The Routledge Companion To Imaginary Worlds

The Routledge Companion to
Imaginary Worlds
This companion provides a definitive and cutting-edge guide to the study of imaginary 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 a cultural phenomenon, explorations of
the technical and creative dimensions of world-building, and studies of specific worlds and
world-builders.
Contributors: Jessica Aldred, Lily Alexander, David Alff, João Araújo, George Carstocea,
Edward Castronova, Astrid Ensslin, Dimitra Fimi, Peter Fitting, Matthew Freeman, David
Glimp, Chris Hanson, Jennifer Harwood-Smith, Dan Hassler-Forest, Andrew Higgins, Matt
Hills, Gerard Hynes, Ian Kinane, Lars Konzack, Lori Landay, David Langdon, Irène Langlet,
Rodrigo Lessa, Mary McAuley, Edward O’Hare, Jeremiah Piña, William Proctor, Michael O.
Riley, Benjamin J. Robertson, Marie-Laure Ryan, Michael Saler, Peter Sands, Kevin Schut,
Anne M. Thell, Mark J. P. Wolf.
Mark J. P. Wolf is a Full Professor in the Communication Department at Concordia

University, Wisconsin, USA. His books include Abstracting Reality, The Medium of the Video
Game, Virtual Morality, The Video Game Explosion, Myst and Riven:The World of the D’ni, Before
the Crash, Encyclopedia of Video Games, Building Imaginary Worlds, The LEGO Studies Reader,
Video Games Around the World, and Revisiting Imaginary Worlds. He is also the founder of the
Imaginary Worlds book series. With Bernard Perron, he is the co-editor of The Video Game
Theory Reader 1 and 2, and the Landmark Video Game book series.
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The Routledge Companion
to Imaginary Worlds
Edited by
Mark J. P. W
olf
First published 2018
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2018 Taylor & Francis
The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial

material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted
in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or

registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Names: Wolf, Mark J. P., editor.
Title: The Routledge companion to imaginary worlds/
edited by Mark J. P. Wolf.
Description: New York: Routledge, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017018653 | ISBN 9781138638914 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Imaginary places in mass media. | Imaginary places
in literature. | Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) | Virtual reality. |
Imaginary places. | Imaginary societies.
Classification: LCC P96.G46 R68 2018 | DDC 700/.472–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017018653
ISBN: 978-1-138-63891-4 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-63752-5 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
A. M. D. G.
CONTENTS
About the Contributors xi

Preface xviii
Acknowledgments xx
PART 1
Content and Story 1
1 Locations and Borders 3

Gerard Hynes
2 The Hero’s Journey 11

Lily Alexander
3 Invented Languages 21
Dimitra Fimi and Andrew Higgins
4 Invented Cultures 30
Mark J. P. Wolf
5 Backstory 37
Benjamin J. Robertson
6 Narrative Fabric 45
Mark J. P. Wolf
7 Saviors 51
Mark J. P. Wolf
8 Portals 56
Jennifer Harwood-Smith
PART 2
Form and Structure 65
9 World Design 67
Mark J. P. Wolf
vii
CONTENTS
10 Ontological Rules 74
Marie-Laure Ryan
11 World Completeness 82
12 World Consistency 90
Rodrigo Lessa and João Araújo
13 Geography and Maps 98

Gerard Hynes
14 History and Timelines 107

15 Mythology 115
Lily Alexander
16 Philosophy 127
Edward Castronova
17 Transmediality 134
Lars Konzack
18 World-Building Tools 141

David Langdon
PART 3
Types of Worlds 151
19 Island Worlds 153

Ian Kinane
20 Underground Worlds 161

Peter Fitting
21 Planets 169
22 Utopias and Dystopias 177

Peter Sands
23 Uchronias, Alternate Histories, and Counterfactuals 184

George Carstocea
24 Virtual Worlds 192

Mark J. P. Wolf
viii
CONTENTS
25 Interactive and Participatory Worlds 198

Matthew Freeman
PART 4
Authorship and Reception 207
26 Subcreation 209
Lars Konzack
27 Authorship 216
Jessica Aldred
28 Reboots and Retroactive Continuity 224

William Proctor
29 Canonicity 236
William Proctor
30 Escapism 246
Lars Konzack
31 Genre 256
Lily Alexander
32 Fandom 274
Matt Hills
33 Worlds as Satire 281

George Carstocea
34 Worlds as Paracosms 291

JEREMIAH Piña
35 Worlds as Experiments 298

Edward Castronova
36 Worlds and Politics 305

Dan Hassler-Forest
PART 5
Worlds and World-Builders 315
37 More’s Utopia 317

David Glimp
38 Cavendish’s Blazing-World 325

Anne M.Thell
ix
CONTENTS
39 Swift’s World of Gulliver’s Travels 332

David Alff
40 Holberg’s Nazar and the Firmament 339

Peter Fitting
41 Paltock’s Sass Doorpt Swangeanti 344

Edward O’Hare
42 Defontenay’s Starian System 351

Irène Langlet
43 Baum’s Oz 359

Michael O. Riley
44 Wright’s Islandia 369

Michael Saler
45 Tolkien’s Arda 377

Dimitra Fimi
46 Roddenberry’s Star Trek Galaxy 385

Mary McAuley
47 Lucas’s Star Wars Galaxy 394

Chris Hanson
48 Linden Labs’s Second Life 402

Astrid Ensslin
49 Persson’s Minecraft 410

Lori Landay
50 Hello Game’s No Man’s Sky 425

Kevin Schut
Index 433
x
About the
Contributors
Jessica Aldred is a scholar, journalist, and producer whose research focuses upon transmedia
franchises, the convergence of cinema and digital games, and the challenges of translating
film characters into successful game characters. She holds a Ph.D. from Carleton University,
and her work has appeared in Games and Culture, Animation, The Oxford Handbook for Sound
and Image in Digital Media, The Globe and Mail, and The National Post and Canadian Business.
Jessica teaches courses about digital cinema, transmedia, and gender and gaming, and is the
co-founder of Rule of Three Productions, where she explores the intersections between
documentary, narrative cinema, and digital games. [jessica.aldred@gmail.com]
Lily Alexander Lily Alexander writes on media, narrative theory, and interactive storytelling.
She has taught in New York City since 2003 at NYU and CUNY. Her degrees include
drama, film, anthropology, and comparative cultural studies. World mythology and litera-
ture, global media and genre studies, fantasy and science fiction, as well as screenwriting are
among the subjects Lily has taught and wrote about; all fields are essential to fictional world-
building (FWB), her main scholarly interest. Her interactive work on the Journey Worlds in
Fellini, Antonioni and Tarkovsky was part of the collaborative experimental digital volume
Filmbuilding (Toronto, 2002). Her recent study “Fictional World-Building as Ritual, Drama,
and Medium” appeared in Revisiting Imaginary Worlds (Routledge, 2017). An award-win-
ing researcher, Lily Alexander authored the Fictional Worlds book series (2013–14), which
includes a print volume and interactive digital books (also on iTunes): The Genre System
& The Symbolic Journey; Dramatic Characters & Action; Tragedy & Mystery; and Comedy & The
Extraordinary. Alexander wrote for television and media forums, such as History Channel,
Cinema Journal, Cinema Art,The Russian Review, Journal of Narrative Theory, and henryjenkins.
org. Her essays also appeared in the media and scholarly collections in the United States,
Netherlands, Russia, Israel, Canada, France, and Italy. Her website is: storytellingonscreen.
com [contact@storytellingonscreen.com and lily.alexander@nyu.edu]
David Alff is an Assistant Professor of English at SUNY-Buffalo. He is the author of

The Wreckage of Intentions: Projects in British Culture 1660–1730 (University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2017). His work has appeared in Eighteenth-Century Studies and The Eighteenth
Century:Theory and Interpretation, and is forthcoming in PMLA. [dalff@buffalo.edu]
João Araújo is a Ph.D. candidate at the Graduate Program in Contemporary Communication

and Culture, in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. He holds a Master’s degree in Contemporary
xi
Ab o u t t h e C o n tr i b u t o r s
Communication and Culture and a Bachelor’s degree in Social Communications (with

an emphasis on Journalism). He currently holds a CAPES Foundation scholarship, and
is a member of the Brazilian research group A-Tevê—Laboratory of Television Analysis
(UFBA—Brazil) and the transnational collective Obitel—Ibero-American Observatory of
Television Fiction. [jesilvaraujo@gmail.com]
George Carstocea is a doctoral candidate in the Cinema and Media Studies program at the
University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. [gcarstocea@gmail.com]
Edward Castronova wonders why vanilla ice cream is even produced in a world that knows
chocolate. He is a Professor of Media at Indiana University and holds a Ph.D. in Economics
from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Professor Castronova specializes in the study
of games, technology, and society. Notable works include Wildcat Currency: The Virtual
Transformation of the Economy (Yale, 2014), Virtual Economies: Analysis and Design (with Vili
Lehdonvirta, MIT, 2014), Synthetic Worlds:The Business and Culture of On-line Games (Chicago,
2005), and Exodus to the Virtual World (Palgrave, 2007). Castronova was born as Edward Bird
in 1962, converted to Roman Catholicism in 1995, and took his wife’s name on marrying
in 2000. He has two sons, two God-children, and a beagle named Tilly. Castronova thinks
God is a game designer: Get to Heaven for the win. [castro@indiana.edu]
Astrid Ensslin is a Professor of Media and Digital Communication at the University of

