The Routledge Companion to Imaginary Worlds

Mark Wolf, Mark J.P. Wolf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317268284
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Science Fiction
• Index: Literature

This companion provides a definitive and cutting-edge guide to the study of imaginary and virtual worlds across a range of media, including literature, television, film, and games. From the Star Trek universe, Thomas More's classic Utopia, and J. R. R. Tolkien's Arda, to elaborate, user-created game worlds like Minecraft, contributors present interdisciplinary perspectives on authorship, world structure/design, and narrative. The Routledge Companion to Imaginary Worlds offers new approaches to imaginary worlds as an art form and cultural phenomenon, explorations of the technical and creative dimensions of world-building, and studies of specific worlds and worldbuilders.

Part 1

CONTENT AND STORY

1

LOCATIONS AND BORDERS

Gerard Hynes

The number of imaginary worlds that could potentially be created is nearly infinite. Given how many imagined worlds have gone unrecorded, being either orally transmitted or private to an individual in the first place, they are also uncountable. The admittedly selective timeline in Mark J. P. Wolf’s Building Imaginary Worlds (2012) lists more than 1,400 worlds and since then dozens more have been created, from Anne Leckie’s Radch Empire and Ken Liu’s Dara to the universe of Jupiter Ascending (2015) and the eighteen quintillion planets of No Man’s Sky (2016). Imaginary locations have been the vehicles of philosophical, anthropological, political (both utopian and dystopian), historical, and linguistic speculation for thousands of years. Many of these worlds are defined as much by specific locations—the Shire, the Battlestar Galactica, Silent Hill—as by the characters or narratives that populate and shape them.

Dictionaries of imaginary places are notable for their inherent eclecticism. Pierre Versins’s Encyclopédie de l’utopie, des voyages extraordinaires et de la science-fiction (1972) includes the world of the Epic of Gilgamesh as well as Poul Anderson’s history of the future, the Psychotechnic League. J. B. Post’s Atlas of Fantasy (1973; rev. ed. 1979) features the Azores of late-­medieval geographic speculation and Matthäus Seuter’s didactic map Mappa Geographiae Naturalis (1730) alongside Edgar Rice Burrough’s Barsoom and Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique. Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi’s Dictionary of Imaginary Places (1980; rev. ed. 1999) contains over 1,200 entries, from Sir Thomas Bulfinch’s Abaton in the Scottish Highlands to Sylvia Townsend Warner’s elven Zuy, under the restriction that they be places a traveler could “theoretically” visit, thus excluding metaphysical realms, planets, and future societies, as well as overlaid worlds such as Thomas Hardy’s Wessex.

Brian Stableford’s Dictionary of Science Fiction Places (1999) links science-fictional locations according to thematic concerns, though it restricts itself to worlds created in science fiction literature rather than film or other media. Umberto Eco’s Book of Legendary Lands (2013) differentiates itself by focusing on lands that were once believed (at least by some) to have existed but have subsequently been recategorized as imaginary: Eden and Hyperborea, Cockaigne and the hollow Earth. The thousands of locations described in these works are heterogeneous in their scale, temporal extent, and connection to the Primary World of everyday experience, yet could all be considered secondary worlds (for the terminology of ‘Primary World’ versus ‘secondary worlds’ see Tolkien, 2008, pp. 59–64; and Wolf, 2012, pp. 25–26).

“World” is as much an experiential as a spatial term, defined by culture, customs, and events as well as by space and place. For this reason, Wolf (2012) defines an imaginary world as “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” (Wolf, p. 377). If imaginary worlds are defined as experiential realms, they may be “as large as a universe, or as small as an isolated town” (Wolf, p. 377). Secondary worlds may exist within the Primary World, in the case of fictional towns such as Night Vale in Welcome to Night Vale (2012–present) and Stephen King’s Castle Rock, or “lost worlds” located on islands, mountain ranges, or beneath the earth. Conversely, the secondary world may encompass the Primary World, such as the universes depicted in the future histories of the television series Firefly (2002), the novel Dune (1965), and the game EVE Online (2003–present).

