedia material. If only one interface is
constructed, the result will be similar to a traditional art object, but this
is an exception rather than the norm.
This formulation places the opposition between the database and the
narrative in a new light, thus redefining our concept of narrative. The
“user” of a narrative is traversing a database, following links between its
records as established by the database’s creator.9
Here, the database viewed through one or more interfaces sounds very much
like an imaginary world seen through various media windows; but
“database” is defined much more broadly, and the ordering of data into a
coherent world is not required.
Both Murray and Manovich conceive of multimedia works as generating
spaces through which users can explore the content of imaginary worlds,
each containing narrative (or at least informational) elements which add
detail to the imaginary world. The distribution of stories over and across a
variety of media is the idea behind what Henry Jenkins calls “transmedia
storytelling”, described in his book Convergence Culture: Where Old and
New Media Collide (2006).
10 In a sense, imaginary worlds have always
promoted convergence culture, since individual worlds have appeared
through multiple media windows ever since those windows became
available. Jenkins looks at how stories spill over from one media window to
another and interconnect with other narratives set in a world:
A transmedia story unfolds across multiple media platforms, with each
new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole. In
the ideal form of transmedia storytelling, each medium does what it does
best—so that a story might be introduced in a film, expanded through
television, novels, and comics; its world might be explored through game
 play or experienced as an amusement park attraction. Each franchise
entry needs to be self-contained so you don’t need to have seen the film
to enjoy the game, and vice versa. Any given product is a point of entry
into the franchise as a whole.11
In another section of the same essay, Jenkins discusses cult movies and what
makes them different from other films, writing:
Umberto Eco asks what, beyond being loved, transforms a film such as
Casablanca (1942) into a cult artifact. First, he argues, the work must
come to us as a “completely furnished world so that its fans can quote
characters and episodes as if they were aspects of the private sectarian
world.” Second, the work must be encyclopedic, containing a rich array
of information that can be drilled, practiced, and mastered by devoted
consumers.
The film need not be well made, but it must provide resources the
consumers can use in constructing their own fantasies: “In order to
transform a work into a cult object one must be able to break, dislocate,
unhinge it so that one can remember only parts of it, irrespective of their
original relationship to the whole.” And the cult film need not be
coherent: the more different directions it pushes, the more different
communities it can sustain and the more different experiences it can
provide, the better. We experience the cult movie, he suggests, not as
having “one central idea, but many,” as “a disconnected series of images,
of peaks, of visual icebergs.”12
The need for a “completely furnished world” emphasizes the world’s
importance, and its encyclopedic nature is another way of describing it as a
database narrative. Eco’s last point quoted here, that cult films do not have a
central idea but many ideas in a disconnected series, further seems to be
emphasizing the need for world-building beyond mere storytelling. Finally,
Jenkins comments on the shift from story to world as well:
More and more, storytelling has become the art of world-building, as
artists create compelling environments that cannot be fully explored or
exhausted within a single work or even a single medium. The world is
 bigger than the film, bigger than even the franchise—since fan
speculations and elaborations also expand the world in a variety of
directions. As an experienced screenwriter told me, “When I first started,
you would pitch a story because without a good story, you didn’t really
have a film. Later, once sequels started to take off, you pitched a
character because a good character could support multiple stories. And
now, you pitch a world because a world can support multiple characters
and multiple stories across multiple media.” Different franchises follow
their own logic: some, such as the X-Men (2000) movies, develop the
world in their first installment and then allow the sequels to unfold
different stories set within that world; others, such as the Alien (1979)
films or George Romero’s Living Dead (1968) cycle, introduce new
aspects of the world with each new installment, so that more energy gets
put into mapping the world than inhabiting it.13
Later in 2007, Jenkins would add a related comment in an article on his
website:
Most often, transmedia stories are based not on individual characters or
specific plots but rather complex fictional worlds which can sustain
multiple interrelated characters and their stories. This process of world-
building encourages an encyclopedic impulse in both readers and
writers. We are drawn to master what can be known about a world
which always expands beyond our grasp. This is a very different pleasure
than we associate with the closure found in most classically constructed
narratives, where we expect to leave the theatre knowing everything
that is required to make sense of a particular story.14
Recognizing that the experience of a world is different and distinct from that
of merely a narrative is crucial to seeing how worlds function apart from the
narratives set within them, even though the narratives have much to do with
the worlds in which they occur, and are usually the means by which the
worlds are experienced. David Bordwell has also noticed the growing
popularity of world-building, writing:
 Less widespread, but becoming very striking in recent years, is what we
may call “worldmaking”. More and more films have been at pains to
offer a rich, fully furnished ambience for the action.… The minutiae
accumulate into a kind of information overload.… Layered worlds,
complete with brand names and logos, became essential to science
fiction, but the tactic found its way into other genres, too. Perhaps
because 1970s location filming turned Hollywood away from spotless
sets, filmmakers sought richly articulated worlds that were grimy.… Star
Wars signaled the marketing potential of massive detailing. Lucas
remarked in 1977 that inventing everything from scratch—clothes,
silverware, customs—created a “multi-layered reality” … Story
comprehension was now multidimensional: a novice could follow the
basic plot, but she could enjoy it even more if she rummaged for
microdata in the film or outside it.15
Other works, like Jesper Juul’s book Half-Real: Video Games between Real
Rules and Fictional Worlds (2005), Edward Castronova’s Synthetic Worlds:
The Business and Culture of Online Games (2005), and many of the essays in
Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s Third Person: Authoring and
Exploring Vast Narratives (2009), discuss imaginary worlds and world-
building, albeit from different angles and for different purposes. The
attitudes and ideas found in these works, and in the above-mentioned works
of Kinder, Murray, Manovich, and Jenkins, are growing in the field of Media
Studies; and certain subfields within it, like video game studies, encourage
thinking about worlds as entities in and of themselves, instead of merely as
backgrounds in which narratives occur.16 One author, Michael O. Riley, has
already used this approach in his book Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of
L. Frank Baum (1997), where he writes in the book’s prologue:

No study, however, has examined his fantasy solely from the standpoint
of his Other-world or examined that Other-world as a whole.
Understandably, because Oz is what Baum is best remembered for, the
tendency has been to concentrate on his masterpiece, The Wonderful
Wizard of Oz, or to deal with his Oz series without giving much
emphasis to his non-Oz fantasies. Yet, Baum’s Other-world includes
much besides Oz, and Oz itself was not a static creation; it developed and
 changed over the course of the books in the series. Therefore, considering
Oz only as an inert, unchanging imaginary world can lead to confusion
and sometimes misunderstanding…. My approach will be to examine
each of Baum’s relevant fantasies (whether book-length or short story),
to analyze the glimpses of his Other-world, and to piece together a
picture of the way in which that world emerged, was changed, was
modified, or was enlarged from its beginning until Baum’s death. I will
also point out how that world and its development reflected the
circumstances of Baum’s life and his experiences of America. For the
purposes of this study, all his works of fantasy are of equal importance,
and there will be little attempt at critical evaluation of the books because
some stories that critics count among his weakest from the standpoint of
plot, characters, and theme are among his strongest from the standpoint
of the development of his Other-world.17
Riley is right in suggesting that new criteria are needed for the examination
of a world; the criteria used in more traditional literary criticism are not
world-centered and constitute a different focus, one that leaves out much
that is important to an analysis of world-building. In this book, then, I hope
to combine approaches like Riley’s with that of MacDonald, Tolkien, Jenkins,
and other authors, into an integrated examination of imaginary worlds from
a Media Studies perspective, looking at the history of their development and
their structures, as well as other areas like internarrative construction,
transmedial growth and adaptation, self-reflexivity, and authorship.
A focus on the worlds themselves, rather than on the individual narratives
occurring within them or the various media windows through which those
narratives are seen and heard, becomes more interesting the larger the world
is that one is considering, and can provide a more holistic approach to
analysis, especially when the worlds in question are transnarrative and
transmedial ones. An examination of the experience of subcreated or
secondary worlds also helps explain the disparity between the popular and
critical reception of films like those of the Star Wars prequel trilogy.
Whereas critics tend to be more interested in traditional categories like
acting, dialogue, character development, and story for their critiques,
audiences are often more concerned with the overall experience, especially
of the world that they are being asked to enter vicariously. As Eco’s
comments (quoted earlier) on cult objects suggest, imaginary worlds invite
audience participation in the form of speculation and fantasies, which
depend more on the fullness and richness of the world itself than on any
particular storyline or character within it; quite a shift from the traditional
narrative film or novel. As Louis Kennedy wrote in The Boston Globe in a
2003 review of the Matrix franchise entitled “Piece of Mind: Forget about
beginnings, middles, and ends. The new storytelling is about making your
way in a fragmented, imaginary world”:
… these movies aren’t about the things we have spent our lives thinking
movies are about—much less what older forms of storytelling, from
theater to novels, are about. They don’t care much about character
development or plot. They don’t care about starting at point A and
moving neatly and clearly to point B, with the action motivated by and
enriched by the believable, carefully portrayed needs and desires of the
humans who enact it.
But what they do care about, and deeply, is creating a world—a rich,
multifaceted, and complex environment that the viewer can enter and
explore in a variety of ways.… We can critique the makers of the
“Matrix” series, Larry and Andy Wachowski, for lots of things, but we
should not fall into the trap of calling them bad storytellers. They aren’t
storytellers at all. They are worldmakers.18
There is no doubt that franchised entertainment, and entertainment in
general, is moving more and more in the direction of subcreational world-
building. Science Fiction and Fantasy have been major mass-market
publishing genres for several decades now, and digital special effects
technology has renewed both genres in cinema. Many of the top-grossing
movies of all time take place in secondary worlds (such as Middle-earth,
Hogwarts Academy, and the Star Wars galaxy). Video games worlds have
become tough competition for the worlds of film and television, not to
mention those of novels and comics. And subcreated worlds often span all of
these media simultaneously.
For the writing of this book, I have had to find more generalized language
that reflects the transmedial nature of so many worlds. The term “author” is
used to include writers, filmmakers, game makers, and so on, whereas
“audience” includes readers, viewers, listeners, and players. The media
objects in which worlds appear, such as books, photographs, films, radio
plays, comics, and video games, are collectively referred to as the “works” set
in a world, which the audience “experiences” (by reading, watching,
listening, playing, and so on). Thus, general statements can be made about a
world and its use without being limited to specific media and media-related
activities.
Imaginary worlds have been referred to in a number of ways, many of
which appear throughout this book as well; as “subcreated worlds”,
“secondary worlds”, “diegetic worlds”, “constructed worlds”, and “imaginary
worlds”. While these terms are sometimes used interchangeably, each term
emphasizes different aspects of the same phenomenon. Tolkien’s term
“subcreated world” indicates the philosophical and ontological distinction
between creation and subcreation (and the dependence of the latter on the
former), while “secondary world” refers to a world’s relationship with our
own world, the “Primary World”. The term “diegetic world” comes from
narratology, and “constructed world” from popular culture, while “imaginary
world” is perhaps the broadest and least technical term, and it appears the
most often in this book, as a kind of default, unless a more specific term is
required.
I have tried to acknowledge the wide range of worlds in different media by
a variety of examples throughout this book, while at the same time I have
taken many examples from those worlds that are the most widely known,
including Tolkien’s Arda (in which Middle-earth is found), the universes of
Star Wars and Star Trek, and other popular worlds like those of Oz, Myst,
and The Matrix. In addition to being the most familiar and accessible, they
are also among the largest and most detailed and developed worlds, and
therefore rife with examples of much of what I will be discussing.
This book is divided into seven chapters, and arranged to set a foundation
in the first three chapters before proceeding to explorations of particular
aspects of imaginary worlds in the latter four. Chapter 1 attempts to define
imaginary worlds and lays the groundwork for a theoretical description of
how they operate, such as the way world-building extends beyond
storytelling, the engagement of the audience, and the way in which worlds
are experienced. Chapter 2 is a history of imaginary worlds, following their
development over three millennia from the fictional islands of Homer’s The
Odyssey to the present, looking at the new directions and uses for imaginary
worlds especially in the past century or so. It also follows some of the ways
conventions and tropes changed over time and how worlds adapted to new
technologies and new media windows through which they could be
experienced. Chapter 3 then examines the various infrastructures that are
used both by authors and audiences to hold a world together, keeping track
of all the relationships among thousands of elements, and also how these
structures might relate to each other.
I have already mentioned how imaginary worlds are often transnarrative,
transmedial, and transauthorial in nature, and these concerns are taken up in
the rest of the book. Chapter 4 looks at narrative as a structuring device, as
well as how multiple narratives set in a world can interact, resulting in what
one might call internarrative theory. Other ideas, like retroactive continuity,
multiverses, and interactivity are also considered in regard to narrative.
Chapter 5 focuses on a particular kind of situation in which subcreation is
itself a theme, resulting in self-reflexivity and subcreated subcreators.
Chapter 6 grazes the surface of an enormous topic, that of transmedial
growth and adaptation, and the demands they make on a world, as well as
some of the processes that occur when worlds make the jump between
media. Chapter 7 examines the transauthorial nature of imaginary worlds,
the resulting concentric circles of authorship, and related topics of
canonicity, participatory worlds, and subcreation’s relationship with
Creation. Finally, the book ends with a glossary of terms, and an Appendix
which is a timeline offering a sampling of 1440 imaginary worlds produced
across three millennia, along with the names of their authors and the works
in which they made their first public appearance.
Imaginary worlds are diverse, dynamic, and often ongoing projects, and
this book could easily have been many times the size that it is. Much
remains to be done in the realm of subcreation studies, and hopefully this
book can provide some framework for thinking about imaginary worlds, as
well as a point of departure for those who will venture off, like the early
explorers in traveler’s tales, into explorations of how worlds grow and
function and reflect our own world. And since our own Primary World has
become a highly mediated one, with much of what we know about it
coming through media rather than just direct experience, an understanding
of how secondary worlds are experienced and imagined by people may also
tell us something about the way in which we form a mental image of the
world we live in, and the way we experience it and see our own lives
intersecting with it.

OceanofPDF.com
1
WORLDS WITHIN THE WORLD

It was toward that point in space that I directed my thoughts, and,

completely permeated by the reading and study of my Starian books, I
crossed the Heavens faster than the speed of light; no longer did anything
Terrestrial occupy my thoughts; I believed that I really was on a planet in
the solar system of Star.

—Charles Ischir Defontenay, Star (Psi Cassiopeia)1

And then finally when you get far enough along in a thing, you feel as
though you’re living there—not just working at a painting, but actually
working in that valley. You’re there.

—Andrew Wyeth, painter2

Texts, media, are not just referential paths leading to worlds: to read a
text or to look at a painting means already to inhabit their worlds.

—Thomas G. Pavel, literary theorist3

To give oneself over to a painting, novel, movie, television show, or video

game is to step vicariously into a new experience, into an imaginary world.
This can be as true for the author of the work as it is for the rest of the
work’s audience. And when such works are well made, they can pull their
audience in so skillfully that not only is one’s imagination stimulated
without much conscious effort, but the whole experience is a pleasurable
one. Storytelling may be a part of it, but less often acknowledged is the draw
of the world itself, especially when that world is substantially different from
our own. Whether through verbal description, visual design, sound design,
or virtual spaces revealed through interaction, it is the world (sometimes
referred to as the storyworld or diegetic world) that supports all the
narratives set in it and that is constantly present during the audience’s
experience. And that experience may or may not include narrative;
enjoyment of a world can be done for its own sake, for example, by
interactively exploring the islands of Riven (1997), poring over floor plans
and technical specifications in Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical
Manual (1991), paging through the bizarre images and unreadable text of
Codex Seraphinianus (1981), or contemplating Naohisa Inoue’s paintings of
his world called Iblard. To invite an audience to vicariously enter another
world, and then hold them there awhile is, after all, the essence of
entertainment, which traces its etymology to the Latin roots inter meaning
“among”, and tenere meaning “to hold”.
How imaginary worlds work (when they are successful) depends on how
they are constructed and how they invoke the imagination of the audience
experiencing them. Worlds, unlike stories, need not rely on narrative
structures, though stories are always dependent on the worlds in which they
take place. Worlds extend beyond the stories that occur in them, inviting
speculation and exploration through imaginative means. They are realms of
possibility, a mix of familiar and unfamiliar, permutations of wish, dread,
and dream, and other kinds of existence that can make us more aware of the
circumstances and conditions of the actual world we inhabit.

The Philosophy of Possible Worlds

The notion that “things could have been otherwise than what they are” is the
idea behind the philosophy of possible worlds, a branch of philosophy
designed for problem-solving in formal semantics, that considers
possibilities, imaginary objects, their ontological status, and the relationship
between fictional worlds and the actual world. Possible worlds theory places
the “actual world” at the center of the hierarchy of worlds, and “possible
worlds” around it, that are said to be “accessible” to the actual world. These
worlds are then used to formulate statements regarding possibility and
necessity (that is, a proposition is “possible” if it is found in one of the
worlds, and “necessary” if it is found in all of them). One philosopher, David
Lewis, has even defended the extreme position that all possible worlds are as
real as our own world, at least to their inhabitants.4
 In the 1970s, philosophical ideas from possible-worlds semantics, speech-
act theory, and world-version epistemology made their way into literary
studies, to be used in the analysis of fictional worlds.5 They also helped
legitimize the notion that fiction can contain certain kinds of truth. One idea
emerging from these writings is an appreciation for the fact that imaginary
worlds can be represented at all. Philosopher Thomas G. Pavel calls realism
“a remarkably courageous project” and writes:
We confidently regard our worlds as unified and coherent; we also treat
them as economical collections of beings, our fits of ontological
prodigality notwithstanding. Since coherence and economy may not
stand up to scrutiny, we most often start by refraining from close
examination. The worlds we speak about, actual or fictional, neatly hide
their deep fractures, and our language, our texts, appear for a while to be
transparent media unproblematically leading to worlds. For, before
confronting higher-order perplexities, we explore the realms described
by compendia and texts, which stimulate our sense of referential
adventure and, in a sense, serve as mere paths of access to worlds: once
the goal is reached, the events of the journey may be forgotten.6
Over the next few decades, a number of books applied possible worlds
theory directly to the making of fictional worlds, most notably Nelson
Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking (1978), Thomas G. Pavel’s Fictional
Worlds (1986), Lubomír Doležel’s Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds
(1998), and Marie-Laure Ryan’s Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and
Narrative Theory (1991) and Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and
Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (2001). Goodman’s book is
concerned with how the worlds of science, art, and other practices are made
and related to each other, and the conflicts and truth-value they contain,
with fictional worlds touched upon mainly in the last chapters. Pavel’s book
narrows its focus to fictional worlds, their philosophical underpinnings, and
their ontological status and relationship to the actual world, but is still cast
in more general terms for the most part. Doležel makes the connections to
literary theory more firmly, using more specific analyses and examples from
literature. Like Pavel, he rejects philosophical notions that deny fiction’s
truth-value, or that do not allow for its unique position between actuality
and unreality:
The assertion that fictional texts have a special truth-conditional status
does not mean that they are less actual than imaging texts of science,
journalism, or everyday conversation. Fictional texts are composed by
actual authors (storytellers, writers) using the resources of an actual
human language and destined for actual readers. They are called
fictional on functional grounds, as media for making, preserving, and
communicating fictional worlds. They are stores of fictionality within
the world of actuality, where the products of the writers’ imaginations
are permanently available to receptive readers. However distant—
historically, geographically, culturally—they may be from the world-
creating act, readers have a standing invitation to visit and use the
immense library where imaginary realms are preserved.7
Doležel further develops the integration of possible worlds theory into
narrative theory, looking at the functioning of one-person narrative worlds
and multiperson worlds, the narrative modalities that shape the action
occurring in them, and the way texts bring fictional entities into being.
Ryan’s books go even farther with the application of possible worlds
theory to narrative theory, and her work overlaps the most with Media
Studies. In Narrative as Virtual Reality, Ryan considers how texts create
worlds and immerse audiences in them, including the effects of the
interactivity found in hypertext and video games and other forms of
participatory interactivity in mediated realms, and even the “world”
metaphor itself. Ryan considers immersion and interactivity and how they
relate to each other as well as to literary texts, and much of the discussion
has to do with the worlds in which texts are set and the reader’s
reconstruction of them during the reading process. She also considers
different types of fictionality; in the second chapter of her book Possible
Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory, Ryan identifies a series
of accessibility relations that can exist between a fictional world and the
actual world, looking at how they can share objects, chronological
compatibility, natural laws, analytical truths, and linguistic compatibility.
She shows how worlds can be devised that share some of these properties
while not sharing others, devising a list of genres based on what is shared
and what is not.
While the philosophy of possible worlds is a necessary starting point, it
tends to lean more toward the abstract and the conceptual nature of
imaginary worlds than practical particulars, and is more concerned with
status and modes of being than with experience and design (although here
Ryan is an exception, as her concerns coincide more with those of Media
Studies). According to Doležel, fictional worlds are a particular kind of
possible world, and are different from those of logic and philosophy; they
are inevitably incomplete, heterogeneous in their macrostructure (worlds are
composites of multiple domains), and constructs of textual poiesis (created
by authors through literature or other media).8 And, according to Nelson
Goodman, “Fiction, then, whether written or painted or acted, applies truly
neither to nothing nor to diaphanous possible worlds but, albeit
metaphorically, to actual worlds. Somewhat as I have argued elsewhere that
the merely possible—so far as admissible at all—lies within the actual, so we
might say here again, in a different context, that the so-called possible
worlds of fiction lie within actual worlds.”9
Ryan is the most explicit in her descriptions of textual worlds, first
summarizing how the concept of “world” involves a “connected set of objects
and individuals; habitable environment; reasonably intelligible totality for
external observers; field of activity for its members”,10 and then going on to
describe the process by which a world emerges from a text:
In the metaphor of the text as world, the text is apprehended as a
window on something that exists outside of language and extends in
time and space well beyond the window frame. To speak of a textual
world means to draw a distinction between a realm of language, made of
names, definite descriptions, sentences, and propositions, and an
extralinguistic realm of characters, objects, facts, and states of affairs
serving as referents to the linguistic expressions. The idea of textual
world presupposes that the reader constructs in imagination a set of
language-independent objects, using as a guide the textual declarations,
but building this always-incomplete image into a more vivid
representation through the import of information provided by
 internalized cognitive models, inferential mechanisms, real-life
experience, and cultural knowledge, including knowledge derived from
other texts.11
Ryan refers mainly to written texts made of words, but her description could
easily be enlarged to include imagery and sound as well (the transmedial
nature of imaginary worlds is discussed in Chapter 6).
The philosophy of possible worlds provides a philosophical foundation for
fictional worlds, and its application to narrative theory has helped to
emphasize the role of the world in which a story takes place. However, in
addition to focusing almost exclusively on narrative-based worlds, most
philosophical writings look mainly at questions of language, taking their
examples from literature, with far less examination of audiovisually-based
worlds and their representation (for example, Goodman touches upon
pictorial representation, mostly in contrast to linguistic representation, and
only more recent works like Ryan’s consider newer media like video games).
Certainly, text is easier to deal with, since it is linear and made of discrete
units, allowing quotation, dissection, and analysis to be done more easily
than similar analyses of imagery and sound. Imagery and sound can both
convey large amounts of information in a simultaneous fashion, and neither
can be adequately described in purely verbal terms. Imagery and sound
differ from text in their referential and mimetic abilities, and provide a much
different experience for an audience, or for an author constructing a world;
so practical concerns must be added to philosophical ones. For that, we must
turn to a consideration of imaginary worlds from the point of view of
building them and visiting them, found in the writings of authors who were
both theoreticians and practitioners of world-making.

Imagination, Creation, and Subcreation

In the eighteenth century, the empirical philosophy represented by Hobbes,
Locke, and Hume was the dominant force behind the conceptualization of
the mind as a storehouse of information and a blank slate or tabula rasa to
be written on by the senses. Imagination was seen as merely a function of
memory, the recollection of decaying sensory data that was to be brought
forth to mind after its objects were gone. For some philosophers, like
William Duff and Dugald Stewart, imagination might be able to combine or
associate ideas, but it was not seen as a truly creative force that could
produce something new.12 Poets like William Wordsworth and Samuel
Taylor Coleridge began to challenge these ideas with a conception of
imagination that was active and creative, and even present from the first
moments of perception. Coleridge saw the active mind as one way in which
human beings were made in God’s image:
Newton was a mere materialist—Mind in his system is always passive—a
lazy Looker-on on an external World. If the mind be not passive, if it be
indeed made in God’s Image, and that too in the sublimest sense—the
image of the Creator—there is ground for suspicion, that any system
built on the passiveness of the mind must be false, as a system.13
Thus, for Coleridge, imagination was a divinely-appointed attribute, and as a
result, even something of a sacred duty. As he wrote in a lecture of 1795:
But we were not made to find Happiness in the complete gratification of
our bodily wants—the mind must enlarge the sphere of its activity, and
busy itself in the acquisition of intellectual aliment. To develope [sic] the
powers of the Creator is our proper employment—and to imitate
Creativeness by combination our most exalted and self-satisfying
Delight. But we are progressive and must not rest content with present
Blessings. Our Almighty Parent hath therefore given to us Imagination
that stimulates to the attainment of real excellence by the contemplation
of splendid Possibilities…14
The contemplation of possibilities, rather than the recollection or
reconstruction of sensory data, meant a different type of imagination from
that which was traditionally conceived. In his examination of imagination,
Coleridge went on to make a distinction between these two types of
imagination, based on their subject matter and function:
The IMAGINATION then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The
primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent
of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the
 eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I
consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will,
yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and
differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves,
diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this process is rendered
impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is
essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and
dead.15
The Primary Imagination is what allows us to coordinate and interpret our
sensory data, turning them into perceptions with which we make sense of
the world around us. The Secondary Imagination “dissolves, diffuses,
dissipates” the concepts and elements of the world around us so as to
recreate something new with them. So the use of the Primary Imagination
occurs, for the most part, unconsciously, as we conceptualize the world
around us and our place in it, while the use of the Secondary Imagination,
by contrast, is conscious and deliberate, not done merely out of habit or
necessity but as a creative act.
But the Secondary Imagination needs limitations to function properly and
usefully. Used to its fullest extent, the Secondary Imagination can result in
the construction of an entire imaginary world, be it a city, island, country, or
planet. Such a world, though, as a whole, cannot be just a random jumble of
made-up things if it is to be believable enough to engage an audience. In
“The Fantastic Imagination”, the Introduction to The Light Princess and
Other Fairy Tales (1893), Scottish author George MacDonald began to
examine how Secondary Imagination is necessarily shaped by laws when it
is used to form an internally consistent world:
The natural world has its laws, and no man must interfere with them in
the way of presentment any more than in the way of use; but they
themselves may suggest laws of other kinds, and man may, if he pleases,
invent a little world of his own, with its own laws; for there is that in
him which delights in calling up new forms—which is the nearest,
perhaps, he can come to creation. When such forms are new
embodiments of old truths, we call them products of the Imagination;
 when they are mere inventions, however lovely, I should call them the
work of Fancy; in either case, Law has been diligently at work.
His world once invented, the highest law that comes next into play is,
that there shall be harmony between the laws by which the new world
has begun to exist; and in the process of his creation, the inventor must
hold by those laws. The moment he forgets one of them, he makes the
story, by its own postulates, incredible. To be able to live a moment in an
imagined world, we must see the laws of its existence obeyed. Those
broken, we fall out of it. The imagination in us, whose exercise is
essential to the most temporary submission to the imagination of
another, immediately, with the disappearance of Law, ceases to act…. A
man’s inventions may be stupid or clever, but if he does not hold by the
laws of them, or if he makes one law jar with another, he contradicts
himself as an inventor, he is no artist. He does not rightly consort his
instruments, or he tunes them in different keys.… Obeying law, the
maker works like his creator; not obeying law, he is such a fool as heaps
a pile of stones and calls it a church.
In the moral world it is different: there a man may clothe in new
forms, and for this employ his imagination freely, but he must invent
nothing. He may not, for any purpose, turn its laws upside down. He
must not meddle with the relations of live souls. The laws of the spirit
man must hold, alike in this world and in any world he may invent. It
were no offence to suppose a world in which everything repelled instead
of attracted the things around it; it would be wicked to write a tale
representing a man it called good as always doing bad things, or a man
it called bad as always doing good things: the notion itself is absolutely
lawless. In physical things a man may invent; in moral things he must
obey—and take their laws with him into his invented world as well.16
Once an imaginary world’s initial differences from the actual world are
established, they will often act as constraints on further invention,
suggesting or even requiring other laws or limitations that will define a
world further as the author figures out all the consequences of the laws as
they are put into effect (how laws form an underlying logic that shapes a
world is the subject of a section later in this chapter). MacDonald’s work
would also inspire another author, who produced one of the most successful
secondary worlds ever created: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Arda, in which lies the lands
of Middle-earth. Like MacDonald, Tolkien also theorized about what he was
doing.
Following Coleridge and MacDonald, Tolkien further refined and
combined their ideas, applying them to the building of imaginary worlds. In
his 1939 Andrew Lang lecture, a more developed version of which appeared
in print as “On Fairy-stories” in 1947 and again in a revised version of 1964,
Tolkien discussed authorial invention and extended the idea of Primary and
Secondary Imagination to the worlds to which they refer. He referred to the
material, intersubjective world in which we live as the Primary World, and
the imaginary worlds created by authors as secondary worlds. Tolkien’s
terms carefully sidestep the philosophical pitfalls encountered with other
terms like “reality” and “fantasy”, while also indicating the hierarchical
relationship between the types of worlds, since secondary worlds rely on the
Primary World and exist within it.
As a philologist, ever careful with words, Tolkien realized that the
ontological differences between the Primary World and secondary worlds
were enough that a similar distinction should be made when referring to
their creation. Like Coleridge, Tolkien saw Imagination as a Divine attribute
shared by humans, and creativity and the desire to create as one of the main
ways human beings were created in the image of God (an idea also found in
Nikolai Berdyaev’s The Destiny of Man (1931), in which he wrote, “God
created man in his own image and likeness, i.e., made him a creator too,
calling him to free spontaneous activity and not to formal obedience to His
power. Free creativeness is the creature’s answer to the great call of its
creator.” 17). Since human beings are created in the image of God, they also
have a desire to create, but the creative activity by which a secondary world
is made differs in both degree and kind from God’s ex nihilo (“from
nothing”) creative power used to bring the Primary World into being. Thus,
Tolkien termed the making of a secondary world “subcreation”, meaning
“creating under”, since human beings are limited to using the pre-existing
concepts found in God’s creation, finding new combinations of them that
explore the realm of possibilities, many of which do not exist in the Primary
World.18 Thus, a “subcreator” is a specific kind of author, one who very
deliberately builds an imaginary world, and does so for reasons beyond that
of merely providing a backdrop for a story.
“Subcreation”, as a noun, refers to both process and product and suggests
their inseparable nature, just as Tolkien saw language and idea as
inseparable. For Tolkien, language was the main means of subcreation,
which was made possible by the separation of the adjective from the noun:
When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from
blood, we have already an enchanter’s power—upon one plane; and the
desire to wield that power in the world external to our minds awakes. It
does not follow that we shall use that power well upon any plane. We
may put a deadly green on a man’s face and produce a horror; we may
make the rare and terrible blue moon to shine; or we may cause woods
to spring with silver leaves and rams to wear fleeces of gold, and put hot
fire into the belly of the cold worm. But in such “fantasy”, as it is called,
new form is made.… Man becomes a subcreator.19
Subcreation, then, involves new combinations of existing concepts, which, in
the building of a secondary world, become the inventions that replace or
reset Primary World defaults (for example, new flora and fauna, new
languages, new geography, and so forth). The more one changes these
defaults, the more the secondary world becomes different and distinct from
the Primary World. It is not surprising, then, that secondary worlds will in
many ways resemble the Primary World; not only because it is the source of
material, but also because it is this familiarity that lets us relate to a
secondary world, especially to its characters and their emotions. Secondary
worlds, then, have the same default assumptions as does the Primary World,
except where the author has indicated otherwise.
Like MacDonald, Tolkien was also interested in a secondary world’s effects
on those who enter it, and how such effects take place. Starting with the
audience’s state of mind and Coleridge’s ideas of “willing suspension of
disbelief” and “poetic faith”, Tolkien suggested that it was a new form of
belief, not disbelief, that was needed:
That state of mind has been called “willing suspension of disbelief”. But
this does not seem to me a good description of what happens. What
 really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful “subcreator”.
He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what
he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore
believe it while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises,
the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out
in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary
World from outside.… then disbelief must be suspended.… But this
suspension of disbelief is a substitute for the genuine thing…20
Tolkien goes on to call this necessary belief “Secondary Belief”, which is the
additional belief pertaining to the secondary world in question, rather than
merely a suspension of our knowledge as to how that secondary world exists
in the Primary World; that is, we imagine what the world would be like if it
really existed, instead of simply ignoring the fact that it is only a story told
in a book (or in other media). Secondary Belief relies on a secondary world’s
completeness and consistency, topics discussed later in this chapter.
In its broadest sense, subcreation covers more than just ideas, conceptual
inventions, and imaginary worlds; it could also include the physical works
of human beings in the world, since things like automobiles, violins,
turpentine, scimitars, and chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream did not
exist in the Primary World before human beings invented them. However,
this sense is far too broad to be useful here, and Tolkien’s use of the term
typically restricted it to the development of secondary worlds. Likewise,
every story is set in a world; but some storyworlds have a closer
resemblance to the Primary World, or are more integrated into the Primary
World, while others are more isolated or detached from the Primary World.
Some worlds are more detailed and developed, while others rely heavily on
existing Primary World defaults, with only a minimal amount of invention.
Thus, fictional worlds can be placed along a spectrum based on the amount
of subcreation present, and what we might call the “secondariness” of a
story’s world then becomes a matter of degree, varying with the strength of
the connection to the Primary World.

Degrees of Subcreation
Just as fictional worlds are a subset of possible worlds, secondary worlds are
a subset of fictional worlds, since secondary worlds are necessarily different
enough (and usually detached or separated in some way) from the Primary
World to give them “secondary” status. To qualify something as a secondary
world, then, requires a fictional place (that is, one that does not actually
appear in the Primary World); but a place is not always a world. The term
“world”, as it is being used here, is not simply geographical but experiential;
that is, everything that is experienced by the characters involved, the
elements enfolding someone’s life (culture, nature, philosophical
worldviews, places, customs, events, and so forth), just as world’s
etymological root word weorld from Old German refers to “all that concerns
humans”, as opposed to animals or gods. Often, this kind of world does
involve geographic isolation, as in the “lost worlds” found in literature;
islands, mountain valleys, underground kingdoms, or other places that are
uncharted and difficult to find or travel to. In order for a world to be
“secondary”, it must have a distinct border partitioning it from the Primary
World, even when it is said to exist somewhere in the Primary World (or
when the Primary World is said to be a part of it, as in the case of the Star
Trek universe containing Earth). A secondary world is usually connected to
the Primary World in some way, but, at the same time, set apart from it
enough to be a “world” unto itself, making access difficult (the ways that
secondary worlds are connected to the Primary World is examined in a
section later in this chapter). The secondary world’s remoteness and the
difficulty of obtaining entry into it make the world more believable, because
it becomes like any other place that the audience has heard of but is not
likely to have experienced in person due to its remoteness or lack of
accessibility, such as Tibet, Tuva, the depths of the African or Amazonian
jungles, the interior of a volcano, or the bottom of the ocean. Lack of
accessibility can also be due to lack of information; for example, Lake
Wobegon does not appear on maps due to incompetent surveyors, according
to its history.
The nature of the borders separating a secondary world from the Primary
World depends on the secondary world’s location and size, and points of
entry for passage between the two are often very limited. The parameters of
secondary worlds vary greatly, from whole universes to small towns or
villages that fully encompass its characters’ world. Moving down from the
large end of the scale, we find multiverses or parallel universes that contain
or are somehow connected to our own; entire galaxies that are separate from
our own but still in the same universe (like the Star Wars galaxy); series of
planets, which may include Earth among them (as in the worlds of Dune or
Star Trek); Earth itself, but with alternate histories or imaginary time
periods (like Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age or J. R. R. Tolkien’s First,
Second, and Third Ages) or Earth in the future (as in The Matrix series);
imaginary continents of the real Earth (like Robert E. Howard’s Thuria,
George R. R. Martin’s Westeros, or Austin Tappan Wright’s Karain
Continent); imaginary countries set in real continents (like Leo McCarey’s
Freedonia, Meg Cabot’s Genovia, Lia Wainstein’s Drimonia, Samuel Butler’s
Erewhon, or Norman Douglas’s Crotalophoboi Land); and finally, imaginary
cities, settlements, or towns (like Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Ashair, Paul
Alperine’s Erikraudebyg, or Lerner and Loewe’s Brigadoon). A single city or
town can qualify as a world unto itself if it is secluded enough from its
surroundings so as to contain most of its inhabitants’ experiences; Ashair is
set deep inside a volcano, Erikraudebyg is surrounded by mountains, and
Brigadoon only appears once in a while and its inhabitants are not allowed
to leave. Obviously, many fictional cities are less isolated; Stephen King’s
Castle Rock, John Updike’s Eastwick, and Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon,
for example, are much closer to towns of the Primary World, both
geographically and conceptually, and arguably far less “secondary” than the
other examples mentioned above. Only a more inclusive definition of
secondary world would include them, and then only because their authors
have set multiple stories in them and developed them to a greater degree
than most fictional towns or cities.
A world’s “secondariness” depends on the extent to which a place is
detached from the Primary World and different from it, and the degree to
which its fictional aspects have been developed and built (including such
things as how many stories are set there, whether the place has been
mapped, and how much its history has been developed). For example, Leo
Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869) could not really be said to contain a
secondary world, since its main action is set in the Primary World, in Russia,
during a real historical period, even though it includes fictional characters,
events, and places (such as characters’ homes and estates). On the other
hand, even though L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)
begins and ends in the Primary World (in Kansas), the majority of its action
takes place in the land of Oz, which clearly is part of a secondary world.
However, what about the Los Angeles of 2019 depicted in Blade Runner
(1982)? While Los Angeles is part of the Primary World, the city depicted in
the movie contains a great deal of invention not found in the actual Los
Angeles and is a place very different from the Primary World. Blade
Runner’s Los Angeles is as much a constructed environment as Oz, yet it
depicts a Primary World location, set in an alternate version of 2019
(released in 1982), in which replicants, artificial animals, flying cars, and
gigantic buildings not only exist but are common. Such examples
demonstrate that rather than having a strict delineation between Primary
and secondary worlds, we have something of a spectrum connecting them,
just as “fiction” and “nonfiction” are not as mutually exclusive as they may
first appear.
As secondariness is a matter of degree, it may be more useful to arrange
fictional worlds along a spectrum of attachment to, or reliance on, the
Primary World (as we know it) and its defaults; from those closest to the
Primary World, to the secondary worlds that are the farthest from it (that
contain the highest degree of subcreation). On the Primary World end of the
spectrum would be nonfictional autobiography, which claims as its subject
an individual’s actual lived experience, as told by that individual. Here, we
have actual events involving actual characters and actual places; but in even
the most careful autobiography, some reconstruction of events occurs (either
consciously or unconsciously) due to imperfections of memory, and thus an
element of fiction enters into the world depicted.21 Biography and historical
documentary, which recounts events and experiences of others, adds more
speculation into the mix; and openly speculative documentary, which
questions its own material and often foregoes the truth-claims found in
traditional documentary, may even suggest multiple versions of events or
possibilities.
Moving down the spectrum, historical novels (or films) leave the realm of
documentary, creating fictional versions of actual events, characters, and
places. For example, in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Napoleon invades Russia,
Moscow is burned, and the French are eventually forced to retreat; but on a
smaller scale, characters and places (like Pierre and Nicolai, and their
estates) are invented, and even Napoleon has fictional actions and dialogue
attributed to him. While such novels may try to remain true (at least in
spirit) to history, they will necessarily invent some characters and places as
well, though often in a way that disrupts the continuity of the Primary
World as little as possible. As we move further down the spectrum, the
notion of “historical”, or even “realistic”, applies less and less, as stories
increasingly replace or reset Primary World defaults, even though the stories
are still ostensibly set within the Primary World. Here we find what we
might call “overlaid worlds”; for example, the stories involving Spider-man
(a.k.a. Peter Parker) are set in a version of New York City in which Spider-
man and the super-villains he fights remain conspicuously in the public eye,
both in person and in the media. In such cases, fictional elements are
overlaid onto a real location, but without separating a secondary world from
the Primary World.
In all of the cases mentioned so far, story events occur in places that are a
part of, or are closely associated with, the Primary World. Such fictional
locations are designed to be typical of the kinds of places that they represent;
for example, Tara in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936) is
designed to be a typical Southern plantation during the Civil War era.
Characters who live at or visit Tara are not really leaving the Primary World,
they are still in the midst of it. Nevertheless, fictional places can be designed
to be set apart, even detached, from the Primary World, so that there is more
of a distinct boundary between them; although such a boundary, too, is a
matter of degree. As places are set farther away from populated and well-
known areas, their remoteness and inaccessibility begin to isolate them from
the Primary World, making them into separate or secondary worlds.
Uncharted islands, desert cities, hidden mountain kingdoms, underground
realms, and other planets are also often populated with inhabitants who
never leave them, and who do not know of the Primary World as we know
it. Customs, languages, cultures, and even flora and fauna can diverge from
those of the Primary World, and become almost completely independent of
them. The greater the amount of such invention occurs in a world, the more
“secondary” it becomes when compared with the Primary World.
Detachment or separation from the Primary World can also occur
temporally; worlds set in the ancient (or even imaginary) eras of the past, or
in the unknowable future, can also be made to differ from the known
Primary World (as hinted in author L. P. Hartley’s claim that “The past is a
foreign country; they do things differently there.”22). For stories set in the
future, greater temporal distance usually results in more Primary World
defaults being changed; stories set in the near-future can be similar enough
to the Primary World to be merely overlaid worlds, whereas far-future
stories usually depict an Earth very different and alien from our own.
Secondary worlds that differ the most from the Primary World contain the
most subcreation, and are thus the kinds of worlds most discussed in this
book, and to which its focus will be narrowed: secondary worlds that are
geographically distinct from the Primary World (even when they are said to
exist somewhere on Earth), and those that are used for stories whose action
occurs mainly within a secondary world, even though those stories’
characters may come from, return to, or otherwise visit the Primary World.
These worlds, in their isolation and uniqueness, are complex entities, wide-
ranging in their variety, sometimes made for no other reason than to create
vicarious experiences for their audiences, and interesting in their own right
apart from the stories that they often contain.
Thus, before embarking on examinations of these worlds, it will first be
useful to examine how they are related to, and differ from, the stories that
occur in them.

Story vs. World: Storytelling and World-building

Worlds often exist to support the stories set in them, and they can even have
stories embedded in them, for example, in “environmental storytelling” as
described by theme park designer Don Carson.23 Yet, while the telling of a
story inevitably also tells us about the world in which the story takes place,
storytelling and world-building are different processes that can sometimes
come into conflict. One of the cardinal rules often given to new writers has
to do with narrative economy; they are told to pare down their prose and
remove anything that does not actively advance the story. World-building,
however, often results in data, exposition, and digressions that provide
information about a world, slowing down narrative or even bringing it to a
halt temporarily, yet much of the excess detail and descriptive richness can
be an important part of the audience’s experience.24 World information that
does not actively advance the story may still provide mood and atmosphere,
or further form our image of characters, places, and events. A compelling
story and a compelling world are very different things, and one need not
require the other. For example, as Oz scholar Michael O. Riley writes of L.
Frank Baum’s works, “stories that critics count among his weakest from the
standpoint of plot, characters, and theme are among his strongest from the
standpoint of the development of his Other-world.”25 At the same time, it is
usually story that draws us into a world and holds us there; lack of a
compelling story may make it difficult for someone to remain vicariously in
a secondary world.
Since stories involve time, space, and causality, every story implies a world
in which it takes place. Worlds can exist without stories, but stories cannot
exist without a world. As Doležel describes it:
Fictional semantics does not deny that the story is the defining feature of
narrative but moves to the foreground the macrostructural conditions of
story generation: stories happen, are enacted in certain kinds of possible
worlds. The basic concept of narratology is not “story,” but “narrative
world,” defined within a typology of possible worlds.26
Yet, while a story takes place in a world, it need not show us very much of
that world (though stories set in a secondary world are set there for a
reason, typically tied to the uniqueness of the secondary world; the story
simply could not be set in the Primary World, or else it would be). A world
can have multiple stories set in it, and need not be dependent on any
particular story for its existence. However, story and world usually work
together, enriching each other, and if an author has been careful in the
construction of a story, the world will appear to exist beyond the immediate
events, locations, and characters covered in the story. Therefore, while all
stories are set in some kind of world, what I will refer to here as a
“traditional” story is a narrative work in which world-building generally
does not occur beyond that which is needed to advance the story, as opposed
to narrative (or even nonnarrative) works whose worlds are deliberately
built beyond the immediate needs of whatever narrative material may be
present.
 World-building is often something that occurs as a background activity,
allowing storytelling to remain in the foreground of the audience’s
experience. At times, however, world-building may overtake storytelling.
Due to secondary worlds’ differences, subcreative works often exhibit an
“encyclopedic impulse” for explanatory interludes; points at which the
narrative halts so that information about the world and its inhabitants can
be given. Descriptions of landscapes, peoples, customs, backstories, and
philosophical outlooks are given either by the main character directly to the
audience if a story is told in first person, or experienced by the main
character and the audience together (with the main character as a stand-in
for the audience), with expository passages in which other characters
introduce lands and peoples. In worlds designed primarily for entertainment
(like James Cameron’s Pandora in Avatar (2009)), for satirical purposes (like
Samuel Butler’s Erewhon), for the purpose of scientific speculation (like A.
K. Dewdney’s Planiverse), or for thought experiments of a philosophical
nature (like those of Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams (1992)) or a political
or social nature (like Thomas More’s Utopia), exposition regarding the
peculiarities of a secondary world can completely overtake narrative,
reducing it to little more than a frame story or a means of moving through
and joining together the various descriptions of aspects of the world. In
many video games, narrative also becomes a way of providing a context for
the games’ action; in particular, adventure games and games with a three-
dimensional environment often emphasize exploration and navigation of the
game’s world, making them an important part of the player’s experience.
Nor does a subcreated world have to be built along a single, main storyline
at all. If the encyclopedic impulse for explanatory interludes is taken a step
further, a series of fragments can form an aggregate picture of a world and
the culture and events within it. In her novel Always Coming Home (1985),
Ursula K. LeGuin describes the Kesh, the people who live in the Valley,
through a variety of narrators and an assortment of brief stories, fables,
poems, artwork, maps, charts, archaeological and anthropological notes and
brief essays, all without a main character or central storyline (a woman
named Stone Telling comes closest to being a main character, but her story
only covers a fraction of the book). There are even extreme cases in which
documentation takes the place of narrative completely, for example, Luigi
Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus, a profusely illustrated 360-page book
written in an untranslated made-up language that is designed to look like a
scientific treatise describing the flora, fauna, inventions, and civilizations of
an unnamed imaginary world. With an unreadable text, one can only
browse and speculate, with each page adding to the experience of the world
depicted (see Figure 1.1).

FIGURE 1.1 An example of world documentation without narrative: typical

pages from the enigmatic Codex Seraphinianus, (1981) by Luigi Serafini.
(Image courtesy of Luigi Serafini, Codex Seraphinianus, Milano, Franco
Maria Ricci, First Edition, 1981.)
The political, social, and philosophical thought experiments in the worlds
mentioned earlier are also examples of how the subcreator of a world has
more strategies available for the embedding of worldviews into a work than
does the author of a traditional story. Traditional stories give authors a
number of ways of integrating ideologies and worldviews into their work; in
perhaps the most commonly used method, characters embody different
points of view, and story events cause these views to confront each other.
For example, in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880), the brothers
Dmitri, Ivan, and Alyosha each embody different philosophical outlooks that
come into conflict and determine the direction of the story. The way actions
and consequences are connected also imply a worldview; whether criminals
pay for their crimes or go unpunished, how events lead one to the next,
where characters’ actions take them in the end—all of these things, when
combined, indicate a particular view of how the world operates, or should
operate. And stylistic choices form a work, make certain demands on an
audience, and imply a worldview: consider the long, rambling sentences of
William Faulkner compared to the short, staccato sentences of James Ellroy;
or the long takes of a Miklós Jancsó film compared to the quick cutting
found in so many contemporary action films; each imbues its material with
different meanings and changes its effect on the audience. For most authors,
the tools of traditional storytelling are sufficient for the expression of ideas
embedded in their works; but some require tools and strategies that are only
available through world-building.
World-building results in the subcreation of new things and the changing
of assumptions regarding existing and familiar things that are usually taken
for granted. Even simple changes in wording can change the default
assumptions underlying a world. Instead of “the door closed”, consider
Robert Heinlein’s use of “the door dilated”.27 It suggests not only a different
architecture and technology, but also a society technologically advanced to
the point where such doors are possible. Why such a door would need to be
used raises other questions: Why a dilating door instead of a swinging one?
Is it to save space? Such a door would probably be automated, instead of
hand-operated, and even require a power source; if so, what does that say
about the culture and people from which it arises? And so on.
Nor does invention end with technology; besides using characters to
embody worldviews, a subcreator can invent new cultures, races, and
species whose very existence can imply certain ideas or outlooks. In Ursula
K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), the Gethen are an
androgynous people who can become either male or female, allowing the
author to comment on sexism and cultural biases in new ways. J. R. R.
Tolkien’s Elves are an immortal race who must stay in Arda (the world)
until it ends, and they come to envy Men their mortality, allowing for
extended commentary regarding Death and Immortality, the main theme of
The Lord of the Rings. The culture and customs of Samuel Butler’s
Erewhonians are a satirical reflection of nineteenth-century Britain, though
the analogies are not made explicit. By changing the defaults of the Primary
World, especially in playful ways that reveal and reverse audience
expectations, secondary worlds can make strange the familiar by exploring
alternatives to the ordinary.
That secondary worlds often differ markedly from the Primary World has
led some people to consider them “unrealistic”, which is to miss the point of
most secondary worlds. While secondary worlds may represent strange and
fantastic alternative worlds, to automatically claim that they are “escapist”
(with the term being applied pejoratively) is to do them an injustice. Tolkien
himself dealt with such accusations, writing:
… it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which
“Escape” is now so often used: a tone for which the uses of the word
outside literary criticism give no warrant at all. In what the misusers are
fond of calling Real Life, Escape is evidently as a rule very practical, and
may even be heroic. In real life it is difficult to blame it, unless it fails; in
criticism it would seem to be the worse the better it succeeds. Evidently
we are faced by a misuse of words, and also a confusion of thought. Why
should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out
and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about
other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not
become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in
this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more,
they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the
Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.28
When one considers that the stories set in many secondary worlds often
include oppression, conflict, war, and dark times for their characters, it soon
becomes clear that these are not worlds that someone would want to
physically escape to, much less reside in.
Having examined how worlds are distinct from the stories set in them, and
how “secondariness” is a matter of degree, we may now turn to the three
main properties needed to produce a secondary world, hold it together, and
make it distinct from the Primary World.

Invention, Completeness, and Consistency

If a secondary world is to be believable and interesting, it will need to have a
high degree of invention, completeness, and consistency. Of course, no
secondary world can be as complete as the Primary World, inconsistencies
are increasingly likely as a world grows, and no world can be the product of
invention to the point that there is no longer any resemblance to the
Primary World. Nevertheless, unless an effort is made in all of these
directions, the resulting subcreation will fail to create the illusion of an
independent world. Without enough invention, you will have something set
in the Primary World, or something quite close to it: our world with
vampires or aliens added, or some new technology, or some strange
occurrence that sets the story in motion; but not a world unique, different,
and set apart from our own. Without an attempt at completeness, you have
the beginnings of expansion beyond the narrative, but not enough to suggest
an independent world; too many unanswered (and unanswerable) questions
will remain which together destroy the illusion of one. And without
consistency, all the disparate and conflicting pieces, ideas, and designs will
contradict each other, and never successfully come together to collectively
create the illusion of another world.
At the same time, as each of these three properties grows, world-building
becomes more challenging. The more complete a world is, the harder it is to
remain consistent, since additional material has to be fit into existing
material in such a way that everything makes sense. Completeness also
demands more invention, as more of the world is revealed. The more
invention a world contains, the more difficult it is to keep everything in that
world consistent, since every Primary World default that is changed affects
other aspects of the world, and those changes in turn can cause even more
changes. Likewise, consistency will limit what kind of invention is possible
as a world grows. Therefore, all three properties must be considered
simultaneously as the world takes shape and develops.

Invention
Invention can be defined as the degree to which default assumptions based
on the Primary World have been changed, regarding such things as
geography, history, language, physics, biology, zoology, culture, custom, and
so on. These differences, obvious markers indicating a work’s status as
fiction, must be carefully presented (in the case of audiovisual media,
designed and constructed as well) to be believable. Credibility is not only a
matter of their technological construction (laughable failures in this area
include the bad special effects in B-movies), but also their design, which
must incorporate a certain logic to seem real and practical, instead of merely
fanciful or random. Believable design is especially important for genres like
fantasy and science fiction, which typically contain more invention than
other genres. Tolkien recognized this need, writing:
Fantasy, of course, starts out with an advantage: arresting strangeness.
But that advantage has been turned against it, and has contributed to its
disrepute. Many people dislike being “arrested”. They dislike any
meddling with the Primary World, or such small glimpses of it as are
familiar to them. They, therefore, stupidly and even maliciously
confound Fantasy with Dreaming, in which there is no Art; and with
mental disorders, in which there is not even control: with delusion and
hallucination.… Fantasy also has an essential drawback: it is difficult to
achieve. Fantasy may be, as I think, not less but more subcreative; but at
any rate it is found in practice that “the inner consistency of reality” is
more difficult to produce, the more unlike are the images and the
rearrangements of primary material to the actual arrangements of the
Primary World. It is easier to produce this kind of “reality” with more
“sober” material. Fantasy thus, too often, remains undeveloped; it is and
has been used frivolously, or only half-seriously, or merely for
decoration: it remains “fanciful”. Anyone inheriting the fantastic device
of human language can say the green sun. Many can then imagine or
picture it. But that is not enough—though it may already be a more
potent thing than many a “thumbnail sketch” or “transcript of life” that
receives literary praise.
To make a Secondary World inside which the green sun will be
credible, commanding Secondary Belief, will probably require labour
and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish
 craft. Few attempt such difficult tasks. But when they are attempted and
in any degree accomplished then we have a rare achievement of Art:
indeed narrative art, story-making in its primary and most potent
mode.29
The degree and depth to which something is invented depends on the skills
of the subcreator and the needs of the work. Invention will inevitably play a
crucial role in whatever story is present; otherwise, there would be no need
for invention and the story could simply be set in the Primary World. Even if
the world exists for its own sake, with story added as a mere structuring
device, the ideas behind the changes of Primary World defaults will dictate
the degree to which they are changed.
We can divide Primary World default changes (in which invention occurs)
into four distinct realms, each of which affects the design of a world on a
different level. The first involves changes in the nominal realm, in which
new names are given for existing things. Very little in the way of world
defaults is changed in such a case, although new language may be invented.
New names may call attention to different aspects of familiar things, or even
define new concepts, since language bears an inherent cultural worldview
within it (another tool available to the subcreator). Almost every world
features new names, but usually more than just names are changed, since a
new language usually implies a new culture.
The most changes to be found are in the next level, the cultural realm,
which consists of all things made by humans (or other creatures), and in
which new objects, artifacts, technologies, customs, institutions, ideas, and
so forth appear. In addition to these, authors have invented new countries
and cultures, new institutions and orders (like the Jedi, Bene Gesserit, or the
Aes Sedai), and even new concepts, like J. R. R. Tolkien’s “mathom” or Philip
K. Dick’s “kipple”.30 The use of fictional cultures allows an author to
comment on existing cultures by contrast, and create hypothetical situations
without the limitations and connotations that would come with the use of
an existing culture. At the same time, fictional cultures are often modeled
after real cultures, using different combinations of their traits that an
audience might find familiar, but in new configurations, some which play
with stereotypes and audience expectations in interesting ways (like the
androgynous Gethen of LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness mentioned
earlier, or the Tassulians of C. I. Defontenay’s Star (1854) who are all
hermaphrodites). Cultures like the Gethen and the Tassulians rely on new
species of beings, which brings us to the boundary of culture and nature.
The third level is the natural realm, which includes not only new
landmasses (or other places like underground regions), but new kinds of
plants and animals, and new species and races of creatures. The unique
aspects of these creatures are often crucial for the role they play in their
world and its stories; for example, the Hobbits in The Lord of the Rings or
the sandworms in Dune. Invention in this area sometimes extends beyond
individual species of plants and animals to entire ecosystems that integrate a
number of them together (as in the film Avatar (2009)). Because this level
goes deeper than that of cultural things, invention in the natural realm must
either rely on convention (for example, well-known fictional animals like
unicorns, dragons, and griffins) or attempt to have some plausible
explanation relating to biology and zoology if some degree of verisimilitude
is desired (which it may not be). On a small scale, invention in the natural
realm proposes new flora and fauna, while on a larger scale, it may propose
new planetary forms, such as the worlds of Larry Niven’s Ringworld series
or Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, which have planets shaped like rings
and discs, respectively.
The deepest level is the ontological realm itself, which determines the
parameters of a world’s existence, that is, the materiality and laws of
physics, space, time, and so forth that constitute the world. For example, the
worlds of Edwin Abbott’s Flatland (1884) and A. K. Dewdney’s The
Planiverse (1984) are both set in two-dimensional universes very different
from our own, and in both cases, their books are dominated by the
encyclopedic impulse described earlier, using narrative as little more than a
vehicle to explain their worlds. Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams also
features vignettes of universes in which time and space behave differently,
and reflects philosophically on each one. A number of common science
fiction conventions, including faster-than-light travel, other dimensions,
time travel, and wormholes used for interstellar travel, usually imply laws of
physics that are different from those currently understood, but the full
consequences of such differences are typically not carried out in the design
of the world. In the few instances where this does happen (as in The
Planiverse), the world necessarily takes center stage and narrative becomes
little more than a frame story used for advancing the exploration (and
explanation) of the world. As such, relatively few books subcreate at this
depth.
Of these four levels, the first two involve things more easily changed by
humans (or other creatures), while the last two are usually far more difficult
to shape or control.31 The second and third, covering culture and nature,
have the greatest balance between familiar Primary World defaults and new
subcreated ones. This seems to be the best combination for Secondary Belief
as well. All invention that occurs in a world must remain analogous, in some
way, to the Primary World in order to be comprehensible (unless, of course,
if the whole point is that something is not able to be understood, like the
sentient sea in Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (1961), which the story’s scientists
know is intelligent even though they are unable to find a way to
communicate with it).
Successful invention may spill over into other worlds; objects and ideas
that prove useful or solve narrative problems can appear in multiple worlds
and even become generic conventions. Faster-than-light spaceships, laser
guns, magical swords, incantations, wormholes, changelings, anti-gravity
technology, elves, dragons, clones, force fields, sentient robots, and other
tropes of science fiction and fantasy have all transcended their worlds of
first appearance to become familiar and acceptable conventions that need
little explanation or justification when they appear in a new world, provided
the work they appear in is of the right genre. (Some things, though, have
been overused to the point of becoming clichés; those of the Fantasy genre
are brilliantly collected in Diana Wynne Jones’s book The Tough Guide to
Fantasyland (1996).)
However, there are certain areas in which invention usually does not
occur, because it would be detrimental to narrative and the audience’s
experience. In order for a world to be taken seriously, audiences have to be
able to relate to a world and its inhabitants, comparing their situations to
similar ones in the Primary World. As a result, we rarely find stories based
on non-humanoid characters like amoebas or gasbags living in Jupiter’s
atmosphere; and when we do, they are inevitably anthropomorphized to
make their experiences relatable (like the lives of the rabbits in Richard
Adams’s Watership Down (1972)). Worlds must also retain some form of
causality, concepts of good and evil, and emotional realism. Without
causality, narrative is lost. The way that events are connected by causality
may change greatly, but causality must be present for actions to have
foreseeable consequences and for events to cohere into a narrative form.
Likewise, what cultures consider to be good and evil may vary, but the
concepts themselves must be present, as they are in all human cultures.
Without them one would have not only lawlessness, but all narrative would
become pointless, since it would no longer matter what characters did or
what happened to them (as discussed in the MacDonald quote given earlier).
Finally, emotional realism is necessary for character identification. Emotions
may be differently expressed or even be suppressed (as they are for Star
Trek’s Vulcans), but they must be present in character interactions. A lack of
emotional realism will make empathy difficult, severely limiting or even
eliminating identification with the world’s characters.
In order to maintain audience interest, invention must take audience
knowledge into account and attempt to avoid implausibilities that could
disrupt a world’s believability. Even though audiences know something is
not real, Secondary Belief is easier to generate if the proposed inventions fit
in with what the audience knows (or does not know) about the Primary
World. A story set on another planet does not contradict any known facts,
since we do not know what life there may be on other planets. Likewise, a
fictional island in the South Pacific we can reasonably accept, because few
people can claim to know all the islands in the Pacific. However, invention
that conflicts with what the audience already knows is harder to accept; for
example, a fictional U.S. state would make Secondary Belief more difficult
for an American audience who know the 50 states than for a foreign
audience who did not. Likewise, a fictional African country may be easier
for an audience to accept than a fictional North American country, simply
because there are more African countries and fewer people who can name
all of them.32 In 1726, Jonathan Swift could claim Brobdingnag to be located
on a peninsula off the California coast, because his audience was European
and far less familiar with the lands across the ocean that were still being
explored (and, of course, because he was writing a satire). If invention
blatantly contradicts what we already know, it can only work in a
lighthearted fashion (like the fictional U.S. states of Missitucky in the
Broadway musical Finian’s Rainbow (1947) and Michisota in Lisa Wheeler’s
children’s book Avalanche Annie: A Not-So-Tall Tale (2003)); or as an
alternate reality or a thinly veiled version of a real place (like Sinclair
Lewis’s Gopher Prairie, based on Sauk Centre, Minnesota; Leo Edwards’s
Tutter, based on Utica, Illinois; or William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha
County, believed to be a version of Lafayette County, Mississippi); or as a
composite that typifies a kind of state without referencing any particular
real one (for example, the Colorado-like state of Fremont in James
Michener’s Space (1982) or Winnemac, the half-midwestern, half-eastern
state in the novels of Sinclair Lewis). Fictional counties, cities, and towns,
however, are easier to accept, because there are so many real ones, that quite
likely no audience member will know them all (though the invention may
seem contrived if one happens to live right where the fictional place is
supposed to be).
Invention, then, is what makes a secondary world “secondary”. Despite the
initial freedom that a subcreator seems to have when inventing, each
invention and changed default places limitations on further directions the
world can develop in, making systems of integrated inventions more
difficult, the more completely one has invented a world.

Completeness
Imaginary worlds are inevitably incomplete; Lubomír Doležel has even
suggested that incompleteness is “a necessary and universal feature” of
fictional worlds, and one of the main ways they differ from the actual
world.33 True completeness is impossible; so completeness, then, refers to the
degree to which the world contains explanations and details covering all the
various aspects of its characters’ experiences, as well as background details
which together suggest a feasible, practical world. Stories often have very
incomplete worlds, and world detail beyond what is necessary to tell the
story is often considered extraneous. However, if a world is to be important
to an author or audience, to be the setting of a series of stories or a franchise,
or just be compelling enough that an audience will want to vicariously enter
the world, then completeness—or rather, an illusion of completeness—will
become one of the subcreator’s goals (with the exception of enigmas and
deliberate gaps that arouse speculation, which are discussed toward the end
of this chapter). As Tom Shippey puts it in The Road to Middle-earth (2003),
“the more unnecessary details are put in, the more lifelike we take fiction to
be.”34
While stories require a certain degree of completeness to be convincing
and satisfying, including such things as well-rounded multi-dimensional
characters and sufficient backstory to explain motivation, worlds need
additional information to appear fully developed and convincingly feasible.
To begin with, characters must have some source of food, clothing, and
shelter to survive, and come from some kind of culture. On a larger scale,
communities will likely need some form of governance, an economy, food
production, a shared form of communication, defense against outsiders, and
other such things. Some things may be central to the story, while others may
only be in evidence in background details, with just enough hints provided
for the audience to answer basic questions concerning a character’s
subsistence and livelihood. Even questions left unanswered will not disturb
an audience if there is enough information present for them to piece
together or at least speculate as to what the answer might be. So long as
audiences do not find their questions unanswerable, the world will appear to
be sufficiently complete. It may take some work to gather and relate the
relevant details in order to answer a particular question; but such effort is
exactly what many fans enjoy, and such activities fuel debate and further
speculation about a world.
For example, we might question the feasibility of the desert settlements on
the planet Tatooine, as seen in Episodes I, II, III, IV, and VI of the Star Wars
films, beginning with basics like food and water. We are told that Owen Lars
runs a moisture farm, with vaporators that collect water from the
atmosphere. In some shots, there are clouds in the sky, so water vapor is
present (and the clouds seen in Episode IV were actually present over
Tunisia when the film was shot, so it is realistic). So they have water, but is
there enough? While the Lars homestead appears to be in a remote and
unpopulated area, Mos Eisley and Mos Espa are relatively large cities; this
can be seen in the various street scenes and establishing shots. Even if there
is enough water, what about Tatooine’s food supply? There appear to be no
farms, and certainly not enough moisture for growing crops (though in
Episode II we are told that Shmi used to pick mushrooms off of the
vaporators). No trees of any kind are seen anywhere, and very little
greenery appears, except for a few small houseplants on the Lars
Homestead, and a bit of greenery growing in the background of two shots in
Episode IV when Luke leaves with C-3P0 to find R2-D2 (see Figure 1.2).
FIGURE 1.2 Evidence of plant life on Tatooine. In the top image alone, one
can find nine instances of plant life growing in the Lars homestead. In the
center image, Aunt Beru holds a large vegetable (actually fennel) which she
uses for cooking. In the bottom image, one can see a fringe of greenery
growing in the valley along the path over which Luke’s landspeeder passes
as Tusken Raiders watch from above. All images from Star Wars Episode IV:
A New Hope (20th Century Fox, 1977).

Yet, we see meals being eaten in people’s homes on Tatooine in Episodes I,

II, and IV. Where does the food come from? One clue might be found in the
merchants’ stalls in the streets of Mos Espa. In Episode I, Jar Jar Binks steals
a froglike gorg from one stall, where many more are hanging. Are these
animals imports from other planets, or are they native? In an exterior shot of
Jabba the Hutt’s palace in Episode VI, we see another larger creature shoot
out its tongue and eat a smaller creature. And there are much larger animals
on Tatooine as well; for example, a herd of banthas are seen in Episode VI,
and dewbacks are seen in Episodes I and IV. Dewbacks are creatures large
enough to ride, and banthas are the size of elephants. So how do these desert
creatures survive? Larger animals can eat smaller ones, but at some point in
an ecosystem the animals need plants to eat, and some source of water.
Some plant life is indicated: in Episode IV, Luke’s Aunt Beru is seen putting
a vegetable of some kind into a blender-like machine; in Episode I there is a
bowl of fruit on the table in the Skywalker hovel; and in Episode II, when
Shmi Skywalker is a captive of the Tusken Raiders, she is tied to a frame
made of thick wooden branches inside a hut. Where do the vegetables, fruit,
and wood come from? We might suppose that there are other areas of
Tatooine that are vegetated, but all shots of the planet from space do not
show any green or blue areas (though we do not see all of the planet’s
surface in these shots).
If we suppose that Tatooine’s food is imported from other planets, what
does this mean for the planet’s economy? What exports might they have to
balance trade? Such questions are better answered for the planet Arrakis in
Frank Herbert’s Dune series. Arrakis, also known as Dune, is a desert planet
whose main export is the expensive spice called melange, which is produced
by Dune’s sandworms and required by Guild Navigators for interstellar
travel (which is only possible using the spice). The valuable spice gives Dune
political importance, and helps make the planet economically feasible in the
process, since whoever controls the planet controls spice production. Herbert
even includes a short section at the back of Dune (1965) entitled “The
Ecology of Dune”. Could Tatooine be similar? At one point in Episode IV,
Luke, believing what his Uncle Owen has told him, says that his father “was
a navigator on a spice freighter”, which sounds very much like Dune. In the
background of a desert shot in Episode IV, we can see a long skeleton of
what appears to be a snake-like animal, that could have been inspired by
Dune’s sandworms (the central part of the Sarlaac also looks a bit like one;
and sandworms on Tatooine are mentioned in the short story “Sandbound on
Tatooine” by Peter M. Schweighofer, and in the video game Super Star Wars
(1992) for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System). Finally, the sector that
Tatooine is in is called Arkanis, which is very close to Arrakis, suggesting
that Tatooine’s design may have been influenced by Dune.35
Therefore, the movies are somewhat inconclusive about food and plant life
on Tatooine. If we go beyond the movies into the Star Wars “Expanded
Universe”, which includes media beyond the films, we find that there are a
few native plants on Tatooine. The plants growing at the Lars homestead are
“funnel flowers” (first identified as such in The Illustrated Star Wars
Universe (1995)); according to Barbara Hambley’s 1995 book The Children of
the Jedi, “deb-debs” are sweet fruits grown in oases; and “hubba gourds”
appear in a few works, their first appearance being in the short story “Skin
Deep: The Fat Dancer’s Tale” by A. C. Crispin.36 Also, the Star Wars Wiki
database, Wookieepedia, tells us that the gorg seller in Episode I is named
Gragra, and that she “was a Swokes Swokes gorgmonger that worked in the
marketplace of Mos Espa” who “grew her food in a sewer zone underneath
Mos Espa.”37 The additional details do not fully answer our questions, and
even raise questions of their own, but they do hint at what solutions there
might be.38
While this example requires information to be drawn from several sources
and combined, for fans familiar with a franchise, such an activity makes use
of their specialized knowledge (rewarding them for the time and effort they
have invested the franchise) and their gap-filling may occur more quickly
and automatically than audience members with less familiarity, resulting in
a different experience of the world. In this particular case, we can even see
how knowledge of multiple worlds (in this case, those of Star Wars and
Dune) can influence the process of extrapolation. While casual audience
members only interested in following a narrative will not actively piece
together such world data or pursue them in different venues, they can still
get a sense of how well a world seems to be fleshed out and revealed, and
this may affect the reception of the work as a whole (see the discussion of
world gestalten in the following text).
The completeness of a world is what makes it seem as though it extends
far beyond the story, hinting at infrastructures, ecological systems, and
societies and cultures whose existence is implied but not directly described
or clearly shown. Likewise, a sense that a world has a past history is also
necessary for it to seem complete. Tolkien was very aware of the need for an
implied background and history, writing about The Lord of the Rings in two
of his letters:
It was written slowly and with great care for detail, and finally emerged
as a Frameless Picture: a searchlight, as it were, on a brief episode in
History, and on a small part of our Middle-earth, surrounded by the
glimmer of limitless extensions in time and space.39
Part of the attraction of The L. R. [The Lord of the Rings] is, I think, due
to the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like
that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a
distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist. To go there is to destroy the magic,
unless new unattainable vistas are again revealed.40
The “glimpses of a large history” that result in a “Frameless Picture” aid the
illusion of completeness, and the feeling of the unexhausted, or better still,
inexhaustible, landscape of the world keeps it fresh for exploration and
speculation (a topic covered later in this chapter).
Apart from direct exposition, there are many ways of indicating the
existence of a past history, from extended backstories to the inclusion of
ruins and legends, to more subtle things, like the condition of objects. When
Star Wars (1977) was first released, it was noted for the way it portrayed a
lived-in universe; vehicles and equipment had dirt, scratches, rust, and other
grit that contributed to a “used” appearance with the wear-and-tear of a past
history. Such silent evidence of a past can now be found in any visual
medium, and has become an important part of building mood and
atmosphere in the worlds in which it appears.
Completeness varies along with the effect the author desires; for example,
some postmodern texts will revel in their incompleteness and foreground it.
Whatever the case, the completeness of a secondary world determines in
large part how believable a world will be, but the depth and detail added to
a world must be done carefully if contradiction is to be avoided. A feeling of
completeness will only be possible if the world also has an inner consistency
that holds all of its many details together in agreement.

Consistency
Consistency is the degree to which world details are plausible, feasible, and
without contradiction. This requires a careful integration of details and
attention to the way everything is connected together. Lacking consistency, a
world may begin to appear sloppily constructed, or even random and
disconnected. Consistency may provide the most restraints for a subcreator,
since it involves the interrelationship of the various parts of the world, and
is one of the main ways that a secondary world attempts to resemble the
Primary World.
The likelihood of inconsistencies occurring increases as a world grows in
size and complexity, but it is also important to note where inconsistencies
occur when they do, to determine how damaging to credibility they will be.
Inconsistencies can occur in the main storyline, secondary storylines,
background details, world infrastructure, or world mechanics.
Inconsistencies in the storylines distract and disrupt the audience’s mental
image of the story as they follow it, especially if they occur in the main
storyline driving the work along; inconsistencies in secondary storylines
may have a less harmful effect, but will still weaken the overall impression
of the work. Background details that are not crucial to the story can tolerate
more inconsistency, especially if they go relatively unnoticed, or if they are
not actively used in any of the storylines. World infrastructure and world
mechanics are even further in the background, and both are usually present
in only partial representations; for instance, the economic system or
ecological systems of the world and the way they function and operate (like
the question of food and water on Tatooine). Inconsistencies in these areas
are usually far less noticeable, as their constituent parts (the facts that are in
conflict) may be spread out throughout the story or the world, and would
need to be considered together for any contradiction to be noticeable.
Consistency is necessary for a world to be taken seriously, but of course,
not all worlds ask to be taken seriously. Some, like Springfield, the town
where The Simpsons (1989–present) is set, use inconsistencies as a source of
humor, or merely place the desire for variety and humor above the need to
be consistent. Springfield’s geography is always changing, as is the Simpson
family’s own history. In the episode “Lisa’s First Word” from season 4, we
learn that Lisa was born during the 1984 Summer Olympics, while the
episode “That ‘90s Show” from season 19 features Homer and Marge when
they were dating, without any kids, in the 1990s. And of course, the entire
Simpson family has remained the same age for the 20+ years the show has
been around. Likewise, super-spy James Bond has remained roughly the
same age over more than four decades of films, while the world around him
keeps pace with the times.
Nevertheless, consistency is often taken seriously, even as a world grows to
an enormous size. Leland Chee, the continuity database administrator for
Lucas Licensing, maintains a Star Wars database of over 30,000 entries on all
the characters, places, weapons, vehicles, events, and relationships from the
Star Wars universe. The database was not started until the late 1990s, after
two decades worth of Star Wars material had been released, resulting in the
organization of several levels of canonicity (see Chapter 7) in an attempt to
deal with the inconsistencies. Since then, Chee’s office has become the force
behind Star Wars consistency, as movies, TV series, games, toys, and other
merchandise can be compared with and integrated into the franchise’s
existing world information. The Star Trek universe, however, spread over an
even longer time period beginning with the original series in 1966, has
hundreds of television episodes, novels, games, an animated TV series, and
more material to coordinate. Stylistic inconsistencies between The Original
Series and the later series (of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s) are occasionally
even noticed by characters within the Star Trek universe itself. For its time
travel story, one episode of Deep Space Nine, season 5, “Trials and Tribble-
ations”, composites its characters into footage from The Original Series
season 2 episode, “The Trouble with Tribbles”, and was broadcast to coincide
with Star Trek’s thirtieth anniversary. The DS9 characters dress in period
costumes, comment on the difference of styles, and in one scene, the
differences in the design of the Klingons’ makeup are foregrounded. In The
Original Series, Klingons looked much more like humans, with a minimum
of makeup to suggest their foreignness, while in later series the Klingons’
features, particular the forehead ridges, were much more pronounced. Since
Worf, one of the time-traveling DS9 characters, was a Klingon of the later
design, the differences were particularly noticeable. This was acknowledged
when another DS9 character, the human O’Brien, sees the older style of
Klingons and asks about the difference, to which Worf replies, “They are
Klingons … and it is a long story.” When pressed, he adds, “We do not discuss
it with outsiders.” Years later, two episodes of StarTrek: Enterprise
(“Affliction” and “Divergence”) would explain the differences as the result of
a virus, which caused the physical changes as well as a change in the
Klingons’ temperament and disposition.41
Discussions of canonicity and speculation as to how inconsistencies might
be resolved can be found on various Internet forums for a variety of
franchises. What is interesting is the degree to which fan communities want
to see inconsistencies resolved; although they would seem to threaten the
believability of a world more than the lack of completeness or invention,
inconsistencies are treated by these fans as though they are merely gaps in
the data, unexplained phenomena that further research and speculation will
sort out and clear up. In some cases they are, while other inconsistencies are
too incongruous to explain and too damaging to be left alone. Sometimes
gaps must be filled before the conflicting information surrounding them
makes it impossible to fill them; at this point, someone authorized by the
franchise must step in and figure out how to reconcile multiple sources and
bring them into agreement. For example, Star Wars fans always wondered
what the floor plan of the Millennium Falcon was, and the exact size of the
spaceship. A ten-page article on the topic appeared on Starwars.com in 2008,
which explained:
Despite repeated efforts by scholars, artists and fans, the interior of the
Millennium Falcon eluded definitive mapping. Artists Chris Reiff and
Chris Trevas finally cracked the puzzle that is the Falcon in the 2008
 boxed set from DK Books, Star Wars Blueprints: The Ultimate
Collection.… Hindering attempts at defining the Falcon’s true specs were
the flexible requirements of filmmaking, which often favored cost-saving
cheats rather than to-the-rivet accuracy in the ship’s various depictions.
Even the most basic question did not produce a simple answer: how big
is the Falcon?
If one were to use the studio interior sets seen in Episode IV and
Episode V as a foundation of scale, it became apparent that they simply
could not fit comfortably within the Falcon’s exterior dimensions as
defined by the ILM models. If the cockpit indicated a certain size, then
the hull height meant Han, and especially Chewie, would have to crouch
to walk around the crew compartments. Furthermore, the full-sized
Falcon exterior built for The Empire Strikes Back was, in actuality, about
75–80 percent of its intended true size, if one were to make an imaginary
blow-up of the ILM miniature to the appropriate dimensions.
Years of expanded universe publishing used an estimate of 87.6 feet
(26.7 meters) as the Falcon’s official length, but Reiff and Trevas
discovered that that would be an impossibility. Using a 1976 scale
illustration by visual effects art director Joe Johnston as a foundation,
and comparing the known lengths of X- and Y-wing fighters, they came
up with a measurement of about 110 feet (33.5 meters). Unfortunately,
Johnston’s sketch was too sketchy for it to produce an accurate
measurement.
Trevas and Reiff used their blueprints to further refine the Johnston-
scaled Falcon and came up with a surprising number. “The first time we
measured, it very nearly came out to 113.8 feet,” says Reiff. “When I
suggested we use that length, Lucasfilm thought it would sound like we
made it up.” That measurement, you see, looks an awful lot like an Easter
Egg reference to THX 1138. The artists instead rounded up to 114 feet.42
The article goes on to relate how Rieff and Trevas used a variety of other
sources to map the Falcon: images from freeze-framed HD copies of the
films for interior and exterior layouts, control panel designs, maps of the
underside lights, gun placements, hatches, doors, and landing gear;
measurements of the sets built for the films; various scale models and props;
the Star Wars Radio Drama (which described several escape pods); West End
Games’s 1987 Star Wars Sourcebook floor plans; Shane Johnston’s drawings
of the Falcon’s interior in Starlog’s Star Wars Technical Journal published in
1993; Wizards of the Coast floor plans (which showed the location of the
ship’s bathroom); a 1997 cut-away poster illustration from SciPubTech; an
expansive exploded view by Hans Jenssen in DK Books’s Star Wars:
Incredible Cross Sections (1997); a three-dimensional walkthrough from the
CD-ROM Behind the Magic (1998); Timothy Zahn’s novel Allegiance (2007);
and the fact that a hyperdrive had to be included and fit into the overall
design. At least in the case of Star Wars, the amount of effort put into
answering such questions and restoring consistency can sometimes equal
that of actual historical researchers establishing facts and revising earlier
claims as new data conflicts with them.
Occasionally, franchise creators will even go back and alter earlier works
to make them consistent with later ones, a process now referred to as
“retroactive continuity” or “retcon” (see Chapter 4). Famous examples of
retconning include J. R. R. Tolkien revising The Hobbit (1937) to bring it into
alignment with The Lord of the Rings (since the Ring did not originally have
many of the properties it was given later), or George Lucas’s many
alterations to the Star Wars re-releases. While controversial among fan
communities, retcon is more common in superhero comic books, and
sometimes attempts are made to explain it away through the use of time
travel, alternate universes, dreams, and other questionable techniques. And
one can find lighthearted approaches toward it as well; on the British TV
show Torchwood, a drug used to erase memories is called “Retcon”.43 The
death of an author who leaves works unfinished can also result in
inconsistencies, which may or may not be reconcilable by those who carry
on his work. While the Tolkien Estate does not approve of or allow new
works set in Middle-earth to be written by other authors, it does allow
Tolkien’s own unpublished material to appear, including multiple drafts of
his works, sometimes resulting in partial and even conflicting versions of
stories. In the foreword to The Silmarillion (1977), Christopher Tolkien
wrote:
On my father’s death it fell to me to try to bring the work into
publishable form. It became clear to me that to attempt to present,
 within the covers of a single book, the diversity of materials—to show
The Silmarillion as in truth a continuing and evolving creation extending
over more than half a century—would in fact lead only to confusion and
the submerging of what was essential. I set myself therefore to work out
a single text, selecting and arranging in such a way as seemed to me to
produce the most coherent and internally self-consistent narrative.… A
complete consistency (either within the compass of The Silmarillion
itself or between The Silmarillion and other published writings of my
father’s) is not to be looked for, and could only be achieved, if at all, at
heavy and needless cost.44
Arda, Tolkien’s subcreated world in which Middle-earth appears, is one of
the largest and most detailed worlds ever made by a single author. It is
amazing how consistent it is, given its expansiveness, fine level of detail, and
span of more than 6,000 years. Yet, some inconsistencies still remain, though
they are usually what we might call “aggregate inconsistencies”, things that
are not readily noticeable unless one combines several facts which one
would not normally consider together, and which would go unnoticed by
casual readers. For example, in The Hobbit, there is the question of Bilbo and
Gollum and their ability to understand each other when they meet under the
mountain. Gollum, or Sméagol as he was known (as we later learn in The
Lord of the Rings), originally came from a different variety of hobbits, the
Stoors, who lived in another region of Middle-earth. As Tolkien explained in
a draft of a letter to A. C. Nunn:
With the remigration of the Stoors back to Wilderland in TA 1356, all
contact between this retrograde group and the ancestors of the Shirefolk
was broken. More than 1,100 years elapsed before the Déagol–Sméagol
incident (c. 2463). At the time of the Party in TA 3001, when the customs
of the Shire-folk are cursorily alluded to insofar as they affect the story,
the gap of time was nearly 1,650 years.
All hobbits were slow to change, but the remigrant Stoors were going
back to a wilder and more primitive life of small and dwindling
communities; while the Shire-folk in the 1,400 years of their occupation
had developed a more settled and elaborate social life, in which the
 importance of kinship to their sentiment and customs was assisted by
detailed traditions, written and oral.45
Even though “hobbits were slow to change”, the two groups were on
markedly different paths of development, and the passage of over 1,500 years
would surely find them so different that it is hard to believe that their
language would remain so unchanged that Bilbo and Gollum could
communicate without any difficulty. Considering Tolkien’s careful treatment
of language (and language change) throughout his work, it is surprising that
such a discrepancy exists; but to notice the inconsistency, one must integrate
information from The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Letters of J. R.
R. Tolkien. If The Hobbit is considered alone, there appears to be no
discrepancy.
As worlds grow in size and detail, aggregate inconsistencies become more
likely, but in many cases, they are so spread out, requiring so many
disparate facts to be considered together, that they are more likely to go
unnoticed. Yet, fans are often very knowledgeable about their favorite
franchises, and even enjoy catching such inconsistencies and trying to
explain and reconcile them with their own theories.46 And this kind of
activity requires one to be thoroughly immersed in the world in question.

Immersion, Absorption, and Saturation

Much has been written about “immersion” in regard to a user’s experience
with new media.47 The term is typically used to describe three different
types of experiences, which exist along a spectrum. On one end, there is the
physical immersion of user, as in a theme park ride or walk-in video
installation; the user is physically surrounded by the constructed experience,
thus the analogy with immersion in water. Moving away from the
surrounding of the entire body, there is the sensual immersion of the user, as
in a virtual-reality-driven head-mounted display that covers the user’s eyes
and ears. While the user’s entire body is not immersed, everything the user
sees and hears is part of the controlled experience; another example, a step
further down the spectrum, would be the watching of a movie in a darkened
theater, or a video game with a three-dimensional space through which the
player’s avatar moves; in such cases, the audience vicariously enters a world
through a first-person point of view or an on-screen avatar. Finally, on the
other end of the spectrum is conceptual immersion, which relies on the
user’s imagination; for example, engaging books like The Lord of the Rings
are considered “immersive” if they supply sufficient detail and description
for the reader to vicariously enter the imagined world.
It is also interesting to note how certain media, like newspaper and radio,
are usually not considered immersive, even though a newspaper, when
opened in front of the reader, fills more peripheral vision than does a book
or television screen, and music on the radio literally surrounds a listener
physically with sound waves. Part of the reason these media are usually not
considered immersive is that neither is likely to provide the kind of vivid
experience of going elsewhere, into a different place, that one can find in
other more “immersive” media.48 Thus, it would seem that an imaginary
world is an aid to conceptual immersion. The metaphor of “immersion”, the
further it moves away from actual, physical immersion, becomes less of an
analogy of what is happening, and only covers the first step of the
experiencing of an imaginary world. In some of the examples of immersion
described above, one might be “immersed”, but cease to be much more than
that. A theme park ride will successfully physically immerse someone, but
may still be uninvolving mentally and emotionally. A virtual space seen
through a head-mounted display may likewise dominate a person’s sensory
registers, but fail to interest a person beyond merely looking around.
On the other hand, for conceptual or emotional immersion to occur, the
audience must be fully engaged with the work at hand; thus, to speak only
of “immersion” is not enough, and an additional liquid metaphor is needed;
that of absorption.49
Absorption differs from immersion in that it is a two-way process. In one
sense, the user’s attention and imagination is absorbed or “pulled into” the
world; one willingly opens a book, watches a screen, interacts with a game
world, and so forth. At the same time, however, the user also “absorbs” the
imaginary world as well, bringing it into mind, learning or recalling its
places, characters, events, and so on, constructing the world within the
imagination the same way that that memory brings forth people, events, and
objects when their names are mentioned. Thus, we are able to mentally
leave (or block out) our physical surroundings, to some degree, because
details of the secondary world displace those of the Primary World while we
are engaged with it. As psychologist Norman Holland describes it:
We humans have a finite amount of attention or “psychic energy.”
Attention is a way of focusing that limited energy on what matters. If
we concentrate on one thing, an important thing, we pay less attention
to other things. Those other things become unconscious (or, more
accurately, “preconscious” in Freud’s term). If we use more energy and
excitation in one prefrontal function, following the play or story, we
have less energy available for other prefrontal functions, like paying
attention to our bodies or to the [Primary] world around that play or
story.50
Since details of the secondary world displace those of the Primary World in
the audience member’s attention, the more details the secondary world asks
the audience to keep in mind (especially details important to the
understanding and enjoyment of the story), the more “full” the audience’s
mind is of the secondary world, and the more absorbing the experience of it
becomes (the challenge of remembering and integrating a wealth of detail
can make absorption similar to Mihaly Csíkszentmihílyi’s notion of “flow”,
another liquid metaphor).
Thus, we can add a third liquid metaphor to complete the process; that of
saturation.
51 When there are so many secondary world details to keep in
mind that one struggles to remember them all while experiencing the world,
to the point where secondary world details crowd out thoughts of the
immediate Primary World, saturation occurs (as in the quote from
Defontenay’s Star (1854) given at the start of this chapter). Saturation is the
pleasurable goal of conceptual immersion; the occupying of the audience’s
full attention and imagination, often with more detail than can be held in
mind all at once. And some worlds do require a great deal of attention,
concentration, and memory, if one is to appreciate all the nuances and
subtleties that an author can offer. The Silmarillion, for example, includes an
“Index of Names” listing 788 entries for all the characters, places, titles, and
terms used in the book.52 To make matters even more difficult, certain
characters have multiple names (Túrin, for example, is also known as
Neithan, Gorthol, Agarwaen, Mormegil, Thurin, Wildman of the Woods, and
Turambar), and several names are shared by more than one character, place,
or thing (for example, Celeborn, Elemmirë, Gelmir, Gorgoroth, Lórien,
Minas Tirith, Míriel, and Nimloth all refer to more than one person or place).
And Tolkien’s names almost always carry meaning as well; after the “Index
of Names” is an appendix entitled “Elements in Quenya and Sindarin
Names” that lists 180 root words and their meanings, from which the
majority of the 788 entries in the “Index of Names” are formed. Many of the
book’s characters are related in elaborate family trees, and these
relationships often play an important role in the stories. Throughout the
book, various events are alluded to long after they have occurred, or are
foretold long before they occur, requiring the reader to remember a good
deal in order to understand the events and motivations behind them. And
The Silmarillion, in turn, acts as a backdrop and backstory for The Lord of
the Rings, which frequently alludes to its material and, in a sense, is The
Silmarillion’s climax and conclusion. For example, Aragorn is distantly
related to Beren, whose romance with Lúthien mirrors Aragorn’s romance
with Arwen; and Aragorn is also the heir of Isildur, whose weakness and
fate he hopes will not match his own. While one can read and enjoy The
Lord of the Rings without having read The Silmarillion, knowledge of The
Silmarillion adds to the story’s depth and nuance, enhancing the reader’s
pleasure and understanding.
Saturation can affect one’s experience of an imaginary world in other
ways as well. In many video games, especially those of the adventure game
genre, players must be able to remember a wealth of details about the
game’s imaginary world in order to put together its backstory and solve
puzzles, both of which are often needed to win the game (as in Riven (1997)).
The worlds of the largest massively multiplayer on-line role-playing games
(MMORPGs), with their vast territories, millions of player-characters, and
ongoing events, are too large for any player to know in their entirety,
allowing even the most hardcore players to achieve saturation.
Worlds offering a high degree of saturation are usually too big to be
experienced completely in a single sitting or session. The amount of detail
and information must be great enough to overwhelm the audience, imitating
the vast amount of Primary World information which cannot be mastered or
held in mind all at once. This overflow, beyond the point of saturation, is
necessary if the world is to be kept alive in the imagination. If the world is
too small, the audience may feel that they know all there is to know, and
consider the world exhausted, feeling there is nothing more to be obtained
from it. A world with an overflow beyond saturation, however, can never be
held in the mind in its entirety; something will always be left out. What
remains in the audience’s mind then, is always changing, as lower levels of
detail are forgotten and later re-experienced and re-imagined when they are
encountered again. For example, someone can read Tolkien’s works in grade
school, high school, college, and later; and with each re-reading, the reader
will notice new things, make new connections, and re-imagine events and
characters due to the reader’s own changed level of maturity and experience.
While this can also occur with smaller works that do not reach the same
levels of saturation or overflow, it is those that do that provide more
interesting re-visioning, as forgotten details return in new imagined forms,
and new configurations of detail and information inhabit the reader’s mind.
Even in the case of visual media like film and television, where images and
sounds are concrete and fixed, the way we imagine the unseen parts of the
world may change with each viewing. We may ask different questions and
focus on different aspects that we had not previously considered, resulting in
a different experience insofar as our speculation and imagination is
concerned. These differences arise due to the way we complete narrative and
world gestalten, which also depends on our own previous experience.

World Gestalten: Ellipsis, Logic, and Extrapolation

The reader makes implicit connections, fills in gaps, draws inferences
and tests out hunches; and to do this means drawing on a tacit
knowledge of the world in general and of literary conventions in
particular. The text itself is really no more than a series of “cues” to the
reader, invitations to construct a piece of language into meaning.…
Without this continuous active participation on the reader’s part, there
would be no literary work at all.

—Terry Eagleton, literary theorist53

 The automatic filling in of gaps by an observer was first noted in Gestalt
psychology, which began in the early twentieth century and saw the whole
as being more than the sum of its parts. In particular, the gestalt principles of
emergence, reification, good continuity, closure, and prägnanz all have to do
with how the human perceptual system organizes sensory input holistically,
automatically filling in gaps, so that the whole contains percepts that are not
present in the individual parts from which it is composed. While a few
principles have been applied to sound, most Gestalt principles apply to
vision, and the way one perceives and completes an image, adding details,
connections, or forms that are not actually present.
As the Eagleton quote in the preceding text suggests, the idea of the gestalt
can be usefully applied not just to the perceptual realm, but the conceptual
realm as well. For example, in classical Hollywood film continuity, when we
see a person drive off in a car in one scene and arrive at a different location
in the next scene, we automatically assume they have driven from one place
to another; a narrative gestalt occurs, as the departure and arrival together
suggests a journey we have not seen. Like visual gestalten, narrative
gestalten occur automatically and seemingly without much conscious effort
on the part of the viewer, provided the viewer is familiar with the cinematic
storytelling conventions being used. Biographical films like Gandhi (1982)
and The Last Emperor (1987) may cover several decades of someone’s life in
only a few hours, resulting in a staggering amount of omission and ellipsis,
and yet such stories, if they are well constructed and include the right
events, can seem complete and comprehensible.
Likewise, we can go one step further and suggest the idea of world
gestalten, in which a structure or configuration of details together implies
the existence of an imaginary world, and causes the audience to
automatically fill in the missing pieces of that world, based on the details
that are given. Psychologists have already considered how our imagination
constructs our own internal version of the real world (as in Steven Lehar’s
book The World in Your Head: A Gestalt View of the Mechanism of
Conscious Experience (2002)) but the same processes can, to a degree, be
applied to our imagining of secondary worlds as well (as Norman Holland
demonstrates in Literature and the Brain).54
 Naturally, the gaps existing in world information overlap considerably
with gaps in the narrative. Narrative theory attempts to answer how
narrative gaps work and how the audience tries to fill them. In Narration
and the Fiction Film (1985), David Bordwell uses the Russian formalist
notions of “fabula” (the story we construct from the causal, spatial, and
temporal links that a narrative provides) and the “syuzhet” (how the film
arranges and presents the fabula) when discussing how narrative gaps are
filled:
The analysis of narration can begin with the syuzhet’s tactics for
presenting fabula information. We must grasp how the syuzhet manages
its basic task—the presentation of story logic, time, and space—always
recalling that in practice we never get ideally maximum access to the
fabula. In general, the syuzhet shapes our perception of the fabula by
controlling (1) the quantity of fabula information to which we have
access; (2) the degree of pertinence we can attribute to the presented
information; and (3) the formal correspondences between syuzhet
presentation and fabula data.
Assume that an ideal syuzhet supplies information in the “correct”
amount to permit coherent and steady construction of the fabula. Given
this hypostatized reference point, we can distinguish a syuzhet which
supplies too little information about the story and a syuzhet which
supplies too much: in other words, a “rarefied” syuzhet versus an
“overloaded” one.55
If only narrative is considered, most subcreated worlds would be considered
to have an overloaded syuzhet, since much of the world information
supplied in a narrative may be considered excess beyond what is needed to
tell the story. However, we can extend the notions of fabula and syuzhet to
the world that is presented and the way it is constructed in the mind of the
audience. If the world is considered instead of merely the narrative set in the
world, the reference point for the ideal syuzhet must change; the ideal
syuzhet would have to provide enough information for the audience to be
able to feel that an independent world appears to exist, and to have some
sense of its infrastructure, cultures, geography, history, and so forth. Thus,
what might appear to be “excess” from a narrative-oriented point of view,
may prove to be necessary from a world-oriented point of view.
If, during fabula construction, a narrative is constructed from causal,
spatial, and temporal linkages, from what is a world constructed? Similar
systems of relationships hold a world’s elements together and define its
structure; maps (spatial links), timelines (temporal links), histories and
mythologies (causal links), and other systems such as genealogical
relationships, and those involving nature, culture, language, and society
(these structures are the topic of Chapter 3). When a large enough number of
elements from these systems are combined in a consistent fashion, a kind of
“world logic” starts to form, by which one can see how a world works and
how its various systems are interrelated. This logic may cover everything
from social customs to the laws governing magic or the limitations of
technology, to even laws of physics that differ from those of the Primary
World, which all help to establish the ontological rules of the secondary
world. Following the Gestalt principle of “good continuation”, structures like
maps and timelines may suggest how gaps are to be filled by laying out
places or events that allow the audience to figure out what lies between
them (for example, terrain that changes from rain forest to desert cannot do
so abruptly; the landscape in between them must gradually transform).
World events likewise can be elided with enough information given so that
the gradual shift from one state to another can be reconstructed in the
audience’s imagination, just as in a narrative we are given the turning points
in a character’s life from which a character arc can be plotted. When Primary
World defaults can be used to fill in such areas, the author can leave such
information to be extrapolated by the audience; for example, cityscapes in
alien worlds often rely on similarities with Primary World cityscapes in their
structure and functioning, despite the fantastic architecture and grand scale
that often set them apart from Primary World cities. Differences are
highlighted while similarities are taken for granted, resulting in an emphasis
on the uniqueness of the secondary world, while still keeping it relatable to
an audience.
World logic, which itself is part of the world’s fabula, gives the audience
the evidence and solid ground which enables them to speculate and
extrapolate, filling in the gaps and completing the gestalten needed for the
illusion of a secondary world. A world’s logic does not need to be so
rigorous as to fill every gap definitively; there will always be room for
ambiguity, especially in word-based media that leave visualization to its
readers’ imagination. For example, Douglas A. Anderson’s book, The
Annotated Hobbit (1986; revised edition, 2002) is replete with illustrations
from translations of The Hobbit from around the world, which together form
a wide gamut of illustration styles and character designs, all based on the
same novel.56
Once a world is developed enough, even its author can become beholden
to a world’s logic and the rules that result from it. This is why one often
hears that a story begins “writing itself” or that characters seem to take on
lives of their own and end up saying or doing things the author had not
planned (while stuck during the writing of one of his Oz novels, L. Frank
Baum once complained that characters would not do what he wanted them
to do57). At such a point, the world’s logic has begun to shape and limit
further additions to the world, occasionally even suggesting things the
author had not considered previously. In a letter of 1956, Tolkien wrote that:
I have long ceased to invent (though even patronizing or sneering critics
on the side praise my “invention”): I wait until I seem to know what
really happened. Or till it writes itself. Thus, though I knew for years
that Frodo would run into a tree-adventure somewhere far down the
Great River, I have no recollection of inventing Ents. I came at last to the
point, and wrote the “Treebeard” chapter without any recollection of
previous thought: just as it now is. And then I saw that, of course, it had
not happened to Frodo at all.58
Such inventions can even work against an author’s narrative goals, as world
logic begins to drive the narrative. While working on The Lord of the Rings
in 1944, Tolkien wrote his son Christopher about how a new, initially
unwanted character was holding back his work:
A new character has come on the scene (I am sure that I did not invent
him, I did not even want him, though I like him, but there he came
walking into the woods of Ithilien): Faramir, the brother of Boromir—
and he is holding up the “catastrophe” by a lot of stuff about the history
of Gondor and Rohan (with some very sound reflections no doubt on
 martial glory and true glory): but if he goes on much more a lot of him
will have to be removed to the appendices—where already some
fascinating material on the hobbit Tobacco industry and the Languages
of the West have gone.59
Not only does Faramir appear as a character needed by the story, he also
personifies the encyclopedic impulse, through his exposition regarding
Gondor and Rohan. Tolkien’s reaction, threatening to remove the exposition
to the appendices, shows the potential tension between story and world
concerns.
World data may slow narrative progress or halt it momentarily, but it also
enriches narrative by giving it more of a context and background depth. Yet,
no matter how much of a world is documented, there is never enough
invented material to fill all the gaps that exist; nor is any world invented so
completely that they could be. Where the world’s own logic does not dictate
specific answers, gaps are usually filled with Primary World defaults; in
other words, unless we are told otherwise, we expect the laws of physics in a
secondary world to be the same as those of the Primary World, and expect
that the secondary world’s social, political, or economic structures will
operate in a similar fashion as those that exist (or used to exist) in the
Primary World. For example, the Anglo-Saxons serve as the model for
Tolkien’s Riders of Rohan, in their poetry, names, and customs. This makes
them more believable and gives them an underlying logic that connects the
various aspects of their culture. While the casual reader may not have any
background in Anglo-Saxon history, their cultural logic remains, adding
consistency and aiding in the filling of gaps.60 Kendall Walton calls this gap-
filling using Primary World defaults the “reality principle”,61 while Marie-
Laure Ryan calls it the “principle of minimal departure”, writing:
We construe the world of fiction and of counterfactuals as being the
closest possible to the reality we know. This means that we will project
upon the world of the statement everything we know about the real
world, and that we will make only those adjustments which we cannot
avoid.62
As mentioned earlier, this is one feature that makes some books, like The
Lord of the Rings, so popular for re-reading; because at different stages of
one’s life, one’s understanding of the world, and thus its defaults, may differ
considerably, so that each time we read the book we fill in the gaps
differently, creating a new experience of the world even though the book
itself has not changed, but rather because the reader has changed since his or
her last reading.
The more detail one is given about a world, the more gestalten can
operate, since the gaps to be filled will be smaller and thus more easily
closed by extrapolation. And the easier they are to close, the more
automatically and unconsciously the audience will close them, resulting in a
greater illusion of an independently existing world. Larger gaps can be
closed too, but with a conscious effort on the part of the audience, who must
actively consider how to close them; an activity that can be a pleasurable
one if the audience feels that the author has already considered the gaps in
question and accounted for them somehow. Even in the case of an apparent
inconsistency, audience members may try to resolve a gap in order to defend
the consistency of a world which they are fond of. Consider, for example,
British theoretical astrophysicist Dr. Curtis Saxton’s thoughtful explanation
as to why we can hear the spaceships in Star Wars even though sound does
not travel in space:
Sound does not propagate in space.… Therefore it becomes difficult and
important to explain how it is that the crews of starships and starfighters
are apparently able to hear the movement of nearby vessels and beam
weapons. Several qualities need to be accommodated:
1. Crew actually hear these phenomena; they behaviorally respond as if
to audio stimuli.
2. Nearby weapon beams sound louder than distant ones.
3. A nearby starship sounds louder than a distant one.
4. The sound characterises the model of starship.
5. A passing starship exhibits a Doppler shift of pitch, according to
relative velocity.
The most plausible explanation is that the sound is produced inside the
cockpit of each starship for the benefit of crew. External radiation
sensors of various kinds are linked to audio systems of the cockpit in
order to provide the pilot with audible cues to the proximity of other
starships and energetic phenomena, operating like a glorified Geiger-
counter. A greater rate of particle detections occurs when the source is
more powerful or closer; each of these contributes an audible click on
internal speakers, millions of pulses received combine to give a sound
which characterizes the emission spectrum of the passing starship.
This is an efficient use of the pilot’s senses to convey vital information;
the pilot’s sight is likely to be preoccupied with controls and visual
displays. As a technology, it also has the strength of appealing to basic
human intuitions about how the physical world operates.
An alternative explanation for the sounds involves the starships’
shields. All space vessels operating beyond the protection of the
atmosphere and magnetosphere of a planet require at least some
shielding to protect them from solar wind particles, etc. It therefore
seems possible that disturbances to the shields could be indirectly but
physically felt through the hull or the generators. The radiation from
blaster shots or nearby sublight engines may cause resonant vibrations,
heard inside the ship as sounds.
An important quote has been discovered in the A New Hope radio play
that conclusively proves that the “sounds in space” really are just
auditory sensor feedback provided to crew inside a ship. This does not
rule out the possibility of some kinds of shield disturbances may have
audible effects, but it does indicate that the sounds heard in the movies
are primarily a product of sensor systems. As Han Solo explains to Luke
Skywalker [ANHRD: 286–287]:
Your sensors’ll give you an audio simulation for a rough idea of
where those fighters are when they’re not on your screen. It’ll sound
like they’re right there in the turret with you.
From the evidence of the movies, it seems that major warships
dispense with this effect, which is how the Executor, Home One, and star
destroyer command bridges maintain such a pure and clinical
atmosphere. Of course, the ships’ gunners, helmsmen and other crew
 who are immediately and directly concerned with outside action may
have auditory sensor data fed into their helmets and headsets.63
This extended discussion, both serious and playful in nature, demonstrates
the importance of consistency in the gap-filling process, and the degree of
speculation it can involve.
Of course, the casual audience member who merely wishes to follow a
narrative and discover its outcomes will probably never experience many of
the world gestalts available to those for whom a vicarious experience of the
world is as important (or more) as the understanding of the narrative.
(Likewise, a single viewing or reading is usually enough for someone
interested only in story, whereas someone interested in the world and its
structures will probably return to a work multiple times in order to focus on
details and the various links between world data.) However, for those who
do care, the vicarious experience of a world is strengthened through
transnarrative and transmedial references, all of which are unified by the
world into an overarching experience (provided all the various details are in
agreement, of course).
Even for the casual audience member, many world gaps are filled
unconsciously (like the gaps of perceptual psychology), giving the feeling of
a fully-rendered complete world with little effort on the part of the audience;
for example, in movies when locations are seen from multiple angles, a
viewer will typically automatically combine the images into a three-
dimensional composite structure, even though the images may actually be a
combination of live-action sets, models, and computer-generated imagery
(this process is similar to what Irvin Rock refers to as “unconscious
inference” in The Logic of Perception (1983)64 and can also be seen as an
extension of the Gestalt principle of invariance). While unconscious
inferences of this kind may be enough to give the casual viewer enough of a
sense of a world’s completeness to keep him or her from being distracted
from following the narrative, viewers more interested in the vicarious
experience of the world may further question a world’s feasibility and look
to data beyond what is needed by the narrative, where larger gaps need to
be filled in with conscious effort (as in the earlier example regarding food
and water on Tatooine).
 Apart from the visual and auditory gestalten that occur when a story or
world is presented in audiovisual media, extrapolation can be divided into
three types: the completion of narrative gestalts, gap-filling using Primary
World defaults, and gap-filling using secondary world defaults. The first two
of these we have already examined, and both are general processes used
across all fictional worlds. The third, however, involves the particular
defaults of a specific secondary world, which the audience must learn in
order to fill in gaps. This includes such things as customs, design styles,
languages, and so on, that are often introduced without explanation and left
for the audience to figure out either directly, from the information given, or
indirectly, from the context formed by events as the world unfolds (for
example, avid Star Trek viewers are familiar with starship layouts and their
interior design styles, allowing them to imagine ship interiors even when
they are not shown). Thus, while Primary World defaults and narrative
gestalts can function right from the beginning of the audience’s encounter
with a world, the defaults of a secondary world must be learned over time
through exposure to, and experience of, a secondary world, occasionally
with conscious effort on the audience’s part (in some cases, sources like
glossaries and appendices can provide direct explanations and details).
This leads to the question of what details need to appear and what can be
left to the imagination. Secondary world defaults are what define a
secondary world and delineate its difference from the Primary World, so
they form the foundation of what must be included. Once enough of them
have been given to establish the world’s logic, the author may begin to leave
things to be extended, inferred, or extrapolated by the audience, so that
detail appears to continue beyond what has actually been given; as Tolkien
puts it, “a Frameless Picture: a searchlight, as it were, on a brief episode in
History … surrounded by the glimmer of limitless extensions in time and
space.”65 The necessary details, then, are those that form the very structures
by which subcreated worlds are held together (and which are the subject of
Chapter 3). Beyond these, an author may add additional details to fill out
and embellish the world, suggest unexplored horizons, and engage the
imagination. In audiovisual media, these may be small details in the
background that reward the observant spectator with additional world data
(see Figure 1.3). Such details would have to be described in a novel rather
than simply remaining in the background; audiovisual media such as
movies, then, have an advantage when it comes to world-building insofar as
they can depict things in the background without calling attention to them,
letting viewers find them during subsequent viewings after the narrative has
been exhausted.

FIGURE 1.3 World details in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (20th
Century Fox, 2002). Staging in depth results in suggestive glimpses of
distance objects and locations (top), while background details and events
reveal further consequences of story events, like the flying droids seen
outside Padmé’s apartment that replace the window which was broken
during the attack of the night before (bottom).
Secondary world defaults can be rigidly defined, or room can be left for
audience interpretation. There is a tendency, especially in word-based media
that leave visualization of a world to the audience’s imagination, for
Primary World defaults to “normalize” secondary world defaults to some
degree. Two examples of this “normalizing tendency” can be found in
Tolkien’s work. When Gandalf is first introduced in The Hobbit, he is
described as having “long bushy eyebrows that stuck out farther than the
brim of his shady hat.”66 And in The Lord of the Rings, Frodo leaves
Hobbiton with the Ring a day after his fiftieth birthday. Despite these facts,
Gandalf, when he is visualized (either in illustrations or in films) is rarely
depicted with eyebrows extending so far out, nor is Frodo depicted as
looking 50 years old. While the Ring is partly responsible for Frodo’s
youthful appearance,67 the other hobbits of the Fellowship are also typically
portrayed to be younger (perhaps all in their twenties, like the four actors
portraying them in Peter Jackson’s film adaptations), even though when the
four hobbits begin their journey Sam is 35, Merry is 36, and Pippin is 28.
Thus, while the description of Gandalf’s eyebrows create a certain feeling
about him when he is introduced, to actually depict (or constantly imagine)
Gandalf to have eyebrows of that size would make him see comic, so the
initial description is more likely to be treated as hyperbole as opposed to a
literal description. Likewise, the hobbits’ initial innocence and relative
inexperience, along with their short height, make them seem more youthful
than they actually are, since these aspects are more strongly emphasized by
the narrative than their ages are. Primary World defaults, then, can temper
strange or unusual details and subtly adjust one’s image of the secondary
world to be more in line with what may be considered more “realistic”.
A world’s inventions and changed defaults can be revealed suddenly or
gradually, and can be explained directly, deliberately left unexplained, or left
to the audience to figure out through context. An example of meaning given
through context can be found on the first page of Frank Herbert’s Dune,
when an old crone comes to see Paul Atreides and it is said of her that, “Her
voice wheezed and twanged like an untuned baliset.” Without defining
“baliset”, the audience can infer it is a musical instrument, because it can be
tuned. In addition, the analogy also describes the sound from what may be
the character’s point of view (Paul may think her voice sounds like a baliset)
which in turn reveals that music is a part of the world’s culture, and perhaps
also among the character’s interests.
 Inferences can also be very subtle and require the connecting of small
details. For example, it is never stated directly that Tolkien’s Elves have
pointed ears, but the similarity between the Quenya words for “leaf” and
“ear” suggest such a shape. As Douglas A. Anderson writes:
In his notes on the stem LAS[1] from *lasse = “leaf and LAS[2] “listen”
(*lasse = “ear”), Tolkien noted the possible relationship between the two
in that Elven “ears were more pointed and leaf-shaped” than human
ones.68
Although some questions can be answered by information in ancillary
materials, much room is left for speculation. While incompleteness is not
desirable in certain areas necessary for comprehension of the story or the
world, room for speculation in other areas is a valuable asset to an
imaginary world, as this is where the audience’s imagination is encouraged
and engaged.

Catalysts of Speculation
I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors
busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of
insuring one’s immortality.