Alberta, Canada. Among her key publications are Literary Gaming (2014), The Language of
Gaming (2011), Canonizing Hypertext (2007), and Creating Second Lives: Community, Identity
and Spatiality as Constructions of the Virtual (2011). [ensslin@ualberta.ca]
Dimitra Fimi is a Senior Lecturer in English at Cardiff Metropolitan University, U.K. She
is the author of Tolkien, Race and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008), which won the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies. She
has also published articles and essays in journals, edited collections, and reference works,
including The J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia (Routledge, 2006), Picturing Tolkien (MacFarland,
2011), Critical Insights: The Fantastic (Salem Press, 2013), Tolkien: The Forest and the City
(Four Courts, 2013), and A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien (Blackwell, 2014). With Andrew
Higgins, she co-edited J. R. R. Tolkien’s A Secret Vice (HarperCollins, 2006), a new critical
edition of Tolkien’s essay on invented languages, and her new monograph on Celtic Myth
in Contemporary Children’s Fantasy has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan. She
lectures on Tolkien, fantasy literature, science fiction, children’s literature, and medievalism
at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. For more information see her website at: www.
dimitrafimi.com/. [dfimi@cardiffmet.ac.uk]
Peter Fitting is an Emeritus Professor of French at the University of Toronto, Canada, and
the former Director of the Cinema Studies Program. Author of more than fifty articles on
science fiction, fantasy, and utopia—from critical analyses of the works of various science
fiction and utopian writers (from P. K. Dick to Marge Piercy); to theoretical examinations
of the reading effect in utopian fiction, the problem of the right-wing utopia, or gender
and reading; to overviews of cyberpunk, feminist utopias, and the turn from utopia in the
1990s, or the Golden Age and the foreclosure of utopian discourse in the 1950s; as well as
articles on science fiction and utopian film and architecture. He has also completed a criti-
cal anthology of subterranean world fiction. He has had a long-time commitment to the
xii
study of utopia through his work with the Society for Utopian Studies (for which he has
twice served as president). He is presently at work on a collection of his writing on science
fiction and utopia. [p.fitting@utoronto.ca]
Matthew Freeman is a Senior Lecturer in Media Communications at Bath Spa University,

U.K., and Director of its Media Convergence Research Centre. He is the author
of Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds
(Routledge, 2016), the author of Industrial Approaches to Media: A Methodological Gateway to
Industry Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and the co-author of Transmedia Archaeology:
Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines (Palgrave Pivot,
2014). His research examines cultures of production across the borders of media and history,
and he has also published in journals including The International Journal of Cultural Studies,
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and International Journal of Communication.
[m.freeman@bathspa.ac.uk]
David Glimp is an Associate Professor in the Department of English, University of Colorado

Boulder. He is the author of Increase and Multiply: Governing Cultural Reproduction in Early
Modern England (Minnesota, 2003), and co-editor of two volumes: with Michelle Warren,
Arts of Calculation: Quantifying Thought in Early Modern Europe (Palgrave, 2004); and with
Russ Castronovo, After Critique?, a special issue of ELN (Winter 2014). [david.glimp@
colorado.edu]
Chris Hanson is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Syracuse University,

where he teaches courses in game studies, digital media, television, and film. His manu-
script Game Time: Understanding Temporality in Video Games is under contract with Indiana
University Press, and he is currently working on a book project on video game designer
Roberta Williams. His work has appeared in the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Film
Quarterly, the Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies (2014), and LEGO Studies:
Examining the Building Blocks of a Transmedial Phenomenon (2014). [cphanson@syr.edu]
Jennifer Harwood-Smith has a Ph.D. from Trinity College Dublin, and is researching

world-building in science fiction. She has contributed two chapters to Battlestar Galactica:
Mission Accomplished or Mission Frakked Up?, “I Frak,Therefore I Am” and “Dreamers in the
Night.” She has also co-authored “‘Doing it in style’: The Narrative Rules of Time Travel
in the Back to the Future Trilogy” with Frank Ludlow, published in The Worlds of Back to the
Future: Critical Essays on the Films. Her essay “Fractured Cities: The Twinning of Tolkien’s
Minas Tirith and Minas Morgul with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis” has been published in J.R.R.
Tolkien: The Forest and the City. She is the 2006 winner of the James White Award and has
published fiction in Interzone and with Ether Books. [harwoodj@tcd.ie]
Dan Hassler-Forest is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Utrecht University. He has

published books on superhero movies, comics, adaptation studies, and transmedia storytell-
ing, and enjoys writing about critical theory, popular culture, and zombies. His most recent
book, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Politics (2016), focuses on fantastic world-building and
radical political theory. [D.A.Hassler-Forest@uu.nl]
Andrew Higgins is a Tolkien scholar who specializes in the role of language invention in
Tolkien and in other fiction. Andrew did his postgraduate work at Cardiff Metropolitan
xiii
University. His Ph.D. thesis The Genesis of Tolkien’s Mythology explored the interrelated
nature of myth and language in Tolkien’s earliest work on his Legendarium. He has also
co-edited, with Dr. Dimitra Fimi, A Secret Vice: J. R. R.Tolkien on Language Invention (2016),
a new edition of Tolkien’s 1931 talk, published by Harper Collins. In 2016, Andrew
taught a thirteen-week online course for Signum University/Mythgard Institute called
“Language Invention through Tolkien,” and he is currently working on turning his thesis
into a book, as well as planning another book surveying language invention in all of fic-
tion from Thomas More to Elvish to Dothraki. Andrew has given Tolkien-related papers
at The UK Tolkien Society, the International Medieval Conference at both Kalamazoo
and Leeds, and The Mythopoeic Society. Andrew is also the Director of Development at
Glyndebourne Opera in Sussex, England. [asthiggins@me.com]
Matt Hills is a Professor of Media and Film at the University of Huddersfield. He is the
author of Fan Cultures (2002) and Triumph of a Time Lord (2010), among other titles. His
work has been published in the Journal of Fandom Studies, International Journal of Cultural
Studies, Science Fiction Film and Television, Participations: The Journal of Audience & Reception
Studies, and the Journal of Transformative Works and Cultures. His latest book is Doctor Who:
The Unfolding Event (Palgrave 2015), and he’s currently working on a new monograph,
Sherlock—Detecting Quality Television. [M.J.Hills@hud.ac.uk]
Gerard Hynes teaches at Trinity College Dublin where he received a Ph.D. for his thesis on
Creation in the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. He teaches on fantasy literature in Trinity
College’s M.Phil. in Popular Literature and M.Phil. in Children’s Literature. He is the
co-editor of Tolkien: The Forest and the City (Dublin, 2013) and has published on geol-
ogy, deforestation, and dwarves in Tolkien’s fiction. His research interests include world-
building and landscape in medieval and fantasy literature. [ghynes@tcd.ie]
Ian Kinane is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Roehampton, where he

teaches popular genre fiction, postcolonial literatures, and children’s literature. He is the
author of Theorising Literary Islands (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), co-editor of Landscapes
of Liminality: Between Space and Place (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), and editor of Didactics
and the Modern Robinsonade (Liverpool University Press, forthcoming). He is currently
preparing a manuscript on Anglo–Caribbean relations and Ian Fleming’s Jamaica-set
James Bond stories, and he is the editor of the International Journal of James Bond Studies.
[kinanei@tcd.ie]
Lars Konzack is an Associate Professor in Information Science and Cultural Communication

at the Royal School of Library and Information Science (RSLIS) at the University of
Copenhagen. He is interested in subjects such as game analysis, role-playing games,
ludology, acafandom, digital culture, and transmedial culture. His works include, among
others, “Computer Game Criticism: A Method for Computer Game Analysis” (2002),
“Geek Culture: The 3rd Counter-Culture” (2006), “Philosophical Game Design” (2009),
“The Origins of Geek Culture: Perspectives on a Parallel Intellectual Milieu” (2014),
“The Cultural History of LEGO” (2014), and “Scandinavia” [video game history] (2015).
[konzack@hum.ku.dk]
Lori Landay is a Professor of Cultural Studies at Berklee College of Music, and an

interdisciplinary scholar and new media artist exploring the making of visual meaning
xiv
in twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture. She is the author of two books, I Love
Lucy (2010) and Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women:The Female Trickster in American Culture
(1998), and of articles on virtual worlds, digital narrative, silent film, television culture, and
other topics. Her creative work includes animation, graphic design, creative documentary,
machinima, interactive virtual art installations, and music video. Her current project
combines critical and creative work to explore subjectivity, presence, and the “virtual
kino-eye” in interactive media, continuing the inquiry begun during her NEH Enduring
Questions Grant for “What is Being?” in 2010–2012. [llanday@berklee.edu]
David Langdon is a recent Ph.D. graduate from the University of South Wales, Cardiff. His
work explores the persistence of the Gothic literary mode in the modern digital game. His
research interests include narrative in modern media forms, the function and relevance of
Gothic media in contemporary culture, and the digital game as representative form. [lang-
dondavid@hotmail.co.uk]
Irène Langlet is a Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of

Limoges, France, where she is in charge of the Master of Arts and Literature. She special-
izes in contemporary fiction (and especially science fiction) and nonfiction (and especially
essays), media cultures, and cultural studies. Her books include Le recueil littéraire. Pratique et
théorie d’une forme (2003), La Science-fiction. Lecture et poétique d’un genre littéraire (2006), and
L’Abeille et la balance. Penser l’essai (2015). She is co-founder and director of ReS Futurae, the
first journal of science fiction studies in French (http://resf.revues.org). [irene.langlet@
unilim.fr]
Rodrigo Lessa holds a Ph.D. in Contemporary Communication and Culture, obtained in the
Graduate Program in Contemporary Communication and Culture at the Federal University
of Bahia, Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. His doctoral internship was at the University of
Hertfordshire, U.K., where he worked asVisiting Professor (TV Drama, undergraduate classes)
and Visiting Researcher under the supervision of Professor Dr. Steven Peacock from 2014
to 2015. Lessa also holds a Master’s degree in Contemporary Communication and Culture
and a Bachelor’s degree in Social Communications (with an emphasis on Journalism). He
is currently an Associate Researcher at the Brazilian research group A-Tevê—Laboratory of
Television Analysis (UFBA—Brazil) and a member of the transnational collective Obitel—
Ibero-American Observatory of Television Fiction. [lessaro@gmail.com]
Mary McAuley reads English and History at Trinity College Dublin, where she also com-
pleted an M.Phil. in Literatures of the Americas—with a special interest in William
Burroughs and the anti-national figure of the “junkie” in U.S. culture. She is currently
researching the subversive potential of liminal spaces and science fictions, as explored
through art and film. [mcaulemm@tcd.ie]
Edward O’Hare is a Ph.D. student at Trinity College Dublin. After studying for a Degree in
Philosophy, he completed the M.Phil. in Popular Literature in 2009. Since 2012, he has
been working on a thesis on Antarctic Gothic Literature, focusing on the Polar Fictions of
writers including Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, H. P. Lovecraft, and John W. Campbell Jr. A
regular contributor to The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, he has published articles
and reviews on a range of subjects. His research interests include Victorian Gothic fiction;
imaginary voyage narratives; ghost stories and other supernatural fiction; the weird tale;
xv
British and American horror and science fiction of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s; and cult
cinema and television of the past and present. [ohareer@tcd.ie]
Jeremiah Piña is a doctoral student at the University of Georgia studying giftedness and
creativity. His research interests are diverse and include topics related to the development
of the creative identity, the creativity of geek cultures, lifespan fantasy play, and, especially,
paracosms. [jpina@uga.edu]
William Proctor a Lecturer in Media, Culture, and Communication at Bournemouth

