36 Days of Fictional Locations
“The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.”
Roald Dahl, Matilda
For 36 Days of type 2019, I chose fictional locations as my theme.
The focus on reading today has become quite one-dimensional. People get caught up in nonfiction — self-help books, business books, books on sales and health and psychology and relationships. These are all valid books to spend your time reading — they’re filled with information that can help better you in your career and your life — but it’s a mistake to leave fiction in the dust.
Fiction is a forgotten gem, an untapped well of knowledge and information. It allows you to see the world in a different light. When you read fiction, you’re looking at the world through someone else’s eyes. It could be argued that this is true of all writing — or even all forms of communication — and this argument would be true, but fiction does something unique that all other forms cannot. It takes us inside — inside the mind and the perspective of the character. You’re seeing a world defined on their terms: their metaphors used to describe their surroundings, their context for events, their perspective on happenings and relationships.
A is for Azkaban, the Wizarding Prison from the Harry Potter universe. Heavily guarded by creatures called Dementors, only approximately ten people have managed to break out of it.
There's a town I know where the hipsters go
They call it Bedrock
Twitch twitch
Bedrock (population 2500) is home to the Flintstones, the Rubbles and multiple other stone age families! It was the first animated TV series to be broadcast.
The show’s setting, though, is perhaps its most defining feature; set in a universe where cavemen coexist with dinosaurs and prehistoric mammals, The Flintstones’ most unique definer is that the families can have modern sitcom- like comic situations in a world where everything is made of rock and wood and powered by animals or the characters’ own two feet.
This anachronism- taking something out of its place in time for rhetorical effect- is crucial to the show’s popularity; never before had a primetime sitcom done something so radical as to put a modern family with modern problems in a world where modern solutions did not exist.
C takes you to none other than Crunchem Hall Primary School that Matilda attended. Even though she started late as compared to the other children she was academically much superior. Her love for fiction and stories enables her to empathise with all the warm people she comes across.
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This was my favourite book as a child because it was one of the first stories I read with a female protagonist who saves the day herself! .
D is for Doru Araeba, the home of the dragons and their riders before their fall. It is also the place where (years later) Eragon and Sapphira find unhatched dragon eggs
Follow the yellow brick road to reach Emerald City where the wizard of Oz lives!
It is believed that Baum was partly inspired by the White City in the World Columbian Exposition of 1893, which he visited frequently, having moved to Chicago for the event.
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The sixth book in the series (The Emerald City of Oz) describes the city as having exactly 9654 buildings and 57318 citizens!
F is for the floating market from London Below (you can read about it in #neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, illustrations by Chris Riddell)
This bazaar assembles at irregular intervals, but always at night. All kinds of goods are traded here, as witnessed by the protagonist Richard Mayhew, and the valid currency in the market is anything that the trader may place value in.
The market is always held in a public place, eg. Westminster Abbey, the battleship Belfast anchored on the Thames, or even inside Harrods! Knowing where the next market will be is a commodity in itself!
G is for Gilead, the authoritarian, theocratic regime that takes over USA in the Handmaid's tale.
The residents of Gilead are conform to a strict class system and hierarchy, with everyone being expected to fulfil certain roles. Only the men have access to education and can hold political positions.
Pictured here are the handmaids, who must wear red to depict the colour of blood, and therefore life. They are perhaps the most important, yet also the most oppressed class of women in Gilead.
This has been adapted into a TV series as well, and is extremely relate-able today even though it was written in 1985
H is for Halloween Town, whose the scenery and inhabitants are based on imagery closely associated with Halloween, including skeletons, ghouls, monsters, black cats etc. Their leader is Jack Skellington, the pumpkin king who wants to take over Christmas because he's bored of Halloween.
Contrary to human belief, most of the residents of this town aren't evil. They only scare people because it's their job to do so!
I is for Isengard, a large fortress in Middle Earth. The tower pictured here (Orthanc) is one of the two titular towers in 'The Two Towers'.
To it's north is Methedras, the southernmost peak of the Misty Mountains, that form its Northern border. The other three sides are surrounded by a large wall known as the Ring of Isengard.
J for Jurassic Park, the main setting for the novel (and film) of the same name.
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It is a cautionary tale about genetic engineering, centered on a disastrous attempt to create a theme park of cloned dinosaurs.
Fiction doesn’t just exist in the form of text and films, but also as graphic novels!
Extracted from the Marvel comics’ Doctor Strange series, K is for Kamar Taj, an isolated community in the Himalayas where Doctor Stephen Strange trains under the Ancient One.
Its library has the most comprehensive collection of arcane lore on the planet, and there's a planning room that has three doors that connect to sanctums in New York, London and Hong Kong
L is for Lower Tadfield, home to the Antichrist (aka Adam Young) and The Them (his friends Pepper, Wensleydale, Brian and Dog) in the Good Omens universe.