—James Joyce, on his novel Ulysses69

As Joyce realized, a work’s immortality depends on whether or not it
remains discussed by others. For a world, this can mean speculation in the
areas where extrapolation attempts to reach: mysterious aspects and open-
ended questions (not without clues, perhaps) that allow speculation to
continue after the works are consumed. Deliberate gaps, enigmas, and
unexplained references help keep a work alive in the imagination of its
audience, because it is precisely in these areas where audience participation,
in the form of speculation, is most encouraged. Some of the most successful
world-builders have realized this. In a letter of 1954, Tolkien wrote:
As a story, I think it is good that there should be a lot of things
unexplained (especially if an explanation actually exists); and I have
 perhaps from this point of view erred in trying to explain too much, and
give too much past history. Many readers have, for instance, rather stuck
at the Council of Elrond. And even in a mythical Age there must be
some enigmas, as there always are. Tom Bombadil is one
(intentionally).70
And in another letter of 1965, referring to Gandalf’s departure from the
Grey Havens at the end of the book, Tolkien wrote:
I think Shadowfax certainly went with Gandalf, though this is not
stated. I feel it is better not to state everything (and indeed it is more
realistic, since in chronicles and accounts of “real” history, many facts
that some enquirer would like to know are omitted, and the truth has to
be discovered from such evidence as there is.71
The same is apparently felt by George Lucas:
The careful tending of the Star Wars continuity has yielded great wealth,
but the key to a productive farm is to leave some fields fallow. A
complete Holocron would leave little room for fantasy—for fans who, as
[Henry] Jenkins says, “love unmapped nooks and crannies, the dark
shadows we can fill in with our imagination.”
That’s something that GWL [George Walton Lucas] understands. For
instance, the origins of the Jedi master Yoda, his species, and his home
planet are off-limits. The backstory isn’t even in the Holocron. “It doesn’t
exist, except maybe in George’s mind,” [Leland] Chee says. “He feels like,
‘You don’t have to explain everything all the time. Let’s keep some
mystery.’”72
Of course, every subcreated world has gaps, so speculation is always
possible; but the difference here is that a successful secondary world is one
an audience wants to extrapolate. Before speculation occurs, curiosity must
be aroused, and it will only be aroused if there is the possibility that a
correct, or at least plausible, answer is thought to exist somewhere. While
completeness can never be achieved, a sense of completeness can, which
gives the impression that all questions could, in theory, be answered, even
though they are not. For the areas of a world in which speculation is
encouraged, the ideal balance of information is one in which enough
information is provided to support multiple theories, but not enough to
prove any one theory definitively. The ability to debate and find new ways
to answer questions can keep a world fresh, especially if it is a “closed”
world for which authorized additions are no longer being made (see Chapter
7). For “open” worlds which are still being built, speculation may lead to new
works that attempt to answer questions in more detail, either by the world’s
originator, by those authorized to add to it, or even by unauthorized fan
additions.
Another catalyst for speculation occurs when a world’s originator dies
leaving unfinished work. Much of Tolkien’s work was unpublished at the
time of his death, and has appeared posthumously in The Silmarillion (1977),
Unfinished Tales (1980), the 12-volume History of Middle-earth series (1983–
1996), and The Children of Húrin (2007), all edited by his son Christopher
Tolkien. Frank Herbert left the seventh and final novel of his Dune series
unfinished in outline form when he died in 1986, and his son Brian (along
with Kevin J. Anderson) used this outline to produce two more Dune novels,
Hunters of Dune (2006) and Sandworms of Dune (2007), as well as a number
of prequel novels. Thus, the desire to see gaps filled and unfinished material
published can help stimulate the circles of authorship that can extend out
from around a world’s originator (see Chapter 7).
As suggested in the second Tolkien quote, regarding Shadowfax, deliberate
gaps, enigmas, and unexplained references add to a world’s verisimilitude by
making it more like the Primary World, where ambiguity and missing pieces
often remain in the search for knowledge, requiring what poet John Keats
called “Negative Capability”; that is, “when a man is capable of being in
uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and
reason”.73 Negative Capability is almost always a necessity in the
enjoyment of subcreated worlds, since much of a world typically remains
unrevealed, unexplained, or ambiguous (like whether balrogs have wings or
not). 74 The more information that an author gives of a secondary world, the
more that can be ellipsized, or left vague. Speculation is more likely to occur
in a near-complete world than a very incomplete one, because the possibility
of completion seems much closer and attainable; smaller gaps are more
likely to be bridged than larger ones. Authors, then, cannot rely on
speculation occurring unless their worlds are substantial enough to generate
theories for their completion.
Yet, despite all the elaborate details that can be included in a world, one
important detail—its exact location—is often left purposely vague, although
at the same time, there is usually some link connecting the secondary world
back to the Primary World.

Connecting the Secondary World to the Primary

World
The boundaries between a secondary world and the Primary World are
usually very distinct (so long as the former does not already contain the
latter, as in Star Trek), and they are important, as they determine who comes
and goes into the secondary world. Getting to a secondary world often takes
some effort, and many secondary worlds have a kind of “no-man’s-land” or
area75 surrounding them which further separates the secondary world from
the Primary World, including oceans (around islands), deserts, mountains,
and other unoccupied lands that serve as a buffer zone, helping to hide the
location (secondary worlds are often hard to find and enter). This buffer zone
could also be outer space itself, or the layers of earth covering an
underground realm. The buffer zone surrounding a secondary world may
also help explain why it is as isolated as it is, and how it has remained
separate from the Primary World, and why it is different from it. A buffer
zone can also make it difficult for someone to leave the secondary world as
well, either because crossing it requires a vehicle of some sort that the
character does not have, because an exit cannot be found, or because the
world’s inhabitants will not permit visitors to leave once they have entered
the secondary world. In any event, the connection to the Primary World,
when it exists, is one that is carefully considered and controlled.
All secondary worlds reflect or resemble the Primary World in some way;
otherwise, we would not be able to relate to them. As Tolkien puts it,
“Fantasy does not blur the sharp outlines of the real world; for it depends on
them.”76 Secondary worlds are, to some degree, versions or variations of our
own world. Likewise, the main character in stories set in secondary worlds is
often a very ordinary sort of person with whom an audience can easily
relate, seeing as they are experiencing the new world vicariously through
the main character. As C. S. Lewis describes it:
Every good writer knows that the more unusual the scenes and events of
his story are, the slighter, the more ordinary, the more typical his
persons should be. Hence Gulliver is a commonplace little man and Alice
a commonplace little girl. If they had been more remarkable they would
have wrecked their books. The Ancient Mariner himself is a very
ordinary man. To tell how odd things struck odd people is to have an
oddity too much: he who is to see strange sights must not himself be
strange. He ought to be as nearly as possible Everyman or Anyman.77
The need for distance and a distinct border around a secondary world,
which helps to constitute its secondariness from the Primary World, has
already been discussed. Uncharted islands, hidden underground kingdoms,
lost worlds hidden in the mountains; these were the settings for most worlds
before authors began to situate them on distant planets in other star systems.
Wherever they might be located, we are usually given some indication of
where they are in relation to where we are, providing a spatial link between
worlds, though it is usually a very difficult and treacherous one to cross.
Other stories take place in the past or future, connected to us but
inaccessible to travelers (except, of course, time travelers).
From early on, framing devices were often employed which linked
secondary worlds to the Primary World. In earlier works, in which the
secondary world has an earthly location in some unexplored region, the
main character often must sail a great distance, or climb through mountain
passes or down into elaborate cave systems in order to reach these places.
Later stories would find magical, supernatural, or technological means of
transporting main characters from the Primary World into a secondary
world, whether Alice into Wonderland, Dorothy into Oz, or Neo into the
Matrix. Some later stories dispense with framing devices, but the connection
to the Primary World remains; stories set in space often include Earth,
though on the margins of the story (as in Star Trek or Dune). Star Wars, for
example, begins each episode with “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far
away”, connecting us both spatially and temporally (albeit very tenuously)
with the galaxy we are about to see. Temporal connections are also
important; many stories are set in the distant past or the future, out of reach
but somehow linked to our place in history, even if alternate histories or
imagined time periods are invented. In most cases, there is no narrative need
to do this (and not all worlds have these links), but such links appear often
enough to suggest that many authors still feel that some spatiotemporal
linkage to the audience’s experience in the Primary World helps them relate
better to the secondary world, from which they would otherwise be
completely detached.
The necessity of linking secondary worlds to the Primary World has
lessened over time, however, as audiences have grown accustomed to
stranger and more alien worlds. From uncharted islands and underground
kingdoms, to planets in outer space, to worlds with no discernable
spatiotemporal connection to our own, the range of examples of secondary
worlds has grown along with their numbers over time. Their popularity has
also increased, especially during the latter half of the twentieth century, and
demand for them is still growing; but to fully understand the direction of
their development, we must next turn to their history, which reaches back
across three millennia and is the topic of the next chapter.

OceanofPDF.com
2
A HISTORY OF IMAGINARY WORLDS

To confront objects which do not exist as though they existed and to be

influenced by them, to believe that they do exist, is not this, since no
harm can come of it, a suitable and irreproachable means of providing
entertainment?

—Philostratos the Younger, third century AD1

I have neither power, time, nor occasion to conquer the world as
Alexander and Caesar did; yet rather than not to be mistress of one,
since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made a World of
my own: for which no body, I hope, will blame me, since it is in every
ones power to do the like.

—Margaret Cavendish, writing about her Blazing-World, in 16662

Before examining how imaginary worlds came about, we might ask why
they came about; why did authors find it necessary to invent other worlds?
Usually, the answer lies in the changing of Primary World defaults, to
amaze, entertain, satirize, propose possibilities, or simply make an audience
more aware of defaults they take for granted. Just like stories of foreign
lands, stories set in imaginary worlds provide the bizarre and exotic, without
the need to travel and without needing to be limited to what actually exists.
Secondary worlds make us look differently at the Primary World, and are
often used to comment on it. A look at the history of imaginary worlds
shows how closely tied they are to the times in which they appear, in their
positioning and location, their design, aesthetics, themes, and their structure
and purpose, as well as the stories told in them. At the same time, however,
secondary worlds often differ greatly from the Primary World, making us
more aware of its default assumptions. And as time went on, more and more
of these defaults could be changed, as the imaginary-world tradition
developed its own conventions and solutions to world-building problems.
Exploring the history and development of subcreated worlds is an
ambitious venture that intersects with the history of literature, painting,
film, television, animation, comic strips and comic books, video games, and
other visual arts, crisscrossed with the history of exploration, utopias,
fantasy, science fiction, playsets, board games, role-playing games,
interactive fiction, special effects, and computer graphics. Even summaries
of these histories is well beyond the scope of this chapter; only their
highlights, insofar as they touch upon the development of imaginary worlds,
will be given.3 Nor is there room for detailed descriptions of all the worlds
discussed here; but a sense of their place in history and contribution to it
will be attempted. From a few fictional islands used as stopping points for
travelers to enormous universes which are the work of hundreds of people
over several decades and worlds so vast that no individual can possibly
experience them in their entirety, imaginary worlds have a long and
interesting history, which begins with the first indications of the presence of
a world beyond the immediate locale in which a story takes place.

Transnarrative Characters and Literary Cycles

Perhaps the simplest literary indication that a world exists beyond the
details needed to tell a particular story is a transnarrative character. A
character who appears in more than one story links the stories’ worlds
together by being present in them, and the character’s presence in multiple
stories suggests that there is more to the character than what any single
story reveals. When multiple characters, objects, and locations from one
story appear in another story, the world in which they all appear becomes
larger than either story, and the audience begins to build up expectations
based on their previous knowledge, and may begin to fill in the gaps
between stories, imaginatively adding to the world.
The first transnarrative characters were actual historical figures, like King
Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon, who appears in or is mentioned in several
books of the Old Testament (the Second Book of Kings, the First and Second
Books of Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Jeremiah, and Daniel) as well
as other historical texts (like Book VIII of Claudius Josephus’ Antiquities of
the Jews). The world in which these historical figures appeared was the
Primary World, and the veracity of stories from different sources about the
same characters could be determined by comparing details like the
characters’ appearance and behavior to see if they were consistent from one
story to the next. In the case of fiction, multiple stories about the same
characters could help create the illusion of an existence independent of any
individual story; thus, transnarrative fictional characters could seem more
real than those that only appeared in a single story.
Multiple stories centered around a transnarrative character sometimes
result in a literary cycle, which can further develop the world beyond the
needs of any specific story. Often an ensemble of characters as well as a
network of locations is shared by the stories of a literary cycle, like those
surrounding the Trojan War, or King Arthur and the Knights of the Round
Table, or Robin Hood. Literary cycles are such that multiple authors may
add stories many years apart, making use of an audience’s familiarity with
the characters and situations of earlier stories in the cycle. To some extent,
literary cycles can be seen as precursors of media franchises, wherein a
series of works, sometimes produced by multiple authors, features the same
characters, objects, and locations. Today’s media franchises differ from
literary cycles in the way they are deliberately constructed and built upon,
often with a framework in mind that encompasses the characters and events
of multiple stories or works before they are produced. Likewise, today
fictional characters are usually considered the intellectual property of their
authors, and unauthorized stories are seen as noncanonical or apocryphal. In
any event, transnarrative characters grow as more of their experiences are
related and the world they inhabit grows along with them.
Nevertheless, the worlds of transnarrative characters, literary cycles, and
media franchises can be set in the Primary World, without a separate,
developed secondary world of their own. The move from stories set in
Primary World locations to those whose action occurs mainly in well-
developed fictional places of considerable size and complexity was one that
required reasons for imagining new worlds. The degree to which a world
was developed depended on that need, as well as the seriousness with which
the design of the world was undertaken. Thus, we find the roots of
secondary worlds extending back into Classical Antiquity.
The Mythical and Unknown World
Fantastic places have always gained more credibility by being set in remote
or little-known areas of the world where their existence is harder to
disprove. In classical antiquity, the inhabitants of the area surrounding the
Mediterranean Sea knew relatively little about the world beyond their
realms; the oceans, and the land masses that lay to the far north and west,
were largely unexplored by them, so they proved fertile ground for the
imagination. Likewise, almost every culture had some kind of afterlife
destinations or Underworld, such as Hades, the Elysian Fields, Annwn,
Toonela, Yum Gan, Uku Pacha, the Fortunate Isles, Adlivun, Hawaiki, and
Xibalba, all of which were thought to exist somewhere underground or
beyond the horizon, in unknown parts of the world. Moreover, what was
known or guessed varied greatly from place to place, as myth and legend
were closely interwoven with everyday life. Belief in the pantheons of Greek
and Roman gods, legends of heroic figures whose deeds transcended what
was humanly possible, and tales passed on orally (growing more elaborate
as they traveled), all combined to create a fantastic vision of the world,
where the real and the unreal intermixed considerably.
A good example of this can be found in the Odyssey. From antiquity to the
present day, scholars have tried to map the fictional islands visited by
Odysseus and the routes between them onto real locations ranging from the
Aegean Sea to as far away as the Atlantic Ocean; that debates concerning
the status of the story’s geography have continued for so long is a testament
to its liminality.4 The uncharted islands visited or mentioned in the Odyssey
include Pharos, Ogygie, Scherie, the island of the Cyclops, the island of the
Lotus-eaters, the floating island of Aeolus, Aeaea, the island of the Sirens,
the island of Helios, Syrie, and Ithaca (whether Homer’s Ithaca is the same
as the real island of Ithaca is still a matter of debate). In the story, these
islands are experienced directly by Odysseus, or described by him or by
other characters (Menelaus describes Pharos, and Eumaeus describes Syrie),
an example of the two main strategies of easing the burden of exposition
created by imaginary worlds. As mentioned earlier, stories involving
imaginary worlds often have more information to convey than stories set in
a familiar part of the Primary World, since more Primary World defaults
have been reset. A main character who is a traveler experiencing the
imaginary world for the first time becomes a stand-in for the audience who
experiences the world through him or her. Likewise, tales told by other
characters are first-person experiences that perform a similar function
within the diegesis. From the Odyssey onward, these two methods appear in
a majority of stories set in secondary worlds, with the Odyssey becoming an
influential model for subcreators in the centuries that followed.
Another method of introducing an imaginary world is to describe it
directly, without recourse to a narrative. A number of historical works of
antiquity also contain descriptions of imaginary realms. Herodotus’
Histories describes the Arimaspi, and includes the author’s own doubts
about them:
The northern parts of Europe are very much richer in gold than any
other region: but how it is procured I have no certain knowledge. The
story runs that the one-eyed Arimaspi purloin it from the griffins; but
here too I am incredulous, and cannot persuade myself that there is a
race of men born with one eye, who in all else resemble the rest of
mankind. Nevertheless it seems to be true that the extreme regions of the
earth, which surround and shut up within themselves all other countries,
produce the things which are the rarest, and which men reckon the most
beautiful.5
Other imaginary lands mentioned in ancient histories include the island of
Thule in Pytheas’ On the Ocean, the island of Pankhaia in Diodorus Siculus’
Bibliotheca Historia, the island of Anostus in Claudius Aelianus’ Varia
Historia, Mount Kunlun in the ancient Chinese text The Book of the
Mountains and the Sea, and the Southwest Wilderness region of China in
Tung-Fang Shuo’s Book of Deities and Marvels. In Inventum Natura and
Naturalis Historia, Pliny the Elder mentions the Arimaspi and several other
imaginary lands: Ear Islands, home of the Auriti, a people with very large
ears; Hyperborea, a land of happiness and long life in the far north; and the
land of the Blemmyae, a race of headless people whose eyes and mouths are
on their chests. Many of these lands and their fantastic inhabitants appeared
in the writings of multiple authors, thereby making them more like real
historical entities that existed beyond the imaginings of an individual
author.
With so much of the world unexplored, entire continents could be
proposed and considered. Plato wrote of Atlantis, and in the east, Tung-Fang
Shuo wrote of Hsuan in Accounts of the Ten Continents. Whether or not
such places really existed was something only explorers could disprove, so
legends could persist for centuries (some, like the sunken Atlantis, even to
the present day). Terra Australis, a great continent supposedly in the
southern oceans, appeared in various works into the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. In Renaissance and Reformation, author James Patrick
summarizes the history of Terra Australis:
Terra Australis, the great southern continent, filled the earth’s remotest
and most mysterious regions in the popular imagination. A southern
Terra Incognita (“unknown land”) was included on the world map
detailed by the second-century Greek geographer Ptolemy, whose works
were rediscovered in the fifteenth century. Ptolemy accepted the theory
put forward by Aristotle (384–322 BCE) that, since the earth was
symmetrical, there must exist frozen lands in the south to balance those
of the north. On a 1569 world map drawn by the great Flemish
cartographer Gerardus Mercator, a huge Terra Australis (the Latin words
literally mean “southern landmass”) fills the world’s southern extremity.
Not until James Cook’s circumnavigation of Antarctica in the late
eighteenth century was the myth of Terra Australis finally exploded.6
Another imaginary-world tradition that can trace its roots to antiquity is
the utopia. The Kallipolis, the ideal city of Plato’s Republic, is a secondary
world used as a philosophical thought experiment, a world in which the
foundation and parameters of a human society are reset and used to debate
what would happen if people were to live a certain way. Plato not only
describes what he thinks a perfect society would be like (establishing what
would later become the utopian tradition), but in Book VIII of his dialogue,
he also describes the decay of an imperfect state from an aristocracy to a
timocracy, to a plutocracy, to a democracy which grows increasingly chaotic
and finally falls into tyranny, thus describing what would later be called a
dystopia. Plato’s city is perhaps the first imaginary world whose societal
structure was given serious consideration and described in detail. It is also
among the earliest secondary worlds created for reasons beyond that of
providing a backdrop for a story, and thus is more of interest in and of itself
as a world.
The final use of secondary worlds to develop in classical antiquity was that
of satire. The island of Meropis, in the text Philippica by Theopompos of
Chios, is a parody of Plato’s Atlantis, with everything exaggerated, like the
continent’s size and the size and number of its people, beyond Plato’s claims
for his continent. Another world made for comic effect is Aristophanes’s city
of Nephelokokkygia or “Cloudcuckooland”, in his comedy The Birds. In it,
the two main characters, Pisthetairos and Euelpides, join the kingdom of the
birds who take over a city and build a giant wall around it. The city becomes
the center of worship, the gods send Poseidon and Hercules to negotiate, and
eventually Pisthetairos marries Zeus’ maid Basileia and goes to join the
gods.
The most sophisticated and elaborate satire of antiquity to make use of a
secondary world came late in the classical period, in the second century AD.
Lucian of Samosata’s True History parodies travelers’ tales and histories and
their literary form and style with a variety of imaginary places and cultures,
and which, in his “Introduction”, he openly admits is untrue:
I am myself vain enough to cherish the hope of bequeathing something
to posterity; I see no reason for resigning my right to that inventive
freedom which others enjoy; and, as I have no truth to put on record,
having lived a very humdrum life, I fall back on falsehood—but
falsehood of a more consistent variety; for I now make the only true
statement you are to expect—that I am a liar. This confession is, I
consider, a full defence against all imputations. My subject is, then, what
I have neither seen, experienced, nor been told, what neither exists nor
could conceivably do so. I humbly solicit my readers’ incredulity.7
Lucian recognizes that “falsehood of a more consistent variety” is necessary
for verisimilitude especially when the fantastic is presented. Even though he
clearly does not intend his story to be believed, he provides many details
and writes in a style that makes the work sound like the histories of the
period, parodying their style as well as content. He describes strange island
worlds, including the island of Galatea made of cheese which has fruit-
covered vines that give milk; Cork Island whose inhabitants have feet of
cork and can walk on water; Cabbalusa where they find women with asses’
hooves; Lampton, whose inhabitants are speaking lamps, and even
Aristophanes’s Cloudcuckooland. The travelers also visit the Elysian Plain
and meet Homer, Socrates, Pythagoras, and other historical figures. In one of
the longer sections of the story, Lucian describes a war of enormous scale
between the Moonites who live on the Moon and the Sunites who live on
the Sun, and then goes on to describe the Moonites’ culture in detail. The
voyage to the moon is also described; the narrator’s ship encounters a
waterspout which sends it sailing into space for eight days, until they cast
anchor on the moon. This interplanetary journey, probably the first in
literature, and other elements of the story, such as encounters with alien
cultures, have led some to consider True History as the first story of the
science fiction genre. As S. C. Fredericks writes:
Because of its powerful mimetic dimension his narrative must not be
reduced solely to being satire nor to being a sequence of literary
parodies. Like a modern SF [science fiction] writer, Lucian takes the
sciences and other cognitive disciplines available to him and pictures
alternate worlds which can dislocate the intellects of his readers in such
a way as to make them aware of how many of their normal convictions
about things were predicated upon cliché thinking and stereotyped
response—in areas as diverse as religious belief, aesthetic judgment, and
philosophical theory. The “places” visited by the protagonist—narrator
are, therefore, intellectual loci, and much more of Lucian’s geography is
figurative then [sic] literal. We really travel with the narrator through a
sequence of conceptions and speculations which comment satirically and
critically on men’s habits of mind in the real world.8
Lucian’s works, including True History, were revived during the
Renaissance, enjoying great popularity and influencing writers including
Thomas More, Desiderius Erasmus, Ludovico Ariosto, and François Rabelais
(More and Erasmus also translated Lucian’s work into Latin).9 Many of
these authors would go on to create their own secondary worlds.
 By the end of the age of classical antiquity, secondary worlds had already
appeared in several of the literary modes that make use of them: tall tales,
histories, satires, thought experiments (which include utopias and dystopias),
and descriptions of proposed places thought to already exist (like Atlantis or
the Elysian Fields). These forms would each develop into a tradition over
time, with later works often referencing earlier ones (Lucian’s inclusion of
Aristophanes’s Cloudcuckooland may be the first time an author has
connected another author’s secondary world to his own).
Over the centuries that followed, Greek and Roman mythology became a
part of the “Matter of Rome” in Medieval European literature, alongside
other cycles and legends, including the Arthurian legends (the “Matter of
Britain”), the legends in the cycles of Charlemagne, Roland, and Guillaume
d’Orange (collectively known as the “Matter of France”), and the
Mabinogion of Welsh mythology. Many of these stories contained fantastic
elements, if not imaginary places, and would provide material for later
authors who would continue the cycles and locate them in imaginary
worlds.
The early Middle Ages saw the production of secondary worlds continue
in the modes established by the ancients. St. Augustine’s City of God
described a utopia not to be found on Earth, and centuries later Dante
Alighieri envisioned what heaven, purgatory, and hell might be like in his
Divine Comedy. Legendary places remained on maps, like the island of Hy
Brasil mentioned in Angelinus Dalorto’s 1325 thesis L’Isola Brazil. Fictional
fantastic islands appeared in literature, like Brissonte and Polyglot in Liber
monstrorum de diversis generibus from around the eighth century, or the
desert islands that provided the settings for two eleventh-century Islamic
novels, Ibn Tufail’s Hayy ibn Yaqdhan (in Latin, Philosophus Autodidactus),
a thought experiment about a feral child rasied by a gazelle on an island,
and Ibn al-Nafis’ Al-Risalah al-Kamiliyyah fil Siera al-Nabawiyyah
(Theologus Autodidactus), about a feral child found by castaways and taken
back to civilization.10 Another Islamic work, completed around the
fourteenth century, The Book of One Thousand and One Nights (known in
the West as The Arabian Nights) contains stories which include an
underwater society, the ancient lost “City of Brass”, and travel to other
worlds. Comedic uses of secondary worlds also continued, as in the
anonymously authored Aucassin et Nicollette from late-thirteenth-century
France which featured the kingdom of Torelore, where the king is pregnant,
the Queen leads the troops, and wars are fought with rotten fruit, cheese,
and other food items.
The secondary worlds produced during these times ranged in their scope
and seriousness, but few of them contained the level of detail and
verisimilitude needed to compete with Primary World settings. Of course,
competition with the real world was usually not a goal; even proposed
continents that cartographers included did not have the detail of actual
landmasses since they remained undiscovered. However, by the end of the
Medieval period, new inspiration for the creation of secondary worlds
would spur their production and demand a greater degree of detail and
verisimilitude, as audience began reading travelers’ tales of actual journeys
undertaken by explorers seeking new worlds during the Age of Exploration.

Travelers’ Tales and the Age of Exploration

The intermixing of fiction and nonfiction continued through Medieval times
and into the Renaissance as a genre of literature known sometimes as
“travelers’ tales” or “travel writing”. The premise of each work is a traveler,
traveling in lands foreign to the reader, who narrates his adventures and
especially the strange sights he sees along the way, including new countries
and their peoples and cultures. Although some works were deliberately
intended as fiction, even the journals of actual travelers could contain
exaggeration or fantastic elements resulting from either the difficulty in
verbally describing the new things or descriptions resulting from
misperceptions of them; Marco Polo described the rhinoceros as a “unicorn”
because of its large single horn, and descriptions of headless men with faces
on their chests is said to have perhaps been a misperception of natives with
their shoulders raised high around their heads. As travelers’ tales related
stories of distant lands, little verification was available to readers, apart from
tales by other travelers to the same lands; and some places believed to be
real, like El Dorado, the mythical city of gold, would themselves become the
inspiration for expeditions.
Although tales of travels had always existed, a landmark of travel writing
that would redefine the genre was produced by the explorer Marco Polo.
During his imprisonment by the Genoese in 1298, Polo dictated stories about
his travels in Asia and China, and the resulting book, Il Milione, later known
as The Description of the World or The Travels of Marco Polo, was very
successful, and later led to Polo to write a new edition between 1310 and
1320. Polo’s book would become the main source of information on the Far
East for Europeans, and a later inspiration to Christopher Columbus. Besides
inspiring exploration, the book also had its imitators, most notably the
fictional work The Book of Sir John Mandeville from c. 1357. Mandeville’s
Book attained great popularity in Europe and by the 1470s there were
versions in English, French, Anglo-Norman French, German, Flemish, Czech,
Castilian, Aragonese, Latin, Italian, Danish, and Gaelic, and 72 editions of
the book were printed during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.11
As exploration increased, more travelers’ tales appeared, and their
audience grew as well. As Rosemary Tzanaki writes in Mandeville’s
Medieval Audiences:

New knowledge of the East was also flowing in during the thirteenth
century, following the conquest of Constantinople and the opening of
routes via the Black Sea, and in particular because of the stability and
security of Central Asia following the Mongol invasion. A new East was
soon to appear through the works of travelers like John of Plano Carpini,
William of Rubruck and Odoric of Pordenone, among the first to journey
to the Tartar Empire. Marco Polo also benefited from the more secure
trade routes to China. By Mandeville’s time, Mamluk expansion and the
conversion of the Khans of the Golden Horde to Islam had reduced the
Christian access to the East once more, but this only served to increase
interest in those lands. Pilgrim itineraries to the Holy Land were also
becoming ever more popular. It was in this climate of geographical
enthusiasm and curiosity that the Book was written.12
The Book of Sir John Mandeville mixes factual travel information, which
scholars have identified as being copied from the works of others, with
fictional fantastic locations and peoples. Among them are the kingdom of
Amazony “whereas dwelleth none but women”; the kingdom of Salmasse
with its venomous trees; the kingdom of Talonach where fish come on land
to worship the king, who has over a thousand wives; the land of Raso where
men are hung if they get sick; the island of Macumeran where the people
have heads like hounds; the island of Silo with its four-legged serpents, two-
headed geese, and white lions; and the island of cyclopses (see Figure 2.1).
Several of the peoples he describes, like the Blemmyae and a race of one-
legged men, seem to be taken from Pliny, and scholars have identified many
other sources from which the author (who may or may not have been called
Mandeville) compiled and copied his stories. Such fantastic tales and places
made the book popular, and Sir Henry Yule, writing in his 1871 work The
Book of Ser Marco Polo, compared its popularity to that of Polo’s book:

And from the greatest frequency with which one encounters in

catalogues both MSS. and early printed editions of Sir John Maundeville
[sic], I should suppose that the lying wonders of our English knight had
a far greater popularity and more extensive diffusion than the veracious
and more sober marvels of Polo. In Quaritch’s last catalogue (November,
1870) there is only one old edition of Polo; there are nine of Maundeville.
In 1839 there were nineteen MSS. of the latter catalogued in the British
Museum Library. There are now only five of Marco Polo. At least
twenty-five editions of Maundeville, and only five of Polo were printed
in the fifteenth century.13
FIGURE 2.1 Examples of the 119 woodcut images that accompanied the
1481 edition of The Book of John Mandeville (circa 1357): a cockodrill of
Silha (top left); an ox-headed man (top, right); the two-headed wild geese of
Silha (center, left); a Blemmyae (center, right); a giant cyclops (bottom, left);
and an Ethiopian with one foot (bottom, right).
The texts’ popularity is not necessarily an indication that they were believed
to be true; even Polo encountered much disbelief in his stories. At the same
time, however, books like Polo’s provided a new level of detail and
verisimilitude for authors of secondary worlds to imitate, and made the role
of the main character more important in achieving such an effect. As Tzanaki
writes:
…the author’s authority is based not on the written authoritas of his
stories but on his traveller-persona of Sir John. As Rubiés and Elsner
have discussed, “after Marco Polo the authority of the traveller replaced
that of the book; the book was only authoritative if the traveller whose
report it contained was authoritative too”. The author of the Book
accordingly created a traveller with a consistently developed personality
to give his unacknowledged compilation a voice. Although we now
know he never truly existed, “Sir John Mandeville” contributed
immensely to the Book’s reception by linking the accounts he used and
constantly reinforcing their veracity.… “Sir John Mandeville” constantly
inserts personal comments into the narrative, describing his experiences
(he has been in the service of both the Sultan of Egypt and the Emperor
of Cathay) and stressing that he has seen many wonders with his own
eyes.… In inspired displays of verisimilitude, the author of the Book even
makes “Mandeville” deny seeing some marvels in order to lend greater
credence to his other assertions. He cheekily explains the omission of
some lands and “diverse things” by saying that he wants to leave
something for others to record.14
In stories of the travelers’ tales genre, the story’s world and its uniqueness
is, to some degree, the main reason for the tale itself, and its main character
is the vehicle by which the audience is vicariously transported to that world.
The central importance given to the story’s world and its oddities is evident
when the travelers’ tales genre is compared to another genre of the time that
made use of imaginary locations: knight-errantry tales, like Thomas
Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485) or the influential Spanish Amadis de
Gaula (1508) of unknown authorship. Although fictional settings appear, the
emphasis in these stories is usually on character and action, which one
would expect in tales of chivalry. For example, Matteo Maria Boiardo’s
Orlando Innamorato (“Orlando in Love”, left unfinished at the time of his
death in 1494 and published the following year) mentions the city of
Albracca and the kingdoms of Sericana, Aronda, Orgagna, Baldacca,
Damogir, Lissa, and the Distant Isles, but develops them very little if at all,
and some locations mentioned are never even visited. Its sequel, Ludovico
Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (“Orlando Enraged”, 1516), one of the longest
poems in Western literature at over 38,000 lines, continues the tale, adding
lands, including Alcina’s Island, Ebuda, and Nubia, as well as Astolpho’s
journey to the moon with St. John to find a cure for Orlando’s madness. The
moon is the one location described in detail, but it is mostly a landscape of
symbolic imagery rather than a habitable place. As chivalric notions
declined, so did knight-errantry tales, until they were parodied in works like
Cervantes’ Don Quixote (El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de La Mancha,
1605 and Part II in 1615), which included Barataria, a fictional island within
the story, the governorship of which is promised to Sancho Panza.
Travel writing, both fictional and nonfictional, could also comment on
current affairs in politics, through allegories, utopias (discussed in the next
section), or satire, and often employed the travelers’ tales format which
introduced worlds through the explorer’s eyes and used them as parodies of
existing societies or outlandish tall tales.15 The books of François Rabelais’
bawdy Gargantua and Pantagruel series (appearing 1532–1564), about a
father and son who are both giants, introduce a variety of worlds, mostly in
the form of islands. Perhaps the most outrageous world presented in his
work is the country of Aspharage, located in Pantagruel’s mouth:
I passed amongst the rocks, which were his teeth, and never left walking
till I got up on one of them; and there I found the pleasantest places in
the world, great large tennis courts, fair galleries, sweet meadows, store
of vines, and an infinite number of banqueting summer outhouses in the
fields, after the Italian fashion, full of pleasure and delight, where I
stayed full four months, and never made better cheer in my life as then.
After that I went down by the hinder teeth to come to the chaps. But in
the way I was robbed by thieves in a great forest that is in the territory
 towards the ears. Then, after a little further travelling, I fell upon a pretty
petty village—truly I have forgot the name of it—where I was yet merrier
than ever, and got some certain money to live by. Can you tell how? By
sleeping. For there they hire men by the day to sleep, and they get by it
sixpence a day, but they that can snort hard get at least ninepence. How
I had been robbed in the valley I informed the senators, who told me
that, in very truth, the people of that side were bad livers and naturally
thievish, whereby I perceived well that, as we have with us the countries
Cisalpine and Transalpine, that is, behither and beyond the mountains,
so have they there the countries Cidentine and Tradentine, that is,
behither and beyond the teeth. But it is far better living on this side, and
the air is purer. Then I began to think that it is very true which is
commonly said, that the one half of the world knoweth not how the
other half liveth; seeing none before myself had ever written of that
country, wherein are above five-and-twenty kingdoms inhabited, besides
deserts, and a great arm of the sea. Concerning which purpose I have
composed a great book, entitled, The History of the Throttias, because
they dwell in the throat of my master Pantagruel.16
While satires, similar to knight-errantry tales, presented worlds which
were different enough to be overtly fictional, or were at the very least not
intended to deceive, other imaginary places were more readily combined
with actual ones. Maps would feature them, sometimes with names that
indicated their questionable status (such as Terra Incognita), sometimes as
newly discovered lands, and sometimes as named lands with specific
geography and detailed coastlines, as though there was no question as to
their existence. Some fictional lands were misrepresentations of other places;
the island known as Thule was probably Iceland, and the island of Estotiland
may have been Labrador or Nova Scotia. Other lands remained on maps
until disproven by further exploration. For example, Antillia, an island
believed to exist in the Atlantic ocean somewhere west of Portugal,
appeared on maps including the chart made by Zuane Pizzigano around
1424, maps made by Genoese Beccario, Andrea Bianco, Grazioso Benincasa,
and many others throughout the 1400s, and Christopher Columbus even
planned to stop at Antillia on his way across the ocean in 1492. As
knowledge of the ocean grew, Antillia shrank and finally disappeared from
maps around 1587.17
As more travelers journeyed and returned, maps grew more complete and
accurate, and more travel literature appeared. With multiple authors writing
about the same areas, not only were more facts available, but stories could
be compared for consistency and checked with other sources. This in turn
would change the nature of travel literature itself. According to Nathalie
Hester:
When foreign lands were less or barely known, travel writing was
esteemed above all as a container of invaluable and rare information.
Later on, as more travelers roamed the globe and facts and data became
increasingly accessible, travelers dedicated more of their exploratory
energies to new ways of narrating their journeys. In the late sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, many… began focusing more on their roles as
narrators and protagonists and on developing their own poetics of travel
writing. In short, a more personalized narrative of travel became as
much a subject of investigation as the factual elements of the journey
itself.18
As travel narratives grew more personalized and audiences more
sophisticated, imaginary worlds had to keep pace with them. It was no
longer enough to merely describe a world’s inhabitants; interaction with
them was needed, and more detail as to their societies, customs, and cultures
was necessary to match the increased verisimilitude found in nonfictional
travel writing. Maps were sometimes included to give a visual dimension to
imaginary places; for example, Fr. Zacharie de Lisieux’s Relation du pays de
Jansénie, où il est traité des singularitez qui s’y trouvent, des coustumes,
Moeurs et Religion des habitants (1660), a satire on Jansenism, had a map of
the country (an oblique one, showing buildings and people in a landscape)
added to its English translation in 1668; and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
had maps of its islands, even though both works were not intended to be
taken as true stories.
However, some authors hoped their imaginary places would be taken as
real. In his book Travelers and Travel Liars 1660–1800, Percy Adams
identifies three types of travel writing: true tales of travels, fictional tales
that were intended to be seen as such, and fictional tales which were passed
off as real by their authors (who Adams calls “travel liars”). Adams’ book is
most concerned with the third group, of whom he writes:
And they have been important, so important that one of them caused the
newspapers of the world to use up a small river of ink reporting a race of
nine-foot giants in Patagonia; so important that another team of them
could persuade the Academy of Sciences in Paris to spend hours
discussing a spurious Northwest Passage; so important that historians
quoted them; cartographers changed maps to conform to them, wits like
Voltaire used them, readers were entertained by them, and philosophers
like Buffon depended on them.19
These “travel liars” plagiarized existing travel accounts (even some written
by other liars), and did research using books like the Atlas Geographus of
1717 to give their stories the verisimilitude they needed. While many kept
their imaginary voyages confined to real locations in order to make their
claims sound more plausible, others ventured into imaginary places, the
details of which were made as realistic as possible. The contribution of
“travel liars” to secondary worlds was an increase in the kind of detail that
made locations seem real, moving both “travel lies” and fiction in the
direction of worlds that were richer and fuller than the mere glimpses and
outrageous descriptions found in earlier works.
Due to their similarities, it is sometimes difficult to completely separate
“travel lies” from works that were not intended to deceive; partly because
some authors’ motives were not always entirely clear, some critics
recognized hoaxes early on, and some readers believed stories which were
intended as fiction. Both types of writing could aspire to verisimilitude, if
not to realism, while still emphasizing the fantastic and exotic; and both
took place in remote and inaccessible places, such as lands in the Americas
which remained unexplored, or in the south seas, or in Terra Australis (for
example, Joseph Hall’s Mundus alter et idem, sive Terra Australis ante hac
semper incognita (1605), Gabriel Foigny’s Les Aventures De Jacques Sadeur
(1676), or Denis Vairasse D’Allais’ Histoire des Sevarambes (five volumes in
the 1670s)). The secondary worlds of these stories ranged along the spectrum
from fantastic to realistic, since even authors who did not intend to deceive
could still try to be as convincing as possible without resorting to the same
truth-claims as travel lies.
The most popular and influential book of the travelers’ tale genre, and also
one categorized by Adams as a “travel lie”, was Daniel Defoe’s Robinson
Crusoe (1719) (see the Appendix for the full titles of this book and others
mentioned in this chapter). Robinson Crusoe became one of the most
reprinted books in the English language, and had so many imitators that
they became a genre unto themselves, known as “robinsonades”, and books
of a similar nature published before Defoe’s came to be called
“prerobinsonades” (including Henry Neville’s novel The Isle of Pines (1668),
about George Pines, who is shipwrecked on a deserted island along with
four women; after 59 years, due to their polygamous behavior, the island has
a population of 1,789). Existing stories were even repackaged with new titles
that had “Robinson” in them; as Philip Babcock Gove writes:
When authors could not supply the demand, publishers did not hesitate
to rechristen fictitious heroes already flourishing. Thus, among a score,
Gil Blas (1715) became Der spanische Robinson (1726), Krinke Kesmes
(1708) became Der holländische Robinson (1721), and François Leguat
(1707) became Der franzöische Robinson (1723). Even supposedly true
voyage-accounts were not exempt; Antonio Zucchelli’s Relazioni del
viaggio e missione di Congo (1712) became Der geistliche Robinson

(1723).20
Gove also mentions a bibliography compiled by Hermann Ullrich that lists
196 English editions of Robinson Crusoe, along with 110 translations, 115
revisions, and 277 imitations.21
As secondary worlds go, Crusoe’s Island is small, but depicted very
realistically and in great detail; its low degree of invention helps to explain
its believability and the ease with which it was imitated. Crusoe, and much
later Friday, are the island’s only human inhabitants (the cannibals and
Spaniards being merely visitors), and the island’s small size becomes evident
early on, when Crusoe looks out over it:
My next work was to view the country, and seek a proper place for my
habitation, and where to stow my goods to secure them from whatever
 might happen; where I was, I yet knew not, whether on the continent or
an island, whether inhabited, whether in danger of wild beasts or not.
There was a hill not above a mile from me, which rose up very steep and
high, and which seemed to over-top some other hills, which lay as in a
ridge from it northward; I took out one of the following pieces, and one
of the pistols, and an horn of powder, and thus armed I travelled for
discovery up to the top of that hill, where after I had with great labour
and difficulty got to the top, I saw my fate to my great affliction, viz. that
I was on an island environed every way with the sea, no land to be seen,
except some rocks which lay a great way off, and two small islands less
than this, which lay about three leagues to the west.22
Unlike most travelers who are merely passing through the lands they
describe, Crusoe lives on the island for 28 years and comes to know it well.
Robinson Crusoe, then, earns its place in the history of secondary worlds
based not on the size of its world, but on the degree to which Defoe
developed it and the number of imitators it inspired.
Seven years later another influential book appeared, with fantastic
inhabited lands and their cultures; Jonathan Swift’s innovative satire,
Gulliver’s Travels (1726). In it, detailed accounts are given of the islands of
Lilliput, Blefuscu, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib, the island of the
Houyhnhnms, the flying island of Laputa, and the peninsula of Brobdingnag,
as well as the cultures of their peoples, and even how the human Gulliver
appears from their point of view. As a result, the cultures depicted are well-
rounded, and we are even given glimpses of their history; for example, the
backstory behind the conflict between the Lilliputians and the Blefuscudians,
which has to do with how they break their eggs. Swift even suggests
Lilliputian culture extends beyond the book, stating:
But I shall not anticipate the Reader with farther Descriptions of this
Kind, because I reserve them for a greater Work, which is now almost
ready for the Press; containing a general Description of this Empire,
from its first Erection, through a long Series of Princes, with a particular
Account of their Wars and Politiks, Laws, Learning, and Religion; their
Plants and Animals, their peculiar Manners and Customs, with other
Matters very curious and useful; my chief Design at present being only
 to relate such Events and Transactions as happened to the Publick, or to
my self, during a Residence of about Nine Months in that Empire.23
Like no other book before it, Gulliver’s Travels struck a balance between
fantastic elements and realistic description, allowing the reader to picture
things vividly no matter how strange they may be. For example, Swift gives
a lengthy explanation of how the flying island of Laputa stays aloft and is
steered, raised, and lowered, as well as why it cannot drift away from the
island of Balnibarbi over which it flies, and the consequences of immortality
experienced by the Struldbruggs of Luggnugg. Descriptions of architecture,
language, customs, landscapes, and other attention to detail surpassed the
verisimilitude found in other satires, and equaled that of other long fiction
of the time like Crusoe, setting a new standard for literary secondary worlds.
As the eighteenth century drew on, island worlds continued to appear, in
dozens of imitations, robinsonades, and unauthorized sequels to Gulliver’s
Travels, along with more original places like Cacklogallinia, a land of giant
chickens and other birds, in Samuel Brunt’s A Voyage to Cacklogallinia
(1727), a satire inspired by the South Sea Bubble of 1720 and the economic
conditions surrounding it. The island of Cantahar, from De Varennes de
Mondasse’s La Découverie De L’Empire De Cantahar (1730), had new species
including the dangerous picdar, the lazy igriuo, and the tigrelis used to pull
carriages. Countries in unexplored continental interiors also appeared, like
Drexara, a region in North America and home to a savage Indian tribe, from
Abbé Antoine François Prévost’s Le Philosphe anglois, ou Histoire de
Monsieur Cleveland (1731); or Mezzorania, an African country where there
is no competition or egoism, from Simon Berington’s The Memoirs of Sigr.
Gaudentio di Lucca (1737).
As more of the world became known and mapped, some authors found a
new place to locate their worlds that was not only difficult for explorers to
reach but would also not appear on maps: underground, deep beneath the
earth’s surface. This choice of location may have been influenced by
nonfiction works like Athanasius Kircher’s Mundus Subterraneus (1665),
which suggested that the earth’s interior contained channels and fire
chambers. Earlier underground worlds were either more mythical or
allegorical in nature, like Hades or the circles of Hell described in Dante’s
Divine Comedy. Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen’s Der
abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teusch (1668), sometimes claimed to be the
first adventure novel written in German, includes a journey to “Centrum
Terrae”, a kingdom deep inside the earth, reached through lakes and
waterways. The place is inhabited by mortal water-spirits or “sylphs” and
their king, and it is only through the use of a magic stone that the story’s
main character, Simplicissimus, is able to travel there:
Meanwhile there rose up here and there more of such water-spirits, like
diving birds, all looking upon me and bringing up again the stones I had
cast in, which amazed me much. And the first and chiefest among them,
whose raiment shone like pure gold and silver, cast to me a shining stone
of bigness of a pigeon’s egg and green and transparent as an emerald,
with these words: “Take thou this trinket, that thou mayst have
somewhat to report of us and of our lake.” But scarce had I picked it up
and pocketed it when it seemed to me the air would choke or drown me,
so that I could not stand upright but rolled about like a ball of yarn, and
at last fell into the lake. Yet no sooner was I in the water than I
recovered, and through the virtue of the stone I had upon me could
breathe in water instead of air: yea, I could with small effort float in the
lake as well as could the water-spirits, yea, and with them descended
into the depths; which reminded me of nothing so much as of a flock of
birds that so descend in circles from the upper air to light upon the
ground.24
Because Centrum Terrae is inhabited by spirits and uninhabitable by
humans, it has as much in common with Dante’s metaphysical places as it
does with the other physical places visited by Simplicissimus, in some ways
bridging the gap between the two types of worlds.
After 1700, underground worlds took on more solidity and became like
other earthly locations ripe for exploration. The country of Rufsal, in Simon
Tyssot de Patot’s La Vie, Les Aventures, & le Voyage de Groenland Du
Révérend Père Cordelier Pierre De Mesange (1720), had four underground
cities with its entrance near the North Pole; earlier “Hollow Earth” theories
often suggested that entrances would be near the poles.25 Rufsal is probably
the earliest instance of a “Hollow Earth” in fiction, a subgenre of literature
that continues to the present.26
Along with the new setting for secondary worlds came new world-
building problems and practical concerns like lighting, oxygen, food
production, and how the inhabitants came to live there. Over the years,
authors have found a variety of solutions to such problems. For example,
regarding lighting: Rufsal is lit by a mysterious fireball; Baron Ludvig
Holberg’s Nazar (from Nicolai Klimii Iter Subterraneum Novam Telluris
Theoriam (1741)) and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar are both lit by
subterranean suns inside the hollow earth (individual homes in Nazar are lit
by luminous creatures called sweecoes); the creatures that live underneath
Anderson’s Rock in Ralph Morris’ A Narrative of the Life and Astonishing
Adventures of John Daniel (1751) live near the surface and catch “oil-fish”
which give them the oil which they use to light their underground homes;
and Rand and Robyn Miller’s underground cavern of the D’ni is lit by a lake
inhabited by bioluminescent plankton. In some cases, a world’s inhabitants
were designed for subterranean life, like the burrowing half-man, half-worm
Worm-men of Trisolday, in Charles Fieux de Mouhy’s Lamékis (1735). And
there are also the Megamicroes, who live underground within an
underground world; in Giacomo Girolamo Casanova di Seingalt’s
Icosaméron (1788), Protocosmo is an island floating on a muddy layer of the
concave interior of the hollow earth, which is lit by a globe in the earth’s
center, and the Megamicroes live underground on the island itself.
Subterranean worlds would continue to appear in the works of Jules Verne,
Edgar Rice Burroughs, and others, representing a step toward more
imaginative worlds with their own unique problems of feasibility for
authors to solve, and worlds less like existing earthly foreign cultures than
surface-based imaginary worlds had been.
Also during the 1700s, an increasing number of worlds, both above and
below ground, appeared in stories in which the world itself was given more
emphasis than the travels that brought characters to and from the world.
Descriptions of languages, laws, and customs would be related during the
main character’s extended stay, like Peter Wilkins’ many years living with
the flying Glumms and Gawreys of Sass Doorpt Swangeanti (the Great
Flight Land) in Robert Paltock’s The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins
(1751). Wilkins interacts with the world he enters to an exceptional degree
unusual for the time; he marries one of the native women and starts a family
with her, stops an attempt to overthrow the kingdom, brings about a
technological revolution by introducing European technology, and persuades
the kingdom to abolish slavery, all before his wife dies and he decides to
return to England in his old age.
Besides the main character’s narration in these stories, natives would also
appear and explain their worlds directly. Occasionally, such details about a
world and its wonders proved to be prophetic. In Giphantie, the land of
Charles François Tiphaigne de la Roche’s 1760 book of the same name
(which was an anagram of Tiphaigne), there is a scene in which the main
character is told how pictures are made:
You know, that rays of light reflected from different bodies form pictures,
paint the image reflected on all polished surfaces, for example, on the
retina of the eye, on water, and on glass. The spirits have sought to fix
these fleeting images; they have made a subtle matter by means of which
a picture is formed in the twinkling of an eye. They coat a piece of
canvas with this matter, and place it in front of the object to be taken.
The first effect of this cloth is similar to that of a mirror, but by means of
its viscous nature the prepared canvas, as is not the case with the mirror,
retains a fac-simile of the image. The mirror represents images faithfully,
but retains none; our canvas reflects them no less faithfully, but retains
them all. This impression of the image is instantaneous. The canvas is
then removed and deposited in a dark place. An hour later the
impression is dry, and you have a picture the more precious in that no
art can imitate its truthfulness.27
This prediction of photography, made 66 years before the first permanent
photograph was made by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826, shows how the
imaginative potential of secondary worlds can foreshadow technological
advances, and such speculation would especially be taken up in the genre of
science fiction (discussed later in this chapter).
Although the travelers’ tale genre would decline in the early 1800s, the
framing device of using journeys to and from a world to bookend the visit to
that world would never fall out of use. Nevertheless, the importance of such
journeys and the amount of time spent describing them would shrink as the
emphasis shifted to the world itself, which was beginning to take center
stage as the location where most of the story took place. Eventually, when
such framing devices were no longer needed and main characters could be
inhabitants of a world instead of merely visitors to them, the main
character’s journey of exploration could take place entirely within the world
itself, as the character moved from the world’s margins to its center, learning
about the world along with the audience. For example, Tolkien’s hobbits
leave the Shire and learn about Middle-earth en route to Gondor and
Mordor; Luke Skywalker leaves Tatooine to join the conflict between the
Rebel Alliance and the Empire; and Neo leaves his desk job to discover what
the Matrix is. These journeys are not unlike the traveler’s journeys in earlier
works, but they take place entirely within their secondary worlds.28
By the start of the nineteenth century, secondary worlds had become more
detailed as authors sought to answer more questions about their worlds.
With every answer, however, came further questions about how the worlds
worked, particularly their social, cultural, and technological aspects. As the
prediction of photography cited in the preceding text illustrates, imaginative
inquiry into technological possibilities was growing and would soon eclipse
travel literature in the public imagination as the Industrial Age began
producing new scientific and industrial marvels. According to Adams:
…the great age for such literature was over with the advent of the
steamboat and the steam locomotive, when real travelers became so
numerous that false ones were both less necessary and more easily
exposed. But the fireside travelers of the eighteenth century continued to
exert their influence.… The historical and adventure novels, from
Smollett’s Roderick Random to Cooper’s Afloat and Ashore to Waltari’s
The Egyptian, have learned from the school of Defoe that by applying
the tools of the scholar they can add color, concreteness, and
verisimilitude to the lands where their heroes go.29
Imaginary worlds did more than influence fiction writing, they also helped
people grow more aware of the default assumptions of their own
worldviews, as well as their ethnocentrism. As Adams writes:
 But the influence went beyond belles-lettres. In a period when tolerance,
democracy, and relativity became important, no thinker or historian
could do without the voyagers, who taught that each nation had a
distinctive, even appropriate, way of life. They inspired studies in
comparative religion, comparative natural history, and comparative
government. Although their great wealth of illustrative material has
sometimes caused historians to decry their lack of “ideas”, the ratio of
original thinkers among them was no doubt as high as it was for any
class of writers.30
While travelers’ tales wrought visions of remote and exotic locales which
they later sought to flesh out into societies and cultures, another concurrent
branch of literature used secondary worlds to construct imaginary societal
structures, at first abstractly and later with increasing attention to their
aesthetic dimension and concrete details: the literature of utopias and
dystopias.

Utopias and Dystopias

While the imaginary worlds of travelers’ tales focused mainly on their
inhabitant’s customs, aesthetics, and cultural differences, utopic fiction of
the same period concentrated more on the social, political, and economic
structures of the worlds they described. Of course, much overlap exists
between the two strands of literature, since a utopia can be a traveler’s
destination. As Gove writes:
The imaginary voyage frequently offers a double opportunity to the
utopist. The voyager’s native guide—the conventional figure who teaches
him the language and explains the customs—usually relates the story of
the founding of his commonwealth; if the people are descended from
Europeans, then their origins involve an earlier voyage and shipwreck.
So the utopist, perhaps not artistically interested in writing fiction at all,
finds in the imaginary voyage the readiest vehicle, especially in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for his optimism and enjoyment of
vicarious justice.31
Travel appears in early utopic fiction, but the journeys to the utopia and
back to Europe are relegated to a thin framing device that brackets the
description of the utopia, which is often nonnarrative in form and more
typically a social proposal or thought experiment than a story.
The utopic tradition can be traced back to antiquity (including such things
as the Garden of Eden and Hesiod’s Golden Age), with Kallipolis, the ideal
city of Plato’s Republic, the most detailed and sophisticated example from
ancient times. As it includes an analysis of a society falling into tyranny,
Republic also anticipates the idea of a dystopia (or “bad place”; the term itself
would not appear until the 1860s), although the difference between a utopia
and dystopia largely depends on the point of view of what someone
considers desirable for a society; in Kallipolis, for example, all music, art,
literature, painting, and architecture must conform to standards set by the
State and serve its interests, a state of affairs many would consider dystopic.
As such, both utopias and dystopias will be considered here in tandem.
Like travelers’ tales, early utopias were an extension of speculation
regarding the new lands being explored, and were set in their vicinity.
According to historians Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel:
Much of Western utopia can be related to the acquisition of the known
visible world by the peoples of the peninsula of Europe…. Imaginary
societies are situated along the general path of actual conquests,
discoveries, and explorations. In the wake of Alexander’s drive to the
heart of Asia, Euhemerus, a Hellenistic Greek, found a good order of
society on Panchaïa, an island on the Indian Ocean. The trader Iambulus,
probably a Syrian metic, abandoned to the sea by his Ethiopian captors
as a sacrificial offering, told how his boat had drifted to Islands of the
Sun somewhere near the east coast of Africa. Other Greek writers
claimed acquaintance with the happy Hyperboreans and the men of
Ultima Thule on the edge of the European continent.… throughout the
Middle Ages new lands were constantly being incorporated into the
utopian mappamundi from the seas to the west of Europe and Africa.32
Although utopic worlds like Plato’s Kallipolis, St. Augustine’s Eternal
Jerusalem in his City of God (426 AD), the mythical land of Cockaigne, and
Christine de Pisan’s City of Ladies in La Cité des Dames (1405) set forth
what their authors considered to be ideal places, the most influential early
utopic writing was St. Thomas More’s Concerning the Best State of a
Commonwealth and the New Island of Utopia (1516), otherwise known as
Utopia. The book was supposedly the recorded discourse of one Rafael
Hythlodaeus, who traveled to Utopia, lived there five years, and then
returned to Europe to tell about it. Utopia is also important from the point of
view of the development of imaginary worlds. First, it is one of the earliest
worlds to appear along with a map; the first edition (1516) had one drawn by
an unknown hand, and the 1518 edition had one drawn by the Dutch painter
Ambrosius Holbein (brother of Hans Holbein the Younger); both were
woodcuts and contained an oblique view of the island. Other more realistic
cartographic maps would come later, such as those by Abraham Ortelius
around 1595 and Brian R. Goodey in 1970. An attempt to map Utopia is
possible because More gives a detailed description of the shape of the island,
complete with measurements in miles, though inconsistencies make a map
following all his figures impossible.33 The description of the urban plan
shared by Utopia’s 54 city-states, however, is consistent and practical, and
amenable to mapping. But while Utopia’s small-scale planning relates to its
social design as a garden state, its large-scale design does not. As Goodey
writes:
“Utopia” was not written as a geography. The locale of More’s society is
almost incidental to the social structure that he describes, and as a result
the maps included in the present paper are based on only a few sections
of description. As Surtz suggests, a better title for the popular editions of
the book might have been “The Best State of a Commonwealth”; for
much of the work does not rely on the geography of the imaginary state
of Utopia for its effect.34
Thus, More’s Utopia is an early example of the inclusion of things beyond
the immediate needs of the story (or in this case, the description of a culture
and society). Some backstory is also given, for example, how the island was
called “Abraxa” before it was renamed for King Utopus, and that Utopian
civilization is more than 1,200 years old. Details about the neighboring
countries of the Polylerites, the Macarians, the Achorians, and the
Anemolians are given when comparisons are made between them and the
Utopians. Ancillary materials included in the early editions of Utopia
include a map (see Figure 2.2), letters written by More and others (which
speak of Utopia as though it were a real place), and the Utopian alphabet
and a quatrain written in the Utopian language (see Figure 3.4), making
Utopia one of the first secondary worlds to have its own script and language
sample. These last were apparently the work of Peter Giles, the author of one
of the letters included and the recipient of several others, making Utopia, to
a small degree, an early example of a collaboratively authored world.35
FIGURE 2.2 Maps of Thomas More’s island of Utopia, from 1516 (left) and
from 1518 (center), both attributed to Ambrosius Holbein; and from 1595,
drawn by cartographer Abraham Ortelius (right).
Much of Utopia, especially Book II, is concerned with social and political
structures, government, religion, education, customs, and routines of daily
life, the content one now expects to find in the description of an imaginary
society. Utopia inspired a host of imitators and began the literary genre of
the same name, diverging from the travelers’ tales genre in that its emphasis
was on the imaginary society described, rather than the journey to or from
the society’s homeland. According to Manuel and Manuel:
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, descriptive works that
imitated the Utopia were called utopias, with a miniscule, and they
adhered more or less to the traditional literary devices that More himself
received from Lucian of Samosata, who in turn had inherited them from
Hellenistic novels, many of them no longer extant. The invention of
printing made readily available translations of tales of this character
from one European language into another, and they came to constitute
an ever-expanding corpus, in which stock formulas and concepts can be
traced historically and their modifications charted. The principal
elements are a shipwreck or chance landing on the shores of what turns
out to be an ideal commonwealth, a return to Europe, and a report on
what has been remarked. If arranged in chronological order these works,
considered “proper utopias” by bibliographers, form a sequence in which
the imitation of predecessors is patent.36
Despite some positive advances, More’s Utopia still had slavery, and many
other utopias of the time also had aspects that would be considered dystopic
today. Johann Eberlin von Günzburg’s Wolfaria (1521), the first Protestant
utopia, depicted a land in which everything was under governmental
control, with harsh punishments like execution and drowning for such
minor infractions as public drunkenness or saying the wrong prayers. Anton
Doni’s I Mondi (1552) introduced Mondo Nouvo, a city-state built in the
shape of a star with 100 streets radiating out from the doors of a central
temple, in which everyone’s dress and meals are uniform, families are
abolished, and women held in common. Women and children are both held
in common in Tommaso Campanella’s The City of the Sun (1623). Thus, the
dividing line between utopic and dystopic depends on one’s own desires and
beliefs.37
As some of the descriptions mentioned above reveal, most utopias were
dreamt up by men, and tended toward male chauvinism. However, the
Renaissance also saw some of the first subcreated worlds made by women,
for whom utopias were a way to imagine worlds which countered the male-
dominated and misogynist attitudes of the time.38 In 1405, Christine de
Pisan wrote her utopian La Cité des Dames (The City of Ladies), an
allegorical city composed of famous women from history. In 1659, Anne
Marie Louise Henriette d’Orléans, Duchesse De Montpensier, wrote two
short novels, La Princesse de Paphlagonie, about the kingdom of Misnie, and
Rélation de L’Isle Imaginaire, about Imaginary Island, and both were
published under the name of her secretary, Segrais. A year later, Madeleine
De Scudéry, known for writing some of the longest novels of the time,
included a map of Tendre, an imaginary land (see Figure 2.3), in her ten-
installment novel Clélie (1654–1660). De Scudéry’s detailed color map
depicts a land of love, with such features as a Lac d’Indiference (“Lake of
Indifference”) and cities with names like Respect, Generosité, Grand Coeur,
Probité, Billet Doux, and Exactitude. And finally, new worlds are proposed
in two works by Lady Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle; a set of
utopian rules for a new society put forth in her essay, “The Inventory of
Judgements Commonwealth, the Author cares not in what World it is
established” in her collection, The Worlds Olio (1655), and her fictional work,
The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World (1666) (described
in the next section), which is sometimes included in lists of utopias though it
is also considered to be early science fiction.
Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a variety of utopias
appeared, ranging from those which were no more than a list of rules
governing a society, to ones that more fully imagined the lands, culture, and
history of their inhabitants. Among the latter, we can find examples in
which some sense of an actual place is attempted. Tommaso Campanella’s
The City of the Sun (1602) begins with a lengthy description of his arrival on
the island of Taprobane and a description of the city that he found there (the
design of which reminds one of Tolkien’s Minas Tirith):
 The greater part of the city is built upon a high hill, which rises from an
extensive plain, but several of its circles extend for some distance beyond
the base of the hill, which is of such a size that the diameter of the city is
upward of two miles, so that its circumference becomes about seven. On
account of the humped shape of the mountain, however, the diameter of
the city is really more than if it were built on a plain.
It is divided into seven rings or huge circles named from the seven
planets, and the way from one to the other of these is by four streets and
through four gates, that look toward the four points of the compass.
Furthermore, it is so built that if the first circle were stormed, it would of
necessity entail a double amount of energy to storm the second; still
more to storm the third; and in each succeeding case the strength and
energy would have to be doubled; so that he who wishes to capture that
city must, as it were, storm it seven times. For my own part, however, I
think that not even the first wall could be occupied, so thick are the
earthworks and so well fortified is it with breastworks, towers, guns, and
ditches.39
After giving the layout of the city, he goes on to describe the palaces and
central temple, and their décor, before launching into an explanation of how
their government is structured, urged on by the questions of the Genoese sea
captain who is his interlocutor.
FIGURE 2.3 Map of Madeleine De Scudéry’s Tendre, from 1654, which
appeared with her novel Clélie, Histoire Romaine (1654–1660) and was
designed by De Scudery and her friends, with the engraving of the final
image attributed to François Chauveau.
 Johann Valentin Andres’s Reipublicae Christianopolitanae Descriptio
(1619), otherwise known as Christianopolis, sets its walled utopian city-state
upon an island called Caphar Salama. After his ship, Fantasy, is shipwrecked
on the island, the book’s main character, the pilgrim Cosmoxenus
Christianus, is examined by the city’s guardians and later shown the city.
Christianopolis is small but meticulously planned out and described in 100
chapters, including a map drawn by Andreæ. According to Edward H.
Thompson of Dundee University:
The general description of Christianopolis is one of best-practice early
modern accommodation: for example, the roofs are divided up by fire-
walls at intervals, and the buildings are all constructed of baked bricks
against the danger of fire; they have double windows “one of glass and
one of wood, set into the wall in such a way that each may be opened or
closed as desired”, with lifting gear—presumably of the kind found to
this day in Amsterdam—to hoist heavy items to the upper floors
(Chapter 23). Pure spring water is channelled into the community, and
divided up first into streets, then into houses, the outflow of a lake runs
by subterranean channels through the sewers, to empty the houses of
dirt each day (Chapter 95). In short, the domestic arrangements may be
Spartan, but they are completely up-to-date for early modern Europe.40
Andreæ’s architectural details and description gives his city-state a more
concrete presence than the more dreamlike descriptions of prior utopias
which focused more on social structures than physical ones.
Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626) involves a ship lost in the South Seas
which chances upon the remote island of Bensalem. We are given detailed
descriptions of the house where the ship’s crew is quarantined right after
arriving, and an elaborate backstory reaching over 3,000 years, which
includes how a miraculous pillar and cross of light, along with a Bible and
letter sent by St. Bartholomew, converted many of the islanders to
Christianity; the early seafaring years and loss of Great Atlantis in a deluge;
and the ancient King Salomana, their lawgiver, and the establishment of his
house. At one point, one resident of Bensalem even says “I have read in a
book of one of your men, of a feigned commonwealth,” and goes on to make
a specific reference to More’s Utopia.
 In many of these works, the author attempts to tell a tale that goes beyond
the mere description of societal structures, and to create a world in which
the story takes place. And, similar to the lands and islands of travelers’ tales,
the locations of utopias generally followed explorations of the day.
According to Manuel and Manuel:
For two hundred years thereafter the imaginary encounters of literary
voyagers with stranger peoples kept close pace with the real adventures
of their seafaring counterparts in America and Asia. Sometimes the
utopias prophetically preceded rather than followed historical landings
in new places: Toward the latter part of the seventeenth century, at a
time when the South Sea islands and Autralia were still unexplored, the
utopians outstripped the sailors, and the Huguenots Gabriel de Foigny
and Denise Vairesse situated kingdoms in the Mers Australes. For some,
there was no longer enough wonderment attached to the coastline of the
Americas. Happiness was where they were not, beyond the horizons.
During the course of the next century ideal societies multiplied in a
balmy region of the Pacific—in Tahiti and on the island of Nouvelle-
Cythère—rêves exotiques bred by the real voyages of Captain James
Cook and Louis Antoine de Bougainville in the same area. After 1800,
the wilderness of the American West, opened to travelers, yielded up
utopian worlds in hidden valleys and on the broad plains and plateaus.
New territories were progressively annexed to utopia until the whole
face of the earth was covered and men had to seek elsewhere.41
To explain why they were not on maps, some worlds, like Bacon’s island
of Bensalem, were said to be deliberately hidden from outsiders. Simon
Tyssot de Patot’s Voyages et avantures de Jaques Massé (1710), featured the
monarchy of Satrapia, cut off from the outside world by mountain ranges,
making it one of the first “lost world” novels. Moreover, works were starting
to originate in the New World as well: Joseph Morgan’s The History of the
Kingdom of Basaruah (1715) appeared in New England, and was one of the
first pieces of prose fiction to be written and published in America by an
American.42
The eighteenth century saw increasing detail put into the design of
utopian worlds, and their political aims changed as well. In her book
Journey Through Utopia, Marie Louise Berneri writes:
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the dimly-known
continents of America or Australia merely offered a setting into which
London or Paris had been transplanted. In the eighteenth century these
countries begin to have a life of their own and the customs of the people
discovered there by travelers or missionaries are incorporated in the
framework of the utopias. We find also that while utopias had tried to
represent a society where complete equality was the rule, many of them
are now concerned with building a free society. The inhabitants of
Diderot’s Tahiti, for example, do not know either government or laws.
Utopias had provided sufficient food and clothing, comfortable houses
and a good education, but in exchange they had demanded the complete
submission of the individual to the state and its laws; they now sought
above all these things freedom from laws and governments.43
Among the more narrative-based utopias, we find some descended from the
travelers themselves, similar to Neville’s Isle of Pines. For example, in
Johann Gottfried Schnabel’s Die Insel Felsenburg (1731), two shipwreck
survivors, Albertus and Concordia, marry and populate the island which
Albertus rules over as his own ideal state; and in Francois Lefebvre’s
Relation du Voyage de l’Isle d’Éutopie (1711) the Eutopians are descended
from a father with ten married children, whose descendents, after 250 years,
number more than 40,000.
Another strategy for the presentation of an imaginary world is found in
John Kirkby’s The History of Automathes (1745). The main narrative, about
the country of Soteria, is related in a manuscript from 1614 that the narrator
finds washed up on the seashore. Such a device puts the imaginary world at
one more remove from the reader, and reflects the experience of reading
about an imaginary country within the story itself. Oddly enough, the
narrator begins his own tale “During my abode in my native county of
Cumberland,” mentioning another fictional country which is never
elaborated upon further; a curious addition, since the story could have been
set in any real country bordering an ocean. Similarly, James Burgh’s An
Account of the First Settlement, Laws, Form of Government and Police of the
Cessares (1764) is related in a series of nine letters dated 1620.
 A printer who printed his own books, Nicolas-Edme Restif de La Bretonne
authored around 200 volumes, among them a series of related utopias
written between 1769 and 1789 which he collectively referred to as Idées
singulières. These works, describing the laws and social structures of lands
including Gynographe, Andrographe, and Thesmographe, are more
concerned with politics and social reforms than with the concrete details
and frame narratives that others used to make their countries seem like real
places. In general, utopian writing could be seen as moving in two different
directions. According to Manuel and Manuel:
Toward the end of the eighteenth century, in a growingly de-
Christianized Europe, even while the old isolated island and valley
utopias and a newer type of awakened-dreamer utopia continued to be
regurgitated, there came into greater prominence the branch of utopian
thought that spurned any fictional backdrop, broke with the limitations
of specific place, and addressed itself directly to the reformation of the
entire species…. By the early nineteenth century innovative utopian
thought had all but lost its enclosed space. The novels portraying
encapsulated and protected pictorial utopias, while they have continued
to be sold in the millions of copies into our own time, were often in
content residual and derivative, dependent on revolutionary utopian
theory that others had propounded.44
The second group mentioned here, of course, is the one concerned with
building secondary worlds. Derivative though they may have been
politically, they sold their “millions” of copies and reached more people no
doubt because of their narrative content and otherworldly settings; they
were novels, not merely political manifestos or outlined programs of social
reform. While communal movements of the nineteenth century and the
rising interest in socialism led some of the latter to inspire actual
communities that would attempt to live out their ideals, novelists sought to
broaden utopian speculative potential while keeping it within a narrative
framework. One author of the period, Félix Bodin, recognized the value of a
secondary world in speculative fiction, and included criticism of the genre
along with an unfinished novel in Le Roman de l’Avenir (1834) (also known
as The Novel of the Future). Bodin felt that audiences were reached more
effectively through imagination and a narrative world using novelistic
techniques rather than through abstract utopian manifestos, and his work
described the direction that science fiction would take decades later, even
before the genre was fully codified.45
The nineteenth century saw an increase in the production of utopias, with
over 300 published in the English language alone.46 Socialist writings and
the arrival of the Industrial Age with its abundance of new technology
opened up possibilities, encouraging speculation and hopes that productivity
and efficiency would be increased, while poverty could be eliminated, or at
least reduced. Many utopias, however, also included an increased reliance on
technology, reduced autonomy for individuals, and greater regulation and
control by the state. For example, Etienne Cabet’s Voyage et aventures de
Lord William Carisdall en Icarie (1839) (later republished as Voyage to
Icaria), which inspired a number of actual Icarian communities throughout
the century, had streets that were all straight and wide, thousands of “street
cars” for public transportation, and a State which planned everything
including people’s meal times, clothes, and curfews. In the story, Eugene,
one of the book’s characters, writes the following about Icarian dining in a
letter to his brother Camille:
The Committee which I have mentioned before has also discussed and
indicated the number of meals, the time at which they should be eaten,
how long they should last, the number of courses, their nature and the
order in which they should be served, varying them continuously, not
only according to the seasons and the months but also according to the
days, with the result that every meal of the week is different from the
other.
At six o’clock in the morning, before they begin work, all the workers,
that is to say all the citizens, eat a very simple breakfast in common at
their workshops, prepared and served by the factory restaurant.
At nine o’clock, they have a luncheon in the workshop, while their
wives and children take theirs at home.
At two o’clock, all the inhabitants of the same street eat together, in
their republican restaurant, a dinner prepared by one of the caterers of
the Republic.
 And every evening between nine and ten, each family has, in its own
home, a supper prepared by the women of the household.
At all these meals, the first TOAST is to the glory of the good Icar,
benefactor of the workers, BENEFACTOR OF THE FAMILIES,

BENEFACTOR OF THE CITIZENS.47

Many would hardly consider such strict conditions to be utopic, and some
authors used their utopias to satirize existing conditions, like Benjamin
Disraeli’s The Voyage of Captain Popanilla (1828), a political satire in which
England appears as the country of Vraibleusia; or Samuel Butler’s Erewhon:
or, Over the Range (1872), the bulk of which was a series of detailed
descriptions of Erewhonian institutions and their operations which satirized
their British counterparts. Erewhon eventually found enough success to
warrant a sequel, Erewhon Revisited Twenty Years Later, Both by the
Original Discoverer and His Son (1901).
Besides satirizing them, authors criticized conditions through the use of
utopias gone wrong, places that look utopic at first glance, but are later
revealed to be terrible, oppressive places, or places designed to suggest that if
certain trends in society continue, undesirable conditions will result. In 1868,
the term “dystopia” was introduced in a speech by John Stuart Mill in the
British Parliament, and came to describe these negative utopias. Dystopic
worlds had been around since Plato’s discussion of a society’s descent into a
tyranny in his Republic, and could be found in the form of fictional countries
like Nimpatan, the humorously bleak land of gold-worshipping Nimpatenese
in John Holmesby’s The Voyages, Travels, And Wonderful Discoveries of
Capt. John Holmesby (1757) or the future Paris of Louis Hippolyte Mettais’s
L’An 5865 ou Paris dans 4000 ans (1865), even before the term created a
separate category for them. Around the end of the nineteenth century, a new
wave of utopian and dystopian literature began, with works like Anna
Bowman Dodd’s The Republic of the Future (1887), Elizabeth Corbett’s New
Amazonia (1889), William Morris’ News from Nowhere (1890), Anna
Adolph’s Arqtiq: A Story of the Marvels at the North Pole (1899), and the
distant future world of the Morlocks in H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine
(1895). The number of dystopias would increase sharply in the twentieth
century, as industrial excess and growing reliance on technology, two world
wars, depressed economies, fascist and totalitarian regimes, and eventually
the invention of the nuclear bomb all conspired to make humanity’s future
appear disturbing and bleak. Such dystopic worlds include Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen
Eighty-four (1949), and the cinematic worlds of THX 1138 (1971), Blade
Runner (1982), and The Matrix (1999). The utopic tradition also continued
throughout the twentieth century, producing a variety of worlds including a
growing number of feminist utopias and ecological utopias that arose with
and helped inspire parallel social movements and changes.
Throughout the nineteenth century, as the Age of Exploration gradually
came to a close, utopias’ locations, like those of travelers’ tales, moved to
other planets, or into the past or the future, where they could remain
inaccessible and exotic. And just as the term “utopia” (literally, “no place”)
indicates an imaginary location, a story set in an imaginary time is
sometimes referred to as a “uchronia”, a term coined by Charles Renouvier in
his novel Uchronie (1876). Uchronias can be set in a vague prehistoric time,
in the future, or an unspecified or even fictional time period (the term is also
sometimes used to include alternate history stories, since stories set in the
future eventually become alternate histories).48 Many uchronias of the
nineteenth century were set far into the future, for example, Edward
Bellamy’s influential book Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888), Mary
Griffith’s “Three Hundred Years Hence” (1836) (believed to be the first utopia
or uchronia written by an American woman), Louis Sébastien Mercier’s
L’An 2440, Rêve s’il en Fût Jamais (1771) (published in 1795 in English as
Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred); Paolo Mantegazza’s
L’Anno 3000 (The Year 3000, 1897), with a good number of predictions that
came true in the twentieth century; Emile Souvestre’s Le Monde tel qu’il
sera (The World of the Future, 1846) about the year 3000; Chauncey Thomas’
The Crystal Button; or, Adventures of Paul Prognosis in the Forty-Ninth
Century (1891); John Macnie’s The Diothas; or, A Far Look Ahead (1883)
about the sixty-ninth century, H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, part of which
takes place in the year 802701, and his story “Man of the Year Million” (1893),
set the farthest into the future that any nineteenth century author was
willing to venture.49
By the end of the nineteenth century, a wide variety of authors had
written works set in imaginary worlds; for example, James Fenimore
Cooper’s Vulcan’s Peak and Leap Islands; Mark Twain’s republic of
Gondour; John Ruskin’s Stiria; Herman Melville’s Mardi Archipelago; the
Brontë sisters’ Gondal and Gaaldine; Alexander Pushkin’s Land of
Lukomorie; Anthony Trollope’s Britannula; glimpses of worlds seen in the
work of Edgar Allen Poe; Gilbert and Sullivan’s Barataria, Titipu, and Zara’s
Kingdom; and composer Hector Berlioz’s city of Euphonia. Occasionally, one
could still find an imaginary world in the form of lost continents proposed
in nonfiction works, like Lemuria, in Philip Sclater’s 1864 essay “The
Mammals of Madagascar” in The Quarterly Journal of Science; or Mu,
described by Augustus Le Plongeon in Queen Móo and the Egyptian Sphinx
(1896) as the land bridge across the Atlantic Ocean which allowed the
ancient Mayans to cross over and become the founders of Egyptian culture.
Utopias, dystopias, and uchronias would continue to be written, but from the
end of the nineteenth century onward, the two literary genres that would
see the most imaginary worlds were the newly-coalesced ones of fantasy
and science fiction, which broadly encompassed past, future, interplanetary,
and alternate worlds.

The Genres of Science Fiction and Fantasy

If travelers’ tales brought audiences to imaginary worlds and utopias gave
them some sense of how their inhabitants lived, the genres of science fiction
and fantasy invited audiences to live in them vicariously. The main
characters of these genres’ stories could still be travelers from the Primary
World, but as both genres developed, a growing number of main characters
would be natives of secondary worlds instead of merely visitors. World
information could still be introduced in long expository passages or
monologues, but authors were finding ways to more smoothly integrate the
new defaults and details their worlds introduced, easing the audience’s
transition into the subcreated world. And, over time, generic conventions
codified and gave authors shortcuts to generating familiarity as audiences
gained experience with the genres and expectations were formed. While
science fiction and fantasy stories can be set in the Primary World, many of
them propose secondary worlds, and the most elaborate imaginary worlds
are now typically found in these genres.
 The genres of science fiction and fantasy both coalesced during the
Victorian era, due to a confluence of circumstances. The rise of newspapers,
the establishment of publishing houses, and the growing literacy that came
with mandatory education all encouraged the increasing output of literature
during the nineteenth century. As the numbers of novels grew, classification
grew in importance and new literary genres formed, claiming for themselves
the works of past centuries that shared the common traits and elements that
defined each genre. The Industrial Revolution and the development of
scientific method promoted methodological investigation and technological
speculation, and their influence would aid the separation of literature of the
fantastic from so-called “realistic” literature toward the end of the century,
with Romanticism challenged by Naturalist and Realist movements.
Fantastic literature itself would eventually undergo a bifurcation into the
genres of science fiction and fantasy, the former encompassing
technologically speculative fiction, tales of space travel, and stories set in the
future, while the latter included myth and legend, folklore, fairy tales, beast
fables, chivalric romance, adventure stories, and stories of magic and the
supernatural. During the twentieth century, elements of both genres would
thoroughly intermix, creating subgenres like science fantasy and space
opera, further blurring the boundaries between science fiction and fantasy.
At the same time, however, the two genres, each with their own concerns
and approaches, would remain the two major poles of fantastic literature.

Science Fiction
The main contributions of science fiction (and science in general) to the
history of imaginary worlds is the locating of worlds outside of the earth,
and the ability to speculate as to what those worlds might be like according
to the use of physical laws and the extrapolation of earthly life and
conditions. Although it did not always agree with science or use all the
means it had available for world-building, science fiction followed closely
on the heels of science, with the term “science fiction” first appearing in
1851, less than two decades after the term “scientist” was coined.50
Along with fantasy, science fiction was originally considered as a type of
literature of the fantastic, and it was not until the twentieth century that it
came to be seen as a separate genre by critics, scholars, and the publishing
industry. Science fiction’s roots also extend back into antiquity and precede
the development of scientific method. Originating as a subset of imaginary
voyages or travelers’ tales, moon journeys can be found as far back as
Lucian’s True History, and begin to appear with regularity during the
Renaissance; for example, in Orlando Furioso (1516), Johann Kepler’s dream
narrative Somnium, seu Opus Posthumum de Astronomia Lunari (1634),
Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone; or A Discourse of a Voyage Thither
(1638), John Wilkins’ The Discovery of a World in the Moone (1638), and
David Russen’s Iter Lunare: Or, A Voyage To The Moon (1703). Authors
already known for their writing in other genres also wrote moon journeys;
Cyrano de Bergerac wrote his Voyage to the Moon (1657), and Daniel Defoe
wrote The Consolidator: Or, Memoirs of Sundry Transactions From the
World in the Moon (1705), which, like his Robinson Crusoe, inspired a host of

imitations and continuations.51 As is usual in science fiction, stories mixed

known facts about the moon and reasonable speculations with fantastic
additions. For example, in George Tucker’s A Voyage to the Moon (1827),
characters travel to the moon in an airtight copper cube six feet long on a
side, and relatively realistic descriptions of aerial views of the Earth are
given, as well as speculations regarding the moon’s origins; but his
Morosofia, the country where they land on the moon, is as populous and
cultivated as any city on Earth. One short story even anticipated satellites
and space stations: Edward Everett Hale’s short story “The Brick Moon”
(1869) has its characters building and launching a 200-foot moon made of
brick as an artificial satellite to aid navigation. The moon is accidentally
launched with people aboard, and they continue living there, cultivating the
brick moon and making it into their own little world where they raise their
descendents.
But there was more in the cosmos than just the Earth–Moon system. As
astronomy developed during the Renaissance, with improved telescopes and
a shift to Copernican thinking, stars and planets were no longer thought of
as points of light but as actual places, which demanded an entirely new
conception of the universe. As astronomer Tilberg J. Herczeg describes it:
The question of the habitable moon rested after Plutarch for almost 1,500
years. The problem of the plurality was centered on an entirely different
idea: the simultaneous existence of “our world” and numerous, perhaps
 infinite, worlds in an infinite cosmos, with their planets and earths. This
idea originated with the atomists, Democritus of Abdera and Leucippus
of Miletos (5th century B.C.). According to this concept, each such
cosmos was formed by random aggregation of a vast number of atoms.
There was hardly a “debate” here: Aristotle strongly opposed the
plurality of worlds and so did the medieval philosophers and
theologians; the idea of atomism became even forbidden. The ideology of
“our unique world”, however, underwent drastic changes when, in the
wake of the Copernican theory, the Englishman Thomas Digges (1576)
and, probably under his influence, the unfortunate Giordano Bruno (1583
and later), constructed the magnificent, visionary picture that the stars
are so many suns, possibly with planets around them, while our sun is a
star.52
Although the sixteenth-century Italian philosopher and Dominican monk
Giordano Bruno is often mentioned for his theory of the plurality of worlds
in his De l’Infinito Universo et Mondi (On the Infinite Universe and Worlds,
1584), he was not the first with such ideas; during the thirteenth century,
Etienne Tempier, the Bishop of Paris, argued that God could have created
alien life forms on multiple worlds, and in the fifteenth century, Cardinal
Nicholas of Cusa suggested the possibility of alien life on the sun and moon.
The discussion was continued in later years by authors like Bernard le
Bovier de Fontenelle, whose Entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes
(Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, 1686) discussed the possibility of
life on other planets, opening the door for authors to begin considering them
as settings for stories.
Imaginary worlds could be set on other planets, but transporting travelers
to these worlds from the Primary World was another problem. Authors were
used to having their travelers’ tales told by narrators who had some link
back to the Primary World; otherwise how could the story have come to the
reader? A temporal version of the same problem would occur later regarding
travel into the future. For serious scientific speculation regarding other
worlds (or the future), fantastic literature itself had to develop further, to
solve the new storytelling problems associated with faraway worlds.
According to science fiction historian Brian Stableford:
 The adaptation of traditional narrative frameworks to the work of
serious speculation laboured under several handicaps. Travelers’ tales,
even in their most utopian mode, were infected by a chronic frivolity
that increased as the travels extended into regions inaccessible to ships
and pedestrians. Literary dreams, even at their most gravely allegorical,
were by definition mere phantoms of the imagination, demolished by
reawakening. The transformation of moral fables into Voltairean contes
philosophiques was hampered by the calculated artificiality of their
traditional milieu and exemplary characters. These problems became
more acute as the philosophy of progress made the future an imaginative
realm ripe for exploration. Utopian speculation entered a “euchronian”
mode once Louis-Sebastien Mercier had led the way in L’An deux mille
quarter cent quarante (The Year 2440, 1771)—which soon prompted the
production of more cynical accounts of futurity, such as Cousin de
Grainville’s Le Dernier Homme (The Last Man, 1805)—but the only
obvious alternative to dreaming as a means of gaining access to the
future was sleeping for a long time. This was no help to a contemporary
narrator if the intelligence gained could not be returned to the present.
The problem of designing and developing appropriate narrative frames
for scientific contes philosophiques inevitably became acute during the
nineteenth century and was not easily solved.53
Stableford also describes how some authors solved the problem by using
dream-journeys or visions to accomplish the cosmic voyaging, as in
Athanasius Kircher’s Iterarium Exstaticum (1656). But this would only allow
the narrator to be an observer, and any worlds seen or described would lack
the concreteness of those with which the narrator could interact. Trips could
be done as satires, like Monsieur Vivenair’s A Journey lately performed
through the Air, in an Aerostatic Globe, commonly called an Air Balloon,
from this terraqueous globe, to the newly discovered Planet, Georgium Sidus
(1784), in which the narrator flies all the way to Uranus (Georgium Sidus) in
a hot air balloon; but too much exaggeration erodes any Secondary Belief
that the author might wish to evoke.
Several solutions appeared over the years, as science fiction slowly
developed. One was to simply locate the foreign planet very close to Earth,
hopefully in such a way that it would not be too noticeable or accessible. In
Margaret Cavendish’s The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-
World (1666), the other planet, the Blazing-World, hovers near the North
Pole, so close to the Earth that it can be reached by boat. The description of
how this works comes very early on in the story, when the heroine travels to
the new world, the only survivor aboard a ship that has been blown into the
Arctic Sea:
Neither was it a wonder that the men did freeze to death; for they were
not onely [sic] driven to the very end or point of the Pole of that World,
but even to another Pole of another World, which joined close to it; so
that the cold having a double strength at the conjunction of those two
Poles, was insupportable: At last, the Boat still passing on, was forced
into another World; for it is impossible to round this Worlds [sic] Globe
from Pole to Pole, so as we do from East to West; because the Poles of
the other World, joining to the Poles of this, do not allow any further
passage to surround the World that way; but if any one arrives to either
of these Poles, he is either forced to return, or to enter into another
World: and lest you should scruple at it, and think, if it were thus, those
that live at the Poles would either see two Suns at one time, or else they
would never want the Sun’s light for six months together, as it is
commonly believed: You must know, that each of these Worlds having its
own Sun to enlighten it, they move each one in their peculiar Circles;
which motion is so just and exact, that neither can hinder or obstruct the
other; for they do not exceed their Tropicks: and although they should
meet, yet we in this World cannot so well perceive them, by reason of
the brightness of our Sun, which being nearer to us, obstructs the
splendor of the Sun of the other World, they being too far off to be
discerned by our optick perception, except we use very good Telescopes;
by which, skilful Astronomers have often observed two or three Suns at
once.54
Cavendish’s Blazing-World is a landmark achievement in the history of
imaginary worlds for two reasons. First, it is the earliest story set on another
planet, away from the Earth–Moon system, and a fictional planet at that, as
opposed to known ones like Mars and Venus. Second, her story is the first to
feature characters who build their own imaginary worlds; in other words,
subcreated subcreators. The main character, who accidentally travels to the
Blazing-World (as just described), becomes its Empress, and later brings the
Duchess of Newcastle (the author, Cavendish herself) into her world to act
as her scribe and seek her advice. The Duchess later wishes that she could be
the Empress of a world, as is her friend, and laments the impossibility of it.
The Immaterial Spirits, who aid the Empress, suggest an alternate way to
rule a world:
But we wonder, proceeded the Spirits, that you desire to be an Empress
of a Terrestrial World, when as you can create your self a Celestial World
if you please. What, said the Empress, can any Mortal be a Creator? Yes,
answered the Spirits; for every human Creature can create an Immaterial
World fully inhabited by Immaterial Creatures, and populous of
Immaterial subjects, such as we are, and all this within the compass of
the head or scull [sic]; nay, not onely [sic] so, but he may create a World
of what fashion and Government he will, and give the Creatures thereof
such motions, figures, forms, colours, perceptions, as he pleases, and
make Whirlpools, Lights, Pressures, and Reactions, as he thinks best; nay,
he may make a World full of Veins, Muscles, and Nerves, and all these to
move by one jolt or stroke: also he may alter that World as often as he
pleases, or change it from a Natural World, to an Artificial; he may make
a World of Ideas, a World of Atoms, a World of Lights, or whatsoever his
Fancy leads him to. And since it is in your power to create such a World,
What need you to venture life, reputation and tranquility, to conquer a
gross material World?55
The Empress and the Duchess subcreate their own worlds, and do so within
the Blazing-World. Although their worlds are not entered into or described
to the degree that the Blazing-World is, the act of world-building is
performed and openly discussed in a way that had never been done
previously.
Cavendish’s Blazing-World was bold and unique but did not inspire
imitators, although the next story to solve the question of interplanetary
travel also used a nearby planet reachable through earthly transportation:
Willem Bilderdijk’s Kort verhaalvan eene aanmerkelijke luchtreis en nieuwe
planeetontdekking (Short account of a remarkable journey into the skies and
discovery of a new planet) which appeared in 1813. Bilderijk’s narrator, who
is also the main character, makes an accidental voyage in a hydrogen balloon
to Selenion, a new moon between the earth and the known moon, called
Luna. At one point, he even sees a line of other moons between Selenion and
Luna.
Another nearby place to put a new planet, yet keep it out of sight, was
inside the earth itself. Building on the tradition of underground realms,
Ludvig Holberg put his new planet of Nazar, which he described as “scarcely
six hundred miles in circumference”, inside a hollow earth, in his book
Nicolai Klimii Iter Subterraneum (Niels Klim’s Underground Travels) (1741).
On his way down into the earth, Holberg’s narrator falls through a cave and
into open space, which he perceives to be a subterranean firmament. He
continues falling and ends up orbiting the planet:
I knew not but that I might be metamorphosed to a planet or to a
satellite; to be turned around in an eternal whirl. Yet my courage
returned, as I became somewhat accustomed to the motion. The wind
was gentle and refreshing. I was but little hungry or thirsty; but
recollecting there was a small cake in my pocket, I took it out and tasted
it. The first mouthful, however, was disagreeable, and I threw it from me.
The cake not only remained in the air, but to my great astonishment,
began to circle about me. I obtained at this time a knowledge of the true
law of motion, which is, that all bodies, when well balanced, must move
in a circle.
I remained in the orbit in which I was at first thrown three days. As I
continually moved about the planet nearest to me, I could easily
distinguish between night and day; for I could see the subterranean sun
ascend and descend—the night, however, did not bring with it darkness
as it does with us. I observed, that on the descent of the sun, the whole
heavens became illuminated with a peculiar and very bright light. This, I
ascribed to the reflection of the sun from the internal arch of the earth.56
The narrator falls to the planet’s surface and continues his adventures there,
visiting the kingdom of Potu, with its tree people, giving a description of
their land, history, law, religion, customs, and education system, halting his
narrative awhile in order to do so.
 Another solution to space travel is to let the aliens do it, and come to Earth
themselves. The first such story in which this occurs is Voltaire’s Micromégas
(1752), in which Micromégas, an inhabitant of a planet orbiting the star
Sirius, comes to the Solar System, befriends a Saturnian, and together they
come to Earth. The Sirian’s height is 25 miles and the Saturnian’s only a
mile, and earth-lings seem very tiny by comparison. The story continues as
the visitors criticize human philosophy and point out its shortcomings,
attacking the idea that mankind is the center point of the universe. While the
story reveals a few facts about Voltaire’s imaginary planet, none of the story
takes place there, and as a result, it remains something just mentioned rather
than described or depicted.
In 1854, readers could finally experience the first imaginary world set on
another planet far away from Earth, in Charles Ischir Defontenay’s Star (Psi
Cassiopeia): The Marvelous History of One of the Worlds of Outer Space,
which appeared in France. Star is the first story set entirely on other planets
in outer space, and the device of a human traveler voyaging there is not
used; no humans travel there from Earth, nor do any alien characters travel
to Earth. The only part of the book that takes place on Earth is the opening
sequence, which relates how the author discovered a metal chest housed in a
meteorite that crashed in the Himalayas. Inside the chest are books written
about, and written by, the occupants of the distant solar system of the planet
Star. After the opening sequence, the remainder of the book is the author’s
translation of the Starian books, immersing the reader in the foreign cultures
presented, and both he, and the audience, experience the Starian system the
same way: through media.
Star was unusual for its time because its world, rather than a main
character, is the central throughline connecting the various texts that make
up the book; in a sense, the world is the main character. The story takes
place over 4,200 years, the first work of fiction with a narrative covering
such a vast time period. Star is divided into five parts, the first of which has
no characters and consists only of the author’s guided tour of the planet Star,
four other neighboring planets (Tassul, Lessur, Rudar, and Élier), and the
four suns of the Starian system. Lush descriptions of the flora, fauna, and
subtle changes in lighting due to the four differently colored suns provide a
background for the book’s next four parts. The second part concerns the
ancient history of Star’s peoples, ending with their near-decimation by the
slow plague, and includes Starian poetry about the plague. The third part
follows the remaining survivors, as they travel to and colonize the four other
planets of the Starian system, making Star the first story of interplanetary
colonization. In the fourth part, descendents of the exiled Starians return to
Star over 800 years later and reestablish their civilization there. The fifth
part, entitled “Voyage of a Tassulian to Tasbar” occurs centuries after the
fourth part, and is a description of Tasbar, Star’s capital city, written by a
traveler from Tassul. Included with his account are a play and historical
prose poem, which together give an impression of Starian life and arts.
Even though Star’s various texts do not share the same characters or
narratives, each section builds on the ones that came before it, requiring the
reader to remember many of the world’s details in order to get the most out
of the stories which rely on them. Finally, after the last story, Defontenay
includes an Epilogue of three poems: “The World of Dreams”, “Regenerative
Hopes”, and “Farewell to the Reader”, each of which discusses some aspect of
the making of imaginary worlds. In many ways at least a half-century ahead
if its time, Star achieves high degrees of immersion, absorption, and
saturation, and is one of the most impressive works of subcreation to appear
in the nineteenth century.57
The French astronomer Nicolas Camille Flammarion, who apparently read
Star and disliked it,
58 probably because its emphasis fell more on the poetic
than the scientific, wrote of the possibility of life on other planets in a
number of scientific texts, starting with La Pluralité des Mondes Habités
(The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds) in 1862, and Les Mondes Imaginaires et
Les Mondes Réels (Real and Imaginary Worlds) in 1864. He also wrote
several works of science fiction, including Récits de l’Infini (Stories of
Infinity, 1872), Uranie (1889), and La Fin du Monde (The End of the World,
1893), which was adapted into a film by Able Gance in 1931. More than any
other author, Flammarion popularized the idea of life on other worlds and
brought it to public attention. Unlike Defontenay, however, Flammarion was
more interested in the ideas behind his books than in world-building. His
science fiction stories’ characters travel with the aid of spirits or as
disembodied spirits themselves, rather than in spaceships. Despite some
detailed descriptions of terrain, his version of Mars is a much more spiritual
place than any of the worlds of his predecessors:
 I learned too that on this planet, less material than our own, the
constitution of the body resembles in nothing the constitution of the
terrestrial body. Conception and birth take place there in an altogether
different manner, which resembles, but in a spiritual form, the
fecundation and blooming of a flower. Pleasure is without bitterness.
They know nothing there of the heavy burdens we of the Earth bear, nor
of the pangs of anguish that we suffer. Everything is more spiritual, more
ethereal, more unsubstantial. One might call the Martians thinking and
living winged flowers. But indeed there is nothing on Earth by means of
a comparison with which we could form a conception of their form and
mode of life.59
Flammarion’s emphasis on the spiritual seems to foreshadow a comment C.
S. Lewis would later make in reference to David Lindsay’s A Voyage to
Arcturus (1920), when writing about the value of planets in science fiction:

He builds whole worlds of imagery and passion, any one of which would
have served another writer for a whole book, only to pull each of them
to pieces and pour scorn on it. The physical dangers, which are plentiful,
here count of nothing: it is we ourselves and the author who walk
through a world of spiritual dangers which make them seem trivial.
There is no recipe for writing of this kind. But part of the secret is that
the author (like Kafka) is recording a lived dialectic. His Tormance is a
region of the spirit. He is the first writer to discover what “other planets”
are really good for in fiction. No merely physical strangeness or merely
spatial distance will realize that idea of otherness which is what we are
always trying to grasp in a story about voyaging through space: you
must go into another dimension. To construct plausible and moving
“other worlds” you must draw on the only real “other world” we know,
that of the spirit.60
Stories that ignore this sense of otherness run the risk of being little more
than earthly stories transplanted to another planet, rather than something
qualitatively different. Such otherness also runs counter to the similarities
with the Primary World that an imaginary world’s nature and culture must
have for comprehensibility and character identification, challenging authors
to find new ways to connect their worlds to their audiences.
One late nineteenth-century work notable for its innovative world-
building is Edwin Abbott Abbott’s Flatland: A Romance of Many
Dimensions (1884). While the book reflects many of the social and cultural
mores of its day, its originality and innovation lies in the structure of the
world itself, which is the two-dimensional plane of Flatland. The experiences
of characters living in two dimensions are explored, and the main character,
A. Square, is visited by a higher-dimensional being (a sphere), and later
visits Lineland, a one-dimensional world in which he himself is a higher-
dimensional being. Through analogy, the book attempts to acclimate its
readers to thinking about a fourth dimension and other dimensions beyond
their own. The book is the first to present a world so fundamentally different
from the Primary World (at least in its physical form), and one completely
detached from our own universe; for the first time, no attempt is made to
forge a connection to the Primary World, representing a new level of
autonomy for imaginary worlds.
Other planets were not the only new location for the worlds of nineteenth-
century science fiction. If the telescope could suggest locations for other
worlds, so could the microscope. Since Robert Hooke’s Micrographia: or,
Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying
Glasses (1665) had described and shown the detail of microscopic worlds, it
was only a matter of time before imaginary worlds would appear under the
microscope. Fitz-James O’Brien’s short story “The Diamond Lens” (1858) told
of a man who perfects a microscope only to find an alluring woman in a
drop of water, whom he is unable to contact. Later, Raymond King
Cummings’ novelette of 1919, The Girl in the Golden Atom (later expanded
into a novel and a sequel), took up the challenge of entering a microscopic
world with a story about a chemist who looks at his mother’s wedding ring
under a microscope and finds a world there inhabited by a beautiful woman.
He invents pills that can make his body shrink or grow in size (reminiscent
of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)), and goes into the ring himself
to find her. There he finds two nations made up of millions of people, the
Oroids and the Malites, and there is even the suggestion that the atoms of
their world contain even tinier inhabitants. Other microscopic worlds
appeared, like those of R. F Starzl’s “Out of the Sub-Universe” (1928), Festus
Pragnell’s The Green Man of Kilsona (1936), and Maurice G. Hugi’s
“Invaders from the Atom” (1937), and one story, G. Peyton Wertenbaker’s
“The Man from the Atom” (1926) even reversed the situation, by making
Earth an atomic particle in another world.
Most imaginary worlds of the time, however, were still earthbound in the
usual forms of islands, underground realms, mountain valleys, or uchronias
set on future Earths. Jean Baptiste Cousin de Grainville’s Le Dernier Homme
(The Last Man) (1805) introduced what would come to be known as the “last
man on Earth” subgenre, about Omegare, the only man left on a dying,
sterile Earth. Jules Verne produced a number of imaginary worlds, including
the Lindenbrock Sea and underground world of Voyage to the Center of the
Earth (1864); Lincoln Island of The Mysterious Island (1874) (which would
later inspire Myst Island in Myst (1993)); Ham Rock Island in Le “Chancellor”
(1875); the underground Coal City in Les Indes Noires (1877); France-Ville in
the Rocky Mountains and Stahlstadt near Pacific coast in Les 500 Millions de
la Bégum (1879); Klausenburg County in Transylvania in Le Château des
Carpathes (1892); and Standard Island, somewhere near New Zealand, in
L’Ile à Hélice (1895). H. G. Wells wrote of Aepyornis Island in The Stolen
Bacillus and Other Incidents (1894) and Moreau’s Island in The Island of Dr.
Moreau (1896), and George Griffith wrote of Aeria, a mountain valley in
Northern Africa in The Angel of the Revolution (1893). Finally, one unusual
underground world was that of the Vril-ya, a master race living in
subterranean tunnels in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871),
which some readers believed to be true. The Vril-ya’s substance of Vril, an
energy source used both to destroy and to heal, even inspired a German “Vril
Society” which would search for it.61
While imaginary worlds of science fiction tried to give a scientific basis to
their worlds, secondary worlds in the twin genre of fantasy were also
departing from the Primary World, but according to their magical or
supernatural origins. Although the two genres would always remain closely
related, it was during the late nineteenth century that their individual
identities became distinct.

Fantasy
Fantasy finds its roots in myth and folklore traditions, and came to
encompass older genres like the heroic romance, beast fables, and fairy tales.
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the work of a number of authors
helped to define the genre. George MacDonald’s 1893 essay “The Fantastic
Imagination” analyzed certain aspects of how imaginary worlds functioned,
and his fiction, including Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women
(1858), At the Back of the North Wind (1870), The Princess and the Goblin
(1872), and Lilith (1895), influenced many twentieth-century fantasy authors.
While some of these works are like fairy tales written for adults, the worlds
they describe are nebulous fairylands, which some would argue fall short of
being true secondary worlds. Referring to Phantastes and Lilith in his book
Imaginary Worlds: The Art of Fantasy, Lin Carter writes:

While the geography of the two romances is not of this world, the books
do not quite make it as progenitors of the central imaginary-world
tradition; they are vivid dreams, not stories, and the weird countries
through which their characters move do not constitute serious, detailed
attempts to construct an invented milieu that gives the illusion of
genuine reality, which is a prerequisite of the genre. Still, they are
profound and beautiful and strange: they make the mind to work, and
they are indubitably fantastic.62
Another author’s worlds combined the supernatural enchantment of fairy
tales with the solidity of the lands of travelers’ tales; William Morris, whose
novels took elements of medieval romance and the details of historical
novels, combining them into believable worlds. Together, his books The
Story of the Glittering Plain which has also been called the Land of the
Living Men or the Acre of the Undying (1891), The Wood Beyond the World
(1894), The Well at the World’s End (1896), and The Water of the Wondrous
Isles (1897) represent a foundation for the fantasy genre. Morris was also
innovative in that his stories’ settings are among the first fantasy settings
(along with Abbott’s Flatland) to be completely disconnected geographically
from the Primary World. Hallblithe travels to the Land of the Glittering
Plain, but his story begins in the fictitious Cleveand by the Sea; likewise, in
The Wood Beyond the World, Golden Walter travels to a faraway land, but
his story begins in the fictitious Langton on Holm. Ralph, the main character
of The Well at the World’s End lives in the kingdom of Upmeads, and the
real Upmeads in England, built in 1908, may even be named after Morris’
kingdom.63
Two other world-builders of note were Henry Rider Haggard and Anthony
Hope. Haggard helped develop the “lost world” subgenre of fantastic
literature, and was best known for his Allan Quatermain series, which began
with King Solomon’s Mines (1885) set in the African country of Kukualand
hidden away in the mountains, and for his “She” novels, beginning with She:
A History of Adventure (1887) which takes place in the lost city of Kor.
Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) was a popular novel in its day and its
setting, Ruritania, gave its name to a subgenre of adventure novels, and
entered as a word into the English Language and the dictionary, meaning
“an imaginary country”.
Another major literary development in the latter half of the nineteenth
century that affected the building of imaginary worlds was the rise of
children’s literature. Child labor laws helped get children into schools and
mandatory education helped to encourage the publication of fairy tales and
stories for children, including reprints of earlier works like John Bunyon’s
The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), which featured an allegorical secondary world
with locations like the Delectable Mountains, the Slough of Despond, the
Hill of Difficulty, and the Valley of Humiliation. Like Bunyon’s work and
most nursery rhymes, many of the books written for children included
another level within them for adults (such as allegory, satire, or narrative
events and details that children would not understand but which were not
necessary for their enjoyment of the tale). One of the first of these multi-
level stories, which also helped inspire the revision of the Chimney-Sweep
Act (keeping children from hazardous work), was Charles Kingsley’s The
Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby (1863).
64 The story is a moral
fable set mainly in a secondary world beneath an English river, featuring
characters with names like Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby, Mrs.
Bedonebyasyoudid, and Professor Ptthmllnsprts. The story mixed fairytale
elements and nonsense with moral lessons and criticism of society, as well as
the author’s own prejudices against Americans, Jews, Catholics, and the
French.
 Similar to worlds designed for satire or humorous effects, Kingsley’s world
is not too concerned with verisimilitude and consistency, but instead
delights in its own fantastic nature. Several other authors of the time are
remembered for their nonsense stories; Edward Lear was known for his
nonsense poetry in collections like Book of Nonsense (1846) and Book of
Nonsense and More Nonsense (1862) before he invented the land of
Gramblamble in “The History of the Seven Families of the Lake Pipple-
popple”, only months before Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland (1865) appeared (Lear’s story later appeared in his Nonsense
Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets (1870)). Carroll’s worlds of
Wonderland, Looking-glass Land, and Snark Island are perhaps the best-
remembered nonsense worlds, due to his combination of logic and humor
that entertained both adults and children successfully, and served as
inspiration for many twentieth-century authors.
Other imaginary worlds in children’s literature of the time include Robert
Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island in Treasure Island (1883) and Suicide City
in his collection New Arabian Nights (1882); Carlo Collodi’s Island of the
Busy Bees in The Adventures of Pinnochio (1883); Edward Earle Childs’
Mouseland in The Wonders of Mouseland (1901); and Edith Nesbit’s island of
“The Island of the Nine Whirlpools” (1900), the island kingdom of Rotundia
in “Uncle James, or The Purple Stranger” (1900), and Polistarchia in The
Magic City (1910). Of these, Nesbit’s worlds were the most playful and
inventive; in Uncle James, she even pauses her narrative of Princess Mary
Ann and Tom the gardener’s boy for a lengthy digression concerning the
geography and natural history of Rotundia.65 In The Magic City,
Polistopolis, the capital city of Polistarchia, is a table-top city built by a boy,
Philip, who suddenly finds himself put into the city where the people he has
populated it with are all alive, another early instance of a subcreated
subcreator. At one point, Mr. Noah, a figure from a Noah’s Ark playset, tells
Philip how the world works:
“‘It’s a little difficult, I own,” said Mr. Noah. “But, you see, you built those
cities in two worlds. It’s pulled down in this world. But in the other
world it’s going on.”
“I don’t understand,” said Philip.
 “I thought you wouldn’t,” said Mr. Noah; “but it’s true, for all that.
Everything people make in that world goes on for ever.”
“But how was it that I got in?”
“Because you belong to both worlds. And you built the cities. So they
were yours.”66
Nesbit’s idea of a subcreated world possessing a kind of dual existence, one
temporary and earthly and the other permanent and supernatural, linked the
Primary World to a secondary world in a new way. It also suggested the
importance of making and the creative urge, adding new implications and
consequences to the subcreator’s acts, ideas which J. R. R. Tolkien would
take up later in his short story “Leaf by Niggle” (1947).
The last great fantasist who began working in the nineteenth century,
Lyman Frank Baum, wrote plays and short stories in the 1880s and 1890s, as
well as several collections of nursery rhymes for children. In 1900, two of his
books were published. One was A New Wonderland (the book was originally
named Adventures in Phunnyland and would later be renamed The
Surprising Adventures of the Magical Monach of Mo and His People (1903)),
which introduced the land of Phunnyland (later renamed Mo) in a collection
of short stories that took place there, linked by a series of transnarrative
characters. The other book of 1900 was The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Baum
would write 13 sequels to the Oz book, all of them with “Oz” in the title,
making the Oz series the first major series linked by their world rather than
by a main character. Most prior book series, like Rabelais’ Gargantua and
Pantagruel series, Carroll’s Alice books, or Haggard’s She series, centered
around characters whose name appeared in the book titles, linking the series
together (an exception being Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872), which had a
single sequel, Erewhon Revisted (1901)). The Oz series attracted its audience
through the world it depicted, rather than a particular character.
The popularity of the series allowed Baum to develop his world to a far
greater extent than the worlds that only appeared in a single book, and even
his first book alone gave his world a solidity that many others lacked. In
Worlds Within: Children’s Fantasy from the Middle Ages to Today, Sheila A.
Egoff described Baum’s work writing:
 It is Baum’s originality that must be saluted. The Wizard of Oz is not
only the first Other World fantasy in American children’s literature; it is
the first fully created imaginative world in the whole of children’s
literature, all the more remarkable because in his own country there
were few signposts to point Baum along “the yellow brick road.” Charles
Kingsley made use of a natural underwater setting in The Water-Babies,
George MacDonald of a familiar folktale world in The Princess and the
Goblin, and Carroll’s Alice books are premised on artifices; but as
Dorothy says at the end of The Wizard of Oz, when asked where she has
come from, “From the Land of Oz.” Oz was a place. It is true that the full
cosmology of Oz did not develop until the later books (and is fully
explained in Raylyn Moore’s Wonderful Wizard, Marvellous Land), but
there was sufficient detail in the first book to make one believe in Oz.67
Regardless of where one wishes to draw the line defining a “fully created
imaginative world”, it is undeniable that the stories about Oz and its
surrounding lands comprised a secondary world of greater size, scope, and
invention than most worlds of its time, even outside of children’s literature.
The rise of the fantasy genre during the Victorian era, and especially
children’s fantasy, meant that a new generation of children would grow up
reading it, and perhaps be inspired to create their own imaginary worlds.
They, in turn, would become the authors of fantasy and science fiction in the
twentieth century. For example, J. R. R. Tolkien (born 1892) and C. S. Lewis
(born 1898) both wrote about their childhood reading and influences; Tolkien
describes his early play with invented languages, while Lewis and his
brother Warnie brought together imaginary lands they had created and
invented a world they called Boxen, which appeared in the posthumously
published Boxen: The Imaginary World of the Young C. S. Lewis (1986).
Many other authors would cite works of Victorian fantasy as an influence on
their own work, as would authors working in fantasy’s generic twin, science
fiction. Children would continue to develop their own detailed fantasy
worlds into the twentieth century, a behavior that became so common that
the term “paracosm” was coined in 1976 to describe it, resulting in the 1988
book The Paracosm: A Special Form of Fantasy by Robert Silvey and Stephen
A. MacKeith, as well as a number of other books that discussed the
phenomenon.
 By the end of the nineteenth century, imaginary worlds had appeared all
over the globe, underground, underwater, in outer space on the moon and
other planets, in dreams, supernatural realms, other dimensions, in the
distant past, the distant future, and in alternate histories, and a few even
existed independently of the Primary World. More worlds began to achieve
autonomy from the Primary World, appearing without frame stories or other
links to the Primary World, though such devices would always remain in
use. Main characters were now sometimes natives of the subcreated worlds,
rather than merely travelers to them. And whereas travelers used as main
characters had typically been merely observers or the passive recipients of
explanations concerning the world being visited, more of them were now
becoming active participants whose involvement and interaction often
permanently changed the worlds into which they came, and the worlds
themselves underwent growth and change instead of being static and fixed.
A few early exceptions exist in which a traveling main character interacts
with and changes the world being visited (as in Cavendish’s Blazing World
and Paltock’s Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, as previously discussed),
but these stand out from the norm of their times.
A good example of the “observer” role versus the “participant” role of the
main character, and the audience preference for the latter, can be found in
the works of L. Frank Baum. One year after publication of The Wonderful
Wizard of Oz (1900), Baum published another novel, Dot and Tot of
Merryland (1901). Merryland is discovered when the children, Dot and Tot,
ride a boat through a tunnel and emerge in a valley hidden in the
mountains. Merryland itself consists of eight valleys encountered along the
river, each separated by a tunnel. The children pass through them one by
one, and except for a time when the Queen of Merryland joins them for the
ride, they do not interact with the world and leave it just as they found it.
As Baum historian Michael O. Riley describes the book:
Dot and Tot never feel the same pressing need to return home that
Dorothy does. Also, no real obstacles are put in the way of their journey,
and, except for their meeting with the queen, they do not become
involved with any of the strange places and peoples of Merryland. The
book has been described as a travelogue, but it is also a stroll through a
 circus sideshow where the spectators move from one strange exhibit to
another, looking, but never becoming personally involved.68
In contrast, when Dorothy arrives in Oz, her house lands on the Wicked
Witch of the East, inadvertently making her a hero and irreversibly changing
the world and politics of Munchkinland, all before she even leaves her house
and sees Oz. Comparing the fates of the two books, it is interesting to note
that while The Wonderful Wizard of Oz went on to become enormously
successful and well known, few people have even heard of Dot and Tot of
Merryland.
By the turn of the century, imaginary worlds had matured considerably
and had established conventions and traditions of their own. While they
could appear in any genre, they had found a receptive home in the new
genres of science fiction and fantasy. Both genres would flourish in the
twentieth century, a period in which more imaginary worlds would be
produced than in all the centuries preceding it combined, and in a variety of
different mass media forms.