University, UK. He is the author of numerous articles and book chapters on subjects
as varied as Batman, James Bond, The Walking Dead, One Direction, Ghostbusters, and
more. William is currently writing his debut monograph, Reboot Culture: Comics, Film
& Transmedia for Palgrave. He is also editor of the forthcoming collections: Disney’s Star
Wars (with Richard McCulloch) (University of Iowa Press), The Scandinavian Invasion:
Critical Perspectives on Nordic Noir and Beyond (also with Richard McCulloch) (Peter Lang);
and Transmedia Earth: Critical Perspectives on Global Convergence Cultures (with Matthew
Freeman) (Routledge). William is creator and director of The World Star Wars Project.
[billyproctor@hotmail.co.uk]
Michael O. Riley is the author of Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum
(University Press of Kansas, 1997) and A Bookbinder’s Analysis of the First Edition of The
Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Book Club of California, 2011). He is the owner, printer, and
bookbinder of The Pamami Press that has published limited editions of rare stories by
L. Frank Baum. He is also Professor Emeritus of English at Georgia College. His specialties
are Children’s Literature and British Romanticism. [alkan@windstream.net]
Benjamin J. Robertson teaches genre studies, media studies, and literary theory in the English
Department at the University of Colorado, Boulder. [benjamin.j.robertson@colorado.edu]
Marie-Laure Ryan is an independent scholar based in Colorado. She is the author of

Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory (1991), Narrative as Virtual Reality:
Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (2001), and Avatars of Story
(2006). She has also edited several collections, including The Routledge Encyclopedia of
Narrative (2005) with David Herman and Manfred Jahn, Storyworlds Across Media (2014)
with Jan-Noël Thon, and The Johns Hopkins Guidebook to Digital Humanities (2014) with
Lori Emerson and Ben Robertson. She has been Scholar in Residence at the University of
Colorado Boulder, and Johannes Gutenberg Fellow at the University of Mainz, Germany.
[marilaur@gmail.com]
Michael Saler is a Professor of History at the University of California, Davis, where he

teaches modern intellectual history. He is the author of As If: Modern Enchantment and
the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (Oxford UP, 2012) and The Avant-Garde in Interwar
England: ‘Medieval Modernism’ and the London Underground (1999); editor of The Fin-de-Siècle
World (Routledge, 2014); and co-editor, with Joshua Landy, of The Re-Enchantment of the
World: Rational Magic in a Secular Age (Stanford, 2009).
Peter Sands is an Associate Professor of English and Director of the Honors College at the
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He teaches and writes about science fiction and
xvi
utopias, law and literature, cannibalism in literature, and emerging technologies. [sands@
uwm.edu]
Kevin Schut is the Associate Dean of the School of the Arts, Media + Culture and a
Professor in the Department of Media + Communication at Trinity Western University
in Langley, British Columbia, Canada. He received his Ph.D. in Communication Studies at
the University of Iowa in 2004, with a focus on media ecology theory, social construction
of technology theory, and critical cultural studies. His research interests are the intersec-
tion of culture, technology, faith, and history, and he finds that computer and video games
are a perfect place to investigate this. He has published Of Games and God: A Christian
Exploration of Video Games (2012), as well as articles and chapters on fantasy role-playing
games and masculinity, mythology in computer games, Evangelicals and games, and the
presentation of history in strategy games. He is fatally vulnerable to turn-based games of
any sort. [kevin.schut@twu.ca]
Anne M. Thell is an Assistant Professor of English Literature at National University of

Singapore. Her first book, Minds in Motion: Imagining Empiricism in Eighteenth-Century
British Travel Literature, examines the ways in which travel literature expedites individual
engagements with epistemology. She is currently at work on a range of projects related
to travel literature, mental illness, and the history of the imagination. [elltam@nus.edu.sg]
Mark J. P. Wolf is a Professor in the Communication Department at Concordia University,

Wisconsin. He has a B.A. (1990) in Film Production and an M.A. (1992) and a Ph.D. (1995)
in Critical Studies from the School of Cinema/Television (now renamed the School of
Cinematic Arts) at the University of Southern California. His books include Abstracting Reality:
Art, Communication, and Cognition in the Digital Age (2000), The Medium of the Video Game
(2001), Virtual Morality: Morals, Ethics, and New Media (2003), The Video Game Theory Reader
(2003), The Video Game Explosion: A History from PONG to PlayStation and Beyond (2007),
The Video Game Theory Reader 2 (2008), Myst and Riven: The World of the D’ni (2011), Before
the Crash: Early Video Game History (2012), the two-volume Encyclopedia of Video Games:The
Culture,Technology, and Art of Gaming (2012), Building Imaginary Worlds:The Theory and History
of Subcreation (2012), The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies (2014), LEGO Studies:
Examining the Building Blocks of a Transmedial Phenomenon (2014), Video Games Around the
World (2015), the four-volume Video Games and Gaming Cultures (2016), Revisiting Imaginary
Worlds: A Subcreation Studies Anthology (2017), Video Games FAQ (forthcoming), The World of
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (2017), The Routledge Companion to Media History and Obsolescence
(2017), and two novels for which his agent is looking for a publisher. He is also founder and
co-editor of the Landmark Video Game book series from University of Michigan Press, the
founder and editor of the Imaginary Worlds book series from Routledge, and the founder of
the Video Game Studies Scholarly Interest Group and the Transmedia Studies Special Interest
Group within the Society of Cinema and Media Studies. He has been invited to speak in
North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Second Life; has had work published in
journals including Compar(a)ison, Convergence, Film Quarterly, Games and Culture, New Review
of Film and Television Studies, Projections, and The Velvet Light Trap; is on the advisory boards of
Videotopia, the International Arcade Museum Library, and the International Journal of Gaming
and Computer-Mediated Simulations; and is on several editorial boards, including those of Games
and Culture and The Journal of E-media Studies. He lives in Wisconsin with his wife Diane and
his sons Michael, Christian, and Francis. [mark.wolf@cuw.edu]
xvii
Preface
In this book, as well as the anthology Revisiting Imaginary Worlds: A Subcreation Studies Anthology
(2017), I have had the pleasure of working with many of the finest scholars writing about
imaginary worlds today, whose research and writings have broadened and enriched my own
knowledge of the field. This collaboration continues in The Routledge Companion to Imaginary
Worlds, with a wide range of topics explored that pertain to the theorizing and understanding
of imaginary worlds and their tradition. Whether viewed as transmedia entities, the recepta-
cles of interrelated narratives, or objects of study of interest in themselves, imaginary worlds
deserve the in-depth examination they receive here, in this unique, authoritative, and multi-
disciplinary overview.
The Routledge Companion to Imaginary Worlds addresses a series of themes pertinent to the
ongoing theoretical and methodological development of the study of imaginary worlds, or
what might be termed Subcreation Studies, to use Tolkien’s term. With growing interest in
transmedia studies and franchising, an increasing amount of attention has turned toward the
study of imaginary worlds, with a number of monographs and anthologies approaching it
from different angles. Attempting to remain true to the key issues, texts, and approaches to
examining imaginary worlds, the Companion features essays on a wide variety of topics, from
form and content, to authorship and reception, to types of worlds and examples from the
imaginary world tradition.
I have included some new divisions or topics in order to encourage study and stimulate
analysis from new angles—for instance, saviors and portals, which appear in so many worlds,
or completeness and consistency, which are goals to be pursued in the construction of worlds.
Of course there are many more that could have been included; it was difficult narrowing the
number of topics and essays down to fifty, and the volume could have been easily twice the
size it is. The imaginary world tradition extends over at least three millennia, with thousands
of examples of worlds, and thus a wealth of avenues to explore. As worlds, there are also the
social, cultural, linguistic, political, technological, and anthropological angles to consider, espe-
cially in some of today’s imaginary worlds, which have grown to such an enormous size that
a single person will never be able to see and experience them in their entirety.
The art of world-building is something that one is aware of the more imaginary worlds
one visits; yet relatively little has been written about it academically. The study of imaginary
worlds is a fascinating and productive endeavor, as the essays here attempt to show. Together,
this collection presents an excellent introduction to the world-based approach, and integrates
and situates it alongside all of the other approaches mentioned above.
Overall, the Companion’s essays are organized into five broad sections, examining the con-
tent and form of worlds, various types of worlds, the authorship and reception of worlds, and
historical exemplars.The first section, “Content and Story,” examines things appearing within
xviii
Pr e f a c e
worlds, such as languages, cultures, the hero’s journey, saviors, portals, and, of course, narrative
elements. The second section, “Form and Structure,” considers formal aspects of worlds, their
design and ontological rules, and the infrastructures that hold them together and organize
their data. The third section, “Types of Worlds,” looks at different types of worlds, including
islands, planets, underground worlds, utopias, uchronias, virtual worlds, and interactive and
participatory worlds. The fourth section, “Authorship and Reception,” examines the contexts
in which world-building occurs, issues like canonicity, genre, escapism, retcon, reboots, and
fandom, and also uses for worlds, such as satire, paracosms, and thought experiments.The fifth
and final section, “Worlds and World-Builders,” looks at some of the important worlds and
world-builders throughout the imaginary world tradition.
Naturally, a single volume can give only a sampling of the many topics and ideas through
which imaginary worlds can be considered and studied; worlds can be enormous objects of
study, and naturally require an interdisciplinary approach. Hopefully, readers will find the
Companion useful and interesting, as well as a point of departure for the vast realms of imagi-
nation waiting to be explored; not only those worlds already created by authors, filmmak-
ers, game makers, and others, but all of the potential and possible worlds that have yet to be
created. As media technology advances in its ability to create images, sounds, and interactive
simulations, our journeys to imaginary worlds will grow ever more vivid, and these, in turn,
will inspire even more fantastic places. And perhaps amidst all of this imagination and inspira-
tion, we will find new ways to better our own world, the one in which we live, and appreciate
it as we should.
xix
Acknowledgments
A Companion like this is only possible with readers and scholars whose interest and desire
brings about the study of imaginary worlds. Therefore, great thanks goes out to all of the
contributors to this volume, who graciously agreed to join in this endeavor: Jessica Aldred,
Lily Alexander, David Alff, João Araújo, George Carstocea, Edward Castronova, Astrid
Ensslin, Dimitra Fimi, Peter Fitting, Matthew Freeman, David Glimp, Chris Hanson, Jennifer
Harwood-Smith, Dan Hassler-Forest, Andrew Higgins, Matt Hills, Gerard Hynes, Ian Kinane,
Lars Konzack, Lori Landay, David Langdon, Irène Langlet, Rodrigo Lessa, Mary McAuley,
Edward O’Hare, Jeremiah Piña, William Proctor, Michael O. Riley, Benjamin J. Robertson,
Marie-Laure Ryan, Michael Saler, Peter Sands, Kevin Schut, and Anne M. Thell. Thanks also
to Lyman Tower Sargent, Rebecca Totaro, and Marta Boni for their help and support; Erica
Wetter and Routledge for asking for this Companion and supporting it along the way; and all
those who will use it in the classroom and elsewhere. Finally, I also must thank my wife Diane
Wolf and sons Michael, Christian, and Francis who were patient with the time taken to work
on this book. And, as always, thanks be to God.
xx
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) dif-
ferentiates 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
3
Gerard Hynes
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 charac-
ters 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.
4
L o c at i o n s a n d B o r d e r s
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
5
Gerard Hynes
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 relation-
ship 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), reflect-
ing 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 instal-
ments 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 the expectation Baum could have that
readers, already familiar with the series, would no longer need to have the world explained
(see Michael O. Riley’s chapter on Baum’s Oz in this volume).
As audiences became more accustomed to interacting with imaginary worlds, the need
for framing devices and connections to the Primary World diminished. Brian Stableford
comments:
A heterocosmic creator cannot organize the informational thread of a text in the