Secondary worlds may be placed on a spectrum of “secondariness,” depending on how detached they are from the Primary World, how different their world defaults are, and how thoroughly their details have been developed (Wolf, 2012, pp. 26–27). Westeros and Tatooine are more secondary than the fictional towns of Derry, Salem’s Lot, and Castle Rock, all located in the Primary-World Maine. For a world to be considered secondary it must have a distinct border, or some sort of buffer zone, dividing it from the Primary World. This may be physical distance, compounded by hostile terrain, as in the cases of El Dorado or Robinson Crusoe’s island. Expanses of time as well as space can also separate the imaginary world, with both the Star Trek universe and Terry Brook’s Four Lands ostensibly set in the future of the Primary World. (For portals between worlds see Jennifer Harwood-Smith’s chapter in this ­volume.)

Locations or Worlds?

Each imaginary world is itself a locus but is also constructed from smaller, discrete loci, defined by their own borders and boundaries. Transnarrative characters, such as King Arthur or Robin Hood, may imply a world beyond each individual narrative, but unless the world is concretized with specific locations the diegetic world will not become a fully developed secondary world. Without Avalon and Camelot, the Arthurian cycles occur in a fictionalized Primary World. Only one location needs to be explored in detail, the rest of the world can be extrapolated or represented through visual or verbal paratexts.

Just as characters may connect worlds, when locations from one story appear in another they connect the two, forming a shared narrative world. Journeys between locations, whether these locations appear in multiple texts or within a single narrative, establish that they exist in the same diegetic world. The Star Wars and Star Trek universes, for example, are defined not by any single location but by a vast system of overlapping locations, characters, and stories in various media. Individual locations may also function as secondary worlds in their own right, such as Metropolis and Gotham City, or the fictional countries of Vlatava and Zandia. However, in their aggregate, they form a larger fictional world, in this case the DC Universe.

A location may still be considered part of the Primary World if the level of difference from the Primary World is sufficiently small. These are what Wolf (2012) calls overlaid worlds: a “fictional diegesis in which an existing, Primary World location is used, with fictional characters and objects appearing in it, but without enough invention to isolate it from the Primary World into its own separate secondary world” (Wolf, p. 379). An example would be New York City as it exists in the Marvel Universe where the cityscape, culture, language, and politics are largely unchanged by the activities of super villains and the presence of the Baxter Building and Avengers Tower. Though events such as the battle of New York in the Marvel Cinematic Universe have altered the cityscape as much as major Primary World events like 9/11, the fundamental characteristics of the city remain unchanged.

Whether or not the New York City of Alan Moore’s Watchmen (1986), where Richard Nixon is still president in 1985 and America has won the Vietnam War, can be considered a secondary world could be debated, though its changed history and geopolitical context would argue for its inclusion. The dystopian, future Los Angeles of Blade Runner (1982) and the Japanese-occupied San Francisco of Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962) could also be compared. Despite being Primary World locations, they are arguably sufficiently defamiliarized and altered to count as secondary worlds.

Borders between Worlds

For most of recorded literary history, the majority of imaginary worlds have been connected to the Primary World. We can, however, see a development in the last two centuries whereby imaginary world-building has increasingly moved from creating secondary worlds located in the Primary World to generating worlds further and further detached from it. Modern imaginary worlds are likely to be, or take place in, fully independent universes, with some inverting their relationship with the Primary World and including it as one small part of their larger universe.

Early imaginary worlds, often created for mythical, philosophical, or satirical purposes, were connected to the Primary World in order to comment upon it. Plato’s Atlantis is located beyond the pillars of Heracles, and so in the Atlantic Ocean, while his ideal republic, Kallipolis, should it ever be built, would also be located in the Primary World. Though Dante’s Commedia would eventually reach the heavenly Empyrean, both Hell and Mount Purgatory are solidly connected to the Primary World, located beneath Jerusalem and in the southern hemisphere respectively, and constantly refer to the history and politics of Dante’s society. Sir Thomas More’s Utopia is located off the coast of South America and the islands of Gulliver’s Travels (1726) are ostensibly near Sumatra, North America, Japan, and Australia. The remoteness and inaccessibility of these largely unexplored locations isolate and detach them from the known Primary World, yet they remain, just about, within the scope of the cartographical domain of their respective periods. It may be significant that islands were the most popular locations for imaginary worlds before the twentieth century. As Ricardo Padrón (2007) puts it:

