Fantasy & Sci-fi rock my world (repost)

This post was originally written as a guest post over on minology.co.uk.

I watch a lot of TV. I’m a big fan of nerd dramas: Arrow, Agents of Shield, Smallville, etc. I love fantasy worlds, where there’s a universe created for the story. Maybe other stories are part of the universe, sometimes they cross over.

In Agents of Shield there was a direct reference to incidents that occurred in the second Thor movie and I had myself a minor geekgasm.

I’ve been a fan of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels for many years and I love that characters drop in to each other’s novels all the time, the settings are the same and over the years I’ve managed to conjure up my own mental image of what Ankh Morpork looks like, the state of the Mended Drum and how the Librarian keeps order up at the Unseen University.

Fantasy worlds are great because you have so much freedom to create things that suit your story and no one can argue with it.

I was watching 24: Live Another Day and after living in London for several years I could see the anomalies of distance – there’s no way someone’s getting to Camden in 10 minutes, not in London traffic – but in a fantasy world, there’s no possibility of such criticism because no one can get out a map and check.

I love fantasy because, isn’t that what we want from the arts? The suspension of reality? To lose ourselves in a little bit of fiction?

Of course the downside of made-up worlds is that it can take a little while to get your head around where things are. You can’t possibly contextualise where the castle is in relation to the hero’s little cottage, or where the local pub is in relation to the hospital (in places like Ankh Morpork those two really should be close together).

For me, when I first read Minology, that stood out. Yes The Will is a new world, the Min are a new race. But the human body is as familiar to me as, well, the back of my hand.

The towns have new names but they’re cleverly chosen to be representative of the body parts in which they’re located and it’s easy enough to visualise where the Luglands is in relation to the Heartlands.

It’s a new world that is instantly memorable and recognisable. I look forward to reading more.

Fantasy & Sci-fi rock my world (repost)