The Rise of Mass Media

Before the twentieth century, imaginary worlds were largely a literary
experience. Words were the building blocks from which worlds were made.
In early works like those of Mandeville or Rabelais, and in many that
followed, illustrations would sometimes accompany the text (for example,
the 119 woodcut illustrations included with the 1481 edition of The Book of
Sir John Mandeville), but these were more or less drawn from the
descriptions in the texts themselves. Maps served as illustrations, and also
provided additional information, of a geographical nature, that the written
text did not. However, imaginary worlds that originated in imagery would
take a much longer time to appear.
Unless one counts such things as murals of the netherworld found in
Egyptian tombs or Greek depictions of Elysium (both considered real places
at the time), early depictions of imaginary places included the skenographia
of ancient Greece around the fifth century BC, stage plays like
Aristophanes’s The Birds, first-century Roman Empire walls painted to
appear to have windows looking out onto imaginary vistas, and Filippo
Brunelleschi’s demonstrations of geometric perspective in the early fifteenth
century and the trompe l’oeil tradition that followed, all of which extended
actual spaces into fictional ones. Some paintings also depicted worlds
already described in literary texts, like Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s
Luilekkerland (The Land of Cockaigne), painted in 1567, or imagined
versions of heaven and hell, like Hierymonius Bosch’s triptych The Garden
of Earthly Delights, painted between 1503 and 1504. Large-scale paintings
could depict imaginary places in detail, like Paolo Veronese’s Feast in the
House of Levi (1573), and from the late eighteenth century onward,
panoramas (sometimes called cycloramas) increased the immersion of the
viewer into the image, while dioramas produced small, dimensional scenes
for onlookers to vicariously enter, and stereoscopic imagery, invented in
1840 by Sir Charles Wheatstone, added visual depth to flat imagery.
As time went on, illustrations designed to accompany texts began to
provide additional information that the text did not; for example, Robert
Paltock’s The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1751) had accompanying
woodcuts important enough to be described on the book’s title page:
“Illustrated with several CUTS, clearly and distinctly representing the
Structure and Mechanism of the Wings of the Glums [sic] and Gawrys [sic],
and the Manner in which they use them either to swim or fly.” By the late
nineteenth century, images were occasionally central to the depiction of an
imaginary world, the best example of the period being the works of the
French illustrator Albert Robida (see Figure 2.4). Robida, who would also
draw illustrations for editions of Rabelais’ works and Gulliver’s Travels,
produced a science fiction trilogy which depicted life in the twentieth
century (Le Vingtième Siècle (1883), La Guerre au vingtième siècle (1887, first
version in serial form, 1883), and La Vie électrique (1890)). Robida wrote and
illustrated the novels, with series of highly detailed images of the machinery,
inventions, and architecture of his future world. While some of his images
were fanciful, others were predictive of actual developments, including the
Telephonoscope (a prediction of television), microbe bombs, rotating
architectural structures, flying cars, undersea tunnels, electric trains, and
more. Another turn-of-the-century artist, the illustrator Louis Biedermann,
was also known for highly detailed imagery of future cities full of
skyscrapers and airships, and his work would inspire science fiction stories
and imagery of the early twentieth century.
 Imaginary worlds depicted in multiple images that were not based on or
designed to accompany written texts, would first appear around the
beginning of the twentieth century, in cinema and comic strips in
newspapers, as imaginary worlds took their first steps into the new mass
media forms. As the Age of Exploration drew to a close, descriptions and
images of the Primary World’s lands and countries gradually became more
available through books, newspapers, magazines, and photographic media.
More local events were also represented in mediated forms, as newspapers
grew in importance while the century turned. All of these things, along with
mandatory education and increasing literacy, media technologies like
photography and halftone printing that allowed photographic images to be
reproduced in newspapers, and growing media industries, resulted in a
situation in which mediated knowledge began to displace firsthand
knowledge to an unprecedented degree. People grew more accustomed to
experiencing and forming a mental image of distant parts of the world
through media representations, which often involved a wide range of
sources of varying reliability. In this way, mass media helped to lessen the
gap between real foreign countries which were experienced solely through
media, and imaginary worlds, which could only be experienced through
media.69
FIGURE 2.4 Albert Robida’s detailed drawings helped to illustrate his
novels, which were visions of what life would be like in the 20th century,
including an aerial rotating house (left) and a restaurant and coffeehouse
atop an ironwork structure (right).
Of course, the similarity between the two had been exploited since the
days of travelers’ tales that copied real accounts of faraway places, but the
rise of mass media made mediated experience far more common than it had
been, and people’s lives became more reliant on it as well, as the seeds of
globalization began to be sown in the early twentieth century. With the
addition of image and sound, the nature of mediated experiences also
changed, as mass media brought its audience a far richer and more detailed
version of the world than mediation had ever done previously. This
heightened sense of reality found in the multimediated world of mass media
was also a challenge to the builders of imaginary worlds, who over the next
century would increase the detail and complexity of their worlds, as well as
expand them into image and sound media, in an attempt to raise the
verisimilitude of their worlds to match what was found in mass media.
When successful, the illusion produced could be a pleasurable one; as
Leonard Bacon wrote in the Introduction to Austin Tappan Wright’s Islandia
(1942):
It was a strange experience to prowl among these records of the wholly
imaginative expressed in terms so definite and concrete. One grew
familiar with the physical geography of a dream.… And certainly there
were several weeks when the reality of Islandia was at least as evident to
me as the illusion of Kamchatka, the latter known only on a map by no
means so exciting as these which grew under Austin Wright’s
cartographical hand.70
Worlds-builders would find ways to imitate nonfiction’s use of new sound
and image media, using them to bring their worlds to life in concrete ways
that the printed word could only suggest. It is no accident that the increase
in the popularity of secondary worlds coincided with the rise of the
mediated Primary World; each encouraged the other, in a way, and the
representation of the Primary World became a way to benchmark the
representation of secondary worlds. But most of all, mass media were new
venues in which imaginary worlds could grow, or even originate.

Early Cinema and Comic Strips

The first big steps taken by imaginary worlds into the realm of sequential
imagery were in cinema and comic strips. Early film was often an extension
of the stage, as performers would be filmed in an uninterrupted take,
preserving their performances. Live theater and opera occasionally gave
glimpses of secondary worlds, like Prospero’s island in The Tempest (1610),
Titipu and Barataria in Gilbert and Sulivan’s musicals, or Wagner’s
Venusberg; but the restrictions of live stage productions limited what could
be done; the German dream of the gesamtkunstwerk, combining all the arts,
would be closer to being realized once motion pictures added sound. In early
cinema, the filmmaker most responsible for bringing imaginary worlds to
the screen was George Méliès, whose background in stage magic, love of
technology, and innovative filmmaking would lead him to become the father
of cinematic special effects. While others like Thomas Edison and the
Lumiere brothers were filming nonfictional “actualities” shot on location, or
short non-narrative performances like sneezing, dancing, or comic boxing,
Méliès was creating films in which everything on screen was designed and
built for the film, including sets, backdrops, vehicles, and everything needed
to construct his on-screen worlds. In two of his early films, A Trip to the
Moon (1902) and The Impossible Voyage (1904), he has scenes set on the
moon and on the sun respectively, reminiscent of True History’s inhabited
moon and sun. In addition to experimenting with visual compositing and
inventing many of early cinema’s in-camera effects, Méliès pioneered the
intercutting of small-scale models sets and vehicles with full-scale versions
of the same; vehicle cutaways revealing multiple interiors; three-
dimensional sets that extend back into two-dimensional backdrops; and
other visual effects techniques that could bring fantastic worlds to the movie
screen.
Another type of moving imagery, animation, brought drawings to life, but
many of the earliest worlds to appear in it would originate in another
graphical medium of the age, the comic strip. Comic strips had been
developing since the late 1880s, and were mostly character-centered, with
scenery used mainly to fill in the background rather than create a coherent
geography. One exception, however, was Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in
Slumberland, which ran from 1905 to 1911 and was revived in 1924–1927
(and ran from 1911 to 1914 as In the Land of Wonderful Dreams). Not only
did McCay’s comic strip name its unique world and feature it in the strip’s
title, but it also foregrounded its highly detailed world of fantastic vistas and
fanciful architecture in a way that no cartoonist had done before and that
few have done since (see Figure 2.5). Slumberland, which Little Nemo travels
to in his dreams, has its own logic, which Nemo discovers over the years. As
comics historians Pierre Couperie and Maurice Horn describe it:
On each of his nocturnal rambles, Little Nemo penetrates a little more
deeply into the dream. One after another he meets those who are to be
his companions and guides: Flip, the green, grimacing dwarf who
involves him in increasingly dangerous escapades; Impy the cannibal,
Slivers the dog, Dr. Pill, and the Princess and her father, King Morpheus.
 Under McCay’s pen, Little Nemo undertakes a genuine methodological
exploration of the dream; little by little he reveals to us its logic, its
language, and its mythical landscapes. Under their influence Little Nemo
changes imperceptibly; the timid, wonderstruck little boy becomes more
assured, and grows in his own esteem as he enters into increasingly
close intimacy with his universe. Ultimately, Little Nemo becomes ruler
of his dream when he learns to be master of its powers and to interpret
its laws.71

FIGURE 2.5 Typical pages from Little Nemo in Slumberland, including

Befuddle Hall (left), which demonstrate McCay’s attention to background
detail and visual world-building.
But the complexity of Slumberland did not foster imitators. The majority
of comic strips remained more character-centered (usually about family life)
and set in the Primary World or thinly-veiled versions of Primary World
places (like Superman’s Metropolis or Batman’s Gotham City). In a
statistical study of comic strips covering the years 1900–1959, family-based
strips were never less than 60 percent of the total, while fantasy and science
fiction strips varied from 1 percent to 5 percent over the same period.72
Only a few strips involved other planets, like Mongo in Alex Raymond’s
Flash Gordon (1934), or Superman’s home planet of Krypton, which was
already destroyed when Superman arrived on Earth. Some strips’ worlds
were set in the distant past, like the Kingdom of Moo in Vincent Hamiln’s
Alley Oop (1934), or the distant future, like René Pellos’ Futuropolis (1937).
Many had earthly locations for their distinctive settings, including Dogpatch
in Al Capp’s Li’l Abner (1934), Pharia of Bob Moore and Carl Pfeufer’s Don
Dixon and the Hidden Empire (1935), the Kingdom of Id in Johnny Hart and
Brant Parker’s The Wizard of Id (1964), or Grimy Gulch in Tom K. Ryan’s
Tumbleweeds (1965), although some, like Flyspeck Island in Curtis (1988),
served only as places of characters’ origins (like Krypton) and are talked
about but rarely ever seen or used as destinations. Some places acquired a
great deal of detail and history due to their longevity: Gasoline Alley, set in
the town of the same name, began in 1918 and has continued to the present
day; its characters have aged and two new generations, the children and
grandchildren of the original characters, have grown up over the years.
Other comic strips were extensions of worlds that had debuted in other
media (such as those of Buck Rogers and Tarzan, both of which debuted in
the comics on January 7, 1929), as worlds began to spread from one medium
to another.

Oz: The First Great Transmedial World

As mass media grew more popular, not only did imaginary worlds appear in
each of them, but individual worlds soon bridged across them, becoming
transmedial, with new works in different media introducing new elements
to those worlds. The first great multimedia world to appear was L. Frank
Baum’s Oz, which over the two decades of its development before Baum’s
death would encompass most of the existing media of the time. Even the
first Oz book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) had closely coordinated
text and images. Instead of having illustrations added to an already
completed text, the text and images of Baum’s book worked together from
the start to form a seamless whole, prompting Michael O. Riley to write that
“the design for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz can only be described as
radically innovative because there had never been anything like it, and few
books since have equaled its amazing blend of story and pictures.”73 In some
cases, the text is even printed over a background illustration, which,
according to Riley, “results in the mind’s receiving the picture that illustrates
a portion of the text at exactly the same time as it is assimilating the
meaning of the text.”74
Baum’s Oz was the most detailed imaginary world of its time, and from
1900 until his death in 1919, Baum wrote 14 Oz books: The Wonderful
Wizard of Oz (1900), The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904), Ozma of Oz (1907),
Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz (1908), The Road to Oz (1909), The Emerald
City of Oz (1910), The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913), Tik-Tok of Oz (1914), The
Scarecrow of Oz (1915), Rinkitink of Oz (1916), The Lost Princess of Oz
(1917), The Tin Woodman of Oz (1918), The Magic of Oz (1919), and Glinda
of Oz (1920) (which was published posthumously). Baum had a lifelong
interest in live theater, and in 1901 he completed a stage musical version of
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which opened in Chicago in 1902 and went on
to New York, where it had nearly 300 performances over a 2-year period
before going on a national tour. It was still playing in 1911, making it one of
the most successful stage musicals of its day. Baum’s second Oz book, The
Marvelous Land of Oz, was even written with the intention of turning it into
a stage musical to follow up on the success of the previous Oz musical,
though the book did much better than the play did.75
Oz quickly expanded into a variety of media. From August 28, 1904 to
February 6, 1905, 26 short stories about Oz, known collectively as Queer
Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz, ran in the comics section of
newspapers accompanied by comic strip illustrations. Around the same time,
from December 1904 to March 1905, Baum’s first illustrator, W. W. Denslow,
who shared the copyright with Baum, ran his own series of illustrated
stories called Denslow’s Scarecrow and Tin-man, based on the same
characters. The Queer Visitors series also led to a short spin-off entitled The
Woggle-Bug Book (1905) which was released along with a musical play of
the same name, as well as other merchandise including Woggle-bug
postcards, buttons, and an unauthorized card game from Parker Bros. In
1908, Baum released and starred in the multimedia show The Fairylogue and
Radio-Plays, which combined a full orchestra, over two dozen live actors,
114 magic lantern slides and 23 film clips, both with hand-tinted color,
together with Baum who would lecture and interact with characters onstage
and on-screen. The show combined adaptations of his earlier Oz works, and
one of the slides even presented the first map of Oz.76
The traveling show was too expensive to be a financial success, and his
next planned musical extravaganza, based on Ozma of Oz, was not
produced. In 1910, the world of Oz appeared on film in three motion picture
productions, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and the Scarecrow in Oz,
and The Land of Oz, all written by Baum but filmed by William Nicholas
Selig. And in 1913, Baum released The Little Wizard Series (which were six
short books of Oz stories for children), and staged The Tik-Tok Man of Oz,
his “fairyland extravaganza in three acts”, which became the basis for the
book Tik-Tok of Oz a year later. After moving to Hollywood, Baum started
the Oz Film Manufacturing Company in 1914, and released a film version of
The Patchwork Girl of Oz, and The New Wizard of Oz, which was a version
of His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz, and served as the basis for the 1915
book. All this demonstrates that Oz did not simply originate in Baum’s
books and then get adapted to other media; new Oz stories could begin as
books, musicals, comic strips, or plays and then be adapted across media,
and those adaptations would often add new material, events, and characters
as well, making Oz a truly transmedial world.
Oz also grew far beyond its original author. Besides additions to Oz from
collaborators such as illustrators W. W. Denslow and John R. Neill who gave
Oz a visual dimension, or all the people involved in the theater productions
who brought the world to the stage, contributions would come from other
authors commissioned by Baum’s estate to continue writing Oz books after
his death. Ruth Plumley Thompson would write a new Oz book every year
from 1921 to 1939, writing more Oz books than Baum himself. MGM’s film
version of The Wizard of Oz (1939) renewed interest in Baum’s world, and
Oz novels appeared from other authors, including John R. Neill, Jack Snow,
Rachel R. Cosgrove, Eloise Jarvis McGraw and Lauren McGraw Wagner,
Dick Martin, and Baum’s sons Frank Joslyn Baum and Kenneth Gage Baum.
By the mid-1950s, Oz had grown so large that Jack Snow’s Who’s Who in Oz
(1954) ran over 300 pages. Today, the International Wizard of Oz Club has
thousands of members and new Oz stories continue to appear, as well as
scholarship analyzing Baum’s subcreated world.
 Baum’s world and its transmedial success would encourage other worlds
to make the transition between media, once they had proven themselves and
attracted a large enough audience in their medium of origin. With its
unequalled malleability and low cost, print media would remain the main
incubator for imaginary worlds into the twentieth century; however, books
would be joined by an even less expensive print medium, in which dozens of
new authors poured forth their stories and worlds to millions of readers
every month.

Pulp Magazines
Evolving out of dime novels and penny dreadfuls, pulp magazines were one
of the main venues for fantasy and science fiction from the late 1890s until
the early 1950s. Pulp magazines aided the growth and spread of imaginary
worlds in three main ways: they brought them to a large audience (in their
heyday, an issue could sell as much as a million copies); they were an outlet
for stories by new writers, many of whom would have prolific careers and
build enormous worlds, the first glimpses of which would appear in the
pulps; and they raised issues pertaining to world-building itself through the
various approaches taken by different authors.
The broad audience reached by pulp magazines grew over the first few
decades of the twentieth century. Early magazines included The Black Cat
(1895–1922), which featured fantasy and science fiction stories, and Frank A.
Munsey’s The Argosy, the prototype adult adventure fiction pulp, which was
converted from a boys’ magazine in 1896, later merged with Munsey’s All-
Story Magazine (begun 1905) into Argosy-All-Story Weekly in 1920, and
outlived the pulp era, finally ending in 1978. The 1920s and 1930s marked the
heyday of the pulps, as well as the appearance of the most famous pulps,
such as Weird Tales (1923–1954, and revived later), Amazing Stories (1926–
2000, restarted 2004–2005), and Astounding Stories (begun in 1930, renamed
several times, and presently called Analog Science Fiction-Fact). New
magazines kept appearing, right up into the 1950s when the pulps died out.
The boom in pulps occurred not only in the United States, but also in
Britain, Australia, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, and Sweden.77
Pulp magazines brought a variety of imaginary worlds to a wide audience
on a weekly or monthly basis, although the short stories or serialized
novellas contained in them did not allow the same degree of world
development as novels did. At the same time, the shortness of the stories,
and their often more outlandish and exaggerated nature, allowed for more
experimentation and innovation since development only needed to go so far.
Some examples of the strange worlds introduced in pulp magazines include
the Hall of Mist, where vast Brains of the far future gather to watch the end
of the universe; the submicroscopic world of Ulm, entered with the aid of an
Electronic Vibration Adjustor; the macroscopic world of Valadom in which
our solar system is only an atom; the Pygmy Planet, a miniature artificial
world created in a laboratory to test theories of evolution; Vulcan, a tiny
planet whose orbit takes it closer to the sun than Mercury; Soldus, a planet
located inside the sun; the planet Lagash, continually lit by its six suns, so
that nightfall occurs only once every 2049 years; Logeia, a world without
hyperbole or metaphor where everything is literal; the planet Hydrot, whose
surface is almost entirely covered with water; the planet Placet, which can
eclipse itself, due to the photon-decelerating Blakeslee Field through which it
moves; and the planet Aiolo, where sentient plants have destroyed all animal
life.78
Short stories and novellas gave glimpses of new worlds, which
occasionally were compelling enough to interest their authors in exploring
more of their possibilities. As a result, some of the worlds introduced in pulp
magazines blossomed into larger and more detailed worlds and universes
that became the settings for series of novels or even works in other media.
Worlds and franchises that debuted in pulp magazines include Philip Francis
Nowlan’s twenty-fifth-century Earth of Buck Rogers; Clark Ashton Smith’s
Zothique (the last inhabited continent of a future Earth); Robert E. Howard’s
Hyborian Age; E. E. Smith’s Lensman universe; Fritz Leiber’s Nehwon (the
world in which Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser have their adventures); Robert
Heinlein’s Future History universe; Isaac Asimov’s Foundation universe and
Galactic Empire universe; Ray Bradbury’s version of Mars in his Martian
Chronicles; Poul Anderson and John Gergen’s Psychotechic League universe;
L. Sprague de Camp’s Viagens Interplanetarias universe; Cordwainer Smith’s
Instrumentality of Mankind universe; and H. Beam Piper’s Terro-Human
Future History universe, among others.79
 The pulps were also known for their colorful cover images and fantastic
interior illustrations, both depicting future cities and alien worlds. Following
after Robida, graphic artists like Louis Biedermann, Frank R. Paul, and Elliot
Dold imagined and drew detailed images of future cities, with elevated
thoroughfares and flying cars docking at platforms atop skyscrapers, all
massively scaled to breathtaking proportions. The sensationalist and often
lurid imagery, combined with stories of aliens, robots, and monsters, also
helped pulp magazines gain the reputation that they have today for being
exaggerated and unrealistic. Yet, some in the industry cared deeply about
verisimilitude and realism. As the founding editor of Amazing Stories, Hugo
Gernsback, wrote in an editorial commentary in a 1932 issue of Wonder
Stories:

When science fiction first came into being, it was taken most seriously
by all authors. In practically all instances, authors laid the basis of their
stories upon a solid scientific foundation. If an author made a statement
as to certain future instrumentalities, he usually found it advisable to
adhere closely to the possibilities of science as it was then known.
Many modern science fiction authors have no such scruples. They do
not hesitate to throw scientific plausibility overboard, and to embark
upon a policy of what I might call scientific magic, in other words,
science that is neither plausible, nor possible. Indeed, it overlaps the fairy
tale, and often goes the fairy tale one better.
This is a deplorable state of affairs, and one that I certainly believe
should be avoided by all science fiction authors, if science fiction is to
survive.80
When the pocketbook-sized paperback came into popularity during the 1940s
and 1950s, it brought about the end of the Golden Age of pulp magazines,
and by the 1960s, according to science fiction historian David Kyle:
The pulps were gone, dinosaurs which evolution had obliterated; they
had been replaced by the smaller, tidier, subdued, digest-size periodicals.
The carnage which commercial greediness had left was actually, in large
measure, just resting, awaiting resurrection. The new, expanding market
was now blazing—the paperback books. The old pulps with their
 insatiable demands had developed scores of writers and had left a strong
and distinguished group which became the heart and soul of modern
science fiction.81
The influence of pulp magazines was great and their spirit carried over into
a variety of other media. In comics, for example, Alex Raymond’s Flash
Gordon traveled to the planet Mongo, and Bob Moore and Carl Pfeufer’s
Don Dixon found the Hidden Empire of Pharia. In 1940, Batman’s Gotham
City would appear, as well as what would come to be known as the DC
Comics universe; in 1944 Wonder Woman would leave Paradise Island and
begin her adventures; and in 1952, Twin Earths, by Okar Lebeck and Alden
McWilliams, featured Terra, a planet orbiting the sun on the opposite side
away from Earth and always hidden from view. As worlds begun in pulp
magazines spread across media, the pulp sensibility would also carry over,
into novels, movies, radio, and television.

Developments in Cinema and Theater

Movie serials, short subjects shown before features and broken up into
chapters (usually 12 chapters of 20 minutes each), were the pulps of the silver
screen, and many came from existing franchises in other media (like Flash
Gordon, Tarzan, and Dick Tracy). A few, like Flash Gordon, visualized new
worlds, but the serials’ limited budgets restricted the amount of depth and
detail that those worlds would have. Full-length feature films, however, were
able to explore their worlds in more depth.
By the 1920s and 1930s, feature film production had the technology and
budgets needed to do justice to bringing imaginary worlds to the screen. The
theatrical stage, with all of its limitations, had produced a few worlds,
including Toyland from Herbert and MacDonough’s operetta Babes in
Toyland (1903), Neverland from J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1904), Rossum’s
Island from Karel Ĉapek’s R. U. R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) (1923), Caspo
from Arnold Bennett’s The Bright Island (1925), Grover’s Corners from
Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938), Brigadoon from the Lerner and Loewe
1947 musical of the same name, the Grand Duchy of Lichtenburg from the
musical Call Me Madam (1950), Anatevka82 from the musical Fiddler on the
Roof (1964), and adaptations of worlds from other media, like the Oz musical
mentioned earlier; but the stage remained more the realm of dialogue and
character development than world development. Cinematic representations
had fewer restrictions, and films like Metropolis (1927), King Kong (1933),
and The Wizard of Oz (1939) demonstrated the medium’s ability to visualize
worlds, and to some extent, even use them (along with special effects) to
market the films in which they appeared. Especially when a story was
already well known, as was the case with The Wizard of Oz, the depiction of
its world on-screen could be a selling point. As the voiceover of the 1939
trailer for The Wizard of Oz proclaimed:
Although The Wizard of Oz has captivated the children of four
generations and fired the imagination of those youthful adults who have
never grown old, although ten million copies have reached eager hands
and eager hearts, no one has dared the towering task of giving life and
reality to the Land of Oz and its people. Every delightful character of L.
Frank Baum’s classic is now reborn, every glorious adventure has been
recaptured and painted with the rainbow; the celebration in
Munchkinland, the flying monkeys, the rescue of Dorothy, the castle of
the witch, the palace of Oz, and Dorothy’s strange journey to the
Emerald City to find the Wonderful Wizard of Oz himself.83
Yet most of the imaginary worlds visualized on film during the first half of
the twentieth century were typically adaptations of worlds originating in
other media; for example, the films Alice in Wonderland (1933), Babes in
Toyland (1934), She (1935), Lost Horizon (1937), Gulliver’s Travels (1939),
Pinocchio (1940), Call Me Madam (1951), Peter Pan (1953), and Brigadoon
(1954), expanded on or even changed the stories on which they were based,
but still ultimately relied on existing source material for their worlds. It
would not be until the second half of the twentieth century that the
origination of imaginary worlds in film would become more common.

Radio and Television

Like comic strips and movie serials, broadcast media are usually episodic in
nature and therefore require characters or worlds to link together multiple
narratives. Before music and talk shows became the dominant forms of
radio, dramatic series and comedies represented outlets for narrative; and
since radio is a medium of voices and sound effects, characters became the
usual link across a program’s episodes (as evidenced by program titles,
which typically included the name of the main character). Apart from
adaptations, such as the BBC’s dramatization of Tolkien’s work or NPR’s
dramatization of the original Star Wars trilogy, there are relatively few
secondary worlds on the radio, and even fewer originating there. Worlds
making their debut on radio would include Euclidia from Perry Crandall’s
Magic Island (1936) about a technically-advanced island and its inhabitants;
Five Points, a suburb of Chicago in which Irna Philips’ soap opera The
Guiding Light (1937–2009) first began; the Land of the Lost in Isabel
Manning Hewson’s Land of the Lost (1943–1948), about an underwater
kingdom where lost objects go; and Borsetshire, a fictional county in
England from The Archers (1951), a British program about rural life. Many
radio shows transferred to television, and radio drama died away, although
some shows continued to flourish; for example, after 19 years as a radio
show, The Guiding Light finally moved to television in 1956, where it ran
until 2009. The two best-known and most detailed secondary worlds to
originate on radio in the latter half of the twentieth century are Lake
Wobegon, from Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion radio show
which began in 1974 (and has since expanded into several novels, with the
radio show itself spawning a feature film), and the Hitchhiker’s Galaxy of
Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which began as a radio
drama in 1978 and expanded into several novels, a computer game, comic
books, and a feature film.
At first, television’s limitations were similar to those of theater, since early
television programs had to be performed live. Budgets were also limited, so
it is perhaps no surprise that most secondary worlds appearing on early
television were adaptations of successful worlds from other media, rather
than original ones created especially for television. These adaptations
include the BBC’s production of Alice: Some of Her Adventures in
Wonderland (1946), Toad of Toad Hall (1946), The Adventures of Alice (1960),
Alice (1965), and Alice in Wonderland (1966), the British broadcast company
Rediffusion’s The Adventures of Sir Lancelot (1956) and An Arabian Night
(1960), and NBC’s Peter Pan (1955). Like stage adaptations, these works
relied to some extent on the audience’s prior knowledge of the works being
adapted, and on conventions which helped viewers overlook their
limitations.
During the 1960s and beyond, bigger budgets, expanded sets, and location
shooting aided the creation of worlds, and new ones originating on
television began to appear. Typically, these were in the form of towns, like
Oakdale, Central City, Bay City, Salem, Collinsport, Llanview, Pine Valley,
Genoa City, Hazzard, Corinth, Cabot Cove, Twin Peaks, Cicely, Capeside,
and Harmony.84 Some towns, like Mayfield, Mayberry, Hooterville, Port
Charles, and Fernwood, even had multiple shows set in them.85 A few
shows were set on islands: the title island of Gilligan’s Island (1964–1967),
Tracy Island from Thunderbirds (1965–1966), Living Island from H. R.
Pufnstuf (1969–1971), and the Island of Sodor from Thomas the Tank Engine
and Friends (1984–present). Both Tracy Island and the Island of Sodor, as
well as Titanica and Marineville from Stingray (1964–1965), were built as
small-scale models inhabited by puppets, the size of which allowed for
greater scope than the worlds of most live-action shows, or shows which
mixed puppets with live actors (like the Neighborhood of Make-Believe of
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (1968–2001) and the eponymous street of
Sesame Street (1969–present)). Animation also allowed more world-building
to occur within a limited budget, as Bedrock (of The Flintstones (1960–1966)),
Orbit City (of The Jetsons (1962–1963, 1984–1985, 1987–1988), and
Springfield (of The Simpsons (1989–present)) can attest.
While the longest-running worlds on television tend to be those of soap
operas, the worlds of broadest scope to originate on television are those of
science fiction. The “Whoniverse” of Doctor Who (1963–1989, 1996, 2005–
present), the universe of Star Trek (1966–1969), Moonbase Alpha of Space:
1999 (1975–1978), the universe of Babylon 5 (1993–1998), and the Uncharted
Territories of Farscape (1999–2003) all are fairly broad in scope, with alien
races and other planets. Several of these went on to start transmedial
franchises, discussed later in this chapter. Other smaller-scale series also
began franchises; Twin Peaks, for example, inspired a feature film, several
books, an audio book, and a set of trading cards.
Apart from a few exceptions,86 the early worlds of broadcast media
brought with them few innovations regarding the form and structure of
imaginary worlds, but what they did contribute was a new relationship
between the worlds and their audiences. The worlds of radio and television
were audiovisual worlds that people experienced in their own homes on a
regular basis, returning to them week after week (or several times a week,
for daily programs), over a period of time that could be decades long,
especially in the case of soap operas. That imaginary worlds could attain
such long-term, ongoing integration into the lives of their audiences was
unprecedented; although novels could span hundreds of years, they did not
take up nearly as much of their audience’s time as long-running broadcast
programs could. And actors could realistically age along with their
characters over long periods of time; for example, in 2010, Susan Lucci and
Ray MacDonnell began their fortieth year of playing the same characters on
All My Children (occasionally actors can age naturally in a series of movies,
like the young actors in the Harry Potter films released over an 11-year
period). Another soap opera, The Guiding Light (later renamed Guiding
Light), ran for 15,762 episodes over 72 years; as dedicated as the show’s fans
may be, it is unlikely that anyone can claim to have seen and heard every
radio and television episode. Since they derive their support from
advertising, which in turn relies on ratings, the episodic imaginary worlds of
broadcast media are also very dependent on audience response for their
continuation; so their makers are often very concerned about audience
reaction and feedback, which can influence the direction further world-
building takes, a situation encountered previously by writers of serialized
literature. And literature, in general, also saw new advancements in world-
building during the twentieth century.

Developments in Literature
Despite the wide range of new media appearing or coming to prominence in
the first half of the twentieth century, books remained the main place where
imaginary worlds were conceived and incubated, including those that
spread to other media, and the first half of the twentieth century saw the
publication of numerous novels whose worlds were uncharted islands,
remote desert cities, lost worlds hidden away in mountains or jungles,
underground realms, underwater worlds, future civilizations, and an
increasing number of new planets (see the Appendix for a list of worlds). In
addition to transmedial adaptation, popular worlds were now more likely to
give rise to sequels and series, especially after the success of the Oz series.
While most authors were content to write about their worlds in a single
book, or develop a single series of books based on the same world, or both
(like L. Frank Baum), Edgar Rice Burroughs was one of the first authors to
produce multiple series of books, each of which was set in a different world.
Burroughs began his fiction-writing career in pulp magazines, where
many of his novels would be serialized. In 1912, two of his series began this
way: “Under the Moon of Mars” serialized in All-Story magazine, which
would become the first entry of his Barsoom series (Barsoom was his
version of the planet Mars); and “Tarzan of the Apes” serialized in All-Story
later that year, introducing his Tarzan series. Burroughs went on to start
several other series: the Pellucidar series, about a world inside the hollow
earth, introduced in At the Earth’s Core (1914); the Mucker series begun with
The Mucker (1914), set on Yoka Island in the Pacific Ocean; the Caspak series
beginning with The Land That Time Forgot (1918), set on the island of
Caspak (also known as Caprona), an island of prehistoric animals; and the
Amtor series beginning with Pirates of Venus (1934), with Amtor as his
fictional version of Venus. Of his six series, four of them, the Barsoom,
Pellucidar, Caspak, and Amtor series, were world-based, with the book titles
tying the series together in a manner similar to the Oz books (except that
“Mars” and “Venus” were used in the titles instead of “Barsoom” and
“Amtor”). While the Tarzan series is linked by the Tarzan character and does
not form a coherent world, several novels in the series introduce imaginary
worlds, including a number of African cities, countries, and kingdoms (such
as Opar, Pal-ul-don, Alali, Castra Sanguinarius, Castrum Mare, Midian,
Onthar, Thenar, and Ashair),87 and Burroughs even has Tarzan visiting
Pellucidar in the crossover novel, Tarzan at the Earth’s Core (1930),
retroactively linking the two series. Likewise, Burroughs wrote other
standalone novels and stories introducing new worlds, like “Adventure on
Poloda” (1942) which introduced his Omos solar system made up of the star
Omos and 11 planets.88
Like Baum, Burroughs was a savvy transmedial author, and helped his
creations spread to film, stage, comics, and radio. Burroughs even thought
about television rights long before the medium appeared, writing in 1932:
 Since those simple days of twenty years ago, when I blithely gave away
a fortune in rights that I did not know existed, many changes have taken
place, bringing new rights with them. Today I am closing a radio
contract covering the dramatic presentation of my stories over the air.
What a far cry from second magazine rights. Within a year I have seen a
television clause inserted in one of my motion picture contracts; and
today I am watching my television rights with as great solicitude as I
watch any of the others, for long before my copyrights expire television
rights will be worth a fortune.89
Burroughs trademarked the Tarzan name and was probably the first author
to incorporate himself, starting Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. in 1923 to handle
the merchandising and licensing of his work, and after 1931, to publish his
books. His multimedia empire flourished, and the company was passed
down to his family after his death in 1950 and is still in business today.
As the twentieth century went on, more sequels and series also meant
worlds of increasing size and complexity. Even some standalone novels of
the time took place over vast timescapes, like William Hope Hodgson’s The
Night Land (1912), covering humanity’s existence over millions of years;
Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930), about 18 species of human
beings evolving over 2 billion years; and Stapledon’s Star Maker (1937),
whose timeline spans billions of years and the entire history of the universe.
Last and First Men included five “Time Scale” charts, each more vast in scope
than the one before it, and Star Maker included “A Note on Magnitude”,
three “Time Scale” charts, and in some editions, a Glossary. Documenting a
wide range of worlds and life forms, and the histories of societies and
cultures arising from them, both books are overwhelmingly cosmic in scale
and amazing feats of subcreation.
Since the addition of maps, secondary worlds had sometimes included
additional materials beyond the story being told, which could add to the
world and its verisimilitude without adding digressions to the narrative. For
example, Robert Paltock’s The Life and Adventure of Peter Wilkins (1751)
included a glossary which listed 103 names and terms from the book. Other
materials were written as backstory; Lord Dunsany (Edward John Moreton
Drax Plunkett) wrote The Gods of Pegāna (1905), about his pantheon of
gods, before writing legends of the lands where they were worshipped.90
Dunsany’s Pegāna inspired H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythology, and more
than likely influenced Tolkien’s writing of The Silmarillion, since Tolkien
mentions Dunsany in his letters.91 During the first half of the twentieth
century, more worlds were being generated with elaborate histories and
backstories, and along with the growing size and scope of these secondary
worlds came more ancillary materials like maps, glossaries, timelines,
genealogies, and so on, especially for larger-scale worlds or those spread
over multiple volumes.
One of the largest worlds of its day, James Branch Cabell’s Biography of
Manuel series (launched with Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice (1919), although
earlier works were later rewritten and incorporated retrospectively into the
series) ran for 18 volumes92 and spanned seven centuries, with a wide
variety of imaginary lands worked into his world, the center of which is
Poictesme, an imaginary province of France. Among these books is The
Lineage of Lichfield (1922), a genealogy of the series’ characters that shows
how they are interrelated.
Other books with additional materials include Burrough’s fourth Barsoom
novel, Thuvia, Maid of Mars (1920), which contained a “Glossary of names
and terms used in the Martian books” with 135 entries covering multiple
books of the series, and E. R. Eddison’s books, which had maps, timelines,
lists of “Dramatis Personae”, and genealogical tables to which readers could
refer. Such material was helpful not only to readers, but to the authors
themselves, whose world-building produced many such resources that were
often never intended for publication. Nor were such ancillary works limited
to worlds of science fiction and fantasy. In preparation for the writing of a
series of five novels93 set in the fictional U.S. midwestern state of Winnemac
(see Figure 2.6), Sinclair Lewis drew detailed maps of the state and its
capital, Zenith, in order to maintain geographic consistency throughout the
novels. The 18 existing maps depict story locations at different scales, from
floor plans of buildings, to city maps, to a map of the state of Winnemac.
Drawn in the summer of 1921 while he was preparing to write Babbitt
(1922), the maps were never published and were only discovered in 1961, 10
years after Lewis’ death.94
 Another work written for the sake of consistency and published
posthumously is Robert E. Howard’s essay “The Hyborian Age”, about his
fictional time period set around 20,000 BC to 9,500 BC, for his Conan the
Cimmerian stories (and retrospectively for his Kull stories). Written
sometime in the 1930s, the piece connects his world to the Atlantis myth and
describes in detail the rise of the kingdoms of the Hyborians and their
eventual downfall. The essay was found and published only months after
Howard’s death, and reprinted several times since then.

FIGURE 2.6 A section of the map drawn by George Annand showing

Sinclair Lewis’s Winnemac, and where it is located in the American
Midwest.
One of the most detailed worlds of the early twentieth century, of which
nothing was published during the author’s lifetime, was Austin Tappan
Wright’s Islandia, set mainly in the country of Islandia on the fictional
Karain subcontinent. Wright was a Law Professor who had been developing
Islandia as a hobby since his childhood. After his death in 1931 in an
automobile accident, at the age of 48, his wife Margaret transcribed the 2,300
pages of Wright’s longhand manuscript, which was later edited by his
daughter Sylvia before being published in 1942. In an introduction published
with the novel, Sylvia Wright described additional materials that her father
had made:
This novel represents only a part of the total Islandia papers. The original
novel, containing close to six hundred thousand words, was so vast as to
be virtually unpublishable, particularly during a wartime paper shortage.
It was in this form, however, a manuscript contained in seven thick
spring binders, too heavy for me to carry by myself, that it was accepted
by the publishers.… With the intelligent and sensitive help of Mark
Saxton, then an editor at Farrar and Rheinhart, I cut the novel by about a
third. This is its form today. As I indicated in a note in the original
edition, my father knew the exact lineaments of every scene that John
Lang saw, down to its geological causes, and enjoyed describing such
things. Much of the cutting was this sort of leisurely observation.… My
father knew the country so well because he had considered it and
traveled around it in many guises. In one, he constructed its history, a
scholarly work entitled Islandia: History and Description, by M. Jean
Perier, whom readers will recognize as the first French consul to Islandia.
The document, of about 135,000 words, is the major part of the
remainder of the unpublished Islandia papers. In addition, there are a
large volume of appendices to the history, including a glossary of the
Islandian language; a bibliography; several tables of population; a
gazetteer of the provinces with a history of each; tables of viceroys,
judges, premiers, etc.; a complete historical peerage; notes on the
calendar and climate; and a few specimens of Islandian literature. There
are also nineteen maps, one geological.95
At least a version of Islandia finally reached publication; some authors
spend a lifetime developing imaginary worlds and ancillary materials
without any public venue. Perhaps the best examples of these will remain
unknown, though occasionally some gain publicity. For example, Henry
Darger, a recluse who worked on his world for over five decades and died in
1973, was discovered to have written a 15-volume 15,145-page (single-
spaced) novel The Story of the Vivian Girls, for which he produced several
hundred paintings as illustrations. Since their discovery, Darger has become
a cult figure in outsider art, books have been written about him, and his
works hang in art museums, but his novel still remains unpublished.
During the twentieth century, more ancillary materials also appeared in
the imaginary worlds of children’s literature, particularly maps, like those of
A. A. Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood in his Winnie-the-Pooh stories, E. A.
Wyke-Smith’s detailed map showing where all the various adventures took
place in The Marvelous Land of Snergs (1927), and C. S. Lewis’ maps of
Narnia and surrounding lands. Occasionally such materials could be quite
elaborate; for their Railway series of books, begun with The Three Railway
Engines (1945) and known for Thomas the Tank Engine, Reverend Wilbert
Awdry and his brother George worked out the geography, history, industry,
and language of their Island of Sodor; and these ancillary materials were
later published in a separate book, The Island of Sodor: Its People, History
and Railways (1987).
One interesting use of a map in a children’s book appears in 365 Bedtime
Stories (1955) by Nan Gilbert (Mildred Gilbertson), a collection of 365
singlepage stories, each with an illustration or two. All the stories revolve
around the neighborhood of Trufflescootems Boulevard, otherwise known as
What-A-Jolly Street, and the 22 children and their families and pets that live
there. The book’s endpapers provide a map of the street, with eight family
homes, Mrs. Apricot’s house, Mr. Gay’s Store, and the School. Details that
can be seen around the houses, like the creek, doghouse, and pony shed,
appear in the stories, which all follow the map consistently, and although
the individual single-page stories each have closure, there are larger story
arcs extending through the book, sometimes linking consecutive stories, and
sometimes returning weeks later and referring back to much earlier stories.
While most of the stories are realistic, the children’s pets and other
neighborhood animals communicate with each other, and occasionally even
inanimate objects like dolls, toys, a snowman, and the north wind become
the stories’ main characters, though none of the human characters ever see
them interacting.
Amidst a growing number of children’s books, one British book brought
with it a glimpse of a world which its author continued expanding in the
following decades, and its sequel became a turning point in the history of
imaginary worlds, raising the bar and setting a new standard for all those
that came after it. The book was J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937), and its
sequel was The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955).

The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s Influence

The first half of the twentieth century had seen a variety of imaginary
worlds in literature: in addition to those mentioned in the last section, there
were dystopias like those found in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932)
and George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949);
fantasy worlds like C. S. Lewis’ Narnia and the planets of his Space Trilogy,
H. P. Lovecraft’s Dreamworld (also known as Dreamlands), and Mervyn
Peake’s Gormenghast; and the worlds of James Hilton’s Lost Horizon (1933),
A. E. van Vogt’s The Book of Ptath (1943), and Herman Hesse’s The Glass
Bead Game (1943). However, it was J. R. R. Tolkien’s Arda, in which Middle-
earth is located, that would become one of the most beloved and influential
imaginary worlds of all time.
Tolkien had always been interested in languages and had even made up
his own imaginary languages as a child. He studied philology at Oxford
University, and continued devising his own languages, influenced by the
sound and structure of languages he was studying, including Finnish, Latin,
Welsh, Icelandic, and other old Nordic and Scandinavian languages.
Realizing that languages do not evolve in a vacuum, he decided to create the
cultures from which his languages would come. While convalescing from
trench fever in 1917, after serving in World War I, he began writing “The Fall
of Gondolin”, the story of Beren and Lúthien, and other connected tales that
grew into his legendarium of the world he called Arda, which he called the
“Silmarillion” (a version of which was edited and published by his son
Christopher as The Silmarillion in 1977). Tolkien’s children’s story, The
Hobbit (1937), was originally separate from this mythology but gradually
became connected to it, and was later revised to be more consistent with his
other works. Following the success of The Hobbit, Tolkien tried to get his
Silmarillion mythology published, but it was turned down; the publishers
wanted something with more hobbits in it instead. Therefore, Tolkien began
writing a sequel, which would eventually become The Lord of the Rings.
 Tolkien’s Arda was unique, but not without its influences. Besides the
older texts of his professional study like Beowulf and the Kalevala, Tolkien
was familiar with the works of more contemporary writers, like George
MacDonald, William Morris, Lord Dunsany, E. R. Eddison, E. A. Wyke-
Smith, and his friend C. S. Lewis. While much of what Tolkien did, in terms
of world-building, had already been done by others—a pantheon of gods,
maps, timelines, glossaries, calendars, invented languages and alphabets—it
was the degree to which he did them that gave his world its rich
verisimilitude, and the quality of his work, with meaningful details
integrated into an elaborate backstory, that set a new standard for world-
building. As Humphrey Carpenter writes:
Not content with writing a large and complex book, he felt he must
ensure that every single detail fitted satisfactorily into the total pattern.
Geography, chronology, and nomenclature all had to be entirely
consistent. He had been given some assistance with the geography, for
his son Christopher helped him by drawing an elaborate map of the
terrain covered by the story.… But the map in itself was not enough, and
he made endless calculations of time and distance, drawing up elaborate
charts concerning events in the story, showing dates, the days of the
week, the hours, and sometimes even the direction of the wind and the
phase of the moon. This was partly his habitual insistence on perfection,
partly sheer revelling in the fun of “subcreation”, but most of all a
concern to provide a totally convincing picture.96
Tolkien wrote that “the ways in which a story-germ uses the soil of
experience are extremely complex,”97 and certainly his own background
contributed to his writings, including his knowledge of medieval history and
lore, his upbringing during the industrialization of the English countryside,
and his war experience. As a professional linguist, his invented languages
had a greater degree of development and a more realistic sound than most
invented languages, and Tolkien even designed them to imitate the way real
languages are related. His languages were even developed beyond what
appears in the appendices to his books, and he considered including more of
them in The Lord of the Rings, writing:
 A lot of labour was naturally involved, since I had to make a linkage
with The Hobbit; but still more with the background mythology. That
had to be rewritten as well. The Lord of the Rings is only the end part of
a work nearly twice as long which I worked at between 1936 and 53. (I
wanted to get it all published in chronological order, but that proved
impossible.) And the languages had to be attended to! If I had considered
my own pleasure more than the stomachs of a possible audience, there
would have been a great deal more Elvish in the book. But even the
snatches that there are required, if they were to have a meaning, two
organized phonologies and grammars and a large number of words.98
Like MacDonald and Lewis, Tolkien also theorized and wrote about what
he was doing, coining the terms “subcreation” and “secondary world” in his
essay “On Fairy Stories” in 1939, in which he explained the value of fantasy
and the role of imagination. He expounded his ideas further in two other
short works, the short story “Leaf by Niggle” (1947) and the poem
Mythopoeia which he revised several times, as well as in a number of his
letters. Nevertheless, it was the subcreation of Arda, in The Hobbit and
especially in The Lord of the Rings, for which he became best known and
which most influenced those who followed him.
While mainstream critics did not know what to make of The Lord of the
Rings, readers responded enthusiastically. No other book imagined a
fantastic world in such detail and beauty while ranging from low comedy to
high drama and from rural homeliness to dark terrors and amazing wonders.
Tolkien’s story sold steadily after the last volume of it was published in 1955,
and as Mike Foster summarized in the J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia:
But an unexpected party began in 1965, a long, loud boom in J. R. R.
Tolkien’s popularity in the United States that spread internationally and
continues yet.
Three factors contributed to this. One was the tenor of the times, the
era of hippies, Vietnam, dissent, demonstrations, conscience, community:
a homely ideal of benevolent, natural, ungoverned, mellow freedom like
that of the Shire.
Another factor was America’s cultural Anglophilia. From the car radio
to the movie theater to the fashion magazines, Britannia ruled pop
 culture from 1964 on.
But the primary cause was an authorized paperback edition published
by Ace Books, a New York science fiction firm, in June 1965.99
Ace Books had published an unauthorized paperback version of The Lord of
the Rings, claiming that the work was public domain because American
publisher Houghton Mifflin had failed to properly apply for an American
copyright on the work. To counter Ace Books’s inexpensive paperback
edition, Houghton Mifflin asked Tolkien for revisions for a new edition, and
put out the authorized paperback edition published by Ballantine Books,
while fighting Ace’s piracy of the book. In the end, Ace agreed to pay
Tolkien royalties and cease publication. The result of the controversy,
however, was that The Lord of the Rings, as a relatively inexpensive
paperback edition, became available to a much wider readership in the
United States. The authorized 1965 edition of The Lord of the Rings included
a new Foreword, an expanded Prologue, revisions of the text for consistency
and additional detail, the correction of typographical errors, and an index
(compiled by Nancy Smith). Tolkien continued making corrections and
additions, which were added at various printings, with some first reaching
publication as late as 1987.
Tolkien had begun work on his world around 1917 and was still adding to
it and revising it when he died in 1973. Christopher Tolkien took on the
editing and publishing of his father’s manuscripts, including The
Silmarillion (1977), Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth (1980),
and 12 volumes of The History of Middle-earth series, published over the
years from 1983 to 1996, which gave readers a detailed inside look at how
Tolkien created his legendarium, showing the evolution of his ideas and
world over time. The same years saw the rise of a great deal of Tolkien
scholarship including books, periodicals, and conferences dedicated to
Tolkien’s work, and adaptations of his work into theater, radio, film,
television, board games, and video games. Likewise, Tolkien’s influence
extended beyond literature, to fantasy settings in film, television, and role-
playing games such as TSR’s Dungeons & Dragons (1974), which included
hobbits, ents, and balrogs, until threats of copyright infringement caused the
names to be changed. The fantasy adventure genre also provided settings for
many text adventure games and graphical adventure video games during the
early years of their development.
The popularity of Tolkien’s work convinced Ballantine Books, who had
released paperbacks of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Tolkien
Reader (1966), that there was a growing audience for the fantasy genre, and
they released paperback reprints of fantasy novels by E. R. Eddison, Mervyn
Peake, David Lindsay, and Peter S. Beagle. In late 1968, Ballantine hired
author Lin Carter as a consultant and together they began the Ballantine
Adult Fantasy Series, which ran from 1969 to 1974 and consisted of 65 books,
many of which were reprints of earlier works by authors including George
MacDonald, William Morris, H. Rider Haggard, Lord Dunsany, William
Hope Hodgson, James Branch Cabell, and others. Also in the series was Lin
Carter’s nonfiction Imaginary Worlds (1973), which looked at the history of
fantasy and included chapters on world-building techniques, with examples
from the other books.
Following Ballantine’s lead, the Newcastle Publishing Company began the
Newcastle Forgotten Fantasy Library, a series of reprints of 24 books by
many of the same authors in Ballantine’s series, released over the years
1973–1980. Both series reinvigorated interest in the fantasy genre,
introduced it to a new generation, and encouraged a new crop of fantasy
authors and world-builders, including Terry Brooks, Stephen R. Donaldson,
Carol Kendall, Terry Pratchett, Anne McCaffrey, David and Leigh Eddings,
Katherine Kerr, Robert Jordan, Janny Wurts, Raymond E. Feist, and others,
many of whose works were Tolkien-influenced in one way or another. Most
of these authors, in addition to writing individual standalone novels, also
produced series of novels each set in their own secondary world, and a
number of their worlds became media franchises.

New Universes and the Rise of the Media

Franchise
The idea of franchising, already present in business, boomed in the 1950s
after the building of the interstate highway system, particularly in the area
of restaurants and motels. Media franchising, which considers characters,
settings, and stories as intellectual property to be used for licensing, had
been around since the days of Baum and Burroughs, and an increasing
number of worlds were being created with franchising possibilities already
in mind. Multiple venues meant more rights and profits, turning the
production of imaginary worlds into big business. During the first half of the
century, most franchises were character-based (like those of Felix the Cat,
Tarzan, Andy Hardy, and Ma and Pa Kettle) while only a few were world-
based (like Oz, Barsoom, or Zothique); but the second half of the century
would see a great increase in world-based franchises, and ones of growing
size and scale. World-based franchises could be extended beyond the lifespan
and experience of any individual character, which gave them an advantage
over character-based franchises. The increased scale, size, and multimedia
nature of these worlds would mean more worlds created by multiple authors
(and their employees), and more worlds which were planned as a series of
works from their very conception, as opposed to worlds that began as a
single successful work which was then followed by one or more sequels that
had not been planned in advance.
Other developments also helped spur the growth of imaginary worlds. As
the second half of the century unfolded, pulp fantasy and science fiction
passed from magazines into paperback fiction, allowing their stories and
worlds to expand into series of novels. Many of these novels involved
multiple planets and interstellar travel, so that the series’ worlds widened
from planets to galaxies or universes, making them broader in scope than
those that had come before them (except for a few works of truly
intergalactic scale, like Stapleton’s Star Maker). The space race and the cold
war nuclear threat provided the impetus for a new age of science fiction, and
in the decade following the launch of Sputnik a vast number of new sci-fi
universes appeared, including the Great Circle civilizations, the Technic
History universe, the Childe Cycle universe, the Marvel Comics universe,
the Noon universe, the Perry Rhodan multiverse, the Rim Worlds, the
Imperium continuum, the Time Quartet universe, the Berserker universe,
Michael Moorcock’s Multiverse, the Whoniverse, the ConSentiency universe,
the Demon Princes universe, the Hainish Cycle universe, the Known Space
universe, the Dune universe, the Destination: Void universe, the Riverworld
universe, the Star Trek galaxy, the World of Tiers universe, and the
Dumarest Saga universe.100 Most of these would continue to expand into
the 1970s and 1980s, and some are still growing today. The model that they
provided, of series of novels or even series of series, continued to be
followed by authors, especially in the genres of science fiction and fantasy,
where series of books set in the same universe have become a standard
strategy in book publishing.
In cinema, the growing use of animation and special effects during the
postwar years (due in part to new technologies like the optical printer)
helped bring these worlds to the screen, and a few films, like Forbidden
Planet (1956), even introduced new worlds, instead of merely visualizing
existing ones from other media. On television, effects-laden shows adapted
worlds to the home screen, and brought new ones as well, including those
seen on Doctor Who (1963), Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s Stingray (1964) and
Thunderbirds (1965), and especially Star Trek (1966).
Doctor Who and Star Trek have both remained actively expanding worlds
for over four decades, and each is composed of feature films, hundreds of
hours of television episodes from multiple series and spin-offs, hundreds of
novels, comic books and comic strips, dozens of games (card games, board
games, role-playing games, pinball games, handheld electronic games, and
video games (including arcade games, home console video games, and
computer games (and for Star Trek, an MMORPG))), animated series,
museum exhibitions, trading cards, action figures, and a variety of other
merchandise. As each of these worlds is so vast, it is unlikely that anyone
can claim to have experienced either world in its entirety, seeing every film
and video, reading every book, and playing every game and so on; and these
worlds’ open and ongoing nature makes it less likely that anyone ever will.
For example, as of mid-2012, the Star Trek universe had 11 feature films, six
TV series with a combined total of 726 episodes, about 500 novels, and 69
video games. Even if one does not consider events in the video games to be
canonical, that’s still 23 days, 16 hours, and 7 minutes of continuous viewing
along with several months of uninterrupted reading (depending on how long
it takes to read 500 novels). These worlds, then, are not only quantitatively
different from earlier ones, but qualitatively different, in that the audience
has an experience of a world which, like the Primary World, not only
achieves saturation of mind, but virtually exceeds the audience’s ability to
encounter it all in its entirety.
The one imaginary world most responsible for the rise of the media
franchise in its modern form, with all its licensing and merchandising, made
its first appearance during the mid-1970s. Inspired by the world-building in
films like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Silent Running (1972) and the
television series Space: 1999 (1975–1978), and having demonstrated his own
world-building abilities in his film THX 1138 (1971), George Lucas released
Star Wars in May of 1977 (and to generate interest in it, preceded it with the
novelization Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker in
November of 1976). The Star Wars galaxy represented a milestone in the on-
screen representation of imaginary worlds; not only was there great
attention given to detail and design (see Figure 1.2), but locations and
vehicles had a used and lived-in look, with all the scratches, dents, and
wear-and-tear that made everything look as though it had a history. Lucas
had taken the gritty realism of films of the late 1960s and 1970s, itself a
cinematic descendent of postwar neorealism, and brought it into his
imaginary world. Another way that he enhanced verisimilitude had to do
with the freedom of camera movement that new special effects techniques
provided, which changed the way the audience experienced the world of
Star Wars. While other films like 2001 had used a locked-off camera for their
special effects shots and spaceship shots, Star Wars was the first film to use
computer-controlled cameras, allowing for special effects shots to be made
with a dynamically moving camera that gave a more spacious and
dimensional feel to the world.
Like Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), Star Wars was an “event” picture released
around the start of the summer season, and it proved that a film could
become a blockbuster even though it was cast with mostly unknowns;
instead of star power, it was the film’s imaginary world itself, and the
special effects that created it, that drew audiences. Star Wars also showed
that more money could be made from merchandising than from box office
receipts. Lucas understood the importance of merchandising early on; as a
chapter on Lucas in The Movie Brats (1979) explained:
From the start he [Lucas] was determined to control the selling of the
film and its by-products. “Normally you just sign a standard contract
with a studio,” he says, “but we wanted merchandising, sequels, all those
things. I didn’t ask for another $1 million, just the merchandising rights.
And Fox thought that was a fair trade.” Lucasfilm Ltd., the production
company George Lucas set up in July 1971, “already had a merchandising
 department as big as Twentieth Century-Fox has. And it was better.
When I was doing the film deal, I had already hired a guy to handle that
stuff.”
Lucas could argue, with reason, that he was protecting his own
investment of two years’ research and writing; and he was also
protecting his share of the $300,000 from [American] Graffiti, which he
and [producer Gary] Kurtz used as seed money for Star Wars. “We found
Fox was giving away merchandising rights, just for the publicity,” he
says. “They gave away tie-in promotions with a big fast-food chain. They
were actually paying these people to do this big campaign for them. We
told them that was insane. We pushed and we pushed and we got a lot of
good deals made.” When the film appeared, the numbers become other
worldly: $100,000 worth of T-shirts sold in a month, $260,000 worth of
intergalactic bubble gum, a $3 million advertising budget for ready-
sweetened Star Wars breakfast cereals. That was before the sales of black
digital watches and Citizens [sic] Band radio sets and personal jet
sets.101
Star Wars and its sequels and prequels did well at the box office, and even
better in toy stores; by early 2010, licensing revenues for the franchise were
estimated to be over US$12 billion.102 Part of the reason was Lucas’s timing;
two innovations of the 1970s, cable television and commercial video cassette
recorders (VCRs), extended a film’s life cycle, allowing people who missed a
film’s theatrical release to catch up and join the audiences awaiting each
new sequel (and buying the merchandise). And just as cable and VCRs made
more repeat viewings possible, special effects became a reason for a repeat
viewing. During the 1970s, more “Making of” documentaries came to be
made, especially for films which pushed the boundaries of what special
effects could do. Growing interest in the Star Wars galaxy also led to the
publication of reference works which gave fans more information regarding
the locations, vehicles, weaponry, creatures, minor characters, and other
such minutiae present in the film’s world.
The late 1970s and 1980s saw the franchising of older works (like Star Trek,
which found new life in a series of feature films and new television series) as
well as many new franchises, whose first appearances were in a variety of
media, including books, film, television, video games, comic books and
graphic novels, a card game (the planet Dominaria grew out of the card
game Magic: The Gathering (1993)), and even a set of action figures; Flint
Dille’s Visionaries: Knights of the Magical Light (1987), set on the planet
Prysmos, began as a set of Hasbro action figures and led to an animated
television show and comic book series that told their story. By the mid-
1980s, merchandising was so common that some worlds included their own
commentary on the phenomenon; for example, Adrian Veidt, one of the
superheroes in the graphic novel Watchmen (1986), is merchandising his
superhero persona and even is shown with his own action figures,
underscoring accusations that he has sold out. And by the 1990s, a number
of how-to books on world-building in science fiction and fantasy, by authors
like Orson Scott Card, J. N. Williamson, Matthew J. Costello, and others,
were encouraging readers to subcreate their own worlds.
The growth of franchising and merchandising also aided the growth of
world-based franchises. With an increasing number of media venues and
merchandise, more money could be ventured in an attempt to establish a
franchise, thus making world-based franchises more of a possibility.
Character-based franchises set in the Primary World typically took less effort
to produce, because they did not require a brand new world to be designed
and developed around the characters to the degree that a world-based
franchise did. The success of films like Star Wars (1977), Alien (1979), and
The Dark Crystal (1982), and television shows like Battlestar Galactica
(1978), encouraged more world-based franchises, which, at least in cinema,
also decreased the dependence on stars, whose unavailability (or
unwillingness) could end the continuation of character-based franchises
centered on them, or at least require the audience to accept recastings (like
the recasting of the role of Buffy when Buffy the Vampire Slayer moved
from film to television, the recasting of the role of Dumbledore in the Harry
Potter movies, or the multiply-recast role of James Bond).
The rise of franchising in the 1970s was also aided by a new medium that
provided additional venues into which imaginary worlds could expand, and
in which new ones would originate as well; the video game, which was a
new development in tradition of interactive worlds.
Interactive Worlds
In one sense, the experiencing of imaginary worlds has always required the
active participation of the audience, whose imaginations are called upon to
fill gaps and complete the world gestalten needed to bring a world to life.
However, such participation does not actively change the events occurring in
the worlds imagined; stories have predetermined outcomes, and their worlds
are experienced vicariously through the characters in those stories.
Nevertheless, just as the role of stories’ main characters changed from
observer to participant, interactive worlds changed the audience member’s
role from observer to participant.
Interactive worlds can be traced back to children’s play and games of
pretend, either in role-playing situations or through the use of toys, like
dolls and toy soldiers used as avatars through which children can vicariously
enter the table-top worlds they created. Some adults also played with toy
soldiers, for example, author Robert Louis Stevenson, who produced
extensive written works and charts based on battles he staged with toy
soldiers.103 Toy soldier campaigns also prefigured the elaborate war board
games that began to develop in the mid-seventeenth century.104
With the mass production of dollhouses in the nineteenth century and rise
of model railroading in the early twentieth century, children’s play gained
more world-building tools, and both dollhouses and model railroads
provided hobbies for adults as well. After World War II, dollhouses and their
furnishing were mass-produced, making them more affordable and available
as toys, but at the same time less detailed and simplified due to the demands
of mass production. Other kinds of themed playsets appeared over the next
few decades (most notably from the Marx Toy Company from the 1930s to
the 1960s, and the Mego Corporation in the 1970s) and would become
another venue for transmedial worlds as franchises began licensing them.105
Extending the age-old idea of building blocks, specialized building sets,
like Meccano (1908), A. C. Gilbert’s Erector Set (1913), the Tinkertoy
Construction Set (1914), and Lincoln Logs (1916), allowed children to design
as well as build, and encouraged the sale of additional building materials for
even larger constructions. The most popular and successful of these began in
the mid-twentieth century, when the LEGO Group’s “Town Plan No. 1” set
of 1955 introduced the LEGO System, the first “system” in the toy industry,
in which every element can be connected to every other element, a fact
which remains true more than 50 years and thousands of different building
sets later. LEGO become another franchise outlet for several different worlds
(including those of Star Wars, Harry Potter, and The Lord of the Rings), and
the LEGO universe has itself expanded to include movies, comics, video
games, and even a massively multiplayer on-line role-playing game
(MMORPG).106 Combining the best aspects of building sets and playsets,
LEGO has become the most versatile world-building toy available.
Games became a new venue for worlds as early as the unauthorized
Parker Bros. Wizard of Oz card game, and some board games, like Eleanor
Abbott’s Candyland (1949) or Klaus Teuber’s The Settlers of Catan (1995),
are set in imaginary lands. While few board games propose an imaginary
world as a setting for game events, role-playing games typically do so.
Building on the tradition of table-top war-gaming, game designer David
Wesely developed the first role-playing game in 1967, a Napoleanic wargame
set in the fictional German town of Braunstein. In earlier war games, players
controlled whole armies, but in Wesely’s game players controlled individuals
and play was more open-ended.107 A few years later in 1973, Wesely’s
friend and fellow wargamer Dave Arneson, along with Gary Gygax, started
TSR (Tactical Studies Rules) Inc. to sell their Dungeons & Dragons (D&D)
rule set, which was published as a game in 1974 and was inspired by the
renewed interest in the fantasy genre. Like the building sets mentioned
earlier, Dungeons & Dragons, using systems of rules and sets of dice,
allowed players to create their own imaginary worlds and use them as game
settings. TSR also published a number of games with ready-made settings
that players could use, including Muhammad Abd-al-Rahman Barker’s
Empire of the Petal Throne (1974), Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor (1975), and
Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar (1976). TSR was not alone for long; another
company, Chaosium, was started in 1975 by Greg Stafford to publish his
game White Bear and Red Moon (1975) which introduced the world of
Glorantha. TSR also published the Dragonlance series of novels written by
Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, which grew out of a role-playing session
and became a growing franchise itself. Other sets of role-playing rules have
appeared, for example Steve Jackson’s GURPS (Generic Universal Role-
Playing System) which can be adapted to any gaming environment. Role-
playing also left the tabletop as players got into character, with the rise of
live-action role-playing (LARP) games in which players act out their
characters in costume.
Just as a novel’s author guides readers along, role-playing games often
required one player to act as “Dungeon Master” (or DM), the controller of
game world events and referee, and games could only run smoothly if all
players consented to the DM’s decisions. The control and regulation of the
game world’s events, however, would soon be able to be taken over by
computer technology, allowing all players to have equal status under an
automated referee, as role-playing games joined the ranks of video games.
The first video game that can arguably be said to depict an imaginary
world (albeit a minimal one), was Spacewar! (1962), developed on the PDP-1
mainframe computer by students at MIT. The game takes place in a starfield
in which two ships, the “needle” and the “wedge”, attempt to shoot each
other while avoiding the gravitational pull of a nearby star. Two mainframe
games, Steve Colley’s Maze War (1974) in which players wander about in a
maze, looking for other players to shoot, and Jim Bowery’s Star Trek–
influenced Spasim (1974), short for “space simulator”, which featured
spaceships and bases in three-dimensional space, were the first video games
to use a first-person perspective, giving players a point of view from within
the game’s world, rather than a third-person perspective looking in from
outside the world. Several mainframe games attempted to bring Dungeons &
Dragons to the computer, using D&D features such as hit points, experience
points, monster levels, and mazes of dungeon rooms: Rusty Rutherford’s
PEDIT5 (1975); Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood’s DND (1975); Don
Daglow’s Dungeon (1975); Oubliette (1977); and Rogue (1980) by Michael
Toy, Glenn Wichman, and Ken Arnold, which inspired many imitators.108
Most mainframe games used a combination of text and simple graphics,
but one built its world using text alone, allowing players to type commands,
use tools, and enter magic words as responses. Programmer Will Crowther,
an avid Dungeons & Dragons player, wrote Colossal Cave Adventure (1976),
based on part of the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky. The game
provided verbal descriptions of the player’s location, and players explored
by typing commands like “north” and “south”; a message at the beginning of
the game read “I WILL BE YOUR EYES AND HANDS. DIRECT ME WITH
COMMANDS OF 1 OR 2 WORDS.” Later, Don Woods, a graduate student
and Tolkien fan, took Crowther’s program and with his blessing added
fantasy elements, after which the game came to be known simply as
Adventure. The game spread and spawned many imitators, which together
became the game genre known as text adventures (which are sometimes
included in the term “interactive fiction”). Crowther and Woods’ Adventure
inspired other games that led to the incorporation of companies to sell them:
Scott Adams wrote Adventureland (1978), the first commercial adventure
game, and began Adventure International in 1979 to sell it; Marc Blank,
Dave Lebling, and others wrote Zork (1979) (the game was released
commercially in three parts from 1980–1982) and started Infocom, which
became the largest producer of text adventure games during the 1980s; and
Roberta and Ken Williams began On-Line Systems (later Sierra On-Line) and
their first game, Mystery House (1980), was one of the first to add graphical
illustrations to the game’s text.
Crowther and Woods’ Adventure also inspired the first all-graphical
adventure game, Warren Robinett’s Adventure (1979) for the Atari 2600 (see
Figure 2.7). With 30 screens worth of imagery through which players could
move, Robinett’s Adventure was the first game to cut cinematically from one
screen to the next as the player–character moved from place to place,
applying film conventions to a video game world. It also provided the player
with a number of objects that could be carried and used (the chalice, sword,
bridge, magnet, gold key, black key, white key, and the dot), though only one
item could be carried at any given time, adding to the game’s difficulty. The
game world also contained four computer-controlled characters, three
dragons and a bat, which interacted with the player–character.
FIGURE 2.7 Warren Robinett’s Adventure (1979) for the Atari VCS 2600 was
the first video game that cut screen to screen as the player-character moved
through the game’s world.
As video games moved from mainframe computers to more public venues
and became commercial products, the most elaborate video game worlds
continued to appear in the adventure game genre, and were made for home
consoles or home computers instead of for the arcade, where fast action,
short games, and high rates of player turnover were more profitable than
slower-paced games involving lengthy exploration and problem-solving.
Only a few arcade games introduced elaborate worlds; for example, Gravitar
(1982) was made of four “universes” each of which had three solar systems
that each had four or five planets, and each planet had its own unique
terrain to navigate. Early home console games, on the other hand, were
cartridge-based and had limited memory, restricting the size and detail of
their worlds, but still a few appeared on them: for example, the Atari 2600
had Robinett’s Adventure (1979), an adaptation of Superman (1979) which
also used Robinett’s system of screen-to-screen movement, and
Dragonstomper (1982), while the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)
introduced The Legend of Zelda (1986) and Final Fantasy (1987), both of
which launched growing franchises.
Home computer role-playing games finally reached a wide audience with
the release of Richard Garriott’s Ultima (1980).109 After the success of his
Tolkien-inspired Akalabeth: World of Doom (1979), Garriott designed and
wrote a larger, more detailed game and game world. Instead of using room-
by-room graphics, Garriott (with the help of Ken Arnold who had helped
design Rogue) used a system of tiled graphics that allowed four-way
scrolling, recentering the graphics as the player moved. Ultima’s overhead-
view graphics, combined with first-person perspective mazes, and the
overall size of Sosaria, the game’s world, helped make the game a success,
and Ultima would go on to be become a franchise, with each game in the
series including new advancements in graphics, character interaction, and
overall world-building.
Throughout the 1980s, video game worlds would grow in size and
interactivity. New programming techniques and programs like Lucasfilm’s
SCUMM engine, written for Maniac Mansion (1987), would increase the
vocabulary of recognized words, and better graphics and faster processing
speeds led to greater detail and more animation. Interaction increased as
well, and games like Don Daglow’s Utopia (1981), Will Wright’s SimCity
(1989), and Peter Molyneux’s Populous (1989), allowed players to build their
own individualized worlds directly, and began the genre now referred to as
“god games”, in which players create and manage miniature worlds. The
CD-ROM provided far more storage capacity than any cartridge had, and
the first game to use a CD-ROM, Cyan’s The Manhole (1987), did not even
fill the entire disc. CD-ROM technology also made possible Cyan’s Myst
(1993), which set new standards for the detail, size, and interactivity found
in single-player adventure games, and went on to start the Myst franchise.
However, the biggest changes in the imaginary worlds found in video games
would come in the mid-1990s, when advances made in single-player games
would be applied to multiplayer games.
As the worlds of graphical adventure games were developing during the
late 1970s and 1980s, text adventure games were becoming multiplayer. In
1978, Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle, students at Essex University, wrote
what they called a MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) on a PDP-10 mainframe
computer; an all-text adventure world in which multiple players could
participate in real time. During the 1980s, MUDs would expand along with
the worlds they depicted. Among the first commercial MUDs, Alan Klietz’s
Sceptre of Goth (1983) allowed 16 users to call in remotely and play
simultaneously, and Kelton Flinn and John Taylor’s Island of Kesmai (1984)
was run on Compuserve in 1985, allowing for up to 100 players. Lucasfilm’s
Habitat (1986) was a graphical virtual world made up of spaces in which
users could see each other’s avatars and speak to each other using displayed
text. Richard Skrenta’s Monster (1988) was a text-based MUD that allowed
on-line creation, in which players could help edit Monster’s on-line world
from within the world itself, making objects and location, and creating
puzzles for other users to solve. Finally, Archetype Interactive’s Meridian 59
(1995) (see Figure 2.8), with three-dimensional graphics, was released with a
flat-rate monthly subscription rate, as opposed to the usual method of
charging by the hour or by the minute. More than 25,000 players took part in
the beta version of the game before its commercial launch, and today it is
considered the first MMORPG (massively multiplayer on-line role-playing
game). Since then, many MMORPGs have followed; Ultima Online (1997),
The Longest Journey (1999), Asheron’s Call (1999), EverQuest (1999), Motor
City Online (2001), Star Wars Galaxies (2003), World of Warcraft (2004), Star
Trek Online (2010), and LEGO Universe (2010).
As imaginary worlds, MMORPGs and other non-game virtual worlds like
Second Life (2003) and Entropia Universe (2003) are vast in geographical size,
have millions of subscribers, and are persistent worlds which run
continuously, often for years. The size and complexity of these worlds are
such that one can never experience or even be aware of more than a tiny
fraction of all the events occurring in the world, and even exploring such a
world is a never-ending endeavor due to their ever-expanding and dynamic
nature. Thus, their vast size and unrepeatable nature make MMORPGs the
first imaginary worlds that run in real time and cannot be seen or
experienced exhaustively, making them even more like the Primary World,
of which only a tiny fraction can be known and experienced during one’s
lifetime.
A world’s persistence also affects the audience’s investment in that world.
Many users have a great deal of time and money invested in the worlds of
MMORPGs, whose virtual economies can affect actual economies in the
Primary World. As secondary worlds, these worlds enjoy an ontological
status unlike secondary worlds of the past. While not “real” in a physical
sense like the Primary World, their persistent and interactive nature make
them qualitatively different from the fictional worlds of novels, film, and
television; they are ongoing and unrepeatable, they exist virtually as code
and intricate mathematic models, they are social networks incarnated in
intangible communities. Users do not experience them vicariously through
an author’s characters, but rather directly, though avatars, albeit still in a
virtual sense. Users actively participate in the building of these worlds,
shaping them and making them their own, within the confines set by the
companies that keep them running. Whereas knowledge of a world’s
infrastructures and world logic is important for the audience’s
understanding of noninteractive worlds and their stories, such knowledge
gains new importance in an interactive world, where it can be used directly
by the player who is a participant in the world whose goals and objectives
often cannot be completed without that knowledge.
FIGURE 2.8 Meridian 59 (1995) came packaged with a map (top) and
featured a first-person view (bottom), and today is considered the first
MMORPG.
Participation in an MMORPG is collaborative, and differs from the
creation of fan fiction, video game level modding, and other such activities
in which fans change or add onto an existing world without affecting the
world, as it is experienced by others; to an extent, everything that happens
within an on-line virtual world is automatically a part of that world, rather
than merely an independent fan production. This kind of large-scale ongoing
collaboration is itself one of the fruits of the use of the computer in the
building of imaginary worlds.

Into the Computer Age

In the latter half of the twentieth century, no other tool advanced the
building of imaginary worlds as much as the computer. The four main ways
that the computer aided subcreative efforts are through interaction,
automation, visualization, and organization. The first three are different
aspects of simulation which is, in a sense, always involved in the creation of
an imaginary world, and the first of these, interaction, has already been
covered in the previous section.
Automation is the computer’s ability to take over the control of the events
of an imaginary world; the most common example of this being the running
of a video game world. The computer controls non-player characters, game
events including physics simulations (everything from bouncing balls to car
crashes to fluid mechanics), and even the changing position of the implied
camera. Interaction makes automation necessary, since there must be some
mechanism to deal with the user’s input. Automation is another way that an
author’s ideas are embedded in an imaginary world; the algorithm is the
guiding hand that regulates the experiences of the world’s visitors and
controls its inhabitants according to its author’s design. Yet the algorithm is
less fixed than the words and images of linear, noninactive media like novels
or film; the algorithm is more contingent, even potentially self-adapting, and
is able to generate replies and reactions to a variety of user responses. In
addition to single-player and multiplayer games, computerized automation
controls the enormous amount of data processing needed to run MMORPGs
in real time, bringing worlds to life that would otherwise not be possible.
Automation is also used for world-building in noninteractive media.
Filmmakers use programs like Weta Digital’s Massive to automate crowd
behaviors in scenes or grow the plants of a jungle. Fluid simulation
programs like RealFlow create water that looks and behaves realistically, and
other programs mimic other kinds of events and the physics affecting them.
These programs bring real-world physics and behaviors into imaginary
worlds, adding to their verisimilitude, as well as giving filmmakers greater
control over what can be done in their worlds. Automation can even lead to
unplanned events which arise wholly from the complex sets of rules
governing a world’s events, making characters appear autonomous. For
example, while working on the battle scenes for the Lord of the Rings films,
Peter Jackson and programmer Steven Regelous (who created Massive)
encountered trouble when automated soldiers did the unexpected.
According to an article in Popular Science:
In another early simulation, Jackson and Regelous watched as several
thousand characters fought like hell while, in the background, a small
contingent of combatants seemed to think better of it and run away.
They weren’t programmed to do this. It just happened. “It was spooky,”
Jackson said in an interview last year.110
Stories exploring the idea of using computer technology to create an
automated virtual world have themselves grown into a kind of subgenre of
science fiction, and include such imaginary worlds as the eponymous city of
Daniel F. Galouye’s Simulacron-3 (1964), Delmark-O of Philip K. Dick’s A
Maze of Death (1970), The Other Plane in Vernor Vinge’s short story “True
Names” (1981), the world inside the ENCOM computer in Tron (1982),
Cyberspace in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), the Metaverse in Neal
Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992), the Autoverse in Greg Egan’s Permutation
City (1994), and the Matrix in Larry and Andy Wachowski’s The Matrix
(1999), just to name a few. These stories also helped to establish certain
tropes of the subgenre: simulations that become autonomous agents within
their respective virtual worlds; characters who enter these worlds and
confuse them with the Primary World; and secondary worlds which are
internally indistinguishable from the Primary World, which has also become
a popular philosophical topic of discussion.111
Even more broadly than interaction and automation, computer graphics
technology has been used for the visualization of imaginary worlds.
Computer imaging and digital special effects have been used to enhance the
depiction of imaginary worlds in every type of digital media, including the
entire worlds of video games, and worlds in feature films, like that of Tron
(1982). In recent times, computer animation has developed far enough that a
wide stylistic range of depiction is possible, from photorealistic worlds, like
James Cameron’s Pandora in Avatar (2009)) to highly stylized ones, like
Radiator Springs of Cars (2006) or the eponymous planet of Planet 51 (2009).
Entire television series have been computer animated along with their
imaginary worlds, like Cube Town of Naomi Iwata’s Pecola (2003) and
Kippernium of Martin Baynton’s Jane and the Dragon (2005).
Computer-based imaginary worlds also promote the production of sequels,
since the digital models developed and built for the original works can be
endlessly reused in subsequent works set in the same world. Discussing
Avatar sequels, James Cameron stated in an interview:

It just makes sense to think of it as a two-or-three-film arc, in terms of

the business plan. The CG plants and trees and creatures and the
musculoskeletal rigging of the main characters—that all takes an
enormous amount of time to create. It’d be a waste not to use it
again.112
Digital model-making and computer animation have decreased the cost
involved in building a world visually, and have opened up the scope and
scale of what is possible. Software advances and growing markets have also
made powerful computer modeling and animation programs commercially
available, bringing new world-building tools to the general public. Other
tools, like YouTube and the World Wide Web itself, give world-builders
outlets to display their worlds, whether they are novels, movies, comics, or
video games. Even novel writing has become easier with computers, since
tasks like character and place name changes can be done with simple search-
and-replace commands.
Finally, computers have aided the building of imaginary worlds as a tool
used for organization. Huge worlds generate vast amounts of data, which
authors must keep straight in order to maintain consistency. In the past,
authors have sometimes compiled “bibles” of their worlds or other such
works, like timelines and glossaries, only some of which is ever published as
ancillary materials. Such reference works become even more important as
the number of people working on a collaborative world grows, and because
the worlds themselves have grown to include thousands of characters,
places, objects, events, and other details. The size of these databases is such
that they would be difficult to manage or even search without computer
assistance; for example, the Star Wars Holocron kept by Lucas Licensing
continuity database administrator Leland Chee contains over 30,000 entries
covering characters, planets, weapons, and other data of the Star Wars
galaxy, and Chee spends three-quarters of his usual workday updating or
using the database.113 Some worlds have their own fan-created databases
on-line, such as those for the Star Wars galaxy, Star Trek universe, and
Tolkien’s Arda, and there are databases for lesser-known worlds, like the
Andromeda Wiki for the Systems Commonwealth universe or the HallaWiki
for D. J. MacHale’s Halla universe. Databases can even be the main medium
in which a world exists; for example, the Galaxiki galaxy started by Jos
Kirps and the Galaxiki Project (at http://www.galaxiki.org) is an editable
galaxy to which anyone can contribute. Users are invited to start their own
solar systems and write about them.
Moving beyond databases merely for storage, the Preserving Virtual
Worlds project, begun in 2008, seeks to preserve entire virtual worlds for
posterity. The project is a joint effort by the Library of Congress, the
Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Maryland, Stanford
University, the Rochester Institute of Technology, and Linden Lab to “develop
basic standards of metadata and content representation” and “Investigate
preservation issues through a series of archiving case studies representing
early games and literature, as well as later interactive multiplayer game
environments” so as to save virtual worlds from the technological
obsolescence that threatens the hardware on which they run.114
The use of computer technology, in all of the areas described in the
preceding text, also advanced another imaginary-world tradition with a long
history, and one which found its greatest expansion in the latter half of the
twentieth century; the use of imaginary worlds as art and thought
experiments.

Worlds as Art and Thought Experiments

Since Plato’s Republic, imaginary worlds have existed for their own sake, not
merely as narrative settings. At first, they were created for the purpose of
either satire, or social thought experiments, in the form of utopias and
dystopias. Such worlds are designed as models or arguments, and when one
of them does contain a narrative, it usually serves as little more than a
vehicle for world exploration and explanation, with many expository
passages regarding the workings of the world. Most often, such secondary
worlds are set in opposition to the Primary World, with the resulting
differences highlighted and discussed to suggest alternative ways of seeing,
living, and organizing societies, and put forth in the hopes of changing the
Primary World.
Some worlds function as experiments within the stories in which they
appear, like Io-Phoebe, the “brick moon” that is built, launched into orbit,
and developed into a world of its own in Edward Everett Hale’s “The Brick
Moon” (1869), or the worlds used by their makers to imprison the human
main characters in Dark City (1998) and The Matrix (1999). Characters often
are aware (or become aware) of the imaginary status of the world they
inhabit, like the characters in Edith Nesbit’s Polistarchia in The Magic City
(1910), the characters who enter the world King Mezentius creates at dinner
in E. R. Eddison’s A Fish Dinner in Memison (1941), the characters who enter
the worlds they read about in books (like Bastian Balthasar Bux, who enters
the land of Fantastica in Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story (1979)), or
the aforementioned main characters of Dark City and The Matrix.
Other authors experiment with the very nature and structure of the worlds
themselves. Lewis Carroll’s two Alice stories both play with logic and
present strange worlds that function very differently from ours (for example,
the scene in which Alice and the Red Queen must keep running to stay in
the same place). Going even farther, Edwin Abbott’s two-dimensional
Flatland and one-dimensional Lineland were worlds quite unlike any that
had gone before them, and unique in the manner in which they were unlike
the Primary World. Abbott’s book inspired what could now be seen as a
traditional of lower-dimensional worlds, including those of C. H. Hinton’s
An Episode of Flatland (1907), Dionys Burger’s Sphereland (1965), A. K.
Dewdney’s The Planiverse (1984), and Ian Stewart’s Flatterland (2001).
Postulations of other worlds can be found in science, too, where the
development of quantum physics in the early twentieth century led to Hugh
Everett’s “relative state” formulation, later renamed the “many-worlds
interpretation” of quantum physics, which proposes that all possible
alternative futures and histories exist, and that each takes place in alternate
realities branching off from each other, tracing out all possible events.
In the twentieth century, various strands of experimental literature took
on the exploration of literary form and fictionality itself, and among them
were authors whose work involved imaginary worlds. As literary theorist
Thomas Pavel notes:
Much later, a new playful fictionality made its appearance under the sign
of modernity. It took various forms, ranging from the spontaneous,
sometimes naive attempts of the surrealists to the elaborate fictional
mechanisms of Borges and the postmodern writers. What these
undertakings have in common is the construction of fictional worlds for
the sake of laying bare the properties of fiction and exploring its
virtualities. Borges fills his stories with impossible objects and
contradictory situations, so that no return to the metropolis is possible
after “The Aleph” or “The Library of Babel.” The purpose of establishing
these fictional spaces is less to increase the trade in conventional wisdom
than to expand our perception of fictional possibilities. Fictional colonies
established as bases for traveling back and forth to the actual world must
therefore be distinguished from fictional settlements founded for the
sake of adventure and investigation, after the burning of the ships.115
Jorge Luis Borges creates or at least hints at worlds in several short stories.
In “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940), Borges and his friend Bioy find an
encyclopedia entry for the country of Uqbar, which appears to be a part of a
larger encyclopedia being written about a world called Tlön, which may or
may not be imaginary, and which has an unusual epistemology all its own.
“The Library of Babel” (1941) is set in an infinite library of endless rows of
hexagonal chambers containing all possible books, and describes the humans
and librarians who live and wander there. The hero of “The Immortal” (1949),
after a harrowing search, reaches the City of the Immortals, only to find it
far different than he expected. And in “Undr” (1975) we are introduced to the
nation of the Urns, whose poetry is the poetry of a single word. But these
brief descriptions barely sketch the worlds Borges invents and fail to do
justice to the experience of reading about them.
Perhaps inspired by Borges, other authors have constructed entire books
from series of glimpses of strange worlds whose designs bear metaphorical
and metaphysical significance. Set within a frame story in which Marco Polo
relates his travels to Kublai Khan, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972) has
55 descriptions of exotic cities which explore the nature of cities and how
they are experienced. Another frame story, of Albert Einstein dreaming
during the days when he is working on his theories of relativity, structures
Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams (1992), a series of impressionistic
vignettes that investigate what life would be like in various universes where
time operates differently. In one such universe, time stops at its center:
As a traveler approaches this place from any direction, he moves more
and more slowly. His heartbeats grow farther apart, his breathing
slackens, his temperature drops, his thoughts diminish, until he reaches
dead center and stops. For this is the center of time. From this place, time
travels outward in concentric circles—at rest at the center, slowly picking
up speed at greater diameters.
Who would make the pilgrimage to the center of time? Parents with
children, and lovers.
And so, at the place where time stands still, one sees parents clutching
their children, in a frozen embrace that will never let go. The beautiful
young daughter with blue eyes and blonde hair will never stop smiling
the smile she smiles now, will never lose this soft pink glow on her
cheeks, will never grow wrinkled or tired, will never get injured, will
never unlearn what her parents have taught her, will never think
thoughts that her parents don’t know, will never know evil, will never
tell her parents that she does not love them, will never leave her room
with the view of the ocean, will never stop touching her parents as she
does now.116
Literary works were not the only ones to encourage innovations. From the
1970s onward, experimental world-building even appeared in traditional
narrative science fiction literature. Worlds were set in Dyson spheres (Bob
Shaw’s Orbitville and Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson’s Cuckoo), on a
neutron star whose surface gravity is 67 billion times that of Earth (Robert
Forward’s Dragon’s Egg), planets shaped like a ring (Larry Niven’s
Ringworld) or a disc (Terry Pratchett’s Discworld) or designed to be a giant
shopping mall (Somtow Sucharitkul’s Mallworld).117 In Bob Shaw’s The
Ragged Astronauts (1986) and its sequels, the twin planets Land and
Overland orbit a center of gravity close enough to share an atmosphere,
making interplanetary travel possible with hot-air balloons and wooden
spaceships. The world of the Cavity in Barrington J. Bayley’s “Me and My
Antronoscope” (1973) reverses the idea of material planets in empty space by
having its inhabitants live in a hollow cavity in a universe of solid rock, with
“spaceships” that burrow through the rock, filling the tunnels left behind
them as they go in search of other cavities.
Some authors built worlds using narrative elements, but without a
traditional narrative structure to tie their novels together: George Perec’s
Life: A User’s Manual (1978) is designed like a literary jigsaw puzzle, with
interconnected series of stories of the residents of an apartment building in
Paris, which is described in intricate detail, room by room; while Ursula K.
LeGuin’s Always Coming Home (1985) is a collection of poems, tales,
histories, charts, maps, and music from the valley of the Kesh, a people who
“might be going to have lived a long long time from now in Northern
California.” 118 Nonnarrative collections of information about imaginary
countries were used as humor in the series of phony traveler’s guidebook
parodies produced by Tom Gleisner, Santo Cilauro, and Rob Sitch, which
include books on an Eastern European country, Molvanîa: A Land
Untouched by Modern Dentistry (2003); a country in Southeast Asia, Phaic
Tân: Sunstroke on a Shoestring (2004), and a Latin American country, San
Sombrèro: A Land of Carnivals, Cocktails and Coups (2006).
Another world worth noting for its experimental nature, as well as its use
as therapy, is artist Mark Hogancamp’s Marwencol, a meticulously detailed
one-sixth-scale World War II–era town built as a form of therapy after a
brutal attack and beatings robbed Hogancamp of his memories. Hogancamp
began photographing the narratives that he played out in Marwencol, in
which he and people he knew were represented by costumed dolls. His
photographs were later discovered and appeared in the art magazine Esopus
in 2005, which led to the feature-length documentary Marwencol (2010).
 Two extreme examples of worlds composed mainly of images, that do not
rely on text or narrative content, are the unnamed world depicted in Luigi
Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus (1981) (see Figure 1.1), and Naohisa Inoue’s
Iblard, which first appeared in his paintings and the book The Journey
Through Iblard (1983). Probably inspired by the enigmatic Voynich
Manuscript, Codex Seraphinianus is an illustrated, encyclopedic book of
several hundred pages showing the peoples, flora, fauna, machines, physics,
chemistry, history, language, and more of a bizarre imaginary world, all in
rich and colorful detail. Text accompanies some of the images, but the entire
book is written in the language of the world, without any means of
deciphering it provided (although the book’s page numbers hint at a
numbering system). Drawn by the Italian artist and designer Luigi Serafini
during the late 1970s and printed in 1981 and several times since then, the
book has attained a cult following and copies now sell for hundreds of
dollars apiece.
Iblard is the world of Naohisa Inoue, a Japanese painter who has been
painting images of his world since the 1970s, and publishing books and CD-
ROMs of the images since the early 1980s. His colorful, impressionistic
paintings of Iblard number in the hundreds, and have been the subject of
several exhibitions (some images can be found on-line). Both Inoue’s and
Serafini’s worlds are visually captivating and stylistically unique, and
demonstrate the possibility of designing worlds as art for their own sake,
apart from any narratives that are set within them.
Many video game worlds also contain a minimum of text and narrative,
relying mainly on visuals; but the addition of interactivity, especially at the
scale allowed by MMORPGs, means that instead of creating worlds merely
as thought experiments, the worlds can become laboratories in which actual
experiments in the social sciences can be performed. Discussing the study of
common-resource pool problems and macro-level behavioral trends using
virtual worlds, telecommunications researcher Edward Castronova and his
team write:
By their nature, synthetic worlds are ideal tools for this research method.
In order to allow for vast, persistent worlds, the servers on which such
environments are stored must keep track of an innumerable amount of
data. Among many other variables this includes player ability statistics
 and assets, auction inventory and market prices, resource depletion, and
the randomized appearances of rare goods. Additionally, besides tracking
information on the state of the world and players, databases may also be
used to monitor nearly all of the social interactive content of the
synthetic world. This includes components such as chat logs and player
emotes (commands for the visual display of emotive avatar animations).
All of this information can be stored, and later, mined for aggregate
trends in player behavior…. In addition to tracking and storing vast
amounts of behavioral data, synthetic worlds also permit the
experimenter a great deal of control. All manner of methods by which
players interact with the environment and each other (including
exchange rates, rates of resource renewal, communication channels, and
market locations) may be manipulated, allowing for a wide range of
potential experimental variables. In controlling for world conditions,
experimenters may then observe the dependent effect on participant
behavior. We argue that these observations are significant because of the
inherent complexity of the social environments in which they occur.119
Although human participants can be used, the simulations using Massive
mentioned earlier demonstrate that algorithmically-controlled agents can
also be usefully employed in experiments involving emergent behavior. In
addition, with other simulated features like physical interactions and
biological growth, imaginary worlds will be able to model increasingly
detailed and complex phenomena, simulating more and more of the Primary
World.
From their inception as imaginary geographical places in unexplored
regions to elaborate persistent universes collaboratively created and
populated by millions, imaginary worlds have developed enormously in the
last three millennia, growing in size, complexity, and their ability to engage
an audience. As secondary worlds subcreated within the Primary World,
they are both a reflection of the world in which we live and those of which
we dream. They are the gesamtkunstwerk that unite all arts, the culmination
of human imagination, the first drafts of the future that humankind will
inhabit, and the dreamworlds we already inhabit today. Although they can
be everything from escapist fantasy to lenses that help us see our own world
more clearly, imaginary worlds are more than art, entertainment, games,
tools, dreams, nightmares, experiments, or laboratories; they are nothing less
than the fulfillment of humanity’s subcreative vocation.

OceanofPDF.com
3
WORLD STRUCTURES AND SYSTEMS OF
RELATIONSHIPS

Avidly, I searched some passages of the books for anything I could relate
to my everyday life; always interpreting, always translating, I found no
mention of mankind or anything from this world. There was no
evocation of sciences, customs and details of our world. What I was
unraveling, through my studies, was the history and knowledge of a
world to which ours appeared unknown.

—Charles Ischir Defontenay, Star (Psi Cassiopeia)1

I now held in my hands a vast and systematic fragment of the entire
history of an unknown planet, with its architectures and its playing
cards, the horror of its mythologies and the murmur of its tongues, its
emperors and its seas, its minerals and its birds and fishes, its algebra
and its fire, its theological and metaphysical controversies—all joined,
articulated, coherent, and with no visible doctrinal purpose or hint of
parody.

—Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”2

Secondary worlds are interesting because of the parallels that can be drawn
between them and the Primary World; it is through these parallels that we
can relate to them and imagine what it would be like to inhabit them. As
discussed in Chapter 1, secondary worlds use Primary World defaults for
many things, despite all the defaults they may reset. If an author wants an
audience to understand and empathize with the characters of a world,
Primary World defaults become important for making connections to the
audience’s own lived experience and establishing some degree of emotional
realism; worlds too removed from the Primary World will be unable to do
either. As Tolkien writes:
Probably every writer making a secondary world … wishes to be a real
maker, hopes that he is drawing on reality: hopes that the peculiar
quality of this secondary world (if not all the details) are derived from
Reality, or are flowing into it. If he indeed achieves a quality that can
fairly be described by the dictionary definition: “inner consistency of
reality”, it is difficult to conceive how this can be, if the work does not in
some way partake of Reality.3
Besides Primary World defaults which still hold true in a secondary world,
similarities with the Primary World can be found in the kinds of
infrastructures that provide a framework in which to locate information
about a secondary world. These are the structures by which we make sense
of a story or a world, whether in fiction or lived experience, and which place
individual facts and details into the larger contexts needed for them to be
fully understood. It is through the completeness and consistency of these
structures that world gestalten are able to occur. Without these structures,
worlds would fall apart and become little more than a collection of data and
information, and they would cease to be worlds.

Secondary World Infrastructures

You can spend your entire life perfecting a new world when you create
its every piece.

—George Lucas, from a 1977 interview in Ecran4

Early worlds, which grew out of the stories told in them or about them,
depended on those stories for their structure; only the elements needed to
tell the story appeared. But more developed worlds grew beyond the needs
of narrative, and transnarrative worlds have an even greater wealth of detail
to organize. What, then, are the frameworks and infrastructures that help
both authors and audiences to organize all the pieces of information about a
world and give a coherent or even consistent existence to the whole?
 Naturally, narrative is the most common form of structure, and the one
that usually determines which elements in a world are most defined and
developed, or at least mentioned. As there is much to say about narrative
and its relationship to world-building, narrative will be considered
separately in Chapter 4.
The first three structures to be discussed in the following sections arise
from the three basic elements needed for a world to exist: a space in which
things can exist and events can occur; a duration or span of time in which
events can occur; and a character or characters who can be said to be
inhabiting the world, since defining “world” in an experiential sense requires
someone to be the recipient of experiences. Each of these has its
organizational tools, examined in the following sections: maps structure
space and connect a world’s locations together; timelines organize events
into chronological sequences and histories which show how they are
temporally related; and genealogies show how characters are related to each
other (the term can be applied more broadly than merely biological kinship).
These three structures are almost always found to some degree in an
imaginary world, since the places, events, and characters of an imaginary
world are fictional.
The next five structures to be discussed are the various systems which
build upon each other and comprise the world itself, from the physical to the
philosophical. The first of these is nature, which is not only the flora and
fauna of a world, but also all of its materiality down to even its laws of
physics, which may differ from those of the Primary World. Culture is built
atop nature by a world’s inhabitants, and is partly determined by what
nature provides, as well as the culture’s own history in the world. Language
arises from culture and contains a culture’s worldview embedded within it,
since it regulates what can be expressed and how it can be expressed, and
gives communicable form to the way in which the members of a culture
collectively conceptualize their world. Mythology emerges from a
combination of the previous layers and is how a culture understands,
explains, and remembers its world. And finally, philosophy is the set of
worldviews arising from the world itself, which includes not only the ideas
and ideologies of the world’s inhabitants, but also those which the author is
expressing through the world’s structure and events.
 Of course, depending on their purpose, worlds have these structures to
varying degrees, and less developed worlds can lack some of them
altogether. Learning the ways in which a secondary world differs from the
Primary World, and learning how a world works, is often a large part of the
enjoyment of experiencing an imaginary world. Thus, how world
information is doled out to the audience is an important part of world-
building and design. Subcreators can imply these structures by giving the
audience information and letting them assemble it, or describe these
structures directly through maps, timelines, glossaries, charts, dictionaries,
encyclopedias, and other such materials. Some ancillary materials, like maps
or casts of characters, are usually placed at the start of a book, so that they
can be used to orient a reader immediately, while other materials, like
timelines and glossaries, are usually placed at the end, since they might
reveal story information too soon if read before the main narrative. Worlds
can even be designed to frustrate the organization of data into world
infrastructures; for example, the Codex Seraphinianus (1981) gives us an
abundance of pieces but leaves us guessing as to how to fit them together
into world infrastructures. Most worlds, however, are designed to make
sense and the oldest and perhaps most common tool used to introduce a
world and orient an audience is the map.

Maps
If you’re going to have a complicated story you must work to a map;
otherwise you’ll never make a map of it afterwards.

—J. R. R. Tolkien5
Maps relate a series of locations to each other, visually unifying them into a
world. They provide a concrete image of a world, and fill in many of the
gaps not covered in the story; gaps between locations, at the world’s edges,
and places not otherwise mentioned or visited by the characters. As such,
they are one of the most basic devices used to provide structure to an
imaginary world.
Maps of imaginary worlds appeared as early as the one printed with
More’s Utopia (1516), which was more pictorial than geographical. Woodcut
maps were added to works, like the double-paged map of Macaria Island in
Caspar Stiblinus’ “Commentariolus de Eudaemonensium Republica” in
Coropaedia, sive de moribus et vita virginum sacrarum (1555). Sometimes a
map was considered important enough to be mentioned in a subtitle; when
Le Père Zacharie de Lisieux’s Relation du pays de Jansénie, où il est traité
des singularitez qui s’y trouvent, des coustumes, Moeurs et Religion des
habitants. Par Louys Fontaines, Sieur de Saint Marcel (1660) was translated
into English in 1668, its title was changed to A relation of the country of
Jansenia, wherein is treated of the singularities founded therein, the
customes, manners, and religion of its inhabitants: with a map of the
countrey. During the 1500s, maps were already appearing in printed Bibles,
which may have encouraged the inclusion of more maps of imaginary
worlds. Some maps were intimately tied to story events, like the detailed
allegorical map entitled “A Plan of the Road from the City of Destruction to
the Celestial City” found in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress from This
World, to That Which is to Come (1684). Others, like the maps found in
Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Treasure Island (1883) (the story of which
originated from a map Stevenson had drawn), had less narrative detail but
looked more like the kind of maps found in atlases.
Maps became more important with the development of the fantasy genre,
in which travel is often a central part of a story’s events, and in which
geography plays a large role, especially if simultaneous journeys have to be
coordinated. Maps give the reader a sense of scale early on, and may range
from the Star Wars galaxy map to maps of archipelagoes, continents, or
countries, to smaller scale maps like the map of Yoknapatawapha County
that William Faulkner included in the back of Absalom, Abasalom! (1936).
Some maps are of areas as small as neighborhoods or estates; these were
commonly found during the 1940s, when over 500 Dell paperback books,
known as “mapbacks”, featured maps on their back covers which were
related to their stories. Maps also give a sense of how locations are related to
one another spatially and topographically, giving story locations a context,
since places are affected and defined by what lies around them. Remoteness,
inaccessibility, and isolation are all expressed in this way, as well as their
opposites. Maps can convey the spaces and great distances needed for
journeys, allowing such journeys to be ellipsized in the text, as well as
giving them a concreteness they would not otherwise have. Maps can also
encourage an author to remain consistent from one book to another. Michael
O. Riley describes L. Frank Baum’s manipulation of distances, before he
codified the map of Oz:
One important way in which Baum modified Oz to accommodate more
stories is evident in The Patchwork Girl: he restored to Oz the sense of
vast size that exists in The Wizard, but is somewhat ambiguous in the
subsequent books. Dorothy’s journeys in that book take days to
accomplish, except when she has the assistance of the Winged Monkeys,
but in The Marvelous Land [of Oz], Glinda reaches the desert from the
Emerald City in an hour, and in Ozma [of Oz] the journey from the
desert to the capital takes less than a day of leisurely walking. But here,
once again, Oz is a land of great distances, and it is “a day’s journey from
the Emerald City” to Jack Pumpkinhead’s house and “a two days’
journey from Jack Pumpkinhead’s house to the edge of the Quadling
Country.”
This sense of space was necessary for the modification that Baum
made to enable a seeming paradise to include the necessary obstacles
and struggles that would generate plots.6
Discussing one of Baum’s later Oz books, The Lost Princess of Oz (1917),
Riley states that, “The map of Oz he had drawn, while eliminating the
flexibility he had utilized in the earlier books to fit the country to his stories,
had the effect of causing him to treat Oz in a more consistent manner. There
are no major changes or reinterpretations of that fairyland in The Lost
7
Princess, but there are several refinements.” Maps are initially designed to
fit a story, but later stories must be fit to existing maps. A map, then, can
restrict stories as well as generate them.
In the Fantasy genre, the use of maps has become so common that their
conventions can be parodied. Diana Wynne Jones’ book The Tough Guide to
Fantasyland (1996), a faux travel guide to the generic fantasyland found in
so many novels, begins with a parody of a map. After summarizing some
cartographical clichés, she writes, “Find your STARTING POINT…. You will
find it down in one corner on the coast, as far away from anywhere as
possible.” And right before that, “If you take this Tour, you are going to have
to visit every single place on this Map, whether it is marked or not. This is a
Rule.”8 Both criticisms, while true of many novels, point out phenomena
that have explanations which relate to mapmaking and world-building.
When mapping the main character’s journey, an author will often want to
create a map that shows the entirety of the lands traveled, while also
showing as much detail as possible. These goals are balanced by cropping the
map around the plot of the journey, assuring that the map can be blown up
as much as possible while keeping the whole journey within it. Inevitably,
since most journeys do not involve spiral trajectories, the starting point will
naturally end up somewhere along the border of the map. Narratively
speaking, having the main character come from a marginal region also
naturalizes expository passages, since the main character is learning about
the world along with the audience. The object of the second criticism, the
journey which visits every place depicted on the map, is sometimes referred
to as a “Cook’s Tour” (after the extensive tours of English travel agent
Thomas Cook). This is the result of an author producing a map, lazily
perhaps, with the minimum needed for the story; the author has only
mapped the places visited by the characters, rather than creating a robust
and detailed map of regions reaching far beyond what is seen in the story.
This is one example of why world-building should go beyond the story’s
needs and suggest a world much broader and more detailed than what the
story gives the audience, since areas appearing on a map that do not appear
in the story encourage speculation and imagination.
Another common convention involves the content of maps. Whereas
regions of the Earth (and perhaps other planets as well) usually have large
areas of fairly homogeneous terrain, many fictional maps will contain a
wide variety of geological features; mountains, deserts, forests, oceans,
archipelagoes, meadowlands, volcanoes, rivers, marshes, and so on,
sometimes all within relatively close proximity. In the case of Fantasy,
varying terrain makes for more interesting journeys, which, since they are
typically on foot or by horse, must place a variety of features with a limited
area if they are to be reached within a given timeframe (usually days or
weeks). On the other hand, science fiction, with its high-speed modes of
travel (even faster-than-light travel) will typically put each location on a
separate planet of its own, with characters crossing the gulfs of space
between them in spaceships or teleportation of some sort. And instead of
juxtaposing multiple types of terrain within a small area, entire planets often
represent a single type of terrain; for example, in the Star Wars galaxy, there
is a desert planet (Tatooine), an ice and snow planet (Hoth), a jungle planet
(Dagobah), a city planet (Coruscant), and so on. Even when planets have
multiple types of terrain, there is usually some geographical or geological
feature or combination of features that makes the planet unique and distinct
from other planets. Likewise, planets will often be limited to a single
dominant culture, which considers the planet its home world and gives the
planet its name. Dozens of examples of these can be found in the Star Wars
and Star Trek universes. When Earth is included among these planets,
humans are usually grouped together as Earthlings, downplaying racial and
cultural differences, implying that these are slight variations when compared
to planetary differences. Planets, then, function much the way that countries
do in single-planet narratives or worlds.
Each location’s uniqueness and distinctiveness not only helps audiences
keep from confusing locations, but also aids the stories set within them by
giving each place a sense of character and even personality. The design and
terrain of a location often corresponds to the events that take place there and
to the worldviews of its inhabitants; desolate, barren wastelands are usually
not happy places, dark places often are dangerous, while sunlit meadows full
of birdsongs and blooms typically do not contain villains’ lairs. Tolkien’s
Middle-earth contains numerous examples of such places: the blasted
wasteland of Mordor; the bucolic Shire; grim, austere Orthanc; mysterious
and beautiful Lothlórien; the dark, subterranean halls of Moria; and so on.
Tolkien also uses design, characters, and events to make his four forests,
Mirkwood, The Old Forest, Lothórien, and Fangorn, all distinct from each
other. Elves inhabit both Mirkwood and Lothórien, but they are quite
different from each other; the former are more primitive and build on the
ground and underground, while the latter are more cultured and live on
platforms high up in the trees. The Old Forest and Fangorn are both
treacherous places for foreigners and both contain sentient tree-like beings,
but whereas the Old Forest’s Old Man Willow is immobile and remains
provincial in his interests, the Ents of Fangorn recognize the
interdependence of the Free Peoples of Middle-earth and decide to leave the
woods and participate in battle. Places can also change along with the
prevailing rulers of lands; Narnia is a snowy land under the power of the
White Witch, but the enduring winter ends along with her reign.
Not only do maps unify the locations of a story or of a world, they also
allow authors to join multiple worlds together into one. Perhaps the earliest
example of this is when L. Frank Baum decided to combine his worlds. As
Michael O. Riley describes it:
In The Road to Oz, Baum had drawn all his imaginary countries together
into the same Other-world, but he had given no information about their
geographical relationships. Now he actually shows the reader how they
are connected. The fact that their positions on the map do not always
agree with the textual descriptions is overridden by the centrality of Oz
and the interconnectedness of Baum’s entire Other-world.
Besides the reality given to Oz by being set in a detailed map, the
country also gains in richness by being set among so many other exotic
countries, most of them with their own histories and special ambiences.
These other countries also gain from being placed around Oz. In fact, it
becomes extremely difficult for a reader who has followed Baum to this
point in his career to go back to the first part of the Oz series or to those
earlier individual fantasies and divorce any of them from Baum’s entire
Other-world; all his various creations have become too firmly a part of
one great fantasy world. The appearance of these maps is, in fact, the
culmination of Baum’s proclivity, evident as far back as 1901, to draw his
various worlds together.9
The tendency to combine worlds is especially great in science fiction, where
planets can become part of the same universe very easily, because they are
not physically connected, and because there is no limit to the number of
planets that can be added. Just as islands lay separated from each other in
the ocean, making them the most popular sites for imaginary worlds before
the twentieth century, planets reside in space in the same manner, separated
from each other, often by vast distances and set in uncharted regions (and
traveled to in spaceships). As discussed in Chapter 2, from the 1950s onward,
many authors began joining their stories and planets into larger
configurations. A number of them also include Earth in their universes, even
if the planet is only mentioned and never visited (as in the Dune universe),
and in some cases, Earth is abandoned, almost forgotten, or even destroyed
(as in the Foundation universe).
When worlds are set on Earth, however, the relationship of secondary
world maps to Primary World maps can become an issue which can intrude
on consistency; therefore some worlds go out of their way to suggest why
they do not appear on standard maps. In More’s Utopia (1516), the reason is
given within a letter from More’s friend Peter Giles, in which he describes
how he and More talked to Raphael Hythloday, the adventurer whose tales
of Utopia are supposedly the source of the book:
As for More’s difficulties about locating the island, Raphael did not try
in any way to suppress the information, but he mentioned it only briefly
and in passing, as if saving it for another occasion. And then an unlucky
accident caused both of us to miss what he said. For while Raphael was
speaking of it, one of More’s servants came in to whisper something in
his ear; and though I was listening, for that very reason, more intently
than ever, one of the company, who I suppose had caught cold on
shipboard, coughed so loudly that some of Raphael’s words escaped me.
But I will never rest till I have full information on this point, not just the
general position of the island, but its exact latitude—provided only our
friend Hythloday is safe and alive.10
Some places are deliberately hidden from outsiders, like Francis Bacon’s
island of Bensalem in The New Atlantis (1626) which had laws of secrecy for
travelers; or more recently, the island on the television series Lost (2004–
2010). Other worlds were naturally hidden by geographical barriers, like the
monarchy of Satrapia in Simon Tyssot de Patot’s Voyages and Adventures of
Jaques Massé (1710), which was cut off from the outside world by mountain
ranges, beginning a tradition of “lost world” novels. Political reasons could
also be used for a world’s obscurity; everything about the land of Archaos in
Christiane Rochefort’s Archaos ou Le jardin étincelant (1972) is said to have
been removed from history books, because the country was such a threat to
its neighbors.11 And a place’s absence on standard maps can be an occasion
for humor; in Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon Days (1985), Keillor takes a
full three pages to explain how Mist County, the location of Lake Wobegon,
was “omitted from the map due to the incompetence of surveyors”, and
describes the political maneuvering that has kept it off the map since.12
Authors can even chide the audience for wanting to know where their lands
are located. In George Barr McCutcheon’s Graustark: A Story of a Love
Behind a Throne (1903), Miss Guggenslocker scolds another character at the
end of Chapter 3:
“Mr. Lorry has offended us by not knowing where Graustark is located
on the map,” cried the young lady, and he could see the flash of
resentment in her eyes.
“Why, my dear sir, Graustark is in—” began Uncle Caspar, but she
checked him instantly.
“Uncle Caspar, you are not to tell him. I have recommended that he
study geography and discover us for himself. He should be ashamed of
his ignorance.”13
In many cases, authors do not provide any map at all, but if a place is
developed enough, an audience can compile information from an author’s
works and create a map of their own. One of the earliest works to receive
such attention was Dante’s Inferno, which inspired many to map his version
of Hell. According to historian Ricardo Padrón:
During the fifteenth century, a Florentine architect by the name of
Antonio Manetti decided that one could gather the information
presented in these passages and extrapolate from it to map out precisely
the size, shape, and location of Dante’s Hell. Manetti’s work would not
make it into print for some time, but his ideas would be popularized in
summary form by many others, fueling what John Kleiner (1994, 24) has
called the “heyday of infernal cartography,” stretching roughly from 1450
to 1600. Italian intellectuals, particularly Florentines, debated,
questioned, and refined Manetti’s “Dantean cosmography,” and even
converted his argument to maps that accompanied their own editions of
Dante’s poem and their commentaries on it. Dantean cosmography
became an intellectual fad that attracted the attention of some leading
thinkers, including no less than a figure than Galileo Galilei …”14
Maps can be constructed from verbal descriptions, but also from visual
information collected from images of the place in question. For his book TV
Sets: Fantasy Blueprints of Classic TV Homes (1996), Mark Bennett mapped
out the homes from 34 television series, the towns of Hooterville and
Mayberry (see Figure 3.1), and Gilligan’s Island, by watching the shows and
establishing the relationships of spaces from what was shown (and in some
cases, filling in gaps, like bathrooms, which he says are rarely shown). Some
maps are used by authors or companies to ensure consistency during
production, and may only appear some time afterwards in ancillary
materials; for example, maps were made of the Podrace course in Star Wars
Episode I and the area of Coruscant in which the speeder chase takes place
in Episode II, but they were not publicly released until several years later in
Creating the World of Star Wars: 365 Days (2005).
15
Tolkien’s world in particular has inspired mapmaking by others, and apart
from Tolkien’s own sketches and official authorized maps produced by his
son Christopher in the 1950s and later by Pauline Baynes in the late 1960s,
one can find published maps of Middle-earth by an “M. Blackburn”, Richard
Caldwell, Barbara Strachey, Karen Wynn Fonstad, Shelly Shapiro, James
Cook, and John Howe.16 The maps are drawn in a variety of styles with
varying degrees of detail. The most detailed of these were the maps
produced by cartographer Karen Wynn Fonstad, who also produced atlases
of other authors’ worlds from the information provided in their books,
including atlases of Anne McCaffrey’s Pern, Stephen R. Donaldson’s the
Land, Krynn (the world of the DragonLance novels), the world of TSR’s
Forgotten Realms, and Tolkien’s Middle-earth. As a cartographer, Fonstad
was interested in more than just the landforms of these worlds; in The Atlas
of Middle-Earth, which even came out in a second edition, she included
maps with troop movements, the borders of kingdoms, landforms, climate,
vegetation, population, and languages, all extrapolated from what is
described or implied within Tolkien’s writings and the maps that accompany
them. That enough of an audience exists for such an atlas to be published (as
well as a revised second edition) is testament to the importance that maps
have as guides to secondary worlds, even when they are unauthorized.
FIGURE 3.1 Two very different maps of Mayberry, North Carolina, by Mark
Bennett (top) and James L. Dean (bottom), extrapolated from the visual
information provided on The Andy Griffith Show. (Mark Bennett, Town of
Mayberry, 1997, Lithograph on Rives BFK paper, 24.25 × 36.25 inches,
Courtesy of the artist and Mark Moore Gallery) (Map of Mayberry courtesy
of James L. Dean).
 Finally, some worlds exist only as maps, without accompanying stories or
text. In 1999, Artist Wim Delvoye compiled his maps of an imaginary world
in a catalog entitled Atlas, the images depicting all the roads, cities, and
geological features that one finds in atlases of Primary World maps. Another
artist, Adrian Leskiw, not only draws maps of his imaginary worlds, but
some of them, like those of his Nation of Breda, have been edited or redrawn
to represent different times in the country’s history (see Figure 3.2). Leskiw
describes the process at his website:
I began this map series in 2003 with three pencil drawings and then
proceeded to scan these. After digitizing the 2003 map of the Isle of
Breda I created a unique map for each year before, until 1979, and after,
until 2024, by editing the base map and each subsequent new map,
ending up with 46 unique maps (and possibly more in the future)! In the
interest of saving space I have selected an assortment of 10 maps from
this 46-year span in order to illustrate the development of the island’s
highway network. After finishing the 2024 map I began making multiple
updates without going to the trouble [of] creating a new map for each
subsequent year and have tentatively labeled this iteration as the 2035
map.17
The multiple versions of the map, showing changes over time, adds a
temporal dimension to the world depicted and combines cartography with
another device often used to structure imaginary worlds: the timeline.
FIGURE 3.2 A detail of the Capital Region from Adrian Leskiw’s map of the
Isle of Breda, as it changed over time. The top image represents the land in
2002, the middle image in 2004, and the bottom image in 2040. The top and
middle images were created in 2003, and the bottom one in 2005. (Images
courtesy of Adrian Leskiw.)