same way as can the creator of simulacra. The reader’s attention must be drawn
to similarities and differences between the world within the text and the primary
world. Even in its simplest variants, this process requires considerable skill and ver-
satility [...] As with the skills in reading mimetic fiction, there has been a gradual
6
e volution during the last two centuries in the skills required in reading heterocosmic
constructions.
(Stableford, 2005, pp. liii–liv; emphasis original)
Where some nineteenth-century works dealing with the far future had felt the need to
include prefatory essays explaining the world they depicted, the emergence of genre labels
(especially science fiction in the 1920s and fantasy in the 1960s; see Prucer, 2007, p. 171;
and James, 2012, pp. 72–73) served to provide audiences with a paratextual warning that the
story may not be set in the Primary World (Stableford, 2005, p. lix). This was reinforced by
the increased use of paratextual material, in the form of maps, time-lines, and genealogies, as
well as distinctive styles of cover art. Travel to distant lands, dream sequences, and time travel
became less and less necessary to prepare readers for an immersive secondary world.
Borders within Worlds

While every secondary world is separated from the Primary World by some form of border,
any secondary world of sufficient size will contain its own internal borders and boundaries.
Borders differ from boundaries in the relationship they establish between locations. Borders
are lines, whether physical or metaphysical, that separate two adjacent locations. Boundaries
surround a location, indicating its limitations and circumference. Both separate two areas, but
a boundary encircles, placing one location within another.
Borders always serve a dual function, connecting as well as defining and excluding. As
Stefan Ekman (2013) states:
Borders and boundaries unite rather than divide. A border between two domains
would be impossible if those domains were not juxtaposed; a polder boundary
would not have a purpose unless the polder were part of the outside world. Both
types of thresholds hold the [secondary] world together but they also keep it var-
iegated, a patchwork of distinct realities that opens up the geography in a fashion
that mere distance cannot do. They expand the world by joining different reali-
ties together.
(Ekman, p. 126)
Borders do not just delimit areas within worlds, they insist on the mutual ontological
interdependence between these areas. They may reveal the limitations of a particular culture’s
ambitions and interests, but not of the world in which it exists.
Unexplained borders can stimulate audience speculation leading to greater immersion in a
world. In Patrick Rothfuss’s series, The Kingkiller Chronicle (2007–present), the mapped world
is titled “The Four Corners of Civilization.” Despite being mapped, there are a number of
borders left unexplained. The island that contains the country of Yll is divided by borders
into three zones, leaving it unclear if the northern and southern extremities belong to Yll or
one of its neighbours. Peninsulas to the north of Ceald and the west of the Commonwealth
are likewise demarcated but untitled. The Four Corners are themselves bordered by water on
three sides and the Stormwal Mountains on the fourth. By having a limited location define
itself as the civilized world, Rothfuss appears to suggest the existence of a larger world, with
other cultures who may consider themselves equally as civilized as the Four Corners. The
existence of this larger world, Temerant, was finally confirmed in the novella The Slow Regard
of Silent Things (2014).
7
Gerard Hynes
Secondary world borders are not limited to separating mundane realms. Many imaginary
worlds fall into Lubomír Doložel’s (1998) concept of a dyadic world: “a unification in one
fictional world of two domains in which contrary modal conditions reign” (Doložel, p. 128).
Doložel compared the world of mythology to the mundane world, where different rules of
permission and prohibition, different dietary, sexual, and ethical systems, apply. The concept
describes imaginary worlds as different as Terri Windling’s Borderland series (1986–present),
where Faerie and mundanity meet, or the Matrix universe that contains both a dystopian
future Earth and the virtual world of the Matrix. The number of possible domains is, of
course, not limited to two, and may be extended indefinitely.
While consistency of world details and defaults is usually essential to maintain the immer-
siveness of a world, dividing a world into different domains allows for an exploration of mutu-
ally contradictory rules: “What is possible or natural is a question of in which domain, not
in which world, the story is set” (Ekman, 2013, p. 127). One domain-border that imaginary
worlds have proven adept at exploring is that between the worlds of the living and the dead.
In the Primary World, it is normally passed only in one direction (with ghosts and appari-
tions an unconfirmed complication). In imaginary worlds, however, it is a border frequently
traversed in both directions, generating domains from Virgil’s underworld and Dante’s Inferno
to the river of Death in Garth Nix’s Abhorsen series (1995–present). In this way, secondary
worlds may usefully explore the interplay between realms whose Primary World counterparts
are usually kept strictly separate.
Where one domain is surrounded by another, we have what Roz Kaveney and John Clute
call a polder. These are, in Clute’s (1997b) formulation:
enclaves of toughened Reality demarcated by boundaries (Thresholds) from the sur-

