Settings of Fantasy: Place

From my MLA 2012 Fantasy presentation

Place:

Skillful world building is vital in Fantasy.  When creating a strange, irrational world, it’s incredibly important to create internal logic and consistency. It’s also helpful to make it familiar to one degree or another to increase the reader’s sense of automatic connection and ease the transition to the strange.  Unless, of course, your goal is the creation of a world that’s confusing and completely illogical, which might be the case depending on the story you want to tell.

Often times the landscape plays a role in the story, and/or has a physical, moral, and/or magical connection to its inhabitants. It can act as another character. Sometimes it’s sentient.  In Christopher Stasheff’s Wizard in Rhyme series, the condition of the land and people is directly, magically related to the condition of the Monarch.  She is truly the steward of the kingdom.

Definitions of place:

·       Alternate Earth – An Earth we almost recognize but with irrational differences. Magic has always been a part of Earth.  A hole opened up and let the things from fantasy and nightmare through. (“Keeping it Real” by Justine Robson, Book 1 of Quantum Gravity series.  Quantum Bomb of 2015 rips a hole through the fabric of realities.)  Mother Earth is fed up and technology dies and unicorns appear. (“Ariel:  A Book of the Change” by Steven R. Boyett, Book 1 of the Change series)

·       Slipstream Earth – An extra layer to the Earth we know that only some are aware of.  Often the story consists of either someone becoming aware of that layer, or that layer threatening to become known to all. – Harry Potter, Wizarding and Muggle worlds.

·       Different Land – Someplace other.  Narnia, created by C.S. Lewis.  A land that couldn’t exist here.  Needs to be internally consistent - following the rules of good storytelling, but other than that there are no limits.

Relationships of place:

·       Immersive: story takes place entirely within a different land with no reference to Earth at all:  Lord of the Rings.  

·       Portal:  Someone from Earth transported – willingly or no – to a different land – “Wizard of Oz”, L. Frank Baum. 

·       Intrusion – Someone or something from a different land comes here.

·       Can also be some sort of bridge between worlds – traffic moving both ways. Vivian Vande Velde’s “Now you see it…” has characters moving from a fantasy world to Earth and back again to get their hands on a pair of glasses that filter magic instead of light.