Timelines
Timelines and chronologies connect events together temporally, unifying
them into a history. They can be used to chart the cause-and-effect
relationships between events, explain and clarify their motivations and
maintain consistency, and give local events a context within larger
movements of historical events. Timelines tie backstory into a story’s current
events and help an audience to fill in gaps, such as characters’ ages or travel
times, or their participation in events described in broader scale. Timelines
also allow simultaneous strands of actions, narratives, or other causal chains
to be compared alongside each other, providing both synchronic and
diachronic contexts for events.
Unlike maps, timelines usually appear at the back of a book rather than the
front, if they appear at all. Although they are often used by authors for the
sake of organization and consistency, they are less likely to appear than
maps, and are placed in the back of a book, because they usually contain
spoilers and other story information that would ruin narrative surprise and
suspense. Timelines may vary from short lists of events in an appendix to
book-length chronologies of hundreds of pages (like those written for the
18
Star Wars universe, the Star Trek universe, and Tolkien’s Arda ), and can
be provided by an author or assembled by third parties who analyze an
author’s works and compile references and inferences from which temporal
structures can be reconstructed.
Timelines also vary considerably in scale. On one end of the spectrum are
detailed minute-by-minute chronologies and those covering the events of a
single day, like the on-line timelines covering individual seasons of the
television show 24 (2001–2010), or the book-length chronology of James
Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) compiled by John H. Raleigh.19 However, even these
need not be limited to the time of the story’s action; Raleigh’s book, for
example not only covers the single day (June 16, 1904) in which the main
narrative of Ulysses takes place, but also over a century of backstory events
which are referred to in the story. Since most stories are built around a main
character’s life or a portion thereof, most timelines cover a timespan
measured in days, weeks, months, or years, or perhaps longer for backstory
material. Other narratives built around the history of a people, a civilization,
or a multigenerational family may use timelines extending hundreds of
years, and in the case of fantasy and science fiction, sometimes thousands of
years. Such timelines and narratives have to contend with social, cultural,
and technological changes, and often include migrations, the establishment
of countries, and the catastrophic events that decimate them. Finally, at the
broadest scale are the timelines of books like Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First
Men (1930) with its timeline of millions of years, and Stapledon’s Star Maker
(1937) with its timeline of billions of years covering the entire history of the
universe. In these stories, humanity itself becomes the main character, as one
type of men evolves into the next, and these versions of humanity interact
with vast and ancient empires on a galactic scale.
Timelines may use conventional calendars or ones unique to their worlds,
like the Shire calendar used by Tolkien’s hobbits, for which translated dates
are also given. Timelines and changes in date can also be implied through
such things as characters’ ages, diurnal cycles, seasonal changes, phases of
the moon, constellation positioning, and a wealth of other time-related
details, which the audience can use to reconstruct the temporal order of
events. For example, in 2008, using story information from Homer’s Odyssey
such as the position of Venus and a total eclipse, scientists Marcelo O.
Magnasco and Constantino Baikouzis determined that the most likely date
of Odysseus’ return home was April 16, 1178 BC.20 Other world devices can
be used to imply the presence of history and an ancient past, like ruins and
traces of long-lost civilizations, cultures and societies layered with
palimpsests that suggest a deep history, or old sage-like characters who act
as purveyors of backstory. All of these can help to create what author John
Clute calls a “time abyss”:
TIME ABYSS Either a phenomenon, or more interestingly, a moment of
perception. As a perception it is closely analogous to the Sense of
Wonder in science fiction, which may be defined as a shift in perspective
so that the reader, having been made suddenly aware of the true scale of
an event or venue, responds to the revelation with awe. The analogue in
 fantasy is the discovery by the reader that there is an immense gap
between the time of the tale and the origin of whatever it is that has
changed one’s perspective on the world.21
Whereas timelines usually help an audience fill the gaps in the temporal
range covering a world’s events, a time abyss instead calls attention to itself
as a gap, its enormity raising more questions than it answers, generating
speculation, specifically as to how the world moved from the former state to
the current one. Whether or not an abyss is used, the creation of historical
depth and a sense of origins allow an author to comment on history and
society through analogy or allegory and reflect upon how civilizations
change and the causes of those changes. In The Lord of the Rings, the Human
Men are a fallen race, and mortal, while the Elves are an unfallen race and
thus immortal; the thousands of years covered in The Silmarillion chart the
histories of both races and how their natures affect them. Just as traditional
novels connect the actions and consequences of their characters to convey a
certain worldview, subcreated worlds allow the stories of entire peoples over
centuries to be devised according to an author’s ideas.
Timelines can be synchronic as well as diachronic, tracing simultaneous
strands of action as they interweave and interact. One extreme example of
this can be found in Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual (1978), which
takes place at the moment of its protagonist’s death, shortly before 8 PM on
June 23, 1975. Perec moves room to room in the apartment building of the
novel, describing each resident’s experience of the moment, although there
are backstories and other story information that expand the book’s timeline
beyond the moment described, and the book even includes an appendix with
a timeline beginning in 1833. In most cases, simultaneous events requiring
adherence to a timeline are the result of interlace narratives, the events of
which include nodal points where multiple storylines converge and diverge.
What has come to be known as the “interlace technique” or medieval
interlace is similar to the structure used by Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings,
and Tolkien scholar Richard C. West sums up the technique by comparing it
to the “organic unity” type of structure, writing:
Organic unity seeks to reduce the chaotic flux of reality to manageable
terms by imposing a clear and fairly simple pattern upon it. It calls for a
 progressive and uncluttered narrative line in which there is a single
major theme to which a limited number of other themes may be related
so long as they are kept subordinate. The main theme grows from a
clear-cut beginning through a middle which develops naturally
(“organically”) from the beginning to a resolution which is the product of
all that preceded it. It is considered preferable to have a limited number
of characters and to have no more than one or two dominate the action.
Any single work should be self-sufficient, containing within itself
everything that is necessary to it and excluding everything that is not
necessary. In other words, the organic work is indivisible in itself but
divided from everything else…. Interlace, by contrast, seeks to mirror the
perception of the flux of events in the world around us, where
everything is happening at once. Its narrative line is digressive and
cluttered, dividing our attention among an indefinite number of events,
characters, and themes, any one of which may dominate at any given
time, and it is often indifferent to cause and effect relationships. The
paths of characters cross, diverge, and recross, and the story passes from
one to another but does not follow a single line. In addition, the narrator
implies that there are innumerable events that he has not had time to tell
us about; moreover, no attempt is made to provide a clear-cut beginning
or end to the story. We feel that we have interrupted the chaotic activity
of the world at a certain point and followed selection from it for a time,
and that after we leave, it continues on its own random path. The author,
or someone else, may perhaps take up the threads of the story again later
and add to it at beginning, middle, or end.
Yet, the apparently casual form of the interlace is deceptive; it actually
has a very subtle kind of cohesion. No part of the narrative can be
removed without damage to the whole, for within any given section
there are echoes of previous parts and anticipations of later ones.22
It is apparent from this description that the interlace structure is best suited
for the task of world-building, emphasizing as it does the narrative fabric of
a world (discussed in detail in Chapter 4) and the context surrounding the
storylines taking place there. And the simultaneity of an interlace structure
means that some form of timeline to coordinate concurrent events is almost
a necessity, at least for the author if not for the audience as well.
Timelines also help to manage temporal structures of worlds where time
flows differently than in the Primary World, or at varying rates, as in the
example from Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams (1992) given near the end
of Chapter 2. One of the earliest examples of a world with a time differential
is the country referred to in the title of George MacDonald’s At the Back of
the North Wind (1870):

“Have you been sitting here ever since I went through you, dear North
Wind?” asked Diamond, stroking her hand.
“Yes,” she answered, looking at him with her old kindness.
“Ain’t you very tired?”
“No; I’ve often had to sit longer. Do you know how long you have
been?”
“Oh! Years and years,” answered Diamond.
“You have just been seven days,” returned North Wind.
“I thought I had been a hundred years!” exclaimed Diamond.
“Yes, I daresay,” replied North Wind. “You’ve been away from here
seven days; but how long you may have been in there is quite another
thing. Behind my back and before my face things are so different! They
don’t go at all by the same rule.”
“I’m very glad,” said Diamond, after thinking a while.
“Why?” asked North Wind.
“Because I’ve been such a long time there, and such a little while away
from mother. Why, she won’t be expecting me home from Sandwich
yet!”23
Not only can the speed at which time passes be different from the Primary
World, but also the rate itself may even vary over time. For example, time in
Lewis’s Narnia seems to move at a variable rate and does not consistently
correspond with that of the Primary World. According to Walter Hooper’s
timeline of the series, the period in England from 1900, when Digory Kirke,
as a boy, first visits Narnia, to 1949 when the British railway accident
mentioned in The Last Battle (1956) occurs, is concurrent with a period in
which Narnia undergoes its entire history from its creation to its final
dissolution, a period of 2555 years.24 Hooper’s timeline shows, however, that
while 1900 in England coincides with Narnia year 1, the year 1930 coincides
with Narnia year 300; 1932 with Narnia year 302; 1940 with Narnia year
1000; 1941 with Narnia year 2303; and 1949 with Narnia year 2555, just to list
a few points of known correspondence. Lewis deliberately highlights the
varying flow of time in his world to underscore its disconnect from the
Primary World, since there is no system to relate the passage of time in one
world compared to the other. An author can even include varying
timeframes within a single secondary world; for example, residents of Fred
Saberhagen’s Azlaroc live in their own unique timeframes. As Brian
Stableford describes it:
Time worked in strange ways on Azlaroc, both objectively and
subjectively. Local time was marked by the continual but irregular fall of
“veils” of transformed matter which isolated sets of contemporary
phenomena from those which had gone before, so that the apparatus of
the past became vague to the eye and insubstantial to the touch by
discrete degrees. Once caught by a veilfall, visitors to Azlaroc were
marooned forever within their “year-group,” assimilated to the local
time-scheme.25
Taking Einstein’s theories into account, characters in science fiction can also
alter their own timeframes through the relativistic time dilations involved
with highspeed travel and intense gravitational forces. The Star Trek: The
Next Generation Technical Manual even includes a section entitled
“Relativistic Considerations” which describes how Star Trek technology and
protocol attempts to circumvent timeframe-related problems, while a
chapter on “Warp Propulsion Systems” describes how faster-than-light travel
is attained.26 In addition to the pseudo-scientific discourse that makes up
the bulk of the book, there is italicized extradiegetic commentary by the
authors that addresses the world-building they are doing, which in the Warp
Propulsion chapter reveals the need for timeline calculations:
Figuring out how “fast” various warp speeds are was pretty complicated,
but not just from a “scientific” viewpoint. First, we had to satisfy the
general fan expectation that the new ship was significantly faster than
 the original. Second, we had to work with Gene’s [Roddenberry]
recalibration, which put Warp 10 at the absolute top of the scale. These
first two constraints are fairly simple, but we quickly discovered that it
was easy to make warp speeds TOO fast. Beyond a certain speed, we
found that the ship would be able to cross the entire galaxy within a
matter of just a few months. (Having the ship too fast would make the
galaxy too small a place for the Star Trek format.)27
Worlds that involve time travel narratives (as Star Trek does, from time to
time) have even more need to attempt to establish temporal order as events
are recontextualized and revisited. In 2009, the makers of Star Trek even
tried to tie in the rebooting of the franchise by suggesting that the Star Trek
movie of 2009 actually took place in an alternate timeline diverging from the
already-established time-line.28 With both Zachary Quinto playing a young
Spock and Leonard Nimoy playing the old “Spock Prime”, the two timelines
are joined and the rebooting is given a diegetic explanation that keeps it
from being separated from the older material, as reboots are in so many
other franchises. As this example shows, along with time and space, it is
characters and their relationships which link together narratives as well as
worlds, and it is to these that we next turn.

Genealogies
Genealogies relate characters to one another, giving them a context within
larger frameworks which are familial, ancestral, social, institutional, and
historical. They include such things as family tree charts connecting
ancestors and descendents, kinship diagrams of lineal and collateral kin,
lineages of rulers and their heirs, and hereditary systems which pass on
knowledge, experience, titles, and property down from one generation to
another. Genealogies can appear in authorized ancillary works such as charts
and lineages, or be implied through a series of connections mentioned
throughout the works making up a world. They act as world infrastructures,
linking a world’s stories together and extending characters by placing them
in broader contexts and tying them into history. Even sequels written by
others can make use of genealogy as a device to link their stories to the
works they follow; for example, the main characters of both Dionys Burger’s
Sphereland (1965) and Mark Saxton’s The Islar, Islandia Today: A Narrative
of Lang III (1969) are the grandsons of the main characters of the stories that
inspired them (Abbott’s Flatland (1884) and Wright’s Islandia (1942),
respectively). Appreciation of subtleties in a text can also rely on the
audience’s knowledge of characters’ genealogies; Tom Shippey describes
how an insult directed at Elu Thingol in The Silmarillion can only be fully
understood through detailed knowledge of Elven genealogy.29
Genealogies function as extensions of characters, which in turn provide
continuity across a world’s eras. Many worlds begin as the background to
the story of a character’s entire life; for example, the six Star Wars films at
the core of the Star Wars universe tell the life story of Anakin Skywalker
(Darth Vader) from childhood to death. Yet as a world grows temporally, it
often passes beyond the lifespan of individual characters. One way around
this is to have long-lived characters whose lives span many eras and thus
allow for a greater degree of both character development and world
development during their lifetime. Example of characters with great
longevity who play a large role in their worlds include L. Frank Baum’s
Queen Zixi of Ix (who is 683 years old), George Lucas’ Yoda (who lived to be
over 800 years old), the Nemsédes in Defontenay’s Star (1854) who are more
than 1,000 years old, and the Dune universe’s Duncan Idaho gholas, who are
a series of clones carrying on the original’s memories that extend the
character over several millennia, making him the only character to appear in
all six of Frank Herbert’s Dune novels. Some characters may even be
“immortals”, like Swift’s Struldbruggs of Luggnugg against whom special
laws have been enacted limiting their rights after a certain age, Tolkien’s
Elves who are to remain in Arda until its end, Stephen R. Donaldson’s
Forestals who protect the forests of the Land, or the robots in many science
fiction worlds. The consequences of immortality are also occasionally
commented upon; for example, both Swift’s Struldbruggs and Tolkien’s Elves
weary of the world and express their envy of mortals whose mortality gives
them rest.
Ancestors and descendents are the most common way of temporally
extending a character. Names and characteristics are often passed along from
parent to child, as well as titles, property, and proprietary knowledge. Whole
lineages of characters can share the same name, like the Dorns of Islandia
(1942) and even objects can have their own lines (like the sequence of
starships to bear the name Enterprise in the Star Trek universe), and
sometimes objects and their history provide a throughline linking the works
of a world together. Over a series of generations, biological descendents can
grow to form a people, and their history can become the throughline of
world at a larger narrative scale (similar to the way Jacob’s descendents
become the Israelites in the Old Testament).
Other relationships can function in a manner similar to biological descent;
in the Star Wars universe, for example, both the Jedi and the Sith have
partnerships of mentors and apprentices to pass their training along. Over
the course of the six main films we discover that Anakin Skywalker was
apprenticed to Ben Kenobi, Kenobi was apprenticed to Qui-gon Jinn, Jinn
was apprenticed to Count Dooku, and Dooku was apprenticed to Yoda,
linking them together almost like a series of fathers and sons.30 Memories
are sometimes passed along to keep a character’s experiences alive even after
their deaths; in the Star Trek universe Vulcans perform mind-melds, while in
the Dune universe the Bene Gesserit pass on their memories genetically
from mother to daughter.
Genealogies give characters context through structures of kinship and
friendship, as characters are understood by the influence of ancestry,
upbringing, and companionship. The deeds and failings of ancestors often
provide a foreshadowing that colors their descendents’ self-images and
expectations. Sons carry the weight of their father’s reputations, and are
often expected to finish their projects or even correct their errors. As heir to
the throne, Aragorn both fears failing in the same way that his ancestor
Isildur did, and Aragorn’s marriage to the Elf-maiden Arwen mirrors the
romance of the human Beren and Elf-maiden Lúthien, from whom he is also
descended. Ben Kenobi loses Anakin Skywalker to the Dark Side, and tries
to make up for it by training Anakin’s son Luke; and it is Yoda, much higher
up the same chain of mentors, who finally completes Luke’s training,
allowing Luke to turn his father back to the side of good; when the chain of
mentors is understood, one can see additional motivation that Yoda might
have for helping Luke. In both cases, the audience does not need to know all
the background connections in order to follow the story, but such knowledge
does provide nuances enriching the audience’s understanding of the
situation.
Additional context can be given well beyond what is necessary for a story.
For example, extensive family tree charts appear in the appendices of The
Lord of the Rings, from the lines of Kings to various hobbit families.
Whereas traditional novels like Tolstoy’s War and Peace will sometimes
have family trees linking the principal characters, charts made for secondary
worlds often feature many names which do not appear in the story, but
which nonetheless add to the experience and the verisimilitude of the world,
and act as catalysts for speculation which heighten audience engagement
and investment in a world.
Finally, genealogies can link stories together as each character’s life history
becomes another narrative thread in a world’s narrative fabric (more on this
in Chapter 4). Even when unrelated characters cross paths briefly, with a
main character from one story becoming just an extra in the background of
another, such a transmedial appearance can be a powerful way to evoke the
world extending beyond the confines of a particular story; and one can
imagine that every minor character and extra passing through the
background has as complete and detailed a life as the main character does.
Genealogies, timelines, and maps are the main infrastructures used in
building a world’s illusion of completeness, and the most basic and common
areas in which invention occurs as well. The next five infrastructures
examined—nature, culture, language, mythology, and philosophy—are often
more backgrounded than the structures of space, time, and character that
they serve, and may rely heavily on Primary World defaults; but even when
invention occurs in them in small amounts, they can subtly and
cumulatively create that feelings of differentness that make imaginary
worlds so fascinating and attractive.

Nature
Imaginary worlds almost always have some kind of physical setting to them,
or, in the case of supernatural worlds, laws and modes of being that operate
in an analogous manner to a physically-based world, without which the
world would cease to be relatable to an earthly audience. Nature, then, deals
with the materiality of a world, its physical, chemical, geological, and
biological structures and the ecosystems connecting them. Almost
inevitably, worlds subcreated to this degree are less likely to be earthbound
ones, since so many Primary World defaults have been changed. They also
typically become, at some level, thought experiments about subjunctive
worlds in which the consequences of changed Primary World defaults are
explored and extrapolated.
The most common type of invention regarding an imaginary world’s
natural realm is that of new flora and fauna. Adding new plants and animals
does little to disrupt the other defaults of the natural world, and even in the
Primary World, new species continue to be discovered and studied. While
such inventions appeared early on as sources of humor and satire, as in
Lucian of Samosata’s True History and Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel
series, they were also made in a more serious vein in the traveler’s tales that
described strange foreign lands and their inhabitants. In most of these
worlds, new creatures were merely presented without any attempt to
consider how they might fit into ecological systems or affect the structures
built upon them (such as culture, language, philosophy, and so forth). Early
utopias explored more of the effect they might have on these structures, but
typically did not reinvent the natural realms of their worlds to any great
degree. Underground worlds tended to connect invented flora and fauna to
other structures of the world, usually by necessity, to explain how their
inhabitants could meet the basic needs of food, water, shelter, and light.
Robert Paltock’s The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1751) was one of
the first worlds to base a culture on its unique plants and animals, including
the glumms and gawreys, the winged natives of Sass Doorpt Swangeanti;
the crullmott tree whose fruit tastes like fowl; the padsi bush whose fruit
tastes like fish; and sweecoes, which are insects that can glow and produce
light. When invented flora and fauna are more than merely window-
dressing or replacements for Primary World animals that serve a similar
function (such as pets or beasts of burden), they are usually used to solve
world-building problems: for example, Paltock’s sweecoes are housed in
wicker lamps to provide light while bioluminescent algae light the
underground lake of the D’ni in the Myst universe; the babel fish of the
Hitchhiker universe is inserted into one’s ear and used as a universal
translator to overcome language barriers; and the sandworms of Arrakis in
Dune are used as a mode of transportation and a by-product of their life
cycle is the spice melange needed for the guild navigators who use it to fold
space and achieve faster-than-light travel. Occasionally an invented plant or
animal even provides the impetus for a story, as any fantasy quest to defeat
a dragon demonstrates.
Worlds that are subcreated to an even deeper level include new kinds of
biology, ecosystems, and planets with unusual material compositions. For
example, Koestler’s Planet, from Barrington J. Bayley’s “Mutation Planet”
(1973), has organisms that can change their genetics and produce radically
different offspring. The planet Sequoia, from Neal Barrett Jr.’s Highwood
(1972) is a land of huge trees, and the planet Karimon, from Mike Resnick’s
Purgatory: A Chronicle of a Distant World (1993) consists of tall trees that
are entire ecosystems. Some planets are metal-poor and their inhabitants
must use other materials: on Lyra IV, the planet from Cyril M. Kornbluth’s
“That Share of Glory” (1952), technology is based on ceramics, while on
Land and Overland from Bob Shaw’s The Ragged Astronauts (1986)
astronauts launch wooden spaceships to travel between the two planets,
which orbit so close that they share an atmosphere. Some elaborate
subcreations even have entire books devoted to their invented flora and
fauna, for example, David Day’s A Tolkien Bestiary (1979), Anne Margaret
Lewis and R. K. Post’s Star Wars: The Essential Guide to Alien Species
(2001), and Dinah Hazell’s The Plants of Middle-earth: Botany and Sub-
creation (2007). Filmmaker James Cameron even assembled a 350-page
Pandorapedia for his planet Pandora in Avatar (2009) and, according to
Wired magazine:

Every animal and plant received Na’vi, Latin, and common names. As if
that weren’t enough, Cameron hired Jodie Holt, chair of UC Riverside’s
botany and plant sciences department, to write detailed scientific
descriptions of dozens of plants he had created. She spent five weeks
explaining how the flora of Pandora could glow with bioluminescence
and have magnetic properties. When she was done, Cameron helped
arrange the entries into a formal taxonomy.31
At least one scientist has parodied this kind of scientific work; the German
zoologist Gerolf Steiner, writing under the name Harald Stümpke, invented a
fictitious order of mammals known as Rhinogrades or Snouters, which
evolved in the imaginary Hi-Iay (or Hi-yi-yi) Islands along with a complete
ecosystem, all described in detail in two books in the early 1960s.32
Among invented creatures, one often finds humanoid races, who range
from those that are only slightly different from humans and treated like new
nationalities, to races in which a subcreator has changed biological defaults
in order to propose thought experiments designed to make an audience see
Primary World biology in a new light. For example, many alternative sexual
biologies can be found in imaginary worlds. In Defontenay’s Star (Psi
Cassiopeia) (1854), the natives of Tassul are hermaphrodites able to beget
and give birth alone. The Gethen of Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand of
Darkness (1969) are neither male or female and have gender identities only
once a month. Esthaa, the planet of James Tiptree Jr.’s “Your Haploid Heart”
(1969) is inhabited by a race whose generations alternate reproductive
methods, changing between asexual and sexual reproduction. Races with
three sexes can be found in both Samuel R. Delany’s Branning-at-Sea (where
they are known as La, Le, and Lo) and in Isaac Asimov’s para-Universe
(where they are known as the Rationals, Emotionals, and Parentals). Melissa
Scott’s Shadow Man (1995), set on the planet Hara, has a race with five sexes
(fem, herm, man, mem, and woman) and nine modes of sexual preference
(bi, demi, di, gay, hemi, omni, straight, tri, and uni). In most cases, the main
character’s encounter with new sexes and the social norms and behaviors
arising from them becomes a crucial part of the stories and worlds in which
they appear.
Subcreating nature to an even deeper level, we find worlds in which the
laws of physics are different from those of the Primary World; for example,
in the world of Greg Egan’s The Clockwork Rocket (2011), light has no
universal speed. Some worlds introduce new colors, such as “jale” and
“ulfire” (due to a blue sun in David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus (1920)),
“rej” in Philip K. Dick’s Galactic Pot-Healer (1969), or “octarine”, the “color of
magic” in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld universe. Some colors may not be
given a name; as Raymond King Cummings writes in The Girl in the Golden
Atom (1922), “Her lips were full and of a color for which in English there is
no name. It would have been red doubtless by sunlight in the world above,
but here in this silver light of phosphorescence, the color red, as we see it,
was impossible.”33 Certain conventions of the science fiction genre, such as
hyperspace, faster-than-light travel, wormholes, and so forth, already imply
new laws of physics; but some worlds introduce new forces, like “noggox” in
Brian Aldiss’ “Legends of Smith’s Burst” (1959), which keeps matter and
antimatter from annihilating each other; or the gravitational forces of
Linovection and Reticutriation in the Tryslmaistan universe of Jennifer
Diane Reitz’s Unicorn Jelly (2000). In his novel Diaspora (1998), Greg Egan
invents new theories of physics including Kozuch Theory, which views
elementary particles as six-dimensional wormholes; while Orson Scott Card
invents “philotes”, which are subatomic particles that allow for faster-than-
light communication. Some video game worlds even let players experience
alternative physical laws, like the negative gravity in some of the “universes”
in Gravitar (1982), the non-Euclidean wraparound space of Asteroids (1979),
or the user-generated spatial connections of Portal (2007).
Some worlds have characters who have the power to subcreate worlds, like
the Thoans in the World of Tiers universe or the D’ni in the Myst franchise,
and they can make worlds in which the laws of physics are different. For
example, in Myst: The Book of Atrus (1995), Catherine’s Age is a giant torus
with a column of water that passes through the center, as a waterfall on one
side and an enormous waterspout on the other. With most of the world’s
mass placed along the outer edge of the torus the water is pulled through the
central hole and around the torus, to fall back as rain again on the other side.
In many cases, “magic”, as found in the genre of fantasy, often works
according to a set of conventions or rules, and these could also be seen as
implying new laws of physics, albeit indirectly. Virtual worlds set in
computer-generated spaces also have their own rules, programmed by their
makers, like the world inside the computer in Tron (1982), cyberspace in
Neuromancer (1984), or the machine-created world of The Matrix (1999), in
which the laws of physics can be bent or even broken.
While worlds have been built in many shapes, such as rings, discs, tiers,
concentric shells, or even the negative curvature of a hypersphere (in
Christopher Priest’s Inverted World (1974)), the most extreme examples of
changing the defaults of the natural world are those imaginary worlds with
a dimensionality different from that of the Primary World. The first of these
appears in Edwin Abbott Abbott’s Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
(1884), which introduced not only the two-dimensional world of Flatland,
but also the one-dimensional world of Lineland. One of the book’s goals,
besides satirizing the Victorian society of its day, was the introduction of
four-dimensional mathematics to its general readership. The book begins
with a detailed account of Flatland that builds the world and explains how it
works over several chapters, and then the two-dimensional protagonist, A.
Square, visits Lineland where he attempts to describe what the second
dimension is like. Later, A. Square is visited by the Sphere, who attempts to
describe to him what a third dimension is like, and through their discussion,
a fourth dimension, and what four-dimensional entities might be like, are
extrapolated from observations about the first three dimensions. Flatland
was an exceptional work of subcreation for its time, and would go on to
remain in print and to inspire an entire subgenre of worlds that experiment
with dimensionality, as other authors’ sequels took up where Abbott left off.
The first sequel to Flatland was C. H. Hinton’s An Episode of Flatland: Or,
How a Plane Folk Discovered the Third Dimension (1907), which recognized
one of the faults of Abbott’s original Flatland. The descriptions of Abbott’s
Flatland, along with his illustrations, give the impression of watching an
overhead view of shapes moving around in Flatland, entering houses which
are shown like floor plans, with the insides laid out like a diagram. Since
Abbott’s characters move around like figures over a background, there are
really two layers to the world; the background and what lies upon it, making
it less than completely flat. Hinton indirectly acknowledges the need for a
revisioning of Flatland in his Introduction:
Placing some coins on the table one day, I amused myself by pushing
them about, and it struck me that one might represent a planetary
system of a certain sort by their means…. And in this case considering
the planets as inhabited worlds, confined in all their movements around
their sun, to a slipping over the surface of the table, I saw that we must
think of the beings that inhabit these worlds as standing out from the
rims of them, not walking over the flat surface of them. Just as the
attraction in the case of our earth acts towards the centre, and the centre
is inaccessible by reason of the solidity on which we stand, so the
inhabitants of my coin worlds would have an attraction proceeding out
in every direction along the surface of the table from the centre of the
coin, and “up” would be to them out from the centre beyond the rim,
 while “down” would be towards the centre inwards from the rim. And
beings thus situated would be rightly described as standing on the rim.34
Hinton realized that a two-dimensional being could be more complicated
than lines or triangles, and still be two-dimensional; though he does not go
into detail as to what exactly their anatomy might be. After a brief review of
the history of his world, which he calls Astria, most of his book is about the
personal details of the character’s lives, dinner parties, conversations,
romance, and so forth, while Hugh Farmer, one of the principle characters,
leads a crusade to convince the Unæans of Astria that the third dimension
exists, a question which becomes a metaphysical controversy that shakes the
foundations of their society. However, as far as world-building goes, most of
the novel reads as though it were taking place in the Primary World, with
relatively little examination of the consequences of making a world two-
dimensional and only a few detailed descriptions of how their world
operates differently than ours.
Dionys Burger’s Sphereland: A Fantasy about Curved Spaces and an
Expanding Universe (1965) is a book more along the lines of Abbott’s work,
and is a sequel, continuing the story of A. Square through his grandson, A.
Hexagon. Burger’s version of Flatland updates Abbott’s with a relativistic
worldview (as the book’s subtitle reveals) that gives his two-dimensional
universe a finite but unbounded space, in the shape of the surface of a
sphere. Upon that surface, Flatland itself is a disc-shaped planet, much like
Hinton’s Astria, but the towns, homes, and forests are still laid out in
overhead view, and they do not react to the gravity that pulls everything
else toward the center of the world-disc. In a passage revealing the author’s
world-building difficulties, Burger seems aware of the awkwardness of
combining the two approaches, writing:
Of course the question immediately arises why everything is not falling
down. Solid objects such as houses and buildings, and plants such as
single trees and the trees in forests, all stay put and do not show any
inclination to sink. The answer is not so easy, and it might be best to just
write it off to natural laws. This does not alter the fact, however, that
scientific theories have been worked out to explain the phenomenon. I
will be glad to touch on the matter in a few words, but this particular
 theory is so complicated that you need not worry if you do not
understand it. Consider for a moment that all these solid objects are
resting on a space parallel to our world—in other words, they are
attached to a flat plane, directly beside the plane of our space. I admit
that this hypothesis—it is no more than a mere supposition—is extremely
difficult for a layman to grasp, even though it is not as difficult for a
three-dimensional being as it is for us. Let us therefore simply note as
fact that trees and houses do stay put, there being no question that they
do.35
If the inhabitants of a two-dimensional disc-shaped world are to live on the
surface of that world, they would have to be confined to the space above a
curving line, resulting in only four directions; back and forth, and up and
down. Hinton realized this but the consequences of it only occasionally
figured into his story, whereas Burger keeps the two-dimensionality of his
world always in mind; but, as the preceding passage shows, Burger had
trouble keeping his design consistent. An amazing number of these problems
were solved, however, in A. K. Dewdney’s Planiverse in The Planiverse:
Computer Contact with a Two-Dimensional World (1984).
In an amazing feat of subcreation, A. K. Dewdney describes Arde, a two-
dimensional disc-shaped world with its own physics, chemistry, biology,
planetary science, astronomy, creatures, cultures, and technologies, all of
which are designed to work in a world of two dimensions. As a computer
scientist and mathematician (and with the help of colleagues in other
disciplines, credited in the acknowledgments), Dewdney considers how
atoms, electromagnetic forces, light and sound waves, turbulence, and other
physical phenomena would operate in two dimensions, and the implications
these would have on the existence of Arde’s inhabitants, the Nsana. He gives
solutions and working designs for such things as doors, electrical wiring,
hinges, gears, and other simple technologies that work differently in two
dimensions, and provides descriptions and illustrations of more complex
two-dimensional machines like clocks, printing presses, ground and air
vehicles, and steam engines (see Figure 3.3). He also describes and illustrates
two-dimensional biological mechanisms including propulsion, digestion, cell
division, and more. From all of these things arise the culture of the Nsana,
with its own traditions and customs, for example, who passes over whom
when two travelers meet who are traveling in opposite directions, or the
order in which passengers board and disembark vehicles.
FIGURE 3.3 A Nsana (top) and a steam engine (bottom) from Arde, the two-
dimensional world of A. K. Dewdney’s The Planiverse. (Images courtesy of
A. K. Dewdney.)
The book’s story involves human computer science experimenters on
Earth who, through their computer system, make contact with a Nsana
named Yendred. The story is little more than a device to link together all the
explanations of how things in the world works, but as is the case with so
many subcreated worlds, narrative is only a single aspect of the world, and
The Planiverse is worth reading as a brilliant piece of subcreation. So
successful was Dewdney’s subcreation, that some people actually believed
the world was real. As Dewdney states in the “Preface to the Millennium
Edition”:
When The Planiverse first appeared 16 years ago, it caught more than a
few readers off guard. The line between willing suspension of disbelief
and innocent acceptance, if it exists at all, is a thin one. There were those
who wanted to believe, despite the tongue-in-cheek subtext, that we had
made contact with a two-dimensional world.… It surprised and worried
the author that so many people believed the tale was factual. Subtext
that should have implied a fantasy (albeit a highly detailed one) was
missed by many.36
That some readers actually believed the world existed demonstrates the
power of good subcreation, even when a secondary world is so far removed
from our own.
Most secondary worlds, however, subcreate nature to a very limited
degree, if they do so at all. Many will instead wish to ground their realism
with Primary World defaults so far as nature is concerned. In the series bible
for the rebooted Battlestar Galactica (2004–2009), there seems to be a sense
of pride in the description of the show’s science and how it does not partake
of some of the usual conventions of science fiction:
Science. Our spaceships don’t make noise because there is no noise in
space. Sound will be provided from sources inside the ships—the whine
of an engine audible to the pilot for instance. Our fighters are not
airplanes and they will not be shackled by the conventions of WWII
 dogfights. The speed of light is a law and there will be no moving
violations.37
To whatever degree they use Primary World defaults or reset them, the
natural realm provides the raw materials for civilizations and the production
of the more commonly subcreated area of culture.

Culture
Culture links nature to history and is usually central to the unique situation
that provides a story’s conflict; and an invented culture can be more
specifically tailored to the author’s needs and does not come with the
baggage of an existing culture. By providing a worldview that shapes the
natural world’s resources into such things as agriculture, architecture,
clothing, vehicles, and artifacts, which in turn inform customs, traditions,
language, and mythologies, culture grounds and connects the various
productions of a people into a (hopefully) coherent structure through which
characters see the secondary world.
As mentioned in Chapter 2, imaginary-world stories typically have the
main character experiencing and learning about a new and foreign culture
along with the audience; such was the basic structure of travelers’ tales. The
main character is often either someone from the Primary World who is a
foreigner to the secondary world, or someone from a marginal area of the
secondary world who journeys into an unfamiliar part of it. As early as
More’s Utopia (1516), culture became an important part of the story and
world, with its proposal for a new way of living and inherent critique of
existing culture; this became typical of utopias in general, since a cultural
critique was usually one of the main reasons behind the writing of a utopia.
Other works such as Gulliver’s Travels (1726) even showed how its human
protagonist appeared from the points of view of those in the foreign cultures
encountered, attempting to make strange the author’s own culture, by
contrast.
Occasionally foreign cultures are presented directly in the form of
documents from the cultures in question; for example, in Defontenay’s Star
(Psi Cassiopeia): The Marvelous History of One of the Worlds of Outer Space
(1854), the chest that the narrator finds in the crashed meteor is full of
Starian books, which make up the text of the novel. There is a description of
the stars and planets of the Starian system, a book of ancient history, a poem
related to the history, individual histories of each planet and their
exploration, two plays, writings on philosophy, morality, and law, and the
book-within-a-book entitled The Voyage of a Tassulian to Tasbar to which
Defontenay adds, “I have preserved in the Tassulian’s account two literary
pieces which were found inserted, convinced that the reader will not be
displeased to discover several samples of Tasbarite literature.”38 Though the
range of texts is a disparate one, they are arranged in roughly chronological
order and together present a coherent history of the Starian system and its
peoples and cultures.
The development of fictional cultures, both in their depth as well as the
quality and plausibility of the cultures generated, depends greatly on the
ability and background of the author. The most complete and consistent
imaginary world and culture of the first half of the twentieth century would
have to be that of Austin Tappan Wright’s Islandia (1942), written before the
author’s death in 1931. In it, main character and narrator John Lang leaves
the United States to become consul to Islandia, which we discover and learn
about along with him. The nation of Islandia, long closed off to foreigners
and foreign trade, for the most part, is facing a time of internal debate as to
whether the country should be opened up to the outside world. Lawyer that
he was, Wright argues both sides of the issue, both explicitly in the speeches
made by Lord Mora and Lord Dorn around the midpoint of the book, and
implicitly throughout the entire book, and particularly at the end, where
John Lang must decide where his destiny lies between the two cultures of
Islandia and America.
The culture of Islandia is fleshed out to a great degree, and a variety of
different scenes, settings, and discussions bring out its richness of detail.
Many of the cultural concepts introduced are central to an understanding of
the story, and though we do not get to see much of the Islandian language,
these concepts are given Islandian terms since no exact equivalent exists in
English. One such notion is that of tanrydoon, literally soil-place-custom,
which means there is a room always reserved for you in a friend’s home
where you are welcome. The concept is first described to Lang by Perier, the
French consul to Islandia:
 “Did you know that even the Islandian city man does not feel that the
city is his home?”
“In a way.” I knew from Bodwin that city men usually had some
relative in the country at whose place they were welcome.
“More than that,” he said. “Every city man has such a place. It is the
same place for his grandfather that it is for his grandson; not only is he
welcome but he has a right—a legal right—to go there and stay as long as
he likes, though if he stays over a month he is expected to do some work.
He may go and take all of his children. Good taste controls the actual
working out.”
Perier was silent for a moment.
“When you marry,” he continued, “a month or so before your child is to
be born you will put yourself and your wife on a boat bound for Doring,
and you two will go to the house of Lord Dorn, and there you will find
them expecting you and glad to see you. There your wife will stay until
the child is weaned, and longer maybe, and you as long as and whenever
you can. If the child becomes sickly or bored in The City here, back you
will all go to Lord Dorn’s. That, and a great deal more, is tanrydoon.”39
While tanrydoon serves an important purpose in the story, even more
important to the story are the four Islandian words for “love”: alia (love of a
place, specifically an ancestral home and land), amia (love of friends), ania
(the desire for marriage and commitment), and apia (sexual attraction).
These kinds of love, and the differences and relationships between them, are
central to the book’s romances and relationships and how they shape the
narrative. The Islandian culture is carefully thought out and laid out in great
detail, more so than any other fictional culture to appear before it. Through
an interesting combination of elements, Wright achieves a new culture
which is neither Eastern nor Western in outlook, and original enough that it
does not feel like a thinly-veiled imitation of an actual existing earthly
culture (as so often happens with fictional cultures), nor is it so primitive as
to seem crude or undeveloped.
With the growth of archaeology and anthropology during the twentieth
century, more fictional cultures, and more developed fictional cultures,
began to appear as audiences became increasingly sophisticated in their
expectations. In America, the growth of mass media, along with new
possibilities for travel and tourism, and waves of immigrants arriving in the
country, meant that most Americans had more contact with (or at least
knowledge of) cultures outside of their own, and thus had more firsthand
cross-cultural experience. Also, imaginary worlds that appeared in
audiovisual media could not rely on mere verbal description as novels did;
cultural design, in such areas as costume, architecture, vehicles, and so forth,
had to be considered concretely, in the form of sounds and images, and had
to be considered as an integrated whole, rather than as a collection of
unrelated designs.
Whether on-screen or on the page, the fictional cultures of imaginary
worlds often have one or more simple defining features to quickly establish
and position them against other cultures (for example, in the Star Trek
universe, the image of Klingons as warriors, Vulcans as logical, Ferengi as
businessmen, and so forth). Just as entire planets often contain a single type
of terrain, much like a single earthly location, quite often locations in
secondary worlds are home to a single culture, regardless of whether those
locations are cities, countries, or entire planets. In multi-planet worlds,
planets that are the main home base of more than two or three cultures are
relatively rare, since each culture can be given its own planet (unless the
story requires otherwise). As mentioned earlier, in multi-planet worlds that
include Earth, all of humanity is often grouped together under the same
cultural umbrella (as “Earthlings” or “Humans”), with the implicit
assumption that differences between human cultures on Earth are small
compared to interplanetary cultural differences. Whatever the case, the lines
dividing cultures are usually clearly drawn ones, and cultural differences are
emphasized.
Cultures, then, provide important structural frameworks for the worlds
into which they are integrated. Even with guides and mentors who are
members of a culture and who provide explanations to main characters and
the audience, new sets of cultural defaults, which may include different
languages, artifacts, foods, customs, and so forth, often produce a great
expository burden to be overcome. Besides maps, timelines, genealogical
charts, and glossaries which convey structural information in a very direct
way (but usually appear outside the narrative), some aspects of cultures can
be conveyed through more indirect means. Elements may be introduced
without explanation if there are Primary World analogs to which they can be
compared, and if the meanings of the new elements can be obtained though
the context in which they appear. In image-based media, elements of culture
may appear visually but without explanation, leaving the audience to figure
things out from context. For example, in video games like Riven (1997) or
Rhem (2003), the player encounters machines the purposes of which are
unexplained, and it is only after the player interacts with them and watches
the consequences that their functions become apparent. Shaun Tan’s
graphical story of an immigrant family, The Arrival (2007), is a book-length
example of learning a culture through context.
Cultural aspects that can be easily summarized or explained can be given
in appendices as well. Dune, for example, includes appendices on the
ecology of Dune, the religion of Dune, the Bene Gesserit and their motives
and purposes, short biographies of characters, and a glossary in which we
find that a baliset is “a nine-stringed musical instrument, lineal descendent
of the zithra, tuned to the Chusuk scale and played by strumming. A
favorite instrument of Imperial troubadors.”40 Since fictional cultures often
are constructed or cobbled together from various aspects or aesthetics of
existing real world cultures, it is not unusual to find a residue of
connotations attached to them, which can be used by an author to aid
explanations or create expectations (for example, Dune’s desert culture is
patterned after Arab and Middle-Eastern cultures to some degree).
Like characters, fictional cultures often have stories of origins (involving
the world’s history), character arcs over the course of a story (cultural shifts
and changes), and are often depicted during the turning points, power
struggles, and decisive moments that determine their future paths. Quite
often, this involves a world which is under the sway or at least the threat of
evil powers; the main character learns about the evil power, joins the fight
against it, and then plays a crucial role in fighting and defeating it (for
example, Dorothy fighting the Wicked Witch in Oz, Frodo helping destroy
the Ring and defeat Sauron, Luke Skywalker helping defeat the Empire, Tron
helping to bring down the Master Control Program, or Neo helping to
defend Zion against the machines). Usually, the decisive moment in the
culture’s history is an invasion or war, a debate as to whether or not to
accept certain technologies or foreign influences, or its first encounter with
another culture. Quite typically, cultural clashes are central to the stories
being told, sometimes with a cross-cultural love story thrown in to
personalize the conflict and add the friction so necessary to fictional
romances. And, just as the end of a story will indicate the future direction
taken by the main character, we are usually given enough information to
assume the future direction in which the culture will be heading, which is
usually a more peaceful and stable one.
Culture, as a means of structuring a world, not only helps to unite other
structuring systems (like geography, history, nature, and so forth), but gives
them a context that relates directly to the experience of its characters, and
gives them meaning. Culture can be one of the most compelling ways that a
world can exceed a story and spark the kind of speculation and conjecture
that brings a secondary world alive in the imagination. And among all the
various aspects of culture, language is one that immediately gives a sense of
a culture’s aesthetics and worldview.

Language
While there are numerous attempts to invent languages for international use
or to try to avoid the supposed flaws of natural languages (Arika Okrent’s
book In the Land of Invented Languages lists hundreds of them41), many
imaginary worlds use constructed languages (or “conlangs”) along with their
invented cultures and peoples, usually without the desire that the language
be used in the Primary World (although some of the more developed ones,
like Quenya and Klingon, have a fan base that attempts fluency in them).
Unlike “natural” languages, a constructed language is deliberately invented
and designed, and typically only sketched out to the degree needed by the
imaginary world in which it appears. Constructed languages are often
divided into two groups, a posteriori languages that borrow or are based on
elements of existing natural languages, and a priori languages that are not
based on any real languages (although it is difficult to completely avoid the
influence of real languages).
Invented languages serve several purposes in imaginary worlds. They can
introduce new concepts, objects, or beings that otherwise have no words for
them, or rename existing things so that the audience will consider them
anew. The design of the sound of the language and its appearance in print,
which can include invented alphabets, scripts, or pictograms, gives a culture
or world an aesthetic flavor and emotional feeling. This, of course, depends a
great deal on the original natural language in which the work appears, since
it relies on connotations from that language, and even its aesthetics, to
produce its own effect. Such connotations, however, may not have the same
effect when a work is translated into other languages. For example, there is a
tendency in English-language fantasy and science fiction to use letters that
appear less frequently (like Q, X, and Z) when coining names that are
intended to sound exotic.42 Likewise, if invented words are too close to real
words they may pick up other connotations inadvertently, so they are
usually avoided, despite the fact that it is not unusual for independent
languages to use the same words with different meanings (linguists refer to
such words as “false friends”, since they can be misleading).43
An invented language can also be used to generate names in a consistent
manner that gives names meaning. For example, in Tolkien’s Sindarin, “mor”
means “black” or “dark”, and is found in a number of names, such as Moria
(“black chasm”), Morgoth (“dark enemy”), Morwen (“dark maiden”), and
Mordor (“black land”). Even if no glossary of root words is provided, readers
may be able to sense similarities and possibly even form expectations when
encountering later names, based on the meanings inherent in the ones they
have seen. Which concepts are given words and which ones are omitted, as
well as the conceptual divisions that become codified in a vocabulary, will
determine what can be expressed in a given language. For example, in
Eunoia, the language devised by poet Christian Bök for the television
program Earth: Final Conflict (1997), there is no past tense, and concepts and
their polar opposites are embodied together (like “war” and “peace”).44
Finally, besides organizing and connecting concepts and cultures in
imaginary worlds, languages and words are also often a source of knowledge
and power within their worlds. For example, George Orwell’s Nineteen
Eighty-Four includes an Appendix on the principles of Newspeak, the official
language of Oceania which aims to limit thought by limiting vocabulary.
The appendix even explains how word formation occurs, the rules of which
limit coinages and new ideas, and impose certain attitudes on the speaker.
The eleventh edition of the Newspeak dictionary is being edited at the time
of the story, and Syme, a character who is working on it, describes it:
 “The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,” he said. “We’re getting
the language into its final shape—the shape it’s going to have when
nobody speaks anything else. When we’ve finished with it, people like
you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our
chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying
words—scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the
language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won’t contain a single
word that will become obsolete before the year 2050.… “Don’t you see
that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In
the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there
will be no words in which to express it.”45
Besides their use for expressing concepts and formulating ideas (or limiting
them), words can also have even more direct power. Like the Biblical “Fiat
Lux” that begins Creation, certain words produce immediate effects in their
respective worlds, like the “true names” of Earthsea, the written language of
the D’ni culture (from the Myst franchise), and the magical spells,
incantations, and passwords found in fantasy literature (see Chapter 5). As a
result, knowledge of their use is often secret and guarded, and passed on
only through the proper training and only to qualified individuals.
In early imaginary worlds, where main characters were mainly only
observers of the secondary worlds they visited, there was less need for
invented languages. Probably the first imaginary world to have its own
language and alphabet was More’s Utopia. The 1517 edition of More’s book
included a page of ancillary materials (attributed to either More or his
friend, Peter Giles46) with the Utopian Alphabet and “A Quatrain in the
Utopian Language”, which was printed using the Utopian script as well as a
transliteration using the Roman alphabet (see Figure 3.4). The language,
however, is not used within the story itself, and some editions of the text do
not even include Giles’ page. A few years later, books in Rabelais’ The
Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel series (1532–1551) used invented
languages within them, but only in a few statements made for comic effect.
As worlds developed and there was more interaction between their natives
and the travelers who visited them, the problem of a language barrier
complicating communication began to be acknowledged and addressed.
Although in some instances, the language barrier provided a source of
misunderstanding that could fuel a story’s conflict, more often it was seen as
an inconvenience to be quickly overcome so that the story could move
along. In Margaret Cavendish’s The Description of a New World, Called the
Blazing-World (1666), the main character travels to the Blazing World sees
the various animal men speaking in their own tongue (the world has a single
language), and we are told that she “took courage, and endeavored to learn
their language; which after she had obtained so far, that partly by some
words and signs she was able to apprehend their meaning”, after which she
felt not only “safe, but very happy in their company”.47 The language
learning appears to take place almost instantly, with no description of how it
occurs; but the language barrier is at least acknowledged. Another solution
was to allow time for the language to be learned, and then simply set it
during an ellipsis; in Thomas Northmore’s Memoirs of Planetes, or a Sketch
of the Laws and Manners of Makar (1795), the main character traveling to
Makar mentions (in first-person narration) how he lived with a family of
natives for a month during which time he learned their language; but that is
all we hear of the experience.
FIGURE 3.4 The Utopian alphabet and a quatrain in the Utopian language,
from Thomas More’s Utopia.
Another solution is to invent a device which can eliminate the language
barrier instantly. Probably the earliest such device can be found in Crowder
and Woodgate’s A Voyage to the World in the Centre of the Earth Giving an
Account of the Manners, Customs, Laws, Government, and Religion of the
Inhabitants, Their Persons and Habits Described with Several Other
Particulars (1755), where the main character visiting the underground world
is given a salve which allows him understand the native language. An even
more powerful device appears in Benjamin Disraeli’s The Voyage of Captain
Popanilla (1828). In a sea chest washed up on shore, Popanilla finds a book,
The Universal Linguist, by Mr. Hamilton, or the Art of Dreaming in
Languages, which puts him to sleep as he reads it, and afterwards, upon
waking, he is able to understand other languages. Later, when he encounters
various peoples of Fantaisie and Vraibleusia, he is able to understand them
as well, thanks to the Universal Linguist. The idea of a “universal translator”
would eventually become a convention in science fiction; for example, the
“universal translators” found in the Star Trek universe, or the Babel Fish in
Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Galaxy, which lives in the user’s ear and
translates what it hears.
A variety of other methods attempted to speed up the learning of
language. In Defontenay’s Star (1854), the narrator learns the language of
the Starian system by studying the Starian books found in a chest inside a
crashed meteorite, despite the lack of any context in which to make a
translation. L. Frank Baum’s John Dough, from John Dough and the Cherub
(1906) understands the animal’s languages due to drinking an Elixir of Life;
and in James Blish’s “And Some were Savages” (1960), a technical process
allows the user to learn a language “in about eight hours.”48 In cases where
there are no characters from outside of the secondary world, a “common
tongue” can be used (like Westron, in the case of Tolkien’s Middle-earth)
which most characters speak in addition to their own local languages. This
common tongue is then translated into the natural language in which the
story appears, so that readers can understand it as well, while still allowing
the local languages to appear as foreign as the author wishes. In The Lord of
the Rings, for example, Frodo’s name in Westron is Maura Labingi and Sam’s
is Banazîr Galbasi, but these names are never used within the text of the
story.
In some stories, the language barrier is addressed and learning of a
language is not ellipsized so severely, for example, in Wright’s Islandia,
where the language barrier is considered thoughtfully and dealt with more
realistically. In some cases, the overcoming of the language barrier can be
the main conflict of a story; for example, the astronaut scientists of
Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (1961) struggle to communicate with the planet’s
sentient ocean, trying to bridge the gap between alien forms of
understanding. However, since many stories set in new worlds start their
action with the arrival of the main character, with neither the time nor the
inclination to deal with the language barrier problem, many rely on
established conventions to find a quick solution to allow communication and
get on with the rest of their action.
With enough usage of an invented language in a story, difficulties can even
arise for the reader, who is called upon to remember new words as they are
used, resulting in the addition of a glossary. Probably the first imaginary-
world story to include a glossary was Robert Paltock’s The Life and
Adventures of Peter Wilkins, A Cornish Man (1751), which featured a two-
page “Explanation of Names and Things mentioned in this Work” listing 103
terms.49 Some definitions reference other terms (for example, a “filus” is
defined as “a rib of the graundee”), enhancing the reader’s immersion in the
world through the interconnectedness of the world’s terminology.
Comparing terms in the glossary also reveals the consistency of the root
structure of the language. We would expect to find the same root appearing
in words with similar meanings, and we do: “Colamb” means “governor” and
“Colambat” means “government”; while “Lask” means “a slave” and
“Laskmett” means “slavery”. Beyond such similarities, though, there is no
overarching structure or logic to Paltock’s language.
Some authors added to their invented language in a piecemeal way as
their worlds grew (in Thuvia, Maid of Mars (1920), Edgar Rice Burroughs
included a glossary for all the Barsoomian words that had accumulated over
his four Mars novels), but this method makes it unlikely that the resulting
language will be able to remain consistent. Other subcreators, like
Cordwainer Smith (and later, George Lucas), were content to take words
from languages other than English and use them as names, or like Samuel
Butler, use anagrams or reversals of words.50 However, language
construction would reach a new level of sophistication when the author
constructing the language had a background in how languages worked and
developed.
During the twentieth century, linguists would sometimes be hired to
develop languages for worlds (usually in cinema and television, where a
budget existed for such things), and some literary authors were linguists as
well. The most famous of these was of course J. R. R. Tolkien, for whom
invented languages were the seeds from which his imaginary world grew.
Tolkien’s own personal history of inventing languages is the subject of his
essay “A Secret Vice”, where he describes early experiences with invented
languages, including his friend’s “Nevbosh” of which he was a speaker, and
his own “Naffarin”.51 Tolkien created over a dozen invented languages of
Middle-earth, of varying size and complexity. His Elven tongue, Quenya, is
perhaps the most detailed (and some would say, the most beautiful) among
them, and is influenced by Finnish and Latin. Based on a series of root
words, Quenya is complete and detailed enough that linguist David Salo
was able to extrapolate it for the translations of characters’ lines in Peter
Jackson’s films of The Lord of the Rings (2001–2003).
Other linguists developing secondary world languages include Suzette
Haden Elgin (who devised Láadan, a “woman’s language” for her Native
Tongue trilogy of novels, with words like widazhad (to be pregnant late in
term and eager for the end) and ásháana (to menstruate joyfully)), Victoria
Fromkin (who developed Paku for The Land of the Lost television series and
the vampire language for Blade (1998)), Alan Garner (who developed
languages for The Dark Crystal (1982)), Tom Shippey (who developed
Marbak for Harry Harrison’s West of Eden (1984)), Paul Frommer (who
developed the Na’vi language for Avatar (2009)), and Marc Okrand (who
designed Atlantean for Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001) and Klingon for the
Star Trek universe). Okrand’s Klingon was developed beyond the films and
television series, appearing in The Klingon Dictionary (1985), and it is
supported by the Klingon Language Institute which features newsletters and
other material in Klingon, including a translation of Hamlet (2000). With
greater fan participation and communication due to the Internet, by the
early twenty-first century, a community of constructed language inventors
coalesced, as well as language construction tools like Mark Rosenfelder’s The
Language Construction Kit, which began on-line and was eventually
published as a book in 2010; and in 2007, the Language Creation Society was
formed, which sponsors an annual Language Creation Conference.
Invented languages, then, can range from hundreds of words, like Klingon,
to a sampling of a language that may only be a few words (although some
languages have very few words to begin with, like the language of Pierre
Barton’s subterranean Ogs, which has only two words, “og” and “glog”).52
Invented languages may be central to a story or world, or merely used to
add flavor to the background. However, even when only well-constructed
glimpses of them appear in a story, these languages add to the narratives
and mythologies that they help to support.

Mythology
Mythologies structure secondary worlds by giving them a history and
context for events, through legends and stories of origins that provide
backstories for the current events and settings of a world. They often reveal
how characters and ongoing problems came to be, so that story events seem
more meaningful and perhaps even the completion of a long character arc or
the resolution of an age-old conflict. Mythologies, then, provide historical
depth, explanations, and purpose to the events of a world.
Inspired by Greek, Roman, or Norse mythology, authors like Dunsany,
Lovecraft, and Tolkien produced hierarchical pantheons of godlike beings
that oversee their subcreated worlds. Lord Dunsany’s first book, The Gods of
Pegāna (1905), contained a creation myth and a hierarchical pantheon of
gods, which later provided a background when Dunsany wrote legends of
the lands where they were worshipped. The Gods of Pegāna is a short book,
with short chapters, and a form and style patterned after the Book of
Genesis:
When MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI had made the gods there were only the
gods, and They sat in the middle of Time, for there was as much Time
before them as behind them, which having no end had neither a
beginning.
And Pegāna was without heat or light or sound, save for the
drumming of Skarl; moreover Pegāna was The Middle of All, for there
was below Pegāna what there was above it, and there lay before it that
which lay beyond.
Then said the gods, making the signs of the gods and speaking with
Their hands lest the silence of Pegāna should blush; then said the gods to
one another, speaking with Their hands; “Let Us make worlds to amuse
Ourselves while MANA rests. Let Us make worlds and Life and Death,
and colours in the sky; only let Us not break the silence upon Pegana.”
Then raising Their hands, each god according to his sign, They made
the worlds and the suns, and put a light in the houses of the sky.53
Dunsany followed up the book with Time and the Gods (1906), which begins
with the preface “These tales are of the things that befell gods and men in
Yarnith, Averon, and Zarkandhu, and in the other countries of my dreams.”
The stories include his pantheon of gods, this time interacting with men in
the world.
Dunsany’s work inspired H. P. Lovecraft, who developed his own
mythology which he called his “pseudomythology”, which would later be
known as his “Cthulu Mythos” after one of the central figures of his
pantheon. Unlike Dunsany’s mythology, Lovecraft’s was dark and
disturbing, his “gods” (actually, extraterrestrials who are worshipped)
malevolent and demonic, and his stories part of the horror genre. These
powerful beings are harmful and indifferent to humanity, and their
incarnate forms are similar to frogs, reptiles, gelatinous blobs, and clouds of
shadow. They often are grotesque, with tentacles, horns, and detached eyes;
but as interdimensional cosmic beings, their composition is different from
that of physical matter. Lovecraft encouraged other writers who were friends
of his to use his mythos in their stories, so as to increase the verisimilitude
of his creation through intertextual references, which implied that the
mythos was based on something real that was being alluded to by multiple
authors.
Dunsany’s pantheon was also an inspiration to J. R. R. Tolkien, who
assembled an elaborate and carefully integrated legendarium of his own
(most notably represented in The Silmarillion (1977) and Unfinished Tales of
Númenor and Middle-earth (1980) among his works published
posthumously). As a Roman Catholic, however, Tolkien did not want his
mythology to contradict Christian theology, and so he attempted to devise
his legendarium so as to fit into it, calling it a “monotheistic but
“subcreational” mythology”.54 At the top of his hierarchy is God (Eru, which
means “the One”), who creates the Valar, angelic-like created beings who
take the place of “gods” but who are not deities, and serving under them are
the Maiar. In his creation story, Ainulindalé, “The Music of the Ainur”, one
of the Valar, Melkor, sows discord and after a fall becomes the evil adversary
that opposes the plans of the Valar. A number of mythological and
supernatural issues, including the nature of evil, the definition of “magic”,
and the conception of death, changed over the decades as Tolkien worked on
his legendarium and considered the theological implications of its design.
Tolkien could be a purist when it came to the construction of an invented
mythology. His letters reveal his thoughts regarding his own mythology,
including a critique of his ongoing work.55 Although he liked Out of the
Silent Planet (1938), the first book of C. S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy, Tolkien

referred to the trilogy’s mythology as “incipient and never fully realized”56

and wrote, “I actively disliked his Arthurian-Byzantine mythology; and still
think that it spoiled the trilogy of C. S. L. (a very impressionable, too
impressionable man) in the last part.”57 Tolkien thought a mythology should
be self-contained and disliked how Lewis’s Narnia stories combined
elements of various mythologies (including dwarves, dragons, and giants of
Northern mythology; Bacchus, Silenus, fauns, and centaurs from Greek and
Roman mythology; talking beavers; and Father Christmas), writing, “It is sad
that ‘Narnia’ and all that part of C. S. L.’s work should remain outside the
range of my sympathy, as much of my work was outside his.”58
Not all authors go so far as to build their own legendarium, of course; but
many use mythological elements for the historical depth and transcendental
power that they bring to a text. As such, the Bible has been a strong
influence and even an Ur-text for many world-builders developing their own
mythologies, not just in literary style (as the Dunsany passage in the
preceding text demonstrates), but also in structure, theme, and content. As
Stephen Prickett states in his book on Victorian fantasy:
It has often been noticed that Plato and the Bible are the two greatest
philosophical influences on English Literature; it has less often been
observed how great their influence has been specifically in the direction
of fantasy. Nevertheless, their pull is obvious. Both suggest the existence
of “other worlds” impinging on this, but of a greater reality, as part of a
greater metaphysical and moral whole that is ultimately beyond man’s
understanding.59
The Bible contains a creation story, covers the rise of a people as they grow
into a nation over thousands of years, follows the long struggle between
good and evil on both natural and supernatural planes, and depicts an
oppressed people looking for a prophesized savior (who is an outsider in
some way); it then details the savior’s growing conflict with the authorities
which ends up in his self-sacrifice for the people, and through his help, the
gaining of freedom or ascendancy as a new era is ushered in by the book’s
end. This pattern, or parts of it, can be found in a great many world-based
stories (particularly that of a savior figure; for example, Peter Wilkins in Sass
Doorpt Swangeanti, Dorothy in Oz, Aragorn in Middle-earth, Paul Atreides
in Arrakis, Neo in the Matrix, Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars galaxy,
and so on).60 Bibles also came to contain maps, timelines, and genealogies,
first as descriptions within the text and later as ancillary materials that
summed up its data in charts. The Bible is also a collection of multiple
narratives woven together, with later books referencing earlier ones
intertextually, as the stories of many large franchises do.
Along with gods and other supernatural beings, legendary figures from
ancient times also abound in subcreated mythologies, their deeds shaping
their worlds and their histories. War figures prominently in many stories,
and is often a continuation of conflicts begun long before the main
characters were born. The Lord of the Rings, for example, is really the
culmination of the long struggle against Morgoth described in The
Silmarillion, which is continued by his servant Sauron, whose spirit rules
Mordor and the Nazgul even after his body is gone and whose power only
ends when the One Ring is destroyed. Lines of kings and royal families also
extend genealogical lines of characters, along with the conflicts they
represent, from the past into the present. Other kinds of lines, like the
mentor–apprentice pairings of the Sith and the Jedi in the Star Wars galaxy,
can also carry on an opposition from one era to another, bringing about
fresh revenge from long-simmering ancient disputes.
Mythology helps to create a sense of historical depth, connecting present
characters and events with ancient ones, and the juxtaposition of the two
eras may reveal differences which imply changes that have taken place in a
world. The hierarchy of supernatural or mythical beings, as well as the
models provided by ancient figures and the value placed on traditions of the
past (or the lack of them), can also tell us something about the worldviews
inherent in a secondary world, as mythology becomes an embodiment of
philosophy.

Philosophy
A philosophical outlook can be embodied within a narrative in a number of
ways: through an author’s direct commentary on events; through characters’
points of view; through statements made explicitly in dialogue or implicitly
in characters’ behavior and choices; through the way actions and
consequences are connected, revealing a worldview concerning cause-and-
effect relationships (for example, whether bad characters are punished for
their crimes or get away with them); and through the author’s overall
attitude as to what is considered normal or unusual (which can be expressed
by the norms within the diegetic world of the story itself). Depending on an
author’s skill and intent, philosophical messages and ideas can be overtly or
covertly embedded to various degrees within a story, and inadvertent or
conflicting messages or worldviews are also possible. Finally, the author’s
style and expectations of his or her audience can reveal something of a
worldview (compare the lengthy meandering sentences of William Faulkner
to the clipped staccato sentences of James Ellroy, or the lush, descriptive
prose of E. R. Eddison to the telegraphic prose of Ernest Hemingway, and
the demands each makes on the reader).
Secondary worlds often differ markedly from the Primary World, and it is
precisely in these differences that philosophical ideas and points of view can
be expressed in an even subtler manner. The subcreated world gives the
author all the same opportunities to embed a worldview as traditional
narrative, as well as new opportunities that occur during the process of
world-building, in which a worldview’s assumptions and implications are
concretized and naturalized by the design of the world itself. Certain things
can no longer be taken for granted, and history, geography, culture,
language, and even ontology can all be designed to reflect ideas, systems,
and beliefs about which the author wishes to make a point; a subcreator can
change the laws of physics and metaphysics, alter the way actions result in
consequences, propose new concepts that question or reconfigure traditional
concepts that undermine our assumptions, or even change probabilities that
suggest different boundaries of plausibility. If the author can present a world
as a coherent whole with enough completeness and inner consistency so as
to gain the Secondary Belief of the audience, the audience may be more
receptive to the ideas being presented than they would be if the same ideas
were stated directly in a more heavy-handed way. Once the conceit of the
world is accepted, some ideas may even pass unnoticed as a part of the
background and default assumptions. Sometimes even the mere presence of
the world itself already makes a statement; if it is not intended as parody or
satire, a utopia that is shown to be functional makes an inherent argument
for its feasibility.
The many default assumptions that are reset can be used to introduce new
ways of thinking, just as encountering a new culture can force one to see the
world in a new way. Sometimes inventions and changed defaults are
manifest even in a film’s opening shot (as in Star Wars (1977) or Blade
Runner (1982)), or a book’s opening sentence: “In a hole in the ground there
lived a Hobbit.” (J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (1937)); “It was a bright cold day
in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.” (George Orwell, Nineteen
Eighty-Four (1949)); “Composite image, optically encoded by escort-craft of
the trans-Channel airship Lord Brunel; aerial view of suburban Cherbourg,
October 14, 1905.” (William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, The Difference
Engine (1990)). Differences can provide an intriguing hook that pulls us into
a world, but they must become naturalized to some degree for Secondary
Belief to occur; at the same time, new terminology gives form to new ideas,
like that of tanrydoon or ania described earlier. The interweaving of Primary
World and secondary world material, and the way in which the new
material is accepted and becomes part of the background assumptions,
makes a subcreated world an effective vehicle for the delivery of
philosophical ideas.
When a main character comes to a secondary world from the Primary
World, there will inevitably be a comparison of worldviews between the
secondary world and Primary World, or more specifically, the culture from
which the main character (and usually also the author) comes. Not
surprisingly, the author’s own worldview usually comes through his or her
secondary world, directly or indirectly; for example, the Roman Catholicism
of Thomas More or J. R. R. Tolkien; the nihilism and cosmicism of H. P.
Lovecraft; the atheism of Philip Pullman; or the Jungian and Taoist outlook
of Ursula K. LeGuin. An author might not even be entirely aware of their
influences until the revision stage. As Tolkien wrote of his own work:
The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic
work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is
why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to
anything like “religion”, to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For
the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.61
Likewise, a world’s villains and evils are likely to represent a philosophy in
direct opposition to the author’s own worldview, and one which is equally
“absorbed into the story and the symbolism”, though it can appear overtly or
even be given a name (like Nabakov’s “Ekwilism” philosophy in Bend
Sinister (1947)).
Sometimes competing philosophies can be played out through two
characters who have similar origins but who take different paths through
their choices and actions; in The Lord of the Rings, for example, Gandalf and
Saruman both begin as Istari, the former remains good while the latter turns
to evil through his lust for knowledge and power and unwillingness to serve;
brothers Boromir and Faramir receive different treatment from their father
and react differently when tempted with possession of the Ring; leaders
Aragorn and Denethor approach their reign of Gondor very differently; and
hobbits Bilbo and Gollum both possess the Ring for years but take different
attitudes toward it, resulting in Bilbo’s being able to let the Ring go and
Gollum’s obsession with reacquiring it.
Secondary worlds, then can embed and support philosophical ideas to an
even greater extent than stories set in the Primary World, and can make use
of all the structures holding a secondary world together to do so. Whether a
philosophy comes naturally out of a subcreator’s work or is the framework
on which the subcreator builds a world, it can be seen as a structuring
device that affects and determines much of the work, and in many cases,
helps to pull various infrastructures together.

Tying Different Infrastructures Together

While each individual infrastructure needs to be complete and consistent
within itself, all of the different infrastructures must also fit together
consistently if world gestalten are to occur. Story events already act as
points at which characters, places, and specific moments in time are tied
together, automatically connecting maps, timelines, and genealogies. These
three structures, which work the closest with narrative structures (the topic
of the next chapter), also connect to the structures of nature, culture,
language, mythology, and philosophy discussed in the preceding text, and
fitting them all together often results in the need for adjustments and
revisions as well.
 Maps must be created with Nature and natural processes in mind, as Lin
Carter points out in Imaginary Worlds: The Art of Fantasy:
Geography does not just happen—natural features are where they are
due to certain causes. It behooves the would-be author of imaginary-
world fantasy to think a little before sketching out his map.
You cannot really have a lush rainforest smack up against a parched
desert of burning sands, you know; it pays to do a bit of reading into
climatology so as to understand the interplay of forces that create
deserts and rainforests, jungles and grasslands, and so on. Nor can you
stick mountains on your map in a helter-skelter fashion; mountains have
a good reason for being where they are, and a fantasy writer should
know something about them.62
Even Tolkien, careful as he was, admitted that he did not pay enough
attention to geology when designing Middle-earth, writing in one of his
letters:
As for the shape of the world of the Third Age, I am afraid that was
devised “dramatically” rather than geologically, or paleontologically. I do
sometimes wish that I had made some sort of agreement between the
imaginations or theories of the geologists and my map a little more
possible. But that would only have made more trouble with human
history.63
Likewise, nature provides the raw materials from which culture arises, and
thus determines much of what cultural artifacts and their societies will be
like, which will in turn limit technologies and influence social structures.
Subcreators must imagine how access to food, clothing, and shelter is
obtained, and how they are found or made, considering the natural
environment. In The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, Diana Wynne Jones
satirically notes the lack of animals in fantasy genre fiction, and writes about
animal skins:
Animal Skins are much in use and are of four kinds:
 1. Trappers’ furs. These are occasionally brought south in bundles. As
there appear to be no animals to be trapped, it is likely that these
skins are either cunning manmade imitations or imported from
another world.
2. Furs worn by NORTHERN BARBARIANS. It is possible that these
are also false or imported. Another possibility is that the animals
providing these furs are now extinct (see ECOLOGY)and that the
famous fur loincloths are handed down father to son.
3. Leather for BOOTS, VESTS, etc. is again of mysterious origin. (See
DOMESTIC ANIMALS.)There are not enough cows to go round, but
the leather has to come from somewhere.
4. Skins of which the TENTS of the DESERT NOMADS are made. Here
the source is obvious. Nomads breed HORSES:the Tents have to be
made of horsehide. In fact, it is entirely probable that Horses provide
all four kinds of Animal Skin.64
The discussion from Chapter 1, regarding food and water on Tatooine, is
another example of how questions can arise when nature does not appear to
completely support the cultures that live in it.
Language relies on both culture and nature, as words are needed for the
objects encountered by the members of a culture in the place where they
live. In linguistics, the Sapir-Whorf Hypotheses suggested that language
shapes thought and culture through the way it allows certain concepts to be
expressed, articulated, or even noticed, due to the available vocabulary and
grammar of the language. Though the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf
Hypothesis has been discredited, the discussion it engendered brought more
attention to the ways in which language influences culture.
The invented languages of secondary worlds are often a large part of their
cultures, and it is not unusual for the audience to receive only those words
which present foreign concepts, since dialog and other uses of the language
will likely be translated into the Primary World language understood by the
audience. While there is a great deal of latitude in the connections made
between language and culture, the two are often developed concurrently and
together provide a specific flavor to the subcreated worlds in which they
appear.
 Language and mythology are also connected, since they help each other to
continue and propagate, and they often share an aesthetic basis as well. For
Tolkien, language was the starting point of his mythology; as he described
the process:
It was just as the 1914 War burst on me that I made the discovery that
“legends” depend on the language to which they belong; but a living
language depends equally on the “legends” which it conveys by tradition.
(For example, that the Greek mythology depends far more on the
marvelous aesthetic of its language and so of its nomenclature of persons
and places and less on its content than people realize, though of course it
depends on both. And vice versa. Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, are
dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors
never invented any Esperanto legends.) So though being a philologist by
nature and trade (yet one always primarily interested in the aesthetic
rather than the functional aspects of language) I began with language, I
found myself involved in inventing “legends” of the same “taste”.65
Mythology is often closely tied to nature, either through stories of origins
and ancient beings associated with the nature elements (as in creation
stories), or the genius loci connected with particular places. As mythology is
also used to evoke a time abyss (as described earlier), it is frequently an
important part of a world’s timeline.
Although the careful integrating of secondary world infrastructures is
necessary for the illusion of a complete and consistent world, deliberately
not doing so can also be a way in which an author embeds a philosophical
idea with a subcreated world. In an essay entitled “How to Build a Universe
That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later”, author Philip K. Dick writes:
So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are
bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated
people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust
their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an
astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the
mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create
universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build
 them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least
that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like
to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued,
and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem.
I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe—
and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and
stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the
ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things.
Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a
dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part
with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of
the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change,
we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects,
customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic
human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters
most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and
deal with the new.66
However they may be used, and to whatever degree they occur, secondary
world infrastructures help to suggest a larger world beyond the incomplete
material available to an audience, by organizing it into shapes that can be
extended by the imagination. Infrastructures provide the scaffolding by
which a world logic can take shape, as well as a platform on which further
extensions of a world can be devised and built. By far the most common
infrastructure used to hold an imaginary world together, and the one to
which most worlds can credit their existence, is that of narrative, the topic
of the next chapter.

OceanofPDF.com
4
MORE THAN A STORY: NARRATIVE
THREADS AND NARRATIVE FABRIC

May these stories drawn from another world have made you forget for a
moment the miseries of this one.

—Charles Ischir Defontenay, Star (Psi Cassiopeia)1

Narrative is by far the most common structure found in imaginary worlds,

and the reason that most of them exist in the first place. Quite often, a world
is designed to fit a certain narrative, and expands along with that narrative
as it grows. Eventually, as the amount of world information increases,
secondary world infrastructures start to take shape, until enough
information is present both to raise questions and suggest answers about the
missing pieces in the world’s history and organization. At that point, the
author may begin adding material beyond that which is needed for the story,
as the logic of the world begins to restrict how the gaps can be filled.
Conversely, as secondary world infrastructures grow, so does narrative.
Mythologies are usually narrative in their organization, and as more events
with causal relationships are added to timelines, narratives begin to form.
Even maps can be used to imply narratives; for example, the presence of
ruins suggests places that were built and then were destroyed or fell into
disuse. As infrastructures are pieced together, world history emerges, as well
as additional storylines from which future narratives set in the same world
may grow. Thus, the extra-narrative material, through which a world
exceeds the stories told in it, can become the seeds of new, connected stories,
which in turn may extend the world even further. This chapter looks at how
narrative operates within a world and helps to structure it, looking first at
narratives within a work, narratives in separate works set in the same world,
narratives that reach between worlds, and finally the extradiegetic narratives
surrounding a world.

Narrative Threads, Braids, and Fabric

In narrative theory, the basic units of narrative have been conceptualized in
a number of different ways, ranging from Vladimir Propp’s functions, to the
abstract units proposed by Gérard Genette, to the more concrete “kernels”
and “satellites” proposed by Roland Barthes and Seymour Chapman.2 The
defining of narrative units differs according to the purpose for which they
are used, and also by the defining of “narrative” itself. For this chapter, we
can broadly define narrative as a series of events which are causally
connected, and narrative units as the events themselves, each of which
consists of some actor or agent taking part in some action (similar to the
way that a noun–verb combination constitutes the minimum requirements
for a complete sentence grammatically). Such a chain of events, often
referred to as a narrative thread, typically revolves around the experiences
of a particular character, place, or even an inanimate object (as in the film
The Red Violin (1998), which follows the same violin over three centuries
and multiple owners, with the violin’s experiences as the main thread
holding the film together), giving a sense of what happens to it over time.
An audience typically will have some expectation that a narrative thread
will lead somewhere, with some endpoint providing closure. For example,
characters undergo changes leading some to endpoint of equilibrium, such as
a stable condition, an achieved goal, or death; the overall change is referred
to as a character arc, and often provides the reason for why the narrative
thread begins and ends where it does.
While some stories are content to follow a single narrative thread, many
stories, and storytelling traditions (like Icelandic sagas and medieval stories
with interlace structures) bring together multiple narrative threads which
run concurrently, with events that happen simultaneously in multiple
threads. As multiple threads share the same diegetic materials, themes, or
events, the individual threads can become tightly woven together into what
we might call narrative braids. Here again, an audience will expect certain
outcomes involving all the related threads within a braid, such as the
working out of conflicts leading to interpersonal equilibrium, or the parting
of the individual threads of the braid as characters depart and go their
separate ways. Stories can follow a single braid, or they might follow
multiple braids, alternating between them.
How tightly narrative braids are woven can also vary. Stories may have
multiple narrative threads that have no connection to each other (and thus
no braiding); they may have parallel threads that are thematically connected
in order to compare and contrast characters and their situations, but with no
direct diegetic contact between threads (which we could term thematic
braiding); multiple threads which share the same locations, minor
characters, and other details, but with no causal linkages between threads
(diegetic braiding); and threads with causal linkages between them, in which
the events of one thread have outcomes in other threads (causal braiding).
Finally, it is possible that two or more characters are part of the same thread,
for example, when they travel together and experience the same events and
there is little to separate or differentiate the characters’ experiences. Thus, as
a story advances, narrative braids can tighten and loosen, sometimes
separating entirely into a series of threads that then recombine in different
ways to form new braids.
When an imaginary world is involved, we may be given extra information
and events which fall outside of the main narrative threads and braids; for
example, places on maps that are not visited, words in a glossary that do not
appear anywhere else, historical events that are only alluded to, or
additional characters who appear in genealogical charts but not within any
of the main narrative threads. Places, objects, and incidental characters may
have histories that are given in digressions, and since worlds often contain
multiple stories, there may be other threads and braids that do not connect
directly to each other in any way. Yet, because of all the secondary world
infrastructures present, all this data and narrative together forms a coherent
world; and in worlds that have accumulated a great amount of detail, it may
be possible to assemble narrative threads for individual characters that have
not been directly assembled by an author. For example, in the Star Wars
galaxy, Han Solo appears in many separate narratives; in three films
(Episodes IV, V, and VI); three novels by Brian Daley (Han Solo at Star’s End
(1979), Han Solo’s Revenge (1979), and Han Solo and the Lost Legacy (1980));
three novels by Ann C. Crispin, which relate Han Solo’s childhood and early
years before the events of Episode IV (The Paradise Snare (1997), The Hutt
Gambit (1997), and Rebel Dawn (1997)); and novels which take place after the
events of Episode VI (including The Courtship of Princess Leia (1995), Vector
Prime (1999), Star by Star (2001), and those of the Legacy of the Force series
published between 2006 and 2008); and even in the Star Wars Holiday
Special (1978). One could compile all of Solo’s appearances in these works,
resulting in a single narrative thread following the character’s life. Besides
characters, one can also often trace the histories of places and objects over
long periods of time, resulting in new narrative threads that are implied by
the information given throughout multiple works (provided that the world is
complete and consistent enough). Given enough information, an audience
can construct timelines to figure out all the events that are occurring
simultaneously at a given moment in time within a world, forming a
transverse thread that slices the world synchronically instead of
diachronically (warp instead of woof). As more information is added, the
narrative material of a world grows more complex than that of a set of
braids, and becomes what we might call a narrative fabric.3
Narrative fabric can also be woven from nonfictional stories of the
Primary World; for example, the collection of stories surrounding World War
II, or the history of baseball, or the sinking of the Titanic, can each be seen
as constituting a narrative fabric (to a certain extent, of course, all nonfiction
narratives taking place in the Primary World can be seen as part of an
immense narrative fabric about the history of human life on Earth). The
seemingly limitless and inexhaustible amount of detail available regarding
nonfictional Primary World narrative fabrics is the very thing that
secondary world narrative fabrics attempt to imitate, through large amounts
of information which exceed the saturation level of the audience (as
described in Chapter 1). Fictional narrative fabrics can be set in the Primary
World as well, but as a fabric grows, so does the amount of invention, which
may eventually come into conflict with what the audience knows about the
Primary World, possible affecting verisimilitude.4 In secondary worlds,
narrative fabric can be more freely created, because all aspects of the world
can be designed to accommodate it.
By allowing the audience to assemble narrative threads from world
material, narrative fabric greatly increases a world’s illusion of
completeness, as well as the audience’s engagement in the world.
Assembling narrative threads and looking for inconsistencies can become
something of a fan pastime, as many Internet forums dedicated to such
activities can attest. Thus, for larger worlds, world databases or “bibles” are
often used by world-builders to monitor consistency, and also to standardize
world-based facts and history when multiple authors are contributing to the
same world. Although a narrative fabric can be created entirely by a single
author, many larger worlds are the result of collaborative effort, and the
multi-narrative nature of narrative fabric is ideally suited to collaboration
since individual narratives within it can be created by separate authors.
Many narrative fabrics expand well beyond the work of their originators,
resulting in the concentric circles of authorship described in Chapter 7.
Massively multiplayer on-line role-playing games (MMORPGs) are a good
example of highly collaborative, open-ended narrative fabrics generated
interactively by their audiences, while the overall shape, flow, and feel of a
fabric is controlled by the company that provides the designs, updates, and
large-scale narrative scenarios that keep the fabric a cohesive whole.
As mentioned earlier, a narrative fabric also allows the audience a
synchronic way to slice the events of a world, since a dense fabric contains
many simultaneous events.5 These might be tethered together through the
use of large-scale events that all the characters are reacting to, weather
conditions that affect everyone simultaneously, or overarching activities like
war efforts and other complex activities that require the timing of events
involving many participants. We may see or experience the same event from
a variety of points of view in different narratives, or within the same
narrative; and again, if enough world information is present, we can
speculate as to how things might look from points of view which are given
only indirectly.
Since individual narrative threads within a fabric can share locations,
events, and characters, it is worth examining how narratives within a world
can be related to each other, and how their presence might affect those that
are added after them. A common type of linkage can be found in nested
stories, stories which are related within other stories; and these are typically
used not so much to advance storylines as to ground them more fully in the
world and its narrative fabric. Such material often acts as backstory, which
fills in the history of a world and its characters and events.
Backstory and World History
Stories set in secondary worlds may need to rely on backstory more than
those set in the Primary World, since much Primary World history is already
known, or at least accessible, to the audience. While initially backstory sets
up the main action of a narrative and relates how the present situation
(usually one of need or distress) came to be, as a world grows and more
narratives take place in it, backstory and world history grow as well, as
narratives are linked together in the world. From the first narrative set in the
world, stories spread out into the future and into the past as sequels and
prequels appear, and stories of origins become more important. Glimpses of
larger structures first hinted at in backstories are opened up and explored, so
the initial development of backstory becomes especially important for the
further development of a world, since it plants the seeds of narratives that
may later be expanded. For example, on pages 177–182 of Myst: The Book of
Atrus (1995), Gehn tells Atrus the story of Veovis and the events
surrounding the rebellion that Veovis started. These events would become
Myst: The Book of Ti’ana (1996), a prequel that provides a context for the
story of Myst: The Book of Atrus and the games Myst (1993) and Riven (1997)
as well.
Backstories are also told with greater “narrative speed” than events of the
main narrative, to use narratologist Gérard Genette’s term. Narrative speed
refers to the difference between the duration of story events versus the time
needed to tell the events. If we make this concept independent of duration
(which, in one sense, may vary depending on the intake capability of
individual audience members (for example, people who read more slowly or
quickly)), this becomes the measure of narrative resolution instead; that is,
the amount of words, sounds, or images used to convey an event or other
story information (resolution is used here to mean something like
granularity, as in “graphical resolution”; as opposed to the use of “resolution”
to mean the completion and closure of a narrative structure). Thus, a story
told in high narrative resolution will relate events and information in great
detail, with tight authorial control over the audience’s experience, while
stories told in low narrative resolution use more summary and synopsis,
relying more on the imagination of the audience and narrative gestalten to
complete the narrative details. Similarly, when an author turns an outline
into a novel, or a treatment into a screenplay, the narrative increases in
resolution.
Backstories are often told in the compressed form associated with low
narrative resolution, and the histories of different locations in a world are
often told to the story’s main characters as they travel from one place to the
next. For example, in The Lord of the Rings, the history of the Barrow-downs
is given as a summary of what Tom Bombadil tells the hobbits about the
place’s history, resulting in a high degree of compression:
Suddenly Tom’s talk left the woods and went leaping up the young
stream, over bubbling waterfalls, over pebbles and worn rocks, and
among small flowers in close grass and wet crannies, wandering at last
up on to the Downs. They heard of the Great Barrows, and the green
mounds, and the stone rings upon the hills and in the hollows among the
hills. Sheep were bleating in flocks. Green walls and white walls rose.
There were fortresses on the heights. Kings of little kingdoms fought
together, and the young Sun shone like fire on the red metal of their new
and greedy swords. There was victory and defeat; and towers fell,
fortresses were burned, and flames went up into the sky. Gold was piled
on the biers of dead kings and queens; and mounds covered them, and
the stone doors were shut; and the grass grew over all. Sheep walked for
a while biting the grass, but soon the hills were empty again. A shadow
came out of dark places far away, and the bones were stirred in the
mounds. Barrow-wights walked in the hollow places with a clink of
rings on cold fingers, and gold chains in the wind. Stone rings grinned
out of the ground like broken teeth in the moonlight.6
In film, such narrative compression might be conveyed by a montage
sequence, as Peter Jackson does at the start of his film adaptation of The
Fellowship of the Ring (2001), in which he gives the backstory of how the
rings of power came to be. In either case, events are merely evoked
impressionistically, leaving much gap-filling to be done by the audience.7
The looseness provided by low narrative resolution lets a subcreator sketch
out the history of a world without having to commit to a high level of detail,
allowing it to be determined later and leaving more options open. The fact
that history is often given as character dialogue also leaves open the
possibility that the character may be lying, mistaken, or simply uninformed
about the history in question, should the author wish to change something
without upsetting consistency with established material; by revealing that a
narrator was unreliable, the world itself can remain consistent despite the
conflicting information of earlier and later stories, since the blame for the
inconsistency now falls on the character, not the author. The same applies if
an entire work is given authorial attribution to a character within a world.
An example of this occurred when Tolkien was revising The Hobbit to bring
it more in line with The Lord of the Rings. In The Lord of the Rings, the Ring
has gained powers and influence it did not originally have when The Hobbit
was written, and the question arose as to why Gollum would give the Ring
up so easily as he had in the original version of the story. This made the
writing of The Lord of the Rings more difficult, so Tolkien rewrote the
ending of Chapter 5 of The Hobbit (in which Gollum loses the Ring and
Bilbo finds it) and sent it, along with other notes on the story, to his
publisher. Three years later in 1950, the publisher had inserted the new
material and asked Tolkien for an explanatory note to explain the changes in
the new edition. Tolkien realized the two accounts were different enough to
clash, and that this would be noticed by readers. Considering what to do,
Tolkien wrote back to his publisher:
I have now on my hands two printed versions of a crucial incident.
Either the first must be regarded as washed out, a mere miswriting that
ought never to have seen the light; or the story as a whole must take into
account the existence of two versions and use it.8
Tolkien accepted the changes and figured out a way for the story to take
them into account. In the “Introductory Note” for the new edition, he wrote:
… More important is the matter of Chapter Five. There the true story of
the ending of the Riddle Game, as it was eventually revealed (under
pressure) by Bilbo to Gandalf, is now given according to the Red Book,
in place of the version Bilbo first gave to his friends, and actually set
down in his diary. This departure from truth on the part of a most honest
hobbit was a portent of great significance. It does not, however, concern
the present story, and those who in this edition make their first
 acquaintance with hobbit-lore need not trouble about it. Its explanation
lies in the history of the Ring, as it is set out in the chronicles of the Red
Book of Westmarch, and it must await their publication.9
By attributing the textual discrepancies to Bilbo’s authorship of the two
accounts, Tolkien explains away the inconsistency and works it into his
world, even turning it into “a portent of great significance”.
Nested stories, then, are a common way of linking stories within an
imaginary world, and indeed, diegetic storytelling itself has a long tradition
(including Biblical dreams and parables, The Arabian Nights, Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales, and Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, to
name a few notable examples). Imaginary worlds, however, especially in
recent times, are often transnarrative in scope, and have multiple stories
occurring in them; not just nested stories, but separate stories that take place
within the same world. While much has been written regarding
intertextuality in narrative theory (for example, see Bakhtin, Barthes,
Derrida, Doležel, and Kristeva), relatively little has been written about the
relationships between stories set in the same imaginary world and how the
creation of stories and worlds affect each other. In one sense, all the stories
set in the same world can be seen as being nested within the overarching
narrative of the history of the world itself; but unlike backstories, these
stories can be conceived and created separately from one another, are
sometimes made by someone other the author of the original, and do not
always require knowledge of each other to be understood; thus their
relationships differ from those of nested stories. The examination of how
such stories relate to one another is something we could call internarrative
theory.

Sequence Elements and Internarrative Theory

At the same time I find it only too easy to write opening chapters—and
for the moment the story is not unfolding.… I squandered so much on the
original “Hobbit” (which was not meant to have a sequel) that it is
difficult to find anything new in that world.

—J. R. R. Tolkien, while writing The Lord of the Rings in 193810

Worlds are built up as more and more stories are set in them, and if a
world’s consistency is to be maintained, each additional story to be added to
a world must take into account all of the narrative material already present
in a world. Often stories are related chronologically to each other and can be
arranged in a sequence, fitting together the stories’ events on the timelines
of the world. Additional stories can also recontextualize the works that
appear before them: new information can change our frame of reference;
characters can be revealed to have different motivations or even to be lying;
and different points of view can change how we understand characters and
story events.
Considering additional stories as elements in a series that build up a
world, we would probably find the most common sequence element to be
the sequel. A sequel, as a story which takes place after an existing story,
usually shares some common elements with the original story it follows,
carrying them forward in time. A sequel is often able to take advantage of
the existing popularity of the original, rather than having to rely solely on
its own merits, at least initially. Sometimes this allows a work of lesser
quality to be made, giving sequels a bad name, though this is, of course, not
always the case; but audiences may still be less likely to experience a sequel
if they have not experienced the original work first.
While they can rely on the success of their predecessors, sequels also face
greater constraints than the original stories that precede them. Unless
multiple stories set in the same world are planned simultaneously, quite
often the relationship between the story and the world becomes reversed in
the sequel; while the world is originally designed to accommodate the first
story set in it, the world is already in existence when the sequel is made, and
the sequel’s story must be made to fit the world, rather than the other way
around. A trade-off between novelty and familiarity occurs: the world is no
longer new to the audience, but the burden of exposition is lessened by what
has already been revealed of the world. One way that successful sequels
restore a sense of novelty is by revealing new areas of the world not present
in the original. For example, two very successful sequels, The Lord of the
Rings (written as a sequel to The Hobbit) and The Empire Strikes Back
(1980), both expand their worlds with new lands, characters, and storylines,
while keeping strong links to the works that precede them. Another type of
expansion jumps forward to a point in time where the world has changed
considerably, as does Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–1994) which
takes place about a century after the original Star Trek (1966–1969) series, or
each of Frank Herbert’s five sequels to Dune (1965), the last of which takes
place more than 5,000 years after the original story.
Since the rise of the sequel, authors and especially world-builders are more
conscious of the fact that a successful world may result in a series of sequels,
prequels, and other series elements, and may even keep this in mind while
writing an original work that introduces a new world. However, this was not
the situation faced by earlier authors, who either simply moved a popular
character to another world or wrote entirely disconnected books set in
different worlds; and before the nineteenth century, very few authors
invented more than a single world. The most prolific world-builder of the
turn of the twentieth century, L. Frank Baum, had written of the
unconnected lands of Phunnyland and Oz in 1900 and had written stories set
in three more unconnected lands (Merryland, Quok, and Yew) before writing
the second Oz book, The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904); so returning to an
existing land was new experience for him. As Michael O. Riley writes:
It was not easy for Baum to return to a world that he had created almost
five years earlier for a very different story; it was also against his
inclinations. The Marvelous Land of Oz was his first attempt to fit a full-
length story into a pre-existing background, and the first time he had to
adapt and develop a background to accommodate a major new plot.
Baum himself appears to have been uncertain just how to do this. The
result is that in regard to the details of the imaginary world of Oz, The
Marvelous Land is one of the more inconsistent books in the series, and
the discrepancies make it difficult to sort out which alterations were the
result of a change in his conception of Oz and which were the result of
carelessness and hasty writing.11
Riley says that the later Oz novels were weaker because Oz was so
established already, and he comments further on the growth of Oz as a
world from book to book, writing:
Not surprisingly, the development of Baum’s great Other-world was not
smooth and logical; very often, the changes created glaring
 inconsistencies from book to book, but that is because Oz did not grow
organically from a central idea. Rather, it developed in successive
versions, each enlarging while superseding the one before and each
reflecting Baum’s current idea of what constituted the most magnificent
and alluring fairyland in the world.12
Series of sequels advance the overarching story of a world, but quite often
this story grows into both the future and the past as more and more
backstories and stories of origins are developed to explain characters, places,
and conflicts. The second most common sequence element, then, is the
prequel, a story that comes before an existing story, and acts as an expanded
backstory for it. The term “prequel” is a relatively recent coinage, having
come about in the latter half of the twentieth century, although the
phenomenon itself is older, and can be found in traditional literature much
earlier.13 Imaginary-world prequels also precede the coining of the term.
Five years and five books after The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950),
C. S. Lewis wrote a prequel, The Magician’s Nephew (1955), and E. R.
Eddison’s Zimiamvia Trilogy includes two prequels, with the second book, A
Fish Dinner in Memison (1941), taking place before the first book, Mistress of
Mistresses (1935), and the third (and unfinished) book, The Mezentian Gate
(1958), taking place before the second book.
Prequels are constrained by the works which come before them, even more
than sequels, since characters’ fates and situations’ outcomes, which appear
in the original work, are already known; thus surprise can be lost, and the
final ending state is more than predictable, it is already known for certain.
We know which characters will not die, and we have some sense of how
things will turn out in the end, unless we have not experienced the original
work; and often a prequel will rely on the audience’s knowledge of the
original work, creating dramatic irony through the audience’s knowledge of
how things will eventually turn out and knowing what the characters do not
know.
Much of what makes a prequel interesting has to do with how it provides a
new starting point for a story the end of which is already known. Instead of
following a character arc wondering where it will lead, we are given both
ends of the arc first; the end at the start of the original work and the
beginning at the start of the prequel. A prequel, then, is not so much about
the destination, but about the journey to that destination, exploring how the
beginning and end states of things are connected. Like characters, worlds are
often younger and less developed in a prequel, with familiar places changed
or even missing altogether. Also, like a sequel, a prequel may feature new
locations and characters that have not appeared before, though they will
usually include some links to the original work.
As worlds develop through multiple stories, a term is needed for works
which come in between already-existing story materials. While these could
be termed “midquels”, there are two distinct types of them which are
different enough to be considered separately, and which we could call
interquels and intraquels.
14 An interquel is a sequence element that occurs
between existing works in a series, while an intraquel is a sequence element
that occurs during a gap within a single existing work. In both cases, the
element’s beginning and end points are known in advance, and the focus is
on the transition between states, added detail, and revealed motivations that
help to fill out an ellipsis, making character arcs and world arcs more
complete.
Interquels appeared as early as the 1920s (within Hugh Lofting’s Doctor
Dolittle series of books), and perhaps the best-known examples of them
would be Star Wars episodes II and III. Although episodes I, II, and III are
collectively known as the “prequel trilogy”, they appeared individually,
making episodes II and III interquels, since they were released between
episodes I and IV; and The Clone Wars (2008) would be an interquel as well,
since it takes place between episodes II and III.
Most commonly, interquels are found in larger, well-developed worlds in
which multiple authors are contributing works (such as novels) which are
outside of the main series of works set in the world (such as films in the Star
Wars galaxy, or movies and television series in the Star Trek universe).
These works are often less canonical yet may use the main characters of the
world, so their chronologies must be tucked into the ellipses of the main
series to avoid conflict with the main series and its chronology. Sometimes
works in a world’s main series make reference to these interquels (as when
Aayla Secura from the Star Wars “Expanded Universe” was given a cameo in
Episode II), but it is more often the case that interquels reference more
established works than the other way around.
Like prequels, interquels face constraints due to the fact that narrative
material occurring before and after them is already established and known.
How tightly the constraints limit what an interquel can do depends mainly
on two factors; the size of the gap in which the interquel occurs, and how
involved the interquel is with the narratives set before and after it. The
larger the gap, the greater the amount of change is possible between the
endpoints of the gap, resulting in more latitude for the interquel’s story, and
more change in the secondary world for the interquel to document. In the
case of the Star Wars galaxy, George Lucas did not allow novels to be
written about the 3-year period of the Clone Wars before the prequel trilogy
was made, to keep more options open for the films.
An interquel may also be tightly involved or loosely involved with the
narratives that surround it. Rather than merely filling in the events in the
lives of main characters from the main series, interquels can give such
characters background roles and concentrate their stories on new characters
instead. The trade-off is one of newness versus connection to the other
stories; the more an interquel introduces new characters and new material,
the more original and less determined by existing stories it becomes, yet it
also becomes less connected to those stories at the same time. Ties to the
secondary world, then, grow in importance as narrative linkages between
sequence elements decrease.
Sharing similar constraints and less common than interquels, intraquels
fill gaps within a single work, usually an ellipsis in which little or nothing is
said of intervening events. Intraquels usually face constraints even more
restricting than interquels, due to the fact that the gap they fill resides
within a work rather than between complete works in a sequence; such gaps
are often smaller, and structures like character arcs that bridge a work may
be less tolerant of interruption than the gaps between works. Intraquels also
are likely to use both strategies that interquels use for dodging restrictions;
that is, appearing in larger gaps and changing their focus to new characters.
For example, Mario Puzo’s novel The Sicilian (1984) is set during the time in
The Godfather (1969) when Michael goes to Sicily, filling in the 2-month gap
mentioned in the last paragraph on page 354 (at the end of Book VI): “But it
was to be another month before Michael recovered from his injuries and
another two months after that before all the necessary papers and
arrangements were ready. Then he was flown from Palermo to Rome and
from Rome to New York.”15 Michael Corleone appears in the novel, but most
of the novel is concerned with the story of Salvatore Guiliano, a kind of
Robin Hood-like bandit figure in the Sicilian countryside, and much of the
story is told in flashback. In the Chronicles of Narnia series, The Horse and
His Boy (1954) is an intraquel that takes place during The Lion, the Witch,
and the Wardrobe (1950) and also focuses on new characters and places.
Unlike interquels, an intraquel can occur as the second sequence element
in a series, serving a similar purpose as a sequel insofar as it gives the
audience more of the same characters from a particular story or world.
Several of Disney’s direct-to-video movies are intraquels set within Disney’s
theatrically released films; for example, Bambi II (2006) takes place after
Bambi’s mother’s death and before Bambi reaches adulthood, and was
released 64 years after the original film Bambi (1942). Other such Disney
videos, including Belle’s Magical World (1998), Tarzan II: The Legend Begins
(2005), and The Fox and The Hound II (2006), can also be considered
intraquels.
While an intraquel fills a gap that occurs within a particular work, we can
invert the relationship and suggest a sequence element that does just the
opposite, one which includes an already-existing element (or elements)
within itself, as if those preceding elements were filling gaps within it. Such
an element, which would take place before, during, and after a previously-
released sequence element (or elements), could be called a transquel. Such a
work is typically broad in scope, setting other stories into a larger historical
context and framework. Probably the best-known transquel would be the
anthology of stories collectively known as The Silmarillion (1977), which
together encompasses thousands of years of history, and condenses all the
events of The Lord of the Rings down to a few paragraphs on two pages.16
The events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings take on new significance
after one reads The Silmarillion, as they are the tail end of a long-running
conflict between good and evil (since the Ring represents the last vestige of
Sauron’s power in Middle-earth, and Sauron is the last of Morgoth’s
servants to be vanquished, and Morgoth (originally Melkor) is the Valar who
became evil and introduced discord into the music of the Ainur at the
beginning of time).
Transquels are generally broad in scope, giving historical context to the
works they encompass. They also tend to be told in low narrative resolution,
and are concerned more with the histories of entire peoples rather than only
individuals, due to the typically enormous timescales being covered. One of
the most ambitious transquels ever written, Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker
(1937) covers billions of years and has a timeline which includes his novel
Last and First Men (1930). When used as a part of a series or franchise, a
transquel provides a framework into which subsequent sequence elements
can be fit, though it also closes off possibilities for the time period that it
covers. Thus, transquels are the least likely kind of sequence element to
appear, and often do so late in a franchise or series, if they appear at all.
The last kind of sequence element is one which runs in tandem
(simultaneously) with an existing element or elements (or part of an
element), which we might call a paraquel. Within works, the same events are
sometimes seen from the perspectives of different characters; the paraquel is
an entire work covering the same events or period in time from a different
perspective. Paraquels can be developed together by the same author (like
the four novels of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet or the first three
novels in E. E. Knight’s Age of Fire series), or long after the sequence
elements they parallel, and by a different author (like Alice Randall’s The
Wind Done Gone (2001), an unauthorized paraquel to Margaret Mitchell’s
Gone With the Wind (1936), told from a slave’s perspective; or Kirill Eskov’s
The Last Ringbearer (1999), an unauthorized paraquel to The Lord of the

Rings, told from the perspective of the residents of Mordor).

17 While many
paraquels found in traditional literature set in the Primary World are
unauthorized and noncanonical, authorized paraquels tend to be found
mainly in series of works set in a secondary world, where the narrative
fabric is broad enough to accommodate them.
Unlike individual stories in which the same events are told by different
narrators, or time-travel stories within which past events are revisited and
seen from a different perspective, or parallel works planned and created
simultaneously, most paraquels are made after the sequence elements they
parallel, which limits their events and outcomes the more closely related
they are to existing sequence elements. Thus, they are more likely to
introduce new characters and storylines and use the existing events of an
imaginary world to set up suspense and provide a background structure. At
the same, paraquels can reveal unseen events and provide motivation for
events from a pre-existing sequence element, offering new explanations for
known events. For example, The Godfather video game (2006) has scenes in
which the player–character (whose default name is Aldo) helps Rocco
Lampone into Jack Woltz’s stable to decapitate the horse’s head that ends up
in Woltz’s bed in the novel and film; a scene in which Aldo plants the gun in
the bathroom that Michael Corleone uses during his dinner with Solozzo
and McCluskey, which is going on at the same time in another room; and
scenes pertaining to the hits carried out which, in the film, are intercut with
the baptism of Carlo’s son to whom Michael is Godfather. Familiarity with
earlier sequence elements, then, is almost always required to make sense of
paraquels.
Due to the variety of sequence elements, there are two orderings that are
perhaps most typically experienced by the audience of an imaginary world;
the order in which the individual sequence elements made their public
appearance (the order typically experienced by contemporary audiences
who experience each element as it appears), or chronological order (an order
that later audiences can assemble once all the elements of a sequence are
available).18
The order in which the sequence elements that make up a world are
encountered greatly affects the way that the audience experiences them and
the world in which they take place. Perhaps the most common example of
this occurs with the Star Wars series of movies; the original trilogy
(Episodes IV, V, and VI, which came out in 1977, 1980, and 1983), and the
prequel trilogy (Episodes I, II, and III, which came out in 1999, 2002, and
2005). Audiences first encountering the movies in the twenty-first century
have a choice; they can either see the movies in the order they were released,
or in chronological order (I, II, III, IV, V, VI). Although the six films together
are the story of Anakin Skywalker and how he becomes Darth Vader, the
original trilogy, taken by itself, positions Luke Skywalker as the main
character instead. Viewers watching the films in release order will
experience the Star Wars universe along with Luke, learning about it as he
does, from Ben Kenobi, Yoda, and others, without the background and
context provided by the prequel trilogy; in doing so, identification with Luke
and his emotional states are strengthened. Viewed in chronological order,
however, the focus is on Darth Vader, and many of the surprises of Episodes
IV, V, and VI are lost, after the prequel trilogy is seen: we already know
Vader is father to Luke and Leia and creator of C3PO; we already know who
Yoda is when Luke first meets him; and other characters like Jabba the Hutt
have also already been introduced.
Viewing the films in release order has its disadvantages as well. Watching
Episodes I, II, and III after seeing the original trilogy, we know that certain
characters (like Anakin, Ben Kenobi, and the Emperor) will not die no
matter what happens to them, so a certain amount of suspense is lost; and
we know where everything has to end up by the end of Episode III, in order
to set up Episode IV. On the other hand, irony can be generated since the
outcomes are known in advance, and the films were designed with the
assumption that audiences had already seen episodes IV, V, and VI. Of
course, since the Star Wars universe has expanded into so many other
media, there are many other possibilities for the way in which it can be
experienced; in 2010, my sons Michael and Christian, at the ages of eight and
six respectively, played the video game LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga
(2007) on the Nintendo Wii, and as a result knew most of the characters and
plotlines (down to details like the color of each character’s lightsaber) before
they ever saw any of the feature films (see Chapter 6 for more on the
different ways that the works that make up a world can be encountered).
Thus, the context provided by surrounding sequence elements can change
the way a particular element is understood, an effect that can even occur
retroactively when more elements are added later as a world develops.
Discussing how knowledge of earlier Oz books affects the reading of later
ones, Michael O. Riley writes:
Ozma of Oz is a transitional book. The story can stand alone without the
section in Oz; the action is complete, and the place of safety and repose
is reached in Ev. However, the visit to Oz at the end is the reward for
both Dorothy and Baum’s readers to whom the main point of the story
is Dorothy’s eventual return to Oz, but that return is not the main point
of the plot. Only the readers’ prior knowledge of Dorothy and of Oz as a
 desirable place gives Oz its dominant role and superimposes the larger,
overarching goal onto the plot of the rescue of the royal family of Ev.19
Since an author’s focus can vary from the story at hand to the larger world
in which it occurs, some sequence elements may be weak as stand-alone
stories when taken by themselves, yet still be important (and be enjoyed as
such) for the world-building that they do. Riley points out that the fifth Oz
book, The Road to Oz (1909), when considered by itself, seems to lack
dangers and action, but that “in context, the serenity of and absence of
violent and threatening incidents in The Road to Oz are assets. The very lack
of a strong plot enabled Baum to concentrate more fully on the nature of Oz
itself, and the book, in addition to clearing up more of the past confusion,
contains a radical reinterpretation of Oz and of Baum’s entire imaginary
world.”20
According to Riley, the growth of Oz was accomplished primarily through
three methods: “the addition of information and details”, “the alteration of
previously given facts”, and “the reinterpretations of the nature of Oz
itself.”21 Riley gives an example of the third method by showing how the
third Oz novel, Ozma of Oz (1907), “reversed the meaning and significance of
Oz as it had first been created in The Wizard,”22 writing:
In The Wizard the strange and beautiful, but illusory, Land of Oz is the
place of danger and trial, the ordeal through which Dorothy has to go to
reach her goal of home. Baum subtly changed all that in Ozma; the
illusion is made reality, and Oz becomes not the ordeal but the goal, the
place of the heart’s desire and, in a very real sense, Dorothy’s true home
because Ozma crowns her a princess of Oz, thus making her a part of
that land.23
The last two methods Riley lists, the alteration of previously given facts and
the reinterpretation of the world’s nature, go beyond the mere growth of a
world, bringing us to a discussion of retroactivity continuity (or retcon) and
reboots.

Retroactive Continuity (Retcon) and Reboots

As a world grows over time, so does an author’s conception of it. The
author’s creative abilities, and the tools used during world-building, may
both mature and develop, making earlier works appear outdated or less
sophisticated, causing an author to rethink and redesign his or her world.
Such changes can be explained diegetically, especially if time has passed
between when the older and newer sequence elements take place: like the
new designs present in Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–1994), which
takes place almost a century after the original Star Trek series (1966–1969);
or the redesigned Grid of Tron: Legacy (2010) which updates that of Tron
(1982). The difference between new and old may be so great that the author
may also want to go back and revise and update the earlier works; for
example, Myst Masterpiece Edition (1999) and realMyst (2000) were both
technologically-updated versions of Myst (1993) (see Figure 4.1). Or, it may
be the case that larger story arcs require that earlier works be adjusted to fit
into them better; for example, Tolkien’s revising of The Hobbit to fit better
with The Lord of the Rings, Lucas’ Special Edition revision and re-release of
the first Star Wars film trilogy, and Stephen King’s revisions to The Dark
Tower: The Gunslinger (original novel, 1982; revised version 2003), the first
book in his Dark Tower series. Or, a universe may have grown so detailed
and complex (especially those created by multiple authors over long periods
of time) that it begins to collapse from increasing inconsistencies and
contradictions, and needs to be reorganized and restarted, like the Crisis on
Infinite Earths (April 1985–March 1986) and Infinite Crises (2005–2006)
series of DC Comics that reset the continuity of the DC Comics Universe.
Such alterations are now common enough to be referred to as “retroactive
continuity” or “retcon”, and are often controversial since the original
versions of works, often the ones that established a particular series or
franchise, are already well known and beloved by fans. The medium used
matters as well; as Henry Jenkins has pointed out, fans of comics take a
different attitude toward retcon than those of film and television
franchises.24
Retconning is often disliked, because it changes already-established facts
and even canonical material (canonicity will be discussed in Chapter 7). An
author can reinterpret past events or make use of holes or audience
assumptions to recontex-tualize events (for example, characters assumed to
be dead but whose deaths were reported by unreliable characters, or the
revelation of hidden motives and different points of view regarding the same
events which lead to a new understanding of those events); but retconning,
which directly contradicts established facts, can seem like cheating. When an
author releases a work to the public, it is akin to the making of a statement
or a kind of social contract with the audience; there is the tacit assumption
that a work tells us something about the world in which it takes place, and
that an author has committed to certain narratives, designs, and so forth.
Retconning undermines this contract, destroying the integrity of the original
work, possibly adding changes to it that audiences will consider
degradations or at the very least, unnecessary. Retconning can make a work
unstable, so that critiques and analyses of the work based on earlier versions
may no longer apply to later ones. If a work is imbedded in cultural
memory, retconning can damage the relationship that an audience has with
a work; for example, after the already-revised versions of the original Star
Wars film trilogy appeared on DVD with even more revisions, fans called
for Lucas to release the original versions of the films on DVD (which he later
did). In general, it seems that audiences typically would prefer that authors
accept the creative challenge of working around the limitations imposed by
earlier works rather than merely going back and changing them.25
FIGURE 4.1 The view from the dock looking up the hill in Myst (1993) and
in realMyst (2001). While Myst was made up of pre-rendered still images
with 8-bit color, realMyst could render its images in 32-bit color in real time
and allowed free movement through its three-dimensional space, allowing
for greater interactivity in the exploration of the world’s spaces.
 On the other hand, there is the argument that living authors have the right
to go back and revise their works, as their own outlooks, abilities, tools, and
conceptions change. This attitude does not consider sequence elements as
individual works standing on their own, but rather parts of greater whole,
an imaginary world which is still a work in progress, changing as it grows.
Whether or not fans like the way that a world is turning out, the author has
the final say, and the world remains an open one until the author deems it
finished or at least closed. Something similar to retconning goes on all the
time during the creative process, in which the conception and details of a
work or world evolve, but normally the audience does not see these stages of
progress, only the final product. Retconning, then, reveals that it is the
world, not any individual work set in it, that is the author’s final product,
reminding the audience that what they are witnessing are merely stages of
development of a final form not yet attained.
Taken to an extreme, the replacement of existing ideas and details results
in a complete reconception and redesign. Many franchises, such as Batman,
James Bond, Star Trek, and Spider-man, have undergone such a rewriting,
now called a “reboot” in fan communities. Taken from computer
terminology, “reboot” suggests not only a restarting, but that something was
no longer viable or had gone wrong to the point that such an extreme
measure was required; thus it is not surprising that most reboots begin with
a new “story of origins” for their main characters. The majority of the time,
reboots appear in character-based franchises; they are done to update long-
running franchises which have become dated over time, and they are usually
done by people other than the original creators of the franchise (which
naturally leads to discussions of canonicity). More often than not, reboots
are done mainly to keep a franchise profitable and allegedly more appealing
to a new generation of audience members, though such changes may
alienate older audiences who still see the value of the original version.
Few authors, if any, reboot their own works, and world-centered
franchises are far less likely to be rebooted than character-centered ones, due
to the fact that a world’s unique appearance is the reason for its popularity,
and its design is either historically situated, or not so closely linked to the
Primary World as to need updating. One notable exception is the Star Trek
reboot that began with the film Star Trek (2009), which positioned itself as a
kind of prequel, with a young Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beginning their
Starfleet careers. The film also attempts to explain the reboot as an “alternate
timeline”, bringing in Leonard Nimoy to play the original version of Spock,
who naturally meets his younger double, resulting in a kind of “passing of
the torch” to the younger Spock played by Zachary Quinto. The presence of
Leonard Nimoy implies his own approval of the reboot, and also insures
some participation from the older generations of audience members who
may dislike the idea of a reboot but still will watch the film to see Nimoy as
Spock. Unlike most reboots, which cannot be considered retcon, since they
make no attempt to connect to the original versions they replace, Star Trek’s
reboot attempts (though perhaps feebly) to connect it to the existing Star
Trek universe, making it a form of retcon, depending on what one makes of
the connection. In any event, such ambiguity shows the crisis that the Star
Trek franchise finds itself in, as it attempts to reinvent itself while still trying
to position new works as an extension of the original.
Worlds within worlds, made by subcreated subcreators, can also be
rebooted; for example, in The Matrix Reloaded (2003), Neo learns from the
Architect that the Machines have rebooted the Matrix several times; and in
Dark City (1998), the Strangers rearrange buildings and implant new
memories in their captives every night at midnight, which essentially
reboots various situations in their constructed city, allowing new
experiments to be run on the human beings imprisoned there.
Reboots and retroactive continuity change a world directly, by altering its
contents, but worlds can also be changed through the context provided by
their surroundings, with the appearance of crossovers and retroactive
linkages, resulting in what are sometimes called “multiverses” or
“metaverses”.