rounding world. [...] these boundaries are maintained [...]. A polder, in other words,
is an active Microcosm, armed against the potential Wrongness of that which sur-
rounds it, an anachronism consciously opposed to wrong time.
(Clute, p. 772)
As Clute points out, the polder is often chronologically as well as physically separated, with a
different temporal progression than the outside world.Two defining examples are the domain
of Tom Bombadil within the Old Forest and the elven realm of Lothlórien in The Lord
of the Rings (1954–55). Bombadil is one of the oldest beings in Middle-earth (along with
Treebeard), able to remember “before the river and the trees [...] the first raindrop and the first
acorn.” Lothlórien is experienced as stepping “over a bridge of time into a corner of the Elder
Days [...] walking in a world that was no more” (Tolkien, 2004, p. 131, p. 349). The concept
can also usefully be applied to various lost worlds located within the Primary World, from
Arcadia onwards. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912) depicts a South American
plateau where dinosaurs, pterosaurs, marine reptiles, and other extinct megafauna from vari-
ous geological epochs have survived. A society of ape-men is presumably also a remnant
from earlier ages, though they coexist with and are conquered by modern humans. In James
Hilton’s Lost Horizon (1933), the inhabitants of Shangri-la, a lamasery in the Kunlun moun-
tains, approach immortality and live preternaturally peaceful and satisfied lives in an isolated
valley that has managed to preserve peace while the outside world is consumed by the First
World War. Such polders are not merely nostalgic redoubts, though they can be that, but may
also challenge assumptions about the experience and trajectory of temporal change.
The differing modal conditions in separate domains need not be physical or temporal but
may be cultural. A recurring concern of certain secondary worlds has been the generation
8
of extreme forms of social engineering in isolated domains. In Lois Lowry’s The Giver
quartet (1993–2012), the world of the Community is divided from the Elsewhere by the
impassable Forest, which allows for and reinforces the extreme conformity of the society. By
cutting themselves off from the heterogeneity of the outside world, the inhabitants of the
Community are able to suppress the social ills of war and starvation but also such essentials as
emotion and memory. It is only in later installments of the series that the existence of outside
civilization is revealed. Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games series (2008–2010) presents a climate
change-transformed North America as the dystopia Panem with a decadent Capitol in the
Rockies and twelve subjugated districts forming the rest of the country. The political system
is maintained through a combination of repressive policing and the combined threat and
public spectacle of the titular gladiatorial games. Curiously, the fascistic rule of the Capitol
over the districts is never rationalized as a reaction to external threats. A previous rebellion
by the districts was put down with the destruction of District 13 serving as a warning. The
actually surviving District 13 is able to engage in its own social experimentation, in this case
communistic, precisely because it too is cordoned off from the outside world.
Borders between domains may be precise or fuzzy, a line or a gradient. Where borders are
debatable, they create zones that John Clute (1997a) terms crosshatch; areas where:
the demarcation line is anything but clearcut, and two or more worlds [or domains]
may simultaneously inhabit the same territory. [...] In other words, when borderland
conventions are absent, there is an inherent and threatening instability (Wrongness)
to regions of crosshatch; a sense of imminent Metamorphosis.
(Clute, p. 237)
For example, in China Miéville’s The City and the City (2009), the twin cities of Besźel and
Ul Qoma occupy the same world, a fictionalized Balkans, but attempt to totally separate
themselves not just into two domains but almost into two worlds. Despite physically overlap-
ping in a number of areas, they are culturally, linguistically, and psychologically divided. This
results in each city’s inhabitants dividing their world into three zones: total, describing areas
completely in the observer’s city; alter, in the other, resolutely unperceived, city; and cross-
hatched, co-inhabited by residents deliberately ignoring each other (Miéville, p. 56). Denizens
must at all times “unsee” the other city and, even in crosshatched areas, breaching the border,
either by physically crossing it or interacting with inhabitants of the other city, will result in
the offender disappearing into the custody of the secretive organization Breach (Miéville, p.
64). Here, Miéville simultaneously exposes the artificiality and porousness of borders within
worlds while also highlighting the ideological and often physical power that border constructs
exert over the inhabitants of worlds, whether secondary or Primary.
Imaginary locations and the borders that connect them to or separate them from the
Primary World have historically served to question the norms of the Primary World and the
divisions that define it. Their usefulness for this purpose is not likely to diminish. Debates
about contemporary globalization, including recent attempts to reassert national borders in
the face of large-scale human migration, will undoubtedly be played out in future imagi-
nary worlds.
References
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Carpenter, H. (ed) (1995) The Letters of J.R.R.Tolkien, London: HarperCollins.
9
Gerard Hynes
Clute, J. (1997a) “Crosshatch,” in Clute and Grant, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, p. 237.
Clute, J. (1997b) “Polder,” in Clute and Grant, The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, pp. 772–73.
Clute, J. and J. Grant (eds) (1997) The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, London: Orbit.
Doložel, L. (1998) Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Eco, U. (2013) The Book of Legendary Lands, trans A. McEwen, London: MacLehose Press.
Ekman, S. (2013) Here Be Dragons: Exploring Fantasy Maps and Settings, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press.
James, E. (2012) “Tolkien, Lewis and the explosion of genre fantasy,” in E. James and F. Mendlesohn (eds),
The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 62–78.
Manguel, A. and G. Guadalupi (1999) The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, London: Bloomsbury.
Miéville, C. (2009) The City and the City, London: Pan Macmillan.
Padrón, R. (2007) “Mapping imaginary worlds,” in J. R. Akerman and R. W. Karrow Jr. (eds), Maps:
Finding our Place in the World, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 255–87.
Post, J. B. (1979) An Atlas of Fantasy, rev. ed., New York: Ballantine Books.
Prucer, J. (2007) Brave New Words:The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, Oxford: OUP.
Rothfuss, P. (2007) The Name of the Wind, London: Gollancz.
Stableford, B. (1999) The Dictionary of Science Fiction Places, New York: Wonderland Press.
Stableford, B. (2005) Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Books.
Tolkien, J. R. R. (2004) The Lord of the Rings: 50th Anniversary Edition, London: HarperCollins.
Tolkien, J. R. R. (2008) Tolkien On Fairy-stories: Expanded Edition with Commentary and Notes, ed. D. A.
Anderson and V. Flieger, London: HarperCollins.
Versins, P. (1972) Encyclopédie de l’utopie, des voyages extraordinaires et de la science-fiction, Lausanne: L’Age
d’Homme.
Wolf, Mark J. P. (2012) Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation, New York and
London: Routledge.
10
2
The Hero’s Journey
Lily Alexander
“The Hero’s Journey” (THJ) is a phrase coined by Joseph Campbell in his book The Hero with
a Thousand Faces first published in 1949 (see also the revised 1968 edition, and collections:
Campbell 1990, 2011). Quickly becoming a catchphrase and new critical idiom, THJ refers
to a formula that has inspired and governed the best adventure stories ever written, as well
as those filmed and scripted into the road movies, the space/time travel TV series and video
games.Yet, what Campbell defined as THJ is pivotal to many realms of human existence and
to a range of disciplines, including anthropology, psychology, education, social studies, and the
scholarship on ritual and religion. Unsurprisingly, THJ has a vital significance to myth, litera-
ture, cinema, television, comic books, and interactive media.
The exploration of THJ phenomenon has a shared interest in the studies of imaginary
worlds, as the two overlap. It is through the Wonderworld where the trajectory of the heroic
journey lies. Similarly, every imaginary world—to be discovered and described—must be first
visited by the traveler, through whose eyes we see it for the first time (Homer’s Odyssey, 8th
century BC; Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, 1726; or Stanisław Lem’s Solaris, 1961). A jour-
ney story, by its nature, requires its unique “world of adventure” (it may be real yet astonishing,
or otherworldly and fantastic, but always “full of wonder”).This newly discovered world must
be traveled around and surveyed. Imaginary worlds in myth and fiction are revealed to read-
ers and audience inevitably by their “tour guides” and principal explorers—the adventurous
noble knights and similar heroic figures, who both actively engage with the Unknown and
reflect on it.
Campbell suggested that most adventure stories and journey tales of world mythologies,
even ones created in distant cultures unknown to each other, have similar story patterns and
include the same set of necessary phases.
Campbell explains THJ as a sequence of three acts, Departure, Initiation, and Return,
which can be further broken down into the following phases: DEPARTURE: 1. The Call
to Adventure, 2. Refusal of the Call, 3. Supernatural Aid, 4. Crossing the Threshold, 5. Belly
of the Whale; INITIATION: 6. The Road of Trials, 7. The Meeting with the Goddess, 8.
Woman as Temptress, 9. Atonement with the Father, 10. Apotheosis, 11. The Ultimate Boon;
RETURN: 12. Refusal of the Return, 13. The Magic Flight, 14. Rescue from Without, 15.
The Crossing of the Return Threshold, 16. Master of Two Worlds, 17. Freedom to Live.
Working on this topic between the 1920s and 1940s, Campbell seized the essence of this
phenomenon, previously unknown to narrative studies. Campbell described the discovered
scholarly paradigm in his various books, eventually widely popularizing the mytheme of THJ.
Yet, he has never claimed the authorship of THJ narrative. But who created this storytelling
recipe, this brilliant formula, and why is it so influential? If Campbell is not its true author,
then who is? This issue has been a subject of confusion, and even a lawsuit.
11
L i ly A l e x a n d e r
In the 1970s, a young journalist was assigned by her newspaper to investigate what was
behind the strange data showing that the middle-class men, aged 30–33, were leaving their
homes in large numbers.There was no explanation why these seemingly normal, trouble-free,
and well-situated males showed the determination to alter their lives. They often took off
on a journey, or “unreasonably” switched from safe corporate jobs to the risky/artistic ones,
and from the wives or girlfriends of their choice to those with polar opposite traits (blonds
to brunettes, the smart to the silly, and vice versa). Neither small children nor the stunned,
scandalized parents could stop the departing young men. But the men themselves were unable
to explain their irresistible drive for a new path. Some later gained wisdom and returned to
their loved ones, while others changed their life trajectories for good. What was behind this
pattern, as well as the variations of outcomes?
Since there were no scholars to help the young journalist in her investigation, she acted as
