I am feeling the need to do a substanial written post, but also to lighten it up a bit around here. Since Diana did an awesome Thursday Thirteen of fictional places she’d like to visit last week, let me just get in on that fun. I’ve read her list, but I’m pretending I didn’t long enough to make one of my own. There will be some overlap.
1. Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Specifically, I would like to tour cities and strongholds of the First Age. Nargothrond. Gondolin. Menegroth. Nogrod and Belegost. These are fictional place names that give me the shivers and make my imagination run entirely amok. And there are more of them.
Gallifrey
2. Gallifrey. Because it’s Gallifrey.
3. The Dreaming, the realm of Morpheus, formally known as Dream of the Endless, from Gaiman’s Sandman series. You knew this had to be here, right? The Library of Dream is a point of particular interest, because it contains every book that was never written (a whole section of novels the authors finished only in their dreams, for instance).
4. Carroll’s Wonderland. I know the story, but haven’t actually read the book. This one is too good to pass up on the strength of adaptations alone, though. If I had 13 wishes and could only use them to visit fictional places, I’d have to use one of them to have a chat with a certain caterpillar.
Kender hero Tasslehoff Burrfoot
5. Krynn, the setting of the Dragonlance series. The halflings of that world, called Kender, are too interesting to not meet.
6. Amber and the Courts of Chaos from Zelazny’s two Chronicles of Amber series. I could be cheating here because that’s two places. Or maybe not. Maybe they are more like sides of a coin, since they are the only two really real worlds, and all other realities are reflections of them.
7. The Emerald City. How could I pass on the Emerald City?
8. Never-Never Land. In the same category as #s 1, 4, and 7. It was impossible to think up a ninth one until I put this one is on the list.
9. Jasper Fforde’s BookWorld. This is a meta-world (for lack of a better term) in which characters and places from books are real, and the putting-together of literature is an industry. There are literary police, of course. And a detective from the “real” world, a bemusing dystopia in which time travel and cloning are well developed, and cheese is so expensive people smuggle it.
Ankh-Morpork
10. The Great City of Ankh-Morpork from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld.
11. Kashyyyk, also known as Wookie Planet C. And Bespin, the Cloud City from The Empire Strikes Back (still my all-time favorite). I’m cheating again, but I figure if I can tour the cities of Middle Earth, I can take a hyperspace jaunt around the Star Wars galaxy. Oh. Coruscant, too. I’d have to see Coruscant.
12. The planets Vulcan and Romulus with a layover at Deep Space Nine. I love Star Trek and Star Wars differently, but equally. They each get three places on the list.
13. Arrakis from Dune. This one wins out over both Westeros and Narnia because “He who controls the spice controls the universe,” and we all know what a megalomaniac I am.
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