Places

This week's book challenge is to name your favourite story settings. A wealth of choices here. Let's move from the mundane to the fantastic, shall we? Splendid.

First off, I really enjoy the setting of Half-Magic and its sequel which is nothing more exotic than the Midwest in the 1920's. The small town feel is really well done and would practically be magical even with the talisman. Marvellous story, marvellous setting, marvellous characters, and a marvellous book.

Closely set in time is the world of PG Wodehouse. Most of his stories take place in Edwardian England that is intended to be fairly real. The world his characters inhabit, however, is fiction in more than simply the events. The world of Half-Magic is real with magic events happening to real children. The world of PG Wodehouse is Edenic with little realism. It shines and is bright and there are rarely any hints that the world of that time included people who were hungry, or that wars were fought and another war loomed around the corner. All is gaiety in London, quiet country houses, respectful servants and beautiful girls where the greatest peril is an unsuitable engagement or that an aunt may ask you to do something you find distasteful, like pinching a silver cow creamer from your host. For all that, it is all the real world, the parts that are unpleasant have simply been edited out.

Next, the Mediterranean world of the mid-19th century is made alluring in The Count of Monte Cristo. Though, yes, it is almost all taken up with the world of the wealthy and noble and very little of it deals with the lives of the majority, it still makes me wish to visit and see the south of France, sail to Italy and find intrigue in Paris. Though I find the Aubrey-Maturin novels endlessly enjoyable, I'm not sure I'd really want to experience the damp, crowded environs of a ship at sea for several years, but some of the time spent ashore in this similar period of history would be fun. Mostly mundane, again, but further removed in time.

The worlds of Narnia and Prydain, though peopled with fantastic creatures, magic and full of adventure seem to me still less exotic than the far future Earth conceived in John C. Wright's Golden Age trilogy. He writes hard SF and scorns concepts that flaunt the laws of physics (no FTL space travel), but the things he imagines we will be able to do millennia from now boggle the mind in the way the best fantasy does.

Speaking of which, the world of Middle Earth is the best fantasy setting there is, mostly because it is so well-realised in so many ways. It is peopled with realistic characters despite their fantastic nature and the varied environs are alluring in their own ways. The timeless forests of Lothlorien, the endless plains of Rohan, the white city of Minas Tirith, the cosy town of Hobbiton, the wild empty moors of Arnor. Other works have similar scope, but none I have encountered has caused each part to seem so real.