a pioneer and discovered “life passages.” (She later acknowledged having taken classes with
renowned anthropologist Margaret Mead.) This was the beginning of the highly successful
career of a reporter-turned-writer and political guru, Gail Sheehy. Her book Passages and its
expansion into a book series (1976, 1999) earned her fame and enviable income, but that
same year she was accused of plagiarism and sued by Californian psychiatrist Roger Gould.
He proved that the notes on the life crises and passages of his patients, which appeared in
his medical records, predate Sheehy’s book Passages. He claimed, therefore, that he was really
the inventor or discoverer, and not Ms. Sheehy. The suit was settled out of court, thus partly
confirming that the psychiatrist “had a point” asserting his primary “authorship.”
The story of this lawsuit, ironic to the core, highlights how little the educated participants
of the controversy had known about the subject of their dispute. The anthropologists had
been aware, by then, of life passages for more than a century, while humankind—our collec-
tive ancestors—not only merely acknowledged it for millennia, but had carefully addressed the
means of ritual-narrative practices. The first scholar who brought attention to the phenom-
enon later signified as THJ was the Dutch anthropologist Arnold van Gennep in his founda-
tional book The Rites of Passage (1909/1961). His work helped to launch an array of subfields
in anthropology, resonating in the works of Mikhail Bakhtin (1928/1984; 1965/1984; 1981),
Lucien Levy-Bruhl (1935/1983), Claude Levi-Strauss (1966, 1974, 1995), Mary Douglas
(2002), Marshall Sahlins (1986), Ronald Grimes (1990, 2002), Peter Stoller (2008), Tom F.
Driver (2006), Catherine Bell (2009), and the disciplines of symbolic anthropology and the
anthropology of experience pioneered by Victor Turner (Turner 1969, 1975, 1976;Turner and
Bruner, 1986; Armstrong, 1981; Losev 1985/2003), as well as the anthropology of religion
that overlaps with the theories of ritual (Lambeck, 2008) and the emerging field of biosocial
studies (Rappoport, 1999; Ingold and Palsson, 2013).
Unlike the theorists of myth-criticism, including Campbell, who researched the connec-
tions between mythology and literature, the anthropologists focused on socio-ritual practices,
which intertwined with the symbolic stories—the embedded myths.The era’s disciplinary walls
prevented scholars in narrative studies from learning about the new ideas in social sciences
(particularly the emerging breakthrough ideas in anthropology addressed by Levi-Strauss in
the 1950s). The utmost authority on the subject, van Gennep, was followed by his disciple
Victor Turner, who rose to prominence in the 1960s. An American scholar of Scottish origin,
he spent many years studying ritual rites in social contexts around the world, particularly in
Africa.Turner also investigated the discourse of life crises, which he linked to the forms of ritual
death-rebirth, examined by him as a cultural code in his body of work. His ideas were followed
by Alexander’s investigation of the ritual codes of symbolic death and symbolic death-rebirth in
poetics, aesthetics, and narrative/media culture (Alexander 2007, 2013a/b, 2014, 2017).
12
T h e H e ro ’ s J o u r n e y
Indeed, we live the lives that are not the straight arrows, but ones marked by crises,
c hallenges, thresholds, phases, and transitions. Hence, our life trajectories are punctuated by all
forms of “symbolic death,” a psychological state defined by Turner as human plasma or prima
materia. In this “limbo” state of “liminality,” we attempt to forsake (reject, leave) everything
we know and rediscover a new sense of reality and identity; this psychological need and
action is investigated by Victor Turner in the contexts of symbolic anthropology in his semi-
nal article “Betwixt and Between,” part of the collection of his works The Forest of Symbols
(1967: pp. 93–112). A crux, according to Turner, is to achieve a true transformative impact by
means of turning the “symbolic death” into the “symbolic death-rebirth.” Through its struc-
ture, originated in ritual,THJ narrative amplifies and frames this transformative phenomenon,
which encompasses any self-doubts, disappointments, dangerous adventures, and mortal bat-
tles that one must experience to ultimately achieve a new Self (see also: Freud, 2003). A ritual-
symbolic tale, THJ enhances its transformative impact by employing a variety of immersive
techniques and sensory stimuli, which refresh, excite, estrange, and sharpen our sense of reality,
often by employing astonishing, colorful, and artistic images and the mysterious ways of tests,
riddles, puzzles, magic, miracles, and m etamorphosis.
Communal experience has shown that there is no other way of changing, for the humans,
including psychologically growing, than through drastic turns that lead us toward emerging
identities, transforming biologically (as well as hormonally), emotionally, socially, and spir-
itually. Notably, these transformations must happen in a sequence of necessary steps. This type
of phase transition—observed by our savvy ancestors to have occurred in all nature—is also
underscored in Hegel’s laws of dialectics: the negation of negation, and the transformation of
quantity into (emerging new) quality.
To reflect and to facilitate such processes of change and social adjustment, humankind,
in its collective wisdom—even while separated by continents and eras—distilled the most
successful experiences, creating and promoting the effective type of adventure stories. Later,
Campbell termed “the Hero’s Journey” that which represents the most operational develop-
mental templates in human culture.
Rooted in ancient initiation rituals—for which it was designed, and within which it was ini-
tially tried and perfected—the symbolic journey facilitates transformation, adjustment, and growth.
Its initial purpose was to aid a male youth in his social transition from boy to man. Over time,
this ritual-mythic narrative has expanded from the initiation rituals of the young to embrace and
stimulate a range of transformative ritual-symbolic experiences for people of different ages and
genders, becoming a meta-ritual template, or defining a transformative “ritual structure” per se.
For example, this model also matches the scenario of a mature man’s ritual initiation into a sha-
man. It has also informed the increasingly popular Heroine’s Journey (or application of the tradi-
tional initiation ritual to the female youth), exemplified by such prominent media texts as Kiki’s
Delivery Service (1989), Spirited Away (2001), Whale Rider (2002), and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006).
Religious narratives of monotheistic belief systems have also integrated the Hero’s Journey
paradigm into these faiths’ core canonical tales. Classical literature has deepened our under-
standing of how these socio-transformative processes are shaped in the modern world.
William Shakespeare’s reflections on the critical threshold events are manifest in the dramatic
life passages of the young man Hamlet and the “old fool” King Lear. These stories have
added the knowledge on the new types of age-related, yet acutely political crises vital for the
coherent development of individuals and societies in modernity. The Romantics—writers
of Romanticism—rediscovered the power of folklore, reflecting on ritual and magic in their
work at the dawn of the 19th century. They were followed by the Modernists who aspired to
add the mythic-ritual elements to their artistic creations.
13
These trends informed the two prominent narrative studies movements of the 1920s
and 1930s: the Ritual School and Myth-Criticism (also known as Mythic or Mythological
Criticism), initially inspired by the Scottish anthropologist Sir James Frazer and later advanced
by the Canadian narrative theorist Northrop Frye et al. Frazer was the first who, in his seminal
book The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (1890), highlighted the interrelated
phenomena: culture’s intense focus on the cyclical processes in the natural environment and
human life, and on the symbolic death-rebirth, as a cultural code. Both would later influence
the scholars and artists of THJ discourse. In the avenue of myth-criticism, Joseph Campbell
wrote a set of influential books, bringing attention to THJ as a timeless mythic story, while
also highlighting the continual impact of myth on narrative culture.
A new theory of narrative developed in the 1920s with an interest in symbolic codes (a
shared focus of emerging structuralism and cybernetics; see also Cassirer, 1929/1970; Ivanov,
1977, Meletinsky, 1976/2000). The Russian narrative theorist Vladimir Propp published his
exhaustive systematic study of thousands of folktales (1928), highlighting recurrent narrative
formulas, including those related to THJ and its essential components and phases. Propp’s
development of Structural Narratology introduced new perspectives and methods (Propp
was among the earliest structuralists, mistakenly referred to as a Formalist, while he was the
Formalist group’s contemporary rather than their methodological ally). Propp’s “narrative
algebra” and acute interest in all things related to steps, paths, and phase transition in the
story development, his acknowledgment that ritual structures are at the bottom of fairytales,
defined a new direction in the study of symbolic journey and its paradigmatic plots and
storylines. In his Morphology of the Folktale (1928/1968) and, particularly, in his later work,
Historical Roots of Fairytale (1946), Propp linked structural narratology with anthropology,
preceding the methodologies of Claude Levi-Strauss.
Another turning point in THJ studies became a development of Functionalism in anthro-
pology, inspired by the work of Emile Durkheim, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, and Bronislaw
Malinowski. This school of thought focused on the questions: how society functions as a
whole. In the 1960s, Victor Turner, the disciple of van Gennep and the Functionalists, rede-
fined symbol as a cornerstone of social processes. A follower of Functionalism, Turner can
be credited with examining how the symbolic processes operate, particularly while aiding as
changes; he offered new analytical techniques, an emphasis on social dynamics, and uncom-
promising concern with society and state. Advanced by Turner, this method had led to his
unique and highly efficient blend of disciplines, Turner’s uniquely successful methodological
synthesis—a productive fusion of functionalism, conflict theory, semiotics, structuralism, and
poststructuralism—giving birth to his conceptualization of a new field termed “symbolic
anthropology.” Turner’s method sees symbols as processes, and all main processes of culture as
the dynamic and functional spheres of influence on society.
In this context, rite of passage was evaluated as one of the primary means of socializa-
tion, as applied to both traditional and modern societies. The symbolic script of THJ is now
contextually viewed as a tool of integration of individuals into a healthy community-society.
Victor Turner wrote about the Sacred Journey as a core of a ritual structure. He insisted
that the Journey remains capable of influencing contemporary societies, but does so by new
forms of ritual-symbolic activity, including those by means of the media (Turner, 1975, 1976;
Alexander, 2007, 2013a, 2017; Jenkins and Alexander, 2014. See also chapters “Mythology”
and “Genre” of this volume).
Summarizing the ideas of these thinkers—Frazer, van Gennep, Propp, Campbell and
Turner et al.—L. A. Alexander bridged anthropological and narratological approaches, pro-
posing “the Masterplot,” a ten-phase transition that navigates a successful rite of passage via
14
a symbolic plot structure and storytelling process (Alexander, 2013a/b). Highlighted as a