It is a quintessential English village with an optimal microclimate (the kind that you could set your calendar by)
The area seems remarkably resistant to change, with anyone inclined to change the village abruptly changing their mind, opting to move instead to Bali, or get in touch with their inner cleric.
Towards the end however, different creatures (such as peaceful green alien traffic police) begin to appear around the countryside as a result of Adam's powers of belief(which are measured in kiloEverests)
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This book is the newest addition to my favourite-books-I-will-recommend-to-everybody-list!
M is for Mama Odie's, the house deep in the bayou, where Tiana goes to figure out how to turn back human from a frog. The (seemingly) kooky old woman lives in a tree that's lit up by fireflies. She also uses a bathtub as a cauldron
I've finally put the research @pranets and I did for our production design project in college to some use 😁 (so what if it only took nine years?)
N is for Narnia, the primary setting in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first and most famous part of the Chronicles of Narnia.
The wardrobe is one of the ways for people from our world to get to Narnia (as the four Pevensie children discover) situated in the house of professior Digory Kirke.
It is ruled by the White Witch at the start of the story (a descendant of Adam's first wife Lilith) who keeps the land in a state of perpetual winter.
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C. S. Lewis wrote the book for his goddaughter Lucy (who also lends her name to the youngest of the Pevensie children)
Fly into Orbit City with the Jetsons!
All the buildings here stand tall in the sky thanks to the long columns they're perched on, and the residents have names relating to space or space travel.
It was made as a counterpart to the Flintstones, keeping kids (and adults) glued to their TV sets for hours since the 60's as it showed a version of the future.
As an adult you've got to wonder though... Where are they getting all the fuel for the planes?!
P is for Pizza Planet!
This space themed restaurant has featured in almost every Pixar film to date, making its first appearance in Toy Story.
The claw machine is one of the games there where people can win (or rescue, as believed by the aliens) an alien toy. Buzz Lightyear ends up in this machine too while trying to make his way back to space
Q is for Qarth, the great trading city on the southern coast of Essos.
Daeneyrs Targaryen almost loses her dragons here, but manages to rescue them from the Undying Ones in the House of the Undying. It is here that she witnesses a series of prophecies (that become clearer only once you read the book, the TV show makes a mess of it... So what are you waiting for?!)
Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, this was the one I picked for R.
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Rick's Café Americian, an establishment run by Rick Blaine in 1941, attracts a varied clientele, including Vichy French and German officials, refugees desperate to reach the still neutral USA, and those who prey on them.
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The movie has such a huge fan following now, that an actual replica of the set has been created in Casablanca!
S is for Smallville, the town where Kal El/ Clark Kent lives before moving to Metropolis. This is where he struggles with his emerging superpowers. Complicating matters is the presence of Kryptonite throughout Smallville, which causes strange mutations in locals and cripples Clark.
T is for Tatooine, the desert planet in the Galaxy.
It is a remote, desolate world orbiting a pair of binary stars, Tatoo I and Tatoo II. Though its proximity to the suns makes life difficult, it is located near key hyperspace routes, making it a smuggler and gangster haven. Annual sandstorms wipe out landmarks and make nomadic life dangerous, with the planet's population clustered into distinct settlements.
It is home to Luke Skywalker (and also his father Anakin)
U is for the Umbrella Academy. It is the home of Sir Regiland Hargreeves, who adopts seven children who are inexplicably born to women who had shown no signs of pregnancy the day before.
Six of those children form the umbrella academy, fighting crime as child superheroes
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I'm dying to get my hands on the graphic novels (hint hint to everyone reading this) after watching the Netflix show!
V is for Villa Villekulla, home to Pippi Longstocking (full name Pippilota Delicatessa Windowshade Mackrelmint Ephrahim's Daughter Longstocking). This superhumanely strong red head lives there with her monkey and her horse.
Her chest of gold coins enables her to maintain an independent lifestyle without her parents. Despite attempts from the village authorities to get her to conform to cultural expectations of what a child's life should be, Pippi is happily lives free from social conventions.
W is for Willy Wonka's chocolate factory
A place that's highly secretive (due to a previous leak in trade secrets) that finally opens its gates to five children (and five grown ups) who win golden tickets from the Wonka bars that they buy. The gates also exist in our world, opening into the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre located in Great Missenden, a short train ride away from London.
This story by Roald Dahl has been adapted into many formats since its release, with each version omitting a bit of the inappropriateness the original contained.
In the first edition of the book way back in the 1970's, the oompa loompas were "a tribe of black pygmies who had been imported by Mr. Willy Wonka from the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had ever been before".
X is for the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters from the X men universe.
This was Charles Xaviers private estate in Westchester County, New York, which he decided to convert to the base operations and training site for the X Men. It also houses the cerebro, which Professor Xavier uses to search for other mutants
The motto of the school is 'Mutatis Mutandis', a Medieval Latin phrase meaning "having changed what needs to be changed"
Yggdrasil is an immense mythical tree that plays a central role in Norse cosmology, where it connects the Nine Worlds. .