Crossovers, Multiverses, and Retroactive Linkages

“Is Elvis a Star Wars person?”
—Christian Wolf, age 5
The two most common ways to link worlds together are transnarrative
characters (or objects) and geographical (or spatiotemporal) linkages. The
presence of transnarrative characters may imply a geographical linkage or
some sort of spatiotemporal linkage between worlds, which enables
characters to cross from one to the other, but the connection need never be
explained or made explicit. Thus, the term “multiverse” is sometimes used,
which describes the overall structure resulting from the connection of two or
more universes that, though connected, still remain distinct and separate.
“Crossovers” are beings or things that appear in two or more universes or
worlds, suggesting a linkage, and “retroactive linkages” are what we might
call the connections between two worlds which were conceived and made
separately, and not originally intended to be connected. Retroactive linkages
are most commonly found in the work of authors who have created two or
more imaginary worlds and wish to bring them together into one larger
creation, so they can be considered as a form of world-building, especially
when care is taken to maintain consistency when the worlds are joined.
The last section of Chapter 1 has already described how secondary worlds
are often linked in some way to the Primary World, and it is quite common
for characters to pass from Primary World to secondary world and back.
Occasionally, allusions to earlier secondary worlds appear in later ones; for
example, Homer appears as a character in Lucian’s True History, and More’s
Utopia is alluded to in Bacon’s New Atlantis (when one of his characters
says “I have read in a book of one of your men, of a Feigned
Commonwealth”), but one rarely finds early crossovers from one secondary
world to another except for characters who visit different worlds in different
stories by the same author, like the stories in Rabelais’ Gargantua and
Pantagruel series, which do not make geographic connections between their
worlds. The retroactive geographical linking of two separately conceived
imaginary worlds, created by the same author, would have to wait until L.
Frank Baum, who had developed several worlds in his children’s stories and
only afterward decided to connect them as neighbors on the same continent.
This retroactive linking had an effect on the stories set in the linked lands.
As Riley points out:
Later when Baum finally drew all his imaginary countries together into
one fantasy Other-world, Oz was, in general, the benefactor, gaining
depth and reality. However, John Dough and the Cherub is the one non-
Oz fantasy in which the benefits go the other way. When Baum later
placed some of the countries from John Dough into a geographical
relationship with Oz, he added a retroactive coherence to the book that
 was lacking in the story itself. Thus John Dough gains by being read
after one is already familiar with Baum’s total Other-world.26
The lands are joined, characters cross over into Oz from his other books, and
the birthday party in The Road to Oz (1909) features characters from Baum’s
other non-Oz books. Since its appearance, Oz has been the subject of
unauthorized crossovers and alternate versions, in the works of science
fiction authors like Philip José Farmer, Robert Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp,
and Tad Williams, who continue the stories of Baum’s characters and who
bring their own characters into Oz.27 Other books, like John Myers Myers’
Silverlock (1949), have an original imaginary world but populate it with
existing characters from history, mythology, and other works of fiction.28
Other examples of retroactive linkages between worlds would include
Tolkien’s linking of The Hobbit (1937) into his Legendarium, since both were
initially conceived as separate projects. In the realm of comic books, there
are crossovers in series set in the same universe (which are fairly common),
retroactively-linked universes (like Jack Kirby’s “Fourth World” series that
was incorporated into the DC Comics Universe), and even crossovers
between the universes of rival companies; for example, crossovers between
the Marvel Comics Universe and the DC Comics Universe in which
characters from both companies appear together in a story (like Superman
meeting Spider-man, or Batman meeting Wolverine). One notable
combination appears in the four-issue series known as DC vs. Marvel or
Marvel vs. DC, depending on which issue you choose. In it, characters from
both universes come together to fight, with the resulting multiverse called
the “Amalgram Universe”, for which the two companies created the fictional
publisher Amalgam Comics, with its own backstory. Twenty-four issues of
Amalgam Comics were published (half by Marvel and half by DC), which
included characters that were combinations of characters from both
companies: for example, Logan Wayne and his superhero persona Dark Claw
was an amalgam of Batman (Bruce Wayne) and Wolverine (Logan); Hal
Stark and his superhero persona Iron Lantern was an amalgam of Iron Man
(Tony Stark) and Green Lantern (Hal Jordan); and Barbara Gordon Hardy
and her superhero persona Black Bat was an amalgam of Batgirl (Barbara
Gordon) and the Black Cat (Felicia Hardy). Often, however, such crossovers
are explained away as alternate universes, “what if” scenarios, or dreams,
and are either excluded from official timelines or considered noncanonical,
to avoid the continuity problems that would otherwise arise. In Who Framed
Roger Rabbit (1988), characters from numerous cartoon franchises come
together in the same film, in what was the biggest crossover event in
animation history up to that time, but there is relatively little continuity to
disrupt since most animated characters rarely age or follow any kind of
organized timelines at all. Likewise, the Disney video game Kingdom Hearts
(2002) cobbles together its game world by linking original worlds of Disney
films along with others taken from elsewhere, such as Alice’s Wonderland,
Winnie-the-Pooh’s Hundred Acre Wood, and Peter Pan’s Neverland.
Probably the most elaborate example of retroactive linkages resulting in a
multiverse is the so-called Tommy Westphall Universe. Noting crossovers
from one television show to another, fans in on-line forums have linked
together 282 televisions shows, from I Love Lucy (1951–1957) to new
programs still on television as of spring 2012, with lists and a chart
demonstrating how all the shows are connected. One of the connected
shows, St. Elsewhere, had a series finale that ended with a twist which
suggests that the entire show may have taken place in the imagination of an
autistic child named Tommy Westphall, which implies that all the other
connected shows were also a figment of his imagination; hence the name
“Tommy Westphall Universe”.
For example, one can trace connections from I Love Lucy (1951–1957) to
twenty-first century programming: I Love Lucy’s Lucy Ricardo also appears
on The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour (1957–1960), where the Ricardos briefly
share a home with the Danny Williams family, and the Ricardos later visit
them on The Danny Thomas Show (1953–1964). One episode of The Danny
Thomas Show featured Buddy Sorrell from The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961–
1966), who was a writer for the fictional show starring Alan Brady, who
would later narrate a documentary directed by Paul Buchman, one of the
two main characters of Mad About You (1992–1999). Mad About You’s
regular guest character Ursula Buffay is the sister of Phoebe Buffay on
Friends (1994–2004) (and played by the same actress, Lisa Kudrow), and
other Friends characters, Chandler and Joey, interacted with characters from
Caroline and the City (1995–1999). At the end of one episode of Caroline and
the City, Niles Crane and Daphne Moon of Frasier (1993–2004) make an
appearance, and in one episode of Frasier, John Hemingway of The John
Larroquette Show (1993–1996) calls in to Frasier Crane’s radio show. The bus
station where The John Larroquette Show takes place is revealed to have
been built by a company named Yoyodyne (manufacturer of parts of
Federation Starships in the Star Trek universe)29 which also happens to be a
client of the law firm Wolfram & Hart on the television show Angel (1999–
2004), which was a spin-off of the TV series of Buffy the Vampire Slayer
(1997–2003). Spike of Buffy the Vampire Slayer smoked Morley cigarettes,
the fictional brand also smoked by the Cigarette Smoking Man of The X-
Files (1993–2002), as well as by characters on ER (1994–2009), Lost (2004–
2010), Medium (2005–2011), CSI: NY (2004–), and over two dozen other
television shows and movies.30
Of course, one might argue that a common brand of cigarettes, an industry
in-joke and play on “Marleys” (Marlboros), is not enough to constitute a
connection, nor perhaps use of the name “Yoyodyne”, neither of which has
the same crossover strength as a transnarrative character. Disagreeing with
such connections, Brian Weatherson, a Cornell University professor of
philosophy, wrote “Six Objections to the Westphall Hypothesis”, looking at
other interpretations and considerations that question the connections made.
And inconsistencies also arise, when connections do not work the same way
in both directions; Petticoat Junction (1963–1970) and Green Acres (1965–
1971) were both set in the same town of Hooterville, and Petticoat Junction
had many crossovers with The Beverly Hillbillies (1962–1971), while Green
Acres treated The Beverly Hillbillies as a fictional program, and even had an
episode in which the Hooterville Community Theater recreates an episode of
the show as a play, and in a Beverly Hillbillies Thanksgiving episode,
characters from all three shows share a meal together in Hooterville.
Crossovers are often a source of humor, with many not considered
canonical, if indeed consistency and a canon are even attempted.
Retroactive linkages, when taken seriously, are usually between different
works or worlds by the same author, who wishes to consolidate his or her
efforts into one larger, overarching world. Sometimes this can involve
linking two or more secondary worlds, as with the L. Frank Baum example
discussed earlier or it may mean connecting a secondary world to stories set
in the Primary World, as Stephen King does with his multivolume Dark
Tower novel (parts one through seven written 1970–2004) that incorporates
many characters from his other books.31 While retroactive linkages can be
done for artistic reasons (like Tolkien’s use of his developing Legendarium to
provide background and history for a sequel to The Hobbit), it may also be
done for commercial reasons, such as when an author hopes to tie his less
successful books into a popular world he has created, hoping to increase
their sales (which was Baum’s motivation for doing so32). Whatever the
case, retroactive linkages can alter the context and canonicity of a work, and
change how an audience sees a particular world and the overarching
narratives taking place within it; so it must be done carefully, if it is to be
done at all. Another factor that can be introduced that influences all these
things is that of interactivity, which gives the audience the ability to affect
events in a world.

Interactivity and Alternate Storylines

All these diverse styles of image-making have one thing in common—
they have the power to transport the viewer into fantastical otherworlds
where the normal rules don’t apply. It’s like being offered a direct
window into their creator’s imagination. And in the case of computer
games, it gets even more interesting because the audience actually has
the opportunity to climb through the window and interact with this
strange new world.

—Anthony Flack, independent video game developer33

The vicarious inhabitation of an imaginary world often goes hand-in-hand
with the desire to interact within the world, from dollhouses and LEGO
cities to video games and virtual worlds like Second Life (2003). And
interaction most often gives way to narrative involvement, as one becomes
engaged in a world. Interactivity, which is made up of choices, splits
narrative threads into alternate storylines, each of which can be followed,
depending on how decisions are made. And a world must account for these
divergent strands.
Even in traditional, noninteractive worlds, the idea of alternate paths
chosen by characters can be present. When two or more characters with
similar backgrounds and abilities face the same choices but each goes a
different way, we get a sense of how choices affect consequences. For
example, as mentioned in Chapter 3, The Lord of the Rings contains many
pairings of similar characters (like Gandalf/Saruman, Faramir/Boromir,
Aragorn/Denethor, and Bilbo/Gollum) who take diverging paths from
similar decision points. Different sets of actions and consequences help an
audience to more fully understand and appreciate a situation and what
narrative possibilities exist. Likewise, interactive worlds, like those of video
games, let the audience try out difference paths of action and see where they
lead, and then start over again from the same starting point.
Much has been written about the problems and possibilities involved in
the combination of narrative and interactivity.34 Combining a world with
interactivity, however, is a different proposition, since an interactive world
does not require a predetermined narrative, and because the structure of a
world is often more robust when it comes to user-led exploration. The
worlds of MMORPGs are persistent and ongoing, and players can create
their own narratives through their actions and interactions with the other
inhabitants of the world, without an author providing events in a top–down
fashion (such players could also be seen as collaboratively authoring world
events). Video games can be designed with as much or as little narrative as
an author wishes; from an open-ended multiplayer game to a very linear
storyline that the user must find and follow, like the correct path through a
maze (choices are made, but there is ultimately only one correct path).
The relationship between interactivity and immersion in a world depends
greatly on the medium, the medium’s conventions, and the audience’s
expectations of the medium. In traditionally noninteractive media, the
presence of interactivity can make one more aware of the limitations of a
world, and the limits of vicarious participation within it (as in “interactive
movies”). The necessity of having to make choices and use an interface to
indicate them may well distance an audience member and diminish
immersion; for example, if a novel suddenly asks a reader to choose between
alternate storylines, a reader could be thrown out ofa story. On the other
hand, in a video game, interactivity can help make a world seem more real,
through one’s ability to act within it rather than just observe it; and a video
game player, who expects interactivity but finds none or very little of it (as
in some early CD-ROM games like Gadget (1993) and Star Trek: Borg
(1996)), may be frustrated and less likely to become immersed in a game.
Highly interactive worlds, which range from ones using physical models
(like a dollhouse, model train landscape, or city made of building blocks) to
digital ones (like video games or virtual worlds), can be quite immersive due
to the degree of interactivity they offer even when no predetermined
narrative is present.
Imaginary worlds, however, often span multiple media. Some interactive
settings are extensions of worlds which originate in other media, such as
video games based on pre-existing world franchises or playsets based on
characters and settings from movies or television shows. Transmedial
expansion can also move in the other direction; a world which originates in
an interactive medium can spawn extensions in noninteractive media. For
example, the video game Myst (1993) was followed by a series of three
novels, Myst: The Book of Atrus (1995), Myst: The Book of Ti’ana (1996), and
Myst: The Book of D’ni (1997). Either way, changing media expectations and
interactivity levels raise questions regarding the status of a world and the
canonicity of events in that world.
Although all imaginary worlds are imaginary, they vary in their
ontological status. Unlike a world present in a novel or a movie, a persistent
on-line world like Second Life or an MMORPG has a continuing existence
and real-time events, locations and objects represented by mathematical
models, and characters which are avatars controlled by participants who
together perform actions and make decisions that directly affect the world;
therefore such a world is often said to be a virtual world in addition to being
an imaginary world. In these worlds, which are usually not restarted or
reset, one could argue that all events are canonical, since they occur
diegetically within the world in question. Alternatively, one could argue that
by a stricter definition, such worlds do not have canonical events apart from
those “official” ones produced by the author of the world, such as those
found in “expansions” and large-scale events which affect an entire world.
Either way, worlds which appear in multiple media will likely have to adjust
to the varying ontological possibilities offered by each medium.
Canonicity can also be affected by interactivity. A noninteractive world
almost always has a set of specific canonical events, which helps define the
world and the audience’s experience of it: Frodo always takes the Ring to
Mordor, Luke always becomes a Jedi, Neo always defeats Agent Smith, and
so on; these events are fixed parts of their worlds’ histories. An interactive
world can also have specific canonical events; for example, in video games,
the events taking place during cut-scenes that are the same every time and
not altered by gameplay. Likewise, an interactive world can also have what
we could think of as general canonical events: Inky, Pinky, Blinky, and
Clyde always chase Pac-Man; the Qotile always shoots swirls of energy at
enemy Yars; the Master Chief always is attacked by Covenant agents; and
the Space Invaders always advance downward and eventually crush the
player’s cannon. While the specific details of these events vary with each
game, they are still inevitable and always a part of the world. General
canonical events often involve the main conflicts of interactive worlds, and
thus are a constitutive part of the audience’s experience of the world.
Interactive worlds with alternate storylines can also treat some endings as
canonical and others as noncanonical. For example, in Riven (1997), out of
ten possible endings, only the ending in which the player frees Catherine,
allowing her to rejoin Atrus before Riven is destroyed, is canonical, since
Catherine appears later in Myst III: Exile (2001). In such games, the player’s
challenge is to see to it that events play out as they should, resulting in the
one set of events that is considered canonical; all interactivity amounts to
merely exploring a world and keeping events going the way the author has
predestined them to go. By keeping to a set storyline, however, such games
can be more fully joined to their nonin-teractive counterparts in a world’s
history; thus, the events of Riven can occupy a central place in the
franchise’s overarching story.
In contrast, interactive branches of a transmedial world may only play
with characters, locations, and situations, without adding any new events to
a world’s canon. The LEGO Star Wars video games, for example, feature
LEGO versions of the franchise’s characters and locations, and the game’s
cut-scenes are parodic versions of scenes from the films (although they
contain enough information to advance the story along and give away plot
twists). Player–characters engage in activities seen in the films, such as
lightsaber fights and the piloting of vehicles and spaceships, but often in
very different contexts and locations that mimic but do not reproduce those
in the films; the games are essentially three-dimensional platform games
dressed up in Star Wars attire.35 In these kinds of games, canonical events
from other media incarnations of a world are alluded to or even replayed,
but no new canonical material is added to the world.
Interactive branches of a transmedial world, then, vary greatly in their
relationships with their noninteractive counterparts, yet in all cases they
provide the audience a new experience related to the world, and one which
potentially can strengthen the world’s bond with its audience. Even when an
interactive setting is more or less detached from a world, its allusions, like
the jokes in the LEGO Star Wars cut-scenes, can serve to provide a sense of
shared community among fans and perhaps even whet their appetite to re-
experience the world in its other media incarnations. The same can be said
for materials chronicling the behind-the-scenes making of an imaginary
world.

The Story of the World: “making of”

Documentation
Audiences who partake of imaginary worlds are often also interested in the
extradiegetic narrative of their making, in subcreation as a process as well as
a product. Since the 1970s, there has been a proliferation of “Making of”
companion media, including such things as documentaries and featurettes
(now most commonly found as DVD extras), books, magazine articles,
websites, visual dictionaries and other reference works, interviews, TV
specials, trading cards, and other kinds of “extras”. These works usually
provide information about the originator of a world and all the various
assistants who worked on it, creating a story about the building of the world
itself. Typically, these narratives contain such things as the origins and
refinement of the artist’s vision, difficulties in getting approval and backing,
early versions of things which are radically different than the final product,
the development of ideas and designs, the intricacies of production and
attention to detail involved, troubles and changes encountering during
production, later revisions and editing, early assumptions about a work’s
success, and the initial public reception of the work. Enjoyment of the
“Making of” material, then, often brings an even greater appreciation of the
world itself, and invites a revisiting of it within the context of the new
knowledge gained.
“Making of” material can help to point out details that might otherwise be
missed, with still photographs, design drawings, architectural plans,
computergenerated models, and other imagery offering a better look at
costumes, vehicles, creatures, sets and locations, props, and so forth. For
example, an article on Myst in Wired magazine36 describes views that many
players do not find, as well as a mistake in the graphics, while John Knoll’s
Creating the Worlds of Star Wars 365 Days (2005) shows close-ups of control
panel graphics and cluttered countertops that appear in the backgrounds of
scenes, revealing details that cannot be seen as clearly in the films (one
image of Watto’s junkyard even reveals a two-armed pod that appears to be
from the Discovery spaceship from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)).37
Documenting the design process, J. W. Rinzler’s The Making of Star Wars
Revenge of the Sith (2005) includes a behind-the-scenes discussion regarding
the background of a concept design depicting a chase scene on Utapau:
Indicating an Utapau interior, Lucas asks, “What is this signage for?”
“Restaurant?” [Concept Design Supervisor Ryan] Church offers.
“Where is the restaurant? Show me more—how does the restaurant fit
in here?”
“We can be a little more literal.”
“Yeah, because eventually we have to say where they eat and shop,”
Lucas says and then goes into more detail for an unusually long time—
it’s clearly important the artists get this right for next week. He pokes
holes in the ceiling of an Utapau interior to allow for shafts of light. “We
have to figure out how the city falls together. It’s slightly organic, but
they have cars.”38
While attention to such minor details adds to the depth, verisimilitude, and
completeness of a world, they are also worthy of attention precisely because
of the “Making of” material which will ensure that fans are aware of these
details; thus the presence of “Making of” materials can support world-
building even in areas that would otherwise go largely unnoticed.
 “Making of” materials can help demonstrate the consistency of a world as
well, containing such things as explanations and motivations which add to
an audience’s knowledge of a world. For example, Knoll’s Creating the
Worlds of Star Wars 365 Days features an overhead map of the entire pod
racing course from Episode I and a reference map of the section of
Coruscant seen in the airspeeder chase from Episode II.39 Both maps, the
features of which are described in detail, show the overall spatial
relationships and the care taken to connect everything together, even though
no more than a small part of each is glimpsed in any given shot in either
sequence. Even in cases where an entire design is not built, but only those
parts needed for the areas shown, maps and layouts give a sense that the
object in question (like a location, vehicle, or building) was still imagined
and designed in its entirety, such that it could have been incarnated (or
could be in a future installment of a world). A well-designed world already
gives us glimpses and implies unseen areas, and the existence of designs,
even behind-the-scenes ones, further provides a sense of completeness and
consistency.
Finally, “Making of” material can also add new content (even canonical
content) to a world.40 Christopher Tolkien’s 12-volume History of Middle-
earth series, based on his father’s manuscripts, is perhaps one of the most
extensive “Making of” documentations in literature. Over the 12 volumes,
the development of J. R. R. Tolkien’s world is traced with writings from six
decades, including additional poems, stories, drawings, etymological data,
partial drafts, and revisions, many of which add to Tolkien’s world,
including The New Shadow, the start of a sequel to The Lord of the Rings.
While the canonicity of such additions is debatable, since they were left
unpublished (and many unfinished) at the time of the author’s death, they
add further depth and context and give some idea of what Tolkien might
have done had he lived longer. Even in his letters (many of which could also
be considered “Making of” material), one finds additional material which is
arguably canonical, due to the fact that it was sent to someone (usually in
answer to a question) and to the air of certainty that it often contains. For
example, in a letter to a Mrs. Meriel Thurston in 1972, Tolkien writes:
 I should be interested to hear what names you eventually choose (as
individual names?) for your bulls; and interested to choose or invent
suitable names myself, if you wish. The elvish word for “bull” doesn’t
appear in any published work; it was MUNDO.41
Of course, “mundo” eventually did appear in a published work, The Letters
of J. R. R. Tolkien (1981). The notion that more material regarding an
imaginary world exists in an unpublished state encourages the hope that it
will one day see publication, and leads to speculation as to what else may
remain hidden waiting to be discovered and made public, working against
the idea that one has seen all there is to see of a world.
Narrative, then, holds a world together at different scales, as it structures
individual works that make up a world, links different works set in a world,
and occasionally, links separate worlds together into multiverses.
Extradiegetically, there is also the “making of” narrative of the building of
the world, which over time can include the revision and rebuilding of the
world, in the form of retcon and reboots. Narratives about the building of
imaginary worlds, however, can also occur within a diegesis, if characters
within a story are themselves building an imaginary world. A story can be
about subcreation, and about subcreators who themselves live within an
imaginary world, which is the subject of the next chapter.

OceanofPDF.com
5
SUBCREATION WITHIN SUBCREATED
WORLDS

Why should you desire to be Empress of a Material World, and be

troubled with the cares that attend Government? When as by creating a
World within your self, you may enjoy all both in whole and in parts,
without controle [sic] or opposition; and may make what World you
please, and alter it when you please, and enjoy as much pleasure and
delight as a World can afford you? You have converted me, said the
Duchess to the Spirits, from my ambitious desire; wherefore, I’le [sic]
take your advice, reject and despise all the Worlds without me, and
create a World of my own.
—Margaret Cavendish, The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-
World (1666)
1

The makers of subcreated worlds often reference or acknowledge their

predecessors and the worlds that have gone before them: Lucian features
Homer as a character in his True History; a character in Bacon’s New
Atlantis (1626) makes a reference to More’s Utopia; Morpheus of The Matrix
(1999) makes several allusions to Alice in Wonderland; a character in Arthur
C. Clarke’s 3001: The Final Odyssey (1997) refers to “those old Star Trek
Programs”2; and Henry Darger’s story of the Vivian girls borrows from the
works of a number of world-builders, including Dante, John Bunyan, Robert
Louis Stevenson, Jules Verne, and L. Frank Baum. Some authors’ works go
even farther, including subcreation as a theme within an imaginary world,
and these worlds feature characters who are themselves subcreators, giving
an author an opportunity to comment on the nature of subcreation and what
it means to make a world.
 Quite often, subcreated subcreators are also able to enter their own
subcreated worlds, sometimes resulting in convoluted ontological
hierarchies. Subcreated subcreators have different motivations for making
worlds, and some of their worlds’ inhabitants are taken from the Primary
World, voluntarily or involuntarily (occasionally these inhabitants do not
even realize that they are in a secondary world). The abuse of subcreation,
represented by evil subcreators, is also a theme one finds. This chapter, then,
examines subcreation within subcreated worlds, and the reflections and
explorations of the authors and diegetic characters who are involved in
world-building activities.

Importance of the Word

In the beginning was the Word…
—John 1:1
Then God said, “Let there be light”, and there was light.
—Genesis 1:3
Like the Fiat Lux of Genesis, most subcreated worlds find their origins in
words, whether as descriptive text, a novel outline, a screenplay treatment,
lines of computer code, or even an invented language. In a sense, all
storytelling, with its authoritative narration, calls narrative worlds into
fictional existence in a similar way; writing about “World Construction as
Performative Force”, literary theorist Lubomír Doležel states:
Where does the narrative’s authentication authority originate? It has the
same grounding as any other performative authority—convention. In the
actual world, this authority is given by social, mostly institutional,
systems; in fiction, it is inscribed in the norms of the narrative genre. Let
us note that all discourse features of the authoritative narrative are
negative: it lacks truth-value, identifiable subjective source (it is
“anonymous”), and spatiotemporal situation (the speech-act is
contextless). This annulling of all the typical features of natural discourse
is a precondition for the performative force to work automatically. If this
negativity reminds the reader of “God’s word”, so be it. It is precisely the
 divine world-creating word that provides the model for the authoritative
narrative and its performative force.3
Words can have a performative force within diegetic worlds as well. In
Tolkien’s mythology, the world is sung into being through the Music of the
Ainur (and words were the inspiration behind Tolkien’s world itself, which
was designed to provide a home for his invented languages and the cultures
and mythology arising from them). In many fantasy worlds, magical
incantations are used to bring things into being, and in science fiction
worlds, words often have similar powers, whether as passwords that allow
access or words of computer code that create, alter, or destroy, as the streams
of computer code do in the Matrix films. The speaking of true names also
holds power in folklore and in the worlds of Vernor Vinge’s “True Names”,
Andre Norton’s Witch World series, Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea stories, and
many others, where the knowing and using of someone’s real name holds
power over them.
Perhaps the best example of the performative force of the word within a
subcreated world is the use of words in the Art of Writing of the fallen D’ni
civilization found in the Myst franchise. The D’ni write Descriptive Books,
which describe the details and structure of a world, or “Age” (the term has
no temporal meaning, though it does invoke a sense of otherness and
remoteness). Next they write associated linking books, each of which
contains an image from the Age on the first page, a live, moving image that
will transport the user to the Age described in the Descriptive Book if one
places one’s hand on the image. The entire D’ni civilization is based on these
books, and the Myst stories revolve around their use. Early on when the
Myst mythology was begun, the Miller brothers decided, taking a stance
similar to Tolkien’s idea of subcreation, that it would not be right to claim
that the D’ni were creating ex nihilo, like God. Thus, the mythology was
designed so that, instead of creating the worlds written in them, the
Descriptive Books and linking books are said to connect to pre-existing
worlds, which exist before the D’ni books describe them and link to them,
bringing the Myst franchise’s mythology more in line with Christian
theology.
To explain the possible confusion between “created worlds” and “pre-
existing worlds” diegetically, the Millers suggested that one of the central
characters, Gehn, misconstrued what the books were actually doing. Both
Myst: The Book of Atrus and the game Riven (1997) are about Gehn, a
surviving D’ni who tries to revive the Art of Writing and believes he is
creating the Ages the books describe (especially because he was able to
develop his test Ages, very short books which linked to pre-existing Ages
that matched his descriptions). He teaches his son Atrus the Art of Writing,
but Atrus later realizes that his father is wrong about how the books work:
The thought was one he had more and more often these past few
months. A dangerous, unspoken thought.
And yet the more I discover about Writing, the more I challenge my
father’s view that we are creating the worlds we travel in.
What if they weren’t so much making those worlds as linking to pre-
existing possibilities?
At first he had dismissed the notion as a foolish one. Of course they
had created these worlds. They had to be! How else would they come
into being in such precise and predictable forms? Besides, it was simply
not possible that an infinite supply of different worlds existed out there,
waiting to be tapped. Yet, the more he thought about it, the more he had
come to question his father’s simpler explanation.4
Even though the books link to pre-existing worlds, the words in them still
have the performative force of opening a portal. Only a few phrases are
enough to connect to a world.5 And the text written in a book connects to
the linked world so precisely, that Writing must be considered very
cautiously. As Gehn tells Atrus:
… I do want you to begin to grip the relationship between the words that
are written on the page and the complex entity—the physical, living Age
—that results. You see, while our Art is a precise one, its effects are often
quite surprising, owing to the complexity of the web of relationships that
are created between things. The meaning of an individual phrase can be
altered by the addition of other phrases, often to the extent that the
original description bears no relation whatsoever to the resultant reality.
That is why the D’ni were so adamant about contradictions.
 Contradictions can destroy an Age. Too often they simply make it break
apart under the strain of trying to resolve the conflicting instructions.6
In the world of the D’ni, the written word has subcreative power beyond the
power to invoke a secondary world, since the Ages involved can be
physically traveled to by their subcreators, which also makes consistency
even more important. Subcreators physically visiting the worlds they create
is a theme frequently found in the imaginary-world tradition, and a form of
self-reflexivity.

Self-reflexivity
When a world is fully imagined, the subcreative act takes a certain amount
of effort and contemplation, so it is not surprising that it should itself be the
inspiration behind some authors’ works, providing ideas for their content
and themes; thus the activities of diegetic subcreators sometimes mirror the
processes of subcreation carried on by their authors. For example, the D’ni
Art of Writing as described above is analogous to the computer
programming done during the creation of the Myst games. Like the
Descriptive Books within the games, the CD-ROMs containing the Myst
games contain the computer code that both describes and calls into being
the worlds of the games; and the above-mentioned quote of Gehn’s,
regarding contradictions, could equally be applied to the art of computer
programming. Both the D’ni language and computer code are unlike spoken
language, extremely precise in their phrasing, and must be free of
contradictions in order to avoid strange results or unstable worlds. The
point-and-click use of the mouse and cursor is similar to the placing of a
hand on the linking image, and the games’ cursor is actually shaped like a
hand when the user uses it to click on a book’s linking image within the
games. The games’ content imitates the form of the games and the interface
they use, tying the user’s experience more firmly into the secondary world
along with more conventional means like direct address.
Likewise, the holodeck in the Star Trek universe functions as a portal to a
subcreated world that one can physically enter; it is an empty room that can
be programmed to simulate an environment that surrounds the user and
allows interaction, through a combination of holography, force fields, tractor
beams, and replicated matter (see Figure 5.1). People who write for the
holodeck are known as holonovelists, a profession that one Star Trek:
Voyager (1995–2001) character, Tom Paris, took up once the USS Voyager
returned to Earth. Holodeck users can converse with simulated characters
and interact with the imaginary world the holodeck presents, and as every
Star Trek fan knows, the holodeck can malfunction, leaving characters
trapped within it, sometimes with the safety protocols turned off, resulting
in situations with real danger (for example, in “A Fistful of Datas” (Season 6,
Episode 8) of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–1994), Worf suffers from
a gunshot wound he receives in the holodeck).
When it is turned off, the holodeck is shown as an empty, rectangular
room, with grids on the walls, floor, and ceiling. Apart from the grids, the
large empty space is similar to a soundstage, which of course the holodeck
set itself is. The spaces of both the soundstage and the holodeck temporarily
become other places once the scenery and set pieces appear in them, and
both spaces can be made to include broad vistas that evoke a sense of much
wider spaces than the room would actually allow. The space itself is also one
of pretend for its participants, who dress in the appropriate costumes before
entering, and yet that sense of pretend can still be interrupted by tragic real
world events when something goes wrong (for example, actor Brandon Lee
dying from a gunshot wound on the film set of The Crow (1994) when a prop
gun fired at him during a scene was improperly prepared).
FIGURE 5.1 Commander William T. Riker enters the holodeck during a
jungle simulation in “Encounter at Farpoint” (Season 1, Episode 1) of Star
Trek: The Next Generation (1987–1994).

Other spaces, like the virtual places that the characters enter in The
Matrix, are similarly shown to be constructs made from computer code, just
like the computer-generated imagery used to fill in the greenscreen
backgrounds behind actors. Like the holodeck, characters can face real
dangers and even die within The Matrix’s computer-generated worlds,
which seems to be a common ontological feature of many computer-
generated worlds that characters can enter (characters can also die within
the virtual worlds of Tron (1982), The Lawnmower Man (1992), VR Troopers
(1994–1996), Virtuosity (1995), and others). The ability to enter virtual worlds
within a diegesis open up narrative possibilities, but without the threat of
possible death, narrative tension would be lost.
Another form of self-reflexivity is authorship attributed to characters
within the text. Within Tolkien’s Middle-earth, Bilbo is said to be the author
of The Hobbit, and later, along with Frodo and Sam, the author of the
fictional Red Book of Westmarch, which is, of course, The Lord of the Rings
itself. As Verlyn Flieger describes it:
Carrying the conceit about as far as it will go, Tolkien inserted his own
name into the header and footer on the title-page of The Lord of the
Rings (and thus into the history of the “book”), not as the author of the
book but as its final transmitter/redactor. What appears to the first-time
or untutored reader to be simply Tolkienian embellishment is in fact a
running inscription in Tolkien’s invented scripts of Cirth and Tengwar. It
can be put into English as follows: “The Lord of the Rings TRANSLATED
FROM THE RED BOOK [in Cirth] OF WESTMARCH BY JOHN
RONALD REUEL TOLKIEN HEREIN IS SET FORTH THE HISTORY OF
THE WAR OF THE RINGS AND THE RETURN OF THE KING AS SEEN
BY THE HOBBITS [in Tengwar].” He is not inventing the story, the
running script announces, he is merely translating and recording.7
Flieger goes on to compare the writing of the Red Book of Westmarch with
the writing of The Lord of the Rings, looking at the various editions and its
“traceable genealogy”, and also points out that Tolkien, in a 1966 interview
with Richard Plotz, suggested that The Silmarillion could be published as
Bilbo’s “research in Rivendell”.8
The many and various self-reflexive moments in which Tolkien’s
characters reflect on or discuss the story they are in and the nature of such
stories in general are examined in detail in Mary Bowman’s essay “The Story
Was Already Written: Narrative Theory in The Lord of the Rings”9 so I will
not enumerate them here. But the most self-reflexive figure within Tolkien’s
oeuvre regarding subcreation appears in his short story “Leaf by Niggle”.
Niggle, a painter, is working on a large painting of a tree, which is an
allegory (a rare one, as Tolkien usually disliked allegory) of the subcreative
process involved in the creation of Tolkien’s own imaginary world. Tolkien
describes Niggle’s painting, writing:
He had a number of pictures on hand; most of them were too large and
ambitious for his skill. He was the sort of painter who can paint leaves
better than trees. He used to spend a long time on a single leaf, trying to
catch its shape, and its sheen, and the glistening of dewdrops on its
 edges. Yet, he wanted to paint a whole tree, with all of its leaves in the
same style, and all of them different.
There was one picture in particular which bothered him. It had begun
with a leaf caught in the wind, and it became a tree; and the tree grew,
sending out innumerable branches, and thrusting out the most fantastic
roots. Strange birds came and settled on the twigs and had to be
attended to. Then all round the Tree, and behind it, through the gaps in
the leaves and boughs, a country began to open out; and there were
glimpses of a forest marching over the land, and of mountains tipped
with snow. Niggle lost interest in his other pictures; or else he took them
and tacked them on to the edges of his great picture. Soon the canvas
became so large that he had to get a ladder; and he ran up and down it,
putting in a touch here, and rubbing out a patch there. When people
came to call, he seemed polite enough, though he fiddled a little with the
pencils on his desk. He listened to what they said, but underneath he
was thinking all the time about his big canvas, in the tall shed that had
been built for it out in his garden (on a plot where once he had grown
potatoes).10
Niggle’s painting of individual leaves and his desire to paint an entire tree is
similar to Tolkien’s love of myth and his desire to develop an entire
mythology of linked stories; and the manner in which the tree begins and
grows is also analogous to the gradual way that his legendarium developed,
both in the way new tales grew out of existing ones (“sending out
innumerable branches”) and the way backstories grew to support his
cultures (“thrusting out the most fantastic roots”). In his letters,11 Tolkien
mentions how characters sometimes appeared that he had not anticipated,
like the Black Riders, Strider, Saruman, the Stewards of Gondor, and
Faramir; these could be seen as the “strange birds that settled on the twigs
and had to be attended to”. The country that “began to open out” through
glimpses in the “gaps in the leaves and boughs” could represent further
details of the imaginary world being built around the story, the filling in of
the background around it (quite the opposite of the “painter’s algorithm”, in
which the background is done first and the foreground painted on top of it
afterward). The pictures “tacked on” the edge of the great picture could
allude to how works like The Hobbit (1937) and the poem The Adventures of
Tom Bombadil (1934) were pulled into the mythology and made a part of it,
and last two sentences quoted might be a description of how Tolkien himself
was distracted by the creation of his world.
Self-reflexivity, whether it refers to the world or the world-building
process, and ranging as it does from subtle analogy to thinly-veiled
autobiography, allows an author to comment on the subcreative process and
its relationship to the world it produces; and perhaps the greatest device for
doing so (though it is often more reflexive than self-reflexive) is the presence
of a subcreated subcreator.

Subcreated Subcreators and Diegetic World-

building
Some subcreators appear as characters within the worlds they create; for
example, in Henry Darger’s book The Story of the Vivian Girls, Darger
appears as a character and his book appears as well and is read by other
characters in his world. Likewise, in Mark Hogancamp’s one-sixth-scale
town of Marwencol which he built in his yard and photographs, one of the
dolls represents Hogancamp himself, and the end of Jeff Malmberg’s
documentary Marwencol (2010) shows that the Hogancamp doll is also
building a one-sixth-scale town and photographing it. Nevertheless, most
subcreated subcreators are not quite as self-reflexive, and are merely
characters in the author’s world.
Characters have always been writers, storytellers, and creators, and many
have discussed hypothetical places or visited imaginary worlds; but the
actual making of an imaginary world by a character was slower to develop.
Socrates describes his Kallipolis in detail in Plato’s Republic (c. 380 BC) and
some nobleman make Sancho Panza the governor of the fictional island of
Barataria (which is really a town) as a joke in the second part of Don
Quixote, but in neither case does a character actually bring about an
imaginary world that can be visited by that character or others. Probably the
first instance of characters actually subcreating an imaginary world which
they or other characters can visit is in Margaret Cavendish’s The Description
of a New World, Called the Blazing-World (1666), from which the opening
quote of this chapter was taken. The story’s characters make their own
worlds and discuss the making of them as well, and the various possibilities
open to them.
Although characters who are subcreators can tell stories set in imaginary
worlds (like the town of Chewandswallow in Cloudy with a Chance of
Meatballs (1978)) or simply imagine a world (like Deborah Blau’s Kingdom
of Yr, made to help her deal with her schizophrenia in I Never Promised You
a Rose Garden (1964)), most subcreated subcreators make worlds that they,
or other characters, can actually travel into, in one form or another. These
types of worlds, and the means by which they are made, result in five
additional types of subcreated subcreators: characters who build physical
worlds using natural means; characters who build virtual worlds using
natural means; characters who dream of worlds; characters who subcreate
using supernatural tools; and characters who have inherent supernatural
subcreative powers. The worlds produced by each of these have different
limitations and sometimes different ontological dimensions, both of which
need to be addressed in the stories that take place in and around them.
Characters who build physical worlds using natural means, a very literal
and concrete approach to diegetic world-building, can be found as early as
1869, in Edward Everett Hale’s short story “The Brick Moon”. The story
involves the building of an artificial satellite for navigational aid, a moon
built from bricks. When the satellite launches, there are still people aboard it
who accidentally get sent into space with it. However, since the moon takes
an atmosphere with it, the people survive, and even begin a new world,
which is described in a series of dispatches from the moon people. As the
story’s narrator writes about their growing world on the brick moon:
Now, however, that it proved that in a tropical climate they were
forming their own soil, developing their own palms, and eventually even
their bread-fruit and bananas, planting their own oats and maize, and
developing rice, wheat, and all other cereals, harvesting these six, eight,
or ten times—for aught I could see—in one of our years,—why, then,
there was no danger of famine for them. If, as I thought, they carried up
with them heavy drifts of ice and snow in the two chambers which were
not covered in when they started, why, they had waters in their
firmament quite sufficient for all purposes of thirst and of ablution. And
 what I had seen of their exercise showed that they were in strength
sufficient for the proper development of their little world.12
Hale’s story begins a planet-building tradition in science fiction, in which
artificial planets are made by civilizations with advanced technology and the
ability to manipulate large masses of matter and construct gigantic
structures, which often involve very different forms of planetary
architecture. Such a civilization appears in Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker
(1937):
…the Symbiotics … armed with their highly developed physical sciences
and with sub-atomic power, they were able to construct, out in space,
artificial planets for permanent habitation. These great hollow globes of
artificial super-metals, and artificial transparent adamant, ranged in size
from the earliest and smallest structures, which were no bigger than a
very small asteroid, to spheres considerably larger than the Earth. They
were without external atmosphere, since their mass was generally too
slight to prevent the escape of gases. A blanket of repelling force
protected them from meteors and cosmic rays. The planet’s external
surface, which was wholly transparent, encased the atmosphere…. One
very small and rather uncommon kind of artificial world consisted
almost wholly of water. It was like a titanic bowl of gold-fish. Beneath
its transparent shell, studded with rocket-machinery and interplanetary
docks, lay a spherical ocean, crossed by structural girders, and constantly
impregnated with oxygen. A small solid core represented the sea
bottom…13
Other structures include a miniature tabletop planet created in a laboratory
in Jack Williamson’s “The Pygmy Planet” (1932), a ring-like planet that
encircles the star it orbits in the Ringworld series by Larry Niven, and the
five-layered world in the World of Tiers series by Philip José Farmer. The
latter series goes beyond mere creation of planets to the making of “pocket
universes” by the powerful Thoans, who can even create different laws of
physics in each little universe they make.
As mentioned in Chapter 1, “world” need not refer to an entire planet, but
rather the realm of a character’s experiences, so diegetic world-building can
occur on a smaller scale as well. In the novels Time Out of Joint (1959) and
Captive Universe (1969) and the films Dark City (1998), The Truman Show
(1998), and The Village (2004), town-sized worlds are physically built to
house inhabitants who are not aware of the fact that they are in a small,
artificial world set apart from the Primary World. The boundaries of these
towns are made impassable to their trapped residents, who gradually
discover their imprisonment and the fact that certain other inhabitants are
aware of what is going on.
Although they are subcreations from the extradiegetic perspective of the
audience, worlds that characters physically build by natural means are
merely world-building projects from the characters’ point of view, since they
are not building a secondary world so much as they are reshaping a part of
the Primary World. On the other hand, characters who build virtual worlds
using natural means are performing an activity which could be considered
subcreation even from within the diegetic world of the story. These kinds of
worlds only appeared once a technology for creating them was available,
namely the computer. Early examples of them include Delmark-O of Philip
K. Dick’s A Maze of Death (1970), the Other Plane of Vernor Vinge’s short
story “True Names” (1981), and the Grid from the film Tron (1982). In 1982,
William Gibson’s short story “Burning Chrome” introduced his on-line
world of cyberspace, which would be the setting of his novel Neuromancer
(1984), while “cyberspace” would become the term used to describe the on-
line world in general. Other diegetic virtual worlds since then include Star
Trek’s holodeck, and the on-line worlds of eXistenZ (1999) and The Matrix
films, and Sapphire, a virtual planet in Greg Egan’s short story “Crystal
Nights” (2008) which, like Williamson’s Pygmy planet, was designed to test
theories of evolution. As mentioned earlier, these worlds, although virtual
even within the diegesis, must be designed to pose real dangers in order to
be narratively interesting. Thus, either characters must either be zapped
electronically into the world (as in Tron), or go in virtually but face the real
possibility of death (as in The Matrix), or risk the virtual world inhabitants
becoming sentient (as in Star Trek: The Next Generation) and escaping from
their confines (as in “Crystal Nights”). One of Star Trek’s holodeck episodes,
“Ship in a Bottle”, even featured a holodeck character who appeared to be
able to leave the holodeck, but he had in fact created a program that
simulated the Enterprise within the holodeck, resulting in a holodeck-
within-a-holodeck that fools the crew initially.
The need for the possibility of real danger within an imaginary world also
occurs in the case of characters who dream worlds. The simplest way to
create this possibility is to not reveal that the world is only a dream until the
end of the story. One of the first examples of this strategy, Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge
Dodgson), presented an imaginary world, Wonderland, which turns out to be
Alice’s dream; both the reader and Alice herself only realize this when she
wakes up at the story’s end. Technically speaking, an imaginary world made
by dreaming can be considered a subcreated world, since it is the product of
a character’s imagination, though it is often not through a deliberate act; but
it does solve all the problems regarding the visiting of a diegetically-
subcreated world (we are led to believe that Alice physically enters
Wonderland, but it turns out not to be the case; this device is also used in
Carroll’s sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There
(1871)). Other imaginary worlds positioned as dreams from which the main
character awakens include Winsor McCay’s Slumberland and H. P.
Lovecraft’s Dreamworld (also known as Dreamlands), both of which are
traveled to multiple times by their stories’ protagonists (Little Nemo and
Randolph Carter, respectively). However, some dream worlds have a more
solid ontological status than others do. Although it is called a dream world,
Lovecraft’s world is not a diegetically subcreated world, insofar as his world
(as it later turns out) does not appear to be merely the creation of Carter’s
slumbering mind; other humans like Richard Upton Pickman and King
Kuranes, both of whom are Carter’s friends from the Primary World, also
travel or reside there, implying an existence of some kind outside of Carter’s
dreams.14 Thus, a world can first appear to be something that one has
dreamt, only to be revealed later as something that actually exists outside of
the dreamer. In such cases, the dreamers are only finding portals to other
worlds, not creating them.
A similar situation can exist among characters who subcreate using
supernatural tools. The D’ni Art of Writing, discussed in the last section, is
an example of characters using a subcreative technology they know how to
use but do not fully understand; thus, it can exist as part of the world’s
premise without further explanation. Although it may be argued that when
Atrus, Gehn, and others write Ages that they, like Lovecraft’s dreamers, are
not creating worlds but merely opening portals into them, certain moments
in the stories (like when Atrus attempts to make changes to Riven to fix its
instability) imply subcreative powers beyond merely that of a portal. As
implied by Arthur C. Clarke’s famous dictum, “Sufficiently advanced
technology is indistinguishable from magic”, sometimes it is difficult to tell
whether advanced world-building technology is supernatural or not. Robert
Wolff, the main character in Philip José Farmer’s The Maker of Universes
(1965), correctly suspects that the universe-building technology he
encounters is scientific not supernatural, but he is not sure at first.
Subcreational tools with a supernatural origin allow for the building of
worlds which are more substantial than dream worlds or virtual worlds, and
which are at the same time are not merely reshapings of the Primary World.
The fact that the subcreational powers reside in the tools rather than their
users means that the characters can remain ordinary humans (or something
similar to ordinary humans), allowing the audience to identify with them
more easily.
Characters who have inherent supernatural subcreative powers are
perhaps among the rarest of subcreated subcreators, as they are typically
supernatural beings or humans given supernatural abilities. The first such
example of the latter can be found in Cavendish’s The Description of a New
World, Called the Blazing-World. The main character, the Lady, travels to an
imaginary world, the Blazing-World, and marries the Emperor and becomes
Empress. Later, she sends for the soul of the Duchess of Newcastle (the title
held by Cavendish herself, though her own name does not appear in the
story) who becomes her spiritual scribe. The Duchess later expresses her
desire to be the Empress of a world, and is told that she need not conquer a
world, but that she “can create an Immaterial World fully inhabited by
Immaterial Creatures”. The Empress and the Duchess then each set about
creating their own imaginary worlds. The Duchess tries patterning her world
after various philosophies, encountering problems with each one, until she
finally decides to come up with the pattern herself:
At last, when the Duchess saw that no patterns would do her any good
in the framing of her World; she was resolved to make a World of her
 own Invention, and this World was composed of sensitive and rational
self-moving Matter; indeed, it was composed onely [sic] of the Rational,
which is the subtilest [sic] and purest degree of Matter; for as the
Sensitive did move and act both to the perceptions and consistency of
the body, so this degree of Matter at the same point of time (for though
the degrees are mixt, yet the several parts may move several ways at one
time) did move to the Creation of the Imaginary World; which World
after it was made, appear’d so curious and full of variety, so well order’d
and wisely govern’d, that it cannot possibly be expressed by words, nor
the delight and pleasure which the Duchess took in making this World-
of-her-own.
In the mean time, the Empress was also making and dissolving several
Worlds in her own mind, and was so puzled [sic], that she could not
settle in any of them; wherefore she sent for the Duchess, who being
ready to wait on the Empress, carried her beloved World along with her,
and invited the Empress’s Soul to observe the Frame, Order and
Government of it. Her Majesty was so ravished with the perception of it,
that her Soul desired to live in the Duchess’s World: But the Duchess
advised her to make such another World in her own mind; for, said she,
your Majesty’s mind is full of rational corporeal motions; and the
rational motions of my mind shall assist you by the help of sensitive
expressions, with the best Instructions they are able to give you.15
Here we have not only the subcreation of a world that a character can enter
into, but two subcreators who discuss world-building, examine each other’s
worlds, and, in a later section, discuss the Primary World in relation to the
secondary worlds. The Duchess’s world, however, is not described in detail,
and the fact that it was made of the “purest degree of Matter” which can
“move several ways at one time”, with an appearance that “cannot possibly
be expressed by words”, left little room for further description or
development.
Like the use of advanced technology, characters may exhibit magical
subcreative powers without understanding them or controlling them. In
Edith Nesbit’s The Magic City (1910), Philip, a boy, builds two cities out of
blocks and household objects, only to find himself later inside one of the
cities:
He gazed on it [the city] for a moment in ecstasy and then turned to
shut the door. As he did so he felt a slight strange giddiness and stood a
moment with his hand to his head. He turned and went again towards
the city, and when he was close to it he gave a little cry, hastily stifled,
for fear some one should hear him and come down and send him to bed.
He stood and gazed about him bewildered and, once more, rather giddy.
For the city had, in a quick blink of light, followed by darkness,
disappeared. So had the drawing room. So had the chair that stood close
to the table. He could see mountainous shapes raising enormous heights
in the distance, and the moonlight shone on the tops of them. But he
himself seemed to be in a vast, flat plain. There was the softness of long
grass round his feet, but there were no trees, no houses, no hedges or
fences to break the expanse of grass. It seemed darker in some parts than
others. That was all. It reminded him of the illimitable prairie of which
he had read in books of adventure.
“I suppose I’m dreaming,” said Philip, “though I don’t see how I can
have gone to sleep just while I was turning the door handle. However—”
He stood still expecting that something would happen. In dreams
something always does happen, if it’s only that the dream comes to an
end. But nothing happened now—Philip just stood there quite quietly
and felt the warm soft grass round his ankles.16
Although Nesbit tells us that it is not a dream, little explanation is given,
although in Chapter 2 a character says that “a sort of self-acting magic rather
difficult to explain” is partly responsible, and gives us a glimpse of the cities’
creation from the residents’ point of view:
As soon as the cities were built and the inhabitants placed here the life
of the city began, and it was, to those who lived it, as though it had
always been. The artisans toiled, the musicians played, and the poets
sang. The astrologers, finding themselves in a tall tower evidently
designed for such a purpose, began to observe the stars and to
prophesy.17
The cities’ past is thus created along with the present, yet at the same time,
the speaker, a resident himself, seems aware of what happened. Nesbit’s
story never attributes its magic to a source, though earlier in the story, as
Philip begins to build his cities, a supernatural one is hinted at:
A bronze Egyptian god on a black and gold cabinet seemed to be looking
at him from across the room.
“All right,” said Philip. “I’ll build you a temple. You wait a bit.” The
bronze god waited and the temple grew, and two silver candlesticks,
topped by chessmen, served admirably as pillars for the portico.18
In most cases, the only characters with inherent subcreative powers under
their control are godlike beings, like the gods of Dunsany’s Pegāna or
Tolkien’s Ainur. The Ainur are the angelic beings who receive themes of
music from Eru Ilúvatar (God), and together fashion the themes into a great
music, which Ilúvatar then shows them:
But when they were come into the Void, Ilúvatar said to them: “Behold
your Music!” And he showed to them a vision, giving to them sight
where before was only hearing; and they saw a new World made visible
before them, and it was globed amid the Void, and it was sustained
therein, but was not of it. And as they looked and wondered this World
began to unfold its history, and it seemed to them that it lived and
grew.19
Some of the Ainur decide to go into the new universe, Eä, and become the
Valar, the “Powers of the World”. Once they do, they must subcreate Arda,
the world itself:
But when the Valar entered into Eä they were at first astounded and at a
loss, for it was as if naught was yet made which they had seen in vision,
and all was but on point to begin and yet unshaped, and it was dark. For
the Great Music had been but the growth and flowering of thought in
the Timeless Halls, and the Vision only a foreshowing; but now they had
entered in at the beginning of Time, and the Valar perceived that the
World had been but foreshadowed and foresung, and they must achieve
 it. So began their great labours in wastes unmeasured and unexplored,
and in ages uncounted and forgotten…20
After the Valar enter into the world, they reside in Valinor, a land that later
becomes inaccessible to the Men of Middle-earth, and by the time of The
Lord of the Rings, the Valar’s role is an indirect one.
An example of more direct interaction with a diegetically-subcreated
world can be found in E. R. Eddison’s A Fish Dinner in Memison (1941), the
second book in his Zimiamvia trilogy. The novel begins by intercutting
chapters (and even parts of chapters) following two storylines; that of
Edward Lessingham and Mary Scarnside on Earth, and the other of King
Mezentius and his court in Zimiamvia. Edward and Mary’s story is one of
romance and marriage in tumultuous early twentieth-century Europe and of
Edward’s battle with despair after his wife’s untimely death in a train crash,
while the other storyline follows the political machinations and intrigues of
Zimiamvia involving King Mezentius and his vassals and the Lady Fiorinda.
The latter storyline ends with the fish dinner of the title, in which the Lady
Fiorinda challenges King Mezentius to build a world according to her
wishes:
The King’s hands, beautiful to watch in the play of their able subtle
strength, were busied before him on the table. Presently he opened them
slowly apart. Slowly, in even measure with their parting, the world of
his making grew between them: a thing of most aery seeming substance,
ensphered, glimmering of a myriad colours where the eye rested oblique
on it, but, being looked to more directly, all mirk, darkling, and unsure.
And within it, depth beneath depth: wherein appeared as if a seething
and a churning together and apart continual of the dark and the
bright.21
After discussing the nature of the lives and deaths of the people who will
live in the King’s world, Fiorinda proposes that she and the King go in and
enter it, so as to know from within what it is like to live there. We soon find
that the two storylines have merged, and that Edward and Mary are the
lives taken on by the King and Fiorinda within the world, and that our
world, the Primary World, is the world created at King Mezentius’s fish
dinner. Upon returning from the world, as the King is still recovering from
his sorrow, “They looked for a minute at the unsure thing on the table before
them. “Fifty more years, afterwards, I wrought there,” said the King; “yet
here, what was it? the winking of an eyelid…”22 By not revealing the nested
nature of the worlds until the end, the Lessinghams’ story is all the more
effective, and Edward’s mourning carries more weight since we, like the
characters, do not realize the true nature of the situation. Later, when the
world is discarded, Fiorinda suggests that the King could always make a
better one if he chose. He laughs and responds:
“Doubtless I could. Doubtless, another day, I will. And,” he said, under
his breath and for that lady’s ear alone, looking her sudden in the eye,
“doubtless I have already. Else, O Beguiler of Guiles, how came We
here?”23
The notion that perhaps the Primary World itself is perhaps someone else’s
subcreated world goes back to the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi,
who dreamed he was a butterfly, only to awaken and wonder if he was a
butterfly dreaming he was a man. Apart from one other mention which is
also only a speculation (Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found
There (1872) ends with Alice considering whether she was a part of the Red
King’s dream), the narrative device of a character who slowly discovers that
what appeared to be the Primary World is in fact a secondary world built to
deceive him, is largely a twentieth-century development, perhaps a
reflection on the growing degree of mediated experience and the rise of mass
media. It is also a device often associated with another theme found within
diegetic subcreation, the idea of an evil subcreator.

Evil Subcreators
I need Ages. Dozens of them. Hundreds of them! That is our task, Atrus,
don’t you see? Our sacred task. To make Ages and populate them. To fill
up the nothingness with worlds. Worlds we can own and govern, so that
the D’ni will be great again. So that my grandsons will be lords of a
million worlds!
 —Gehn in The Book of Atrus24
The figure of the evil subcreator is usually guilty of one or both sins; abusing
his power and putting himself in the place of God, or using a subcreated
world as a means of imprisoning or containing an individual or a
community in order to further some project of his own. Examples of the
abuse of power include Tolkien’s Melkor, his satanic figure from The
Silmarillion, and Gehn from the Myst franchise. Tolkien admitted that the
temptation was inherent in subcreative power, writing:
… the creative (or should I say, subcreative) desire. seems to have no
biological function, and to be apart from the satisfactions of plain
ordinary biological life, with which, in our world, it is indeed usually at
strife. This desire is at once wedded to a passionate love of the real
primary world, and hence filled with the sense of mortality, and yet
unsatisfied by it. It has various opportunities of “Fall”. It may become
possessive, clinging to the things made as “its own”, the subcreator
wishes to be the Lord and God of his private creation. He will rebel
against the laws of the Creator—especially against mortality. Both of
these (alone or together) will lead to the desire for Power, for making the
will more quickly effective,—and so to the Machine (or Magic).25
The desire for power and the connection to the machine is especially
apparent in those situations in which a world is not made for its own good,
but rather as a tool used to dominate others or use them for its maker’s own
ends; which brings us to stories which use a subcreated world as a means of
deception or imprisonment (or both).
Typically in these stories, we share the perspective of the main character
who comes to discover that something is not right and that there are certain
boundaries surrounding the world in which he or she lives that cannot be
crossed. As such characters try to uncover the mysterious nature of their
world and find a way to cross the boundaries being imposed on them, the
fact that they are living in a world built to deceive them slowly becomes
clear, as evidence accrues. The world-builders, who are usually also the
guardians of the world, attempt to stop the main character’s epiphany, but
are unsuccessful, and eventually as the conflict escalates, the main character
is somehow instrumental in bringing about an end to the world, or a
rebuilding of it with a redistribution of power.
Even when the world-builders’ intentions may be good (as in Margaret
Peterson Haddix’s Running Out of Time (1995) and M. Night Shyamalan’s
The Village (2004), in which some of the world-builders live and raise
families within the world they made), the attempt to keep others from
realizing the constructedness of the world results in the keeping of them in
the world by force, turning it into a kind of prison. Others with evil intent
not only use their worlds as prisons, but usually have other purposes as well
for their worlds’ unknowing inhabitants, as in Time Out of Joint (1959), The
Truman Show (1998), Dark City (1998), and The Matrix (1999), to use a few
more well-known examples.
In both Time Out of Joint and The Truman Show, a city is built with the
sole purpose of providing an environment for one man whose life provides
something for society at large, even while he is unaware of the true nature
of his situation. In Time Out of Joint, Ragle Gumm plays a newspaper game
entitled “Where Will the Little Green Be Next?” winning the cash prize week
after week and managing to live off the proceeds; it is later revealed that his
choices predict where enemy nuclear strikes will occur, and that this ability
is being used against his will (he previously did the job consciously, until
defecting to the other side, at which point he was stopped, his memory was
erased, and he was placed in the phony town where the game was devised
so that he would end up continuing his work without realizing it). In The
Truman Show, Truman Burbank unknowingly lives his entire life as the
subject of an ongoing reality TV show, providing entertainment for the
show’s audience, until he begins to realize how false his life is. In both cases,
the unknowing victim around whom the world is built is allowed to
function normally, and the world is constructed in such a way so that he
naturally provides what the society outside the world needs; it is only when
these worlds are tested that the main characters begin to realize they are in a
kind of prison.
FIGURE 5.2 Nightly reshapings of the city performed by the Strangers in
Dark City (1998): buildings shrink and grow into new forms (left, top and
bottom), while the city’s inhabitants have their memories reset and find
themselves in new lives the next morning (right, top and bottom).
Even more sinister are the Strangers of Dark City and the Machines of The
Matrix, who use the unknowing human inhabitants of their worlds for
scientific purposes; the former studying human memory and identity (see
Figure 5.2), while the latter use human bodies as a power source. Instead of
merely escaping, the main characters in these worlds learn the powers of
their inhuman captors and take them on directly, ending their rule of the
subcreated world they have created. In both of these cases, however, the
subcreated world is not destroyed; the Matrix is rebooted, with the Oracle
and the Architect agreeing to free the humans that want to be freed, and at
the end of Dark City Murdoch reshapes the city and creates his longed-for
Shell Beach. Thus, the subcreative powers that create the worlds redeem
them as well.
Subcreation, as a theme within a subcreated world, allows an author to
reflexively examine the nature of subcreation, what it means to build a
world, the uses of such worlds, and what it means to be in a world. The
inclusion of diegetic subcreators in a world also has the potential for
metaleptic twists, as characters move from one level of nested worlds to
another, crossing between ontological levels of the diegesis. The way these
worlds-within-worlds are made, whether by technology, magic, or the force
of imagination alone, and how they are made, reveal some of the dreams
that authors have harbored for some time: the autonomy of the inhabitants
within a world; the making of worlds that become real and can be entered;
and the completion of secondary worlds, the unreachable goal for Primary
World authors who can only begin and expand a world but never complete
it, no matter how much of their lives they may devote to it. At the same
time, the ever-increasing number and variety of media windows, through
which worlds can be experienced, are giving them unprecedented
opportunities for transmedial growth and adaptation, which is the topic of
the next chapter.

OceanofPDF.com
6
TRANSMEDIAL GROWTH AND
ADAPTATION

I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only
placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a
majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding
paint and music and drama. Absurd.

—J. R. R. Tolkien, Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien1

At a certain point the length of a written work can change its nature
completely. It ceases to be a book, or a piece of writing to be read. With
words and images, and the accumulation of detail, not subdued to the
task of communication, a different function is revealed: the creation of
an alternate reality, a means of living for a lifetime in another world.

—John M. MacGregor, Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal2

More and more, storytelling has become the art of world-building.… The
world is bigger than the film, bigger even than the franchise.… World-
making follows its own market logic.

—Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture3

Many worlds extend beyond their work of first appearance, growing beyond
the needs of the first story to be set in them, even when that story is the
world’s reason for existence. Not only do they become transnarrative in
scope (as discussed in Chapter 4), they often also extend across multiple
media, becoming transmedial. This can happen in two ways: adaptation,
when a story existing in one medium is adapted for presentation in another
medium, but without adding any new canonical material to a world
(translation can be considered a type of adaptation); and growth, when
another medium is used to present new canonical material of a world,
expanding the world and what we know about it.4 Of course, every
adaptation adds something to the story or world within the work being
adapted; even an audio book which is a straightforward reading of a written
text may affect emphasis or pacing, or provide pronunciations of names that
would otherwise be ambiguous in print. Whether or not additions can be
considered growth, however, depends on the canonicity of the added
material, and thus its authorship, topics which are discussed in the next
chapter.
Both growth and adaptation assume pre-existing material which is being
extended or modified in some way. The field of Adaptation Studies, arguably
originating with George Bluestone’s Novels into Film (1957), has typically
been most concerned with how narratives change when they move from one
medium to another. The growth and adaptation of a world, however, goes
beyond narrative, and may even have very little to do with narrative. Some
degree of a world’s aesthetics (the sensory experience of a world) and a
world’s logic (how a world operates and the reasons behind the way it is
structured) must be carried over from one work to another or from one
medium to another. World infrastructures (discussed in Chapter 3) will have
to be referred to or carried over to a recognizable degree, if the world is to
retain some semblance to its appearance in its medium of origin, though
sometimes only a few representative parts—characters, objects, or situations
—are all that are carried over, for example in merchandising, where images
of characters or objects from a world are used to tie just about any kind of
product into a franchise.
Other factors also affect adaptation and growth. The budget allotted to a
film adaptation, for example, and the technology available, may determine
how faithfully a written work can be rendered; commercial pressures may
attempt to move the world and its narratives into more action, sex, and
violence; and extradiegetic information such as stars’ personas and directors’
reputations will influence the reception of a work. When The Lord of the
Rings was adapted into a film, the romance between Arwen and Aragorn,
which appeared mainly in Appendix A of the book, was expanded and
foregrounded more in the movie, and Arwen’s role was enlarged as well,
due to studio’s desire for more romance; and likewise many action scenes
were prolonged and given greater emphasis than in the book. Peter Jackson’s
background as a director of horror movies, and his love of monsters, also
colored his adaptation of the book (as he admits in the DVD extras for the
films). Commercial forces naturally affect the originators of worlds as well;
when a living author is still producing works set in a world while an
audience is consuming them, the reception of those works will often
influence the direction that the author takes in the further development of a
world; for example, while writing The Lord of the Rings as a sequel to The
Hobbit, Tolkien’s publisher wanted more hobbits, a demand which

determined the starting point for the writing of The Lord of the Rings.5 And
finally, another factor affecting transmedial growth and adaptation is the
nature of transmediality itself.

The Nature of Transmediality

The notion of transmediality, the state of being represented in multiple
media, suggests that we are vicariously experiencing something which lies
beyond the media windows through which we see and hear it, since it posits
an object that can be seen and heard through different windows, and one
that is independent of the windows through which it is seen and heard, even
though it exists only in mediated fashion. Transmediality implies a kind of
independence for its object; the more media windows we experience a world
through, the less reliant that world is on the peculiarities of any one medium
for its existence. Thus, transmediality also suggests the potential for the
continuance of a world, in multiple instances and registers; and the more we
see and hear of a transmedial world, the greater is the illusion of ontological
weight that it has, and experiencing the world becomes more like the
mediated experience of the Primary World.
In order for a narrative or world to be transmedial, it must be able to be
present in multiple forms of mediation (which contain and convey world
information), such as text, imagery, sound, three-dimensional shapes, and
interactive media. The range of different forms in which it can be present
broadens the possibilities for transmedial growth and adaptation; for
example, Dewdney’s Planiverse, which is two-dimensional, can appear in
text, image, and sound, but there will probably never be a LEGO playset
based on the Planiverse, because of the three-dimensional form required for
such an adaptation (there could, however, be a Colorforms playset based on
it). Some worlds may appear in only one or two forms initially, but are
expanded through adaptation to media involving other forms; in such cases,
interpretations and additions to a world are inevitable, as information is
generated for the new forms (as described in the next sections).
Transmedial worlds with sufficient growth in multiple forms and media
can often be identified by a range of different elements even when they
stand alone; sometimes a name, image, sound effect, or musical cue alone is
enough to evoke the world in which it is found. One such world is George
Lucas’ Star Wars galaxy, which began as ideas that became a treatment and
screenplay6 that led to a theatrical feature film and a novelization, and
which was followed by a holiday television special, trading card sets, toy
sets with action figures, comic books, more feature films, film soundtracks,
novels and novelizations, children’s books, made-for-TV movies, radio plays,
video games, websites, LEGO sets, animated TV shows, encyclopedias and a
variety of other reference works, books about the LEGO adaptations, and a
variety of other merchandise branded with Star Wars imagery and
increasingly removed from the world itself. Many of these things only refer
to or play with the world’s elements, creating alternate or even parodic
versions of them. The LEGO Star Wars video games, for example, greatly
change the look and feel of all the world’s visuals, simplifying and
bowdlerizing them into a bright, cheery world where everything is comedic
and no one dies (they just briefly fall to bouncing pieces). Yet, in these
games, the world of Star Wars is referenced and evoked, even though we are
experiencing virtual LEGO versions of characters, objects, locations, and
situations which are loosely based on the “real” Star Wars galaxy. Other
elements, like the Star Wars film soundtracks, occupy an interesting
position; while much of the film’s music is nondiegetic, and thus not a part
of the diegetic world, the music is arguably still a part of the world insofar
as the audience’s experience of the world is concerned, as are other
nondiegetic materials like the opening title crawl stretching into the distance
or the custom font (“StarVader”) used for the main title.
A discussion of transmedial growth should attempt to examine what
occurs during the move across media. However, analyzing transmedial
movements across every possible pairing of media would be a lengthy
undertaking involving much overlap and repetition; a better approach is to
look at each of the properties present in different media, their capabilities
and peculiarities, and the process of using each as a window that reveals an
imaginary world.

Windows on the World: Words, Images, Objects,

Sounds, and Interactions
Besides Doležel’s observation that all imaginary worlds are inevitably
incomplete (see Chapter 1), one thing that all imaginary worlds share in
common is the fact that our experiences of them are always mediated
experiences. And the medium in which a world originates will help
determine the world’s potential for growth and adaptation, due to such
factors as the audience size and receptivity, the conventions and audience
expectations that come with the medium, and most importantly, the
medium’s unique combination of properties available for the conveyance of
the world and its stories.
To create their mediated experiences, every medium makes use of one or
more basic elements: words, images, sounds, and interactions.7 As windows
on the world, we could also add objects, which tell us something about the
world from which they come, through their design, appearance, and
behavior, and even through their mere existence as well (for example, a
piece of advanced technology suggests a culture with a certain amount of
technological achievement). Objects may suggest much about the cultures
and world from which they come, but like imagery and sound, the access to
a world that they offer is necessarily indirect. Some things, such as playsets
(like the LEGO sets based on Star Wars characters, vehicles, and locations)
only refer to things in imaginary worlds, without being actual objects from
those worlds (apart from in the imaginations of those who play with them).
Likewise, even movie props (like Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber), though they
are the actual objects seen in the films, are at the same time not the objects
of the imaginary world in another sense; Luke’s lightsaber, for example,
cannot produce a glowing blade the way it does in the film without the help
of special effects. Stage props, though they are seen directly by the audience,
also are stand-ins for other objects due to the imposition of theatrical
conventions. Such objects may refer to objects in an imaginary world, or
stand in for them, but they cannot be those objects any more than actors are
the characters they play, or people from an imaginary world can enter into
the Primary World. Only within fiction itself is such dual citizenship in both
Primary and secondary worlds possible, and perhaps this explains its
popularity there.
While images and sounds are clearly sensory-oriented, working directly
with the eye and ear, words and interactions are arguably more indirect and
abstract. Although words become incarnate either graphically or sonically,
they are concepts or ideas, able to engage an audience in complex ways, for
example, through the description of a smell, taste, or emotion, or the internal
thoughts of a character. Though they function more indirectly in the
representation of a sensory experience than do images and sounds, they are
also more flexible in the kinds of experiences they are able to represent.
Interactions, likewise, tell us about the behaviors of things, the way things
react and interact when prompted by someone. Like words, interactions are
conceptual in nature and rely on graphic and sonic means for their
expression. Words, images, objects, sounds, and interactions, then, are the
five elements that make up the windows through which we experience
imaginary worlds.
Media use these five elements in different ways to construct their
windows, and there is much overlap as well between media: novels use the
written word (though they may include maps); visual media like
photography and film can include the written word within their images;
aural media like radio can include the spoken word along with music and
sound; audiovisual media can include word, image, and sound together;
interactive media like video games can include words, images, sounds, and
interactions; and playsets can incorporate all of these along with their
objects. These overlaps make transmedial growth and adaptation easier,
since the same elements may be present in different media; voices, visual
designs, names, and so forth often carry over from one medium to another,
strengthening transmedial ties. At the same time, however, differences
between media impose limits and constraints during the process of
transmedial expansion.
Transmedial Expansion
The work in which a world debuts usually must be able to stand on its own,
since it introduces its world and because it will be judged on its own merits
rather than by the reputation of a predecessor (though a work may receive
attention due to an author’s or company’s reputation). Narrative often plays
a part in a world’s first appearance, since the reason most worlds are made
is to serve and support a particular story that the author wants to tell, a
story which for some reason cannot simply be set in the Primary World
alone. Once the world is crafted to fit the initial story or stories, all later
works set in the world will have to take into consideration the pre-existing
aspects of the world set up by works that preceded them (which explains
why some sequels are not as good as the stories they follow). Narrative
extensions of the original story, covering the further adventures or
backstories of characters, the exploration of new areas of a world, and so
forth, have already been discussed in Chapter 4; how these extensions make
the leap from one medium to another will be examined here.
During the move from one medium to another, forms of mediation may be
lost or gained, causing the material of a story or world to be changed. These
processes also occur as the world itself comes into being, moving from a
conception in the author’s mind to an incarnation in mediated form; thus
even a work that is not transmedial undergoes at least one of these
transformations. Looking at the list of media windows from the last section,
we can describe processes of transformation involving each of them:
description (adaptation into words), visualization (adaptation into images or
objects), auralization (adaptation into sounds), interactivation (adaptation
into interactive media), and deinteractivation (adaptation moving from
interactive media to noninteractive media).8 While all of these processes also
occur in the transmedial adaptation of stories set in the Primary World, the
problems encountered within them are especially heightened when they are
applied to the adaptation of secondary worlds, because the use of Primary
World defaults are not relied upon to the same degree (since so many of
them are reset), leading to greater challenges but also to new possibilities.

Description
As discussed in Chapter 5, worlds often originate in words, because they are
the fastest, easiest, most malleable, and most inexpensive elements to use
when world-building. Words can describe conceptual ideas that have no
perceptual forms; unshowable things like the inner states and unexpressed
emotions of characters, and impressionistic experiences which the author
describes in terms of how they make someone feel, instead of just what is
seen and heard. In The Lord of the Rings, for example, Treebeard’s eyes and
Saruman’s voice are described in such a way that we do not so much get a
physical description of how they look and sound respectively, but rather the
effect that they have on those who perceive them:
But at the moment the hobbits noted little but the eyes. These deep eyes
were now surveying them, slow and solemn, but very penetrating. They
were brown, shot with a green light. Often afterwards Pippin tried to
describe his first impression of them.
“One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with
ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was
sparkling with the present: like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a
vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake. I don’t know but it felt as
if something that grew in the ground—asleep, you might say, or just
feeling itself as something between root-tip and leaf-tip, between deep
earth and sky had suddenly waked up, and was considering you with the
same slow care that it had given to its own inside affairs for endless
years.”9
Interestingly, Tolkien even mediates the description through Pippin’s words,
which are of course Tolkien’s own as well. Saruman’s voice receives a
similar treatment, with a description of its effect rather than merely its
sound:
Suddenly another voice spoke, low and melodious, its very sound an
enchantment. Those who listened unwarily to that voice could seldom
report the words that they heard; and if they did, they wondered, for
little power remained in them. Mostly they remembered only that it was
a delight to hear the voice speaking, all that it said seemed wise and
reasonable, and desire awoke in them by swift agreement to seem wise
 themselves. When others spoke they seemed harsh and uncouth by
contrast; and if they gainsaid the voice, anger was kindled in the hearts
of those under the spell. For some the spell lasted only while the voice
spoke to them, and when it spoke to another they smiled, as men do who
see through a juggler’s trick while others gape at it. For many the sound
of the voice alone was enough to hold them enthralled; but for those
whom it conquered the spell endured when they were far away, and ever
they heard that soft voice whispering and urging them. But none were
unmoved; none rejected its pleas and its commands without an effort of
mind and will, so long as its master had control of it.10
Both Treebeard’s eyes and Saruman’s voice would be hard to incarnate into
image and sound without losing the powers that Tolkien can attribute to
them in a written description. Words can also control the level of vagueness
that an author desires, and they can easily be manipulated to hide ellipses,
helping them to go unnoticed in a text. Finally, they allow anyone to
produce as elaborate and epically-scaled a world as one can imagine for no
more than the cost of pencil and paper, making them the most common
elements used in world-building.
On the other hand, words are also the most provocative and connotative of
world-building elements, relying upon the audience’s experiences and world
gestalten to produce their effects. As Tolkien puts it:
The radical distinction between all art (including drama) that offers a
visible presentation and true literature is that it imposes one visible
form. Literature works from mind to mind and is thus more progenitive.
It is at once more universal and more poignantly particular. If it speaks
of bread or wine or stone or tree, it appeals to the whole of these things,
to their ideas; yet each hearer will give to them a peculiar personal
embodiment in his imagination. Should the story say “he ate bread”, the
dramatic producer or painter can only show “a piece of bread” according
to his taste or fancy, but the hearer of the story will think of bread in
general picture it in some form of his own. If a story says “he climbed a
hill and saw a river in the valley below”, the illustrator may catch, or
nearly catch, his own vision of such a scene; but every hearer of the
words will have his own picture, and it will be made out of all the hills
 and rivers and dales he has ever seen, but especially out of The Hill, The
River, The Valley which were for him the first embodiment of the
word.11
In the making of his works, Tolkien takes on the role of architect, art
director, costume designer, set decorator, and more, giving detailed verbal
descriptions of all the sensory aspects of his world, using words to evoke a
range of experiences, skillfully playing upon his readers’ connotations while
reining them in when necessary.
The connotative nature of words, however, becomes a problem when
adaptation from other media occurs. The subtleties of a sunset, the vast
visual spectacle of a landscape overrun by warring armies, the sound of a
Beethoven symphony, the vertiginous changes in perspective during a
cinematic chase scene, or even a cleverly composed set of panels filling a
page of a graphic novel, is difficult, if not impossible, to translate into mere
words. The rhetorical device of ekphrasis (the literary attempt to describe a
visual work of art) has been around since Ancient Greece, but it can only go
so far in evoking its subject, and may, like the examples given above, resort
to describing the experience of perception as much as the object being
perceived, in order to achieve its effect.
The connotative meanings of words can also come into play in invented
languages, where linguistic aesthetics may play a part in generating
meaning or at least the language’s appeal. Similar to the linguistic “false
friends” mentioned in Chapter 1, invented words may carry different
connotations or meanings to speakers of different languages, or the invented
words may even have meaning in another language. Discussing an invented
language in Star Wars, Paul Hirsch recalled, “Ben Burtt came up with the
language for Greedo. But one of the words he had was actually Spanish
slang. He didn’t know and so he changed the word. Actually, all the words
had to be checked to make sure they were okay.”12 There is also the question
of how invented languages should be translated or if they should be
translated at all. Regarding the translation of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien
allowed English-based names to be translated (such as “Brandywine”), but
wanted his invented words left as they were (the Swedish translation of The
Hobbit had substituted Hompen for Hobbit, much to Tolkien’s displeasure).
13
 Description, then, is especially useful for transmedial expansions of worlds
that already exist in visual media (like the dozens of Star Trek and Star
Wars novels), since audiences will have visual imagery to reference as they
read verbal descriptions of the world’s contents. Even if the written works
introduce new characters, locations, and objects, the style and aesthetics of
the existing visual imagery will still be able to carry over and influence how
the new material will be envisioned in the imagination of the audience. And,
as audiences imagine what they read, they take part in another process
which many world-builders use: visualization.

Visualization
Visualization gives a concrete and visible form to things which are
conceived in words (or sounds), adapting them into still images, moving
images, or three-dimensional objects or models (physical or virtual) which
are used in the production of still and moving imagery. Images can do many
things that mere words cannot; they are sensually richer and more
immersive, they can present a great deal of detail or information
simultaneously and use complex compositions, and they have a more
immediate effect on the audience’s emotions, from foregrounded dramatic
action to subtle effects involving atmosphere and mood. Although visual
media are sometimes faulted for their failure to exercise the imagination the
way reading does, seeing things does not reduce the need for imagination; it
merely makes different use of it, especially where the revelation of worlds is
concerned. While the written word may require the reader to imagine how
things look and sound, imagery can present scenes of rich detail, visuals
which suggest much and present many more gaps where information and
explanation need to be filled in, encouraging extrapolation and speculation;
for example, complicated machinery that challenges us to figure out its
workings (see Figure 6.1), dense cityscapes that suggest the ongoing lives of
millions of inhabitants, or background details which may provide narrative
clues and hints of other events occurring simultaneously.14 Such visual
material is often not explained explicitly, and may require multiple viewings
in order to be understood (or even noticed); likewise, background details and
events may even take on great significance only in retrospect. Visualization
may answer the question as to how things look, but it often raises many
other questions regarding the purpose, functioning, usage, and history of
what is depicted, especially in the depiction of secondary worlds in which
Primary World defaults have changed.
Visualizations adapted from written works may range widely based on
artists’ interpretations. For example, Tolkien’s work has been adapted into
visual form by a variety of artists such as Alan Lee and John Howe (whose
designs were an influence on Peter Jackson’s film versions of Tolkien’s
works), Pauline Baynes, Ted Nasmith, Michael Hague, Ralph Bakshi, and
dozens of other artists, including Tolkien himself who illustrated many
scenes from his works. Douglas A. Anderson’s The Annotated Hobbit also
gives samples of illustrations from foreign language editions of The Hobbit
from around the world, demonstrating a wide range of graphical styles.15
A visualization not only depicts events, but necessarily does so from a
particular vantage point, which means that point of view and composition
can be used to further comment on the scene, enhance aspects of it, and
suggest a certain attitude towards what is portrayed. When applied to the
depiction of a world, multiple angles and varying points of view are
necessary to give the world a dimensional, fully-realized feel. Such visual
world-building can be done with sketches, requiring some artistic talent, or
with photorealistic imagery, which can be a costly venture and place
demands on a world-builder’s budget. Star Trek television series episodes,
for example, often begin scenes with establishing shots of cityscapes on
foreign planets which are matte paintings or models with minimal
movement (an occasional vehicle or monorail car passing through), only to
complete the rest of the scene with interiors shot in the studio. With a higher
budget, more can be done to give a world’s imagery an even more fully-
realized appearance; for example, the planetscapes of the Star Wars movies,
which feature three-dimensional fly-throughs of cities and locations seen
from multiple angles and under varying lighting and weather conditions,
and even at different scales.
FIGURE 6.1 Examples of machinery encountered in Myst III: Exile (2001)
which players learn about through examination and interaction.
The process of visualization in cinema has developed over time into a set
of techniques. Storyboards first developed with the planning of animated
films, and then were used by live-action filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock.
Star Wars (1977) went beyond storyboards to motion graphics, using World
War II aerial fighter plane footage to demonstrate how its spaceships would
move, and later Star Wars films used animatics, moving storyboards that
allow shot dynamics like compositional movement and temporal length to
be planned out in advance of production. This phase of production has come
to be known as “pre-visualization” or “pre-viz”, with the “pre” prefix
indicating that it takes place before the visualization that occurs when the
footage is actually shot or composited, although “pre-visualization” is
certainly a form of visualization as well.
Of course, adaptation into visual form presents problems as well. The
“normalizing tendency” discussed in Chapter 1, in which an audience adjusts
their imagination according to Primary World defaults, suggests that a literal
adaptation into visual form may not always be the best one; recall the
example of Gandalf’s eyebrows extending beyond the brim of his hat.
Although Tolkien gives this description, seeing it all the time would produce
an almost comic effect; thus in nearly every visual interpretation, Gandalf’s
eyebrows do not extend so far, even when they are shown as bushy. A
further example is C. S. Lewis’ Perelandra (1943), in which characters are
naked for most of the story; easy to do in print, but far more distracting in a
movie (it’s one thing to know that someone is naked, and another to see it all
the time).
Adaptation into visual form, even when the end result is two-dimensional
imagery, usually requires adapting verbal descriptions into three-
dimensional designs, especially for media with moving imagery or multiple
images which view things from multiple angles, and even single images
which use perspective will need to be conceived in three dimensions (some
exceptions exist, like the two-dimensional worlds of Abbott’s Flatland,
Dewdney’s Planiverse, and two-dimensional video games). These three-
dimensional designs may remain designs drawn on paper, become virtual
objects seen on a computer screen, or become actual, physical objects
constructed for a stage play, film set, or playset.
The oldest kind of adaptation into three-dimensional form is visualization
for the stage, going back to the plays of ancient Greece that depicted
imaginary worlds like Aristophanes’s Cloudcuckooland. The limitations of
the stage, however, make for the harshest kind of adaptation, especially
when it comes to the fantastic. While J. R. R. Tolkien was not against a film
version of The Lord of the Rings, he was critical of the attempt to bring
fantasy to the stage, writing:
In human art Fantasy is a thing best left to words, to true literature. In
painting, for instance, the visible presentation of the fantastic image is
technically too easy; the hand tends to outrun the mind, even overthrow
it. Silliness or morbidity are frequent results. It is a misfortune that
Drama, an art fundamentally distinct from Literature, should so
commonly be considered together with it, or as a branch of it. Among
these misfortunes, we may reckon the depreciation of Fantasy…. Drama
is naturally hostile to Fantasy. Fantasy, even of the simplest kind, hardly
ever succeeds in Drama. Fantastic forms are not to be counterfeited. Men
dressed up as talking animals may achieve buffoonery or mimicry, but
they do not achieve Fantasy. This is, I think, well illustrated by the
 failure of the bastard form, pantomime. The nearer it is to “dramatised
fairy-story” the worse it is. It is only tolerable when the plot and its
fantasy are reduced to a mere vestigiary framework for farce, and no
“belief” is required or expected of anybody. This is, of course, partly due
to the fact that the producers of drama have to, or try to, work with
mechanism to represent either Fantasy or Magic. I once saw a so-called
“children’s pantomime”, the straight story of Puss-in-Boots, with even
the metamorphosis of the ogre into a mouse. Had this been mechanically
successful it would have either terrified the spectators or else have been
just a turn of high-class conjuring. As it was, though done with some
ingenuity of lighting, disbelief had not so much to be suspended as hung,
drawn, and quartered.16
Tolkien’s comments, however, were not directed at film or animation, nor
could he have envisioned the degree to which cinematic special effects
would be able to appear photorealistic in their appearance and behavior.
The process of film production can involve the rendering of things
mentioned in the script into visible form first as two-dimensional drawings
(storyboards and sketches of costumes, sets, props, characters, and so forth),
and then those drawings are adapted into three-dimensional forms, making
such visualization a two-step process. Here, too, problems can occur with the
change in dimensionality; unclear notes can lead to objects the wrong size
on the set (for example, during the making of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge
of the Sith (2005), a table that was supposed to be 10 feet wide was 16 feet

wide due to a misread digit17), and designs must accommodate other

considerations such as the human actors (during the making of Star Wars
Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002), costumes were drawn and made into
maquettes (small, physical models) that had unrealistic body shapes and
dimensions and had to be redesigned to fit the actresses18). Likewise,
translation between physical models and digital models of the same things
can present design challenges (like getting the digital version of Yoda to
match the physical puppet version that audiences were already familiar
with19).
Although visualization is usually a multi-step process as designs move
across media and the different technologies used to create them, it can also
occur directly from a conception into a three-dimensional form, provided
the necessary tools are available. Computer animation programs allow
three-dimensional models to be created directly in the computer, and
physical processes like sculpting also begin in three dimensions. Another
method for building three-dimensional models directly is through
assemblage. Designer Joe Johnston describes the building of the speeder
bikes in The Return of the Jedi (1983):
The rocket bikes were built entirely in three dimensions. There were
some preliminary sketches done, but once the final design was set, it was
all done in model, you know, kit bashing. You’d take model kits, and
you’d chop them off, and you’d get the pieces and use them to build the
bikes. There’re a lot of different pieces on the bikes; there’s a space
shuttle nose that is part of the exhaust flaring at the back; there’s a part
of a formula car that’s up front; there’s a Ferrari engine as part of the
rocket engine, etc…. So in a way the rocket bikes were pretty unique
because the design was determined more in three dimensions than it was
on paper.20
This process also is amenable to collaborative efforts; according to Jody
Duncan, “Throughout the design process, [George] Lucas would often break
off parts from one model and attach them to another to create an entirely
new design.”21 The use of computer graphics also allows designs to be made,
and edited, directly in three dimensions, and the resulting computer models
can be used by multiple departments, ensuring better communication and
design consistency.22
Considering that most imaginary worlds begin in the realm of words and
find their way across media, visualization is perhaps the most common
process occurring during transmedial adaptation. As worlds are planned to
be transmedial from their very conception, more of a world’s look can be
designed from the beginning, and more tools exist now than ever before to
aid in the visualization process. Alongside visualization is another process
that often occurs with it and which influences it as well: sound design.

Auralization
While much has been written about visualization, its sister process,
auralization, or adaptation into sound, is far less discussed. After words,
sound is the most inexpensive element to work with because of its flexibility
and ease of manipulation. Sound is naturally immersive, surrounding the
listener in space, providing atmosphere and evoking emotional responses; it
can imply large spaces and a world through ambience and sound effects.
Secondary worlds, with their invented languages, new creatures, vehicles,
weaponry, and fantastic locations are often strongly associated with the
sounds devised for them, and these sounds can be used across a variety of
media to bind an imaginary world together even when the visual styles of
works in different media vary considerably. Like imagery, sounds often
cannot be described in words; for those who have seen the Star Wars films,
the familiar sounds of a lightsaber’s swooping hums, TIE fighters screaming
through space, or Chewbacca’s throaty roar will instantly bring to mind
images from the films with a directness that text can only try to suggest.
Sound designers, then, must envision (enaudition?) sounds that are
appropriate and capture the personality and feel of the visual designs,
hopefully making as memorable an impression.
Apart from sound design, auralization can also involve turning words or
imagery into sounds, or translating story material into voices, sound effects,
music, and ambience. To look at the process of transmedial auralization here,
it might be useful to compare three worlds being presented solely through
sound; radio adaptations of The Lord of the Rings (adapted from a novel), the
Star Wars radio plays (adapted from movies), and Garrison Keillor’s Lake
Wobegon (which originated as a radio program). In all three, there is, as one
would suspect, a heavy dependence on the spoken word (particularly
character dialogue) with sound effects filling in narrative information; but as
each has a different medium of origin, the end results vary widely. Consider,
for example, differences in length, resulting from compression and
expansion of the original material.
The first adaptation of The Lord of the Rings was produced by Terence
Tiller for the BBC in 1955–1956, an American adaptation by The Mind’s Eye
for National Public Radio appeared in 1979, and another BBC adaptation, by
Brian Sibley and Michael Bakewell, appeared in 1981. The first BBC
adaptation was the only one made during Tolkien’s lifetime, and he was
understandably displeased with it; the BBC allotted 3 hours for The
Fellowship of the Ring, but then decided to only allot 3 hours more for the
story’s completion, rather than 3 hours for The Two Towers and another 3
hours for The Return of the King. (In the end, 6 hours proved to be too short
and demanded such omissions and compression that the recording was
evidently not valued enough to be preserved, since no copies of the
broadcast are known to have survived.) The American adaptation made in
1979 was 12 hours long, and the second BBC one that followed shortly after
it in 1981 was around 13 hours and 20 minutes long. While the 1981 version
has received the most praise, it was also still quite abridged when one
considers that the unabridged audio book of The Lord of the Rings read and
performed by Rob Inglis in 2002 was 55 hours long.
Since The Lord of The Rings began as a book, voice casting of the
characters had some latitude, since the character’s voices had never been
heard before. At the same time, they would have to be distinct enough to
become recognizable after a short time, although those familiar with the
book could tell who was speaking through context. Sound effects, likewise,
might require additional explanation as some of the sounds would not be
instantly understood and connected with things in the book; for instance,
the sounds of various fictional creatures, or the ambient sound of different
locations, might not be recognizable out of context.
By contrast, the Star Wars radio plays, were longer than the films from
which they were adapted; the original film version of Star Wars (1977) was 2
hours and 1 minute long, while the radio version was 5 hours and 51
minutes; The Empire Strikes Back (1980) was 2 hours and 9 minutes in
theaters but 4 hours and 15 minutes on radio; and Return of the Jedi (1983)
was 2 hours and 16 minutes on film, and 3 hours on the air. Although both
films and radio plays included Ben Burtt’s sound effects, the radio plays
added expository dialogue, and opened up the storyline, adding scenes that
further explained what was going on and providing more backstory and
additional conversations and events. Audiences familiar with the films may
have naturally expected the film actors to voice their characters, and some
did, including Mark Hamill, Anthony Daniels, and Billy Dee Williams; but
some were replaced by other voices; Princess Leia was played by Ann Sachs,
Han Solo by Perry King, Darth Vader by Brock Peters, Yoda by John Lithgow,
and Jabba the Hutt by Ed Asner. To further frustrate expectations, although
Mark Hamill voiced Luke Skywalker in the radio plays of the first two films,
Joshua Fardon voiced Luke Skywalker for the third. While the Star Wars
stories were more complete than the adaptations of Tolkien’s work, the use
of different voice actors was an unexpected change which also demanded
audience adjustment. Audiences who had seen the films before listening to
the radio plays, however, had a guide to visualization, even for the added
scenes and dialogues in the radio plays.
Finally, Keillor’s Lake Wobegon stories, appearing on his long-running
radio program A Prairie Home Companion, are conceived and written for
the air as radio programs, avoiding issues of compression and additions and
audience expectations based on other media. The world of Lake Wobegon
has successfully expanded into several novels, but as the characters and
locations are so well established in the minds of listeners, it seems unlikely
that there will ever be a movie about Lake Wobegon exploring it visually (in
2006 a movie was made about The Prairie Home Companion show, but this
should not be confused with the Lake Wobegon stories themselves). The
Lake Wobegon stories’ reliance on Keillor as voiceover narrator, and voice
actors who are not film actors, make radio the best medium for the world to
appear in.23
Auralization also applies to interactive sound, which functions differently
from noninteractive sound due to the game player’s need to continually
make decisions based on changing game information. In addition to
aesthetic concerns like those described earlier, sounds are designed to
provide orientation as well as exposition. According to Miles Griffiths,
Senior Designer at SCI Games:
All we have to do is present the player with as much information to
process as possible. Given that the player can only look at one thing at a
time, the best way to do this is with sound. First off, a good ambient
track sets the tone. The distant thump and crackle of explosives and
gunfire give the illusion that combat is occurring over a wide area. On
top of this, every foregrounded gunshot, scream, garbled radio message,
and vehicle engine contributes to an illusion of great activity. Positional
sound can make a player feel like he is in the middle of a huge cauldron
of action, turning a small-scale skirmish into just one fragment of a huge
battle.24
All of the same considerations in noninteractive media—mood and
atmosphere, the feel and emotion evoked by the sound, the quality of the
sound and its perspective, and so on—are present in the design of sound for
interactive media as well, along with the additional considerations as to how
sound can be used to aid orientation and navigation. Sound can introduce
things at a distance before they are seen, lure the user in a particular
direction, or warn the user from moving in a particular direction. The use of
sound in interactive media brings us to the next transmedial adaptation
process, that of making something interactive, which we might call i
nteractivation (in the same way that “activation” means “to make something
active”).

Interactivation
Interactivity cannot be present by itself; it requires words, images, sounds, or
physical objects (like a playset), or some combination of them, in order for
interactivity to be possible. As such, some description, visualization, or
auralization is required as a prerequisite to interactivation. A model of the
world (or a copy of the world itself, in the case of a world originating in
digital form) must be constructed which can be interacted with by the user,
which usually includes the exploration of the world’s spaces, the witnessing
of events in the world, and interaction with other characters in the world.
This can be done using only description (as in a text adventure game), but
more likely it involves visualization and auralization of the world’s assets.
The interactivation of a world differs from the interactivation of a
narrative insofar as a world already implies multiple paths of action that a
visitor can take. As discussed in Chapter 4, a world may contain a set of
canonical stories that take place within it, but the degree to which these are
included in an interactive work will vary considerably, and may even
depend on the user whose choices will set events in motion or keep them
from occurring. Either way, the world, as a set of locations, objects, and
characters, can still be depicted and offered for exploration.
As a process of transmedial adaptation, interactivation usually requires
that a world be simplified in order for interaction and exploration to be
possible, since the larger and more detailed a world is, the more interactive
possibilities arise. While the worlds of print, film, and television can
selectively use locations and other world assets, needing only glimpses or
even just mentions of some areas, users who cannot freely explore all the
areas of a world may become more aware of the world’s constraints and
limitations, which in turn may damage a world’s illusion of completeness.
As Owain Bennalack, editor of the video game magazine Develop, puts it:
The problem a game designer has, compared to a novelist or a filmmaker,
is the “What’s behind the door?” conundrum.… If there are doors that
can’t be opened, then the player is going to step back from really being
there. It breaks the spell. On the other hand, if any door can be opened,
the world is going to have to be pretty straightforward—or else it’s not
going to have many doors!25
Thus, many video game worlds are careful to have diegetic explanations that
help make their world’s boundaries seem natural, keeping their worlds from
feeling confined. For example, some games or game levels are set aboard
space stations (like the first level of Halo (2001)), in buildings that the player
is trying to escape from (as in Doom (1993)), on islands (like Myst (1993),
Riven (1997), and Alida (2004)), or in cities where only a few roads lead out
of town (like the cities of the Grand Theft Auto series). To help add a feeling
of expansiveness to these worlds, there are two types of boundaries, those
prohibiting movement (like walls and shorelines), and beyond them, those
prohibiting visibility, where vistas stretch into the distance to the horizon or
into outer space, making the world appear vaster than it is.
While a world adapted into a game is usually simplified, narrative material
is often expanded during the transmedial move to interactivity, allowing
more possibilities to open up to the player’s choices. Neil Randall and
Kathleen Murphy describe the adaption that occurred in The Lord of the
Rings Online (2007):

Players need to be able to step into the world of the adapted story and
spend a significant amount of time in that world, exploring its many
locations and engaging with the characters and objects drawn from or
even simply suggested by the source text. In addition, to meet the same
requirement of long-term immersive player involvement, videogame
adaptations must expand the scope of the original story, allowing players
 to meet added characters performing added tasks and fitting into added
plots and subplots. They must allow players to explore what is
happening in that world beyond the scope of the storyline presented in
the source.26
Worlds adapted into games from other media come with audience
expectations based on their source material, making it harder for them to
succeed than games whose worlds originate within them and are thus
designed with interactivity in mind. In the case of games adapted from
feature films, a host of other factors, including tight production schedules,
changing story information as the project passes through production and
postproduction, and conflicting demands from the various constituencies
(administrative, financial, marketing, technical, and so on) that have a stake
in the production of a game, also make it more difficult for games adapted
from movies to succeed.27
Game worlds adapted from worlds originating in noninteractive media are
often not so much an extension of those worlds, as they are alternate
versions of them. For example, the massively multiplayer on-line role-
playing games (MMORPGs) Star Wars Galaxies (2003–2011) and The Lord of
the Rings Online both are designed after their respective worlds from other
media, but exist alongside them as separate worlds with their own separate
histories that accrue as players play them. Since the events of the Star Wars
films have already occurred, they can at best only be reenacted in Star Wars
Galaxies, as they, and their outcomes, are already well known. One solution
to the question of how to treat existing canonical events is to set the
interactive world in another time period, long after the events from other
works set in the world, the way the MMORPG Uru: Ages Beyond Myst
(2003) takes place long after the events of the Myst games and novels that
came before it, placing their canonical events in the past so that consistency
and continuity can remain undisrupted. Another solution, as discussed in
Chapter 4, is to have one “correct” set of events leading to the “right” ending
which the player must achieve in order to win, so that only one course of
events remains canonical.
The interactivation of a world presents continuity problems which are not
faced by worlds which originate in interactive media and are designed with
interactivity in mind, but these problems can be solved by the boundaries
placed on interactivity. As more worlds are planned in advance as
transmedial worlds, their interactive works can be designed to occupy either
time periods left open by their noninteractive works, allowing audience
participation to determine events, or they could also be set during the events
occurring in the noninteractive works, but be limited spatially or narratively
to events outside of the mainstream of canonical events in such a way that
the player’s deeds will not affect them. When interactive worlds make
transmedial moves into noninteractive media, continuity is much easier to
control, although the move must also deal with deinteractivation.

Deinteractivation
Worlds making transmedial moves are subject not only to gains and
additions, but to losses and reductions as well. In this sense, description and
visualization are complementary processes, insofar as one involves moving
from image to word and the other from word to image; the same can be said
of the relationship between description and auralization. Likewise, as
interactivation occurs during the move from noninteractive media to
interactive media, deinteractivation, the removal of interactivity, occurs
when a world moves in the other direction, from interactive media to
noninteractive media; for example, when worlds originating in video games
are adapted into films, television shows, or books.
Deinteractivation usually involves the addition of narrative material, since
the removal of interactivity often requires substituting a fixed series of
events for the series of events that would otherwise occur as a result of the
choices made by the user.28 Even a speedrun video made from a video game
will contain a fixed series of events which are not necessarily the same as
what a player will encounter. The adaptation of a video game into a movie
usually requires a large amount of additional narrative material, particularly
when it is lacking in the game (for example, the adaptation of Super Mario
Bros. (1985) into the 1993 movie of the same name or the adaptation of Pac-
Man (1980) into the 42-episode television series Pac-Man: The Animated
Series (1982–1983), as opposed to the adaptation of more cinematic games
which already have three-dimensional worlds and more thoroughly-
developed narratives). Just as movies that “open up” theatrical plays often
differ from their source material, there is always the chance that the added
material and change of medium and conventions will considerably alter the
original world. At the same time, player interaction is the main reason for
most games to exist, and without it, there may be little to interest an
audience. It may be possible to exchange one type of interactivity for
another (which occurs in the Pokémon card game or the board games based
on Pac-Man and Myst), but the change from one type of interactivity to
another can itself involve some degree of deinteractivation (for example,
imagine the loss of direct action if Pac-Man was adapted into a text
adventure (see www.pac-txt.com)).
The process of deinteractivation also removes the player’s close
identification with their avatar (which is usually the game’s main character).
Instead of being a surrogate for the player, the move to a noninteractive
medium means that the audience must now watch as the character acts
independently and makes its own decisions. In the case of first-person
perspective games, where the point of view is that of the main character
who is rarely seen directly, the loss of interactivity will be even more
noticeable. Little can compensate directly for this loss of character
identification since it is qualitatively different from the third-party character
identification found in film and literature; and the shift from one to the other
may also underscore the latter’s noninteractive nature. In exchange for the
control of the main character, the move to noninteractive media will usually
mean a more developed world, often with a higher degree of realism and
characters who are presented with more depth, and situations with more
complexity and nuance. Whether or not these tradeoffs are acceptable to the
audience will determine the success of the transmedial expansion, and
perhaps even the future of the franchise in the new medium.
Like interactivation, the process of deinteractivation is easier if the new
work is set in a different part of the world than its interactive counterparts.
When the Myst franchise expanded into three novels, the novels were set in
time periods before and after the action of the games. The first novel, Myst:
The Book of Atrus (1995), set the stage for the action occurring in Myst
(1993); the second novel, Myst: The Book of Ti’ana (1996) expanded the
backstory of the first novel; and the third novel, Myst: The Book of D’ni
(1997) was set some time after the events of Riven (1997). While the events of
the games are central to the franchise, they do not contradict the events of
the novels, which for the most part can stand on their own, narratively
speaking.
The experience of deinteractivation, from the point of view of the
audience, can even apply to transmedial worlds that begin in noninteractive
media and move to interactive media, if the audience encounters the
interactive works of the world first and the noninteractive works afterward.
This, however, leads us to the next section, which considers the order in
which the audience encounters the various works set in a particular world.

Encountering Transmedial Worlds

How an audience first enters into an imaginary world, and the sequence in
which the various works making it up are experienced, can greatly shape the
audience’s experience of the world. While in the past worlds began in one
medium and, if they found success there, made their way into other media,
worlds have recently become more transmedial from their very inception,
making the question of the ordering and timing of works in different media
all set in the same world something which is considered from the start and
shapes the world-building process thereafter. As Danny Bilsen, Executive
Vice President of Core Games for THQ describes it:
Finally, we are finding that the ultimate challenge for delivering
transmedia experiences is one of production and timing. How can these
pieces be built, how often on different systems and at different costs and
how can they be delivered in the most rewarding sequence to the fans?
For instance, a film may take a year or two to produce; a video game
may take three years; and a graphic novel six months. Getting these to
arrive in the most dramatic sequence is a new challenge that transmedia
producers only now are having the privilege of facing. But it still all
starts and ends with a robust and consistent world, created and managed
by inspired visionaries, who are themselves its biggest fans.29
Since the first works to appear will introduce the imaginary world to the
audience, setting the tone and expectations, an early failure could have the
effect of producing a negative image of the world, making it more difficult
for other works set in the same world to find backing and an audience
(imagine, for example, if the old Marvel Star Wars comics and 1978 holiday
TV special appeared first and their success determined whether or not the
films would be made). From a practical standpoint, some media are easier to
use or less expensive to produce, and more likely to be used to introduce a
world; thus more worlds are debuted in novels than in feature films or
television series. However, even though authors may take care to produce
and release works in a particular order, audience members may still
experience those works in an altogether different sequence.
Although a series of works can be experienced in any order, there are six
types of orderings that are most likely to occur, each of which changes one’s
experience of a world: order of public appearance, order of creation, internal
chronological order, canonical order, order of media preference, and age-
appropriate order. Probably the most common of these is order of public
appearance, which contemporary audiences, who experience the works as
they appear, are most likely to follow. Series of works set in a world are
almost always designed to be experienced in order of public appearance, and
even when worlds are planned in advance, release order is the most likely
order to be experienced. Once several works set in the same world have
been released, though, later audiences will have more of a choice, and can
enter into a world or franchise through any of its works, determining for
themselves the order in which the works will be experienced.
Another common way that works are experienced is in the order of
creation, which is usually the same as the order of public appearance. By
experiencing works in this order, one can watch a world grow as the author
develops it, and also experience the suspense and surprises built into the
narrative structures; as discussed in Chapter 4, watching the Star Wars
episodes in the original order they were made (IV, V, VI, I, II, III) is quite
different from watching them according to their internal chronological order
(I, II, III, IV, V, VI). The order of creation, however, can vary from the order
of public appearance; for example, the order of publication of the seven
Narnia books was The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), Prince
Caspian (1951), The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952), The Silver Chair
(1953), The Horse and His Boy (1954), The Magician’s Nephew (1955), and
The Last Battle (1956), while the order in which the books were actually
completed runs Wardrobe, Caspian, Treader, Horse, Chair, Battle, and
Nephew (and by internal chronological order, the books run Nephew,
Wardrobe, Horse, Caspian, Treader, Chair, Battle). When the order of
creation differs from the order of public appearance, it is often because the
author is working on multiple works simultaneously, or because different
teams may be working on works in different media designed to be released
together (for example, the movie The Matrix Reloaded and the video game
Enter the Matrix were developed simultaneously and were both released on

May 15, 2003), a situation referred to as “co-creation” in the industry.30 In

cases of co-creation and simultaneous releases, both order of creation and
order of public appearance will give way to other kinds of sequencing.
Internal chronological order is also a common way of experiencing a series
of works, since following a world’s internal chronology reveals the world’s
diegetic history and development, the arcs of its characters, and the
resolution of its conflicts. While internal chronological order often matches
order of public appearance for the most part, the fact that prequels are now
a common sequence element means that chronological order is often not the
best way to experience a series of works, since prequels are often made with
the assumption that the audience is already familiar with worked released
prior to them. Experiencing a prequel before the works that precede it can
destroy enigmas by explaining them too soon; by revealing causes before
their effects, by revealing secrets that drive suspense, or by giving the
backstory of characters who are supposed to remain mysterious for awhile
to achieve a certain effect in the narrative (for example, when Aragorn, Yoda,
and Morpheus are first introduced in their respective worlds, other
characters do not know who they are and neither is the audience supposed
to know who they are at that point). Internal chronological order, then, is
more useful once one is familiar with the works set in the world already,
allowing one to get a better sense of how events relate to each other, as well
as to test the consistency of a world’s cause-and-effect structures. Internal
chronological order is often provided by timelines and chronologies of a
world’s events, although transquels and simultaneous events can complicate
the arrangement of a set of works into chronological order.
For larger worlds, another type of ordering is what we could call canonical
order, in which the most canonical material is experienced first, with less
canonical material experienced later. Since the most canonical material is
usually what constitutes the core of the world, and what makes it popular if
it is popular, it makes sense to begin there; and if one enjoys the world and
wants more of it, one then moves to the spin-offs and derivative works next,
rather than begin with ancillary works (it seems very unlikely that someone
would read multiple Star Wars novels without ever having seen the feature
films). For many worlds, canonicity is associated with quality and how true
a work is to the world’s subcreator’s vision, thus the best material is often
also the most canonical, with less canonical material dropping off somewhat
in quality or varying from the author’s original ideas.
Transmedial worlds, especially those which have already spread to a
variety of media, allow the audience to experience the world in still another
order, the order of media preference. People who have never read The Lord
of the Rings might see the movies instead, since they require less time
commitment, and then read the book later if they enjoyed the movie.
Transmedial adaptation can make this a strange sequence; for example, there
is a 256-page novelization of the movie Great Expectations (1998) which is
itself based on the much longer Dickens novel of the same name; so someone
could begin with the short novelization, see the movie, and then read the
full-length Dickens original. The order of media preference may be
determined by the investment each medium requires in terms of length,
amount of time needed, the cost to purchase or experience a work, and
individual media biases. Media preference could also be limited by what
media are available, or allowed, leading to the next type of ordering, age-
appropriate order.
Children are entering into franchises and worlds at younger and younger
ages, making age-appropriate order the way many of them encounter a
transmedial world. For example, all of the movies of the Pirates of the
Caribbean franchise are PG-13, yet there are several LEGO sets based on the
films which are designed for children under 13. Age-appropriate works can
introduce worlds and the narratives in them through sanitized, simplified,
and child-friendly versions of other works set in a world. The LEGO Star
Wars video games, for instance, feature dozens of cut-scenes which
recapitulate the plots of the six feature films, but use LEGO versions of
characters in wordless parodies of the film scenes, often including slapstick
comedy and leaving out violence or replacing it with some alternative
representation (LEGO people falling to pieces rather than being executed
realistically). These cut-scenes reveal storylines to children before they have
seen the films, yet at the same time, as parody, they are quite different from
the actual films. These early experiences, while they undoubtedly generate
interest in a franchise or world, also may influence or even spoil the first-
time film viewings that come later, ruining surprises and suspense, and
giving dramatic scenes humorous connotations as the cut-scenes are
recalled. Even reference works like encyclopedias or atlases may give away
story information that could affect one’s experience of other works. Thus, by
courting younger and younger audiences, world-builders may be changing
the ways their worlds are experienced and remembered.
Transmedial growth and adaptation enrich an imaginary world beyond
what any single medium could present, and also make the world less tied to
its medium of origin, giving it greater independence as more media
windows are available through which to experience it. Authors can now
design worlds for multiple media from their inception, and older worlds
may gain new audiences as new interpretations of them in other media
appear. Due to the use of multiple media, and the often wide scope and size
of the worlds appearing in them, the authorship of such worlds often
extends beyond the originator of the world, expanding into concentric
circles of authorship, which are the subject of the next chapter.

OceanofPDF.com
7
CIRCLES OF AUTHORSHIP

It’s strange, especially for a director, to find out you are not the creator.
You are instrumental in creating something, but even if you fancy the
idea that you pulled it out of yourself, you have to acknowledge that you
could not have done it alone.