key narrative paradigm in Alexander’s Fictional Worlds, the symbolic journey has many goals,
most importantly, epistemological: the leapfrogging of knowledge. THJ with its embed-
ded mythologemes provides plentiful resources and has a special importance for fictional
world-building, which implies the creation of the original and diverse Wonderworlds, as
well as the believable Homeworlds. The former is a mysterious world in which a journey
takes place, while the latter is a journey’s both: its starting point and destination—the place
where the Hero’s family and community live. What lies beneath the Hero’s Journey is a
phenomenon rooted in the logic of socialization, discovered and utilized by humans at the
dawn of culture. Its anthropological significance explains why this formula is so influential
for narratology and media theory, while encompassing and defining storytelling from myth
to video game.
Updates to the formulization and interpretations of THJ are not only possible but are due
and timely. Encompassing the deliberations of at least four generations of scholars, THJ as
an academic discourse received theoretical and methodological updates, which are impor-
tant to highlight. Informed by Frazer, aided by Jung, and inspired by the artistic boom
of Modernism, the myth-criticism school demonstrated impressive insight, originality, and
enthusiasm in the study of narrative. Yet, it reached methodological dead-ends, neglecting
the study of historicity and cultural diversity of a symbolic expression, and the influential
dynamics between literature and society. Campbell established his earlier theoretical frame-
work borrowing from psychoanalysis and the semiotics of culture, largely influenced by Carl
Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious. The dated components of Campbell’s approach
toward THJ reside in the umbrella of Jungian conception of culture and a trend to firmly
explain symbols as “defined once and for all” while disregarding the ethnic and historical
diversity of symbolization in culture. (For example,Vogler, a fervid follower of Campbell, in
The Writer’s Journey, 3rd ed., 2007, defines the sirens of the Greek mythology as the univer-
sal symbol of “women as danger”; without even suggesting that alternative interpretations
are possible.)
While Campbell remains one of the most inspirational and effective scholars of THJ dis-
course, some concepts, typically revoked as outlined by Campbell, may be viewed as dated or
questionable. For example, the notion of archetype has been replaced in anthropology with the
concept of dominant symbols (provable and rooted in the practices recorded by ethnographic
research, as proposed by Turner). Another questionable term is a monomyth, which implies that
there is one core mythic paradigm that defines all mythology. Instead, contemporary symbolic
anthropology identifies a spectrum (more than one!) of dominant symbols and core symbolic
processes that cover the main spheres of human experience. Psychoanalysis, particularly the
Jungian method used by Campbell as his underlying theoretical basis, has been replaced in
the discussions of THJ with the framework of new emerging disciplines, such as social and
symbolic anthropology, semiotics, narratology, cultural theory, etc. Other often highlighted
flaws include reliance on universal symbolic categories and thinking in generic terms about
meaning-making in various cultures, ethnicities, and demographics.
As mentioned above, it is precisely the lack of the following that diminished the authority
of the Jungian method in THJ studies: (a) an historical approach toward symbolism (usually
containing the layers of meaning), (b) the acknowledgment of diversity in cultural, eth-
nic, demographical, and gender-defined formation and interpretation of symbols, as well as
(c) the dynamic and fluid nature of symbols. The latter is highlighted in such recent notions
as symbolic processes (Turner), crystallization of symbols (Freidenberg), unfolding symbols (Lotman),
and signification or resignification—giving a new symbolic meaning ( poststructuralism), as
15
well as the simulacrum—a symbolic construct aimed at displacing or even replacing reality
(Baudrillard, 1995).
Some elements of sequential logic in Campbell’s formula may be questioned when
factoring in the substantial works of other anthropologists and narratologists. In the sequence
of THJ phases, as proposed by Campbell, some segments may be viewed as optional (No. 3
“Refusal of the Call”), or placed in a different order. For example, No. 4 “Meeting a Mentor”
is not principal at the early phase preceding “Crossing the Threshold,” and can be more logi-
cally placed at the epicenter of the journey, at the onset of “Resurrection.” In fact, meeting
various examiners and helpers (Propp) happens earlier while the Mentor (Donor or Sacred
Instructor, as per Propp and Turner) emerges essentially later, with the message of paramount
importance and while sharing the breakthrough knowledge. Alternatively to Campbell’s suc-
cession, “The Reward,” “The Road Back,” and “The Resurrection” can be more logically
linked as a following sequence: “Meeting the Mentor” (who is a catalyst of rebirth), “The
Resurrection,” “The Reward” (only offered to the one enlightened), followed by “The Road
Back” (see Alexander’s Fictional Worlds, chapters 3–4).
In our grasp of the logic of THJ, recent theories of the ritual process, particularly rites of
passage, including initiation rites, which respond to developmental crises, must be taken into
consideration, particularly those by Arnold van Gennep, Emile Durkheim,Victor Turner, and
their followers in ritual theory (Mead, 1928a/b, 1999, 2003; Douglas, 2002; Lewis, 2003;
Eliade, 1998; Lambeck, 2008; Grimes, 2002; Sahlin, 1986; Somé, 1997; Ingold and Palsson,
2013).The rise of structural narratology, stemming from Propp and advanced by Levi-Strauss,
followed by the Tartu School’s thinkers (Lotman, Ivanov), adds not merely plentiful new nar-
rative examples but also the alternative models of the embedded phase transition. While close
to those of Frazer, van Gennep, Propp, Campbell, and Turner, other emerging and possible
interpretations may offer useful takes on the sequential logic of THJ. Regardless of different
approaches to the “thresholds of change” in THJ, the comprehensive understanding of its
meaning offers the artist a deeper grasp of THJ paradigm in its anthropological significance.
Curious writers are advised to examine various discussions on the phase transition in the
author’s book Fictional Worlds, and then compare/contrast them, in order to establish one’s
own understanding of this profoundly inspiring creative formula.
In the media today, the Hero’s Journey formula and treatise are gaining increasingly more
significance. Its influence spreads with the emergence of the visually intensified, immersive,
and interactive narrative discourse. Much has been written about the Hero’s Journey as an
underlying structure in contemporary storytelling—one that is explicitly evoked by many
working in the industry, from George Lucas’s open acknowledgment of the insights he drew
from Joseph Campbell to the use of these concepts in many of the most widely used books
on screenwriting. From Star Trek to The X-Files, and from the Harry Potter series to The Lord
of the Rings (1954–1955) and beyond, most of contemporary adventure stories employ the
core elements of the Symbolic Journey. THJ is a continuous source of inspiration, unfailing
and infinite, for creative writers in any medium. It offers a reliable logical structure on which
to lean and a plethora of modifiable exciting elements from which to choose. The formula
requires a modeling system structured by means of the tests, trials, and suspenseful elements of
“symbolic death-rebirth,” which Turner defined as the ritual-symbolic forms of “dying from”
and “dying to”—the excruciating path of growing into a new and matured person.
We can call THJ a “framework of the thresholds of change” that constitutes a logical
phase transition (or a cultural approach toward understanding change as a process). While
the core of THJ is cogent and iron-clad, the variable parts are narratively astonishing and
gripping. They encompass stimulating events and characters, such as riddles, challenges,
16
battles, thresholds, taboo, magic beings, mystery, dragons, aliens, confinement, devouring,
saving, noble knights, supportive gurus, enlightening, magic gifts, and manifestations of sacred
knowledge. The dramatic encyclopedia of THJ, with its array of movable parts, ensures a
thrilling entertainment. Yet, while flexible, these variables must be properly aligned with the
logic of the process. The THJ databank of imagery serves as the means to both: creating plots
and making sense of contemporary tales, particularly those with the adventure, fantasy, or
sci-fi storylines, even for crime fiction and neo noir. What can we find as the use value of the
Hero’s Journey as a tool for authors in structuring contemporary stories is addressed in Vogler
(2007) and Alexander (2013a/b).
The popularity of THJ in the media discourse is not without controversies, particularly
when the formula and its components are superficially overused, misused, and even abused.
As any efficient symbolic order, endowed with an intrinsic persuasive power,THJ is especially
attractive to those eager to employ it for political or commercial gain. Western societies have
lost or given up on the effective initiation mechanisms, similar to those employed by the
ancients (Mead, 1928a/b, 1942, 1999, 2000, 2003). It is not a secret that it is the modern media
that has attempted to take upon itself this role, with mixed results. Most media practitioners
or those who manage them as a business have little understanding of the true “initiating” role
of THJ for individuals and societies. They see its profitability, resulting from the continuously
flocking audiences, and promptly harvest the profits.
Since THJ, in actuality, is manifest today within the media realm, the deeper understanding
of its logic and message by the practitioners, audiences, critics, parents, and affected individu-
als is vital to culture and society. The anthropological significance of THJ explains how it
functions as both a tool for the authors in structuring the story and a means by which the
audience (readers/game players) can interpret this narrative formula and benefit from it. It
is through the use of this tool, the “journey”—essentially a ritual mechanism—that the two
groups meet, as the Initiating and the Initiands (to borrow Turner’s terms). Both the former
and the latter need the knowledge encoded within this narrative paradigm.
Initiands are the story heroes and all of us, the audience. The Initiating, however, are those
who embed in the story their ideology in the form of the “sacred message” they deem essen-
tial. Any idea adeptly promoted as the story’s enlightening moment obtains immediate social
influence. Thus, through any new THJ media text, the propositions for the “superior” and
“necessary” knowledge can be propagated and advanced. In any era, audiences are exposed
to the enormous persuasive power of THJ texts, which promote the range of the know-how
templates we “should” link to the idea of progress, and build our futures upon.
Along with politically controversial messages promoted as “enlightenment,” no less destruc-
tive are the superficial uses of THJ with no real message at all. Readers are aware of the fact
that popular culture is overpopulated with fake heroes and recognize that media is oversatu-
rated with cheap imitations of the Journey story. Dragons and zombies have been overworked
and lost their evil appeal. Software makes it a breeze to create assembly lines of unimaginable
beings (Men in Black, 1997), but often neither the monsters nor the authors know what they
are doing in the story. The Initiands, sword-wielding or shooting from the hip, promptly
destroy their enemies, but gain no wisdom and return without a message for community.
The visual candy of special effects has been widely accepted as the exciting “key points” of
the story. Aspiring artists and game developers, who seriously study THJ, need to know what
is missing from their scripts, what “can go wrong,” and which missteps to avoid in designing
an innovative yet true to its purpose Journey World of their own. Writers and video game
designers, who are making scriptwriting choices and searching for effective narrative forms,
will be rewarded by the audiences’ grateful attention.
17
While watching stories or participating in games, modern-day audiences are already