Yggdrasil is an immense ash tree that is center to the cosmos and considered very holy. The gods go to Yggdrasil daily to assemble at their things, traditional governing assemblies. The branches of Yggdrasil extend far into the heavens, and the tree is supported by three roots that extend far away into other locations; one to the well Urðarbrunnr in the heavens, one to the spring Hvergelmir, and another to the well Mímisbrunnr. Creatures live within Yggdrasil, including the dragon Níðhöggr, an unnamed eagle, and the stags Dáinn, Dvalinn, Duneyrr and Duraþrór
Z is for the kingdom of Zubrowka. Home to the Grand Budapest Hotel, Zubrowka was named after a Polish beer.
The kingdom even has its own website, giving you a crash course in the cultural, political, artistic and culinary evolution of the fictional land.
The website highlights images of the 'captivating wildlife' and 'age-old institutions', including a hub for the Zubrowka film industry which employs 74% of Zubrowkan citizens when everyone's not celebrating 'Ziegenfest', an annual holiday to celebrate the traditional friendship between man and goat!
0 is for Null Island, the fictional place created by a digital mapping error
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When addresses are added to a map, a program called a geocoder translates the physical address into its geographic coordinates, which allows the location to be easily mapped. But sometimes due to human typos, bad data or even bugs in the geocoder itself, the geocoding program fails to run correctly and the output of the program becomes “0,0”—or no information. You might have come across this bug more often than you realize, for example, while taking a photo with your smartphone camera. If the camera software has the geo-tagging feature disabled, it will tag the photo with null values for both latitude and longitude.
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Trouble begins when another program tries to read this data. A properly designed software will identify the values as invalid and ignore them, but badly written ones will map them to this lonely spot hundreds of miles from the shores of Africa. Because there are scores of badly written software using map data, an unbelievably large number of addresses get mapped to this fictional place called “Null Island” out in the Atlantic. The term was coined by the authors of 'Natural Earth' in 2011, describing it as a "one square meter island". Since then, the Republic of Null Island has a website, a flag and a map
1 represents 17, Cherry Tree Lane, the home of the Banks family.
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It's where Mary Poppins is employed as a Nanny (not once but twice!)
The planetary body 2008 NQ17 that's discovered by Raj in the Big Bang Theory.
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The trains-Neptunian object is located beyond the Kuiper belt. Officially designated 2008 NQ17, Raj had nicknamed the body "Planet Bollywood"
3 is for 33, Himmel Street, in the town of Molching, on the outskirts of Munich, Germany. .
It is the home of Rosa and Hans Hubermann, the adoptive parents of Liesel Meminger (aka the book thief). They take her in during the second world War.
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The word himmel translates to heaven in German, which is ironic because it leads to the Dachau concentration camp.
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It's a wonderful book (if you haven't already read it) that's narrated by death.
42, Wallaby Way, Sydney is an address that you'll probably curse me for putting back into your head because it took you ages to forget it the first time around!
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From the Finding Nemo universe, it's where P. Sherman keeps Nemo after kidnapping (fishnapping?) him from the reef. Nemo is in a fish tank with a bunch of other fish, known as the Tank Gang. They accept Nemo as one of them, giving him the nickname 'Sharkbait' after he completes his initiation on Mt. Wannahockaloogie
Penthesilea, from Invisible cities represents 5.
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"Penthesilea is different. You advance for hours and it is not clear to you whether you are already in the city's midst or still outside it. If you ask the people you meet, "Where is Penthesilea?" they make a broad gesture which may mean "Here" or else "Farther on", or "All around you," or even "In the opposite direction."
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"I mean the city," you ask, insistently.
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"We come here every morning to work," someone answers, while others say, "We come back here at night to sleep."
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"But the city where people live?" you ask.
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"It must be that way," they say, and some raise their arms obliquely toward an aggregation of opaque polyhedrons on the horizon, while others indicate, behind you, the specter of other spires.
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"Then I've gone past it without realising it?"
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You have given up trying to understand whether, hidden in some sac or wrinkle of these dilapidated surroundings there exists a Penthesilea the visitor can recognize and remember, or whether Penthesilea is only the outskirts itself. The question that now begins to gnaw at your mind is more anguished: outside Penthesilea does an outside exist? Or, no matter how far you go from the city, will you only pass from one limbo to another, never managing to leave it?"
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Invisible Cities is an amazing book that I read it thanks to a book club I've joined recently where we read about cities each week.
District 6 of Panem, from the Hunger Games universe. It is one of the 13 districts of Panem, and its principal industry is transportation.
In The Hunger Games: Tribute Guide, it says that the people of District 6 dislike traveling, even though their industry is transportation.