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I saw a picture a while back, and for the life of me I can’t find it again. To paraphrase the joke, it’s got three girls all holding up their favorite books.
Girl 1: My favorite series is Harry Potter, and I’d love to go to Hogwarts!
Girl 2: My favorite series is Percy Jackson, and I wish I could go to Camp Half-Blood!
Girl 3: My favorite series is The Hunger Games, and I… I’m good.
As a kid, the bulk of my daydreaming involved jaunting off to one fictional world or another. Some of them, on reflection, might not have actually been that fun to live in. Oops.
What fictional settings did you fantasize about as a kid? Which ones would you still go to “like a shot,” as Peter S. Beagle (haha, I got the name right this time) once said of Middle-Earth? What fictional settings do you love reading about, but wouldn’t live in if they paid you?
For the writers among us, do you prefer creating worlds for your readers to daydream about visiting, or worlds to make them glad they don’t have to live there?
~ Kristycat
11 comments:
I always wanted the tourist package to Middle Earth, same with the Discworld. A nice package of a quick trip to the The Shades and a minor robbery/assault to give you a flavour of the Thieves Guild. Also a tour of the Assasins Guild would be an extra treat. You could have such fun and it would be such a money-spinner (until some idiot flaunted the rules and got himself/herself killed.)
Just in case you'd still like to find the book, it's probably Daughter of the Mountains by Louise Rankin, illustrated by Kurt Wiese. Written in 1948. "In the last days of the British Empire, a Tibetan girl named Momo gets a pet she's always dreamed of - a rare red-gold Lhasa terrier named Pempa. The dog is stolen by a caravan because a rich (kindly) British woman in Calcutta has requested one. Momo rushes straight after the caravan and all the way to Calcutta in search of her dog. Lots of cultural detail, such as how to greet another person in Tibet (stick out your tongue) and Momo's amazement when meeting foreign people who carry packs rather than having pack-mules to do it for them."
Ooh, another Syber-Squad fan!
Nothing much to add here...
Ooh, another Syber-Squad fan!
Nothing much to add here...
I liked Syber-Squad too. Tim Curry got to chew the scenery, which in my opinion he's always at his best doing. :) Had the best Christmas episode out of any of those shows of the time period, too...
I remember taking the Oath in the hope that it would cause Something to Happen. Nothing did, that I ever noticed, which in retrospect I think was probably just as well.
I considered it, but couldn't think of a way to deal with my parents. They would neither allow it nor fail to notice: when I was Nita's age, I could not simply vanish into the city for a few hours and not have hell to pay. (I was fifteen or sixteen before I could even vanish into the village.) Plus there's the whole awfully-dangerous thing.
I think if I were going to live in the Young Wizards 'verse, I would want to live on one of those worlds where the existence of wizardry is well-known and they broadcast television in the Speech, but probably not be a wizard myself. It seems like a nice compromise.
Yes, it was RPM. RPM wasn't the GAG series, it was actually one of the most dark and serious PR series to date. Maybe THE darkest. It was also the series' saving grace after three seasons of absolute stinkers. *Bruce Kalish, I hope you're proud of yourself.* But, in part because they got Judd Lynn, one of the best EPs the show has had, back for it, it is, as Will said, very aware of its history and tropes. It manages to do Lampshade Hanging without ever crossing the line into outright parody.
Tanaya 7: Red's the perfect one. Black's the brooding bad boy. Green's the clown. Yellow... well she's the girl. So what does that make you?
Flynn: I'm Scottish! -- "Ranger Blue."
Yes, it was RPM. RPM wasn't the GAG series, it was actually one of the most dark and serious PR series to date. Maybe THE darkest. It was also the series' saving grace after three seasons of absolute stinkers. *Bruce Kalish, I hope you're proud of yourself.* But, in part because they got Judd Lynn, one of the best EPs the show has had, back for it, it is, as Will said, very aware of its history and tropes. It manages to do Lampshade Hanging without ever crossing the line into outright parody.
Tanaya 7: Red's the perfect one. Black's the brooding bad boy. Green's the clown. Yellow... well she's the girl. So what does that make you?
Flynn: I'm Scottish! -- "Ranger Blue."
CN: First Nations stereotypes
I was unfortunate enough to grow up with a library full of nothing more than Babysitters Club, Nancy Drew and ... Mandy? Or something? It was an inspiration Christian series about an orphan girl and her Nobel Savage Guardian. In any case, not really any worlds or situations I wanted to spend much time in.
In grade 5 I read Jurrasic Park (stealth borrowed from my mother's bookshelf) and my literary world exploded. From there I went into Dune and then David Eddings' books, but it wasn't until I found Anne McCaffrey that I actually found a book world I wanted to go to (although now, not so much. problematic gender issues!) I spent a year or so on Pern, then in Valdemar (M. Lackey) and then settled into Tamora Pierce's worlds for the rest of my childhood.
Oh! I did read a book around grade 2 about a young girl in Tibet who goes on a journey to get back her dog that was kidnapped. I have no idea what it was called but I loved it dearly. I spent a year or so convinced that I would move to Tibet when I grew up.
CN: First Nations stereotypes
I was unfortunate enough to grow up with a library full of nothing more than Babysitters Club, Nancy Drew and ... Mandy? Or something? It was an inspiration Christian series about an orphan girl and her Nobel Savage Guardian. In any case, not really any worlds or situations I wanted to spend much time in.
In grade 5 I read Jurrasic Park (stealth borrowed from my mother's bookshelf) and my literary world exploded. From there I went into Dune and then David Eddings' books, but it wasn't until I found Anne McCaffrey that I actually found a book world I wanted to go to (although now, not so much. problematic gender issues!) I spent a year or so on Pern, then in Valdemar (M. Lackey) and then settled into Tamora Pierce's worlds for the rest of my childhood.
Oh! I did read a book around grade 2 about a young girl in Tibet who goes on a journey to get back her dog that was kidnapped. I have no idea what it was called but I loved it dearly. I spent a year or so convinced that I would move to Tibet when I grew up.
When I was a teen, I wanted to be one of Diane Duane's wizards; I remember taking the Oath in the hope that it would cause Something to Happen. Nothing did, that I ever noticed, which in retrospect I think was probably just as well.
My standard answer to the question now is the universe of Janet Kagan's novel Hellspark, partly because it genuinely seems like a nice place to live in (with, as Will said of his choice, room for adventures for them as wants them), and partly because the protagonist of the novel is an expert linguist with a talent for bridging the gap with aliens who speak previously-unknown tongues, so it won't matter so much when it turns out that SF has been lying to us all along and people in the distant future don't speak English.
(In general, since I read a lot of SF and pre-Industrial fantasy, the whole prospect of living in fictional worlds got a lot less appealing when I started worrying about whether I'd be able to speak the language, or know how to go to the toilet, or what would happen if I was wearing my contact lenses instead of my glasses at the time. At least I'm no longer taking the drug that you needed to stop taking, when you stopped taking it, in carefully graduated increments; being whisked off to another dimension without my pills would have been really unpleasant, regardless of where it was.)
On the subject of writers creating unpleasant worlds: there's a short story I can never remember the title or author of, about an novelist who gets very drunk and tells his neighbour about the time he was mysteriously zapped into his own fictional world, which he'd deliberately created with a whole lot of nasty world-building details for extra drama. The punchline is that the neighbour asks him how he got back, and he says, "Back? No, you don't get it. I'm still here."
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