—Wim Wenders, from an interview in the journal IMAGE1

Suddenly he said: “Of course you don’t suppose, do you, that you wrote
all that book yourself?” … I think I said: “No, I don’t suppose so any
longer.” I have never since been able to suppose so. An alarming
conclusion for an old philologist to draw concerning his private
amusement. But not one that should puff any one up who considers the
imperfections of “chosen instruments”, and indeed what sometimes seems
their lamentable unfitness for the purpose.

—J. R. R. Tolkien, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien2

Despite attacks on them and proclamations of their death, the notions of

authorship and the author have endured and show no signs of falling out of
use. What has changed, however, is the idea of the author as a lone figure
producing a work in isolation, for whom influences and potential
consequences play no role in the shaping of a work. The notion of
authorship has expanded out to include a variety of roles and acknowledged
contributions that make a work what it is, while still maintaining the need
for attribution. As Jack Stillinger writes in Multiple Authorship and the Myth
of Solitary Genius:

For practical purposes, the single most important aspect of authorship is

simply the vaguely apprehended presence of human creativity,
 personality, and (sometimes) voice that nominal authorship seems to
provide. Just as it would be unthinkable for a visitor to an art museum to
admire a roomful of paintings without knowing the names of the
individual painters and for a concertgoer to sit through a program of
symphonies and concertos without knowing the names of the individual
composers, so it is impossible to imagine any presentation of writings
(even of writings in which Barthes and Foucault contest the existence of
authors!) that does not prominently refer to authorship.…
Obviously, the myth of single authorship is a great convenience for
teachers, students, critics, and other readers, as well as for publishers,
agents, booksellers, librarians, copyright lawyers—indeed, for everyone
connected with the production of books, starting with the authors
themselves. The myth is thoroughly embedded in our culture and our
ordinary practices, including the ordinary practices of criticism and
interpretation, for which, I would argue, it is an absolute necessity. The
countering reality of multiple authorship is no threat to the continuing
existence of the myth, nor, except for deconstructionist theorists, is there
any compelling reason for wanting the myth to cease to exist. Although
a deconstructivist approach to interpretation might take comfort in the
idea of a plurally altered text, the behavior of deconstructionists as
authors of their own texts shows that the myth is in no danger from that
quarter.3
While Stillinger writes mainly about literature and film, this is especially
true of imaginary worlds; the larger they are, the more likely it is that they
are the work of many people, not just as influences on an author, but also as
workers who contribute new assets and storylines to a world. Imaginary
worlds are often not only transmedial and transnarrative, but transauthorial
as well.
Authorship, then, can be conceptualized as a series of concentric circles
extending out from the world’s originator (or originators), with each circle
of delegated authority being further removed from the world’s origination
and involving diminishing authorial contributions, from the originator and
main author to estates, heirs, and torchbearers; employees and freelancers;
the makers of approved, derivative, and ancillary products that are based on
a world; and finally to the noncanonical additions of elaborationists and fan
productions. A world’s expansion into these circles may occur early on, as
transmedial demands require specialized work in different media, or later, as
the world continues growing after its originator has retired or died. A
world’s author or owner, however, can decide to what extent authorship will
be delegated, or if it will be at all, determining whether a world will remain
open or closed, as well as what material will be considered canonical. Before
we examine the different circles, then, we must first consider issues of
canonicity, beginning with whether a world is open or closed.

Open and Closed Worlds

An “open” world is a world in which canonical material is still being added;
such a world is still growing and developing, as it accrues more information,
detail, and narrative. In an open world, an author is also free to change
material or the canonical status of material, for example, when retconning
occurs. An author can also arrange for a world to remain “open” even after
his or her death, passing on the authorial power over the world to some
successor along with whatever intellectual property rights may come with it.
A “closed” world, on the other hand, is one which its author has declared
“finished”, meaning that no more canonical material will be added to it. A
world may also become closed when an author dies without having passed
on the authority to add canonical material to a world, or when someone to
whom the author has passed such authority declares that no more canonical
material will be added to the world.
Closed worlds can still make transmedial moves, but these will be
interpretations instead of true additions (which is to say, none of the added
material will be canonical). Thus, a closed world can continue growing as
various interpretations and derivative material (like merchandise) appear for
it, even after the author is done with it, as the various rights and ownership
of the world are passed along to a custodian of the author’s choosing. After a
time, worlds fall into public domain; today anybody could write and publish
a story set in More’s Utopia or Butler’s Erewhon, but these would still fail to
contribute material that everyone would accept as canonical on the same
level as the original stories by More and Butler. Both worlds, though public
domain, would still remain closed.
 Perhaps the most famous closed world would be Tolkien’s Arda. Although
Tolkien wanted to “leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint
and music and drama”,4 he clearly intended this to mean transmedial
interpretation, not additional stories written by others, as is evident in a
letter written to his publisher.5 Christopher Tolkien, chosen as his father’s
literary executor, has since published much of his father’s writings
posthumously, but it does not seem likely that he or the Tolkien estate will
ever go against his father’s wishes and allow stories written by others to add
to the tales of Middle-earth (nor would fans be likely to accept new stories
written by others as canonical, anyway).
An example of an open world would be the Star Wars galaxy, which, as of
2012, is still being added to by George Lucas and his employees. The longer a
world remains open, the more likely we are to find its authorship spread out
over the concentric circles of authorship described in this chapter; and the
world of Star Wars provides excellent examples of them, as well as a good
example of a world with material occupying multiple levels of canonicity.

Levels of Canonicity
The idea of canon, that certain things are “true” for an imaginary world (that
characters, locations, and objects exist, and that events have happened
within that world), demonstrates the desire for authenticity from the point
of view of the audience, who are often concerned with demarcating what is
“official” for a world or franchise. Part of this is due to the importance given
to authorship; the author is considered the true source of world material, the
creative vision that makes it a unified experience. Or at least one hopes it is
unified; if others are authorized to contribute to a world, it also becomes a
question of what an author is willing to accept, and how much authority has
been delegated.
Canonicity is more than just a question of determining whether something
is canonical or not. Just as there are circles of authorship, there are differing
degrees of canonicity, and purists may accept less material as canonical than
will a casual audience member with less interest in (and less knowledge of)
a particular world. For example, one could accept only the Dune novels
written by Frank Herbert, and not those written by his son Brian, even
though some of them were developed out of the elder Herbert’s notes. Those
who view worlds as works of art may not accept anything beyond what was
initially produced by the world’s originator, recognizing only that which
comes from their original artistic vision (which itself may vary over time) as
authentic; even retcon performed by the world’s originator may be rejected.
Some worlds have very well-defined levels of canonicity. The Star Wars
Holocron (the franchise’s database), managed by Leland Chee, is organized
into five levels of canonicity: G-canon (the most recent versions of films
Episodes I–VI, the scripts, movie novelizations, radio plays, and Lucas’
statements), T-canon (the Star Wars: The Clone Wars television show and
the live-action Star Wars television series); C-canon (the Expanded Universe
elements); S-canon (a secondary canon including the role-playing game Star
Wars: Galaxies); and N-canon (noncanonical material, such as the Star
Wars: Infinities series of stories). And hierarchies exist even within canon
levels; for example, in G-canon, the films are more canonical than the
novelizations, and the more recent versions of films are considered more
canonical than the older versions of them.6 Different levels of canon can
also disagree on points; for example, while Lucas considers Boba Fett to
have died in Return of the Jedi, in the Extended Universe (EU) he survives
and goes on to further adventures.
To complicate things further, noncanonical works are produced not only
by fans, but sometimes by the world’s own author or others authorized to
produce them; for example, the Energizer battery commercial in which
Darth Vader appears with the Energizer Bunny (see Figure 7.1), or the four
commercials for Georgia Coffee in which characters from Twin Peaks
appear. Thus, for a work to be canonical requires that it be declared as such
by someone with the authority to do so; authorship alone is not sufficient to
determine the work’s status. Those works, however, that typically possess
the highest degree of canonicity are those which come from the innermost
circles of authorship, which surround the originator and main author of a
world.
FIGURE 7.1 Some of the noncanonical appearances of Darth Vader allowed
by Lucasfilm: in a 1994 Energizer battery commercial (top, left); in a 2009
promotional ad for Star Wars on the Space Channel (bottom, left); on the
golf course in a 2008 Star Wars ad on the Spike Channel (top, right); and in a
2004 ad for Target (bottom right).

Originator and Main Author

The person who conceives of a world, the originator, is usually also the main
author responsible for the first work or works appearing in the world;
however, it is possible that the two roles are separate, as in the case of some
shared worlds in which authors write works set in a world devised by
someone else (for example, the planet Uller, invented by John D. Clark and
used as the location for three novellas (“The Long View” by Fletcher Pratt,
“Uller Uprising” by H. Beam Piper, and “Daughters of Earth” by Judith
Merril) which were published together as The Petrified Planet (1952)). More
often than not, though, the originator and main author are the same. The
author, then, invents the world, determines its bounds, and usually builds
some of its infrastructures (as discussed in Chapter 3). When the world
makes its first public appearance, the author’s name becomes associated
with it as the source of the world and the authority behind it.
 Levels of canonicity may exist even within the main author’s own works.
If an inconsistency occurs between a major work and a minor work in an
author’s oeuvre, the major work will likely be considered the more
canonical of the two. Likewise, early works or later works may be given
greater canonical status. Authors who change their work will undoubtedly
prefer the later versions to the early ones (or else the changes would not be
made). When those changes amount to retconning, the later work can be
seen as preferable, because retconning usually ties earlier works more firmly
into the author’s world, eliminating inconsistencies. Nevertheless, if the
works have existed a long time in their original, earlier form before the
retconning, they may have become known and loved by an audience who
will prefer the earlier versions and not want to see them changed; for
example, fans who prefer the original versions of Star Wars Episodes IV–VI
to the retconned Special Edition versions. These fans may consider the
earlier versions canonical, disagreeing with what Lucas himself deems
canonical. Tolkien was well aware of this kind of reaction when he
retconned The Hobbit to bring it in line with The Lord of the Rings, doing so
quietly and even finding a way to cleverly make both versions canonical; the
older version is said to be the story that Bilbo told, but a distortion of the
truth, while the newer “corrected” version tells the story as it really was.
Thus, both versions can remain within Tolkien’s mythology simultaneously,
with their disagreement explained in diegetic terms.
Unpublished work also raises the question of canonicity. A work may
remain unpublished due to not being finished, not being polished to a
desired degree of quality, or simply because the author died before getting
around to publishing it. If a work’s authorship is unquestioned and the work
appears to be complete, it may be considered canonical; on the other hand,
without the author’s final approval, one can ask whether the work in
question actually reached the final stage of revision that the author would
have wanted before it was released to the public (although even released
works can later be retconned). A range of examples exists within J. R. R.
Tolkien’s posthumously published works edited by his son Christopher. The
stories of The Silmarillion (1977) existed in various forms for decades and
many of them feel complete and even polished in the published book;
although he continued changing it until his death, Tolkien had tried to get a
version of The Silmarillion published during his lifetime, so he must have
considered much of it complete and ready to go. By contrast, other texts
appearing in Unfinished Tales (1981) and the 12-volume History of Middle-
earth series (1983–1996) range from ones that are nearly done to partial
drafts and sketches. Multiple versions of the same stories occur at differing
levels of narrative resolution, and conflicts arise between them as well. For
example, Tom Shippey has pointed out that there are at least nine different
versions of “The Legend of Beren and Lúthien” ranging in length from two
pages to two hundred pages, and that “authors tend not to begin with Grand
Designs which they then slowly flesh out, but with scenes and visions, for
which they may eventually find intellectual justification.”7
An author can even play with noncanonical material within a canonical
work. Nine years after Miguel de Cervantes published the first part of his
Don Quixote (1605), an unauthorized sequel appeared under the pseudonym
Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda. In the second part of Don Quixote (1615),
Cervantes confronted Avellaneda’s unauthorized sequel by having his
characters talk about it and ridicule it, and at one point, they even meet Don
Alvaro Tarfe, a character from Avellaneda’s book. By bringing Tarfe into his
novel, Cervantes has turned a character who was originally noncanonical
(since he only appeared in the false sequel) into a canonical one (since he
appears in Cervantes’ own Part II). (Of course, one could argue that
Cervantes’ use of Tarfe is itself an unauthorized act, making Cervantes’ use
of Tarfe noncanonical from the point of view of Avellanda’s book; but it
would be something of a stretch to regard Avellanda’s book as having a
canon of its own.) In any event, the audience’s desire to see certain works
and worlds continue does not end with a character’s death or even the
author’s.

Estates, Heirs, and Torchbearers

The threat of unauthorized sequels persists after an author’s death, so it is
not unusual for a popular world to be handed over to a caretaker who will
continue to manage the world, whether it is open or closed. If the world is
closed, the new owners can collect income from the world, allowing
adaptations and licensing merchandise and so on, without adding to the
world. If the author leaves the world open, the author is granting permission
to continue expanding the world, and the world’s new owner may then
oversee further world-building. Sometimes an author’s worlds would not
even reach an audience, were it not for the caretakers who manage and
promote them (like the worlds invented by Thomas Williams Malkin, Austin
Tappan Wright, and Henry Darger, each of which gained public recognition
only after the author’s death). Such caretakers include estates, heirs, and
torchbearers.
If a world is left open, an author’s estate, represented by an executor,
usually determines how it will be passed on and to whom (unless the author
has already dictated to whom it will go). As with the inheritance of physical
property, there may be a direct heir, for example, Frank Herbert’s son Brian
who continued the Dune series of novels, or Christopher Tolkien, who took
on the editing and publication of his father’s unpublished work. If there is
no direct heir, a torchbearer can be granted the right to continue building a
world. For example, after L. Frank Baum’s death, his wife Maud Baum along
with William Lee, vice president of L. Frank Baum’s publisher, chose Ruth
Plumy Thompson to continue writing Oz novels. Mark Saxton helped Sylvia
Wright edit her father’s manuscript for Islandia (1942), and then went on to
write three Islandia novels of his own, using Austin Tappan Wright’s notes.
Some torchbearers even finish works begun by an author, for example, when
Brandon Sanderson finished Robert Jordan’s A Memory of Light, the last
novel in his Wheel of Time series (the novel was broken into three books,
The Gathering Storm (2009), Towers of Midnight (2010), and A Memory of
Light (2012)). A torchbearer differs from an heir in the sense that a
torchbearer’s role is assigned by an estate, and could be revoked; whereas an
heir, usually a widow, son, or daughter, has a natural right to inherit
property due to familial ties or connections, or because the heir was
specifically appointed by the author before his or her death (for example, H.
P. Lovecraft named Robert Hayward Barlow as his literary executor, since
Barlow had collaborated with him and Lovecraft was his friend and mentor).
Before 1900, few worlds extended beyond a single book, much less a single
author. Baum’s Oz was the first world to continue after the author’s death in
an official manner, with an authorized torchbearer. As the new “Royal
Historian of Oz”, Thompson ended up writing more canonical Oz novels
than Baum did (19 to Baum’s 14). Since then, the L. Frank Baum Family
Trust has continued to name other “royal historian” torchbearers, with the
most recent one (as of 2012) being Sherwood Smith. The flow of authorized
novels, then, continues even though all of Baum’s original novels have
entered into public domain, which demonstrates that while individual works
set in a world can become public domain, the world itself does not
(canonically speaking), and Oz currently holds the record for the world
remaining officially “open” the longest, with canonical additions having been
made from 1900 to 2006.
Since heirs and torchbearers are given creative control of a world, can they
retcon the originator’s material that preceded them? Retconning is
controversial enough even when performed by the work’s original author, so
even greater objections usually arise when someone else makes such
changes. Torchbearer retconning occurs most often in film, television, and
other media where high production costs make it more likely that a world is
a corporation’s intellectual property. While franchise ownership gives a
company the legal right to control or change a franchise’s works, critics and
audiences will naturally object to alterations that destroy or degrade the
artistic integrity of a work (such as Turner Entertainment’s controversial
colorization of Casablanca (1942)). Yet, while fans, critics, and historians
may prefer the older, original versions of works, commercial pressures to
“update” works for contemporary audiences can still prevail.
Although Gene Roddenberry originated Star Trek, the original television
series was produced by Desilu, and after various acquisitions, mergers, and
splits, CBS Paramount Television obtained the rights to produce Star Trek
television shows, while Paramount Pictures produced the movies, licensing
them from CBS Paramount Television.8 When the original Star Trek
episodes were remastered in high definition in 2006, CBS Paramount
Television retconned the series as well: special effects shots were replaced
with computer graphics versions, matte backgrounds were redone, scenes
were recomposed, actors were added into shots, and the opening music was
re-recorded in digital stereo. (And, in 2009, J. J. Abrams’ Star Trek movie
retconned the characters of the original series, though an attempt was made
to tie the changes into the franchise’s continuity through the use of time
travel and an alternate reality.) In such cases, retconning is motivated not by
the desire for world continuity, but rather by the desire to keep older works
palatable to newer audiences, which is often the motivation behind remakes
and reboots as well.
 While torchbearers work for the author’s estate or the franchise’s
corporate owners, they are more than just employees, since they fill the role
vacated by the world’s main author, actively setting the direction and the
course of the growth of the author’s imaginary world. However, other
writers may be commissioned for books as well, and work on storylines
given to them but without the control that a torchbearer has in the further
development of a world.

Employees and Freelancers

Often a world, especially a transmedial one, will become too much for a
single person to produce alone, so the author (or an estate, heir, or
torchbearer) will hire employees and freelancers (who, unlike regular
employees, come and go, working on a project-to-project basis) to aid in the
construction of a world and the works set in it. Employees and freelancers
differ from heirs and torchbearers in that they are unable to initiate new
works, perform retconning, or add new canonical material without
permission from the author, heir, or torchbearer; they are hired hands who
are assigned tasks and paid for them. On the high end of this spectrum are
writers commissioned to write novels set in an author’s world, and
screenwriters and directors making films set in the author’s world (for
example, screenwriter Leigh Brackett and director Irving Kershner both
worked on The Empire Strikes Back (1980) for George Lucas). Since the work
they do is for someone else’s world, they usually do not own any of the
intellectual property that they work on for the world. In the literary world,
this practice of work-for-hire is known as “sharecropping”. According to
Walter Jon Williams, a writer of tie-in novels:
Many of these invented universes proved enormously popular with the
reading public, and commercial publishers were not slow to perceive the
opportunity that lay within that popularity. When the author was
unavailable or not inclined to write further installments in the series,
other writers were commissioned to pen “authorized” sequels. The
background of Isaac Asimov’s popular robot stories, for example,
provided the framework for the Robot City novels of the late 1980s.
 This is a practice known in the industry as “sharecropping,” and as with
sharecropping in the agricultural sector, the greatest benefit is gained by
the owner of the (in this case literary) property, and much less by the
workers tolling on that property. Typically, the original creator is given a
large advance, usually with the expectation of doing little or no work on
the project. The sharecropper receives a much smaller share of the
money…. The sharecropper is often a new writer whose profile would be
raised by having his or her name associated with that of a best-selling
author—the Robot City novels, for example, were written by Michael
Kube-McDowell and William F. Wu, both relative newcomers.
Sharecropping is a practice with a venerable history. Many of the
works of Alexandre Dumas père, as an example, were written in large
part by his stable of collaborators—this includes all three Musketeers
books as well as The Count of Monte Cristo. Unlike modern
sharecroppers, however, Dumas’ collaborators were rarely, if ever,
credited for their works.9
The prestige connected with working on a well-known world, then, is often
the main compensation received by the sharecropper. World-based
franchises seem to be particularly prone to sharecropping; according to
writer Carol Pinchefsky:
Media tie-ins are not the sole domain of the speculative fiction genre.
Sweet Valley High, Little House on the Prairie, and CSI have all been
tied-in. However, tie-ins are a mainstay of speculative fiction, and
bookstores are devoting an increasingly larger portion of bookshelf space
to them. Why is this happening to science fiction and fantasy, but not
other genres?
In a genre based on speculation, the interviewees can only speculate.
Margaret Weis (Mistress of Dragons) says, “I think because readers
become so involved in the world itself. With fantasy and science fiction,
[the readers] are interested in the whole exotic alien world, which is so
different than ours. In a romance [the readers] care about the characters
more than the world.” In other words, fans become so smitten with a
certain universe, they crave stories placed there.10
 Employees and freelancers may be given varying degrees of artistic license
and responsibility, and their creative contributions can shape a world to a
large extent; consider Ben Burtt’s sound design work and the graphic design
work of Ralph McQuarrie and Doug Chiang which defined the sound and
look of the Star Wars films. Those who work on a well-established world
will be beholden to follow the world’s “bible” and make sure their
contributions remain consistent with it, which can be more difficult than
inventing something new, due the restrictions imposed by existing material.
Creative contributions of employees and freelancers can range from great to
small, down to the contributions of movie extras who fill in the backgrounds
of crowd scenes, and technicians whose work may go unnoticed in the
finished product. Extending the circles of authorship even farther, we come
to the licensing and merchandising of imaginary worlds, and other
properties made from their data.

Approved, Derivative, and Ancillary Products

The most commercially successful imaginary worlds are those whose assets
are instantly recognizable; iconic characters, places, vehicles, and other
objects which evoke the world and are used to promote a variety of licensed
merchandise, which bear their images and forms. Merchandised items, then,
usually add little or no canonical material to a world, since they rely on the
popularity of existing assets that have already appeared elsewhere.
Occasionally, however, they can be used to reveal world information that
does not appear in other sources. For example, designer Ralph McQuarrie
made an uncredited cameo appearance in The Empire Strikes Back (1980) as
an unnamed extra walking through the background of a shot. Later, an
action figure of “General McQuarrie”, made in his likeness, appeared,
revealing the character’s name. Such information, minimal as it is, has no
real bearing on the film’s story, but is the kind of trivia that fans enjoy
knowing as “inside information” about a world.
While toys, games, and other merchandise contribute little or nothing in
the way of canonical material, some ancillary products, like encyclopedias
and atlases, organize existing data and sometimes provide new data that has
not appeared in any other work but merely fills in gaps in various world
infrastructures. When such reference works are officially commissioned by
the world’s owner, these additions may be given canonical status. Often,
however, such works are compiled and assembled from existing material;
cartographer Karen Wynn Fonstad, for example, was known for her atlases
of imaginary worlds, including The Atlas of Pern (1984), The Atlas of the
Land (1985), Atlas of the Dragonlance World (1987), The Forgotten Realms
Atlas (1990), and two editions of The Atlas of Middle-earth (1981 and 1991).
Other reference works filled with data about individual imaginary worlds,
such as chronologies and encyclopedias, have been assembled and even
published without the permission of the authors’ estates. Yet, estates can
hold back scholarship that discusses and involves an author’s unpublished
material; for example, the Tolkien Estate has not allowed publication of
scholarly analysis of Tolkien’s unpublished Quenya manuscripts.11
Approved, derivative, and ancillary products may add not to a world’s
canon, but they can change the way that a world and its assets are
experienced. For example, encountering Darth Vader first as a LEGO
minifigure or as bobble-head toy will reduce the air of menace that he had
in his original appearance in Star Wars in 1977. Likewise, glancing through
atlases like Fonstad’s Atlas of Middle-earth or Barbara Strachey’s The
Journeys of Frodo (1992) or chronologies like Michael W. Perry’s Untangling
Tolkien (2006) or Daniel Wallace’s The New Essential Chronology to Star
Wars (2005), will reveal much of the stories and their plots to those who
have not read the books or seen the films. The aggressive marketing behind
certain worlds, especially in toy stores, can risk revealing too much about a
world before its audience is old enough to experience its original core works.
While the production of world-based merchandise needs approval from
the owners of a world, scholarly work which analyzes, discusses, or compiles
information about a world can often avoid the need for authorization and
approval. Whether it praises, critiques, or both, scholarly analysis calls
attention to a world and usually provides a new context in which to view it,
so it, too, can change the way an audience experiences a world. The fact that
authorization is usually not required for such discussion of a world means
that scholarship bridges the gap out to the next circle of authorship, that of
elaborationists and fan productions.

Elaborationists and Fan Productions

Fan productions set in other authors’ worlds have been around since early
unauthorized sequels, like those made for Orlando Innamorato (1495) and
Don Quixote (1605). In a sense, fan productions can be seen as an extension
of what audiences do all the time while experiencing a world; filling in gaps
as world gestalten occur. As Henry Jenkins describes it:
The encyclopedic ambitions of transmedia texts often results in what
might be seen as gaps or excesses in the unfolding of the story: that is,
they introduce potential plots which cannot be fully told or extra details
which hint at more than can be revealed. Readers, thus, have a strong
incentive to continue to elaborate on these story elements, working them
over through their speculations, until they take on a life of their own.
Fan fiction can be seen as an unauthorized expansion of these media
franchises into new directions which reflect the reader’s desire to “fill in
the gaps” they have discovered in the commercially produced
material.12
“Fanon” is a term sometimes used to describe the theories and gap-filling
ideas that many fans think are canon, when they actually are not.13 Writers
of fan fiction, whom Anthony Burdge and Jessica Burke refer to as
“elaborationists”,14 go beyond the unconscious filling of gaps to consciously
devising stories and world material that elaborate upon and extend the
narratives and characters of a world. (While much can be said about fan
fiction, machinima, and other such user-created additions to imaginary
worlds, these kinds of additions are almost always noncanonical, and thus a
detailed analysis of them is beyond the scope of this chapter.)
The material created by fans rarely becomes official canon, and in the rare
cases that it does, it is usually only accepted at a lower level of canon. For
example, the fan “Tawnia Poland” suggested the name “Darth Caedus” and
won the “Darth Who” contest which asked fans to name a new Sith character
who would appear in Karen Traviss’s book Sacrifice (2007) from the Legacy
of the Force series of Star Wars novels, which reside in Star Wars C-canon.
Also more rare are those elements that move up levels of canon as well:
Lucas liked the planet name “Coruscant” first used in Timothy Zahn’s
Expanded Universe (EU) novel Heir to the Empire (1991), and used it in The
Phantom Menace (1999); and the character Aayla Secura first appeared in
several EU novels and comics before Lucas put her in Attack of the Clones
(2002); in both cases, an element from C-canon was moved up to G-canon.15
Although fan productions almost never become canon themselves, they
can affect canon in a number of ways. Authors producing ongoing worlds
often are aware of fans’ reactions, through fan productions, fan mail,
Internet forum discussions, and sales figures, and these reactions will
influence the creation of later works set in the world. For example, Boba
Fett, who was originally a minor character in The Empire Strikes Back and
Return of the Jedi, became so popular with fans that he was given more

backstory in Attack of the Clones.16 Likewise, the negative reaction of fans

to Jar Jar Binks in The Phantom Menace led to a much-reduced role in
Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith (2005).
17 Authors may also
consider fan theories (fanon) regarding solutions to problems or directions
that a story may go, and end up using them in the actual continuation of a
story (a situation referred to as the “Sure, Why Not?” trope at TVtropes.org);
Piers Anthony, for example, is known for using fans’ suggestions for his
Xanth series.18 Thus, fan reactions (and the commercial success or failure
that they can represent), can influence the design of works and worlds,
potentially taking them in a different direction than an author’s original
intentions.
Fans who are serious about contributing canonical material to a world can
become employees or freelancers, or in some cases, even the torchbearers
assigned to continue a world (as is the case with lifelong Doctor Who fan
Steven Moffat, who eventually became the head writer and executive
producer of Doctor Who).19 However, relatively few fans have the means
and opportunity to devote their careers to working on their favorite worlds.
And while some worlds employ hundreds of people in their ongoing
creation, the majority of them are on the lower end of the hierarchies of
authorship, with perhaps only a few near the top who have the power to
decide what will become canon. There are, however, worlds in which the
circles of authorship reach outward to fans much sooner, and where large
numbers of people can add to a world’s canon, albeit in limited form; we
might refer to such worlds as participatory worlds.
Participatory Worlds
Many worlds are shared worlds, built from the work of multiple
contributors; so such worlds can be said to be participatory at least in one
sense. Some worlds, however, allow participation by world’s audience,
blurring the distinction between author and audience. The world is still
originated by an author, who determines what the world will be like initially
and what rules will be followed by the participants and inhabitants within
it; so the role of an author is still present, even though it may be filled by a
team rather than an individual. A participatory world, however, allows an
audience member to participate in the world and its events, and make
permanent changes that result in canonical additions to the world. Such
additions may be the actions of an avatar who is a part of the diegesis and
takes part in diegetic events (as in an MMORPG), a player–character in a
tabletop game or MUD who can actively build and change the world from
within the world, or a player who institutes changes from outside of the
world, negotiating the world’s shape and future with others.
Participatory worlds are a subset of interactive worlds, since while all
participatory worlds are inherently open and interactive, not all interactive
worlds allow the user to make permanent changes to the world, sharing in
its authorship. The worlds of single-player video games, for example, allow
interaction, but nothing the player does will result in a permanent change in
the world’s canon; individual play experiences may differ, but the world
remains fixed (the copy of the game that the player owns is only an instance
of the world).20 In most MMORPGs, on the other hand, the player’s avatar
can make changes to the world that other players can note, and that become
part of that world’s history, even if those changes are relatively small within
the scope of the world. Other worlds, like Second Life (2003) and Galaxiki
(2007) are not games but also allow users to build, name, and edit their own
properties.
Acts of authorship by players in participatory worlds can range from
changes made diegetically from within a world (when characters battle
opponents or build structures) to those made from without (when players
contact the game makers and demand changes to the game). While typical
player activities in a MUD or MMORPG will generate events which other
players can observe (or observe the effects of), some on-line worlds allow
players to actively reshape and change the world itself more directly and
profoundly. Since Richard Skrenta’s Monster (1988), some MUDs have “on-
line creation” capabilities, allowing players to edit spaces, create and delete
objects, and change the game world from within the game world. A world’s
rules can also be changed from within; in the MMORPG A Tale in the Desert
(2003), social connections are important as players can organize petitions
requesting various changes to the game world, which are granted if they
have enough signatures of other players, integrating the ability to change the
world into the legal system of the game.
Changes to a world can be categorized according to which infrastructures
they affect, and the degree to which players can affect them. Maps may be
altered when a character builds a house, or builds the land mass on which a
house can be placed, or generates the space itself into which land can be
placed, or perhaps even the rules governing how spaces can be edited or
added in the world. Timelines, naturally, are built from events that occur,
although many larger worlds like Second Life or most MMORPGs contain
thousands of simultaneous events so that no practical timeline can be made
to include all of them, although some large-scale events can affect the world
as a whole, whether in-game or behind-the-scenes. Genealogies are
determined by characters and their relationships, and though most on-line
worlds do not introduce new avatars through the procreation of existing
ones (though in theory they could), characters can be long-lived and can
build social structures (like guilds), which often determine much of a user’s
experience of a world. The nature of a world can sometimes be changed
internally or externally, as discussed earlier, and the culture of the world
will often arise from player interactions, though many world elements, such
as the objects or activities allowed within a world, may be seeded by the
makers of the world. The culture of an on-line world can be suggested by the
makers of the world, but it is the citizens of the world, the players and their
avatars, who will either accept or reject cultural elements, becoming co-
creators along with the makers of the world.
Culture in worlds like Second Life is largely produced by the world’s
inhabitants, and the building of virtual objects within on-line worlds, along
with the selling of them for real currency, has become big business. Worlds
like Second Life and Entropia Universe (2003) have in-world currencies that
are interchangeable with real currencies, and in 2006, “virtual land baroness”
Anshe Chung became the first person to become a millionaire in Second Life,
all from a US$9.95 investment.21 In the Entropia Universe, a virtual space
station sold for US$330,000 in 2009; and in 2010, a virtual resort there sold
for US$635,000.22 In 2009, the Second Life economy was estimated to be
worth US$567 million, about a quarter of the entire U.S. virtual goods
market.23 The building of participatory worlds, and the changing of their
infrastructures, increasingly effects social and economic structures in the
Primary World, as these secondary worlds grow more closely linked to the
Primary World.
The most participatory kind of imaginary world is, of course, the one you
create yourself. Since the appearance of “how-to” books on world-building
for fantasy and science fiction authors in the 1990s, many tools for
subcreators have appeared, from Bill Appleton’s World Builder (1986) for the
Macintosh, to Mark Rosenfelder’s Language Construction Kit (published in
2010, though versions of it have been available on the Internet since 1996)
and The Planet Construction Kit (2010), to computer animation programs
like Bryce (1994), 3DS Max (1996), Blender (2002), Autodesk MotionBuilder
(2009), and many others which allow the design and construction of three-
dimensional landscapes, objects, and characters. The act of world-building,
with the myriad decisions, intricacies, and complexities it can involve, not
only leads to a greater appreciation of well-built worlds, but perhaps also to
greater contemplation of the Primary World itself.

Creation, Subcreation, and the Imago Dei

To construct plausible and moving “other worlds” you must draw on the
only real “other world” we know, that of the spirit.

—C. S. Lewis, “On Stories” in Of Other Worlds24

The virtual “worlds” we enter into offer us a means of escape, a mode of
imagining, and a never-depleted well of possibility for imagining
ourselves all-powerful, infinite, beautiful, desired, even worshipped.
Virtual reality experiences such as video games and online worlds like
Second Life are the most potent forms of world-building available today,
 even more so than cinema or novels, because the agency of the player is
ramped up to such an extent that in many virtual worlds, it is up to the
player–inhabitant to literally construct the world, or to single-handedly
destroy his or her enemies, thereby symbolically bringing order to the
world and “building” it anew. World-building, I argue, is patently a
religious endeavor, one of the oldest ones on earth, practiced today in
some of the newest of ways.

—Rachel Wagner, Godwired: Religion, Ritual, and Virtual Reality25

Will’s idea, at this point, was that players were to directly experience the
difficulty and frustration of making life in the universe, and appreciate
the improbability that life exists at all.

—Chaim Gingold, “A Brief History of Spore”26

Nevertheless—and it is curious when one considers how individual is the
world of each fantasy—there is a very definite and constant character to
fantasy, and in nothing is it perhaps so markedly constant as in its
devotion to wonder at created things, and its profound sense that that
wonder is above almost everything else a spiritual good not to be lost.

—C. N. Manlove, The Impulse of Fantasy Literature27

Wonder, in the sense of miracle, mysticism, and faith, may well be the
single most important contribution of virtual worlds to human
experience.

—Edward Castronova, Exodus to the Virtual World28

Subcreation, by its very nature, is a collaborative effort in which existing
concepts are combined in new ways, and a secondary world is produced
which is a variation on the Primary World. Creation, the Primary World,
makes possible and provides the conceptual and material support for
subcreation and secondary worlds, and subcreation can be seen as a
reflection of Creation. Thus, we find that many authors writing about
human creativity have interpreted Genesis 1:27, in which God creates
human beings in His own image, the Imago Dei, to indicate that our desire
to create is part of what it means to be created in God’s image, and,
according to Bruce Mazlish, “one of humanity’s deepest aspirations.”29 In his
“Letter of His Holiness Pope John Paul II to Artists”, Pope John Paul II wrote
of an idea similar to subcreation, substituting “craftsman” for “subcreator”:
The opening page of the Bible presents God as a kind of exemplar of
everyone who produces a work: the human craftsman mirrors the image
of God as Creator. This relationship is particularly clear in the Polish
language because of the lexical link between the words stwórca (creator)
and twórca (craftsman).
What is the difference between “creator” and “craftsman”? The one who
creates bestows being itself, he brings something out of nothing—ex
nihilo sui et subiecti, as the Latin puts it—and this, in the strict sense, is a
mode of operation which belongs to the Almighty alone. The craftsman,
by contrast, uses something that already exists, to which he gives form
and meaning. This is the mode of operation peculiar to man as made in
the image of God. In fact, after saying that God created man and woman
“in his image” (cf. Gn 1:27), the Bible adds that he entrusted to them the
task of dominating the earth (cf. Gn 1:28). This was the last day of
creation (cf. Gn 1:28–31). On the previous days, marking as it were the
rhythm of the birth of the cosmos, Yahweh had created the universe.
Finally, he created the human being, the noblest fruit of his design, to
whom he subjected the visible world as a vast field in which human
inventiveness might assert itself.30
Subcreation, though it relies on Creation, inherently asks us to imagine what
possible worlds could exist beyond what is known to exist in the Primary
World. It invites invention and experimentation, leading to an examination
of the consequences resulting from the various structures and combinations
of elements that a subcreator imagines, and perhaps even the difficulty in
incarnating them into words, images, objects, sounds, and interactions. In
doing so, we are able to suppose what things would be like if they were
otherwise, and different from those of existing Creation. Writing to someone
who suggested that a subcreator should not go beyond “those channels
which he knows the creator to have used already”, Tolkien responded:
 We differ entirely about the nature of the relation of subcreation to
Creation. I should have said that liberation “from the channels of the
creator is known to have used already” is the fundamental function of
“subcreation”, a tribute to the infinity of His potential variety, one of the
ways in which indeed it is exhibited, as indeed I said in the Essay. I am
not a metaphysician; but I should have thought it a curious metaphysic—
there is not one but many, indeed potentially innumerable ones—that
declared the channels known (in such a finite corner as we have any
inkling of) to have been used, are the only possible ones, or efficacious,
or possibly acceptable to and by Him!31
The act of world-building makes one consciously consider the various
decisions involved in creating a world, and realize, at least to a small degree,
perhaps, the difficulties involved. Besides material considerations, a
subcreator can also play with philosophical possibilities in a world,
speculating as to what effects changes would have on the inhabitants of a
world; as Edward Castronova has suggested, “Much of the task of world-
building involves implicit messaging about what kind of world is a good
world”.32
Such contemplation of the aspects of world-building can lead to the
wonder discussed in the quotes given earlier, along with a greater
appreciation for the Primary World itself. Interviewing Rand Miller, one of
the creators of Myst, Jon Carroll wrote:
In my notebook I had a question from Kevin Kelly, the executive editor
of Wired. It was not a question I had planned to ask, but many
unexpected things had happened. “How has designing a whole world
changed your idea of God?”
Rand puffed his cheeks and blew. “Well, we could talk about that for
hours. We thought about it a lot. I guess the simple way is to say that we
know how much work it took to create Myst, and how puny and unreal
it is compared to the real world, and therefore how miraculous all of
creation is. Matching our experience … it just makes us realize how great
God is.”33
Subcreative activity, then, can be a humbling experience when one considers
the relative simplicity and incompleteness that is inevitable in all subcreated
worlds, no matter how large and detailed they may be. Comparing
secondary worlds to the Primary World (which human beings, even
collectively, have only seen a tiny fraction of), can only lead to a sublime
experience of the latter’s unimaginable vastness and intricacy.
While making one’s own world is undoubtedly the best way to experience
the subcreative process, the contemplation involved in the experience of
making a world is also present in the genre of video games known as “god
games”, in which the player builds a world within the context of the game.
As Mark Hayse sums it up:
God games also inspire some theorists to reflect upon the player–game
phenomenon as a divine–human metaphor. Kevin Kelly imagines that
the player’s work of designing and directing an emergent video game
world reflects the ongoing divine activity of creation (1995). For example,
Kelly observes that god games feature an evolving future in which
players directly control global events such as the weather while only
indirectly influencing the response of those simulated organisms which
are affected by it. Kelly speculates that god game players come to feel
interest and affection for the worlds that they make. Elsewhere, Kelly
argues that technology can “advance our understanding of god-ness by
experiencing the limits and powers of unfolding creations of our own”
(1999, 392). Similarly, Steven Garner (2005) suggests that creative
engagement with technology is an expression of the Imago Dei—the
image of God within human beings. Garner reasons that just as God
might create persons, so those persons might imitate God through
creative acts of their own. However, Noreen Herzfeld (2005) argues that
god games do not fairly reflect the creative Imago Dei. She maintains
that the Imago Dei implies a kind of mutual relationship that god games
cannot reflect. Instead, Herzfeld contends that god games foster playful
experiences of power and control.34
Subcreators in art and science have both struggled to define the limits of
sub-creation, for example, in the desire to create a conscious, autonomous
being with self-awareness, evident in works spanning millennia from
Pygmalion’s statue and Hephaestus’ automatons in Greek mythology to the
robots and artificial intelligence of the present day. Taken to an extreme, the
desire for autonomous creations results in an entire imaginary world which
exists and functions on its own, a secondary world separated from the
Primary World.
Differing as it does from ex nihilo creation, subcreation is not a usurping
of the Creator’s role, but rather cooperation with it, and acknowledgement
of it. The subcreative desire is a part of human nature that precedes our
fallen state, and the action and contemplation that accompanies it are both a
gift and part of a divinely-mandated vocation calling us to carry on the
work that God has begun. Like any gift, it can be neglected or even abused,
but it is given to each person as an inalienable right. As Tolkien explains it:
Fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even
insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure
the perception of, scientific verity. On the contrary. The keener and
clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make. If men were ever in
a state in which they did not want to know or could not perceive truth
(facts or evidence), then Fantasy would languish until they were cured.…
For creative Fantasy is founded upon the hard recognition that things
are so in the world as it appears under the sun; on a recognition of fact,
but not a slavery to it.… Fantasy can, of course, be carried to excess. It
can be ill done. It can be put to evil uses. It may even delude the minds
out of which it came. But of what human thing in this fallen world is
that not true? Men have conceived not only elves, but they have
imagined gods, and worshipped them, even worshipped those most
deformed by their authors’ own evil. But they have made false gods out
of other materials: their notions, their banners, their monies; even their
sciences and their social and economic theories have demanded human
sacrifice. Abusus non tollit usum. Fantasy remains a human right: we
make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made:
and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.35
Subcreation and the building of imaginary worlds has been around as long
as human imagination, but the opening of many new media windows
during the twentieth century has made them more vivid and concrete, and
vastly increased the number of worlds being produced. The addition of new
tools like the computer and the Internet in the late twentieth century further
refined their production and allowed audiences to reach into worlds and
inhabit them vicariously, at the same time bringing them ever closer to the
Primary World. Whatever their use, whether for the proposals of social,
political, technological, and philosophical possibilities, or for escape,
entertainment, satire, therapy, communication, speculation, or the pleasures
of a good story, imaginary worlds have always been with us and interest in
them has never waned; if anything, it has grown stronger over time as more
possibilities become realized in the Primary World, many of which can trace
their origins to secondary worlds.
Subcreation is not just a desire, but a need and a right; it renews our vision
and gives us new perspective and insight into ontological questions that
might otherwise escape our notice within the default assumptions we make
about reality. Subcreated worlds also direct our attention beyond
themselves, moving us beyond the quotidian and the material, increasing
our awareness of how we conceptualize, understand, and imagine the
Primary World. And the more aware we are of it, the better we can
appreciate the Divine design of Creation itself and our place in it.
In my opinion, when we talk about God making man in His own image
and likeness, we should understand that the likeness has to do with his
essence, and this is creation. From this comes the possibility of evaluating
a work and what it represents. In short, the meaning of art is the search
for God in man.