An island is clearly bounded and set off from the rest of the world. It has no terra incognita, no feisty neighbours, no disputable borders, no porous frontiers. Unlike a continent, with its vast spaces, islands can be taken in at a glance, giving us the impression that we can know them completely.

(Padrón, p. 265)

They, like planets, are surrounded by uncharted regions and do not need to accommodate to pre-existing borders (see Wolf, 2012, p. 159).

A significant breakthrough occurred in the nineteenth century when world-builders first ceased to fit their worlds, however distantly, into the Primary World. E. A. Abbott’s Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884) was the first work to present a secondary world totally detached from the Primary World in terms of both location and fundamental physical defaults. The novella takes place in a two-dimensional universe populated by geometric figures. The protagonist, A. Square, guides readers through the nature of Flatland and the practicalities of living there, including the gender and class distinctions encoded into the number of sides a Flatlander may have. A. Square has a vision of Lineland, a one-dimensional world, and is visited by a three-dimensional being, a Sphere, from Spaceland, who shows him both the possibilities of three-dimensional existence and the solipsism of Pointland, “the Abyss of No Dimensions” (Abbott, p. 91). Here, Abbott was innovative in creating a series of interrelated secondary worlds that form their own multiverse without attempting any connection, save satirical, to the Primary World.

William Morris’s The Story of the Glittering Plain (1890) and The Wood Beyond the World (1894) likewise severed the link with the Primary World, generating the first medievalist fantasy worlds that purport to exist on their own terms. Unlike Morris’s earlier News from Nowhere (1890), set in England in a neo-medieval future, neither The Story of the Glittering Plain nor The Wood Beyond the World is ever connected with any Primary World location. The former sees Hallblithe of the House of the Raven attempt to rescue his betrothed from pirates and end up in the utopian Land of Living Men. In the latter, Golden Walter sets out on a trading expedition and, after escaping from an enchantress and striking up a relationship with an unnamed Maid, becomes king of the city of Stark-wall. Despite the English nomenclature—the stories begin respectively in the fictional villages of Cleveland by the Sea and Langton upon Holm—and the deliberately archaized English used throughout, England is never mentioned in the novels. Morris never names the worlds in which these events take place, but even if they are set in a fictional historical period their fantastical elements separate them from the Primary World as surely as Tolkien’s Middle-earth.

This combination of a medievalist world and supernatural elements established a pattern for fantasy world-building, later followed by Tolkien and his innumerable imitators. But the comparison with Tolkien brings up certain complications. On the one hand, Tolkien followed Morris in creating, or sub-creating, to use his preferred term, a fully independent secondary world (one that has served as the model for countless later fantasists and that remains unusual among single-authored imaginary worlds for the degree and quality of its world-building). On the other hand, he insisted that Arda, the planet containing Middle-earth, was the Primary World in a fictional historical period (Carpenter, 1995, p. 220, p. 239, p. 283, p. 376), reflecting the ambiguity of Morris’s relationship with the Primary World. Morris and Tolkien have both exerted contradictory impulses on subsequent fantasy world-building, equally inspiring independent secondary worlds and slightly mythologized versions of Northern Europe in the early Middle Ages.

L. Frank Baum’s Oz equally marks a transition in the treatment of the connection between Primary and secondary world. It was the first major series to be linked by world rather than by main character and remains the first transmedial world, appearing on stage, in film, and in cartoon strips as well as in the Oz books (Wolf, 2012, p. 109, pp. 117–119). In the early instalments of the series, Dorothy must travel from Kansas to Oz, while in The Emerald City of Oz (1910) she moves there permanently. She is joined in later volumes by native protagonists who have no connection to the Primary World. This reflects t...