—Andrei Tarkovsky, film director36

OceanofPDF.com
APPENDIX
Timeline of Imaginary Worlds

This list of imaginary worlds, while broadly inclusive, is still far from
complete and is only a sampling of worlds, chosen either for their size, scale,
degree of subcreation, complexity, popularity, fame, historical significance,
or uniqueness, to give an overview of the history of imaginary worlds. The
entries are arranged chronologically by year (and alphabetically when a year
has multiple entries), and each entry is in the format of year, name of the
world (in boldface), scale of world or type of world (in square brackets),
author (with real name in square brackets, if a pseudonym was known to be
used), and work of first public appearance (typically in italics).
This list is world-based rather than based by work or author, thus only the
work in which a world made its first public appearance is listed; further
works set in the same world do not appear, since such a list would be far
longer than the present one. As a result, works that were not the first to be
set in their respective worlds do not appear on the list; for example, World of
Warcraft (2004) is not listed because Azeroth, the Warcraft universe, already
appears in Warcraft: Orcs & Humans (1994), and Ursula K. LeGuin’s The
Dispossessed (1974) is not listed, because Annares, the planet on which it is
set, is a part of the Hainish Universe first introduced in the short story
“Dowry of the Angyar” in a 1964 issue of Amazing Stories. Likewise, The
Lord of the Rings (1954–1955) is not listed, because Arda, the world in which
Middle-earth is located, already appears in The Hobbit (1937), and the film
Star Wars (1977) is not listed, because the Star Wars galaxy first appeared in
the novelization of the film, Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke
Skywalker (1976), which preceded it by only a few months. Of course, one
can go too far in this direction as well; several published poems written by
Tolkien, such as “The City of the Gods” (1923) and “The Adventures of Tom
Bombadil” (1934) are arguably set in Arda, but the glimpses they provide are
so minimal and fleeting, and their links to the world so tenuous (the
Bombadil poem, for example, was not initially set there, and was linked to
Arda only retroactively), that one hardly feels that the world has been
introduced, in comparison to The Hobbit; so some judgment in this vein has
had to be applied regarding first appearances.
The years listed also represent the time of public appearance, not
composition, since typically only the former can be known with certainty.
For example, Philip K. Dick’s Plowman’s Planet first appeared in Nick and
the Glimmung which was written in 1966 but was not published until 1988;
therefore its appearance in Galactic Pot-Healer, which was published in
1969, is listed here as its first public appearance. Since worlds are listed by
place name rather than by main character, some appear only as “Alternate
Earth” or “Future Earth”—for example, the world of Buck Rogers, which first
appeared in “Armageddon, 2419 A.D.” in the August 1928 issue of Amazing
Stories. As the world of Buck Rogers demonstrates, some of the worlds listed
here are versions of the Primary World which are set either in a past or
future distant enough to be foreign to the Primary World as we know it, and
likewise versions of Primary World with alternate histories also appear here
if the resulting world is unique and sufficiently different from our own, for
example, the San Francisco of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
(which later would become the Los Angeles of Blade Runner (1982)), or the
New York of Watchmen (1986). Also, because worlds are location-based
rather than character-based, there is no listing of the Buffyverse, as it is
centered around a person, but there is a listing for Sunnydale, the city in
which Buffy lives (the TV series is set there, but the movie that preceded it
was not, so the series is listed as the first public appearance of the location).
Occasionally, worlds are retroactively linked into the same universe; for
example, L. Frank Baum’s A New Wonderland (1900, later retitled The
Surprising Adventures of the Magical Monarch of Mo and His People when it
was rereleased in 1903), introduces the land of Phunnyland, which was later
renamed Mo. Years later in 1915, part of the ninth book in his Oz series, The
Scarecrow of Oz, takes place in Mo, revealing that Mo and Oz reside in the
same world. In such a case, both worlds are still listed separately, since they
were conceived separately and were only tenuously linked long after both
had been in existence for some time. Likewise, Henry Rider Haggard’s novel
She and Allan (1921) combined characters of his “She” series and “Allan
Quatermain” series, both of which were begun in the 1880s. In the same
way, two or more series can take place in a linked universe in such a tenuous
way that, for all practical purposes, the series are considered separately; for
example, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom series (about Mars), his Amtor
series (about Venus), and his Tarzan series all arguably take place in the
same universe, but each has a different main character and occurs on a
different planet, with very little overlap between them, so each receives a
separate entry in the list (supposed sequels, set in another world and written
by a different author, like Dionys Burger’s Sphereland (1960) written as a
sequel to Edwin Abbott’s Flatland (1884), also warrant separate entries).
Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel series, Burroughs’s Tarzan series, and
Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle series also pose a similar problem, in that multiple
books within each series introduce different worlds, with only the characters
linking the series; in these cases, despite the presence of internarrative
characters, all the worlds of each series do not form a consistent whole, and
thus they appear as separate entries. Another example of a classification
problem is the planet Uller: at the invitation of Twayne Publishers, John D.
Clark invented the planet Uller, which was then used as the location for
three novellas (“The Long View” by Fletcher Pratt, “Uller Uprising” by H.
Beam Piper, and “Daughters of Earth” by Judith Merril) and published
together as The Petrified Planet (1952). Piper went on to include Uller in his
Terro-Human Future History universe, and also wrote another story, “Ullr
Uprising” (1953), set on an alternate version of Uller. Uller is included in the
list along with the Terro-Human universe, since the Terro-Human universe
was Piper’s creation, rather than Clark’s, even though Clark was the
originator of Uller; while Ullr is not included since it is a part of the Terro-
Human universe.
In the compiling of this list, several sources were very useful, including
The Dictionary of Imaginary Places by Alberto Manguel and Gianni
Guadalupi (which itself acknowledges Pierre Versins’s Encyclopèdie de
l’Utopie, des Voyages extraordinaire et de la Science-Fiction and Philip
Goves’s The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction), The Encyclopedia of
Fantasy by John Clute and John Grant, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
by John Clute and Peter Nicholls, The Dictionary of Science Fiction Places by
Brian Stableford, Encyclopedia of Fictional and Fantastic Languages by Tim
Conley and Stephen Cain, TV Towns by Stephen Tropiano, 100 Years of
American Newspaper Comics edited by Maurice Horn, The Visual
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction edited by Brian Ash, and lists from
Wikipedia. Also, the complete texts of many of the works written before
1900 are now public domain, and full-text versions of them can be found on
the Internet.
Ninth century BC Aiaia, Aiolio, Cyclops Island, Fortunate Islands,
Ogygia, Siren Island, etc. [islands], Homer, The Odyssey
Fifth century BC Land of the Arimaspi [land in Africa], Herodotus,
Histories
414 BC Cloudcuckooland [city in the sky], Aristophanes, The Birds
≈ 380 BC Kallipolis [city], Plato, The Republic
360 BC Atlantis [island], Plato, Timaeus
Fourth century BC Meropis [island], Theopompos of Chios, Philippica
Fourth century BC Mount Kunlun [mountain in China], Anonymous, The
Book of the Mountains and Seas
Fourth century BC Panchaiïa [island], Euhemerus, Sacred History Fourth
century BC Thule [island], Pytheas, On the Ocean
Third century BC Mount Tushuo [mountain in China], Anonymous, The
Compendium of the Deities of the Three Religions
165–50 BC Islands of the Sun [islands], Iambulus, Islands of the Sun
First century BC Hsuan [continent], Tung-fang Shuo, Accounts of the Ten
Continents
First century BC Southwest Wilderness [region in China], Tung-fang Shuo,
Book of Deities and Marvels
First century AD Basilisk Land, Blemmyae Land, Ear Islands, etc. [various
places], Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia
Second century Blessed Island, Cabbalussa, Cork Island, Dionysus’s
Island, Dream Island, Empi Archipelago, etc. [islands], Lucian of
Samosata, True History
≈ Third century Anostus [island], Claudius Aelianus, Varia Historia
426 Eternal Jerusalem [city], St. Augustine of Hippo, City of God
Eighth century Brissonte [riverland], Polyglot [island], Anonymous, Liber
Monstrorum de Diversis Generibus
Twelfth century (Unnamed island) [desert island], Ibn Tufail, Hayy ibn
Yaqzān
Thirteenth century (Unnamed island) [desert island], Ibn al-Nafis, Al-
Risalah al-Kamiliyyah fil Siera al-Nabawiyyah
Thirteenth century Cockaigne [country], Anonymous, Le Dit de Cocagne
Thirteenth century Torelore [kingdom], Anonymous, Aucassin et Nicolette
≈Fourteenth century City of Brass, Irem Zat El-Emad, Waq Archipelago,
etc. [various places], Anonymous, The One Thousand and One Nights
(The Arabian Nights)
c. 1321 Hell, Purgatory, Heaven [versions of metaphysical places], Dante
Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
1325 Hy Brasil [island] Angelinus Dalorto, L’Isola Brazil
c. 1357 Amazonia, Bragman, Calonack, Chana, Dondun, Lomb, Mabaron,
Mancy, Nacumera, Silha, Tracoda, etc. [various lands and islands], Sir
John Mandeville (thought to be a pseudonym), The Book of Sir John
Mandeville
1405 City of Ladies [city], Christine de Pisan, La Cité des Dames
1424 Antillia, Devil’s Island, etc. [islands], Zuane Pizzigano, Pizzigano
Chart of 1424
1485 Avalon [island], Camelot [castle], Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte
d’Arthur
1495 Albracca [city], Matteo Maria Boiardo, Orlando Innamorato
1508 Devil’s Island, Fixed Isle, Mongaza, Infante Island, etc. [islands],
Anonymous, Amadís de Gaula
1516 Alcina’s Island [island] Ebuda, Nubia, etc. [lands], Ludovico Ariosto,
Orlando Furioso
1516 Utopia [island], Macarenses, Achora, Polyleritae [lands], St. Thomas
More, Concerning the Best State of a Commonwealth and the New Island
of Utopia
1521 Wolfaria [land], Johann Eberlin von Günzburg, Wolfaria
1532 Aspharage [country in a giant’s mouth], François Rabelais, Les
horribles et épouvantables faits et prouesses du très renommé Pantagruel
Roi des Dipsodes, fils du Grand Géant Gargantua
1534 Abbey of Thélème [Abbey in France], François Rabelais, La vie très
horrificque du grand Gargantua, père de Pantagruel
1538 Brigalaure, Fortunate Islands, etc. [islands], François Rabelais, Le
voyage de navigation queue fist Panurge, disciple de Pantagruel, aux isles
incognues et éstranges de plusiers choses merveilleuses et difficiles á
croire, qu’il dict avoir veues, dont il fait narration en ce présent volume, et
plusiers aultres joyeusetez pour inciter les lecteurs et auditeurs á rire
1552 Chaneph Island, Cheli, Clerkship, Savage Island, Sneak’s Island,
etc. [islands], François Rabelais, Le quart livre des faicts et dicts du bon
Pantagruel
1552 Un Mondo Nuovo [country in Central Europe], Anton Francesco Doni,
I Mondi
1555 Macaria [island], Caspar Stiblinus, “Commentariolus de
Eudaemonensium Republica” in Coropaedia, sive de moribus et vita
virginum sacrarum
1558 Estotiland, Drogio, Fislandia, etc. [islands], F. Marcolini, Dello
scoprimento dell’Isole Frislandia, Eslanda, Engrovelanda, Estotilanda e
Icaria, fatto sotto il Polo Artico dai due fratelli Zeno, M. Nicolo e M.
Antonio
1564 Island of Charges, Island of Ignoramuses, Entelechy, Out, etc.
[islands], François Rabelais, Lecinquiesme et dernier livre des faicts et
ducts du bon Pantagruel, auquel est contenu la visitation de l’Oracle de la
dive Bacbuc, et le mot de la bouteille; pour lequel avoir est enterpris tout ce
long voyage
1564 Lamiam, Parthalia, Taerg Natirb [islands], William Bullein, A
Dialogue both Pleasant and Pitiful, wherein is a Goodly Regimente against
the Fever Pestilence, with a Consolation and Comfort against Death
1572 Sea of Giants [Arctic region], Tommaso Porcacchi, Le isole piu’ famose
del mondo
1596 El Dorado [city in South America], Sir Walter Raleigh, The Discoverie
of the lovlie, rich and beautiful Empyre of Guiana with a relation of the
great and golden City of Manoa (which the Spaniards call El Dorado) And
the Provinces of Emerria, Arromania, and of other countries, with their
rivers, adjoyning.
1602 Taprobane [island], Tommaso Campanella, La Città del Sole
1605 Terra Sancta, Lavernia, Viragynia, Variana, Lyperia, etc. [lands in
Antarctic region], Joseph Hall, Mundus alter et idem, sive Terra Australis
ante hac semper incognita
1614 Calemplui [island], Fernão Mendes Pinto, Peregrinação
1615 Barataria [island], Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El ingenioso hidalgo
Don Quixote de La Mancha Part II
1616 Antangil [island], Anonymous (though the initials I.D.M.G.T. are given
as the author), Histoire du grand et admirable royaume d’Antangil
 Inconnu jusques à présent à tous Historiens et Cosmographes: composé de
six vingts provinces trés-belles & trés fertile
1619 Caphar Salama [island], Johann Valentin Andreæ, Reipublicae
Christianopolitanae Descriptio (Beschreibung des Staates Christenstadt)
1623 Prospero’s Island [island], William Shakespeare, The Tempest
1626 Bensalem [island], Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis
1634 The Moon [moon], Johannes Kepler, Somnium
1638 The Moon [moon], John Wilkins, The Discovery of a World in the
Moone
1641 Macaria [kingdom, unknown location], Attributed to Samuel Hartlib
but now thought to have been written by Gabriel Plattes, A Description of
the Famous Kingdom of Macaria: shewing its Excellent Government,
wherein the Inhabitants Live in Great Prosperity, Health and Happiness;
the King Obeyed, the Nobles Honoured and All Good Men Respected; Vice
Punished and Virtue Rewarded, as an Example to Other Nations; in a
Dialogue between a Scholar and a Traveller
1648 Nova Solyma [city in Israel], Samuel Gott, Novae Solymae libri sex
1654 Animal Republic, Island of Poetry, Pyrandria [islands], Jean Jacobé
de Frémont d’Ablancourt, Supplément de l’Histoire Véritable de Lucien
1656 Oceana [islands], James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana
1657 The Moon [moon], Cyrano de Bergerac, Voyage to the Moon
1657 The Marvellous Islands [islands], Charles Sorel, La Maison des Jeux
1659 Imaginary Island [island], Anne Marie Louise Henriette d’Orléans,
Duchesse De Montpensier, Rélation de L’Isle Imaginaire
1659 Misnie [kingdom], Anne Marie Louise Henriette d’Orléans, Duchesse
De Montpensier, La Princesse de Paphlagonie
1654 Tendre [country], Madeleine De Scudéry, Clélie, Histoire Romaine
(published in ten volumes, 1654–1660)
1660 Jansenia, Calvinia, Libertinia, Despairia [lands], Le Père Zacharie de
Lisieux, Relation du pays de Jansénie, où il est traité des singularitez qui
s’y trouvent, des coustumes, Moeurs et Religion des habitants. Par Louys
Fontaines, Sieur de Saint Marcel
1666 Blazing-World [planet], Margaret Cavendish, The Description of a
New World, Called the Blazing-World
1668 Centrum Terrae [underground kingdom], Hans Jakob Christoffel von
Grimmelshausen, Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teusch
1668 Isle of Pines [island], Henry Neville, The Isle of Pines, or, A late
discovery of a fourth island near Terra Australis incognita, by Henry
Corneius van Sloetten
1673 Floating Island, Savoya, Ursina, Vulpina, etc. [islands in the North
Atlantic Ocean], Richard Head, The Floating Island or A New Discovery
Relating the Strange Adventure on a late Voyage from Lambethana to
Villa Franca, Alias Ramallia, to the Eastward of Terra Del Templo: By
Three Ships, viz. the “Pay-naught”, the “Excuse”, and the “Least-in-Sight”
under the conduct of Captain Owe-much: Describing the Nature of the
Inhabitants, their Religion, Laws and Customs
1675 Sevarambi [country], Denis Vairasse D’Allais, Histoire des Sevarambes,
peuples qui habitent une partie du troisième continent, communement
appelé la Terre Australe
1676 Terre Australe [continent], Gabriel Foigny, Les Aventures De Jacques
Sadeur Dans La Découverte Et La Voyage De La Terre Australe, contenant
les coutumes et les moeurs des Australiens, leur religion, leurs études,
leurs guerres, les animaux particuliers à ce pais et toutes les raretez
curiesses qui s’y trouvent
1678 Oroonoko Island [island in the West Indies], Aphra Behn, Oroonoko,
or the Royal Slave
1684 Christian’s Country [country], John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress
from This World, to That Which is to Come
1696 Noland [land], Anonymous, The Free State of Noland
1700 Calejava [island], Claude Gilbert, Histoire de Calejava ou de l’Isle des
Hommes Raisonnables, avec le Paralelle de leur Morale et du
Christianisme
1703 The Moon [moon,] David Russen, Iter Lunare: Or, A Voyage To The
Moon. Containing Some Considerations on the Nature of that Planet. The
Possibility of getting thither. With other Pleasant Conceits about the
Inhabitants, their Manners and Customs
1703 Naudely [island], Pierre de Lesconvel, Idée D’Un Regne Doux Et
Heureux, Ou RelationDu Voyage du Prince de Montberaud dan l’Ile de
Naudely
1704 Formosa [island near Philippines (not to be confused with Taiwan,
which was formerly named Formosa)], Xternatesa [city], George
Psalmanazar, Description de l’isle Formosa
1705 The Moon [moon], Daniel Defoe, The Consolidator: Or, Memoirs of
Sundry Transactions From the World in the Moon
1708 Fonseca [island near Barbados], Anonymous, A Voyage to the New
Island, Fonseca, Near Barbados
1708 Krinke Kesmes [island near Terra Australis], Henryk Smeeks, The
Mighty Kingdom of Krinke Kesmes
1709 Atalantis [island], Delarivier Manley, Secret Memoirs and Manners of
Several Persons of Quality, of both Sexes, From The New Atalantis
c. 1710 Bustrol [island], Satrapia [empire], Simon Tyssot de Patot, Voyage et
Avantures de Jaques Massé
1711 Éutopia [island], François Lefebvre, Relation du Voyage de l’Isle
d’Éutopie
1715 Basaruah [kingdom], Joseph Morgan, The History of the Kingdom of
Basaruah Containing A Relation of the most Memorable Transactions,
Revolutions and Heroick Exploits in that Kingdom, from the first
Foundation thereof unto this present time. Collected from the most Antient
Records of that Country, and translated into our Language, not only for
Delight, but for the abundant Instruction that may be learned there-from,
in these Remote Parts. Written in Discharge of the Trust reposed in the
Author by his Majesty, for the Discovery of Foreign things. By a Traveller
in Basaruah
1718 Isle de la Pierre Blanche [island in straits of Malacca], Dralsé de
Grandpierre, Relation De Divers Voyages Faits Dans L’Afrique, dans
L’Amerique, & aux Indes Occidentales
1719 Crusoe’s Island [island near South America], Daniel Defoe, The Life
and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner
1719 Paradise Island, Vendchurch’s Island [islands in the Pacific Ocean],
Ambrose Evans, The Adventures, and Suprizing Deliverences, of James
Dubordieu, And His Wife: Who were taken by Pyrates, and carried to the
Unihabited-Part of the Island of Paradise
1720 New Athens [country], Thomas Killigrew the Younger, “A Description
of New Athens in Terra Australis Incognita”, in Miscellanea Aurea, or, The
Golden Medley
1720 Rufsal [underground country near the North Pole], Simon Tyssot de
Patot, La Vie, Les Aventures, & le Voyage de Groenland Du Révérend Père
Cordelier Pierre De Mesange
1724 Alca [island], Daniel Defoe, A New Voyage Round the World, By a
Course Never Sailed Before
1724 Hermaphrodite Island [island drifting near Lisbon, Portugal], Thomas
Artus, Déscription de L’Isle des Hermaphrodites nouvellement découverte,
contenant les Mouers, les Coutumes et les Ordonnances des Habitans de
cette Isle, comme aussi lle Discours de Jacophile à Linne, avec quelques
autres piéces curieuses
1726 Lilliput, Luggnagg, Laputa [islands], Brobdingnag [peninsula off the
California coast], Jonathan Swift, Travels Into Several Remote Nations Of
The World, In Four Parts, By Lemuel Gulliver, First a surgeon and then a
Captain of several Ships
1727 Cacklogallinia [island], Samuel Brunt, A Voyage to Cacklogallinia:
With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of the
Country
1727 Quarll Island [island off the coast of Mexico], Peter Longueville, The
Hermit: Or, the Unparalleled Sufferings and Surprising Adventures of Mr.
Philip Quarll, An Englishman
1730 Babilary, Doctor’s Island, Foollyk, Greedy Island, etc. [islands],
Abbé Pierre François Guyot Desfontaines, Le Nouveau Gulliver ou Voyage
de Jean Gulliver, Fils du Capitaine Gulliver, Traduit d’un Manuscrit
Anglois, par Monsieur L. D. F.
1730 Cantahar [island], De Varennes de Mondasse, La Découverie De
L’Empire De Cantahar
1730 Schlaraffenland [country], Matthäus Seutter, Accurata Utopiae Tabula
1731 Drexara [region in North America], Land of Nopandes [land], Abbé
Antoine François Prévost, Le Philosphe anglois, ou Histoire de Monsieur
Cleveland, fils naturel de Cromwell, par l’autuer des Mémoires d’un
Homme de qualité
1731 Genotia [continent], Louis Adrien Duperron de Castera, Le Theatre
Des Passions Et De La Fortune Ou Les Avantures Surprenantes de
Rosamidor & de Theoglaphire. Histoire Australe
1734 World of Truth [country], Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux,
“Voyage au Monde Vrai” in Le Cabinet du Philosophe
1735 Abdalles, Amphicléocles [kingdoms in Africa], Trisolday
[underground kingdom], Island of the Sylphides [island], Charles Fieux
de Mouhy, Lamékis, ou le voyages extraordinaires d’un Egyptien dans la
 terre intérieure avec la découverte de l’Isle des Silphides, enrichi des notes
curieuses
1735 Groenkaaf, Manghalour [islands], Louis Rustaing de Saint-Jory, Les
Femmes Militaires
1735 Romancie [walled kingdom], Guillaume-Hyacinthe Bougeant, Voyage
Merveilleux du Prince-Fan-Férédin dans la Romancie; Contenant Plusiers
Observations Histoiriques, Géographiques, Physiques, Critiques et Morales
1736 Autonous’s Island [island], Anonymous, The History of Autonous,
containing a Relation how that Young Nobleman was accidentally left
alone, in his Infancy, upon a Desolate Island; where he lived nineteen
years, remote from all Humane Society, ‘till taken up by his Father
1737 Jumelles [islands, near New Zealand], de Catalde, Le Paysan
Gentilhomme, Ou Avantures De M. Ransay: Avec Son Voyage Aux Isles
Jumelles
1737 Mezorania [kingdom, in east Africa], Simon Berington, The Memoirs
of Sigr. Gaudentio di Lucca: Taken from his Confession and Examination
before the Fathers of the Inquisition at Bologna in Italy; Making a
Discovery of an unknown Country in the midst of the vast Deserts of
Africa
1739 Meillcourt [island in the Indian Ocean], Jean Baptiste de Boyer,
Marquis d’Argens, Le Législateur Moderne, Ou Les Mémoires Du
Chevallier De Meillcourt
1740 Argilia [country], Johann Michael Freiherr von Loën, Der redliche
Mann am hofe, oder die Begebenheiten des Grafen von Rivera
1740 The Moon [moon], Pythagorlunister, A Journey to the Moon
1741 Ferdinand’s Island [island in the West Indies], Johann Michael
Fleischer, Der Nordische Robinson
1741 Nazar [underground country], Baron Ludvig Holberg, Nicolai Klimii
Iter Subterraneum Novam Telluris Theoriam Ac Historiam Quintae
Monarchiae Adhuc Nobis Incognitae Exhibens E Bibliotheca B. Abelini
1745 Soteria, Cumberland [countries], John Kirkby, The Capacity and
Extent of the Human Understanding; Exemplified In the Extraordinary
Case of Automathes; A Young Nobleman, Who was Accidentally left in his
Infancy, upon a desolate Island, and continued Nineteen Years in that
solitary State, separated from all Human Society. A Narrative Abounding
 with many surprizing Occurrences, both Useful and Entertaining to the
Reader
1747 Goat Land [empire in India], Mask Island [island], Charles Fieux de
Mouhy, Le Masque de Fer, ou les Aventures Admirables du Pere et du Fils
1748 Banza [city], Thermometer Island [island], Denis Diderot, Les Bijoux
Indiscrets
1750 Frivola [island in the Pacific Ocean], Abbé Gabriel François Coyer, A
Discovery of the Island Frivola
1750 Land of Parrots [island in the South Seas], Pierre Charles Fabiot
Aunillon, Abbé Du Guay de Launay, Azor, ou Le prince enchanté; histoire
nouvelle, pour servir de chronique à celle de la terre des perroquets;
traduit de l’anglois du sçavant Popiniay
1751 Philos [island], Comte de Martignay, Voyage d’Alcimédon, ou
Naufrage qui conduit au port
1751 Providence Island, Anderson’s Rock [islands], Ralph Morris, A
Narrative of the Life and Astonishing Adventures of John Daniel, A Smith
at Royston in Hertfordshire for a Course of Seventy Years.
1751 Sass Doorpt Swangeanti [island], Robert Paltock, The Life and
Adventures of Peter Wilkins, A Cornish Man. Taken from his own Mouth,
in his passage to England, from off Cape Horn, in the ship “Hector”.
1752 Dumocala [island kingdom], Stanislaw Leszczyński (Stanisłas I, King
of Poland), Entretien d’un européen avec un insulaire du Royaume de
Dumocala
1752 Planet around the star Sirius [planet], Voltaire [François Marie
Arouet], Micromégas
1753 Bingfield’s Island [island], William Bingfield, The Travels and
Adventures of William Bingfield, Esq.
1753 Floating Islands [islands], Etienne-Gabriel Morelly, Naufrage des isles
flottantes ou Basiliade du célèbre Pilpai, poème héroïque traduit de
l’indien
1753 Isle of Birds [island], Eléazar de Mauvillon, Le Soldat Parvenu Ou
Mémoires Et Aventures De Mr. De Verval Dit Bellerose Par Mr. De M***
1754 Gala [country in Asia], André-François de Brancas-Villeneuve, Histoire
ou Police du royaume de Gala, traduite de l’italien en anglais, et de
l’anglais en français
1755 (Unnamed world) [underground world], Anonymous, published by S.
Crowder and H. Woodgate, A Voyage to the World in the Centre of the
Earth Giving an Account of the Manners, Customs, Laws, Government,
and Religion of the Inhabitants, Their Persons and Habits Described with
Several Other Particulars: In Which Is Introduced the History of an
Inhabitant of the Air, Written by Himself, with Some Account of the
Planetary Worlds.
1755 Laïquhire, Waferdanos [islands in the North Atlantic], Anonymous,
Voyage Curieux d’un Philadelphe dans des Pays nouvellement Découverts
1756 Albino Land [country], Voltaire [François Marie Arouet], Essai sur
l’histoire générale et sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations depuis
Charlemagne jusqu’à nos jours
1757 Nimpatan [island in the South Atlantic], John Holmesby, The Voyages,
Travels, And Wonderful Discoveries of Capt. John Holmesby
1760 Giphantia [island in the West African desert], Charles-François
Tiphaigne de la Roche, Giphantie
1764 Cessares Republic [country in South America], James Burgh, An
Account of the First Settlement, Laws, Form of Government and Police of
the Cessares: A People of South America, in nine Letters From Mr. Vander
Neck, one of the Senators of that Nation, to his Friend in Holland, with
Notes by the Editor
1765 Galligenia [island], Charles François Tiphaigne de la Roche, Histoire
Des Galligénes, Ou Mémoires De Duncan
1766 Indian Island, Learding’s Island [islands near Cape Horn], André
Guillaume Contant d’Orville, La Destinée Ou Mémoires Du Lord
Kilmarnoff, Traduits De L’Anglois De Miss Voodwill, Par M. Contant
Dorville
1766 Leonard’s Land [land in Patagonia, South America], Kingdom of the
One-eyed [land in West Africa], Jean Gaspard Dubois-Fontanelle,
Aventures Philosophiques
1767 Winkfield’s Island, Idol Island [islands in the Atlantic by North
American], Unca Eliza Winkfield, The Female American: Or, the
Adventures of Unca Eliza Winkfield
1768 Gangaridia [kingdom on the River Ganges], Voltaire [François Marie
Arouet], La Princess de Babylone
1768 Island of the Ajaoiens [island], attributed to Bernard Le Bovier de
Fontenelle, La République des philosophes ou Histoire des Ajaoiens
1768 Isle of Boredom [island], Castora, Futura, etc. [countries], Marie
Anne de Roumier Robert, Les Ondins
1771 Land of Goat Worshippers [land in southeast Russia], Abbé H. L. Du
Laurens, Le Compère Mathieu ou les bigarrures de l’esprit humain
1776 Yluana [island], Charles Searle, The Wanderer: Or, Memoirs of Charles
Searle, Esq.: Containing His Adventures by Sea and Land. With Many
remarkable Characters, and interesting Situations in Real Life; and a
Variety of surprizing Incidents
1777 Gynographe [country], Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne, Les
Gynographes, ou Idées de deux honnêtes femmes sur un problème de
réglement proposé à toute l’Europe pour mettre les femmes à leur place, et
opérer le bonheur des deux sexes
1778 Carnovirria, Taupiniera, Olfactaria, Auditante, Bonhommica, Luxo-
volupto [countries], Attributed to John Elliott, The Travels of Hildebrand
Bowman, Esquire, Into Carnovirria, Taupiniera, Olfactaria, and
Auditante, in New Zealand; in the Island of Bonhommica, and in the
powerful Kingdom of Luxo-volupto, on the Great Southern Continent.
Written by Himself; Who went on shore in the Adventure’s large Cutter, at
Queen Charlotte’s Sound New Zealand, the fatal 17th of December 1773;
and escaped being cut off, and devoured, with the rest of the Boat’s crew,
by happening to be a-shooting in the woods; where he was afterwards
unfortunately left behind by the Adventure
1781 Metapatagonia [archipelago between Tierra del Fuego and Antarctica],
Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne, La Découverte australe Par un
Homme-volant, ou Le Dédale français; Nouvelle très-philosophique: Suivie
de la Lettre d’un Singe, & ca.
1782 Andrographe [country], Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne,
L’andrographe ou Idées d’un honnête homme sur un projet de réglement
proposé à toutesles nations de L’Europe pour opérer une réforme générale
des moeurs, et par elle, le bonheur du genre humain avec des notes
historiques et justificatives
1784 Georgium Sidus [the planet Uranus], Monsieur Vivenair, A Journey
lately performed through the Air, in an Aerostatic Globe, commonly called
 an Air Balloon, from this terraqueous globe, to the newly discovered
Planet, Georgium Sidus
1784 Unknown Island [island in the Indian Ocean], Guillaume Grivel, L’Isle
Inconnue, ou Mémoires du Chevalier de Gastines
1785 Cucumber Island [island near Africa], Rudolph Erich Raspe, Baron
Munchausen’s Narrative Of His Marvellous Travels And Campaigns in
Russia
1786 Feather Island [island in the Indian Ocean], Fanny de Beauharnais,
Rélation très véritable d’une isle nouvellement découverte
1787 Cannibal Island, San Verrado [islands in the Carribean Sea], François
Guillaume Ducray-Duminil, Lolotte Et Fanfan, Ou Les Adventures De
Deux Enfans Abandonnés Dans Une Isle Déserte
1788 Marbotikin Dulda [island in the Indian Ocean], New Britain Islands
[islands off the Cape of Good Hope], Pierre Chevalier Duplessis, Mémoires
De Sir George Wollap; Ses Voyages dans différentes parties due Monde;
aventures extraordianaires qui lui arrivent; découverte de plusiers
Contrées inconnues; description des moeurs & des coutumes des Habitans
1788 Protocosmos [underground country on an island, entered underwater],
Giacomo Girolamo Casanova di Seingalt, Icosameron Ou Histoire
D’Edouard, Et D’Elisabeth qui passérent quatre vingts un an chez les
Mégamicres habitens aborginènes du Protocosme dans l’intérieur de notre
globe
1789 Thesmographe [kingdom], Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne, Le
Thesmographe, ou idées d’un Honêtte Homme sur une Projet-Règlement
proposé à toutes la Nations de l’Europe pour opérer une Reforme Générale
des Lois
1790 Fortune Island, Bear Island, Island of Chance [islands near North
American coast], Philosophers’ Island [island near Tierra del Fuego],
Abbé Balthazard, L’Isle des Philosophes Et Plusiers Autres, Nouvellement
découveries, & remarquables par leur rapports avec la France actuelle
1792 Empire of the Alsondons [underground empire], Robert-Martin
Lesuire, L’Aventurier Français, ou Mémoires de Grégoire Merveil
1794 Spensonia [island], Thomas Spence, A Marine Republic, or A
Description of Spensonia
1795 Butua [kingdom in Africa], Tamoe [island in the Pacific Ocean],
Donatien-Alphonse-François, Marquis de Sade, Aline et Valcour, ou le
 Roman Philosophique
1795 Makar [country], Thomas Northmore, Memoirs of Planetes, or a Sketch
of the Laws and Manners of Makar
1796 Hewit’s Island [island near Madagascar], Charles Dibdin, Hannah
Hewit: Or, The Female Crusoe
1801 Felicity Isle [island in the Aegean Sea], Fanny de Beauharnais, L’Isle
de la Félicité ou Anaxis et Théone
1802 Lithconia [country], John Lithcow, “Equality—A Political Romance” in
The Temple of Reason 2
1802 Palace of Arthur [palace], Novalis [Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr
von Hardenberg], Heinrich von Ofterdingen
1805 Future Earth [alternate Earth], Jean Baptiste Cousin de Grainville, Le
Dernier Homme
1806 Allestone [land], Thomas Williams Malkin, The world’s map and
stories appear in Benjamin Heath Malkin’s A Father’s Memoirs of His
Child
1808 Harmonia [colonies], Charles Fourier, Théorie des Quatre Mouvements
1812 Eugea [island in the Atlantic], Népoumucenè Lemercier, L’Atlantiade,
ou La Théogonie Newtonienne
1812 New Switzerland [island in the East Indies], Johann David Wyss, The
Swiss Family Robinson
1813 Selenion [a new moon located between the earth and the moon],
Willem Bilderdijk, Kort verhaalvan eene aanmerkelijke luchtreis en
nieuwe planeetontdekking (Short Account of a Remarkable Journey into
the Skies and Discovery of a New Planet)
1817 Goldenthal [village in Switzerland], Johann Heinrich Daniel Zschokke,
Der Goldmacherdorf
1820 New Britain [country in North America], G. A. Ellis, New Britain: A
Narrative of a Journey, by Mr. Ellis, To a Country So Called By Its
Inhabitants, Discovered in the Vast Plain of the Missouri, in North
America, and Inhabited by a People of British Origin, Who Live Under an
Equitable System of Society, Productive of Peculiar Independence and
Happiness. Also, Some Account of Their Constitution, Laws, Institutions,
Customs and Philosophical Opinions: Together With a Brief Sketch of
Their History from the Time of Their Departure from Great Britain
1820 Symzonia [underground realm under Antarctica], Captain Adam
Seabourn, Symzonia, A Voyage of Discovery
1821 Pluto [underground world inside the hollow Earth], Anonymous,
Voyage au centre de la terre, ou aventures de quelques naufragés dans des
pays inconnus
1822 Hurlubiere [empire in Western Europe], Island of the Patagones
[island in the Atlantic Ocean], Charles Noldier, Hurlubleu, Grand
Manifafa d’Hurlubiére
1826 Imagination [kingdom], Wilhelm Hauff, Märchenalmanach
1827 Morosofia [country on the moon], George Tucker, A Voyage to the
Moon: With Some Account of the Manners and Customs, Science and
Philosophy, of the People of Morosofia, and Other Lunarians
1828 Isle of Fantaisie, Vraibleusia [islands in the Indian Ocean], Benjamin
Disraeli, The Voyage of Captain Popanilla
1830 Micromona [country], Karl Immerman, Tulifänntchen, Ein
Heldengedicht in drei Gesängen
1831 Apodidraskiana [state of the United States], Thomas Love Peacock,
Crotchet Castle
1832 Mayda [island], Washington Irving, The Alhambra
1834 Future Earth [alternate Earth], Félix Bodin, Le Roman de l’Avenir
1834 Angria [country], Gondal [island in the North Pacific Ocean],
Gaaldine [island in the South Pacific Ocean], Emily, Anne, Charlotte, and
Patrick Branwell Brontë, (the islands appeared in various poems and
prose, some now lost)
1835 Leap Islands [islands near Antarctica], James Fenimore Cooper, The
Monikins
1835 Tsar Dodan’s Kingdom [kingdom in Russia], Alexander Pushkin, The
Tale of the Golden Cockerel
1835 Viti Islands [islands], Henry-Florent Delmotte, Voyage pittoresque et
industriel dans le Paraguay-Roux et la Palingénésie Australe par Tridacé-
Nafé-Théobrôme de Kaou’t’Chouk, Gentilhomme Breton, sous-aide à
l’éstablissement des clysopompes, etc.
1836 Future Earth [alternate Earth], Mary Griffith, “Three Hundred Years
Hence” in Camperdown; or, News from Our Neighborhood: Being Sketches
1837 Flora, Athunt [countries], Ferdinand Raimund, Die gefesselte
Phantasie
1837 New Holland [country in Australia], Richard Whatley, Account of an
Expedition to the Interior of New Holland
1838 Tsalal [island near Antarctica], Edgar Allen Poe, The Narrative of
Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
1839 Icaria [country], Etienne Cabet, Voyage et Aventures de Lord William
Carisdall en Icarie
1845 Kingdom of Dolls [kingdom entered through a wardrobe], Alexander
Dumas (père), Histoire d’une Cassenoisette
1845 Island of the Fay [island], Edgar Allen Poe, “The Island of the Fay” in
Tales
1845 Silence [land in Libya], Edgar Allen Poe, “Silence: A Fable” in Tales
1845 Venusberg [mountain realm], Richard Wagner, Tannhäuser
1845 Vondervoteimittiss [Dutch borough], Edgar Allen Poe, “The Devil in
the Belfry” in Tales
1847 Vulcan’s Peak, The Crater, Rancocus Island, etc. [various places],
James Fenimore Cooper, The Crater; or, Vulcan’s Peak. A Tale of the
Pacific
1849 Mardi Archipelago [islands], Herman Melville, Mardi, and A Voyage
Thither
1849 Victoria [town in England], James S. Buckingham, National Evils and
Practical Remedies, with a Plan of a Model Town
1851 Ejuxria [country], Hartley Coleridge, Poems by Hartley Coleridge, With
a Memoir of His Life by His Brother (by Derwent Coleridge)
1851 Stiria [land], John Ruskin, The King of the Golden River or The Black
Brothers, A Legend of Stiria
1852 Euphonia [city in the mountains of Germany], Hector Berlioz,
“Euphonie, ou la Ville Musicale, Nouvelle de l’Avenir” in Les Soirées de
l’Orchestre
1854 The Starian system [solar system], Charles Ischir Defontenay, Star (Psi
Cassiopeia): The Marvelous History of One of the Worlds of Outer Space
1855 Aklis [country], Oolb [city], George Meredith, The Shaving of Shagpat
1855 Barsetshire [county in England], Anthony Trollope, The Warden
1857 Blackstaff, Paflagonia, Crim Tartary [countries], M. A. Titmarsh
[William Makepeace Thackeray], “The Rose and the Ring” in Christmas
Books
1858 (Unnamed world) [microscopic world], Fitz-James O’Brien, “The
Diamond Lens” in Atlantic Monthly, August 1858
1858 Coral Island, Emo, Mango Island, etc. [islands in the South Pacific],
Robert Michael Ballantyne, The Coral Island
1858 Fairyland [country], George MacDonald, Phantastes: A Faerie
Romance for Men and Women
1862 Other planets [planets], Nicolas Camille Flammarion, La Pluralité des
Mondes Habités
1862 Airfowlness, Land of Golden Asses, etc. [lands], Charles Kingsley,
The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby (first serialized in
McMillan’s Magazine)
1864 Lemuria [lost continent], Philip Sclater, “The Mammals of Madagascar”
in The Quarterly Journal of Science
1864 Lindenbrock Sea [underground], Jules Verne, Voyage au Centre de la
Terre, ou Aventures de Quelques Naufragés dans des Pays Inconnus
1865 Future Paris [alternate Paris], Louis Hippolyte Mettais, L’An 5865 ou
Paris dans 4000 Ans
1865 Wonderland [dream/underground below England], Lewis Carroll
[Charles Lutwidge Dodgson], Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
1866 Queen Island [island near North Pole], Jules Verne, Voyage et
Aventures du Capitaine Hatteras
1867 Troll Kingdom [land in the mountains of Norway], Henrik Ibsen, Peer
Gynt
1868 Forest Island, Island of the Wanderers [islands], William Morris, The
Earthly Paradise, A Poem
1869 Fairyland [land], Jean Ingelow, Mopsa the Fairy
1869 Future Paris [alternate Paris], Tony Moilin, Paris en l’An 2000
1869 Io-Phoebe [artificial moon], Edward Everett Hale, “The Brick Moon”
serialized in The Atlantic Monthly, July 1869
1870 Aphania [kingdom], Tom Hood, Petsetilla’s Posy: A Fairy Tale
1870 Country at the back of the North Wind [land], George MacDonald,
At the Back of the North Wind
1870 Gloupov [town], Saltykov-Shchedrin [Mikhail Yevgrafovich Saltykov],
Istoriya Odnogo Goroda
1870 Mars [planet], Annie Denton Cridge, Man’s Rights; or, How Would You
Like It?
1871 Country of the Vril-ya [underground country, under England],
Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer, Lord Lytton, The Coming Race
1871 Gramblamble Land [country], Edward Lear, “The History of the Seven
Families of the Lake Pipple-popple” in Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany,
and Alphabets
1871 Looking-glass Land [dream/land], Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge
Dodgson], Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There
1871 Mountain of the Spirits [mountain], Gustavo Adolfo Becquer, “El
monte de las animas” in Leyendas
1872 Erewhon [country], Samuel Butler, Erewhon; or, Over the Range
1872 Wessex [region in southwest England], Thomas Hardy, Under the
Greenwood Tree
1874 City of Night [city], James Thomson, The City of Dreadful Night
1874 Lincoln Island [island in the Pacific Ocean], Jules Verne, The
Mysterious Island
1875 Gondour [republic], Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens], The
Curious Republic of Gondour, and Other Whimsical Sketches
1875 Ham Rock [island in the Atlantic Ocean], Jules Verne, Le “Chancellor”
1875 Nomansland [kingdom], Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, The Little Lame
Prince and His Traveling Cloak
1875 Selene [city near Belgrade, Yugoslavia], Paul Féval, La Ville Vampire
1876 Hygeia [town], Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson, Hygeia, A City of
Health
1876 Polar Bear Kingdom [underground in ice, near Franz Josef Land],
Jókai Mór, 20,000 Lieues sous les Glaces
1876 Snark Island [island], Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson], “The
Hunting of the Snark”
1876 Uchronia [alternate Europe], Charles Renouvier, Uchronie: l’utopie
dans l’histoire, esquisse historique apocryphe du développement de la
civilisation européenne tel qu’il n’a pas été, tel qu’il aurait pu être
1877 Coal City [underground city], Jules Verne, Les Indes Noires
1879 Farandoulie [kingdom in Australia], Makalolo [country in central
Africa], Albert Robida, Voyages Très Extraordinaires de Saturnin
Farandoul dans les 5 ou 6 Parties du Monde
1879 Ville-France, Stahlstadt [countries in the Pacific Northwest of North
America], Jules Verne, Les 500 Millions de la Bégum
1880 Mizora [underground country], Mary E. Bradley Lane, Mizora: A
Prophecy. A Mss. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera
Zarovitch, Being a true and faithful account of her Journey to the Interior
of the Earth, with a careful description of the Country and its Inhabitants,
their Customs, Manners and Government (Originally published as
“Narrative of Vera Zarovitch”, with the same subtitle as that of the book,
in the Cincinnati Commercial beginning November 6, 1880.)
1880 Papefiguiera [country], Béroualde de Verville, Le Moyen de parvenir.
Oeuvre contenant la raison de tout ce qui a esté, est et setra, avec
démonstrations certaines et nécessaires selon la rencontre des effets de
vertu
1881 Britannula [island near New Zealand], Anthony Trollope, The Fixed
Period (first serialized in Blackwood’s Magazine)
1882 Suicide City [underground city east of Paris], Robert Louis Stevenson,
New Arabian Nights
1883 Future New York [alternate New York], Ismar Thiusen [John Macnie],
The Diothas; or, A Far Look Ahead
1883 Future World of the 20th century [world], Albert Robida, Le
Vingtième Siècle
1883 Island of the Busy Bees [island], Carlo Collodi, Le Aventure di
Pinocchio
1883 Treasure Island [island], Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island
1884 Flatland [two-dimensional world], Lineland [one-dimensional world],
Spaceland [three-dimensional world], Edwin Abbott Abbott, Flatland: A
Romance of Many Dimensions
1884 Malacovia [city-fortress in the Danube], Amedeo Tosetti, Pedali sul
Mar Nero
1885 Agartha [kingdom], Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, Mission de l’Inde en Europe
1885 Kukuanaland [land in central southern Africa on a plateau surrounded
by mountains], Henry Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines
1885 Titipu [town in Japan], Sir William Schwenk Gilbert and Sir Arthur
Sullivan, The Mikado
1887 Alternate New York [alternate New York], Anna Bowman Dodd, The
Republic of the Future: or, Socialism a Reality
1887 Coradine [country in Northern Scotland], W. H. Hudson, A Crystal
Age
1887 Kor [ruins of a city], Henry Rider Haggard, She: A History of
Adventure
1887 Zuvendis [country in East Africa], Henry Rider Haggard, Allan
Quartermain
1888 Chairman Island [island], Jules Verne, Deux ans de vacances
1888 Future America [alternate America], Edward Bellamy, Looking
Backward: 2000–1887
1888 Kosekin Country [underground country under Antarctica], James De
Mille, A Strange Manuscript found in a Copper Cylinder
1889 Barataria, [kingdom], Sir William Schwenk Gilbert and Sir Arthur
Sullivan, The Gondoliers
1889 New Amazonia [country], Elizabeth Corbett, New Amazonia
1889 Dogland [land], Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson], Sylvie and
Bruno
1889 Pantouflia [country], Andrew Lang, Prince Prigio
1889 (Other planets) [planets], Nicolas Camille Flammarion, Uranie
1890 Freeland [country in East Africa], Theodor Hertzka, Freiland
1890 Future England [alternate England], Lady Florence Dixie, Gloriana, or
the Revolution of 1900
1890 Future England [alternate England], William Morris, News from
Nowhere (or, An Epoch of Rest)
1890 Future New York [alternate New York], Ignatius Donelly, Caesar’s
Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century
1890 Mars [version of Mars], Robert Cromie, A Plunge into Space
1891 The City of Tone [city in the future], Chauncey Thomas, The Crystal
Button: or, Adventures of Paul Prognosis in the Forty-ninth Century
1891 Elisee Reclus Island [island in the North Pacific], Alphonse Brown,
Une Ville de Verre
1891 Land of the Glittering Plain [kingdom near Scotland], Isle of Ransom
[island], William Morris, The Story of the Glittering Plain which has also
been called the Land of the Living Men or the Acre of the Undying
1892 Abaton [city], Sir Thomas Bulfinch, My Heart’s in the Highlands
1892 Altruria [island continent], William Dean Howells, A Traveler from
Altruria (first serialized in The Cosmopolitan, November 1892)
1892 Atvatabar [underground country], William R. Bradshaw, The Goddess
of Atvatabar, being the History of the Discovery of the Interior World and
 the Conquest of Atvatabar
1892 Klausenburg County [county in Transylvania], Jules Verne, Le
Château des Carpathes
1893 Aeria [mountain valley in North African], George Griffith, The Angel
of the Revolution
1893 Isle of Feminine [island in the Caribbean Sea], Charles Elliot
Niswonger, The Isle of Feminine
1893 Future Earth [alternate Earth], Nicolas Camille Flammarion, La Fin du
Monde
1893 Zara’s Kingdom [island in the South Seas], Sir William Schwenk
Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan, Utopia Limited; or, The Flowers of
Progress
1894 Aepyornis Island [island], H. G. Wells, “Aepyornis Island” in The
Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents
1894 Boyberik [town in Russia; later renamed “Anatevka” in Fiddler on the
Roof (1964)], Sholem Aleichem, Tevye and His Daughters
1894 Country of the People of the Mist [country in central–southeast
Africa], Henry Rider Haggard, The People of the Mist
1894 Future Earth [alternate Earth], H. G. Wells, The Time Machine: An
Invention (first serialized in New Review)
1894 Ruritania [country in Europe], Anthony Hope [Anthony Hope
Hopkins], The Prisoner of Zenda
1894 The Wood beyond the World [country], William Morris, The Wood
beyond the World
1895 Etidorhpa’s Country [underground country in a Kentucky cave], John
Uri Lloyd, Etidorhpa or the End of the Earth, the Strange History of a
Mysterious Being and the Account of a Remarkable Journey as
Communicated in Manuscript to Llewellyn Drury who Promised to Print
the Same but Finally Evaded the Responsibility which was Assumed by
John Uri Lloyd
1895 Raymangal [island], Emilio Salgari, I misteri della Jungla Nera
1895 Standard Island [island somewhere near New Zealand], Jules Verne,
L’Ile à Hélice
1896 Noble’s Isle [island in the Pacific Ocean], H. G. Wells, The Island of Dr.
Moreau
1896 Mu [continent], Augustus Le Plongeon, Maya/Atlantis: Queen Móo and
the Egyptian Sphinx
1896 Upmeads [kingdom], William Morris, The Well at the World’s End
1897 Nu [version of Mars], Kurd Lasswitz, Auf zwei Planeten
1897 Wondrous Isles, Isle of Increase Unsought [islands], William Morris,
The Water of the Wondrous Isles
1898 Adam’s Country [colony], Paul Adam, Lettres de Malaisie
1899 The Arq [city], Anna Adolph, Arqtiq: A Story of the Marvels at the
North Pole
1899 Avondale [phalanstery], Grant Allen, “The Child of the Phalanstery” in
Twelve Tales
1899 Double Island [island], George Maspero, Les Contes Populaires de
l’Egypte Ancienne
1899 Future London [alternate London], H. G. Wells, When the Sleeper
Awakes: A Story of the Years to Come
1900 Cooperative City [city in Maine], Bradford Peck, The World, A
Department Store, A Story of Life under the Cooperative System
1900 Island of the Nine Whirlpools [island], Edith Nesbit, “The Island of
the Nine Whirlpools” in The Book of Dragons
1900 Phunnyland [kingdom (later renamed Mo; retroactively linked to Oz)],
L. Frank Baum, A New Wonderland (later renamed The Surprising
Adventures of the Magical Monarch of Mo and His People when re-
released in 1903)
1900 Oz [country], L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
1900 Rotundia [island kingdom off the coast of Britain], Edith Nesbit, Uncle
James, or The Purple Stranger” in The Book of Dragons
1900 Tryphême [kingdom on the Mediterranean coast by Spain], Pierre
Louÿs, Les Aventures du Roi Pausole
1901 Bugville [town], Gus Dirks, The Latest News from Bugville
1901 Graustark, Axphain, Dawsbergen [countries], George Barr
McCutcheon, Graustark: The Story of a Love Behind a Throne
1901 Merryland [land (retroactively linked to Oz)], L. Frank Baum, Dot and
Tot in Merryland
1901 The Moon [moon], H. G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon
1901 Mouseland [land], Edward Earle Childs, The Wonders of Mouseland
1901 Neustria [colony in South America], Emile Thirion, Neustria, Utopie
Individualiste
1901 Quok [land (retroactively linked to Oz], L. Frank Baum, “The Queen of
Quok” in American Fairy Tales
1901 Riallaro Archipelago [islands], Godfrey Sweven [John Macmillan
Brown], Riallaro, The Archipelago of Exiles
1902 Altneuland (Old Newland) [country], Theodor Herzl, Altneuland
1902 Cagayan Salu [island], Andrew Lang, The Disentanglers
1902 The Moon [version of the moon], George Méliès, A Trip to the Moon
1903 Toyland [land], Victor Herbert and Glen MacDonough, Babes in
Toyland
1903 Yew [island (retroactively linked to Oz)], L. Frank Baum, The
Enchanted Island of Yew
1904 Costaguana [country in South America], Joseph Conrad, Nostromo
1904 Country of the Blind [country in the mountains of Ecuador], H. G.
Wells, “The Country of the Blind” in Strand Magazine, April 1904
1904 Neverland [island], Sir James Matthew Barrie, Peter Pan, or the Boy
Who Wouldn’t Grow
1904 The Sun [version of the sun], George Méliès, The Impossible Voyage
1905 Kaloon [land], Henry Rider Haggard, Ayesha, the Return of She
1905 Mandai Country [underground country at the North Pole], Hirmiz bar
Anhar, Iran
1905 Pegāna [home of the gods], Lord Dunsany [Edward John Moreton
Drax Plunkett], The Gods of Pegāna
1905 Slumberland [kingdom], Winsor McCay, Little Nemo in Slumberland
1906 Averon, Yarnith, Zarkandhu [countries], Lord Dunsany [Edward John
Moreton Drax Plunkett], Time and the Gods
1906 Harmonia [country, unknown location], Georges Delbruck, Au Pays de
l’Harmonie
1906 Isle of Phreex, Isle of the Mifkets, etc. [islands], L. Frank Baum, John
Dough and the Cherub
1906 Kellecheura [purgatorial place], R. H. Wright, The Outer Darkness
1906 Kravonia [country in Eastern Europe], Anthony Hope [Anthony Hope
Hopkins], Sophy of Kravonia
1906 Morrow Island [island], Henri Chateau, La Cité des Idoles
1907 Astria [two-dimensional world], C. H. Hinton, An Episode of Flatland:
Or, How a Plane Folk Discovered the Third Dimension
1907 Expiation City [city in Europe], P. S. Ballanches, La Ville des
Expiations
1907 Land of Paradise [forest], L. Frank Baum, Policeman Bluejay
1907 North Pole Kingdom [underground country in the Arctic], Charles
Derennes, Le Peuple du Pôle
1907 Sargasso Sea, Land of Lonesomeness [sea and land], William Hope
Hodgson, The Boats of the “Glen Carrig”
1907 Zvezdnym (Star City) [city at the South Pole], Valery Briussov,
“Respublika Yuzhnogo Kresta” in Zemnaya Os
1908 Asgard [city], Jack London, The Iron Heel
1908 Dream Kingdom [kingdom between Russia and China], Alfred Kubin,
Die Andere Seite: Ein Phantastischer Roman
1908 Penguin Island [island], Anatole France [Jacques Anatole François
Thibault], L’Ile des Pingouins
1908 River Bank [land], Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
1908 Terre Libre [island in the Pacific Ocean], Jean Grave, Terre Libre
1909 Alternate Earth [alternate Earth], E. M. Forster, “The Machine Stops”
in The Oxford and Cambridge Review, November 1909
1909 Ardistan, Djinnistan [countries], Karl Friedrich May, Ardistan and
Djinnistan
1909 Hoste [island near Tierra del Fuego], Jules Verne, Les Naufragés du
“Jonathan”
1909 Grand Duchy of Grimmburg [duchy in Germany], Thomas Mann,
Königliche Hoheit
1910 Polistarchia [country], Edith Nesbit, The Magic City
1910 Ponukele-Drelchkaff [empire in North Africa], Raymond Roussel,
Impressions d’Afrique
1910 Roadtown [city near New York City], Edgar Chambers, Roadtown
1911 Amorphous Island, Cyril Island, Fragrant Island, etc. [islands],
Alfred Jarry, Gestes et Opinions du Docteur Faustroll, Pataphysicien
1911 Future Earth [future Earth], Hugo Gernsback, “Ralph 124C 41+: A
Romance of the Year 2660” first serialized in Modern Electrics, April 1911
1911 Kalomera [community], William John Saunders, Kalomera: The Story
of a Remarkable Community
1911 True Lhassa [underground city under Tibet], Maurice Champagne, Les
Sondeurs d’Abîmes
1912 Barsoom [version of Mars], Edgar Rice Burroughs, “Under the Moons
of Mars” in All-Story Magazine, February 1912)
1912 Future Earth [future Earth], William Hope Hodgson, The Night Land
1912 Land of Wonder [land], Isaac Leib Peretz, Ale Verk
1912 Maple White Land [land on a volcanic plateau in South America], Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World
1913 Flotsam [island], Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Cave Girl
1913 Maxon’s Island [island in the South China Sea], Edgar Rice Burroughs,
A Man Without a Soul
1913 Opar [city in an African valley], Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Return of
Tarzan
1914 Lutha [country in Southern Europe], Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Mad
King
1914 Pellucidar [underground world inside the hollow earth], Edgar Rice
Burroughs, At the Earth’s Core
1914 Yoka Island [island in the Pacific Ocean], Edgar Rice Burroughs, The
Mucker
1915 Herland [country], Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland
1915 Plutonia [underground world], Vladimir Obruchev, Plutonia
1915 Toonerville [town], Fontaine Fox, Toonerville Folks
1917 Crotalophoboi Land [country in North Africa], Nepenthe [island in
the Tyrrhenian Sea], Norman Douglas, South Wind
1917 Euralia, Barodia [kingdoms], A. A. Milne, Once on a Time
1917 Faremido [land], Frigyes Karinthy, Utazas Faremidoba
1918 Caspak (also known as Caprona) [island], Edgar Rice Burroughs, The
Land That Time Forgot
1918 Gasoline Alley [town], Frank O. King, Gasoline Alley
1918 Meccania [country in Western Europe], Owen Gregory, Meccania, the
Super-State
1918 Orofena [island in the South Pacific], Henry Rider Haggard, When the
World Shook, Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley
and Arbothnot
1919 Animal Land [land], Howard R. Garis, Uncle Wiggily
1919 Agzceaziguls [country], Charles Derennes, Les Conquérants d’Idoles
1919 Beaulieu [town], Ralph Adams Cram, Walled Towns
1919 Blackland [ruined city], Jules Verne, L’Etonnante Aventure de la
Mission Barsac
1919 The Oroid world [microscopic world in a wedding ring], Raymond
King Cummings, “The Girl in the Golden Atom” (novellette, later
published in book form in 1922)
1919 Poictesme, Targamon, etc. [countries], James Branch Cabell, Jurgen, A
Comedy of Justice
1919 Spinachova, Demonia, etc. [lands], E. C. Segar, Thimble Theatre
1920 Dreamworld (or Dreamlands) [world], H. P. Lovecraft, “Polaris” in
Philosopher, December 1920
1920 Gopher Prairie [town in central Minnesota], Sinclair Lewis, Main
Street
1920 Green Meadows, Smiling Pool [rural locales], Carrotville [town],
Thornton W. Burgess, Peter Rabbit
1920 Jannati Shahr [city in Saudi Arabia, beyond mountains], George Allen
England, The Flying Legion
1920 Mag-Mell, Raklmani [islands near Ireland], Maria Savi-Lopez,
Leggende del Mare
1920 Tormance [planet], David Lindsay, A Voyage to Arcturus
1920 Tutter [town in Illinois], Leo Edwards [Edward Edson Lee], “The
Cruise of the Sally Ann”, Shelby Daily Globe, April 1920
1921 Capellette, Alma [planets], Homer Eon Flint, The Devolutionist
1921 Capillaria [underwater world], Frigyes Karinthy, Capillaria
1921 Pal-ul-don [kingdom in Zaire], Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan the
Terrible
1922 Auspasia [kingdom], Georges Duhamel, Lettres d’Auspasie
1922 Demonland, Witchland, Zimiamvia, etc. [lands (supposedly on
Mercury)], E. R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros
1922 Isles of Wisdom [archipelago], Alexander Moszkowski, Die Inseln der
Weisheit Geschichte einer abenteuerlichen Entdeckungsfahrt
1922 Jolliginki [country on the African coast near Mozambique], Hugh
Lofting, The Story of Doctor Dolittle
1922 Rootabaga country, etc. [countries], Carl Sandburg, Rootabaga Stories
1922 Utopia [planet], H. G. Wells, Men Like Gods (first serialized in The
Westminster Gazette, December 1922)
1922 Venusia [island in Atlantic Ocean near equator], Raymond Clauzel,
L’Ile des Femmes
1922 Winnemac [midwestern U.S. state], Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt
1923 Barnsville [town], Augustus Daniel “Ad” Carter, Just Kids
1923 Belesbat [underwater city], Claire Kenin, La Mer Mystérieuse
1923 Capa Blanca Islands [islands], Spidermonkey Island [island off the
coast of Brazil], Hugh Lofting, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle
1923 Cuffycoat’s Island [island], Vichebolk Land [land in the Arctic
Circle], André Lichtenberger, Pickles ou Récits à la Mode Anglaise
1923 Rossum’s Island [island], Karel Ĉapek, R. U. R. (Rossum’s Universal
Robots)
1923 Yu-Atlanchi [land in the Andes], A. Merritt [Abraham Merritt], “The
Face in the Abyss”, in Argosy, September 8, 1923
1924 Alali [village], Minuni [region], Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan and the
Ant Men
1924 Candelabra, Hitaxia, Kleptomania, Nikkateena, Woopsydasia
[European kingdoms], Costa Grande [Latin American republic], Roy
Crane, Washington Tubbs II (later known as Wash Tubbs)
1924 Elfland, Erl [kingdoms], Lord Dunsany [Edward John Moreton Drax
Plunkett], The King of Elfland’s Daughter
1924 Fantippo [kingdom in West Africa], Hugh Lofting, Doctor Dolittle’s
Post Office
1924 Ladies’ Island [island], Gerhart Hauptmann, Die Insel der Grossen
Mutter oder das Wunder von Ile des Dames
1924 OneState [country], Yevgeny Zamyatin, We
1924 Orphan Island [island in the Pacific Ocean], Rose Macaulay, Orphan
Island
1924 Sannikov Land [underground world], Vladimir Obruchev, Sannikov
Land
1925 Caspo [island kingdom], Arnold Bennett, The Bright Island
1925 Ebony [island], Salvador de Madariaga, The Sacred Giraffe; Being the
Second Volume of the Posthumous Works of Julio Arceval
1925 Edomite Empire [empire], An-Ski [Solomon Samuel Rappaport],
Gesamelte Shriften
1925 Neutopia [country], E. Richardson, Neutopia
1926 (Unnamed world) [macroscopic world], G. Peyton Wertenbaker, “The
Man from the Atom”, Amazing Stories, Volume 1, Number 1, April 1926
1926 City of Sand [city in the deserts of Syria], Jean d’Agraives [Frédéric
Causse], La Cité des Sables
1926 City of Shadows [city under the Mediterranean], Léon Groc, La Cité
des Ténèbres
1926 Dorimare, Land of Faerie [lands], Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist
1926 The Hundred Acre Wood [forest], A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh
1926 Ishtar [land], Emakhtila [island], A. Merritt [Abraham Merritt], The
Ship of Ishtar
1927 Articoles, Maïna [islands in the Pacific Ocean], André Maurois,
Voyage au Pays des Articoles
1927 Atlanteja [city], Luigi Motta, Il Tunnel Sottomarino
1927 Electropolis [city in the Australian outback], Otfrid von Hanstein,
Elektropolis
1927 Hall of the Mist [place on the star Antares], Donald Wandrei, “The Red
Brain” in Weird Tales, October 1927
1927 The Marvelous Land of Snergs [land], E. A. Wyke-Smith, The
Marvelous Land of Snergs
1927 Metropolis [city], Thea von Harbou and Fritz Lang, Metropolis
1927 Sunless City [underground city under the Nubian desert], Albert
Bonneau, La Cité sans Soleil
1927 Zaroff’s Island [island in the Caribbean], Richard Connell, “The Most
Dangerous Game” in Collier’s Weekly, January 19, 1924
1928 (Unnamed world) [microscopic world], Roman Frederick Starzl, “Out
of the Sub-Universe”, Amazing Stories Quarterly, Summer 1928
1928 Captain Sparrow’s Island [island], S. Fowler Wright, The Island of
Captain Sparrow
1928 Future Earth [future Earth], Philip Francis Nowlan, “Armageddon,
2419 A.D.” in Amazing Stories, August 1928
1928 Hulak [city in a crater in Brazil], T. C. Bridges, The Mysterious City
1928 Osnome [planet], E. E. Smith, The Skylark of Space, first serialized in
Amazing Stories, August 1928
1928 Purple Island [island in the Pacific Ocean], Mikhail Bulgakov,
Bagrobyj Ostrov
1928 Xenephrine [planet], Raymond King Cummings, A Brand New World
1929 Castra Sanguinarius, Castrum Mare [cities], Edgar Rice Burroughs,
Tarzan and the Lost Empire
1929 Mahagonny [city in the desert by the ocean], Bertol Brecht, Aufstieg
und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny
1929 Paroulet’s Country [underground country], Maurice Champagne, La
Cité des Premiers Hommes
1929 Thuria [continent], Robert E. Howard, “The Shadow Kingdom” in
Weird Tales, August 1929
1929 Toyland [land], Enid Blyton, Noddy Goes to Toyland
1929 The World Below [underground world], S. Fowler Wright, The World
Below
1929 Yoknapatawpha County [county in the southern United States],
William Faulkner, Sartoris
1930 Alternate Earth [alternate Earth], Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men:
A Story of the Near and Far Future
1930 Alternate United States [alternate United States], Georges Duhamel,
Scènes de la Vie Future
1930 Averoigne [province in Medieval France], Clark Ashton Smith, “The
End of the Story” in Weird Tales, May 1930
1930 Big Tooth Continent [continent], Lev Kassil, The Black Book and
Schwambrania
1930 City of Beauty, City of Smoke [cities], Miles J. Breuer, “Paradise and
Iron” in Amazing Stories Quarterly, Summer 1930
1930 Le Douar [island off the coast of Brittany], J. H. Rosny [Séraphin Justin
François Boex], L’Enigme du “Redoutable”
1930 Evallonia [country in Central Europe], John Buchan, Castle Gay
1930 Fattipuff Kingdom, Thinifer Kingdom [kingdoms], André Maurois,
Patapoufs et Filifers
1930 Green Sand Island [island near Hawaii], Tancrède Vallerey, L’Ile au
Sable Vert
1930 Lothar [underwater city], Jack Williamson, The Green Girl (first
serialized in Amazing Stories, beginning March 1930)
1930 Poseidonis [last isle of Atlantis], Clark Ashton Smith, “The Last
Incantation” in Weird Tales, June 1930
1930 Theives’ City [city in the Klondike region], Maurice Level, La Cité des
Voleurs
1930 Ultimo [underground city] John Vassos and Ruth Vassos, Ultimo: An
Imaginative Narration of Life Under the Earth
1931 Bimble Town [town], K. Bagpuize [J. R. R. Tolkien], “Progress in
Bimble Town (Devoted to the Mayor and Corporation)”, in The Oxford
Magazine, October 15th, 1931
1931 Hyperborea [Arctic continent], Clark Ashton Smith, “The Tale of
Satampra Zeiros” in Weird Tales, November 1931
1931 Lodidhapura [city in the jungles of Cambodia], Edgar Rice Burroughs,
The Jungle Girl
1931 Seachild’s City [island in the North Atlantic], Streaming Kingdom
[kingdom under the English Channel], Jules Supervielle, L’Enfant de la
Haute Mer
1931 Ulm [microscopic world], S. P. Meek, “Submicroscopic” in Amazing
Stories, August 1931
1932 Azanian Empire [island], Evelyn Waugh, Black Mischief
1932 Bronson Beta [planet], Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie, When Worlds
Collide (first serialized in Blue Book, beginning in September, 1932)
1932 Buyan Island [island], Karl Ralston, “Buyanka” in The Songs of the
Russian People
1932 Future England [future England], Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
1932 Hyborian Age [Earth with an alternate history], Robert E. Howard,
“The Phoenix on the Sword” in Weird Tales, December 1932
1932 Junkville [town], Earl Duvall, Silly Symphonies (comic strip)
1932 Midian [country in Africa], Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan Triumphant
1932 Onthar, Thenar [lands in Africa], Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan and
the City of Gold (first serialized in Argosy magazine, beginning March
1932)
1932 Phandiom [planet], Clark Ashton Smith, “The Planet of the Dead” in
Weird Tales, March 1932
1932 The Pygmy Planet [artificial, miniature world], Jack Williamson, “The
Pygmy Planet” in Astounding Stories, February 1932
1932 Venusberg [city in the Baltic region], Anthony Powell, Venusberg
1932 Yoh-Vombis [city on Mars], Clark Ashton Smith, “The Vaults of the
Yoh-Vombis” in Weird Tales, May 1932
1932 Zothique [continent], Clark Ashton Smith, “The Empire of the
Necromancers” in Weird Tales, September 1932
1933 Alternate Earth [alternate Earth], H. G. Wells, The Shape of Things to
Come: The Ultimate Revolution
1934 Dogpatch [village], Al Capp, Li’l Abner
1933 Freedonia [country in Europe], Leo McCarey, Duck Soup
1933 Rampole Island [island in the South Atlantic], H. G. Wells, Mr.
Blettsworthy on Rampole Island
1933 Shangri-La [valley in Tibet], James Hilton, Lost Horizon
1933 Skull Island [island southwest of Sumatra], Merian Cooper and Ernest
Schoedsack, King Kong
1933 Xiccarph [planet], Clark Ashton Smith, “The Maze of the Maal Dweb”
in The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies
1934 (Unnamed world) [world], Mo Leff, Peter Pat
1934 Alternate Universe [alternate universe], Murray Leinster [William
Fitzgerald Jenkins], “Sidewise in Time” in Astounding Stories, June 1934
1934 Amtor [version of Venus], Edgar Rice Burroughs, Pirates of Venus
1934 Kingdom of Moo [kingdom], Vincent Hamlin, Alley Oop
1934 Lensman universe [universe], E. E. Smith, Triplanetary (serialized in
Amazing Stories, January–April, 1934)
1934 Mongo [planet], Alex Raymond, Flash Gordon
1934 Valadom [inhabited asteroid], Donald Wandrei, “Colossus” in
Astounding Stories, January 1934
1934 Storn [island near the coast of Southern England], Victoria Sackville-
West, The Dark Island
1935 Fluorescente [city], Tristan Tzara, Grains et Issues
1935 Grande Euscarie [underground country], Luc Alberny, Le Mammouth
Bleu
1935 Green Land [underwater country in England], Roncador [country
next to Paraguay], Herbert Read, The Green Child
1935 Nivia [colony on Saturn’s moon Titan], Stanley G. Weinbaum, “Flight
on Titan” in Astounding Stories, January 1935
1935 Pharia [empire], Bob Moore and Carl Pfeufer, Don Dixon and the
Hidden Empire
1935 Roman State [underground country beneath England], Joseph O’Neill,
Land Under England
1935 Tabbyland [land], Grace Dayton, The Pussycat Princess
1935 Uncertainia [kingdom], William T. McCleery and Ralph Briggs Fuller,
Oaky Doaks
1936 Austin Island [island in the Pacific Ocean], Stanley G. Weinbaum,
“Proteus Island” in Astounding Stories, August 1936
1936 Euclidia [island in the South Pacific], Perry Crandall, Magic Island
1936 Foozland, Skoobozia [countries], Gene Ahern, The Squirrel Cage
1936 Great Garabagne [country], Henri Michaux, Voyage en Grande
Garabagne
1936 Kilsona [microscopic world], Festus Pragnell, The Green Man of
Kilsona
1936 Ixania [country in Europe], Eric Amber, The Dark Frontier
1936 Tanah Masa [island], Karel Ĉapek, War with the Newts
1936 Vulcan [planet], Ross Rocklynne, “At the Center of Gravity” in
Astounding Stories, June 1936
1937 (Unnamed world) [microscopic world], Maurice Gaspard Hugi,
“Invaders from the Atom”, Tales of Wonder #1, Winter 1937
1937 Arda [Earth during an imaginary time period], J. R. R. Tolkien, The
Hobbit
1937 Artificial planets [planets], Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker
1937 Five Points, Selby Flats, Springfield [towns], Irna Phillips, The
Guiding Light (later renamed Guiding Light)
937 Rhth [planet], Don A. Stuart [John W. Campbell, Jr.], “Forgetfulness” in
Astounding Stories, June 1937
1937 Futuropolis [future world], Martial Cendros [René Thévenin] and
René Pellos [René Pellarin], Futuropolis
1938 Ashair [city], Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan and the Forbidden City
1938 Future Earth [future Earth], Ayn Rand, Anthem
1938 Grover’s Corners [town], Thorton Wilder, Our Town
1938 Gyronchi, Jonbar [cities], Jack Williamson, The Legion of Time
1938 Ishmaelia [country in northeast Africa], Evelyn Waugh, Scoop, A Novel
about Journalists
1938 Krypton [planet], Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, “Superman” in Action
Comics, June 1938
1938 Rimrock [town in south western Colorado], Fred Harman, Red Ryder
1938 Space Trilogy solar system [planets], C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent
Planet
1938 Soldus [planet inside the Sun], Nat Schachner, “The Sun-world of
Soldus” in Astounding Science-Fiction, April 1938
1938 Ultra-Earth [planet], Nat Schachner, “Simultaneous Worlds” in
Astounding Science-Fiction, November 1938
1938 Urbs [city], Stanley G. Weinbaum, The Black Flame
1939 Arkham, Dunwich [cities], H. P. Lovecraft, The Outsider and Others
1939 Blitva [country], Miroslav Krleža, Banket u Blitvi
1939 Campagna, Great Marina [countries], Ernst Jünger, Auf den
Marmorklippen
1939 Future History Universe [universe], Robert Heinlein, “Life-Line” in
Astounding Science-Fiction, August 1939
1939 Karud [planet], Raymond Z. Gallun, “The Shadow of the Veil” in
Astounding Science-Fiction, February 1939
1939 Nehwon [world], Fritz Leiber, “Two Sought Adventure” in Unknown
magazine, August 1939
1939 Rose [island], Mervyn Peake, Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor
1939 Uuleppe [planet], Stanton A. Coblentz, “Planet of the Knob-Heads” in
Science Fiction, December 1939
1940 Centropolis [city], A. E. van Vogt, Slan (serialized in Astounding
Science-Fiction, beginning in September 1940)
1940 DC Comics universe [universe], Gardner Fox, All Star Comics #3
1940 Gotham City [city], Bill Finger, Batman #4, Winter 1940
1940 Leigh Brackett solar system [version of the solar system], Leigh
Brackett, “Martian Quest” in Astounding Science Fiction, February 1940
1940 Tlön, Mlejnas, Uqbar [countries], Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar,
Orbis Tertius” in Sur, May 1940
1940 Tomainia [country], Charles Chaplin, The Great Dictator
1940 Villings [island in the Pacific Ocean], Adolfo Bioy Casares, La
Invención de Morel
1941 Babel Library [library], Jorge Luis Borges, “La Biblioteca de Babel” in
El Jardin de Senderosque se Bifurcan
1941 Lagash [planet], Isaac Asimov, “Nightfall” in Astounding Science-
Fiction, September 1941
1941 Tantalus [planet], P. Schuyler Miller, “Trouble on Tantalus” in
Astounding Science-Fiction, February 1941
1942 The Black Planet [planet], Henry Kuttner, “We Guard the Black
Planet” in Super Science Stories, November 1942
1942 Foundation universe [universe], Isaac Asimov, “Foundation” in
Astounding Science-Fiction, May 1942
1942 Hydrot [planet], Arthur Merlyn [James Blish], “Sunken Universe” in
Super Science Stories, May 1942
1942 Karain subcontinent [subcontinent in the Southern Hemisphere],
Austin Tappan Wright, Islandia
1942 Logeia [world], Fletcher Pratt, The Undesired Princess (first serialized
in Unknown, February 1942)
1942 Mechanistria [planet], Eric Frank Russell, “Mechanistria” in
Astounding Science-Fiction, January 1942
1942 The Omos solar system [star and 11 planets], Edgar Rice Burroughs,
“Adventure on Poloda” in Blue Book, January 1942
1943 Carcasilla [underground city], Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, Earth’s
Last Citadel
1943 Castalia [province in central Europe], Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead
Game
1943 Cyrille [planet], C. L. Moore, Judgment Night
1943 Gondwana [supercontinent], A. E. van Vogt, The Book of Ptath
1943 Island of Eight Delights and Bacchic Wine [island], Stefan Andres,
Wir sind Utopia
1943 Land of the Lost [underwater land], Isabel Manning Hewson, Land of
the Lost
1943 Stygia [planet], Manly Wade Wellman, “Legion of the Dark” in Super
Science Stories, May 1943
1943 Symbiotica [planet], Eric Frank Russell, “Symbiotica” in Astounding
Science-Fiction, October 1943
1943 Zavattinia [village near Bamba, Italy], Cesare Zavattini, Totò il Buono
1944 Bombardy [country], Eric Linklater, The Wind on the Moon
1944 Paradise Island [island], William Moulton Marston, Wonder Woman
1945 Animal Farm [farm], George Orwell [Eric Arthur Blair], Animal Farm:
A Fairy Story
1945 Galactic Empire universe [universe], Isaac Asimov, “Blind Alley” in
Astouding Science-Fiction, March 1945
1945 The Island of Sodor [island in the Irish Sea], Rev. Wilbert Vere Awdry,
The Three Railway Engines
1945 Kingdom of King Clode [kingdom], James Thurber, The White Deer
1945 Mount Tsintsin-Dagh [mountain in northern Tibet], Paul Alperine,
Ombres sur le Thibet
1946 Aiolo [planet], Murray Leinster [William Fitzgerald Jenkins], “The
Plants” in Astounding Science-Fiction, January 1946
1946 Alternate world [alternate world], Franz Werfel, Stern der
Ungeborenen (Star of the Unborn)
1946 Erikraudebyg [settlement], Paul Alperine, La Citadelle des Glaces
1946 Gormenghast [castle], Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan
1946 Hekla [planet], Hal Clement [Harry Clement Stubbs], “Cold Front” in
Astounding Science-Fiction, July 1946
1946 Placet [planet], Fredric Brown, “Placet is a Crazy Place” in Astounding
Science-Fiction, May 1946
1946 Sainte Beregonne [hidden city quarter in Hamburg, Germany], Jean
Ray, Le Manuscrit Français
1947 Brigadoon [town in Scotland], Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe,
Brigadoon
1947 Doodyville [town], Robert E. “Buffalo Bob” Smith, Howdy Doody
1947 Longjumeau [city in France], Léon Bloy, “Les Captifs de Longjumeau”
in L’Oeuvre Compléte
1947 Mars (of The Martian Chronicles) [planet], Ray Bradbury, “Rocket
Summer” in Planet Stories, Spring 1947
1947 Niggle’s Parish [region], J. R. R. Tolkien, “Leaf by Niggle” in The
Dublin Review
1947 Padukgrad, Sinisterbad [countries], Vladimir Nabakov, Bend Sinister
1947 Throon [planet], Edmond Hamilton, The Star Kings
1947 Wing IV [planet], Jack Williamson, “With Folded Hands…” in
Astounding Science Fiction, July 1947
1948 Dalarna [country], George U. Fletcher [Fletcher Pratt], Well of the
Unicorn
1948 Raintree County [county], Ross Lockridge, Jr., Raintree County
1948 Walden Two [town], B. F. Skinner, Walden Two
1949 Alternate United States [alternate United States], George Stewart,
Earth Abides
1949 Candyland [board game setting], Eleanor Abbott, Candyland
1949 Chita [island], Pierre-Mac Orlan, Le Chant de l’Equipage
1949 City of the Immortals [city], Jorge Luis Borges, “El Immortal” in El
Aleph
1949 Comarre [city], Arthur C. Clarke, “The Lion of Comarre” in Thrilling
Wonder Stories, August 1949
1949 The Commonwealth of Letters [land], John Myers Myers, Silverlock
1949 Heliopolis [city], Ernst Jünger, Heliopolis
1949 Karres [planet], James H. Schmitz, The Witches of Karres
1949 Oceania, Eurasia, Eastasia [continents], George Orwell [Eric Arthur
Blair], Nineteen Eighty-Four
1949 New Crete [future Earth], Robert Graves, Watch the North Wind Rise
(also known as Seven Days in New Crete)
1949 Psychotechnic League universe [Earth with an alternate history],
Poul Anderson and John Gergen, “The Entity” in Astounding Science
Fiction, June 1949
1949 Shuruun [city on Venus], Leigh Brackett, “The Enchantress of Venus” in
Planet Stories, Fall 1949
1949 Viagens Interplanetarias universe [universe], L. Sprague de Camp,
“The Animal-Cracker Plot” in Astounding Science Fiction, July 1949
1950 Borsetshire [county in England], Godfrey Baseley, The Archers
1950 Curbstone [artificial satellite], Theodore Sturgeon, “The Stars are the
Styx” in Galaxy Science Fiction, October 1950
1950 Dying Earth universe [future Earth], Jack Vance, The Dying Earth
1950 Grand Duchy of Lichtenburg [duchy in Europe], Howard Lindsay and
Russel Crouse, Call Me Madam
1950 Instrumentality of Mankind future history universe [universe],
Cordwainer Smith [Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger], “Scanners Live in
Vain” in Fantasy Book #6, 1950
1950 Moominland, Daddy Jones’s Kingdom [kingdoms], Tove Jansson,
Kuinkas Sitten Kävikäan
1950 Narnia [country], C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
1950 Myopia [kingdom], Jack Kent, King Aroo
1950 Quivera [country in South America], Vaughan Wilkins, The City of
Frozen Fire
1950 Skontar [planet], Poul Anderson, “The Helping Hand” in Astounding
Science Fiction, May 1950
1950 United Planets universe [universe], Mike Moser, Space Patrol
1951 61 Cygni VII [planet], Clifford D. Simak, Time and Again
1951 Farghestan, Orsenna, Vezzano [countries], Julien Gracq, Le Rivage des
Syrtes
1951 Jemal, Medral [planets], Raymond F. Jones, “The Toymaker” in The
Toymaker: A Collection of Science Fiction Stories
1951 Kyril [planet], Jack Vance, “Son of the Tree” in Thrilling Wonder Stories,
June 1951
1951 Ormazd [planet], L. Sprague de Camp, Rogue Queen
1951 Qylao [inhabited planetoid], Fox B. Holden, “The Death Star” in Super
Science Stories, April 1951
1952 Alternate America [alternate America], Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Player
Piano
1952 Alternate Earth and Venus [alternate Earth and Venus], Frederik Pohl
and Cyril M. Kornbluth, “Gravy Planet” in Galaxy Science Fiction, June
1952
1952 Asbefore Island [island], Jacques Prévert, Lettre des Îles Baladar
1952 Lyra IV [planet], Cyril M. Kornbluth, “That Share of Glory” in
Astounding Science Fiction, January 1952
1952 Mount Analogue [mountain island], René Daumal, Le Mont Analogue
1952 Ozagen [planet], Philip José Farmer, The Lovers, in Startling Stories,
August 1952
1952 Shandakor [city on Mars], Leigh Brackett, “The Last Days of
Shandakor” in Startling Stories, April 1952
1952 Terra [planet], Oskar Lebeck and Alden McWilliams, Twin Earths
1952 Terro-Human Future History universe [universe], H. Beam Piper,
“Uller Uprising” in The Petrified Planet
1952 Uller [planet], John D. Clark, Fletcher Pratt, H. Beam Piper, and Judith
Merril [Judith Josephine Grossman], The Petrified Planet
1952 Unreturnable-Heaven [city in Nigeria], Wraith Island [island in
Nigeria], Amos Tutuola, The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-
Wine Tapster in the Dead’s Town
1953 Alternate America [alternate America], Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
1953 Baudelaire [planet], Philip José Farmer, “Mother” in Thrilling Wonder
Stories, April 1953
1953 Devon [town], Elliot Caplin and Stan Drake, The Heart of Juliet Jones
1953 Helle [planet], Bengo Mistral [Norman Lazenby], The Brains of Helle
1953 Lithia [planet], James Blish, A Case of Conscience
1953 Maghrebinia [vast realm], Gregor von Rezzori, Maghrebinische
Geschichten
1953 Mesklin [planet], Hal Clement [Harry Clement Stubbs], Mission of
Gravity
1953 Shadow City [city], A. E. van Vogt, The Universe Maker
1954 (Unnamed island) [island], William Golding, Lord of the Flies
1954 Azor, Gemser, Halsey’s Planet, Sunward, etc. [planets], Frederik Pohl
and Cyril M. Kornbluth, Search the Sky
1954 Borovnia [country], Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme, (Christchurch,
New Zealand newspaper reports of the murder of Honora Mary Parker)
1954 Iszm [planet], Jack Vance, The Houses of Iszm
1954 Troas [planet], Isaac Asimov and probably John D. Clark, “Sucker Bait”
in Astounding Science Fiction, February 1954
1954 Viridis [planet], Theodore Sturgeon, “The Golden Helix” in Thrilling
Wonder Stories, Summer 1954
1955 Abatos [planet], Phillip José Farmer, “Father” in The Magazine of
Fantasy and Science Fiction, July 1955
1955 Bartorstown [post-apocalypse city in the Rocky Mountains], Leigh
Brackett, The Long Tomorrow
1955 Belly Rave [New York suburb in an alternate future], Frederik Pohl
and Cyril M. Kornbluth, Gladiator-at-Law
1955 Eterna [planet], Eric Frank Russell, “The Waitabits” in Astounding
Science Fiction, July 1955
1955 India [island in Indian Ocean], C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy
1955 LEGO System universe [universe], The LEGO Group, Town Plan No. 1
1955 Neverreachhereland [land], André Dhôtel, Les Pays oú l’on n’arrive
jamais
1955 Planet orbiting Proxima Centauri [planet], Stanislaw Lem, Oblok
Magellana
1955 Rigo [town in alternate North America], John Wyndham, The
Chrysalids
1955 Sabria [planet], Jack Vance, “The Gift of Gab” in Astounding Science
Fiction, September 1955
1955 Tranai [planet], Robert Scheckley, “A Ticket to Tranai” in Galaxy
Science Fiction, October 1955
1955 Tylerton [town], Frederik Pohl, “The Tunnel under the World” in
Galaxy Science Fiction, January 1955
1955 What-A-Jolly Street (Trufflescootems Blvd.) [neighborhood in Iowa],
Nan Gilbert [Mildred Gilbertson], 365 Bedtime Stories
1956 Altair IV [planet], Fred M. Wilcox, Forbidden Planet
1956 Aniara [space station], Harry Martinson, Aniara
1956 Bachepousse [island], Country of the Graal Flibuste [country],
Robert Pinget, Graal Flibuste
1956 Caphad, Essur, Glome, Phars, etc. [kingdoms], C. S. Lewis, Till We
Have Faces
1956 Diaspar [city on future Earth], Arthur C. Clarke, The City and the
Stars
1956 Exopotamia [country], Boris Vian, L’Automne à Pékin
1956 Nidor [planet], Robert Randall [Robert Silverberg and Randall Grant],
The Shrouded Planet
1956 Oakdale [town in Illinois], Irna Phillips, As the World Turns
1956 Peyton Place [town], Grace Metalious, Peyton Place
1956 Tropical Valley [valley in the Northwest Territories, Canada], Pierre
Berton, The Mysterious North
1956 Xanadu [planet], Theodore Sturgeon, “The Skills of Xanadu” in Galaxy
Science Fiction, July 1956
1957 Abyormen [planet], Hal Clement [Harry Clement Stubbs], Cycle of
Fire
1957 Alternate United States [alternate United States], Ayn Rand, Atlas
Shrugged
1957 Barnum’s Planet [planet], Avram Davidson, “Now Let Us Sleep” in Or
All the Seas With Oysters
1957 Big Planet [planet], Jack Vance, Big Planet
1957 Dante’s Joy [planet], Philip José Farmer, Night of Light
1957 Darkover [planet], Marion Zimmer Bradley, Falcons of Narabedla
1957 Great Circle civilizations [planets], Ivan Efremov, Andromeda Nebula
1957 Home, Rathe [planets], James Blish, “Get out of My Sky” in
Astounding Science Fiction, January 1957
1957 Leeminorr [planet], Robert Silverberg, “Precedent” in Astounding
Science Fiction, December 1957
1957 Mayfield [town], Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher, Leave it to Beaver
1957 Sargon Empire [planets], Robert A. Heinlein, Citizens of the Galaxy
1957 Tyana II [planet], Robert Scheckley, “The Language of Love” in Galaxy
Science Fiction, May 1957
1957 Wild Island [island], Ruth Stiles Gannet, My Father’s Dragon
1957 Ygam [planet], Stefan Wul, Oms en Série
1958 Conniption [town], Stan Lynde, Rick O’Shay
1958 Duchy of Grand Fenwick [country in Europe], Jack Arnold, The
Mouse that Roared
1958 Kakakakaxo [planet], Brian Aldiss, “Segregation” (also known as “The
Game of God”) in New Worlds, July 1958
1958 Kapetopek [country], Flathill Country [region], Tatsuo Yoshida, Mach
GoGoGo (first serialized in Shueisha’s Shōnen Book, and later known as
Speed Racer)
1958 Lanador [planet], Robert A. Heinlein, “Have Space Suit—Will Travel”
serialized in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 1958
1958 New Cornwall [planet], Richard McKenna, “The Night of the Hoggy
Darn” in Worlds of If, December 1958
1958 Pao [planet], Jack Vance, The Languages of Pao
1958 Ragnarok [planet], Tom Godwin, The Survivors
1958 Technic History universe [universe], Poul Anderson, War of the
Wing-Men
1958 Tenebra [planet], Hal Clement [Harry Clement Stubbs], Close to
Critical (first serialiazed in Astounding Science Fiction, beginning in May
1958)
1958 Thalassa [planet], Arthur C. Clarke, “The Songs of Distant Earth” in
The Other Side of the Sky
1958 Veldq [planet], Charles V. de Vet and Katherine MacLean, “Second
Game” in Astounding Science Fiction, March 1958
1959 Aocicinori [galaxy], Scotlund Leland Moore, The Galaxy of Aocicinori
1959 Cannis IV [planet], Colin Kapp, “The Railways up on Cannis IV” in The
Unorthodox Engineers
1959 Central City [city], Max Schulman, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis
1959 Childe Cycle universe [universe], Gordon R. Dickson, Dorsai!
1959 Glumpalt [planet], Brian Aldiss, “Legends of Smith’s Bursts” in Nebula
Stories
1959 Katroo [country], Dr. Seuss, Happy Birthday to You
1959 Land between the Mountains [land], Carol Kendall, The Gammage
Cup
1959 Level Seven [underground city], Mordecai Roshwald, Level Seven
1959 Old Town [town], Philip K. Dick, Time out of Joint
1959 Topaz [planet], Harlan Ellison, “Eyes of Dust” in Rogue, December 1959
1959 Tralfamadore [planet], Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., The Sirens of Titan
1959 Village of the Smurfs [village], Peyo [Pierre Culliford], Les
Schtroumpfs (The Smurfs)
1960 Abbey Leibowitz [abbey in North American desert in a post-
apocalyptic future], Walter M. Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz
1960 Bedrock [town], William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, The Flintstones
1960 Bellota [planet], R. A. Lafferty, “Snuffles” in Galaxy Magazine,
December 1960
1960 Chronopolis [city], J. G. Ballard, “Chronopolis” in New Worlds, June
1960
1960 Eden [planet], Mark Clifton, Eight Keys to Eden
1960 Genoa, Texcoco [planets], Mack Reynolds, “Adaptation” in Astouding
Science Fact & Fiction
1960 Klendathu [planet], Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers
1960 Ledom [planet], Theodore Sturgeon, Venus Plus X
1960 Mayberry [town in North Carolina], Sheldon Leonard and Charles
Stewart, The Danny Thomas Show
1960 Omega [planet], Robert Sheckley, The Status Civilization
1960 Pyrrus [planet], Harry Harrison, Deathworld
1960 The Runaway World [planet], Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth,
Wolfbane
1960 Savannah [planet], James Blish, “And Some Were Savages”, Amazing
Stories, November 1960
1960 Sirius IX, Walonka [planets], Chad Oliver, Unearthly Neighbors
1960 Tharixan [planet], Poul Anderson, The High Crusade
1960 Warlock [planet], Andre Norton, Storm Over Warlock
1961 Amara [planet], William F. Temple, The Three Suns of Amara
1961 Andorra [country (not to be confused with the real country of
Andorra)], Max Frisch, Andorra
1961 Chandala [planet], James Blish, “A Dusk of Idols” in Amazing Stories,
March 1961
1961 Concordia [country in Europe], Peter Ustinov, Romanoff and Juliet
1961 Dara [planet], Murray Leinster [William Fitzgerald Jenkins], “Pariah
Planet” in Amazing Stories, July 1961
1961 Dunia [country in Africa], Anthony Burgess, Devil of a State
1961 Ghrekh, Pittam, Speewry [planets], Robert Lowndes, Believer’s World
1961 Hi-Iay Islands (also called Hi-yi-yi Islands) [archipelago], Harald
Stumke [Gerolf Steiner], Bau und Leben der Rhinogradentia
1961 Kandemir [planet], Poul Anderson, “The Day after Doomsday” in
Galaxy Magazine, December 1961
1961 Lilith [planet], Geraldine June McDonald Willis, The Light of Lilith
1961 Marvel Comics universe [universe], Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve
Ditko, Fantastic Four #1
1961 Noon universe [universe], Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Noon: 22nd
Century
1961 Og [underground world], Pierre Berton, The Secret World of OG
1961 Orisinia [country], Ursula K. LeGuin, “An Die Musik” in Western
Humanities Review 15 (1961)
1961 Perry Rhodan multiverse [multiverse], K. H. Scheer and Clark Darton,
Perry Rhodan
1961 The Rim Worlds [planets], A. Bertram Chandler, The Rim of Space
1961 Sirene [planet], Jack Vance, “The Moon Moth” in Galaxy Magazine,
August 1961
1961 Solaris [planet], Stanislaw Lem, Solaris
1962 (Unnamed world) [interactive world], Steve Russell, J. M. Graetz, and
others, Spacewar!
1962 Big Slope [mountain in future Earth], Brian Aldiss, Hothouse
1962 Imperium continuum [parallel worlds], Keith Laumer, Worlds of the
Imperium
1962 Jundapur [state in India], Manoba [island near New Guinea], Paul
Scott, The Birds of Paradise
1962 Orbit City [city], William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, The Jetsons
1962 Pala, Rendang [islands in the Indonesian Archipelago], Aldous Huxley,
Island
1962 Sako [planet], Edmond Hamilton, “The Stars, My Brothers” in Amazing
Stories, May 1962
1962 Time Quartet universe [universe], Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in
Time
1962 Wisdom Kingdom [kingdom], Norman Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
1962 Zembla [country], Vladimir Nabakov, Pale Fire
1963 Aerlith [planet], Jack Vance, The Dragon Masters
1963 Argent [planet], John Phillifent, King of Argent
1963 Artemis [planet], Evelyn E. Smith, The Perfect Planet
1963 Berserker universe [universe], Fred Saberhagen, “Fortress Ship” in If,
Jan 1963
1963 Birdwell Island [island], Norman Bridwell, Clifford the Big Red Dog
1963 Crabwall Corners, Hooterville, Pixley, Stankwell Falls, etc.,
[towns], Paul Henning, Petticoat Junction
1963 Dune universe [universe], Frank Herbert, Dune World (serialized in
Analog magazine)
1963 Eden [planet], Stanislaw Lem, Eden
1963 Fruyling’s World [planet], Laurence M. Janifer, Slave Planet
1963 Future Earth [future Earth], Poul Anderson, “No Truce with Kings” in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, June 1963
1963 The Multiverse [multiverse], Michael Moorcock, The Stealer of Souls
1963 Neighborhood of Make-Believe [kingdom], Fred Rogers, MisteRogers
(Canadian program that preceded Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood)
1963 The Phyto Planet [planet], Richard McKenna, “Hunter, Come Home”
in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1963
1963 Port Charles [city in New York], Frank and Doris Hursley, General
Hospital
1963 Space Patrol universe [universe], Roberta Leigh, Space Patrol
1963 Soror [planet], Pierre Boulle, La Planète des Singes
1963 Tirellian [city on Mars], Roger Zelazny, “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November 1963
1963 Weng [village in Austrian Mountains], Thomas Bernhard, Frost
1963 The Whoniverse [universe], Sydney Newman, C. E. Webber, and
Donald Wilson, Doctor Who
1963 X [city], Tibor Déry, G. A. úr X.-ben
1963 San Lorenzo [island in the Carribean Sea], Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Cat’s
Cradle
1963 Witch World [world], Andre Norton, Witch World
1964 Alpha III M2 [planet], Philip K. Dick, Clans of the Alphane Moon
1964 Arkanar [planet], Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Hard to be a God
1964 Azrael [planet], John Brunner, “The Bridge to Azrael” in Amazing
Stories, February 1964
1964 Bay City [town in Illinois], Irna Phillips and William J. Bell, Another
World
1964 Blue World [planet], Jack Vance, “The Kragen” in Fantastic Stories of
Imagination, July 1964
1964 ConSentiency universe [universe], Frank Herbert, “The Tactful
Saboteur” in Galaxy Magazine, October 1964
1964 Dapdrof [planet], Brian Aldiss, The Dark Bright Years
1964 Demon Princes universe [universe], Jack Vance, The Star King
1964 Earthsea [archipelago], Ursula K. LeGuin, “The Word of Unbinding”,
Fantastic, January 1964
1964 Gilligan’s Island [island in Pacific Ocean], Sherwood Schwartz,
Gilligan’s Island
1964 Hainish Cycle universe [universe], Ursula K. LeGuin, “Dowry of the
Angyar” in Amazing Stories, September 1964
1964 Id [kingdom], Johnny Hart and Brant Parker, The Wizard of Id
1964 iDeath [town in rural United States], Richard Brautigan, In
Watermelon Sugar
1964 Known Space universe [universe], Larry Niven, “The Coldest Place” in
If, December 1964
1964 Marineville [city], Titanica [underwater city], Gerry and Sylvia
Anderson, Stingray
1964 Nihil [planet], Martin Thomas, Beyond the Spectrum
1964 Prydain [country], Lloyd Alexander, The Book of Three
1964 Rainbow [planet], Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Far Rainbow
1964 The Reefs of Space [universe], Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson, The
Reefs of Space
1964 Regis III [planet], Stanislaw Lem, The Invincible
1964 Shinar [planet], Ben Bova, Star Watchmen
1964 Simulacron-3 [virtual world], Daniel F. Galouye, Simulacron-3
1964 Yr [kingdom], Hannah Green [Joanne Greenberg], I Never Promised
You a Rose Garden
1965 Chelm [city], Samuel Tenenbaum, The Wise Men of Chelm
1965 Dare [planet], Philip José Farmer, Dare
1965 Drimonia [country in Europe], Lia Wainstein, Viaggio in Drimonia
1965 Ellipsia [planet], Hortense Calisher, Journal from Ellipsia
1965 Grimy Gulch [town in the Old West], Tom K. Ryan, Tumbleweeds
1965 Helior [planet], Harry Harrison, Bill the Galactic Hero
1965 Lemuria [continent], Lin Carter, A Wizard of Lemuria
1965 Lifeline [city on Venus], Roger Zelazny, “The Doors of His Face, the
Lamps of His Mouth” in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,
March 1965
1965 Na [planet], Robert Scheckley, “Shall We Have a Little Talk?” in Galaxy
Magazine, October 1965
1965 Pia 2 (also known as Ptolemy Soter) [planet], Avram Davidson, Rork!
1965 Refuge [planet], Joseph L. Green, The Loafers of Refuge
1965 Salem [town], Ted and Betty Corday, Days of Our Lives
1965 Sphereland [two-dimensional spherical world], Dionys Burger,
Sphereland: A Fantasy about Curved Spaces and an Expanding Universe
1965 Tracy Island [island], Gerry Anderson and Sylvia Anderson,
Thunderbirds
1965 World of Tiers universe [multiverse], Philip José Farmer, The Maker
of Universes
1966 Camiroi [planet], R. A. Lafferty, “Primary Education of the Camiroi” in
Galaxy Magazine, December 1966
1966 Collinsport [town in Maine], Dan Curtis, Dark Shadows
1966 Destination: Void universe [universe], Frank Herbert, Destination:
Void
1966 Proavitus [inhabited asteroid], R. A. Lafferty, “Nine Hundred
Grandmothers” in If, February 1966
1966 Riverworld [planet], Philip José Farmer, “Riverworld” in Worlds of
Tomorrow, January 1966
1966 Star Trek galaxy [galaxy], Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek
1966 Zygra [planet], John Brunner, A Planet of Your Own
1967 Altair [planet], Edmund Cooper, A Far Sunset
1967 Alternate Earth and Mars [alternate Earth and Mars], William F.
Noland and George Clayton Johnson, Logan’s Run
1967 Branning-at-Sea [city in future Earth], Samuel R. Delany, The Einstein
Intersection
1967 Braunstein [RPG setting], David Wesely, Braunstein
1967 Chthon [planet], Piers Anthony, Chthon
1967 Dumarest Saga universe [universe], Edwin Charles Tubb, The Winds
of Gath
1967 Gor [planet], John Norman [John Frederick Lange, Jr.], Tarnsman of
Gor
1967 Hawksbill Station [prison colony in the prehistoric past], Robert
Silverberg, “Hawksbill Station” in Galaxy Magazine, August 1967
1967 Macondo [village in Columbia], Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred
Years of Solitude
1967 Pern [planet], Anne McCaffrey, “Weyr Search” in Analog, October, 1967
1967 Sangre [planet], Norman Spinrad, The Men in the Jungle
1967 Unistam [country], James Blish and Norman L. Knight, A Torrent of
Faces
1967 Urath [planet], Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light
1967 The Village [seaside village], Patrick McGoohan and George Markstein,
The Prisoner
1968 Alternate solar system [alternate solar system], Stanley Kubrick and
Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey
1968 Alternate United States [alternate United States], Philip K. Dick, Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
1968 Astrobe [planet], R. A. Lafferty, Past Master
1968 Beninia [country in West Africa], John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar
1968 Gurnil [planet], Lloyd Biggle, The Still Small Voice of Trumpets
1968 Halla, Shundi [kingdoms], Satyajit Ray, Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne
1968 Ici [ruins], Philippe Jullian, La Fuite en Egypte
1968 Llanview [city in Pennsylvania], Agnes Nixon, One Life to Live
1968 Montefor [planet], William F. Temple, The Fleshpots of Sansato
1968 Nacre [planet], Piers Anthony, Omnivore
1968 Nevèrÿon [world], Samuel R. Delany, “Time Considered as a Helix of
Semi-Precious Stones” in New Worlds, December 1968
1968 Novaria, Vindium, Zolon, Xylar, Othomae, etc. [countries], L.
Sprague de Camp, The Goblin Tower
1968 Paradise [planet], Joanna Russ, Picnic on Paradise
1968 Región [country], Juan Benet, Volverás a Región
1968 Star Well [inhabited asteroid], Alexei Panshin, Star Well
1968 Sulwen’s Planet [planet], Jack Vance, “Sulwen’s Planet” in The Farthest
Reaches (edited by Joseph Elder)
1968 Tschai [planet], Jack Vance, City of the Chasch
1969 Belzagor [planet], Robert Silverberg, Downward to the Earth (first
serialized in Galaxy Science Fiction, November 1969)
1969 Doona [planet], Anne McCaffrey, Decision at Doona
1969 Esthaa [planet], James Tiptree Jr. [Alice Bradley Sheldon], “Your
Haploid Heart” in Analog Science Fact & Fiction, September 1969
1969 Flora [planet], John Boyd, The Pollinators of Eden
1969 Gondwane [continent], Lin Carter, Giant of World’s End
1969 Harlech [planet], John Boyd, The Rakehells of Heaven
1969 Kanthos, Sulmannon, Anzor [countries], Alex Dain, Bane of Kanthos
1969 Living Island [island], Hollingsworth Morse, H. R. Pufnstuf
1969 Mnemosyne [planet], Bob Shaw, The Palace of Eternity
1969 Plowman’s Planet [planet], Philip K. Dick, Galactic Pot-Healer
1969 Quilapa, Zaachila [villages], Harry Harrison, Captive Universe
1969 Sesame Street [street in New York City], Joan Ganz Cooney and Lloyd
Morrisett, Sesame Street
1969 The South Kingdom [kingdom], John Bellairs, The Face in the Frost
1969 Yarth [planet], Gardner F. Fox, Kothar: Barbarian Swordsman
1969 Zarkandu [planet], Lin Carter, Lost World of Time
1970 Amber universe [universe], Roger Zelazny, Nine Princes in Amber
1970 Bremagne, Gwynedd, Kheldour, Meara, etc. [countries], Katherine
Kurtz, Deryni Rising
1970 Brodie’s Land, MLCH Country [country], Jorge Luis Borges, El
Informe de Brodie
1970 Clio [planet], Andre Norton, Ice Crown
1970 Delmark-O [virtual world], Philip K. Dick, A Maze of Death
1970 Esperanza [planet], Ron Goulart, The Sword Swallower
1970 Pine Valley [town in Pennsylvania], Agnes Nixon, All My Children
1970 Rominten [reserve in Eastern Prussia], Michel Tournier, Le Roi des
Aulnes
1970 Strackenz [duchy in Germany], George MacDonald Fraser, Royal Flash
1970 Tome [planet], John Jakes, Mask of Chaos
1970 Urban Monads [skyscrapers that each contain 25 cities], Robert
Silverberg, “A Happy Day in 2381” in Nova 1 (edited by Harry Harrison)
1970 Urban Nucleus world [future Earth], Michael Bishop, “If a Flower
Could Eclipse” in Worlds of Fantasy, Winter 1970
1970 Vandarei [world], Joy Chant [Eileen Joyce Rutter], Red Moon and
Black Mountain: The End of the House of Kendreth
1971 (Unnamed world) [underground city], George Lucas, THX 1138
1971 Antares IV [planet], George Zebrowski, “Heathen God” in The
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January 1971
1971 Arab Jordan [kingdom in 21st century New York City], Katherine
MacLean, The Missing Man
1971 Balbrigian and Bouloulabassian United Republic [country], Max
Jacob, Histoire du roi Kaboul Ier et du marmiton Gauwain
1971 Borthan [planet], Robert Silverberg, A Time of Changes
1971 Dhrawn [planet], Hal Clement [Harry Clement Stubbs], Star Light
1971 Fourth World [world], Jack Kirby, The New Gods 1971 Misterland
[land], Roger Hargreaves, Mr. Tickle
1971 Oceana [island near Ireland], H. R. F. Keating, The Strong Man
1971 Roland [planet], Poul Anderson, “The Queen of Air and Darkness” in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, June 1971
1971 Viriconium [city], M. John Harrison, The Pastel City
1971 Watkinsland [South American coastal area], Doris Lessing, Breifing
for a Descent into Hell
1972 Aglaura, Anastasia, Argia, Baucis, Catmere, etc. [55 cities], Italo
Calvino, Le Città Invisibli (Invisible Cities)
1972 Archaos [kingdom], Christiane Rochefort, Archaos ou Le jardin
étincelant
1972 Blokula, Broceliande, Elfhame, Elfwick, etc. [kingdoms], Sylvia
Townsend Warner, Kingdoms of Elfin
1972 The Cemetery [future Earth], Clifford D. Simak, Cemetery World
1972 Humanx Commonwealth universe [universe], Alan Dean Foster, The
Tar-Aiym Krang
1972 Kregen [planet], Alan Burt Akers [Henry Kenneth Bulmer], Transit to
Scorpio
1972 Marilyn [planet], Micheal G. Coney, Mirror Image
1972 The Para-Universe [universe], Isaac Asimov, The Gods Themselves
1972 Parsloe’s Planet [planet], Kenneth Bulmer, Roller Coaster World
1972 Sainte Croix, Sainte Anne [planets], Gene Wolfe, The Fifth Head of
Cerebus
1972 Sequoia [planet], Neal Barrett, Jr., Highwood
1972 Thanator [fictional version of Jupiter’s moon Callisto], Lin Carter,
Jandar of Callisto
1972 The Valley Forge [space station orbiting Saturn], Douglas Trumbull,
Silent Running
1972 Watership Down [warren of rabbits], Richard Adams, Watership
Down
1972 Whileaway and other worlds [alternate worlds], Joanna Russ, “When
it Changed” in Again, Dangerous Visions (edited by Harlan Ellison)
1972 Yan [planet], John Brunner, The Dramaturges of Yan
1973 Abbieannia, Angelinia, Calverinia, Glandelinia [countries], Henry
Darger, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of
the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child
Slave Rebellion
1973 Aeneas [planet], Poul Anderson, The Day of Their Return
1973 Alastor Cluster [star cluster], Jack Vance, Trullion: Alastor 2262
1973 The Cavity [cavity surrounded by solid rock], Barrington J. Bayley,
“Me and My Antronoscope” in New Worlds Quarterly 5, 1973
1973 CoDominium universe [universe], Jerry Pournelle, A Spaceship for the
King
1973 Florin, Guilder [countries], William Goldman, The Princess Bride
1973 Genoa City [city in Wisconsin], William J. Bell and Lee Philip Bell, The
Young and the Restless
1973 Kark [continent], Miles Copeland and Michael Hicks-Beach, The Game
of Nations
1973 Koestler’s Planet [planet], Barrington J. Bayley, “Mutation Planet” in
Frontiers 1: Tomorrow’s Alternatives
1973 Lituania [country], Henri Guigonnat, Démone en Lituanie
1973 Murdstone [planet], Ron Goulart, Shaggy Planet
1973 Omelas [city], Ursula K. LeGuin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from
Omelas” in New Dimensions 3, October 1973
1973 Starmont [planet], Terry Carr, “The Winds of Starmont” in No Mind of
Man (edited by Robert Silverberg)
1973 Three-O-Seven [island in the Aleutian Archipelago], René Barjavel, Le
Grand Secret
1974 (Player-created worlds) [RPG setting], Gary Gygax and Dave
Arneson, Dungeons & Dragons
1974 (Unnamed world) [interactive world], Steve Colley, Maze War
1974 (Unnamed world) [interactive world], Jim Bowery, Spasim
1974 Beklan Empire [country], Richard Adams, Shardik
1974 Calliur [planet], Mildred Downey Broxon, “The Stones have Names” in
Fellowship of the Stars (edited by Terry Carr)
1974 Cathadonia [planet], Michael Bishop, “Cathadonian Odyssey” in The
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September 1974
1974 Charon [planet], Joe Haldeman, The Forever War
1974 Earth City [world], Christopher Priest, Inverted World
1974 Folsom’s Planet [planet], Barry N. Malzberg, On a Planet Alien
1974 The Holdfast [community in an alternate Earth], Suzy McKee
Charnas, Walk to the End of the World
1974 Ishtar [planet], Poul Anderson, Fire Time
1974 Koryphon [planet], Jack Vance, The Gray Prince
1974 Land of the Lost [prehistoric land], Sid and Marty Kroft, The Land of
the Lost
1974 Mist County (location of Lake Wobegon) [county in central
Minnesota], Garrison Keillor, A Prairie Home Companion
1974 Mote Prime [planet], Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, The Mote in
God’s Eye
1974 Shkea [planet], George R. R. Martin, “A Song for Lya” in Analog
Science Fact & Fiction, June 1974
1974 Sigma Draconis III [planet], John Brunner, Total Eclipse
1974 Skaith [planet], Leigh Brackett, The Ginger Star
1974 Solatia [country], Jane Yolen, The Magic Three of Solatia
1974 Weinunnach [planet], Gardner Dozois, “Strangers” in New Dimensions
IV (edited by Robert Silverberg)
1974 Zangaro [country in Africa], Frederick Forsyth, The Dogs of War
1975 (Unnamed world) [interactive world], Gary Whisenhunt and Ray
Wood, DND
1975 (Unnamed world) [interactive world], Don Daglow, Dungeon
1975 (Unnamed world) [interactive world], Rusty Rutherford, PEDIT5
1975 Arachne [planet], Michael Bishop, “Blooded on Arachne” in Epoch
(edited by Roger Elwood and Robert Silverberg)
1975 Bellona [city], Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren
1975 Blackmoor [RPG setting], Dave Arneson, Blackmoor
1975 Borderland, Wasteland [parallel universes], Clifford D. Simak,
Enchanted Pilgrimage
1975 Cuckoo [Dyson sphere], Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson, Farthest
Star
1975 Da-Dake, Na-Nupp, Vipp [countries], Dr. Seuss [Theodore Seuss
Geisel], Oh, the Thinks You Can Think!
1975 Dokal, Shaltoon, Laborlong [planets], Kilgore Trout [Philip José
Farmer], Venus on the Half-Shell
1975 Ecotopia [country], Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia: The Notebooks and
Reports of William Weston
1975 Glorantha [world], Greg Stafford, White Bear and Red Moon
1975 Moonbase Alpha [moon], Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, Space: 1999
1975 Nation of the Urns [land], Jorge Luis Borges, “Undr” in El Libro de
Arena
1975 Orbitsville [Dyson sphere], Bob Shaw, Orbitsville
1975 Sinapia [country], Anonymous, edited by Stelio Cro, Description de la
Sinapia, Peninsula en la Tierra Austral: A Classical Utopia of Spain
(translation of an unpublished Spanish manuscript thought to have been
written in the late 1600s or 1700s)
1975 Tékumel [planet], Muhammad Abd-al-Rahman Barker, Empire of the
Petal Throne
1975 W [island], Georges Perec, W, Or the Memory of Childhood
1975 Where-Nobody-Talks [country], Jean-Marie-Gustave Le Clézio,
Voyages de l’Autre Côté
1975 X513 [planet], Suzette Haden Elgin, “Modulation in All Things” in
Reflections of the Future (edited by Russell Hill)
1976 (Unnamed world) [interactive world], Willlam Crowther, Colossal
Cave Adventure (text adventure program)
1976 Alliance-Union universe [universe], C. J. Cherryh, Gate of Ivrel
1976 Blaispagal, Inc. [planet], Michael Bishop, “In Chinistrex Fortronza the
Peole Are Machines; or Hoom and the Homonuculus” in New
Constellations (edited by Thomas M. Disch and Charles Naylor)
1976 Cinnabar [city], Edward Bryant, Cinnabar
1976 Fernwood [town in Ohio], Gail Parent, Ann Marcus, Jerry Adelman,
and Daniel Gregory Browne, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman 1976 Florian
[planet], Brian Stableford, The Florians
1976 Hed [land], Patricia A. McKillip, The Riddle-Master of Hed
1976 Hoep-Hanninah [planet], Marta Randall, A City in the North
1976 Ibansk [town in Eastern Europe], Aleksandr Zinoviev, Ziyayushchie
Vysoty
1976 Mansueceria [planet], Michael Bishop, And Strange at Ecbatan the
Trees
1976 Mattapoisett [rural community of the future], Marge Piercy, Woman
on the Edge of Time
1976 Oerth [planet], Gary Gygax, The Gnome Cache (serialized in Dragon
magazine beginning June 1976)
1976 Redsun [planet], Vonda N. Maclntyre, “Screwtop” in The Crystal Ship
1976 Schilda [city-republic], Erich Kästner, Die Schildbürger
1976 The Seven Kingdoms [kingdoms], Richard Cowper [John Middleton
Murry, Jr.], “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” in The Custodians
1976 Star Wars galaxy [galaxy], George Lucas, Star Wars: From the
Adventures of Luke Skywalker (novelization of the 1977 film Star Wars,
ghostwritten by Alan Dean Foster from the screenplay by George Lucas)
1976 Sweet Pickles [town], Richard Hefter, Jacqueline Reinach, and Ruth
Lerner Perle, Me Too Iguana
1976 Triton [moon of Neptune], Samuel R. Delany, Triton
1977 Atlanton Earth [planet], Neil Hancock, Greyfax Grimwald
1977 Cirque [city on an alternate Earth], Terry Carr, Cirque
1977 Dextra [planet], David J. Lake, The Right Hand of Dextra
1977 Estarcion [world], Dave Sim, Cerebus
1977 Fantasy Island [island], Gene Levitt, Fantasy Island
1977 The Four Lands [lands of a future Earth], Terry Brooks, The Sword of
Shanarra
1977 Galactic Center Saga universe [universe], Gregory Benford, In the
Ocean of Night
1977 The Land [land], Stephen R. Donaldson, Lord Foul’s Bane
1977 Nullaqua [planet], Bruce Sterling, Involution Ocean
1977 Terabithia [kingdom], Katherine Paterson, The Bridge to Terabithia
1977 Tezcatl [planet], Michael Bishop, Stolen Faces
1977 Tsunu [kingdom], Richard A. Lupoff, Sword of the Demon
1977 Turquoise [planet], Ian Wallace [John Wallace Pritchard], The Sign of
the Mute Medusa
1977 Worlorn [planet], George R. R. Martin, Dying of the Light
1977 Xanth [world], Piers Anthony, A Spell for Chameleon
1978 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier [apartment building in Paris], Georges Perec,
La Vie, mode d’emploi
1978 Adventureland [interactive world], Scott Adams, Adventureland
1978 All-World [multiverse], Stephen King, The Gunslinger (serialized in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction)
1978 Azlaroc [world], Fred Sabehagen, The Veils of Azlaroc
1978 Chewandswallow [town], Judi Barrett and Ron Barrett, Cloudy with a
Chance of Meatballs
1978 Demea [planet], Elizabeth A. Lynn, A Different Light
1978 Dis [underground city], Charles L. Harness, Wolfhead
1978 Eshgorin [land], Eleanor Arnason, The Sword Smith
1978 Evarchia [country in the Balkan peninsula], Brigid Brophy, Palace
without Chairs: A Baroque Novel
1978 Hitchhiker’s Galaxy [galaxy], Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to
the Galaxy (radio drama)
1978 Ireta [planet], Anne McCaffrey, Dinosaur Planet
1978 Isis [planet], Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Ruins of Isis
1978 Lysenka II [planet], Brian Aldiss, Enemies of the System: A Tale of
Homo Uniformis
1978 Maralia [planet], Barrington J. Bayley, Star Winds
1978 MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) [interactive world], Roy Trubshaw and
Richard Bartle, MUD (Multi-User Dungeon)
1978 Parhan [empire somewhere in the Middle East], Dominique
Bromberger, L’Itinéraire de Parhan au Château D’Alamut et Au-delá
1978 The Proteus Universe [universe], Charles Sheffield, Sight of Proteus
1978 Ramah [planet], Lee Killough, A Voice out of Ramah
1978 Terran Federation planets [planets], Terry Nation, Blake’s 7
1978 Twelve Colonies [planets], Battestar Galactica [space station], Glen
A. Larson, Battlestar Galactica
1978 Tyree [planet], James Tiptree Jr. [Alice Bradley Sheldon], Up the Walls
of the World
1978 Victoria [planet], Ursula K. LeGuin, “The Eye of the Heron” in
Millennial Women (edited by Virginia Kidd)
1978 World of Two Moons [world], Wendy and Richard Pini, Elfquest
1978 Xuma [planet], David Lake, The Gods of Xuma or Barsoom Revisited
1978 Zacar [planet], Andre Norton, Yurth Burden
1979 (Unnamed world) [interactive world], Warren Robinett, Adventure
(for the Atari 2600)
1979 Akalabeth [interactive world], Richard Garriott, Akalabeth: World of
Doom
1979 BoskVeld [planet], Michael Bishop, Transfigurations
1979 Canopus universe [universe], Doris Lessing, Shikasta
1979 Delayafam [planet], Jayge Carr [Margery Ruth Morgenstern Krueger],
Leviathan’s Deep
1979 Everon [planet], Gordon R. Dickson, Masters of Everon
1979 Fantastica [land], Michael Ende, The Neverending Story
1979 Gaea [space station orbiting Saturn], John Varley, Titan
1979 Gateway [space station], Frederik Pohl, “The Merchants of Venus” in
The Gold at the Starbow’s End
1979 Geb [planet], Brian Stableford, The Paradox of the Sets
1979 God’s World [planet], Ian Watson, God’s World
1979 Goss Conf [planet], David Dvorkin, The Green God
1979 The Great Underground Empire [interactive world], Tim Anderson,
Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling, Zork
1979 Hazzard County [county in Georgia], Gy Waldron, The Dukes of
Hazzard
1979 Jem [planet], Frederik Pohl, JEM
1979 Little Belaire [township in a future Earth], John Crowley, Engine
Summer
1979 Lodon-Kamaria [planet], Barbara Paul, Bibblings
1979 LV-426 [planet], Ridley Scott, Alien
1979 Monsalvat [planet], M. A. Foster, The Day of the Klesh
1979 Pacifica [planet], Norman Spinrad, A World Between
1979 Pile [city], Brian W. Aldiss and Mike Wilks, Pile: Petals from St. Klaed’s
Computer
1979 The Planiverse [two-dimensional universe], A. K. Dewdney,
“Exploring the Planiverse”, Journal of Recreational Mathematics, Vol. 12,
No. 1, September 1979, pages 16–20.
1979 Theives’ World [world], Robert Asprin, Theives’ World
1979 Treason [planet], Orson Scott Card, A Planet Called Treason
1979 Zanthodon [underground country under Africa], Lin Carter, Journey
to the Underground World
1980 (Unnamed world) [interactive world], Michael Toy, Glenn Wichman,
and Ken Arnold, Rogue
1980 4H 97801 [star system with planet], Ian Watson, The Gardens of
Delight
1980 Alternate America [alternate America], L. Neil Smith, The Probability
Broach
1980 Alternate England [alternate England], Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker
1980 Bloom County [county], Berkeley Breathed, Bloom County
1980 Coimheadach [island], Helen Wykham, Ottoline Atlantica
1980 Dragon’s Egg [neutron star], Robert Forward, Dragon’s Egg
1980 Eran [planet], David J. Lake, The Fourth Hemisphere
1980 Majipoor [planet], Robert Silverberg, Lord Valentine’s Castle
1980 Momus [planet], Barry B. Longyear, Circus World
1980 Mystery House [interactive world], Roberta and Ken Williams,
Mystery House
1980 Reverie [planet], Bruce Sterling, The Artificial Kid
1980 Rubanis [planet], Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières, Métro
Châtelet, Direction Cassiopeia
1980 Tew [planet], Orson Scott Card, Songmaster
1980 Tiamat [planet], Joan Vinge, The Snow Queen
1980 Ultima Universe [interactive world], Richard Garriott, Ultima
1980 Uplift universe [universe], David Brin, Sundiver
1980 Urth [alternate Earth], Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer
1981 (Unnamed world) [world], Luigi Serafini, Codex Seraphinianus
1981 Aerlon [planet], Charles L. Harness, Firebird
1981 Aldo Cerise, Colmar, Farhome [planets], Keith Laumer, Star Colony
1981 Boomerang [planet], Nicholas Yermakov, The Last Communion
1981 Bypass [town in North Carolina], Doug Marlette, Kudzu
1981 Carlotta, Nearth [planets], James Morrow, The Wine of Violence
1981 Eternia [planet], Mattel Corporation, Masters of the Universe
“Mineternia” minicomic
1981 Greater Island, Lesser Island [islands], Jörg Müller and Jörg Steiner,
Die Menschen im Meer (The Sea People)
1981 God-Does-Battle [planet], Greg Bear, Strength of Stones
1981 Nyumbani [Africa with an alternate history], Charles R. Saunders,
Imaro
1981 The Other Plane [virtual world], Vernor Vinge, “True Names”, in Dell
Binary Star #5
1981 Radix series Earth [future Earth], A. A. Attanasio, Radix
1981 Toontown [town], Gary Wolf, Who Censored Roger Rabbit?
1981 Tuna [small town in Texas], Jaston Williams, Joe Sears, and Ed
Howard, Greater Tuna
1981 Utopia [interactive world], Don Daglow, Utopia
1981 Windhaven [planet], George R. R. Martin and Lisa Tuttle, Windhaven
1981 The Worlds [space habitats], Joe Haldeman, Worlds
1982 Aloria [world], David Eddings, Pawn of Prophecy
1982 Asgard [planet], Brian Stableford, Journey to the Center
1982 Aventine [colony on a distant planet], Lee Killough, Aventine
1982 Ballybran [planet], Anne McCaffrey, The Crystal Singer
1982 Chiron [planet], James P. Hogan, Voyage from Yesteryear
1982 Counter-earth [planet], François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters, Les
Murailles de Samaris (the first book in the Les Cités Obscures series, first
serialized in the June issue of (A Suivre), a French periodical)
1982 Cyberspace [virtual world], The Sprawl [future United States],
William Gibson, “Burning Chrome” in Omni, July 1982
1982 Geta [planet], Donald Kingsbury, Courtship Rite
1982 Gravitar [interactive world], Mike Hally and Rich Adam, Gravitar
1982 The Grid [digital world inside a computer], Steven Lisberger, Tron
1982 Grimace [town in Texas], Jerry Bittle, Geech
1982 Helliconia [planet], Brian Aldiss, Helliconia Spring
1982 Inquestor universe [universe], Somtow Sucharitkul [also known as S.
P. Somtow], The Dawning Shadow: Light on the Sound
1982 The Kingdom [console RPG setting], Stephen Landrum,
Dragonstomper
1982 Meirjain [planet], Barrington J. Bayley, The Pillars of Eternity
1982 Neo-Tokyo [city], Katsuhiro Otomo, Akira (first serialized in Young
Magazine)
1982 Riftwar universe [universe], Raymond E. Feist, Magician
1982 Shaper/Mechanist universe [universe], Bruce Sterling, “Swarm” in The
Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1982
1982 Thra [planet], Jim Henson, The Dark Crystal
1982 Walpurgis III [planet], Mike Resnick, Walpurgis III
1982 Wundle [kingdom], Robert Siegel, The Kingdom of Wundle
1983 Altair IV [planet], Ben Bova, The Winds of Altair
1983 Boldhome [on-line RPG setting], Alan E. Klietz, Scepter of Goth
1983 Camarand [kingdom], Don Reo, Wizards and Warriors
1983 Corinth [town in Pennsylvania], Agnes Nixon and Douglas Marland,
Loving
1983 Demiplane of Dread [RPG setting], Tracy and Laura Hickman,
Ravenloft
1983 Discworld [world], Terry Pratchett, The Colour of Magic
1983 Dragaera [planet], Steven Brust, Jhereg
1983 Fraggle Rock [world], Jim Henson, Fraggle Rock
1983 Fujimura, Nelson, Sidon [settlements on Ganymede], Gregory
Benford, Against Infinity
1983 Hyperion Cantos universe [universe], Dan Simmons, “Remembering
Siri” in Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 1983
1983 Iblard [world], Naohisa Inoue, The Journey Through Iblard (paintings
appeared in exhibitions prior to the release of the book)
1983 Klepsis, Emporion, Apateon [planets], R. A. Lafferty, The Annals of
Klepsis
1983 Ntah [country], John Brunner, The Crucible of Time
1983 Orthe [planet], Mary Gentle, Golden Witchbreed
1983 Rabelais [planet], Jayge Carr [Margery Ruth Morgenstern Krueger],
Navigator’s Sindrome
1983 Tortall [country], Tamora Pierce, Alanna: The First Adventure
1983 Warhammer universe [universe], Games Workshop, Warhammer
Fantasy Battle
1984 (Unnamed world) [world], Glen Cook, The Black Company
1984 Absu [planet], James Morrow, The Continent of Lies
1984 Alternate Earth [alternate Earth], Harry Harrison, West of Eden
1984 Alternate United States [alternate United States], Suzette Elgin,
Native Tongue
1984 Aseneshesh [planet], James Kelly, Planet of Whispers
1984 Cabot Cove [town in Maine], Peter Fisher, Richard Levinson, and
William Link, Murder, She Wrote
1984 Fionavar [world], Guy Gavriel Kay, The Summer Tree
1984 Frontera [settlement on Mars], Lewis Shiner, Frontera
1984 Hawkins Island [island near Cape Cod], Hilbert Schenck, A Rose for
Armageddon
1984 Krynn [world], Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, Dragons of
Autumn Twilight
1984 Mallworld [planet], Somtow Sucharitkul [also known as S. P. Somtow],
Mallworld
1984 Mu Archipelago [on-line RPG setting], Kelton Flinn and John Taylor,
Island of Kesmai
1984 The Territories [alternate world], Stephen King and Peter Straub, The
Talisman
1984 Tigris [planet], Timothy Zahn, A Coming of Age
1985 Amaterasu [planet], Walter Jon Williams, Knight Moves
1985 Belshazzar [planet], Norman Spinrad, Child of Fortune
1985 Cascara [island in the Carribean Sea], Dick Clement, Water
1985 Sea Venture (also known as CV) [city], Damon Knight, CV
1985 Damiem [planet], James Tiptree Jr. [Alice Bradley Sheldon], Brightness
Falls from the Air
1985 Dayworld [planet], Philip José Farmer, Dayworld
1985 Ethshar [land], Lawrence Watt-Evans, The Misenchanted Sword
1985 Gilead [republic], Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
1985 Hav [peninsular city-state in the Near East], Jan Morris, Last Letters
from Hav
1985 Ibis 2 [planet], Linda Steele, Ibis
1985 Medea [planet], Harlan Ellison and others, Medea: Harlan’s World
1985 Mutare [planet], Cynthia Felice, Downtime
1985 Valley of the Kesh [valley in Northern California], Ursula K. LeGuin,
Always Coming Home
1985 Rocheworld [double planet], Robert Forward, Rocheworld
1985 Thundera [planet], Tobias “Ted” Wolf, Thundercats
1985 The Way universe [universe], Greg Bear, Eon
1986 Alternate New York [alternate New York], Alan Moore and Dave
Gibbons, Watchmen
1986 Athos [planet], Lois McMaster Bujold, Ethan of Athos
1986 Boxen [world], C. S. Lewis, Boxen: The Imaginary World of the Young
C. S. Lewis
1986 Brotherworld [space station], Gregory Benford, “As Big as the Ritz” in
Interzone #18, Winter 1986
1986 Chameleon [planet], Sheila Finch, Triad
1986 Deverry [kingdom], Katherine Kerr, Daggerspell
1986 Habitat World [on-line RPG setting], Randy Farmer and Chip
Morningstar, Habitat
1986 Hyrule [interactive world], Shigeru Miyamoto, The Legend of Zelda
1986 Ingary, Strangia, Sultanates of Rashpuht [countries], Diana Wynne
Jones, Howl’s Moving Castle
1986 Keléstia [RPG setting], N. Robin Crossby, HârnMaster
1986 Land, Overland [planets], Bob Shaw, The Ragged Astronauts
1986 Landover [kingdom], Terry Brooks, Magic Kingdom for Sale—SOLD!
1986 Lusitania [planet], Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead
1986 Redworld [planet], Charles L. Harness, Redworld
1986 Rhomary [planet], Cherry Wilder [Cherry Barbara Grimm], Second
Nature
1986 Shora, Valedon [planets], Joan Slonczewski, A Door into Ocean
1986 Vorkosigan Saga universe [universe], Lois McMaster Bujold, Shards
of Honor
1987 Abeir-Toril [RPG setting], Ed Greenwood and Jeff Grubb, Forgotten
Realms Box Set
1987 Alternate universe of The Culture [universe], Iain M. Banks,
Consider Phlebas
1987 Destiny’s Road universe [universe], Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and
Steve Barnes, The Legacy of Heorot
1987 Dimension X [alternate dimension], Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird,
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
1987 Empire of Videssos [empire], Harry Turtledove, The Misplaced Legion
1987 Enigma 88 [planet], Hal Clement [Harry Clement Stubbs], Still River
1987 Ephar [planet], Harry Turtledove, “Last Favor” in Analog Magazine,
December 1987
1987 Final Fantasy Universe [universe], Hironobu Sakaguchi, Final Fantasy
1987 Ilia [planet], Sheila Finch, The Garden of the Shaped
1987 Imakulata [planet], Orson Scott Card, Wyrms
1987 Kingdom of Kroz [kingdom], Scott Miller, Kingdom of Kroz
1987 Jubal [planet], Sheri S. Tepper, After Long Silence
1987 The Manhole [interactive world], Rand and Robyn Miller, The
Manhole
1987 Maniac Mansion [interactive world], Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick,
Maniac Mansion
1987 Pennterra [planet], Judith Moffett, Pennterra
1987 Prysmos [planet], Flint Dille, Visionaries: Knights of the Magical Light
1987 Springfield [city], Matt Groening, The Simpsons (shorts appearing on
The Tracy Ullman Show)
1987 Talislanta [RPG setting], Stephen Michael Sechi and P. D. Breeding-
Black, Talislanta
1987 Velgarth [continent], Mercedes Lackey, Arrows of the Queen
1988 (Unnamed world) [on-line RPG setting], Rich Skrenta, Monster
1988 Alternate version of Deimos [moon of Mars], Charles Harness, Krono
1988 Cadwal [planet], Jack Vance, Araminta Station
1988 Cay Habitat [space station], Rodeo [planet], Lois McMaster Bujold,
Falling Free
1988 Clarion [planet], William Greenleaf, Clarion
1988 Desolation Road [town on Mars], Ian McDonald, Desolation Road
1988 The Domination of Draka series world [alternate Earth], S. M.
Stirling, Marching Through Georgia
1988 Elanthia [on-line RPG setting], Simutronics, GemStone II
1988 Flyspeck Island [island], Ray Billingsley, Curtis
1988 Osten Ard [continent], Tad Williams, The Dragonbone Chair
1988 Qom [planet], Nancy Kress, An Alien Light
1989 (Unnamed world) [interactive world], Peter Molyneux, Populous
1989 Artemis [planet], Storm Constantine, The Monstrous Regiment
1989 The Cylinder [world], K. W. Jeter, Farewell Horizontal
1989 Elyisium [planet], Paul J. McAuley, Secret Harmonies (also known as
Of the Fall)
1989 Peponi [planet], Mike Resnick, Paradise
1989 Republic of Elbonia [country], Scott Adams, Dilbert
1989 SimCity [interactive city], Will Wright, SimCity
1989 Stohlson’s Redemption [planet], Hayford Pierce, The Thirteenth
Majestral
1990 Alifbay, Kahani, Moody Land [countries], Salman Rushdie, Haroun
and the Sea of Stories
1990 Cicely [town in Alaska], Joshua Brand and John Falsey, Northern
Exposure
1990 Darwin IV [planet], Wayne Douglas Barlowe, Expedition
1990 Erhal system [planets], Sherwood Smith, Wren to the Rescue
1990 The Heritage Universe [universe], Charles Sheffield, Summertide
1990 Htrae [underground world], Rudy Rucker, The Hollow Earth: The
Narrative of Mason Algiers Reynolds of Virginia
1990 Isla Nublar [island], Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park
1990 Mêlée Island, Monkey Island [islands], Ron Gilbert, The Secret of
Monkey Island
1990 Miranda [planet], Michael Swanwick, Stations in the Tide (serialized in
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine)
1990 Randland [world], Robert Jordan [James Oliver Rigney, Jr.], The Eye of
the World
1990 Twin Peaks [town in Washington State], David Lynch and Mark Frost,
Twin Peaks
1990 Veritas [city], James Morrow, City of Truth
1990 World of the Three Moons [planet], Marion Zimmer Bradley, Julian
May, and Andre Norton, Black Trillium
1991 Alternate Earth [alternate Earth], William Gibson and Bruce Sterling,
The Difference Engine
1991 Athas [RPG setting], Timothy B. Brown and Troy Denning, Dark Sun
1991 The Caves of Mr. Seudo [underground world], Rand and Robyn
Miller, Spelunx and the Caves of Mr. Seudo
1991 Hydros [planet], Robert Silverberg, The Face of the Waters
1991 Lunaplex [city on the moon], Charles L. Harness, Lunar Justice
1991 Odern [planet], Harry Turtledove, “The Great Unknown” in Analog,
April 1991
1991 Slowyear [planet], Frederik Pohl, Stopping at Slowyear
1991 United Socialist States of America [alternate United States], Eugene
Byrne and Kim Newman, “In the Air” in Interzone #43, January 1991
1992 Alternate Worlds [alternate worlds where time operates differently],
Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams
1992 The Continent [continent], Andrzej Sapkowski, Miecz Przeznaczenia
(The Sword of Destiny)
1992 Dinotopia [island], James Gurney, Dinotopia: A Land Apart From Time
1992 Drakkar [RPG setting], MPG-Net, Kingdom of Drakkar
1992 Ferngully [rainforest], Diana Young, Ferngully
1992 Harmony [planet], Orson Scott Card, The Memory of Earth
1992 Kyrandia [kingdom], Frank Klepacki, The Legend of Kyrandia
1992 Meridian [planet], Eric Brown, Meridian Days
1992 Metaverse [virtual world], Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
1992 Nou Occitan [planet], John Barnes, A Million Open Doors
1992 Pop Star [planet], Masahiro Sakurai, Kirby’s Dream Land
1992 Quintaglio homeworld [planet], Robert J. Sawyer, Far-Seer
1993 Babylon 5 universe [universe], J. Michael Straczynski, Babylon 5
1993 Dominaria [planet], Richard Garfield, Magic: The Gathering
1993 D’ni and various Ages [underground world and “Ages”], Rand and
Robyn Miller, Myst
1993 Future Earth, Venus, and Mars [planets], Jeff Segal, Exosquad
1993 Honor Harrington universe [universe], David Weber, On Basilisk
Station
1993 Kaleva [planet], Ian Watson, Lucky’s Harvest
1993 Karimon [planet], Mike Resnick, Purgatory: A Chronicle of a Distant
World
1993 Mars [version of Mars], Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars
1993 Petaybee [planet], Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough,
Powers That Be
1993 Stratos [planet], David Brin, Glory Season
1994 Alternate Paris [alternate Paris], Jules Verne, Paris in the 20th Century
(originally written in 1863)
1994 Autoverse [virtual world], Greg Egan, Permutation City
1994 Azeroth (Warcraft universe) [RPG setting], Blizzard Entertainment,
Warcraft: Orcs & Humans
1994 Boohte [planet], Connie Willis, Uncharted Territory
1994 Caribe [underwater city], Maureen McHugh, Half the Day is Night
1994 Dinadh [planet], Sheri S. Tepper, Shadow’s End
1994 Foreigner universe [universe], C. J. Cherryh, Foreigner
1994 Grandinsula [island], Jill Paton Walsh, Knowledge of Angels
1994 Island of the Day Before [island], Umberto Eco, The Island of the Day
Before
1994 Mera [planet], Alison Baird, The Stone of the Stars
1994 Nirn [RPG setting], Bethesda Softworks, Elder Scrolls: Arena
1994 Planescape [RPG setting], David “Zeb” Cook, Planescape
1994 Skolian Empire [planets], Catherine Asaro, “Light and Shadow” in
Analog Fiction and Fact, April 1994
1994 Solis [city on Mars], A. A. Attanasio, Solis
1994 Stargate universe [universe], Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin,
Stargate
1994 Worldwar world [alternate Earth], Harry Turtledove, Worldwar: In the
Balance
1995 (Unnamed planet) [planet], Brian Stableford, Serpent’s Blood
1995 Aebrynis [RPG setting], TSR, Inc., Birthright
1995 Bountiful [planet], Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Alien Influences
1995 Catan [island], Klaus Teuber, The Settlers of Catan
1995 City of Lost Children [city], Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, City of
Lost Children
1995 Clifton [town in Indiana], Margaret Peterson Haddix, Running Out of
Time
1995 Dark Town [town], Kaja Blackley and Vanessa Chong, Dark Town
1995 Hara [planet], Melissa Scott, Shadow Man
1995 His Dark Materials multiverse [multiverse], Philip Pullman, Northern
Lights (also published as The Golden Compass)
1995 Meridian 59 [MMORPG setting], Archetype Interactive, Meridian 59
1995 Moor [town in Austria], Christoph Ransmayr, Morbus Kitahara
1995 Stateless [artificial island], Greg Egan, Distress
1995 Tiangi [planet], Amy Thompson, The Color of Distance
1995 Toxicurare [planet], William Moy Russell, The Barber of Aldebaran
1995 Waterworld [future Earth], David Twohy, Peter Rader, and Kevin
Reynolds, Waterworld
1996 Greenwood [planet], David Drake, Patriots
1996 Neverwhere [underground land], Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere
1996 Night Dimension [world], Naoto Ohshima, NiGHTS into Dreams …
1996 Night’s Dawn Trilogy universe [universe], Peter F. Hamilton, The
Reality Dysfunction
1996 Quidam [world], Franco Dragone, Quidam
1996 Rakhat [planet], Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow
1996 The Realm Online [on-line RPG setting], Sierra On-Line, The Realm
Online
1996 Sims Bancorp Colony #3245.12 [colony on a distant planet], Elizabeth
Moon, Remnant Population
1996 Westeros [continent], George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
1997 Aarklash [RPG setting], Rackham (now Rackham Entertainment),
Confrontation
1997 Anderran, Emelan, Sotat, etc. [countries], Tamora Pierce, Sandry’s
Book (also published as The Magic in the Weaving)
1997 Carter-Zimmerman Polis [alternate Earth], Orpheus, Swift [planets],
Greg Egan, Diaspora
1997 Corona [world], R. A. Salvatore, The Demon Awakens: The
DemonWars Saga Vol. I
1997 Deception Well [planet], Linda Nagata, Deception Well
1997 Hogwarts Academy [school and surrounding area], J. K. Rowling,
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
1997 Eseveron [land], Rob Lay, A Fork in the Tale
1997 Future Earth [future Earth], Luc Besson, The Fifth Element
1997 Green Lawn [town in Connecticut], Ron Roy, The Absent Author
1997 The Isles [islands], David Drake, Lord of the Isles
1997 The Lexx universe [universe], Paul Donovan, Lexx
1997 Liberty City [interactive city], Rockstar Games, Grand Theft Auto
1997 Oddworld [interactive world], Lorne Lanning and Frank Ryan,
Oddworld: Abe’s Oddyssey
1997 Quibsh [planet], Timothy Zahn, “The Art of War” in Fantasy & Science
Fiction, March 1997
1997 Stormhold [kingdom], Neil Gaiman, Stardust
1997 Sunnydale [suburb in California], Joseph “Joss” Whedon, Buffy the
Vampire Slayer (TV series)
1997 Timeline-191 world [alternate Earth], Harry Turtledove, How Few
Remain
1997 Vlhan [planet], Adam Troy-Castro, “The Funeral March of the
Marionettes” in Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 1997
1998 Capeside [town in Massachusetts], Kevin Williamson, Dawson’s Creek
1998 Dark City [city], Alex Proyas, Dark City
1998 Darwinia [continent], Robert Charles Wilson, Darwinia
1998 The Edge [island in the sky], Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell, Beyond
the Deepwoods
1998 Gallinaco [country], Yves Beauchemin, “The Banana Wars” in The Ark
in the Garden: Fables for Our Times (edited by Alberto Manguel)
1998 Golgot [city on Venus], Alexander Jablokov, Deepdrive
1998 Jean [planet], Mark Stanley, Freefall
1998 Sasania [desert country], A. S. Byatt, Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice
1998 Seahaven [town], Peter Weir and Andrew Niccol, The Truman Show
1998 StarCraft universe [RPG setting], Blizzard Entertainment, StarCraft
1998 Tereille, Kaeleer [realms], Anne Bishop, Daughter of the Blood
1999 (Unnamed world) [world], Wim Delvoye, Atlas
1999 Arcadia, Stark [MMORPG setting], Ragnar Tørnquist and Didrik
Tollefson, The Longest Journey
1999 Dereth [MMORPG setting], Turbine Entertainment Software,
Asheron’s Call
1999 Everworld [planet], K. A. Applegate, Everworld #1: Search for Senna
1999 Harmony [town], James E. Reilly, Passions
1999 The Matrix [virtual world], Larry and Andy Wachowski, The Matrix
1999 Mazalan [empire], Steven Erikson, Gardens of the Moon
1999 Moda-5, Rados [planets], Joanna Barkan, Barbie: Voyage to Rados
1999 Neopia [planet], Adam Powell and Donna Williams, Neopets.com
1999 Neopolis [city], Alan Moore, Gene Ha, Zander Cannon, Top 10
1999 Norrath [MMORPG setting], Brad McQuaid, Steve Clover, Bill Trost,
EverQuest
1999 Silent Hill [town in California], Keiichiro Toyama, Silent Hill
1999 Smuggler’s Cove [village], Walter Wick, I Spy: Treasure Hunt
1999 Tørrendru [land near the Central Siberian Plateau], Izaak Mansk, The
Ride of Enveric Olsen
1999 The Uncharted Territories [galaxy], Rockne S. O’Bannon, Farscape
1999 World of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen [alternate Earth],
Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,
Volume I
2000 (Unnamed island) [island in the South Pacific], William Broyles, Jr.
and Robert Zemeckis, Castaway
2000 CrossGen universe (Sigilverse) [universe], Mark Alessi, CrossGenesis
2000 Deltora [kingdom], Emily Rodda, The Forests of Silence
2000 Genovia [country in Europe], Meg Cabot, The Princess Diaries
2000 Maginaryworld [world], Hidenori Oikawa, Sonic Shuffle
2000 Mejere, Taraak [planets], Takeshi Mori, Vandread
2000 Mouse Island [island], Geronimo Stilton [Elisabetta Dami], Lost
Treasure of the Emerald Eye
2000 Nyeusigrube [world], Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, In the Forests of the
Night
2000 Pndapetzim [city in Asia], Umberto Eco, Baudolino
2000 Revelation Space universe [universe], Alastair Reynolds, Revelation
Space
2000 Systems Commonwealth universe [universe], Gene Roddenberry and
Robert Hewitt Wolfe, Andromeda
2000 Tryslmaistan [universe], Jennifer Diane Reitz, Unicorn Jelly
2001 Aldrazar [RPG setting], Jolly R. Blackburn, David Kenser, et al.,
Hackmaster
2001 Ambergris [city], Jeff VanderMeer, City of Saints and Madmen: The
Book of Ambergris
2001 Arcanis [RPG setting], Paradigm Concepts, Arcanis
2001 Bas-Lag [world], China Miéville, Perdido Street Station
2001 BookWorld [world], Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair
2001 Bubble Town [town], Cinepix, Cubix
2001 Chalion universe [universe], Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of
Chalion
2001 Creation [RPG setting], Robert Hatch, Justin Achilli, Stephan Wieck,
Andrew Bates, Dana Habecker, Sheri M. Johnson, Chris McDonough,
Richard Thomas, Exalted
2001 Flatterland, Mathiverse [worlds], Ian Stewart, Flatterland: Like
Flatland, Only More So
2001 Halo universe [interactive world], Bungie, Halo
2001 Jumpgate universe [MMORPG setting], NetDevil, Jumpgate: The
Reconstruction Initiative
2001 Motor City [MMORPG setting], Electronic Arts, Motor City Online
2001 Nydus [planet], Julia Gray, The Dark Moon
2002 Alternate Earth [alternate Earth], Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of
Rice and Salt
2002 Banton, Renberg, Morlaw, Danver [towns], Bob Gale, Interstate 60
2002 Firefly universe [universe], Joss Whedon, Firefly
2002 Halla [universe], D. J. MacHale, The Merchant of Death
2002 Nyambe [RPG setting], Chris Dolunt, Nyambe: African Adventures
2002 Polyester [planet in a parallel universe], Jim Davis, Garfield’s Pet
Force: Book 1: The Outrageous Origin
2002 Seven Suns universe [planets], Kevin J. Anderson, Hidden Empire
2002 Spaceland [four-dimensional world], Rudy Rucker, Spaceland
2003 Alagaësia [land], Christopher Paolini, Eragon
2003 Alternate Earth [alternate Earth], Max Barry, Jennifer Government
2003 Celenheim [country], Starbreeze Studios, Enclave
2003 Cube Town [town], Naomi Iwata, Pecola
2003 Entropia Universe [MMORPG setting], MindArk, Entropia Universe
2003 Ga’Hoole world [world], Kathryn Lasky, The Capture
2003 Kaihapa, Kainui [ocean planets], Hal Clement [Harry Clement
Stubbs], Noise
2003 Maple Island, Victoria Island, Ossyria, Masteria [MMORPG setting],
Wizet, MapleStory
2003 Michisota [U.S. state], Lisa Wheeler, Avalanche Annie: A Not-So-Tall
Tale
2003 Molvanîa [country in Eastern Europe], Tom Gleisner, Santo Cilauro,
and Rob Sitch, Molvanîa: A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry
2003 Muddle Earth [planet], Paul Stewart, Muddle Earth
2003 Nation of Breda [country], Adrian Leskiw, The Map Realm: The
Fictional Road Maps of Adrian Leskiw
2003 Planetside universe [MMORPG setting], Sony Online Entertainment,
Planetside
2003 Rhem [interactive world], Knut Müller, Rhem
2003 Second Life [on-line world], Linden Research, Inc., Second Life
2003 Shadowbane world [MMORPG setting], Wolfpack Studios,
Shadowbane
2003 Shutter Island [island], Dennis Lehane, Shutter Island
2004 Akloria, Illumina [worlds], Tuomas Pirinen, Sudeki
2004 Aliwalas, Avila, Halconia, Hayuhay [kingdoms], Don Michael Perez,
Mulawin
2004 Bhrudwo, Elamaq, Faltha [continents], Russell Kirkpatrick, Across the
Face of the World
2004 Eberron [RPG setting], Keith Baker, Bill Slavicsek, James Wyatt,
Eberron Campaign Setting
2004 The Emberverse world (also known as the Change World) [alternate
Earth], S. M. Stirling, Dies the Fire
2004 Estrada-Blair [planet], Suzette Haden Elgin, “We Have Always Spoken
Panglish” in SciFiction, October 27, 2004
2004 The Fourlands [world], Steph Swainston, The Year of Our War
2004 Gezeitenwelt (also known as World of Tides) [world], Magus
Magellan [Bernhard Hennen, Hadmar von Wieser, Thomas Finn, and Karl-
heinz Witzko], Das Geheimnis der Gezeitenwelt
2004 Globus Cassus [future Earth], Christian Waldvogel, Globus Cassus
2004 The Island [island], Jeffrey Lieber, J. J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof, Lost
2004 The Kingdom of Far Far Away [kingdom], Andrew Adamson,Shrek 2
2004 Lazy Town [town], Magnús Scheving, Lazy Town
2004 Nasqueron [planet], Iain M. Banks, The Algebraist
2004 Neptune [town in California], Rob Thomas, Veronica Mars
2004 Paragon City [MMORPG setting], Cryptic Studios and Paragon
Studios, City of Heroes
2004 Phaic Tăn [country in Southeast Asia], Tom Gleisner, Santo Cilauro,
and Rob Sitch, Phaic Tăn: Sunstroke on a Shoestring
2004 Scrapland [interactive world], American McGee, Scrapland
2004 The Village [village], M. Night Shyamalan, The Village
2005 Aldea [RPG setting], Jeremy Crawford, Dawn Eliot, Stephen Kenson,
and John Snead, Blue Rose
2005 Alphaverse, Betaverse, Gammaverse [parallel universes], Chris
Roland and Robert Wertheimer, Charlie Jade
2005 Aurelia, Blue Moon [planet and moon], National Geographic and Blue
Wave Productions, Alien Worlds
2005 Eidolon [country], Jane Johnson, The Secret Country
2005 Kippernium [kingdom], Martin Baynton, Jane and the Dragon
2005 Marwencol [town in Belgium], Mark Hogancamp, “Marwencol on My
Mind” in Esopus 5, 2005
2005 Rivet Town, Robot City [cities], Chris Wedge and Carlos Saldanha,
Robots
2006 Atlantika [undersea world], Jun Lana, Atlantika
2006 Calaspia [land], Suresh Guptara and Jyoti Guptara, Conspiracy of
Calaspia
2006 Code Geass world [alternate Earth], Gorō Taniguchi and Ichirō
Ōkouchi, Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion
2006 Daikūriku [planet], Junji Nishimura, Simoun
2006 Dreamland [world], Scott Christian Sava, The Dreamland Chronicles
2006 Erfland [world], Rob Balder, http://www.erfland.com
2006 The Named Lands [world], Ken Scholes, “Of Metal Men and Scarlet
Thread and Dancing with the Sunrise” in Realms of Fantasy, August 2006
2006 Overside [planet], Evan Dahm, Rice Boy
2006 Radiator Springs [town in western North America], John Lasseter and
Joe Ranft, Cars
2006 San Sombrèro [country in Latin America], Tom Gleisner, Santo
Cilauro, and Rob Sitch, San Sombrèro: A Land of Carnivals, Cocktails and
Coups
2006 Sera [planet], Epic Games, Gears of War
2007 (Unnamed world) [countries], Shaun Tan, The Arrival
2007 Andalasia [land], Kevin Lima and Bill Kelly, Enchanted
2007 Dingburg [city], Bill Griffith, Zippy the Pinhead
2007 Galaxiki [galaxy], Jos Kirps and the Galaxiki Project, Galaxiki
2007 Rapture [interactive world], Ken Levine and Paul Hellquist, Bioshock
2007 Terra [planet], Aristomenis Tsirbas, Terra
2008 Arbe [planet], Neal Stephenson, Anathem
2008 Axiom [space station], Future Earth [future Earth], Andrew Stanton,
WALL·E
2008 Panem [country in future North America], Suzanne Collins, The
Hunger Games
2008 Sapphire [virtual planet], Greg Egan, “Crystal Nights” in Interzone
#215,
April 2008
2008 User-generated worlds [worlds], Will Wright, Spore
2008 Wizard City, Krokotopia, Grizzleheim, Marleybone, Mooshu,
Dragonspyre, Celestia, Wintertusk [on-line worlds], Kingslsle
Entertainment, Wizard10l
2009 Chester’s Mill [town in Maine], Stephen King, Under the Dome
2009 Farm Town [on-line world], Slashkey, Farm Town
2009 FarmVille [on-line world], Zynga, FarmVille
2009 Pandora [planet], Gearbox Software, Borderlands
2009 Pandora [planet], James Cameron, Avatar
2009 Planet 51 [planet], Jorge Blanco and Joe Stillman, Planet 51
2009 Sengala [country in Africa] Jon Cassar, 24: Redemption
2010 CityVille [on-line world], Zynga, CityVille
2010 Forbidden Island [island], Gamewright, Forbidden Island
2010 FrontierVille [on-line world], Zynga, FrontierVille
2010 Limbo [world], Christopher Nolan, Inception
2010 New Austin, West Elizabeth [U.S. border counties], Nuevo Paraiso
[Mexican state], Rockstar Games, Red Dead Redemption
2011 Minor Universe 31 [universe], Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a
Science Fiction Universe
2011 Palm City [city], Tom Wheeler, The Cape
2011 Terra Nova [alternate Earth], Kelly Marcel and Craig Silverstein, Terra
Nova
2011 Yalda’s universe [universe], Greg Egan, Orthogonal, Book One: The
Clockwork Rocket

OceanofPDF.com
NOTES

Introduction
1. Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 1895, first published in
The Fortnightly Review, February 1891.
2. Gore Vidal, “The Oz Books” in Gore Vidal, United States: Essays, 1952–
1992, New York, New York: Random House, 1993, page 1095.
3. David Lynch, as quoted in Ed Naha, The Making of Dune, New York,
New York: Berkley Books, 1984, page 213.
4. As quoted in Norman Holland, Literature and the Brain, Gainsville,
Florida: The PsyArt Foundation, 2009, pages 327–328. The two essays
Holland is summarizing are Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, “Consider
the Source: The Evolution of Adaptations for Decoupling and
Metarepresentation” in Metarepresentations: A Multidisciplinary
Perspective, Vancouver Studies in Cognitive Science, Dan Sperber, editor,
New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, pages 53–116; and
John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, “Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds?
Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Aesthetics, Fiction, and the Arts” in
SubStance 94/95, Special Issue, H. Porter Abbott, editor, 2001, pages 6–
27.
5. Michele Root-Bernstein, “Chapter 29. Imaginary Worldplay as an
Indicator of Creative Giftedness” in L. V. Shavinina, editor, International
Handbook on Giftedness, Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer
Science+Business Media B.V., 2009, page 599, available at
http://www.psychologytoday.com/files/attachments/1035/imaginary-
worldplay-indicator-creative-giftedness.pdf (accessed September 23,
2011).
6. Michael O. Riley, Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum,
Lawrence, Kansas: The University Press of Kansas, 1997, page 225.
7. See Marsha Kinder, Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video
Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Berkeley,
California: University of California Press, 1991, pages 122–123.
 8. See Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative
in Cyberspace, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: MIT
Press, 1997, pages 254–258.
9. See Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, Cambridge,
Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2001, pages 225–227.
10. Technically, the term should be “transmedial storytelling”, since an
adjectival form is required; I have used this term instead throughout this
book.
11. See Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media
Collide, New York, New York: New York University Press, 2006, pages
95–96.
12. Ibid., pages 97–98.
13. Ibid., page 114.
14. Henry Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling 101”, March 22, 2007, available
at
http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html
(accessed September 28, 2011).
15. David Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It, Berkeley, California:
University of California Press, 2006, pages 58–59.
16. To varying degrees, many of the essays in the anthology Third Person:
Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives discuss world-building and
the way narratives and worlds are related. See Pat Harrigan and Noah
Wardrip-Fruin, Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives,
Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2009.
17. Michael O. Riley, Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum,
Lawrence, Kansas: The University of Kansas Press, 1997, pages 12–13.
18. See Louis Kennedy, “Piece of Mind: Forget about beginnings, middles,
and ends. The new storytelling is about making your way in a
fragmented, imaginary world”, The Boston Globe, June 1, 2003, page N1.

1. Worlds within the World

1. Charles Ischir Defontenay, Star (Psi Cassiopeia): The Marvelous History
of One of the Worlds of Outer Space, first published in 1854, adapted by
P. J. Sokolowski, Encino, California: Black Coat Press, 2007, page 28.
 2. From Andrew Wyeth, The Helga Pictures, New York: Harry N. Abrams,
1987, page 186.
3. From Thomas G. Pavel, Fictional Worlds, Cambridge, Massachusetts and
London, England: Harvard University Press, 1986, page 74.
4. See David Lewis, “Anselm and Actuality”, Nous, 4, pages 175–188; and
Counterfactuals, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973, pages 84–
91; and On the Plurality of Worlds, Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell
Publishing, 1986.
5. See Thomas G. Pavel, Fictional Worlds, Cambridge, Massachusetts and
London, England: Harvard University Press, 1986, page 9.
6. Ibid., page 73.
7. See Lubomír Doležel, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds,
Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, page 28.
8. Ibid., pages 22–23.
9. See Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, Indianapolis, Indiana:
Hackett Publishing Company, page 104.
10. See Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and
Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media, Baltimore, Maryland:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001, page 91.
11. Ibid., page 91.
12. For a discussion of how the imagination was conceptualized before
Coleridge, see John Spencer Hill, Imagination in Coleridge, Totowa, New
Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1978, pages 1–3.
13. From E. L. Griggs, editor, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
6 volumes, London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1956–1971,
page 709.
14. From the 1795 “Lecture on the Slave-Trade”, in Kathleen Coburn,
general editor, and L. Patton, volume editor, The Collected Works of
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 1, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul;
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969, page 235.
15. From Chapter xiii of Biographia Literaria I, in Kathleen Coburn,
general editor, and James Engell and W. J. Bate, volume editors, The
Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 7, London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969, page 304.
16. From “The Fantastic Imagination”, the Introduction to George
MacDonald’s The Light Princess and other Fairy Tales (1893), reprinted
 in The Heart of George MacDonald, Rolland Hein, editor, Vancouver,
British Columbia: Regent College Publishing, 1994, pages 424–425.
17. From Nikolai Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man (1931) as quoted in
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, San Francisco, California:
HarperCollins, page 61. Because the book and its 1937 English
translation preceded Tolkien’s writing of “On Fairy-stories”, it is possible
that Tolkien could have been influenced by Berdyaev’s work, though
there is no indication that he read it or even knew of it.
18. Tolkien used both “sub-creation” and “subcreation” in his writings; I
have chosen to use the more streamlined “subcreation” for this book.
19. From J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories”, reprinted in Verlyn Flieger and
Douglas A. Anderson, editors, Tolkien On Fairy-stories, London,
England: HarperCollins, pages 41–42.
20. Ibid., page 52.
21. The subjective nature of autobiography also skews the image of the
world depicted, and can arguably be seen as a form of fiction-making as
well. For a typology of fictional worlds, see Chapter 2 of Marie-Laure
Ryan’s Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory,
Indianapolis, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1991.
22. From the Prologue to L. P. Hartley’s novel, The Go-Between (1953).
23. See Don Carson, “Environmental Storytelling: Creating Immersive 3D
Worlds Using Lessons Learned from the Theme Park Industry”,
Gamasutra, March 1, 2000, available at
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3186/environmental_storytelli
ng_.php.
24. World richness depends on the amount of world data, the variety of
world data (data in multiple media windows, as well as from a variety
of world infrastructures), and the interconnectedness of the data (in
order to promote world gestalten and suggest world infrastructures).
25. Michael O. Riley, Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum,
Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1997, page 13.
26. See Lubomír Doležel, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds,
Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, page 31.
27. From Robert Heinlein’s Beyond This Horizon, published as a two-part
serial in Astounding Science Fiction in the April and May issues of 1942,
and later as a novel in 1948.
28. From J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories”, reprinted in Verlyn Flieger and
Douglas A. Anderson, editors, Tolkien On Fairy-stories, London,
England: HarperCollins, page 69.
29. Ibid., pages 60–61.
30. Tolkien wrote, “anything that Hobbits had no immediate use for, but
were unwilling to throw away, they called a mathom.” (J. R. R. Tolkien,
The Lord of the Rings, paperback one-volume edition, Boston and New
York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994, page 5); while Dick wrote,
“Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use
the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday’s homeopape. When
nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself.” (Philip K. Dick, Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep, (originally published in 1968), New York:
Ballantine Books, 1990, page 57).
31. Although genetic engineering seems to have breached the third realm,
along with selective breeding and Mendelian hybridization experiments
in cross-breeding. Humans have the desire to subcreate in the third and
fourth realms not only in their fiction, but also in the Primary World as
well.
32. Fictional countries can be used to test people’s geographical knowledge.
For example, two articles by Lester Haines in The Register revealed that
in 2004, 10 percent of poll respondents in Britain believed “Luvania” was
going to join the European Union, and in 2007, two-thirds of all
Hungarians polled would not grant asylum to people from “Piresia”.
(From “Brits welcome Luvania to EU”, The Register, April 29, 2004, and
“Hungarians demand ejection of Piresan immigrants”, The Register,
March 21, 2007, as mentioned at
http:www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictional_country (accessed May 20,
2009).)
33. Lubomír Doležel, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds,
Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998, page
169.
34. Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle-earth, Revised and Expanded
Edition, Boston, and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003, page
74.
35. Earlier versions of the Star Wars script had characters carrying the
“Aura Spice” instead of the Death Star plans as the McGuffin, and Han
 Solo being paid in spice instead of money; and in an early version of the
Return of the Jedi (1983) script, Chewbacca and Lando were to give
Jabba a “phony spice extractor” in exchange for Han. See Laurent
Bouzereau, Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays, New York, New York:
Ballantine Books, 1997, pages 87, 91, 241, and 243.
36. This short story appeared in Kevin J. Anderson, editor, Tales from
Jabba’s Palace, New York: Bantam Spectra, 1995.
37. From the Wookieepedia entry for “gorg”, at
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Gragra (accessed December 16, 2008).
38. Of course, the Star Wars universe is vast and growing, therefore, by the
time you read this, there may be more of an explanation available. Also,
more on the question can be found on Wookieepedia, The Star Wars
Wiki, which lists 34 different forms of non-sentient life on Tatooine, and
states that:
Tatooine was once a lush world that had large oceans and a world-
spanning jungle inhabited by the native and technologically advanced
Kumumgah. Sometime in its history, the Rakatan Infinite Empire
invaded the planet and conquered and enslaved its native inhabitants.
After a terrible plague weakened the Rakata, the Kumumgah
eventually rebelled and managed to drive the Rakata off the planet. In
response, they subjected the planet to an orbital bombardment that
“glassed” (that is, fused the silica in the soil into glass, which then
broke up over time into sand) the planet and boiled its oceans away. It
is possible that the Kumumgah’s excessive production started this
drastic climatic change before the Rakata arrived. Nonetheless, this
change split the indigenous Kumumgah into two races: the Ghorfas
and the Jawas.
From the “Tatooine” page of Wookieepedia, available at
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Tatooine#cite_ref-EP4NOVEL_4–0
(accessed December 9, 2011).
39. From a draft of a 1971 letter to Carole Batten-Phelps, in The Letters of J.
R. R. Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter, Boston, Massachusetts:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981, page 412.
40. From a 1963 letter to Colonel Worskett, in The Letters of J. R. R.
Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter, Boston, Massachusetts:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981, page 333.
41. For more on the Klingon augment virus, see http://memory-
alpha.org/en/wiki/Klingon_augment_virus (accessed September 3, 2008).
42. From “Secrets of the Millennium Falcon”, by Pablo Hidalgo with Chris
Reiff and Chris Trevas, October 26, 2008,
http://www.starwars.com/vault/books/feature20081026.html?page=2
(accessed October 28, 2008).
43. See “Retroactive Continuity” at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retconned
(accessed September 3, 2008).
44. See Christopher Tolkien, “Foreword”, in J. R. R. Tolkien, The
Silmarillion, edited by Christopher Tolkien, (Boston, Massachusetts:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1977), pages 7–8.
45. From a draft of a letter to A. C. Nunn, in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien,
edited by Humphrey Carpenter, Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 1981, page 290.
46. A similar challenge exists for the audience of murder mysteries, who
must piece together a series of what appear to be unconnected facts and
events in order to solve the mystery.
47. Though the media-related meaning of the term is new enough that it
does not appear in the Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary
from 1989.
48. Of course, newspaper stories can describe other places or worlds, and
radio drama is capable of creating a world through dialogue, sound
effects, and ambience, but these are exceptions which are far from being
the typical experience that most users have with these media.
49. Ryan divides “absorption in the act of reading” into four degrees:
concentration, imaginative involvement, entrancement, and addiction.
See Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and
Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media, Baltimore, Maryland:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001, pages 98–99.
50. Norman Holland, Literature and the Brain, Gainesville, Florida: PsyArt
Foundation, 2009, page 48.
51. This should not be confused with Doležel’s use of the term “saturation”
to denote an intensional function; see Lubomir Dole([0-9]+)el,
 Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds, Baltimore, Maryland: Johns
Hopkins University Press, pages 169–184.
52. The count was made using the Second Edition of the book that
appeared in 1999.
53. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, 3rd Edition,
Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, page 66.
54. See Steven Lehar, The World in Your Head: A Gestalt View of the
Mechanism of Conscious Experience, Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates, 2002; and Norman Holland, Literature and the
Brain, Gainesville, Florida: PsyArt Foundation, 2009.
55. See David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, Madison, Wisconsin:
The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985, page 54.
56. See Douglas A. Anderson, The Annotated Hobbit, Second Edition,
Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002.
57. Martin Gardner and Russell B. Nye, The Wizard of Oz and Who He
Was, East Lansing, Michigan: University of Michigan State Press, 1957,
page 30, referenced in Michael O. Riley, Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy
World of L. Frank Baum, Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas,
1997, page 194.
58. From a draft of a letter to a Mr. Thompson, in The Letters of J. R. R.
Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter, Boston, Massachusetts:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981, page 231.
59. From a 1944 letter to Christopher Tolkien, in ibid., page 79.
60. The use of Primary World defaults to fill gaps is especially evident in
“overlaid worlds” that rely on so many Primary World defaults that they
have a very low degree of secondariness; for example, the world of
Spider-man, which takes place in a New York City very similar to the
real one, except for the super-villains that continually plague it, or the
other thinly-veiled versions of New York City found in Batman’s
Gotham City or Superman’s Metropolis (the story of Superman does
involve the fictional planet of Krypton, but only in its backstory).
61. See Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of
Representational Arts, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England:
Harvard University Press, 1990.
62. See Marie-Laure Ryan, “Fiction, Non-Factuals and the Principle of
Minimal Departure”, Poetics 8, 1980, page 406.
63. From the “Sound in Space” section of the Star Wars Technical
Commentaries: Astrophysical Concerns webpage by Dr. Curtis Saxton,
available at http://www.theforce.net/SWTC/astro.html#sound (accessed
November 19, 2008).
64. See Irvin Rock, The Logic of Perception, Cambridge, Massachusetts:
MIT Press, 1983, pages 240–282.
65. From a draft of a letter to Carol Batten-Phelps, in The Letters of J. R. R.
Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter, Boston, Massachusetts:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981, page 412.
66. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, New York: Ballantine Books, 1965, page 17.
67. Tolkien writes that “Frodo also showed signs of good ‘preservation’:
outwardly he retained the appearance of a robust and energetic hobbit
just out of his tweens.” From J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring,
New York: Ballantine Books, 1965, page 71.
68. See Douglas A. Anderson, The Annotated Hobbit, Second Edition,
Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002, page 207.
69. As quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, New Revised Edition,
London, England: Oxford University Press, 1983, page 521.
70. From a letter to Naomi Mitchison, in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien,
edited by Humphrey Carpenter, Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 1981, page 174.
71. From a 1965 letter to Miss A. P. Northey in The Letters of J. R. R.
Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter, Boston, Massachusetts:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981, page 354.
72. See Chris Baker, “Master of the Universe”, Wired 16.09, September 2008,
page 141.
73. From John Keats’ letter of 1817 to his brothers George and Thomas,
reprinted in The Complete Poetical Works of John Keats, edited by
Harry Buxton Foreman, published by H. Frowde, 1899, page 277, and
also available at http://www.mrbauld.com/negcap.html (accessed
September 22, 2008).
74. The question as to whether balrogs (mythical beasts in Tolkien’s works)
have wings is debatable, because while they seem to be suggested in the
descriptions Tolkien provides, there is no clear evidence one way or the
other; although the fact that the Balrog falls into the abyss with Gandalf
 when the bridge breaks seems to suggest either no wings or at least no
functional wings.
75. Or a span of time, providing a temporal separation from the Primary
World; being set in the future or distant past makes a world inaccessible
to us as well.
76. From J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories”, reprinted in Verlyn Flieger and
Douglas A. Anderson, editors, Tolkien On Fairy-stories, London,
England: HarperCollins, page 83.
77. From C. S. Lewis, “On Science Fiction” in Of Other Worlds: Essays and
Stories, edited by Walter Hooper, New York and London: Harcourt Brace
and Company, 1966, pages 64–65.

2. A History of Imaginary Worlds

1. From the “Prooemium” section of Philostratos the Younger, Imagines,
third century AD, translated by Arthur Fairbanks, available at
http://www.theoi.com/Text/PhilostratusYounger.html (accessed January
23, 2009).
2. Margaret Cavendish, “To the Reader” in The Description of a New
World, Called the Blazing-World, printed by A. Maxwell in London,
1666.
3. Published histories of these areas often value and emphasize different
things from those that are useful to an analysis of world-building. Thus,
some of the texts that are important to those histories will not be
important to the analysis in this chapter, while other works that are
important to a history of world-building may not meet their criteria for
importance.
4. Diskin Clay, “The Islands of the Odyssey”, Journal of Medieval and
Early Modern Studies, 37:1, Winter 2007, pages 141–161.
5. Herodotus, Histories, Book III, translated by George Rawlinson, from
The Internet Classics Archive, available at
http://classics.mit.edu//Herodotus/history.html (accessed January 26,
2009).
6. James Patrick, Renaissance and Reformation, Tarrytown, New York:
Marshall Cavendish, 2007, page 384.
 7. From the end of the “Introduction” of Lucian of Samosata, The True
History, translated by H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler, Oxford, England:
The Clarendon Press, 1905, availableat http://www.sacred-
texts.com/cla/luc/wl2/wl211.htm (accessed January 27, 2009).
8. From S. C. Fredericks, “Lucian’s True History as SF”, Science Fiction
Studies, No. 8, Volume 3, Part 1, March 1976, available at
http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/8/fredericks8art.htm (accessed
January 27, 2009).
9. David Marsh, Lucian and the Latins: Humor and Humanism in the
Early Renaissance, Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press,
1999.
10. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayy_ibn_Yaqdhan and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-Nafis#Theologus_Autodidactus
(both accessed February 2, 2009).
11. From the “Introduction” of Rosemary Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Medieval
Audiences: A Study on the Reception of the Book of Sir John Mandeville
(1371–1550), Surrey, England: Ashgate Publishing, 2003, page 1.
12. Ibid., page 6.
13. As quoted in John Ashton, editor, The Voiage and Travayle of Sir John
Maundeville, Knight, London, England: Pickering and Chatto, 1887, page
vii.
14. From the “Introduction” of Rosemary Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Medieval
Audiences: A Study on the Reception of the Book of Sir John Mandeville
(1371–1550), Surrey, England: Ashgate Publishing, 2003, page 7.
15. Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the
English Renaissance 1545–1625, Oxford, England: Oxford University
Press, 1999.
16. François Rabelais, Les horribles et épouvantables faits et prouesses du
très renommé Pantagruel Roi des Dipsodes, fils du Grand Géant
Gargantua, “Chapter XXXII. How Pantagruel with his tongue covered a
whole army, and what the author saw in his mouth”, translated by Sir
Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty and Peter Antony Motteux, available
online at http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Pantagruel/Chapter_XXXII
(accessed February 10, 2009).
17. See “Antillia”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antillia, and “Isle of Seven
Cities”, http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Isle-of-Seven-Cities
 (both accessed February 26, 2009).
18. Nathalie Hester, Literature and Identity in Baroque Italian Travel
Writing, Ashgate Publishing, 2008, page 3.
19. Percy G. Adams, Travelers and Travel Liars, 1660–1800, Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962, pages 17–18.
20. Philip Babcock Gove, The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction: A History
of Its Criticism and a Guide for Its Study, with an Annotated Checklist
of 215 Imaginary Voyages from 1700 to 1800, London, England: The
Holland Press, 1961, pages 124–125.
21. Ibid., page 136.
22. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, New York: Greenwich House Classics
Library, distributed by Crown Publishers, Inc., 1982, page 71.
23. From Part One, Chapter Four of Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels,
1726, reprinted by Sandy Lesberg, editor, New York: Peebles Press
International, Inc., page 62.
24. From Book V, Chapter xii, of Hans Jacob Christoffel von
Grimmelshausen, Der Abenteurliche Simplicissimus Teutsch, 1668,
available at http://web.wm.edu/history/rbsche/grimmelshausen/bk5-
chap12.html (accessed March 4, 2009).
25. A number of “Hollow Earth” theories are collected and summarized at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow_Earth (accessed March 6, 2009).
26. According to Peter Fitting, editor, Subterranean Worlds: A Critical
Anthology, Middleton, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2004,
page 8.
27. As quoted in Paul Burns, The History of the Discovery of
Cinematography, available at
http://www.precinemahistory.net/1750.htm (accessed March 12, 2009).
28. The case of Neo in The Matrix (1999) even reverses this idea, as he must
leave the secondary world in order to be made aware of it; and the
Primary World that we know is revealed to be only a secondary world
within the ruined and rebuilt “real world” controlled by the machines.
29. Percy G. Adams, Travelers and Travel Liars, 1660–1800, Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962, page 131.
30. Ibid., page 224.
31. Philip Babcock Gove, The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction: A History
of Its Criticism and a Guide for Its Study, with an Annotated Checklist
 of 215 Imaginary Voyages from 1700 to 1800, London, England: The
Holland Press, 1961, page 159.
32. Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the
Western World, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 1979, page 21.
33. See Brian R. Goodey, “Mapping “Utopia”: A Comment on the
Geography of Sir Thomas More”, Geographical Review, Vol. 60, No. 1,
January 1970, pages 15–30.
34. Ibid., page 18.
35. See the edition of More’s Utopia in the Cambridge Texts in the History
of Political Thought series, edited by George M. Logan and Robert M.
Adams, New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.
36. Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the
Western World, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 1979, pages 1–2.
37. Thus, any division that one could attempt to make between utopias and
dystopias would reveal particular beliefs and agendas; the only solution
is to consider them both together as potential social structures.
38. Some worlds were guilty of female chauvinism; Marie Anne de
Roumier Roberts’s Les Ondins (1768) features the country of Castora,
ruled by a queen, from which all men have been banished. Any visiting
men who stay longer than a day are sacrificed to the goddess Pallas, the
Protectoress of Castora.
39. Tommaso Campanella, The City of the Sun, 1602, available from Project
Gutenberg at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2816/2816-h/2816-h.htm
(accessed April 9, 2009).
40. Edward H. Thompson, “Christianopolis—The Human Dimension”, paper
presented at the Table Ronde “Publicists and Projectors in 17th-Century
Europe” at the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbuttel, February 1996,
and available at http://homepages.tesco.net/eandcthomp/andpro.htm
(accessed April 16, 2009).
41. Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the
Western World, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 1979, page 22.
42. See the discussion of the sale of one of the only four remaining copies
of Morgan’s book at http://antiques-collectibles-auction-
 news.com/2008/02/27/14th-century-work-of-art-by-the-italian-painter-
allegretto-nuzi-1315-1373-soars-to-295000-at-philip-weiss-auctions-
multi-estate-sale-held-feb-23-24-2008/ (accessed April 17, 2009).
43. Marie Louise Berneri, Journey Through Utopia, Berlin, Germany, and
New York, New York: Schocken Books, 1950, page 177.
44. Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the
Western World, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 1979, page 3.
45. See the entry “Bodin, Félix” by Paul K. Alkon in Samuel L. Macey,
editor, Encyclopedia of Time, New York: Routledge Press, 1994, pages 67–
68.
46. According to Lyman Tower Sargent, who claims there were “160
utopias published between 1800 and 1887” and “the same number of
utopias written between 1888 and 1895 as in all the previous 87 years.”
From Lyman Tower Sargent, “Themes in Utopian Fiction in English
Before Wells”, Science Fiction Studies, Number 10, Volume 3, Part 3,
November 1976, available at
http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/10/sargent10art.htm (accessed
April 21, 2009).
47. From Etienne Cabet, Voyage to Icaria, reprinted in Marie Louise
Berneri, Journey Through Utopia, New York: Schocken Books, 1950, page
229.
48. A list of over 2900 uchronias can be found online at “Uchronia: The
Alternate History List” at http://www.uchronia.net/ (accessed April 28,
2009).
49. The next century would see even more distant uchronias, like Olaf
Stapledon’s Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future
(1930) which covers about 2 billion years, and his Star Maker (1937)
which covers even more.
50. The term “science fiction” appeared in Chapter 10 of William Wilson’s
A Little Earnest Book upon a Great Old Subject (1851). “Scientist” was a
deliberate coinage, appearing in print in 1840, and it appears to have
been first suggested, along with “science”, in the 1830s, according to
Raymond Williams’s Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society,
Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, page 279.
51. See Philip Babcock Gove, The Imaginary Voyage in Prose Fiction: A
History of Its Criticism and a Guide for Its Study, with an Annotated
Checklist of 215 Imaginary Voyages from 1700 to 1800, London, England:
The Holland Press, 1961, page 205.
52. Tilberg J. Herczeg, “The Habitability of the Moon”, in G. Lemarchand
and K. Meech, editors, A New Era in Bioastronomy, ASP Conference
Series, Vol. 213, 2000, page 594.
53. See Brian Stableford, “Science fiction before the genre” in Edward
James and Farah Mendleson, editors, The Cambridge Companion to
Science Fiction, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press,
2003, page 18.
54. Margaret Cavendish, The Description of a New World, Called the
Blazing-World, printed by A. Maxwell in London, 1666. Also available
at
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/newcastle/blazing/blazing.html
(accessed June 4, 2009).
55. Ibid.
56. Baron Ludvig Holberg, “Chapter I. The Author’s Descent into the
Abyss” from Nicolai Klimii Iter Subterraneum (1741), available at
http://www.archive.org/stream/nielsklimsjourne00holb/nielsklimsjourne
00holb_djvu.txt (accessed June 4, 2009).
57. All titles of poems and section headings are taken from the DAW Books
translation that appeared in C. I. Defontenay, Star (Psi Cassiopeia): The
Marvelous History of One of the Worlds of Outer Space, Encino,
California: Black Coat Press, 2007.
58. According to Pierre Versins’s “Introduction” to the 1975 reprint of Star,
that also appeared in the 2007 reprint cited earlier.
59. From Part III, Chapter III of Camille Flammarion’s Uranie, translated
from the French by Mary J. Serrano, available at
http://fiction.eserver.org/novels/uranie/default.html (accessed July 9,
2009).
60. From C. S. Lewis, “On Stories” in Essays Presented to Charles Williams,
Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1947, and reprinted in Of
Other Worlds: Essays and Stories, edited by Walter Hooper, New York
and London: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1966, page 12.
61. See the “Vril” page of Wikipedia, available at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vril (accessed July 10, 2009).
62. Lin Carter, Imaginary Worlds: The Art of Fantasy, New York: Ballantine
Books, 1973, page 19.
63. See “Upmeads”,
http://manchesterhistory.net/edgarwood/upmeads1.html (accessed May
28, 2009).
64. According to Sheila A. Egoff, Worlds Within: Children’s Fantasy from
the Middle Ages to Today, Chicago and London: American Library
Association, 1988, page 45.
65. The 596-word digression reads thus:
In old, old, olden times, when all our world was just loose earth and
air and fire and water mixed up anyhow like a pudding, and spinning
around like mad trying to get the different things to settle into their
proper places, a round piece of earth got loose and went spinning
away by itself across the water, which was just beginning to try to get
spread out smooth into a real sea. And as the great round piece of
earth flew away, going around and around as hard as it could, it met a
long piece of hard rock that had got loose from another part of the
puddingy mixture, and the rock was so hard, and was going so fast,
that it ran its point through the round piece of earth and stuck out on
the other side of it, so that the two together were like a very-very-
much-too-big spinning top.
I am afraid all this is very dull, but you know geography is never
quite lively, and after all, I must give you a little information even in a
fairy tale—like the powder in jam.
Well, when the pointed rock smashed into the round bit of earth the
shock was so great that it set them spinning together through the air—
which was just getting into its proper place, like all the rest of the
things—only, as luck would have it, they forgot which way around
they had been going, and began to spin around the wrong way.
Presently Center of Gravity—a great giant who was managing the
whole business—woke up in the middle of the earth and began to
grumble.
“Hurry up,” he said. “Come down and lie still, can’t you?”
 So the rock with the round piece of earth fell into the sea, and the
point of the rock went into a hole that just fitted it in the stony sea
bottom, and there it spun around the wrong way seven times and then
lay still. And that round piece of land became, after millions of years,
the Kingdom of Rotundia.
This is the end of the geography lesson. And now for just a little
natural history, so that we may not feel that we are quite wasting our
time. Of course, the consequence of the island having spun around the
wrong way was that when the animals began to grow on the island
they all grew the wrong sizes. The guinea pig, as you know, was as big
as our elephants, and the elephant—dear little pet—was the size of the
silly, tiny, black-and-tan dogs that ladies carry sometimes in their
muffs. The rabbits were about the size of our rhinoceroses, and all
about the wild parts of the island they had made their burrows as big
as railway tunnels. The dormouse, of course, was the biggest of all the
creatures. I can’t tell you how big he was. Even if you think of
elephants it will not help you at all. Luckily there was only one of him,
and he was always asleep. Otherwise I don’t think the Rotundians
could have borne with him. As it was, they made him a house, and it
saved the expense of a brass band, because no band could possibly
have been heard when the dormouse was talking in his sleep.
The men and women and children in this wonderful island were
quite the right size, because their ancestors had come over with the
Conqueror long after the island had settled down and the animals
grown on it.
From Edith Nesbit, “Uncle James, or The Purple Stranger” in The Book of
Dragons (1900), reprinted by Chronicle Press, 2001, pages 25–26. Also
available at http://www.online-literature.com/edith-nesbit/book-of-
dragons/2/ (accessed June 1, 2009).
66. From Edith Nesbit, The Magic City, London: MacMillan and Company,
1910, page 84. Also available at
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20606/20606-h/20606-h.htm (accessed
June 2, 2009).
67. Sheila A. Egoff, Worlds Within: Children’s Fantasy from the Middle
Ages to Today, Chicago and London: American Library Association,
1988, page 73.
68. Michael O. Riley, Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum,
Lawrence, Kansas: The University Press of Kansas, 1997, page 62.
69. In some cases, stories were presented as being already mediated; for
example, John Kirkby’s The History of Automathes (1745) is itself being
read from a manuscript by the narrator.
70. Leonard Bacon, “Introduction” in Austin Tappan Wright, Islandia, New
York and Toronto: Farrar & Rinehart, Inc., 1942, page viii.
71. Pierre Couperie and Maurice C. Horn et al, A History of the Comic
Strip, translated from the French by Eileen B. Henessy, New York:
Crown Publishers, Inc., 1967, pages 27–28.
72. Ibid., page 155. The study discussed was conducted by F. E. Barcus.
73. Michael O. Riley, Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum,
Lawrence, Kansas: The University Press of Kansas, 1997, page 42.
74. Ibid., page 47.
75. Ibid., pages 98–99.
76. Ibid., page 150.
77. David Kyle, A Pictorial History of Science Fiction, London and New
York: Hamlyn Publishing Group Limited, 1976, page 117.
78. The Hall of the Mist is from Donald Wandrei’s “The Red Brain” in
Weird Tales, October 1927; Ulm is from S. P. Meek’s “Submicroscopic” in
Amazing Stories, August 1931; Valadom is from Donald Wandrei’s
“Colossus” in Astounding Stories, January 1934; the Pygmy Planet is
from Jack Williamson’s “The Pygmy Planet” in Astounding Stories,
February 1932; Vulcan is from Ross Rocklynne’s “At the Center of
Gravity” in Astounding Stories, June 1936; Soldus is from Nat
Schachner’s “The Sun-world of Soldus” in Astounding Science-Fiction,
April 1938; Lagash is from Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall” in Astounding
Science-Fiction, September 1941; Logeia is from Fletcher Pratt’s novel
The Undesired Princess, first serialized in Unknown, beginning in
February 1942; Hydrot is from Arthur Merlyn’s “Sunken Universe” in
Super Science Stories, May 1942; Placet is from Fredric Brown’s “Placet is
a Crazy Place” in Astounding Science-Fiction, May 1946; and Aiolo is
from Murray Leinster’s “The Plants” in Astounding Science-Fiction,
January 1946.
79. Philip Francis Nowlan’s future Earth first appeared in “Armageddon,
2419 A.D.” in Amazing Stories, August 1928; Zothique first appeared in
 Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Empire of the Necromancers” in Weird Tales,
September 1932; Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age first appeared in
“The Phoenix on the Sword” in Weird Tales, December 1932; the
Lensman universe first appeared in E. E. Smith’s Triplanetary (serialized
in Amazing Stories, January—April, 1934); Nehwon first appeared in
Fritz Leiber’s “Two Sought Adventure” in Unknown magazine, August
1939; the Future History Universe first appeared in Robert Heinlein’s
“Life-Line” in Astounding Science-Fiction, August 1939; the Foundation
universe first appeared in Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” in Astounding
Science-Fiction, May 1942, while his Galactic Empire universe first
appeared in “Blind Alley” in Astouding Science-Fiction, March 1945; Ray
Bradbury’s version of Mars first appeared in “Rocket Summer” in Planet
Stories, Spring 1947; the Psychotechnic League universe first appeared in
Poul Anderson and John Gergen’s “The Entity” in Astounding Science
Fiction, June 1949; the Viagens Interplanetarias universe first appeared in
L. Sprague de Camp’s “The Animal-Cracker Plot” in Astounding Science
Fiction, July 1949; the Instrumentality of Mankind future history
universe first appeared in Cordwainer Smith’s “Scanners Live in Vain” in
Fantasy Book #6, 1950; and the Terro-Human Future History universe
first appeared in H. Beam Piper’s “Uller Uprising” in The Petrified Planet
(1952).
80. Hugo Gernsback, “Reasonableness in Science Fiction”, Wonder Stories,
December 1932, reproduced in David Kyle, A Pictorial History of Science
Fiction, London and New York: Hamlyn Publishing Group Limited, 1976,
page 80.
81. David Kyle, A Pictorial History of Science Fiction, London and New
York: Hamlyn Publishing Group Limited, 1976, page 147.
82. Anatevka was originally named “Boyberik” in Sholem Aleichem’s
fictional memoir Teyve and His Daughters (1894).
83. From the voiceover for the 1939 trailer for MGM’s The Wizard of Oz.
The trailer can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=VNugTWHnSfw (accessed October 14, 2011).
84. Oakdale, Illinois is from As the World Turns (1956–2010); Central City
is from The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1959–1963); Bay City, Illinois is
from Another World (1964–1999); Salem is from Days of Our Lives
(1965–present); Collinsport, Maine is from Dark Shadows (1966–1971
 and 1991); Llanview, Pennsylvania is from One Life to Live (1968–2011);
Pine Valley is from All My Children (1970–2011); Genoa City, Wisconsin
is from The Young and the Restless (1973–present); Hazzard County,
Georgia is from The Dukes of Hazzard (1977–1985); Corinth,
Pennsylvania is from Loving (1983–1995); Cabot Cove, Maine is from
Murder, She Wrote (1984–1996); Twin Peaks, Washington is from Twin
Peaks (1990–1991); Cicely, Alaska is from Northern Exposure (1990–
1995); Capeside, Massachusetts is from Dawson’s Creek (1998–2003); and
Harmony is from Passions (1999–2008).
85. Mayfield appeared in Leave it to Beaver (1957–1963), Still the Beaver
(1985–1986), and The New Leave it to Beaver (1986–1989); Mayberry,
North Carolina appeared on The Danny Thomas Show in 1960, The
Andy Griffith Show (1960–1968), and Mayberry, R. F. D. (1968–1971);
Hooterville appeared in Petticoat Junction (1963–1970) and Green Acres
(1965–1971); Port Charles, New York is from General Hospital (1963–
present), Port Charles (1997–2003), and General Hospital: Night Shift
(2007–2008); and Fernwood, Ohio is from Mary Hartman, Mary
Hartman (1976–1977), Forever Fernwood (1977), and Fernwood 2-Night
(1977–1978).
86. For example, the Neighborhood of Make-Believe in Mister Rogers’
Neighborhood has an unusually elaborate geography for a children’s
program (including non-Euclidean spaces); characters that occupy a
broad ontological spectrum; and in at least one episode, an intertextual
reference referring to an event (the fire in Corney’s factory) that
occurred 21 years earlier on the show, which could only be remembered
by adults who had seen the show during their own childhood.
87. The city of Opar appears in The Return of Tarzan (1913); Pal-ul-don, a
kingdom in Zaire, in Tarzan the Terrible (1921); the village of Alali and
the region of Minuni in Tarzan and the Ant Men (1924); the cities of
Castra Sanguinarius and Castrum Mare in Tarzan and the Lost Empire
(1929); the African country of Midian in Tarzan Triumphant (1932); the
lands of Onthar and Thenar in Tarzan and the City of Gold (1933); and
the city of Ashair in Tarzan and the Forbidden City (1938).
88. Other worlds of his include Maxon’s Island in the South China Sea in A
Man Without a Soul (1913); the island of Flotsam in The Cave Girl
(1913); Lutha, a country in Southern Europe in The Mad King (1914);
 and Lodidhapura, a city in the jungles of Cambodia, in The Jungle Girl
(1931).
89. From Edgar Rice Burroughs, “Protecting the Author’s Rights”, The
Writers 1932 Year Book & Market Guide, reprinted in Edgar Rice
Burroughs Tells All (Third Edition), compiled by Jerry L. Schneider,
Amazon.com: CreateSpace, 2008, page 160.
90. According to Lin Carter, Imaginary Worlds: The Art of Fantasy, New
York: Ballantine Books, 1973, page 44.
91. In letters 19 and 294 in J. R. R. Tolkien, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien,
edited by Humphrey Carpenter, Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 1981, pages 26 and 375, respectively.
92. In the Storisende edition published by McBribe, at least, in which
several works can form a single volume; see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Biography_off_Manuel for the list of
books.
93. The state of Winnemac is the setting for Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith
(1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), The Man Who Knew Coolidge (1928), and
Dodsworth (1929).
94. Helen Batchelor, “A Sinclair Lewis Portfolio of Maps: Zenith to
Winnemac”, Modern Language Quarterly, December 1971, Volume 32,
Issue 4, pages 401–429. Another example of an American locale outside
the realm of fantasy and science fiction is William Faulkner’s
Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, which served as the setting for
fourteen novels and several short stories, with Faulkner’s hand-drawn
map of it included in Absalom, Abasalom! (1936).
95. From Sylvia Wright’s “Introduction” in the 1958 edition of Austin
Tappan Wright, Islandia, New York, New York: New American Library,
pages v–vi.
96. Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien: A Biography, Boston, Massachusetts:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1977, pages 194–195.
97. From Tolkien’s “Foreword” to The Lord of the Rings, Boston,
Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1966, page 5.
98. From a draft of a 1955 letter to W. H. Auden, in The Letters of J. R. R.
Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter, Boston, Massachusetts:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981, page 216.
 99. Mike Foster, “America in the 1960s: Reception of Tolkien” entry in
Michael D. C. Drout, editor, J. R. R. Tolkien Encylopedia: Scholarship
and Critical Assessment, New York, New York, and London, England:
Routledge, 2007, page 14.
100. For the dates, creators, and works of first appearance of these worlds,
see the Appendix.
101. From Michael Pye and Lynda Miles, The Movie Brats, Geneva, Illinois:
Holt, Rinehart, and Winston (now Holt MacDougal), 1979, as reprinted
in Sally Kline, editor, George Lucas: Interviews, Jackson, Mississippi:
University of Mississippi Press, pages 79–80.
102. According to Alex Ben Block and Lucy Autrey Wilson, George Lucas’s
Blockbusting: A Decade-by-Decade Survey of Timeless Movies Including
Untold Secrets of Their Financial and Cultural Success, New York, New
York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2010, page 624.
103. See Matthew Kirschenbaum, “War Stories: Board Wargames and (Vast)
Procedural Narratives” in Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin,
editors, Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives,
Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2009, pages 357–358.
104. Some examples are Christoph Weickhmann’s New-Erfundene Große
König-Spiel (The Newly Invented Great King’s Game) (1650), and
Johann Christian Ludwig Hellwig’s Versuch eines aufs Schachspiel
gebaueten taktischen Spiels von zwey und mehreren Personen zu spielen
(Attempt at a Tactical Game for Two and More Persons, Based on Chess)
(1780), according to Rolf F. Nohr’s “war” entry in Mark J. P. Wolf, editor,
Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology, and Art of
Gaming, Westport, Connecticut: ABC-CLIO/Greenwood Press, 2012.
105. Begun in 1919, the Marx Toy Company made metal playsets during the
1930s and 1940s, like the Sunnyside Service Station (1934) and the
Roadside Service Station (1935). With the advent of plastics, production
became easier and less expensive, and the number of playsets increased
as did their popularity. In the 1950s, Marx produced more generic sets,
like Cowboy and Indian Camp (1953) and Arctic Explorer Play Set (1958),
as well as sets based on actual events like the Civil War and real places
like Fort Apache (1951) and Fort Dearborn (1952). Other sets were
adaptations of existing properties in other media, like the Roy Rogers
Ranch Set (1952), Lone Ranger Rodeo (1952), Walt Disney’s Davy
 Crockett at the Alamo (1955), and Gunsmoke Dodge City (1960). The
transmedial nature of these sets, which played on the popularity of
existing franchises, encouraged the sale of playsets in general.
106. Although many LEGO sets are based on other franchises (like Star
Wars), the LEGO system universe has its own settings and narratives.
For example, in the LEGOLAND Idea Book of 1980, we find:
This book is presented like a story. Just follow our two Mini-Figures™,
Mary and Bill, as they build their LEGOLAND home and community
and then move on to other adventures by car, on foot, and finally by
spaceship. Along the way you’ll find lots of ideas for building,
designing and combining: how to build an airport, or a spaceship, how
to put on a circus, how to light up your town at night.
(From the LEGOLAND Idea Book, Hamburg, Germany: Muhlmeister &
Johler, 1980.)
The 82-page narrative, which is laid out between graphical building
instructions of the models seen in the story, follows Mary and Bill as
they build their home, go into town for the day, and return to find their
house on fire, which is quickly extinguished by the fire department. They
then travel to see a circus, stay overnight at a windmill, visit a seaside
town where they have a new house and buy furniture for it, have their
car towed and fixed near an airport, and take part in other activities.
Later they go to a movie theater where a movie about astronauts is
playing, and when they leave the theater at night, they don space
helmets and air tanks and fly off in their own spaceship. They travel to a
moon base, and with another astronaut, they go to answer an SOS
signal, which turns out to be coming from a downed alien spaceship.
They meet the aliens, tow their spaceship back to the moon base, and
help repair it. The aliens leave and Mary and Bill follow them to the
aliens’ planet, where they see strange buildings, vehicles, and other
varieties of aliens. After their stay, Mary and Bill fly off in their
spaceship, returning to Earth, where they arrive at a medieval castle
(implying that their journey involves time travel as well as space travel,
though this is never stated explicitly). They are brought to the castle in a
horse and carriage, explore it and meet another couple there (who
 appear to be the lord and lady of the manor), and together the two
couples attend a jousting tournament (where, oddly enough, two
spacemen wearing medieval helmets are sitting among the crowd). After
a brief tour of another, smaller castle, Mary and Bill are off again in their
spaceship, waving goodbye as they often do when leaving a location. On
the last page, they are shown looking out of their spaceship and waving
goodbye to the reader as well. On the front and back cover of the book,
Mary and Bill are pictured back in a town, telling the townspeople about
their adventure (images of which appear in dialogue balloons). On the
back cover, however, the medieval castle can be seen just over the hill,
implying nearby proximity.
107. According to the Wikipedia page on David Wesely found at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Wesely (accessed January 29, 2010).
108. See “Historia de los CRPGs”, Meristation Zonafora, at
http://zonaforo.meristat.ion.com/foros/viewtopic.php?p=15403838
(accessed February 1, 2010); Matt Barton, “The History of Computer
Role-Playing Games Part 1: The Early Years (1980–1983)”, Gamasutra, at
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20070223a/barton_pfv.htm
(accessed February 1, 2010); and Rusty Rutherford, “The Creation of
PEDIT5”, Armchair Arcade, available at
http://www.armchairarcade.com/neo/node/1948 (accessed February 1,
2010). Also see Matt Barton, Dungeons and Desktops: The History of
Computer Role-Playing Games, Wellesley, Massachusetts: A. K. Peters,
2008.
109. Sources seem to vary (especially on the Internet) as to whether Ultima
was released in 1980 or 1981; however, The Official Book of Ultima by
Shay Addams, with a preface by Richard Garriott, says it was “published
by California Pacific in 1980”. See Shay Addams, The Official Book of
Ultima, Radnor, Pennsylvania: COMPUTE! Publications, 1990, page 15.
110. Dan Koeppel, “Massive Attack: Fasten Your Seat Belts: Peter Jackson’s
Second Lord of the Rings Installment Will Feature One of the Most
Spectacular Battle Scenes in Film History, a Product of the Digital Dark
Arts”, Popular Science, January 23, 2003, page 44.
111. For example, see the Wikipedia page for “Simulated Reality” at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_Reality (accessed February 2,
2010).
112. As quoted in Benjamin Svetkey, “The New Face of Movies”,
Entertainment Weekly, #1086, January 22, 2010, page 34.
113. See Chris Baker, “Master of the Universe”, Wired 16.09, September 2008,
page 136.
114. See the “Preserving Virtual Worlds” page at http://pvw.illinois.edu/pvw/
and the Library of Congress’s page
http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/partners/pwv/pwv.html (accessed
February 3, 2010).
115. Thomas G. Pavel, Fictional Worlds, Cambridge, Massachusetts and
London, England: Harvard University Press, 1986, pages 84–85.
116. Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams, New York, New York: Warner
Books, pages 71–72.
117. These worlds can be found in Bob Shaw’s Orbitsville (1975), Frederik
Pohl and Jack Williamson’s Farthest Star (1975), Robert Forward’s
Dragon’s Egg (1980), Larry Niven’s Ringworld (1970), Terry Pratchett’s
The Colour of Magic (1983), and Somtow Sucharitkul’s Mallworld (1984),
respectively.
118. From “A First Note” at the beginning of Ursula K. LeGuin’s Always
Coming Home, New York and London: Bantam Books, 1985. Perec’s
apartment building may be too small to be considered an imaginary
world by some, but I include it here (and in the Appendix) due to the
high degree of development and detail that the building and its
apartments are given (which is certainly more than such buildings
receive in traditional literature), and the importance of the spaces to the
narratives contained in the book.
119. Edward Castronova, Mark W. Bell, Robert Cornell, James J. Cummings,
Matthew Falk, Travis Ross, Sarah B. Robbins and Alida Field, “Synthetic
Worlds as Experimental Instruments”, in Bernard Perron and Mark J. P.
Wolf, editors, The Video Game Theory Reader 2, New York and London:
Routledge, 2008, pages 284–285.

3. World Structures and Systems of Relationships

1. Charles Ischir Defontenay, Star (Psi Cassiopeia): The Marvelous History
of One of the Worlds of Outer Space, first published in 1854, adapted by
P. J. Sokolowski, Encino, California: Black Coat Press, 2007, page 24.
 2. From the short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” in Jorge Luis Borges,
Fictions, 1944, reprinted in Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions,
translated by Andrew Hurley, New York, New York: Penguin Books,
1998, pages 71–72.
3. From J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories”, as reprinted in Tree and Leaf,
Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1964, page 64.
4. George Lucas, from an interview by Claire Clouzot in Ecran, September
15, 1977, pages 33–41, and later translated from the French by Alisa
Belanger and reprinted in Sally Kline, editor, George Lucas: Interviews,
Jackson, Mississippi: University of Mississippi Press, 1999, where the
quote appears on page 58.
5. J. R. R. Tolkien, as quoted in Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien: A
Biography, Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1977,
page 195. The quote comes from a January 1971 radio interview by the
BBC.
6. Michael O. Riley, Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum,
Lawrence, Kansas: The University Press of Kansas, 1997, pages 176–177.
7. Ibid., pages 208–209.
8. Both quotes are from Diana Wynne Jones, The Tough Guide to
Fantasyland, New York, New York: DAW Books, 1996, page 11.
9. Michael O. Riley, Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum,
Lawrence, Kansas: The University Press of Kansas, 1997, pages 186–187.
10. Thomas More, Utopia, edited by George M. Logan and Robert M.
Adams, New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989,
page 125.
11. As described by Culley Carson-Grefe:
The very novel we read takes its existence from a clever manipulation
of the meaning of the word hole. The history of the land of Archaos—
the book we read—has Notes supposedly been reconstructed by
searching out what was lacking in official history: everything that was
missing was Archaos. Because Archaos represented such a threat to its
neighbors, all references to it had been eliminated…. This supposedly
verifiable lacuna assumes a wholeness to history impossible to justify
in other than fanciful terms. At the same time, the very idea of the
 hole takes on an entirely new meaning. No longer an emptiness, a
mere absence, it is a cutting out, an extraction.
From Culley Carson-Grefe, “Hole Studies: French Feminist Fiction”,
available at:
http://crisolenguas.uprrp.edu/Articles/Hole%20Studies%20French%20Fe
minist%20Fiction.pdf.
12. See page 10 and pages 111–113 of Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon
Days, New York, New York: Penguin Books, 1985.
13. George Barr McCutcheon, Graustark: A Story of a Love Behind a
Throne, Chicago, Illinois: Herbert S. Stone & Company, 1903, page 61.
14. See Ricardo Padrón, “Mapping Imaginary Worlds” in James R. Akerman
and Robert W. Karrow Jr., editors, Maps: Finding Our Place in the World,
Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007, page 261.
15. See John Knoll, with J. W. Rinzler, Creating the Worlds of Star Wars:
365 Days, New York, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2005, days 167
and 200.
16. The maps by Pauline Baynes, “M. Blackburn”, and Richard Caldwell can
be found in Akerman and Karrow (see endnote 14), Barbara Strachey’s
maps in her book Journeys of Frodo (1981), Karen Wynn Fonstad’s maps
in the two editions of The Atlas of Middle-Earth (1991 and 2001), Shelly
Shapiro’s maps in certain reissues of Tolkien’s books, James Cook’s
maps in Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi’s The Dictionary of
Imaginary Places (2000), and John Howe’s maps in Brian Sibley’s The
Maps of Tolkien’s Middle-earth (2003).
17. Adrian Leskiw, “Nation of Breda”, in The Map Realm: The Fictional
Road Maps of Adrian Leskiw, available at http://www-
personal.umich.edu/~aleskiw/maps/breda.htm (accessed March 8, 2010).
18. See Michael W. Perry, Untangling Tolkien: A Chronology and
Commentary for The Lord of the Rings, Seattle, Washington: Inkling
Books, 2003; Kevin J. Anderson and Daniel Wallace, Star Wars: The
Essential Chronology, New York, New York: Del Rey, 2000; and Michael
and Denise Okuda, Star Trek Chronology: The History of the Future,
New York, New York: Pocket Books, 1993 (first edition), 1996 (second
edition).
19. John H. Raleigh, The Chronicle of Leopold and Molly Bloom: Ulysses as
Narrative, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
 1977.
20. Constantino Baikouzis and Marcelo O. Magnasco, “Is an eclipse
described in the Odyssey?”, Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences 105, (June 24, 2008), page 8823, available at
http://www.pnas.org/content/105/26/8823 (accessed March 23, 2010).
21. John Clute, entry for “Time Abyss” in John Clute and John Grant,
editors, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, New York: St. Martin’s Griffin,
1999, pages 946–947.
22. Richard C. West, “The Interlace Structure of The Lord of the Rings”, in
Jared Lobell, editor, The Tolkien Compass, Chicago, Illinois: Open Court
Publishing Company, 1975 (first edition), 2003 (second edition), page 76–
77.
23. George MacDonald, At the Back of the North Wind, New York, New
York: Schocken Books, 1978, page 88.
24. Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: Companion & Guide, New York, New York:
HarperCollins Publishers, 1996, pages 420–423.
25. Brian Stableford, The Dictionary of Science Fiction Places, New York,
New York: The Wonderland Press, 1999, page 34.
26. Rick Sternbach and Michael Okuda, Star Trek: The Next Generation
Technical Manual, New York and London: Pocket Books, 1991. See
“Relativistic Considerations” on page 78 and “Warp Propulsion Systems”
on pages 54–74.
27. Ibid., page 55.
28. See for example the “Star Trek Universe Timelines” at
http://img.trekmovie.com/images/st09/stotimelines.jpg (accessed April 1,
2010).
29. See Tom Shipppey, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, Boston
Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001, pages 243–244.
Shippey quotes the insult and describes its context, concluding, “But the
subtlety and the tension depend on carrying in one’s head a string of
distinctions between elvish groups, and a whole series of pedigrees and
family relationships. The audiences of Icelandic sagas could do this, but
readers of modern novels are not used to it, and easily miss most of
what is intended.” (page 244).
30. Although Dooku became the padawan of Master Thame Cerulian at the
age of thirteen, he trained with Yoda before this and could still be
 considered an apprentice of Yoda’s; Yoda even refers to Dooku as his old
padawan in Attack of the Clones (2002).
31. Joshua Davis, “Second Coming”, Wired, December 2009, page 192.
32. See Harald Stümpke, Bau und Leben der Rhinogradentia with preface
and illustrations by Gerolf Steiner, Stuttgart, Germany: Fischer, 1961,
and Harald Stümpke, Anatomie et Biologie des Rhinogrades—Un Nouvel
Ordre De Mammifères, Issy-les-Moulineaux, France: Masson, 1962. Also
see J. B. Post, An Atlas of Fantasy, revised edition, New York, New York:
Ballantine Books, 1979, page 152.
33. Raymond King Cummings, “Chapter XIX. The City of Arite” of The
Girl in the Golden Atom (1922).
34. C. H. Hinton, An Episode of Flatland: Or, How a Plane Folk Discovered
the Third Dimension, Swan Sonnenschein & Co., Limited: Bloomsbury,
England, 1907, pages 1–2.
35. Dionys Burger, Sphereland: A Fantasy about Curved Spaces and an
Expanding Universe, New York, New York: Quill/HarperResource, 2001,
page 61. Sphereland was originally published in Dutch in 1965.
36. A. K. Dewdney, The Planiverse: Computer Contact with a Two-
Dimensional World, New York: Copernicus, an imprint of Springer-
Verlag, 2001 (original edition 1984), pages ix and xi.
37. Ronald D. Moore, Battlestar Galactica Series Bible, 2003, page 2,
available at
http://leethomson.myzen.co.uk/Battlestar_Galactica/Battlestar_Galactic
a_Series_Bible.pdf (accessed March 8, 2011).
38. Charles Ischir Defontenay, Star (Psi Cassiopeia): The Marvelous History
of One of the Worlds of Outer Space, first published in 1854, adapted by
P. J. Sokolowski, Encino, California: Black Coat Press, 2007, page 167.
39. Austin Tappan Wright, Islandia, Bergenfield, New Jersey: Signet, 1942,
page 62.
40. Frank Herbert, Dune, New York: Berkley Books, 1977 (originally
published by the Chilton Book Company, 1965), page 514.
41. Arika Okrent, In the Land of Invented Languages, New York, New York:
Spiegel & Grau, 2009.
42. Lin Carter devotes an entire chapter of his book Imaginary Worlds to a
discussion of good and bad names and how they function; see Lin
Carter, “A Local Habitation and a Name: Some Observations on
 Neocognomia”, Imaginary Worlds, New York, New York: Ballantine
Books, 1973, pages 192–212.
43. For lists of words with different meanings in different languages, see
Adam Jacot de Bonoid, The Meaning of Tingo: And Other Extraordinary
Words from Around the World, New York, New York: The Penguin Press,
2006. For example, “dad” in Albanian means “wet nurse or babysitter”,
“babe” in SiSwati means “father or minister”, and “mama” in Georgian
means “father” (page 81). Invented languages that combine invented
roots to make words can inadvertantly result in words with unwanted
real-language connotations; for example, in Tolkien’s work, the
character Celeborn (“silver tree”) has a name that in Telerin Quenya
translates as “Teleporno”.
44. See “Earth: Final Conflict” in Tim Conley and Stephen Cain,
Encyclopedia of Fictional & Fantastic Languages, Westport, Connecticut:
Greenwood Press, 2006, page 55.
45. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, New York: Harcourt, Brace, and
Company, 1949, pages 51 and 53.
46. Thomas More, Utopia, edited by George M. Logan and Robert M.
Adams, New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989,
page 123.
47. Margaret Cavendish, The Description of a New World, Called the
Blazing-World, 1666.
48. Tim Conley and Stephen Cain, Encyclopedia of Fictional & Fantastic
Languages, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2006, page 13.
49. The glossary can found on pages 289–295 of the text of the Second
Volume of the 1751 edition, which is available at
http://books.google.com/books?
id=OpPRAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
(accessed October 25, 2011).
50. For example, in the Star Wars galaxy, words taken from Primary World
languages are often used as names; for example, Tatooine (from
Tataouine (also transliterated “Tatooine”), the Arabic name of the capital
of the Tataouine Governate in Tunisia, where Star Wars was filmed),
Vader (Dutch for “father”), Yoda (similar to “Yoddha”, Sanskrit for “great
warrior”), Padmé (Sanskrit for “Lotus”), Amidala (a feminine form of the
Buddha Amida), Leia (Assyrian for “royalty”), Dooku (similar to “doku”,
 Japanese for “poison”), and so on. Lucas even takes names directly from
existing English words (Bail, Bane, Coruscant, Mace, Maul, Rancor, Solo,
and so forth) or makes names from obvious variations from them
(Ephant Mon (from “Elephant Man”), Sidious (from “insidious”), or
Tyranus (tyrannous, tyrant), and so on). While the use of foreign words
can add meaning to names, names whose etymologies are too obvious,
or call attention to their origins too blatantly, may run the risk of
undermining the verisimilitude of a world.
51. J. R. R. Tolkien, “A Secret Vice”, in The Monsters and the Critics and
Other Essays, edited by Christopher Tolkien, London, England:
HarperCollins Publishers, 1997 (originally published by George Allen &
Unwin Ltd. in 1983), pages 198–223.
52. Pierre Berton, The Secret World of OG, Toronto, Ontario: McClelland
and Stewart, 1961
53. From Lord Dunsany, “Of the Making of the Worlds” in The Gods of
Pegāna (1905).
54. From Letter 181 of Humphrey Carpenter, editor, The Letters of J. R. R.
Tolkien, Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981, page
235.
55. Ibid., see Letters 15, 25, 31, 109, 153, 154, 156, 163, 165, 200, 211, 212, and
especially 131, 144, and 181.
56. Ibid., from Letter 276, page 361.
57. Ibid., from Letter 259, page 349.
58. Ibid., from Letter 265, page 352.
59. Stephen Prickett, Victorian Fantasy, Bloomington and London: Indiana
University Press, 1979, page 229.
60. Other Bible stories are also used for inspiration: in Defontenay’s Star
(1854), when the Starians are wiped out, Ramzuel escapes in an abare
(spaceship) with his family and later his descendents become the new
Starian people; and Book IV is even named “Exodus and Deuteronomy”.
61. From Letter 142 of Humphrey Carpenter, editor, The Letters of J. R. R.
Tolkien, Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981, page
172.
62. Lin Carter, Imaginary Worlds: The Art of Fantasy, New York, New York:
Ballantine Books, page 180.
63. From Letter 169 of Humphrey Carpenter, editor, The Letters of J. R. R.
Tolkien, Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981, page
224.
64. Diana Wynne Jones, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, New York, New
York: DAW Books, Inc., 1996, page 20.
65. From Letter 180 of Humphrey Carpenter, editor, The Letters of J. R. R.
Tolkien, Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981, page
231.
66. Philip K. Dick, “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two
Days Later”, 1978, in Philip K. Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon, New
York, New York: Doubleday, 1985, pages 4–5.

4. More than a Story: Narrative Threads and Narrative Fabric

1. Charles Ischir Defontenay, Star (Psi Cassiopeia): The Marvelous History
of One of the Worlds of Outer Space, first published in 1854, adapted by
P. J. Sokolowski, Encino, California: Black Coat Press, 2007, page 237.
2. For an overview of the conceptualization of narrative units, see Jan
Christoph Meister, “Narrative Units”, in Routledge Encyclopedia of
Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-
Laure Ryan, London, England, and New York, New York: Routledge,
2005, pages 382–384.
3. Although this may be the first time the term “narrative fabric” is used,
this extension of the metaphor of narrative threads has been suggested
by others; for example, Eugène Vinaver described the alternating themes
of interlace narrative as needing to “alternate like threads in a woven
fabric, one theme interrupting another and again another, and yet all
remaining constantly present in the author’s and the reader’s mind.” As
quoted in Carol J. Clover, The Medieval Saga, Ithaca, New York: Cornell
University Press, 1982, page 143, which cites page 76 of Vinaver’s The
Rise of Romance (Gloucestershire, England: Clarendon Press, 1971) as
the source of the quote.
4. Although it is often the degree of invention, rather than the amount,
that creates conflicts; a narrative fabric could be woven, for example,
about the intersecting lives of a hundred characters living in New York
 City over several decades, producing a dense and detailed narrative
fabric which does not become a secondary world.
5. For a look at how simultaneity was dealt with in Icelandic and
medieval sagas, see the “Simultaneity” chapter in Carol J. Clover, The
Medieval Saga, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1982, pages
109–147.
6. From J. R. R. Tolkien, “In the House of Tom Bombadil” in The Fellowship
of the Ring, New York: Ballantine Books, 1965, page 181.
7. It should also be noted here that narrative resolution depends on the
level of narrative we are considering; while the preceding passage is a
very low-resolution version of the history of the Barrow-downs, the
passage is at the same time also a summary of what Bombadil is telling
the hobbits, which involves less compression.
8. From a letter to Sir Stanley Unwin, reprinted as Letter 129 in Humphrey
Carpenter, editor, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, Boston, Massachusetts:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981, page 142.
9. From the “Introductory Note” in 1951 Second Edition of The Hobbit, as
reprinted in Douglas A. Anderson, annotator, The Annotated Hobbit,
Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1988, page 322.
10. From a letter to Sir Stanley Unwin, reprinted as Letter 24 in Humphrey
Carpenter, editor, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, Boston, Massachusetts:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981, page 29.
11. Michael O. Riley, Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum,
Lawrence, Kansas: The University Press of Kansas, 1997, page 104.
12. Ibid., page 133. Riley’s comment that the later Oz novels were weaker
appears on page 171.
13. For example, Jean Webster’s novel Just Patty (1911) is a prequel to her
earlier book When Patty Went to College (1903).
14. As Internet searches of the terms reveal, “interquel”, “intraquel”, and
“midquel” have all been independently invented a number of times
since the mid-1990s, with all three terms being used interchangeably to
suggest the same thing. This is why I propose “midquel” as a more
general term, and “interquel” and “intraquel” as two specific and
different types of midquels.
15. Mario Puzo, The Sicillian, New York, New York: Random House, 1984,
page 354 in the paperback edition.
16. Pages 303 and 304, to be precise. Technically speaking, The Lord of the
Rings extends a bit beyond the events of The Silmarillion, if one
includes the timeline in Appendix B, which gives two pages’ worth of
events into the Fourth Age.
17. Thanks to Sean Malone for calling my attention to The Last Ringbearer.
18. The order of first public appearance of sequence elements can also
differ from the order in which an author created them; for example, C. S.
Lewis’s seven books that make up The Chronicles of Narnia have a
different order of creation, order of publication, and order in which they
take place (see Chapter 6).
19. Michael O. Riley, Oz and Beyond:The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum,
Lawrence, Kansas: The University Press of Kansas, 1997, page 141.
20. Ibid., pages 152–153.
21. Ibid., page 134.
22. Ibid., page 135.
23. Ibid., page 137.
24. Jenkins writes, “Television and film producers often express the need to
maintain absolute fidelity to one definitive version of a media franchise,
fearing audience confusion. Comics, on the other hand, are discovering
that readers take great pleasure in encountering and comparing multiple
versions of the same characters.” From Henry Jenkins with Sam Ford,
“Managing Multiplicity in Superhero Comics: An Interview with Henry
Jenkins” in Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, editors, Third Person:
Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives, Cambridge, Massachusetts:
MIT Press, 2009, page 307.
25. Although sometimes earlier works do not receive the retconning they
clearly need. For example, in the novelization of Star Wars that came
out in late 1976 before the movie, during the scene in which Ben Kenobi
gives Luke his lightsaber, the text reads:
“Your father’s lightsaber,” Kenobi told him. “At one time they were
widely used. Still are, in certain galactic quarters.”
Since by the end of Episode III Kenobi, Yoda, Anakin, and the Emperor
are the only ones left who have lightsabers, they cannot be “widely
used” anywhere; this line of dialogue did not appear in the movie, but
 was part of the extra material added for the novelization. From the Star
Wars novelization, credited to George Lucas (though ghostwritten by
Alan Dean Foster), New York, New York: Ballantine Books, 1976, page
79.
26. Ibid., pages 123–124.
27. For examples and descriptions of what some authors have done with
Oz and Baum’s characters, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_Oz.
28. Some, though, like Philip Jose Farmer’s Wold Newton Family stories or
Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, combine
characters from other sources but have their stories set in the Primary
World or some version of it, rather than an original imaginary world.
29. The use of Yoyodyne as a background detail on Star Trek: The Next
Generation (1987–1994) comes from the film The Adventures of
Buckaroo Bonzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984), although the name
itself originally comes from the fictional aerospace company in Thomas
Pynchon’s novels V. (1963) and The Crying of Lot 49 (1966).
30. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morley_(cigarette) for a list of shows
in which Morley cigarettes have appeared. The list even includes The
Dick Van Dyke Show (1961–1966), thought to be the earliest appearance
of Morley cigarettes.
31. King’s eighth Dark Tower book, The Wind Through the Keyhole (2012),
is an interquel which takes place between books four and five of the
series.
32. Regarding the retroactive linking of Baum’s worlds, Riley writes about
Baum’s sense as a businessman:
[Baum’s] suggestion in 1915 to his publishers that their reissue of his
“Laura Bancroft” book BABES IN BIRDLAND under his own name
include the subtitle “An Oz Fairy Tale.” In his opinion, this connection
would give it the appeal of his Oz stories and lead to larger sales. Quite
rightly, I believe, his publishers felt that this might be perceived as
deceptive and that the connection to Oz could be made in the
advertising of the books. Thus, Baum never then pulled his Bancroft
world into his larger fantasy world.
From an e-mail from Michael O. Riley to the author, March 5, 2012.
33. Anthony Flack, as quoted in Dave Morris and Leo Hartas, The Art of
Game Worlds, New York, New York: HarperCollins, 2004, page 174.
34. See especially the work of Roger Schank, Marie-Laure Ryan, Jesper
Juul, Brenda Laurel, Janet Murray, and Chris Crawford.
35. Other LEGO video games, like those based on the Indiana Jones and
Batman franchises, are very similar in their activities—running,
jumping, climbing, beating up enemies, picking up studs—to the LEGO
Star Wars games, but in different attire.
36. Jon Carroll, “Guerillas in the Myst”, Wired magazine, 2.08, August 1994,
page 72.
37. See John Knoll, Creating the Worlds of Star Wars 365 Days, New York,
New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2005, pages 123, 149, 146, 147 in
particular.
38. J. W. Rinzler, The Making of Star Wars Revenge of the Sith, New York,
New York: Del Rey Books, 2005, page 50.
39. Ibid., pages 167 and 200, respectively.
40. The same can be said for other extradiegetic material pertaining to a
world, such as advertising, merchandising, and so forth. As Pat Harrigan
and Noah Wardrip-Fruin point out, “Everyone of a certain age (and their
parents) knows what an Ewok is, but the word Ewok is never used in
Return of the Jedi (1983), the movie in which they appear; the
information was transmitted via the spin-off toys, comics, cartoons, and
books.” From Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, editors, Third
Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives, Cambridge,
Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2009, page 23.
41. From letter 342, to Mrs. Meriel Thurston, on November 9, 1972, in
Humphrey Carpenter, editor, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, Boston,
Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981, page 422.

5. Subcreation within Subcreated Worlds

1. Margaret Cavendish, The Description of a New World, Called the
Blazing-World, printed by A. Maxwell in London, 1666. Also available at
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/newcastle/blazing/blazing.html
(accessed February 24, 2011).
2. On page 152 of Arthur C. Clarke’s 3001: The Final Odyssey (New York,
New York: Del Rey Books, 1997), Captain Dmitri Chandler says “Where
have I heard that idea before? Of course, Frank—it goes back a thousand
years—to your own time! ‘The Prime Directive’! We still get lots of
laughs from those old Star Trek programs.” Having his characters laugh
at Star Trek seems to place his own world on a higher, more realistic
plane, which of course is debatable, especially considering some of the
events of Clarke’s own story.
3. Lubomír Doležel, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds,
Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998, page 149.
4. Rand and Robyn Miller with David Wingrove, Myst: The Book of Atrus,
New York, New York: Hyperion, 1995, pages 203–204 (paperback edition).
5. According to Cyan programmer and official D’ni Historian Richard
“RAWA” Watson, a kind of world gestalt occurs to fill in the missing
details of a world if the description does not cover them:
The majority of Gehn’s Ages were very short as he tested the effects of
various phrases that he was copying from other Books.
As page 123 of The Book of Atrus explains, a Descriptive Book will
[connect] to an Age once the very first word is written. It’s just that
the more detailed your description, the more the Age will match what
you want. If you just write the word “island” and use the Book, you’ll
link to a complete Age, but the only thing you’ll know about it before
you get there is that it will have an island. Everything else will be
filled in “at random”, meaning the Book will just link to one of
countless Ages that match your generic description. You don’t even
know if it will have oxygen or not. Not a good idea.
So many of Gehn’s Ages would have just been a few paragraphs to
cover the safety kinds of things and the particular phrase he was
trying to test. (Similar to the test Ages that Atrus writes at the end of
The Book of Atrus.)
Ironically, these shorter Ages of Ghen’s are much more likely to have
been stable, as they were too short to have many contradictions in
them.
To use the programming analogy for the Art, many of Gehn’s Ages
were simple, such as:
 10 PRINT “Hello”
20 GOTO 10
From an e-mail from Richard A. Watson to the author, September 17,
2004. Watson must be referring to the hard cover edition of Myst: The
Book of Atrus, as the passage he describes comes later than page 123 in
the paperback edition.
6. Rand and Robyn Miller with David Wingrove, Myst: The Book of Atrus,
New York, New York: Hyperion, 1995, page 212 (paperback edition).
7. Verlyn Flieger, “Tolkien and the Idea of the Book” in Harold Bloom,
editor, Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: The Lord of the Rings—
New Edition, New York, New York: Infobase Publishing, 2008, page 130.
8. Ibid., pages 132–133.
9. Ibid., pages 145–169.
10. J. R. R. Tolkien, “Leaf by Niggle”, reprinted in The Tolkien Reader, New
York, New York: Ballantine Books, 1966, pages 100–101.
11. The letters in question are #163, which mentions the appearance of
Strider, Saruman, the Stewards of Gondor and others, while Faramir’s
appearance is mentioned in letter #66.
12. From “The Brick Moon” (1869) in “The Brick Moon and Other Stories by
Edward Everett Hale” at Project Gutenberg, available at
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1633 (accessed February 28, 2011).
13. Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men, & Star Maker: Two Science-fiction
Novels, Chelmsford, Massachusetts: Courier Dover Publications, 1968,
pages 364–365.
14. Although it is clear in Lovecraft’s work that his Dreamworld is
something beyond the dreams of one individual, multiple Primary
World characters appearing in the same dream could be explained by
technology, as the dream-invading apparatus used in the film Inception
(2010).
15. Margaret Cavendish, The Description of a New World, Called the
Blazing-World, printed by A. Maxwell in London, 1666. Also available
at
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/newcastle/blazing/blazing.html
(accessed February 24, 2011).
16. Edith Nesbit, The Magic City, London: MacMillan and Company, 1910,
pages 14–15. Also available at
 http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20606/20606-h/20606-h.htm (accessed
March 1, 2011).
17. Ibid., page 27.
18. Ibid., page 11.
19. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, edited by Christopher Tolkien,
(Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1977), page 17.
20. Ibid., page 20.
21. E. R. Eddison, A Fish Dinner in Memison, New York, New York:
Ballantine Books, 1969, page 266.
22. Ibid., page 308.
23. Ibid., page 312.
24. Rand and Robin Miller, with David Wingrove, Myst: The Book of Atrus,
New York, New York: Hyperion, 1995, page 262 (paperback edition).
25. From Letter #131, to Milton Waldman, in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien,
edited by Humphrey Carpenter, Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 1981, page 145.

6. Transmediai Growth and Adaptation

1. From letter #131, to Milton Waldman, in Humphrey Carpenter, editor,
The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin
Company, 1981, page 145.
2. John M. MacGregor, Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal, New
York, New York: Delano Greenidge Editions, LLC, 2002, page 24.
3. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media
Collide, New York: New York University Press, 2006, page 114.
4. At what point can something no longer be considered an adaptation?
How much narrative must be carried over? For example, when adapting
The Lord of the Rings into a video game, we could have Frodo passing
through mazes of forests, eating evenly distributed lembas wafers that
lie in his path, while being chased by four black Nazgul—and end up
with a game which is only Pac-Man (1980) with new graphics.
5. One can find Tolkien’s concern for his publisher’s wishes in a number
of letters, for example, letter #35 to C. A. Furth, in which he discusses
whether or not The Lord of the Rings is shaping up as a suitable sequel
to The Hobbit. He adds in a footnote:
 Still, there are more hobbits, far more of them and about them, in the
new story. Gollum reappears, and Gandalf is to the fore: “dwarves”
come in; and though there is no dragon (so far) there is going to be a
Giant; and the new and (very alarming) Ringwraiths are a feature.
There ought to be things that people who liked the old mixture will
find to have a similar taste.
From letter #35 in Humphrey Carpenter, editor, The Letters of J. R. R.
Tolkien, Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981, page
42.
6. For an examination of the how the screenplays evolved, see Laurent
Bouzereau, Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays, New York, New York:
Ballantine Books, 1997.
7. Future media may be able to add a few more sensory registers.
Developing technologies aim to bring experiences of smell and taste to
audiences, but since these require physical contact with at least trace
amounts of the objects being experienced, and have effects that linger,
unlike image and sound which can be switched off or changed abruptly,
it seems unlikely that they will play much of a part in mediated
experiences of imaginary worlds. The sense of touch, likewise, could
become involved with virtual reality hardware like force feedback
gloves, but these, too, are not expected to reach the stage of
sophistication necessary to reproduce experiences with a level of realism
to match that of sight and sound.
8. While “auralization” does not appear in the current edition of the
Oxford English Dictionary, I believe it is a sound coinage based on the
relationship between “visual” and “visualization”, and can therefore be
used to refer to sound design and the process of making audible sound
from a description of a sound. The word “auralization” is also already
used in the more narrow sense of using a computer to calculate and
reproduce sound waves in computer simulations of spaces; for example,
see Michael Vorländer, Auralization: Fundamentals of Acoustics,
Modelling, Simulation, Algorithms and Acoustic Virtual Reality, New
York, New York: Springer, 2008.
9. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, one-volume edition, Boston,
Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994, page 452.
10. Ibid., page 564.
11. J. R. R. Tolkien, Endnote E of “On Fairy-Stories” in Tree and Leaf,
London, England: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1964, page 67.
12. Laurent Bouzereau, Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays, New York,
New York: Ballantine Books, 1997, page 49.
13. Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond, The J. R. R. Tolkien
Companion and Guide: Chronology and Reader’s Guide, Boston,
Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006, pages 647–649.
14. For example, the kitchen of Dex’s Diner in Star Wars Episode II: Attack
of the Clones (2002) is seen only briefly through the Diner’s order
window in the film, yet photographs in Star Wars Mythmaking: Behind
the Scenes of Attack of the Clones reveal all the piping, machinery,
utensils, furnishings, and food of the cluttered set. See Jody Duncan,
Star Wars Mythmaking: Behind the Scenes of Attack of the Clones, New
York, New York: Ballantine Books, 2002, pages 74 and 107. The existence
of so much detail that is barely, if at all, seen in the film can be justified
by the fact that it can be revealed in “Making Of” books such as
Duncan’s, and at the same time helps to give fans more reasons to buy
the books, since they can reveal more of the Star Wars universe.
15. Douglas A. Anderson, The Annotated Hobbit, Second Edition, Boston,
Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002.
16. J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories” in Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A.
Anderson, editors, Tolkien On Fairy-stories, London, England:
HarperCollins Publishers, 2008, pages 61–62.
17. J. W. Rinzler, The Making of Star Wars Revenge of the Sith, New York,
New York: Del Rey Books, 2005, page 208.
18. Jody Duncan, Star Wars Mythmaking: Behind the Scenes of Attack of
the Clones, New York, New York: Ballantine Books, 2002, page 48.
19. Ibid., page 40. The preceding page also notes how Yoda’s role in the film
changed because the digital model was able to do much more than the
puppet model could (as in Yoda’s lightsaber fight with Count Dooku).
20. Designer Joe Johnston, as quoted in Laurent Bouzereau, Star Wars: The
Annotated Screenplays, New York, New York: Ballantine Books, 1997,
page 279.
21. Jody Duncan, Star Wars Mythmaking: Behind the Scenes of Attack of
the Clones, New York, New York: Ballantine Books, 2002, page 175.
22. David E. Williams, “The Politics of Pre-Viz”, American
Cinematographer, Authoring Images, Part I, May 2007, pages 8–13.
23. Some may question the inclusion of Lake Wobegon as an imaginary
world, perhaps citing its lack of invention (claiming it is too similar to
the Primary World) or its incompleteness (due to a lack of visualization
of much of it). To this, I would respond by pointing out Keillor’s book,
Lake Wobegon Days (1985), which gives a detailed history of the town,
as well as the abundance of Lake Wobegon stories in subsequent books
and on the air over several decades, which develop the town and its
inhabitants. Lake Wobegon’s degree of development, its self-
containedness and disconnectedness from the areas around it, and
regular cast of inhabitants, qualifies it for inclusion under a broad
definition of imaginary worlds.
24. Matthew Miles Griffiths, Senior Designer at SCI Games, as quoted in
Dave Morris and Leo Hartas, The Art of Game Worlds, New York, New
York: HarperCollins, 2004, pages 112–114.
25. As quoted in Dave Morris and Leo Hartas, The Art of Game Worlds,
New York, New York: HarperCollins, 2004, page 122.
26. Neil Randall and Kathleen Murphy, “The Lord of the Rings Online:
Issues of Adaptation and Simulation” in Gerald Voorhees, Joshua Call,
and Katie Whitlock, editors, Dungeons, Dragons and Digital Denizens:
Digital Role-Playing Games, New York, New York: Continuum, 2012,
page 121.
27. These reasons, and more, are described in detail in Trevor Elkington,
“Too Many Cooks: Media Convergence and Self-Defeating Adaptations”
in Bernard Perron and Mark J. P. Wolf, editors, The Video Game Theory
Reader 2, New York, New York: Routledge, 2008, pages 213–235.
28. Although this is not always the case. For example, an encyclopedic
work could be made about a video game world which merely describes
its contents without adding any narrative to them.
29. Danny Bilsen, as quoted in “Building Transmedia Worlds”, Game
Theory with Scott Steinberg, September 29, 2010, available at
http://gametheoryonline.com/2010/09/29/transmedia-video-game-toys-
comics-films-movies-tv/.
30. See Chapter 4 in Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and
New Media Collide, New York, New York: New York University Press,
 2006.

7. Circles of Authorship
1. Wim Wenders, “A Conversation with Wim Wenders”, Wim Wenders
interviewed by Scott Derrickson, IMAGE: A Journal of the Arts and
Religion, Summer 2002, Number 35, page 47.
2. J. R. R. Tolkien, in a draft of a letter to Carole Batten-Phelps, in J. R. R.
Tolkien, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter,
Boston, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981, page 413.
3. Jack Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius,
Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1991, pages 186–187.
4. J. R. R. Tolkien, from letter #131 to Milton Waldman, in The Letters of J.
R. R. Tolkien, page 145.
5. Ibid., page 371. In letter #292, Tolkien complains of hearing from a fan
who was writing a sequel, and asks the press to do what they can to stop
him. On page 404, in letter #315, written to his son Michael in 1970,
Tolkien does write “I should like to put some of this stuff into readable
form, and some sketched for others to make use of.” However, this, too,
appears to be referring to usage that would bring in income, rather than
expansion by other writers, since the sentence that follows refers
indirectly to the literary income passing on to his children.
6. See the “Star Wars Canon” Wikipedia webpage, available at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_canon; and Chris Baker, “Master
of the Universe”, Wired 16.09, September 2008, pages 134–141. For a
discussion of the debates surrounding Star Wars canon, see
http://www.canonwars.com/SWCanon2.html. These pages, however,
were written before the release of the 3-D versions of the films, so it is
unclear if they are considered more canonical than the original two-
dimensional versions of the films.
7. Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle-earth, Revised Edition, Boston,
Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003, page 315. The list of
nine versions appears on pages 313–314.
8. See the explanation provided by Turkano, Senior Member of the Star
Trek Wiki, on the “Who Owns Star Trek?” webpage available at
http://forums.startrekonline.com/showthread.php?t=77190.
 9. Walter Jon Williams, “In What Universe?” in Pat Harrigan and Noah
Wardrip-Fruin, editors, Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast
Narratives, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2009, page 27. Unlike
what one might think, writing for an existing world is not necessarily
easier than inventing one; on page 29 of the essay, Williams adds, “Tie-in
novels are said to be easier than the original ones because the characters
and settings are already established. As far as my Star Wars book went,
it would have been a lot less work to have invented it all myself.”
10. Carol Pichefsky, “Expanded Universes, Contracted Books: A Look at
Tie-in Novels”, Wizard Oil blog on Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic
Medicine Show, available at
http://www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com/cgi-bin/mag.cgi?
do=columns&vol=carol_pinchefsky&article=010.
11. See the discussion, regarding how the Tolkien estate did not give
permission to publish certain scholarship which contained analysis of
Tolkien’s unpublished work, in Erik Davis, “The Fellowship of the Ring:
Wherein an Oxford don and his ragtag army of fans turn a fairy tale
about hobbits into the ultimate virtual world. Can any movie ever do it
justice?”, Wired 9.10, October 2001, pages 130–131.
12. Henry Jenkins, “Transmedia Storytelling 101”, March 22, 2007, available
at
http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html
(accessed September 12, 2011).
13. See the “fanon” TVtropes.org webpage available at
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Fanon (accessed
September 15, 2011).
14. See Anthony Burdge and Jessica Burke, “Fandom” entry in Michael D.
C. Drout, editor, J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical
Assessment, Boca Raton, Florida: CRC Press, 2007, pages 194–195.
15. For a list of other elements that started as unauthorized additions and
became canon, see the “Canon Immigrants” TVtropes.org webpage,
available at
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CanonImmigrant
(accessed September 15, 2011).
16. Techically, Boba Fett’s popularity began even before The Empire Strikes
Back, since he first appeared in the Star Wars Holiday Special (1978) as
 an animated character. Also, see “Confirmation Case: Boba Fett” on the
“Star Wars Canon: Overview” webpage, available at
http://www.canonwars.com/SWCanon2.html (accessed September 15,
2011).
17. For more on the controversy surrounding Jar Jar, see the “Jar Jar Binks”
Wikipedia webpage, available at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jar_Jar_Binks (accessed September 15,
2011); and the “Hear the Critics Speak” webpage available at
http://www.mindspring.com/~ernestm/jarjar/jarjarcritics.html (accessed
September 15, 2011).
18. See the “Sure, Why Not?” TVtropes.org webpage at, available at
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SureWhyNot (accessed
September 15, 2011), which also has a list of examples from different
media, including some from Anthony’s Xanth series.
19. For a list of fans that became employees or freelancers, see the list at
“Promoted Fanboy”, TVtropes.org webpage, available at
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PromotedFanboy
(accessed September 16, 2011), and the “Running the Asylum” TVtropes
webpage, available at
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RunningTheAsylum
(accessed September 16, 2011).
20. This is not to say that the player’s actions cannot be integrated into the
events of the canon; in Riven, for example, Catherine is able to continue
as a character in Myst III: Exile (2001) only because the “stranger” (the
player’s character) rescued her, provided that the “right” ending was
chosen. At the same time, only one ending of Riven is considered
canonical, and Catherine is present in Myst III: Exile even if the player
does not choose the canonical ending; so the narrative assumes that the
“right” ending occurred, and thus the world remains unchanged by the
player’s actions.
21. According to Robert D. Hof, “Second Life’s First Millionaire”, Bloomberg
Businessweek, November 26, 2006, available at
http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2006/11/sec
ond_lifes_fi.html (accessed September 20, 2011).
22. See Mike Schramm, “Man buys virtual space station for 330k real
dollars”, Joystiq, January 2, 2010, available at
 http://www.joystiq.com/2010/01/02/man-buys-virtual-space-station-for-
330k-real-dollars/ (accessed September 21, 2011), and “Planet Calypso
Player Sells Virtual Resort for $635,000.00 USD”, PR Newswire,
November 12, 2010, available at http://www.prnewswire.com/news-
releases/planet-calypso-player-sells-virtual-resort-for-63500000-usd-
107426428.html (accessed September 21, 2011).
23. Kathryn Gibson, “Second Life economy totals $567 million US dollars in
2009—65 percent growth over 2008”, Helix, February 4, 2010, available at
http://www.
helrxvirtualworlds.com/blogs/secondlife/2009endofyearsecondlifeecono
my (accessed September 21, 2011).
24. C. S. Lewis, “On Stories” in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories, edited
by Walter Hooper, New York, New York: Harcourt Brace & Company,
1966, page 12.
25. Rachel Wagner, from the book proposal for her book Godwired:
Religion, Ritual, and Virtual Reality, January 2010, page 2.
26. Chaim Gingold, discussing Will Wright’s Spore (2008), in Chaim
Gingold, “A Brief History of Spore” in Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-
Fruin, editors, Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives,
Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2009, page 131.
27. C. N. Manlove, The Impulse of Fantasy Literature, Kent, Ohio: Kent
State University Press, 1983, page 156.
28. Edward Castronova, Exodus to the Virtual World, New York, New York:
Palgrave MacMillan, 2007, page 201.
29. Bruce Mazlish, The Fourth Discontinuity: The Co-evolution of Humans
and Machines. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1993,
page 195.
30. From Pope John Paul II, “Letter of His Holiness Pope John Paul II to
Artists”, 1999, available at
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/letters/documents/hf_j
p-ii_let_23041999_artists_en.html (accessed September 21, 2011).
31. J. R. R. Tolkien, in a draft of a letter to Peter Hastings, in J. R. R. Tolkien,
The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter, Boston,
Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981, pages 188–189. Quotes
from Hasting’s letter, including the one mentioned earlier, appear on
pages 187–188.
32. Edward Castronova, Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of
Online Games, Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2005, page
262. I would like to thank Mark Hayse for bringing this quote to my
attention.
33. Jon Carroll, “Guerillas in the Myst”, Wired 2.08, August 1994, page 73.
34. From Mark Hayse, “god games” entry in Mark J. P. Wolf, editor,
Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology, and Art of
Gaming, Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO/Greenwood Press, 2012.
The works that Hayse cites in the quote are Stephen R. Garner, “Hacking
with the Divine: A Metaphor for Theology–Technology Engagement”,
Colloquium 37, No. 2, 2005, pages 181–195; Noreen Herzfeld, “God Mode
in Video Games”, paper presented at the 2005 Conference on Violence
and Religion, Vallendar, Germany, July 2005; Kevin Kelly, Out of Control:
The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World,
New York: Basic Books, 1995; and Kevin Kelly, “Nerd Theology”,
Technology in Society 21, 1999, pages 387–392, available at
http://www.kk.org/writings/nerd_theology.pdf (accessed September 21,
2011).
35. J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories” in Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A.
Anderson, editors, Tolkien On Fairy-stories, London, England:
HarperCollins Publishers, 2008, pages 65–66.
36. Andrei Tarkovsky, June 11, 1982, Diari Martirologio, pages 503–504, as
quoted in Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids, edited by Giovanni
Chiaramonte and Andrey A. Tarkovsky, London, England: Thames &
Hudson, 2004, page 86.

OceanofPDF.com
GLOSSARY

absorption The process that often follows immersion in a world. Absorption

is a two-way process; the audience’s attention and imagination is
absorbed or “pulled into” the world, and at the same time, the audience
also “absorbs” the imaginary world as well, bringing it into mind, learning
or recalling its places, characters, events, and so on, constructing the
world within the imagination the same way that that memory brings
forth people, events, and objects when their names are mentioned. Thus,
one is able to mentally leave (or block out) one’s physical surroundings, to
some degree, because details of a secondary world displace those of the
Primary World while one is engaged with it.
aggregate inconsistencies Inconsistencies occurring in a story which are
only noticeable when one takes into account multiple facts and considers
them together collectively. For example, in The Hobbit, when Bilbo and
Gollum meet, they are able to converse easily; yet, if one considers the
hundreds of years Gollum lived alone under the mountain, the 1,650 years
separating the Shire-folk (from which Bilbo came) from the Stoors (from
which Gollum came), and the changes in both cultures and the attendant
changes in language that one would expect over the same length of time,
it seems that Bilbo and Gollum would have more difficulty
communicating than they do. However, to notice this inconsistency
requires the integration of information from The Hobbit, The Lord of the
Rings, and The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien; if The Hobbit is considered
alone, no discrepancy appears to exist.
auralization The process of turning something into a sound, just as
visualization is the process of turning something (like a description) into
an image that can be seen. Radio dramas, for example, use background
sound effects along with character dialogue to bring to life the stories they
tell, while in cinema sound, designers must devise sounds for invented
creatures, vehicles, and devices that seem appropriate for them.
causal braiding The condition that occurs when multiple stories or
narrative threads set in the same world have causal linkages between
them, in which the events of one thread have outcomes in other threads.
This interrelatedness of narrative threads can then be seen as braiding
them together through the cause-and-effect events that link them.
completeness The degree to which an imaginary world has all the necessary
elements needed to be considered feasible, with enough detail present
such that the audience can answer questions about the world, such as
where the world’s residents get their food and basic necessities, what their
daily lives are like, and how their society is structured.
conlang Short for “constructed language”, a conlang is a language which is
consciously and deliberately devised by an individual or group, as
opposed to languages that develop naturally over time within a culture.
consistency The degree to which world details support each other without
contradiction. This requires a careful integration of details and attention
to the way everything is connected together. Lacking consistency, a world
may begin to appear sloppily constructed, or even random and
disconnected.
deinteractivation The removal of interactivity that occurs when a world or
narrative makes a transmedial move from an interactive medium to a
non-interactive medium.
diegesis The fictional world in which a story takes place. The term is used to
distinguish between the world of the characters and the world of the
story’s audience; for example, film credits and subtitles are nondiegetic,
because they do not exist for the film’s characters, whereas the scenery
and the objects used by the characters are diegetic. A diegesis can be an
imaginary or secondary world, or a fictionalized version of the Primary
World.
diegetic braiding The condition that occurs when multiple stories or
narrative threads set in the same world share the same locations, objects,
characters, and other details. This interrelatedness of narrative threads can
then be seen as braiding them together through the diegetic elements and
events that link them.
dystopia John Stuart Mill’s term for a negative form of a utopia, that is, a
utopia gone wrong, usually one where the government has become
repressive and controlling.
encyclopedic impulse A tendency toward having explanatory interludes,
during which the narrative of a work halts so that information about the
world and its inhabitants can be given. Descriptions of landscapes,
peoples, customs, backstories, and philosophical outlooks are given either
by the main character directly to the audience (if a story is told in first
person) or experienced by the main character and the audience together
(with the main character as a stand-in for the audience) through
expository passages in which other characters introduce lands and
peoples.
environmental storytelling Theme park designer Don Carson’s term for
the telling of stories by infusing narrative elements into a world in such a
way so that they can be found and recombined by the world’s audience,
who discover these elements as they experience the world.
imaginary world All the surroundings and places experienced by a fictional
character (or which could be experienced by one) that together constitute
a unified sense of place which is ontologically different from the actual,
material, and so-called “real” world. As “world” in this sense refers to an
experiential realm, an imaginary world could be as large as a universe, or
as small as an isolated town in which a character resides.
immersion A process which involves being surrounded or engulfed in
something; within Media Studies, the term may refer to one of three
different types of experiences. The first is the physical immersion of user,
as in a theme park ride or walk-in video installation; the user is physically
surrounded by constructed experience, thus the analogy with immersion
in water. The second is the sensual immersion of the user, as in a virtual-
reality-type of head-mounted display, which covers eyes and ears. While
the user’s entire body is not immersed, what the user sees and hears is
part of the controlled experience. The third is conceptual immersion,
which is the least physical and which relies the most on the audience’s
imagination; for example, engaging books like The Lord of the Rings are
 considered “immersive” if they supply sufficient detail and description for
the reader to vicariously enter the imagined world.
interactivation The process by which something noninteractive is made into
something interactive. Adding interactivity usually means adding
moments of choice for the user, the outcomes of which have some bearing
on the future choices that the user will have to face later.
internarrative theory Theory that examines how individual narratives can
be related and interact with each other, including separate narrative
threads or braids that occur within a single work, or the narratives of
separate works which are set in the same world, or which have
transnarrative characters or objects.
interquel A narrative sequence element which fits chronologically in
between two already-existing narrative elements in the same sequence.
An interquel connects works together, filling in the events that happened
in between them, and so interquels are thus usually about how one
situation developed into another, since both the beginning and end points
of the interquel’s story are already known to the audience.
intraquel A narrative sequence element which fills in a narrative gap within
an already-existing narrative sequence element. Like an interquel, it is
usually more about how one situation developed into another, since both
the beginning and end points of the intraquel’s story are already known
to the audience.
invention The act of producing fictional elements for a narrative or world,
particularly those elements which vary considerably from their Primary
World counterparts, or those that have no Primary World counterparts.
midquel A narrative sequence element which takes place between sections
or sequence elements of already-existing narrative material, combining
the functions of sequels and prequels. Midquels can be further usefully
divided into interquels and intraquels.
narrative braid Narrative threads taking place within the same world which
become grouped together due to the fact that they share the same themes,
characters, objects, locations, events, or chains of cause-and-effect. Types
 of narrative braiding include diegetic braiding, thematic braiding, and
causal braiding.

narrative fabric A structure that results when a narrative or world has

enough detail and events such that one can trace all the events happening
to individual characters or locations over time (constituting diachronic or
vertical narrative threads) or all the simultaneous events occurring at each
moment (constituting synchronic or horizontal threads). All these
resulting narrative threads woven together result in what could be called
a narrative fabric.
narrative gestalt A structure or configuration of details which implies a
sequence of causally-linked events, constituting a story, for which the
audience fills in ellipsized actions or details, based on the sequence’s
narrative logic. For example, if a character in a film drives off from one
location and the film cuts to the character arriving at another location, we
assume the character has driven from one place to the other.
narrative resolution The amount of words, sounds, or images used to
convey an event or other story information (resolution is used here to
mean something like granularity, as in “graphical resolution”; as opposed
to the use of “resolution” to mean the completion and closure of a
narrative structure). Thus, a story told in high narrative resolution will
relate events and information in great detail, with tight authorial control
over the audience’s experience, while stories told in low narrative
resolution use more summary and synopsis, relying more on the
imagination of the audience and narrative gestalten to complete the
narrative details.
narrative speed Narratologist Gérard Genette’s term which refers to the
difference between the duration of story events versus the time needed to
tell the events. If we make this concept independent of duration (which
may vary, depending on the intake capability of individual audience
members (for example, people who read more slowly or quickly)), this
becomes the measure of narrative resolution instead, that is, the amount
of words, sounds, or images it takes to describe a particular event.
narrative thread A series of causally-linked events, which usually revolves
around a character, object, or location, giving a sense of what happens to
it over time. An audience typically will have some expectation that
narrative threads will lead somewhere, with some endpoint providing
closure.
normalizing tendency An unconscious tendency in which Primary World
defaults “normalize” secondary world defaults to some degree, within an
audience’s imagination, especially in the case of word-based media that
leave visualization of a world to the reader’s imagination. In other words,
if certain aspects of a character are exaggerated in their initial description,
readers are likely to play this down in their imagination as time goes on,
resulting in a more “normal” appearance. Any divergence from realism
may be reduced this way, to make a world and its elements seem more
realistic when an author’s details seem to be exaggerations of what is
likely or possible.
overlaid world A fictional diegesis in which an existing, Primary World
location is used, with fictional characters and objects appearing it, but
without enough invention to isolate it from the Primary World into its
own separate secondary world.
paraquel A narrative sequence element which runs parallel, that is,
simultaneously, with an already-existing narrative sequence element or
elements, often covering known events from a different perspective. Most
paraquels are made after the sequence elements they parallel, which limits
their events and outcomes the more closely related to existing sequence
elements they are. They are thus more likely to introduce new characters
and storylines and use the existing events of an imaginary world to set up
suspense and provide a background structure. At the same, paraquels can
reveal unseen events and provide motivation for the events of a pre-
existing sequence element, offering new explanations for known events.
participatory world A world in which audience members participate in the
world and its events, making permanent changes that result in canonical
additions to the world. Such additions may be the actions of an avatar
who is a part of the diegesis and takes part in diegetic events, as in an
MMORPG, or a player–character in a tabletop game or MUD who can
 actively build and change the world from within the world, or a player
who institutes changes from outside of the world, negotiating the world’s
shape and future with others. Such worlds differ from a merely interactive
world, in which interaction occurs but no canonical changes can be made
to the world.
prequel A narrative sequence element that comes before an already-existing
narrative sequence element, which usually shows how characters and
situations came to be, and often provides backstory for them.
Primary Imagination Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s term for the kind of
imagination that allows us to coordinate and interpret our sensory data,
turning them into perceptions with which we make sense of the world
around us. This he opposed to what he called “Secondary Imagination”,
which he describes as being similar in kind to Primary Imagination, but
differing in degree and mode; it uses and recombines ideas and concepts
in order to create, rather than using and interpreting direct sensory data,
making it the kind of imagination that allows us to picture what does not
exist.
Primary World J. R. R. Tolkien’s term for our world, the material, physical
world, as opposed to the imaginary worlds made within it, which he
called secondary worlds, borrowing from Coleridge’s ideas of Primary
and Secondary Imagination.
reboot A complete reconception and redesign of a franchise or world. Taken
from computer terminology, “reboot” suggests not only a restarting, but
also that something was no longer viable or had gone wrong enough to
require such an extreme measure; thus it is not surprising that most
reboots begin with a new “story of origins” for its main character or
characters. The majority of reboots appear in character-based franchises;
they are done to update long-running franchises which have become
dated over time, and they are usually done by people other than the
original creators of the franchise (which naturally leads to discussions of
canonicity). More often than not, reboots are done mainly to keep a
franchise profitable and allegedly more appealing to a new generation of
audience members, though such changes may alienate older audiences
who still see the value of the original version.
retcon Originating in the comic book community, “retcon” is short for
“retroactive continuity”, which is when an author alters established facts
in earlier works in order to make them consistent with later ones.
retroactive linkage A joining of two independently-created worlds that
previously had existed separately, usually through a transnarrative
character who appears in both worlds, or by the revelation that the two
worlds share a border or some other geographic linkage. Authors who
develop multiple worlds will often link them retroactively, to compile
their world-building efforts into a single large entity.
saturation The condition that occurs when there are so many secondary
world details to keep in mind that one struggles to remember them all
while experiencing the world, to the point that the details of the
secondary world crowd out thoughts of the immediate Primary World.
Saturation is the pleasurable goal of conceptual immersion; the attempt to
occupy the audience’s full attention and imagination, often with more
detail than can be held in mind all at once.
Secondary Belief J. R. R. Tolkien’s term for the audience’s belief in the
secondary world that occurs when the construction and presentation of
the world is successful; he suggests that additional belief is what is
occurring in such a situation, rather than the “suspension of disbelief” as
suggested by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Secondary Imagination Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s term for the kind of
imagination that uses and recombines ideas and concepts in order to
create, rather than using and interpreting direct sensory data; the kind of
imagination that allows us to picture what does not exist. This he opposed
to what he called “Primary Imagination”, which allows us to coordinate
and interpret our sensory data turning them into perceptions with which
we make sense of the world around us.
secondary world J. R. R. Tolkien’s term for imaginary worlds, used to
distinguish them ontologically from the material, physical world we
inhabit (which he calls the Primary World), borrowing from Coleridge’s
ideas of Primary and Secondary Imagination.
sequel A narrative sequence element which follows an already-existing
narrative sequence element. A sequel usually shares some common
elements with the original story it follows, carrying them forward in time.
A sequel is often able to take advantage of the existing popularity of the
original, rather than having to rely on its own merits, at least initially.
Sometimes this allows a work of lesser quality to be made, giving sequels
a bad name, though this is, of course, not always the case; but audiences
may still be less likely to experience a sequel if they have not experienced
the original work first.
subcreated world J. R. R. Tolkien’s term for a world which is made through
the process of subcreation. The term deftly sidesteps philosophical
problems with terms like “real” and “imaginary” and the ways they
overlap.
subcreation J. R. R. Tolkien’s term for the building of imaginary worlds
through the using and recombining of existing concepts and ideas, as
opposed to the ex nihilo (“from nothing”) creation that only God is able to
do; thus, he appends the “sub” prefix; “subcreation” literally means
“creating under”.
thematic braiding The condition that occurs when multiple stories or
narrative threads set in the same world are thematically connected in
order to compare and contrast characters and their situations. This
interrelatedness of narrative threads can then be seen as braiding them
together through the themes that link them.
transmedia storytelling Henry Jenkins’s term for storytelling which
involves narrative material spread across works appearing in different
media, resulting in a narrative that spans multiple media.
transnarrative character A character who appears in more than one story.
The presence of the character in multiple stories suggests that the stories
share the same diegesis or world.
transquel A narrative sequence element which covers a time period before,
during, and after an already-existing narrative sequence element or
elements, as if those preceding elements were filling gaps within it.
 Transquels are usually broad in scope, setting other sequence elements
into a larger historical context and framework.
uchronia Charles Renouvier’s term for an unspecified or fictional time
period in which a story is set, usually in the far future or distant past.
“Uchronia” means “no time”, and the word is patterned after “utopia”
which means “no place”.
utopia Thomas More’s term, taken from Greek, meaning “no place” and
used as the name of his fictional island. More broadly, the term is used to
describe an ideal community or society with a perfect form of governance
(or what some characters think is the perfect form of governance).
virtual world A world which has an existence independent of its users,
usually as a model within a computer memory which is algorithmically
reconstituted and controlled by a computer program. Users are able to
interact with objects, characters, and each other in a virtual world through
an interface, and some virtual worlds, like those of MMORPGs, are
persistent and events continue within them after the user leaves them.
world gestalt A structure or configuration of details which together implies
the existence of a world, and causes the audience to automatically fill in
the missing pieces of that world, based on the details that are given.
Usually, all the given pieces follow a certain logic, which helps dictate
what the missing information might be like, allowing existing information
to be extrapolated to fill in the gaps.

OceanofPDF.com
INDEX

Abbott, Edwin Abbott 104–105, 107, 170, 175–176, 255, 290, 304
Abbott, Eleanor 139, 317
Abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teusch, Der 81, 293
absorption 49, 351n49, 375
Adams, Douglas 123, 187, 332
Adams, Percy 78–79, 84
Adams, Richard 37, 328–329
adaptation 12, 14, 59, 99, 118–119, 122–125, 133, 142, 203, 244–264, 359n105,
369n4, see also “transmedial expansion”
Adventure 140–142, 330, 332
adventure games 5, 140–144, 260, 263
Aes Sedai 35
afterlife destinations 67
Age of Exploration 72–84, 95, 112, 352n2
aggregate inconsistencies 47–48
Alexandria Quartet 210
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 105, 108, 236, 302
Alien 10, 137, 333
All My Children 125, 327
Always Coming Home 30, 150, 336
Amalgam Universe 218
Amazing Stories 120–121, 288–289, 311–313, 322–324, 357
Analog Science Fiction-Fact 120, 323, 326, 329, 337–338, 340, 368
Anderson, Douglas A. 53, 60, 253
Andreæ, Johann Valentin 91, 293
animal skins as used in fantasy novels 195
animation 5, 66, 115, 124, 135, 137, 146, 256, 263, 352n2, 372n16
Annotated Hobbit, The 53, 253
Antillia 77, 291
Appleton, Bill 282
Arda 23, 32, 47, 130–131, 147, 165, 270, 288–289, 314
Arimaspi 68, 290
Ariosto, Ludovico 76, 291
Aristophanes 70–71, 111, 255, 290
Arneson, Dave 139, 329
Arrival, The 183, 345
Ashair 26, 314
Aspharage 76–77, 292
Asteroids 175
At the Back of the North Wind 168, 302
Atari 140–142
Aura Spice 350n35
auralization 250, 257–260, 262, 370n8, 375–376
authorship 61, 201, 220, 267–287
automation 145
Avatar 30, 36, 146, 173, 188, 345
Azlaroc 169, 331
backstory 39, 50, 61, 80, 86, 91, 127, 131, 165–166, 202–204, 207, 250, 265,
351n60, 377, 380
Bacon, Francis 91–92, 160, 217, 226, 293
Bacon, Leonard 114
Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series 133
Barker, M. A. R. 5, 139, 330
Barrie, James M. 5, 307
Barthes, Roland 199, 269
Batman 7, 117, 121, 215, 218, 315, 351n60, 367n35
Battlestar Galactica 137, 175, 332
Baum, L. Frank 5, 12, 27, 29, 54, 108–111, 117–119, 125–126, 157, 159, 170, 187,
206, 217, 219, 226, 275, 306–307, 367n32
Bene Gesserit 35, 171, 183
Bennalack, Owain 261
Bennett, Mark 161–162
Bensalem 91–92, 160, 293
Berdyaev, Nikolai 23, 349n17
Berneri, Marie Louise 92
Bible 91, 156, 191, 204, 284, 364n60 “bibles” (used for consistency) 147, 179,
201, 278
Biedermann, Louis 112, 120
Bilderijk, Willem 101, 300
Bilsen, Danny 264
Birds, The 70, 111, 290
Biography of Manuel series 127, 309, 358n92
Blade Runner 27, 95, 193, 289
Blazing-World 65, 89, 100–101, 110, 186, 233, 237–238, 293
Blemmyae 69, 74
Bluestone, George 246
board games 3, 66, 135, 352n2
Bodin, Félix 94, 300
Bombadil, Tom 202–203, 233, 288–289, 365n7
Bond, James 137, 215
Book of Ser Marco Polo, The 73, 75
Book of Sir John Mandeville, The 73–75, 111, 291
books, see “literature”
Bordwell, David 11, 52
Borges, Jorge Luis 149, 153, 315, 317, 327, 330, 361
Bosch, Hierymonius 111
Boston Globe, The 13
Brackett, Leigh 276
Breda 163–164, 343
“The Brick Moon” 98, 148, 234, 302
Brigadoon 26, 122–123, 317
Brobdingnag 38, 80, 295
Brontë siblings 5, 300–301
Brothers Karamazov, The 32
Burdge, Anthony 279
Burger, Dionys 148, 170, 176–177, 325
Burke, Jessica 279
Burroughs, Edgar Rice 26, 82, 125–127, 188, 289–290, 308–314, 316
Burtt, Ben 252, 259, 277
Butler, Samuel 26, 30, 32, 95, 109, 188, 270, 303
Cabell, James Branch 127, 133, 309, 358n92
Cabet, Etienne 94, 301
Cacklogallinia 80–81, 295
Cameron, James 27, 146, 173, 345
Campanella, Tommaso 88–89, 292
Candyland 139, 317
canonicity 44, 210, 213, 221–222, 224, 246, 260, 262, 266, 269–276, 278–281,
367n40, 371n5, 371n6, 372n20, 380
Card, Orson Scott 6, 137, 174, 333, 336
Carpenter, Humphrey 131
Carroll, Jon 285
Carroll, Lewis 108–109, 148, 236, 302–303
Carson, Don 29, 377
Carter, Lin 6, 106, 133, 194, 325–328, 333, 363n42
Casablanca 10, 275
Castronova, Edward 11, 151–152, 283, 285
causal braiding 199, 376, 378, see also “narrative braiding”
Cavendish, Margaret 65, 89, 100–101, 110, 186, 226, 233, 237
Centrum Terrae 81, 293
Chapman, Seymour 199
chauvinism 88, 354n38
Chee, Leland 44, 61, 147, 271
Chiang, Doug 277
Children of Múrin, The 61
children’s literature 107–110, 129–130
chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream 25
Christoffel, Hans Jakob 81, 293
Chronicles of Narnia, see “Narnia”
chronologies, see “timelines”
Chung, Anshe 282
cinema, see “film”
City of the Sun, The 88–89, 292
Clark, John D. 273, 290, 319
Classical Antiquity 67–71, 85
closed worlds 61, 269–270, 274
Cloudcuckooland 70–71, 255, 290
Clute, John 166
co-creation 265
Codex Seraphinianus 17, 30–31, 151, 155, 333
Coleridge, Hartley 5, 301
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 5, 20–21, 23–24, 380–381
Colossal Cave Adventure 140, 330
comics 7, 9, 13, 65, 112, 114–118, 121, 123, 126, 134, 135, 137–138, 147, 213,
217–218, 264, 352n2, 366n24, 367n40
completeness 25, 33–34, 38–43, 60–61, 172, 194, 196, 201, 224, 248, 261, 285,
350n38, 376
computers 66, 141–147, 179, 215, 223, 228, 257, 287, 352n2, 370n8, 370n19, 380,
382, see also “massively multiplayer on-line role-playing games
(MMORPGs)”, “video games”
conlang 184, 376, see also “invented languages”
consistency 25, 33–35, 43–48, 55, 194, 196, 201, 203, 205–206, 219, 224, 264,
266, 278, 365n4, 375–376, 380, see also “reboots” and “retroactive continuity
(retcon)”
Convergence Culture: When Old and New Media Collide 9, 245
“Cook’s Tour” 158
Cosmides, Leda 4
Couperie, Pierre 115
Creating the Worlds of Star Wars 365 Days 223–224
Creation 20–25, 185, 191, 196, 283–287
crossovers 125, 216–219, 366n28, 366n30, see also “multiverses”, “retroactive
linkages”, and “transnarrative characters”
Crow, The 231
Crowther, Will 140, 330
Csíkszentmihályi, Mihaly 49
cult movies 10
Cummings, Raymond King 105, 174, 309, 311
cyberspace 8, 146, 175, 235
Dante 71, 81, 161, 226, 291
Darger, Henry 5, 129, 226, 231, 274, 328
Dark City 148, 216, 235, 242–244, 341
Dark Crystal, The 137, 188, 334
Dark Tower series 213, 219, 366n31
database narratives 9–10
De Scudéry, Madeleine 89–90, 293
Dean, James L. 162
Defoe, Daniel 79, 294–295
Defontenay, Charles Isher 16, 36, 49, 102, 104, 153, 170, 174, 180, 187, 198, 301,
355n57, 364n60
deinteractivation 250, 262–264, 376
Delvoye, Wim 163, 341
Denslow, W. W. 118–119
description 182, 250–252, 260, 262, 370n8, 375–376, 379
Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World 89, 100–101, 186, 226,
233, 237, 293, see also “Blazing-World”
Desitny of Man, The 23
Dewdney, A. K. 30, 36, 148, 177–179, 247, 255, 333
Dick, Philip K. 35, 174, 197, 235, 289, 321, 324, 326, 327, 349
Dickens, Charles 266
dioramas 111–112
diegesis 14, 16, 376, 379–380, 382, see also “fictionality” and “world-building”
diegetic braiding 199, 376, 378, see also “narrative braiding”
Dineson, Isak 5
Discworld series 36, 150, 174, 335
Doctor Dolittle 208, 290, 310
Doctor Who 124, 135, 279, 324
Doležel, Lubomir 18–19, 29, 38, 227, 248
dollhouses 138, 220–221
Don Quixote 76, 233, 274, 279, 292
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 32
Dot and Tot of Merryland 110–111, 306
Duff, William 20
Duncan, Jody 257, 370n14
Dune universe 26, 36, 41–42, 59, 61, 63, 134, 160, 170–171, 173, 183, 206, 271,
275, 323
Dungeons & Dragons 133, 139–140, 329
Dunsany 127, 131, 133, 189–191, 239, 307, 310
Durrell, Lawrence 210
dystopias 69, 84–96, 148, 354n37, 354n38, 376
Eagleton, Terry 51
Eco, Umberto 10
Eddison, E. R. 127, 131, 133, 148, 192, 207, 240, 310
Egoff, Sheila A. 109
Einstein’s Dreams 30, 36, 149–150, 168, 339
ekphrasis 252
elaborationists 269, 279–280
Elves’ ears 59–60
Ellroy, James 32, 192
Emerald City, The 1
emotions 4, 37
encyclopedic impulse 10–11, 30, 36, 54, 279, 355n65, 376–377
Energizer Bunny 271
Entropia Universe 143, 282, 343
environmental storytelling 29, 377
Episode of Flatland, An 148, 175–176, 307
ER 8
Erector Set 138
Erewhon 26, 30, 32, 95, 109, 270, 303
Erikraudebyg 26, 317
escapism 33
eXistenZ 235
exploration, see “Age of Exploration”
fabula 52–53
Fairylogue and Radio-Plays, The 118
fan productions 61, 269, 279–280, 371n5
“fanon” 279
fantasy 13, 34–35, 62, 66, 96–97, 106–111, 133, 135, 156–158, 191, 227, 256, 283,
286–287, 352n2, 358n94, 367n32, see also “pulp magazines”
Faulkner, William 32, 38, 156, 192, 312, 358n94
Feast in the House of Levi 111
Fett, Boba 271, 280, 372n16
Fictional Worlds 18
fictionality 18–20, 55, 349n21
film 1–3, 5, 9–11, 13, 16, 44, 59, 65, 112, 114–115, 118, 122–123, 126, 135–138,
146–147, 221, 246–247, 249, 255–256, 259–264, 266–267, 269, 271, 275, 283,
352n2, 366n24, 366n25, 371n6, 375–376, 378
Fish Dinner in Memison, A 148, 207, 240–241
Flack, Anthony 220
Flammarion, Nicolas Camille 103–104, 305, 355n58
Flatland 36, 104–105, 107, 148, 170, 175–177, 255, 304
Flieger, Verlyn 231
flow 49
Fonstad, Karen Wynn 161, 163, 278–279, 362
Forbidden Planet 135, 320
Foster, Mike 132
franchises 7, 10, 13, 44, 46, 48, 67, 120, 124, 134–138, 191, 215, 221, 228, 246,
266–267, 275–277, 359n105, 366n24, 367n35, 380
Fredericks, S. C. 70
Gadget 220
Galaxiki 147, 281, 345
Gandhi 52
Gasoline Alley 117, 309
Genette, Gérard 199, 202
Gernsback, Hugo 121
gesamtkunstwerk 114, 152
Gethen 32, 36, 174
genealogies 53, 155, 170–172, 182, 191, 194, 200, 231, 282, 363n29, 363n30
Georgia Coffee 271
Gestalt principles 51, 53, 57
Gibson, William 146, 193, 235, 334, 338
Gilbert and Sullivan 95, 304–305
Gilbert, Nan 129, 320
Giles, Peter 86, 160, 185
Gillett, Stephen L. 6
Gingold, Chaim 283
Giphantie 83, 297
Girl in the Golden Atom, The 105, 174, 309
God xiii, 23, 227–228, 283–287
“god games” 142, 285–286
Godfather series 209–210
Gods of Pegāna, The 189–190, 239, 307
Gone with the Wind 28, 210
Goodey, Brian R. 86
Goodman, Nelson 18–19
Gove, Philip Babcock 79, 84
Graustark: A Story of a Love Behind a Throne 160–161, 306
Gravitar 141, 175, 334
Great Expectations 266
Griffiths, Miles 259–260
Guiding Light, The 125, 314
Gulliver’s Travels 78, 80, 123, 156, 180, 295
Gygax, Gary 139, 329
Haggard, Henry Rider 107, 109, 133, 289, 304–305, 307, 309
Hale, Edward Everett 98, 148, 234, 302
Hamlet on the Holodeck 8
Harrison, Pat 11
Harry Potter 125, 137–138, 341
Hartley, L. P. 28
Hayse, Mark 285–286
Heinlein, Robert 32, 120, 217, 315, 321–322, 349
Herbert, Frank 41, 59, 61, 170, 206, 271, 275, 323–325
Herczeg, Tilberg J. 98
Herodotus 68, 290
Hester, Nathalie 77
Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds 18
Hitchcock, Alfred 255
Hinton, C. H. 148, 175–177, 307
Histories 68, 290
History of Automathes 93, 296
History of Middle-earth series 6, 61, 133, 224, 274
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy 123, 173, 187, 332
Hobbit, The 46–47, 59, 130–133, 193, 203–205, 209, 213, 217, 219, 233, 246,
252–253, 273, 314, 369n5, 375
Hodgson, William Hope 126, 133, 307–308
Hogancamp, Mark 5, 150–151, 233, 344
Holberg, Ludvig 82, 101, 296
Holland, Norman 4, 49, 52
hollow earth 82, 101–102, 353n25
Holocron 44, 61, 147, 271
holodeck 8, 230–231, 235–236
Homer 14, 68, 70, 166, 217, 226, 290
Hooper, Walter 168
Hooterville 124, 161, 219, 323
Hope, Anthony 107, 305, 307
Horn, Maurice 115
Howard, Robert E. 26, 120, 127–128, 313
hyperserials 8
Iblard 17, 151, 335
Inferno 161, 291
IMAGE 268
imaginary worlds, see Table of Contents for listing of topics and pages
Imaginary Worlds: The Art of Fantasy 6, 106, 133, 194–195, 363n42
imagination, 20–25, 50–51, 58, 220, 255, 348n12, 375, 377, 380–381; see also
“Primary Imagination” and “Secondary Imagination”
Imago Dei 283–287
immersion 2, 48–49, 221, 257, 351n47, 351n48, 351n49, 375, 377, 381
Impossible Voyage, An 115, 307
In the Land of Invented Languages 184
incompleteness, see “completeness”
inconsistencies, see “consistency”
Industrial Age 84, 94, 97
infrastructures, see “world infrastructures”
interactivation 250, 260–262, 377
interactive fiction 66, 140, 352n2
interactive worlds 138–145, 201, 220–223, 281, 372n20, 380, see also
“interactive fiction”, “massively multiplayer on-line role-playing games
 (MMORPGs)”, “participatory worlds”, “role-playing games”, and “video
games”
interactivity, see “interactive worlds” and “interactivation”
interdimensional cosmic beings 190
interfaces 9, 220, 229, see also “media windows”
interlace narratives 167–168, 199, 365n3
internarrative theory 9, 14, 204–212, 377
interquels 207–208, 365n14, 366n31, 377–378
intraquels 207–209, 365n14, 378
intertexuality 8, 191, 204, 358n86, see also “internarrative theory”
invention 22, 32, 33–38, 53, 59, 193, 284, 363n42, 363n43, 365n4, 370n23,
372n9, 378, see also “languages, invented”
Islandia 114, 128–129, 170–171, 180–181, 187, 275, 316

J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia 132

Jancsó, Miklós 32
Jedi 35
Jenkins, Henry 9–12, 213, 245, 279, 366n24
Johnston, Joe 257
Jones, Diana Wynne 37, 157, 195, 336
Journey Through Utopia 92
Joyce, James 60, 165
Juul, Jesper 11
Kallipolis 69, 85–86, 233, 290
Keats, John 62
Kelly, Kevin 285–286
Kennedy, Louis 13
Kershner, Irving 276
Kesh 30, 150, 336
Kinder, Marsha 7–8, 11
King Arthur 67, 71, 75, 291
King Kong 122, 313
King Nebuchadnezzar II 66
King, Stephen 213, 219, 345, 366n31
Kingsley, Charles 107, 109, 302
kipple 35, 349n24
Kirkby, John 93, 296
Knoll, John 223–224
Kyle, David 121
Lake Wobegon 26, 123, 160, 258–259, 329, 370n23
Language Construction Kit, The 189, 282
languages, invented 2, 47, 131, 183–189, 196, 227, 251, 257–258, 363n42,
363n43, 364n50, 375
Laputa 80, 295
Last and First Men 126, 165, 210, 312, 355n49
Last Emperor, The 52
“Leaf by Niggle” 108, 132, 232–233, 317
Lear, Edward 107–108, 302
Lee, Brandon 231
Left Hand of Darkness, The 32, 36, 174
Legend of Zelda 142, 336
LEGO 3, 5, 138–139, 143, 211, 220, 222–223, 247–248, 266–267, 278, 359n106,
367n35
LEGOLAND Idea Book 359n106
LeGuin, Ursula K. 30, 32, 36, 150, 174, 193, 228, 323–324, 329, 332, 336, 361
Lehar, Steven 52
Lem, Stainslaw 37, 187, 320, 323, 325
Leskiw, Adrian 163–164, 343
Lewis, C. S. 5, 63, 104, 109–110, 129–132, 168, 191, 207, 255, 283, 315, 318–320,
336, 366n18
Lewis, David 17
Lewis, Sinclair 127–128, 358n93
Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, The 82, 110, 112, 127, 172–173, 187–
188, 297
Life: A User’s Manual 150, 166–167, 331, 361n118
Light Princess and Other Fairy Tales, The 22–23
Lightman, Alan 30, 36, 149–150, 168, 339
Lincoln Logs 138
Lindsay, David 104, 133, 174, 309
Lineland 105, 148, 175, 304
literary cycles 66–67, 71
literature 1–3, 59, 65–66, 70, 97, 120–122, 125–135, 147–150, 224, 246–247, 249,
256, 262, 264, 266, 269, 271, 283, 352n2, 366n25, 370n23, 372n9
Literature and the Brain 4, 52
Little Nemo in Slumberland 115–117, 307
Living Dead cycle 10
Logic of Perception, The 57
Lord Dunsany, see “Dunsany, Lord”
Lord of the Rings, The 7, 32, 36, 42, 46–49, 54–55, 59, 130–133, 138, 145–146,
166–167, 171, 183, 187–188, 192–193–194, 202–205, 209–210, 213, 219–220,
222, 224–225, 231, 240, 246, 250–252, 256, 258, 261–262, 266, 273, 279,
352n67, 352n74, 366n16, 369n4, 369n5, 375, 377
Lost 160, 219, 344
Lovecraft, H. P. 127, 130, 189–190, 193, 236, 275, 309, 315, 368n14
Lucas, George 11, 46, 61, 135–136, 154, 170, 188, 208, 213, 215, 223–224, 247,
257, 270–271, 273, 276, 280, 327, 331, 364n50, 366n25
Lucian of Samosata 70–71, 172, 217, 226, 291
Lynch, David 1
MacDonald, George 6, 12, 22–24, 37, 106, 109, 131–133, 168, 302
MacGregor, John M. 245
Magic City, The 108, 148, 238–239, 308
Magic: The Gathering 137, 339
“Making Of” documentation 137, 223–225, 370n14
Making of Star Wars Revenge of the Sith, The 223–224
Mandeville, Sir John 73–75, 111, 291
Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences 73, 75
Maniac Mansion 142, 337
Manlove, C. N. 283
Manovich, Lev 8–9
Manuel, Frank E. 85, 88, 91, 93
Manuel, Fritzi P. 85, 88, 91, 93
maps 2, 10, 53, 77–78, 81, 87, 111, 127, 129, 131, 144, 154–165, 172, 182, 191,
194, 198, 200, 224, 249, 282, 349n32, 358n86, 358n94, 362n16
mapbacks 156
Marwencol 5, 150–151, 233, 344
Marx Toy Company 138, 359n105
Massive (computer program) 145–146, 152
massively multiplayer on-line role-playing games (MMORPGs) 50, 135, 138,
143–145, 151, 201, 220–221, 261–262, 271, 281–282, 380, 382
mathom 35, 349n30
Matrix universe 13–14, 26, 63, 83, 95, 148, 175, 183, 191, 216, 222, 226–227,
231, 235–236, 242, 244, 265, 342
Mayberry 124, 161–162, 322
Maze War 139, 329
Mazlish, Bruce 284
McCay, Winsor 115–116, 236, 307
McCutcheon, George Barr 160–161, 306
McQuarrie, Ralph 277–278
Meccano 138
media franchises, see “franchises”
Media Studies 2–3, 6–7, 11–12, 19, 377
media windows 9, 12, 220, 244, 247–249, 267, 287, 349n24, 369n7
Mego Corporation 138
Méliès, George 115, 307
Meridian 59 143–144, 340
Meropis 69, 290
Metropolis 122, 311
microscopic worlds 105
Middle-earth 13–14, 23, 42, 46–47, 83, 158–159, 163, 173, 187–188, 191, 194,
231, 240, 270, 278–279
midquels 207, 365n14, 378, see also “intraquels” and “interquels”
Millennium Falcon 45–46
Miller, Rand 82, 228, 285, 337–339
Mitchell, Margaret 28, 210
MMORPGs, see “massively multiplayer on-line role-playing games
(MMORPGs)”
Mongol invasion 73
Monster 143, 281, 337
moon journeys 70, 76, 98, 115
More, Thomas 30, 71, 86, 91, 156, 160, 180, 185, 193, 217, 226, 270, 291, 382
Morris, William 106–107, 131, 133, 302, 304–306
Movie Brats, The136
MUDs, see “multi-user dungeons”
Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary
Genius 268–269
multi-user dungeons (MUDs) 142–143, 281, 380
multiverses 14, 216–219, 366n28, see also “crossovers”, “retroactive linkages”,
and “transnarrative characters”
mundo 225
murder mysteries 351n46
Murphy, Kathleen 261
Murray, Janet H. 8, 11
Myst universe 14, 105, 142, 173, 175, 185, 202, 213–214, 221, 223, 228–229, 236,
241, 254, 261–264, 339, 368n5, 372n20
Mystery House 140, 333

Napoleon 27
Narnia 129–130, 159, 168, 191, 207, 209, 265, 318, 366n18
narrative 2–3, 52–54, 57, 154, 158, 194, 197–225, 227, 232, 246–247, 249, 260,
262–263, 265, 348n16, 359n106, 365n7, 371n28, 372n20, 377; see also other
terms beginning with “narrative”
Narrative as Virtual Reality 18–19
narrative braids 199–200, 376, 378, 382
narrative fabric 200–201, 210, 365n3, 365n4, 378
narrative gestalten 51–52, 202–203, 378
narrative resolution 202–203, 209, 274, 365n7, 378–379
narrative speed 202, 379
narrative threads 199–201, 365n3, 376–379, 382
Nazar 82, 101, 296
Negative Capability 62
Neighborhood of Make-Believe 124, 323, 358n86
neorealism 136
Nesbit, Edith 108, 148, 238–239, 306, 308, 355n65
Neuromancer 175, 235
New Atlantis, The 91, 160, 217, 226, 293
Newcastle Forgotten Fantasy Library 133
Newspeak 185
Niels Klim’s Underground Travels 82, 101–102, 296
Niell, John R. 119
Niépce, Joseph Nicéphore 83
Night Land, The 126, 308
Nimoy, Leonard 169, 215–216
Nineteen Eighty-Four 95, 130, 184–185, 193, 317
noncanonicity, see “canonicity”
normalizing tendency 59, 255, 352n67, 379
Novels into Film 246

Odyssey, The 14, 68, 166, 290

Okrent, Arika 183–184
“On Fairy Stories” 6, 23, 132, 256, 349n17
open worlds 61, 269–270, 274
order of experience 211, 264–266
Orlando Furioso 76, 291
Orlando Innamorato 75, 279, 291
Orwell, George 95, 130, 184–185, 193, 316–317, 364
overlaid worlds 28, 351n60, 379
Oz 1, 12, 14, 27, 29, 54, 63, 109–111, 117–119, 122, 125, 134, 157, 159, 183, 191,
206, 212, 217, 275, 306, 367n32
Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum 12

Padrón, Ricardo 161

Paltock, Robert 82, 110, 112, 127, 172–173, 187–188, 297
panoramas 111
paracosms 4–5, 110
paraquels 210, 379
Parker Bros. 118, 139
participatory worlds 144, 281–283, 379–380; see also “interactive worlds”,
“massively multiplayer on-line role-playing games (MMORPGs)”, and
“video games”
Patrick, James 69
Pavel, Thomas 16–18, 148–149
Pellucidar 82, 125–126, 308
Penson de Quincey, Thomas 5
Perec, Georges 150, 166, 330–331, 361n118
Perelandra 255, 315
Philippica 69, 290
Philostratos the Younger 65
photography 1, 13, 83–84, 112, 249
Pinchefsky, Carol 277
Pirates of the Caribbean 266
Planet Construction Kit, The 282
Planiverse 30, 36, 148, 177–179, 247, 255, 333
Plato 69, 85–86, 95, 148, 191, 233, 290
Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games 7
playsets 66, 221, 247–248, 255, 260, 352n2, 359n105
Poe, Edgar Allen 96, 301,
Poictesme 127, 309
Polo, Marco 72–73, 75
Pope John Paul II 284
Portal 175
Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory 19
possible worlds philosophy 7, 17–20, 29
Preserving Virtual Worlds project 147
prequels 12, 61, 136, 202, 206–208, 211, 265–266, 365n13, 380
prerobinsonades 79
pre-visualization 255
Prickett, Stephen 191–192
Primary Imagination 21–23, 380–381
Primary World 14–15, 23–28, 34–38, 43, 49–50, 62, 64, 66–67, 72, 96–97, 104–
107, 110, 112, 114, 117, 135, 137, 143, 148, 152, 155, 168, 173–175, 180, 182,
184, 192, 200–201, 215, 226, 235, 237–238, 241, 244, 247, 249–250, 282–287,
349n31, 366n28, 375–376, 378, 381; defaults of 32–37, 53–54, 57–59, 65, 68,
153–154, 172, 179, 193, 253, 255, 287, 351n60, 379–381; links to secondary
worlds 62–64, 108, 160, 216–217, 219, 287, 349n32, 352n75, 354n28, 361n11,
364n50, 368n14, 370n23
“principle of minimal departure” 55
Propp, Vladimir 199
pulp magazines 112, 119–122, 134
Puzo, Mario 209
Pyncheon, Thomas 366n29
Quadling Country 157
Queen Móo and the Egyptian Sphinx 96, 306
Quenya 50, 60, 184, 188, 278, 363n43
Quinto, Zachary 169, 215
Quok 206, 306
Rabelais, François 71, 76, 109, 111, 172, 185, 217, 290, 292
radio 1, 7, 13, 48, 118, 122–126, 247, 249, 258–260, 271, 351n48, 370n23, 375
Randall, Neil 261
“reality principle” 55
reboots 212–216, 380
Red Violin, The 199
Reipublicae Christianopolitanae Descriptio 91, 293
Renaissance and Reformation 69
Renouvier, Charles 95, 303, 382
Republic 69, 85, 148, 233, 290
Restif de La Bretonne, Nicolas-Edme 93, 298–299
retroactive continuity (retcon) 14, 46, 212–216, 270, 273, 275–276, 366n25, 380,
see also “backstory”
retroactive linkages 125, 216–219, 367n32, 380–381, see also “crossovers” and
“transnarrative characters”
Rhem 182, 343
Riley, Michael O. 12, 29, 110, 117, 157, 159, 206, 212, 217, 367n32
Ringworld series 36, 150, 235
Rinzler, J. W. 223–224
Riven 17, 50, 182, 202, 222, 228, 261, 264, 372n20
Road to Middle-earth, The 39
Robida, Albert 112–113, 120, 303–304
Robin Hood 67
Robinett, Warren 140–142, 332
Robinson Crusoe 79–80, 295
robinsonades 79
Rock, Irvin 57
Roddenberry, Gene 169, 276, 325
role-playing games 66, 135, 138, 271, 352n2
Roman de l’Avenir, Le 94, 300
Romero, George 10
Root-Bernstein, Michelle 4
Rosenfelder, Mark 189, 282
Rotundia 108, 306, 355n65
Rufsal 82, 295
Ryan, Marie-Laure 18–20, 55
Saberhagen, Fred 169, 323
Saruman’s voice 251
Sass Doorpt Swangeanti 82, 173, 191, 297
saturation 49–51, 351n46, 351n51, 361n118, 363n29, 381
Saxton, Curtis 55–56
Sayers, Dorothy L. 6
science fiction 13, 66, 96–106, 112, 135, 158–159, 169, 227, 352n2, 355n50,
358n94, see also “pulp magazines”
SCUMM engine 142
Second Life 143, 220–221, 281–283, 343
secondariness 25–28, 33, 351n60
Secondary Belief 24–25, 35, 37, 100, 193, 381
Secondary Imagination 21–23, 380–381
secondary worlds 13, 23, 35, 57–58, 63, 65, 71–72, 79, 84, 93–94, 96, 114, 127,
131, 143, 152–153, 192, 194, 196, 208, 210, 216–217, 219, 228, 257, 282, 365n4,
376, 379, 381; borders of 26, 28, 62–64, 242, 261, 354n28; credibility of 34–
35; history of 65–152; location of 85, 91–92, 160; see also “imaginary
worlds”
self-reflexivity 229–233
sequels 10, 76, 80, 95, 105, 109, 125–126, 130–131, 134, 136–137, 146, 150, 170,
175–176, 202, 205–207, 369n5, 371n5, 381
sequence elements 205–212, 215, 265–266, 366n18, 377–382, see also
“intraquels”, “interquels”, “paraquels”, “prequels”, and “transquels”
Serafini, Luigi 31, 151, 333
Settlers of Catan, The 139, 340
sharecropping 276–277, 372n9
Shippey, Tom 39, 170, 188, 274, 363n29
Sicilian, The 209
Silmarillion, The 5, 46–47, 49–50, 61, 127, 130–131, 133, 166, 170, 190, 192,
209, 231, 239–241, 274, 351n52, 366n16
Silent Running 135, 328
SimCity 142, 338
Simpsons, The 7, 43–44, 337
simulation 4, 145
Skrenta, Richard 143, 281, 337
smell 369n7
soap operas 123
Solaris 37, 187, 323
Solo, Han 200, 350n35
Space: 1999 135, 330
Spacewar! 139, 323
Spasim 139–140, 329
Sphereland 148, 170, 176–177, 325
Spider-man 28, 215, 351n60
Stableford, Brian 99, 169, 290, 330, 332, 334, 340, 355
stage, see “theater”
Stapledon, Olaf 126, 134, 165, 210, 234–235, 312, 314, 355n49
Star (novel of 1854) 16, 36, 49, 102–103, 153, 170, 174, 180, 187, 198, 301,
355n57, 355n58, 364n60
Star Maker 126, 134, 165, 210, 234–235, 314, 355n49
Star Trek universe 2, 7, 14, 25–26, 37, 44, 57, 62–63, 134–135, 137, 143, 147,
158, 165, 169, 171, 182, 187–188, 206, 208, 213, 215–216, 219–220, 226, 228,
235–236, 252, 255, 259, 276, 325, 350n38, 366n29, 367n2
Star Wars 3, 5, 7, 11–12, 14, 26, 39–46, 123, 135–138, 161, 193, 208, 211, 215,
223–224, 252, 255–258, 265, 273, 277, 279, 331, 350n35, 359n106, 366n25,
371n6
Star Wars universe 7, 13, 55–56, 58, 61, 63, 83, 135, 137–138, 143, 147, 156, 158,
165, 170–171, 173, 183, 191–192, 200, 205, 208, 216, 222–224, 247–248, 256–
259, 262, 264, 266–267, 270–271, 277, 280, 331, 363n30, 364n50, 367n35,
370n14, 370n19, 372n9, 372n16
stereoscopic imagery 112
Stevenson, Robert Louis 108, 138, 156, 226, 304
Stewart, Dugald 20
Stillinger, Jack 268–269
Story of the Vivian Girls, The 129, 233, 328
Struldbruggs of Luggnugg 80, 170
subcreated worlds 14, 61–62, 119, 152, 193, 196, 381; laws of 22, 37; made by
women 88–89; see also “imaginary worlds” and “secondary worlds”
subcreation 4, 23–24, 132, 172–174, 179, 225, 228, 283–287, 349n18, 349n31,
381–382; and Creation 20–25, 283–287; and imagination 20–25; degrees of
25–29; within subcreated worlds 226–244;see also “world-building”
subcreators 23, 43, 68, 155, 193, 203, 216, 225, 284–287; subcreated subcreators
226, 233–244; see also “world-building”
Superman 7, 117, 142, 315, 351n60
supersystem of entertainment 7–8
Swainton, Steph 5
Swift, Jonathan 38, 78, 80, 170, 295
syuzhet 52
Tale in the Desert, A 281
tanrydoon 181
Taprobane 89, 292
Tarkovsky, Andrei 287
Tarzan 7, 117, 125–126, 134, 289–290, 308–311, 313–314, 358
Tassulians 36, 103, 174, 180
taste 369n7
television 1–3, 9, 13, 16, 44, 48, 65, 122–126, 135, 137, 146, 218–221, 260, 262–
264, 271, 275, 352n2, 366n24
Tendre 89–90, 293
Terra Australis 69, 292–295
Teuber, Klaus 139, 340
Texas Instruments TI99/4a 5
theater 114–115, 118–119, 122–124, 126, 255–256, 263, see also “The Birds”
thematic braiding 199, 378, 382, see also “narrative braiding”
Theopompos of Chios 69, 290
Thomas the Tank Engine 129, 316
Thompson, Edward H. 91
Thompson, Ruth Plumley 119, 275
thought experiments 30, 32, 69, 71, 147–152; see also “dystopias” and
“utopias”
365 Bedtime Stories 129, 130, 320
Thunderbirds 124, 135, 325
THX 1138 95, 135, 327
time abyss 166, 196, 352n75
Time Out of Joint 235, 242, 321
timelines 2, 53, 126–127, 131, 147, 155, 163–169, 172, 182, 191, 194, 196, 266,
282, 366n16
Tinkertoy 138
Tiphaigne de la Roche, Charles François 83, 297
Tolkien, Christopher 46–47, 54, 61, 133, 224, 270, 274–275
Tolkien estate 46, 270, 278, 372n11
Tolkien, J. R. R. 5–6, 14, 23–26, 32–35, 42, 46–47, 50–51, 54–55, 58–62, 83, 89,
108–109, 123, 127, 130–134, 140, 142, 153–154, 156, 158–159, 161, 163, 165–
167, 170, 173, 184, 187–190, 193–196, 203–205, 213, 217, 219, 224–225, 227–
228, 231–233, 239–242, 245–246, 251–253, 255–256, 268, 270, 273, 278, 284–
286, 312, 314, 317, 349n17, 349n18, 352n74, 363n29, 363n43, 368n11, 369n5,
371n5, 380–381
Tolstoy, Leo 27, 171
Tommy Westphall Universe 218–219
Tooby, John 4
torchbearers 269, 274–276, 280
Torchwood 46
touch 369n7
Tough Guide to Fantasyland, The 37, 157,
transmedia storytelling 9, 347n10, 382
transmedial expansion 8–9, 14, 117–119, 221, 244–267, 269–270, 357n82,
371n5
transmediality, nature of 7, 13, 246–248
transnarrative characters 7, 11, 66, 216, 377, 380, 382, see also “crossovers”
transquels 209–210, 266, 366n16, 382
Travelers and Travel Liars 1660-1800 78
travelers’ tales 15, 72–84, 91, 96–98, 114
Treebeard’s eyes 250–251
Trip to the Moon, A 115, 307
Tron 146, 175, 183, 213, 231, 235, 334
True History 70–71, 115, 172, 217, 226, 291
Truman Show, The 235, 242, 341
TSR 139, 163 24 165
TV Sets: Fantasy Blueprints of Classic TV Homes 161
Twin Peaks 124, 271, 338
2001: A Space Odyssey 135–136, 223, 326
Tzanaki, Rosemary 73, 75
uchronias 95–96, 105, 355n48, 355n49, 382
underground worlds 81–82, 125, 172, 353n25, 353n26
Uller 273, 319
Ultima 142, 333, 360n109
Ulysses 60, 165
Unfinished Tales 61, 133, 190, 274
universal translators 187
Utapau 223–224
Utopia 30, 86–88, 91, 156, 160, 180, 185–186, 217, 226, 270, 291
utopias 1, 66, 69, 84–96, 148, 172, 193, 352n2, 354n37, 354n38, 354n46, 376, 382
Vader, Darth 170, 211, 259, 271–272, 278–279
VCRs 137
Verne, Jules 82, 105, 226, 302–306, 308–309, 339
Vidal, Gore 1
video games 1–4, 13, 16, 20, 41, 66, 135, 137–144, 147, 174–175, 220–222, 247,
249, 261–264, 267, 285–286, 352n2, 369n4, 371n28, see also “god games” and
“massively multiplayer on-line role-playing games (MMORPGs)”
Village, The 235, 241, 344
Vinaver, Eugène 365n3
virtual worlds 4, 8, 16, 48, 143–144, 146–147, 151, 175, 220–221, 231, 235–237,
283, 382
visualization 59, 145, 250, 252–257, 260, 262, 370n8
Visionaries: Knights of the Magical Light 337,
Voyage to Arcturus, A 104, 174, 309
Voyage to Icaria 94, 301
Voynich Manuscript 151
Vril 106
Wachowski brothers 13, 342
Wagner, Rachel 283
Walton, Kendall 55
War and Peace 27, 171
Wardrip-Fruin 11
Watchmen 137, 336
Water-Babies, The 107, 109, 302
Watership Down 37, 328
Ways of Worldmaking 19
Weatherson, Brian 219
websites 1, 3, 8, 11, 223, 247
Weird Tales 120, 311–313
Wells, H. G. 95–96, 106, 305–307, 310, 313, 354n46
Wenders, Wim 268
weorld 25
West, Richard C. 167
Westphall, Tommy, see “Tommy Westphall Universe”
What-A-Jolly Street 130, 320
Who Framed Roger Rabbit 218
Wilde, Oscar 1
Williams, Walter Jon 276–277, 372n9
“willing suspension of disbelief” 24–25, 179, 256, 381
Winnemac 127–128, 310, 358n93
Winnie-the-Pooh 218, 311
Wizard of Oz, The (film) 119, 122
Wonder Stories 121, 317–319
Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The (book) 27, 109–110, 117–119, 212, 306
Woods, Don 140
Wordsworth, William 20
World Builder 282
world-building 12, 14, 34, 59, 66, 82, 97, 101, 104, 116, 119, 124–125, 131, 135,
138, 142, 145, 147, 150, 155, 157–158, 167, 192, 206, 216, 224, 235, 242, 251,
259–260, 264, 282–283, 348n16, 349n21, 349n24, 352n2, 361n118, 367n40,
370n23, 380; as a background activity 30, 32, 43, 59, 253, 370n14; as a
 human activity 3–6; as an indication of giftedness 4; as a religious
endeavor 283–287; beyond storytelling 10–11, 17, 29–33, 131, 153, 198;
franchise entertainment moving toward 13; how-to books on 6, 133, 137,
282; see also “subcreation”
world gestalten 51–60, 62, 66, 194, 203, 251, 279, 349n24, 351n46, 352n74,
368n5, 382
world infrastructures 43, 143, 153–198, 246, 278, 282, 349n24
World in Your Head, The 52
world logic 53–55, 246, 368n11, 382
Worlds Within: Children’s Fantasy from the Middle Ages to Today 109
Wright, Austin Tappan 5, 26, 114, 128–129, 170, 180, 187, 274, 316
Wright, Sylvia 128–129
Wright, Will 142, 283, 338, 345
Wyeth, Andrew 16
X-Men 10
Xylar 326
Yoknapatawpha County 38, 156, 312, 358n94
Yoyodyne 219, 366n29
Yule, Sir Henry 73, 75
Zenith 127
Zhuangzi 241
Zimiamvia Trilogy 207, 240, 310
Zork 140, 332
Zothique 120, 134, 313

OceanofPDF.com