invested in the transformative journey. To make sense of contemporary stories, which employ
the Hero’s Journey in obvious or subtle ways, audiences consciously or subconsciously focus
on the story structure and its embedded transformative arc. In the best media examples, their
identification with the Initiand is empathetic and profound.The hero could be an undercover
agent, or a youth in a road movie, while the confusing circumstances and hard-to-read stran-
gers may substitute for the symbolic maze of the Wonderworld and its magic populace. The
crux of the matter is that the hero must face the unknown, be insightful and diplomatic, face
pain, confront fears, open his or her mind to the new higher knowledge, and thus “win” and
then return as a transformed grown man, or an empowered confident woman, with a gift of
new wisdom to community; and so does the audience, which has accompanied the Heroes
on the Journey all along.
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3
Invented Languages
Language invention has occupied many brilliant minds throughout history, from the
philosophically driven pursuit for the prelapsarian “perfect language” of Adam in the Middle
Ages (Eco, 1995) to the more utilitarian 20th-century aim of facilitating communication in
an increasingly globalized world by creating languages such as Esperanto and its offspring (see
Okrent, 2009). At the same time, language play and language invention seem to be as much
of a common human activity as is the building of imaginary worlds. In fact, one field where
the two often meet naturally and effortlessly is the case of childhood paracosms (see “Worlds
as Paracosms” in this volume).
Invented languages emerging out of childhood play and world-building can be seen in
the childhood experiences of several authors and artists, often leading to more developed
imaginative works in adulthood. Root-Bernstein’s recent study of paracosms includes in
children’s “world-play” the composition of “languages and codes” alongside stories, his-
tories, pictures, maps, etc. (2014: 70). An early example is recounted by the British writer
and scholar Benjamin Heath Malkin in his A Father’s Memoirs of His Child (1806), an
account of the life and premature death of Malkin’s son, Thomas Williams Malkin. Memoirs
describes Thomas as a child prodigy and the inventor of an imaginary country called
Allestone, which included an invented language based on Latin (Ibid.: 82). The son of the
Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Hartley Coleridge, also invented a world called
Ejuxria, complete with peoples, geography, and invented languages (Ibid.: 85). Moreover,
in childhood, the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, along with his sister Nannerl,
invented the fantasy kingdom of Rücken (“the backward kingdom”) in which Mozart
and his sister were the king and queen. Inhabitants of Rücken spoke a secret backward
language (Morris, 1994: 52).
Perhaps the most significant early example of “world-play” that included language inven-
tion comes from the early works of the Brontë children, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne.
As children the Brontës created several invented worlds that they brought to life with narra-
tives, maps, pictures, and elements of language invention. These activities occurred in 1826,
after the death of their mother, when Charlotte Brontë was ten years old, Branwell nine, Emily
eight, and Anne six. Branwell had received a set of twelve wooden soldiers from their father,
which sparked a set of imaginary characters who the children called the “Young Men” or the
“Twelves.” In their adventures, the “Twelves” eventually set foot in Africa, where the children
conceived a fanciful “Great Glass Town” encompassing a confederacy of soldier-ruled lands,
and an invented language based upon the Yorkshire dialect (Brontë, 2010: 47). Even arguably
the greatest inventor of fictional languages, J. R. R. Tolkien, indicates in his essay “A Secret
Vice” that his earliest experience with language invention and elements of world-building
21
may have been partially inspired by play with his two cousins Mary and Marjorie Incledon,
who were engaged in inventing nursery languages such as Animalic (Tolkien, 2016: 8–12).
As the example of childhood paracosms demonstrates, language invention is often an
integral “infrastructure” for building imaginary worlds, and this is true both for fiction and for
contemporary cinematic and digital narratives. Indeed, “con-langs” (constructed languages)
or “art-langs” (art languages) have been used widely to support and enhance world-building,
though with varying degrees of complexity and completeness. The spectrum of language
invention is a broad one. Often authors only mention an imaginary language, without neces-
sarily giving any samples of that language in their narratives. For example, in The Memoirs of
Planetes, or a Sketch of the Laws and Manners of Makar (1795), Thomas Northmore describes a
strange place called Makar where his fictional explorer learns the language of the natives.The
language is evoked by Northmore to emphasize the strangeness of the people encountered in
Makar, but no actual examples of the language are recorded (Wolf, 2012: 186). Moreover, sev-
eral authors of “weird literature” have invented and evoked just the name of languages to add
a sense of mystery and even horror to their narratives. A good example of this is the invented
language of Aklo first mentioned by Arthur Machen in his story “The White People” (1899)
and then used again by H. P. Lovecraft in his Cthulhu mythos (specifically in his stories “The
Dunwich Horror” (1929) and “The Haunter in the Dark” (1936)) to describe a necromantic
language that if spoken would call forth demonic and evil powers (see Clore, 2009: 32–33).
Nevertheless, by ascribing to them particular qualities and values, such merely named lan-
guages can still be used to characterize their speakers and their culture.
A frequent usage of invented languages is naming. Ursula K. Le Guin notes that all writers
of fiction with an entirely imaginary setting have to “play Adam” in that they must make up
names for the characters and creatures of their fictive world (Conley and Cain, 2006: xvii).
Naming is, indeed, a subcreative act: it can be used to introduce new ideas or concepts, or
to cast the Primary World word in a new light. Naming can also be used to emphasize the
“otherness” of a particular race or culture in a secondary world. For example, in many English
science fiction works there is a tendency to use infrequent English consonants (such as Q,
X, and Z) and dense consonant clusters in the names of aliens in order to stress this sense of
“otherness” (ibid.). Language inventors who take particular care to construct nomenclature
that is coherent and consistent exploit the potential of linguistic invention even further, using
it to give the illusion of an imaginary world with what Tolkien called the “inner consist-
ency of reality” (Tolkien, 2008: 59), himself being a chief practitioner. As we shall see below,
Tolkien did not only invent names, but also complete vocabularies, phonologies, grammars,
visual writing systems, and other paratextual documents. Tolkien’s legacy of detailed language
invention is clear in the work of Ursula K. Le Guin, Tom Shippey, and more recently Mark
Okrand and David J. Peterson.
The invention of fictional languages that contribute to world-building has historically
moved alongside a number of different parallel cultural and literary processes: (a) the develop-
ment of genres that rely on constructing imaginary worlds (from utopias and travelers’ tales
to science fiction and fantasy); (b) the evolution of learned or scientific thinking about the
origins, nature, and role of language in human societies; (c) the history of invented languages
in the Primary World, with the intention to be used for communication (from a priori philo-
sophical languages to a posteriori International Auxiliary Languages); and (d) ultimately the
historical, cultural, and social context in which they (and their imaginary worlds) are born.
It is not an accident that the earliest example usually cited of an “art-lang” to flesh out
an imaginary world is to be found in a genre known as “the traveler’s tale.” This narrative
framework became popular in the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance. It merged fiction and
22
I n v e n t e d L a n g ua g e s
on-fiction in accounts of travels to distant lands and encounters with strange peoples, some
n
real and some invented.Two early examples of this mix of historical and fictional traveler’s tales
is Marco Polo’s account of his real journey to the East in his Travels (c. 1298) and the fictional
account of a crusader knight’s supposed travels and adventures in the East in The Book of Sir John
Mandeville (c. 1357) that actually imitated Polo’s chronicle. The fictional “traveler’s tales” that
followed used this trope to mirror these real-world explorations and have an invented traveler
encounter new and strange lands, peoples, and languages. One of the earliest of these is Thomas
More’s Utopia (1516). More included in the back of the 1516 edition of Utopia a poetic quat-
rain written in his invented language of “Utopian.” This quatrain starts with the line “Utopos
ha Boccas peu la-chama polta chamaan” (Conley and Cain, 2006: 202) and clearly indicates
that Utopian was an a posteriori language based on elements of Latin, Greek, Italian, and even
Persian (before becoming Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor and subsequently executed, More was
a noted European diplomat). More included a Latin translation of the quatrain for his readers.
Editions that followed included an invented alphabet either by More or his humanist colleague
Peter Giles to visually represent the Utopian language (see Conley and Cain, 2006: 201–203).
After More, arguably the best-known traveler’s tale is Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
(1726), an important landmark in this early use of language invention as a key component of
world-building combined with political satire. Swift created names, place-names, and phrases
in several imaginative languages spoken by the residents of the fantastical places where Lemuel
Gulliver is shipwrecked. One of the unique elements of Swift’s language invention was its
sound-aesthetic construction, which helped distinguish between the nature and culture of the
different peoples that Gulliver encountered on his fantastical travels (see David Alff ’s chapter
in this volume). A good example of how this works is to contrast the phonetic makeup of the
fragments Swift gives of the Lilliputian language, which tends to have words that end in open
vowels, with the sound aesthetic of the language spoken on the island of Glubbdubdrib (“The
Island of Sorcerers”), which tends to use hard consonants and word endings in plosive and
dental phonemes. Another example of Swift’s focus on the sound of his invented languages
can be seen elsewhere in the language of the Houyhnhnm, a race of civilized horses. For the
Houyhnhnm, Swift invents and gives examples of words that use onomatopoeia to bring to
mind the sounds of a horse’s whinny (e.g., “Gnnauyh” means “bird of prey”).
The Enlightenment brought a new focus on philosophy, science (especially mathematics),
and a desire for a language that would express the new scientific “truths” as clearly and per-
fectly as mathematical notation. Several philosophers, including Francis Lodwick, Gottfried
Leibniz, John Wilkins, and George Delgarno attempted to construct a universal philosophical
language that would be based on a logical and mathematical description of the universe (see
Okrent, 2009: 19–75). These types of philosophical languages are called a priori languages as
they do not reflect any overt elements of real world languages. Several fiction authors would
reflect the flavor and structure of philosophical languages in their world-building. For exam-
ple, in his 1676 work La Terre Australe Connue (The Southern Land Known) Gabriel de Foigny
invented a language called “Australian” that reflects the a priori structure of the universal
philosophic languages (see Conley and Cain, 2006: 167–169). In “Australian,” for example, the
five vowels represent the five primary elements: fire (a), air (e), salt (o), water (i), and earth (u),
while the consonants stand for other elemental words or ideas (e.g., c = hot). Foigny wrote
that “the advantage of this system is that one becomes a philosopher as soon as one learns the
first elements of speech. One can not name anything in that country without at the same time
making explicit its nature” (cited in Rogers, 2011: 168).
By the 19th century, the a priori languages of the previous era had given way to inter-
national languages that sought to bring different peoples closer together by simplifying the
23
vocabulary, grammatical structure, and syntax of existing natural languages. These “auxiliary
languages” were meant to facilitate communication at a time when the world was seem-
ingly becoming smaller. The most well-known of these auxiliary languages is Esperanto
(see Okrent, 2009: 79–124). Alongside what became a vogue for international languages,
a paradigm shift in the study of language also influenced the construction of art-langs.
Philosophy gave way to philology, with 18th- and 19th-century philologists becoming inter-
ested in the existence of a “proto-language” spoken by a hypothetical common people, the
Indo-Europeans, which through time and migration had become splintered into different
language groups and dialects. A good example of this dialogue between this academic para-
digm shift and the invention of art-languages is the idiom of Vril-ya in Edward Bulwer-
Lytton’s early dystopian science fiction story The Coming Race (1871), which Bulwer-Lytton
dedicated to the Oxford philologist Max Müller (1823–1900). Bulwer-Lytton imaginatively
incorporated Müller’s ideas on language development and decay that had been explored by
Müller in The Stratification of Language (1868). Yaguello (1991) has characterized Bulwer-
Lytton’s The Coming Race as a work that “most deserves the name of fiction-linguistics.
For the language of Vril-ya is constructed as an extrapolation from the accepted truths of
the linguistic science of the time” (p. 45). By the late 19th and early 20th century, Bulwer-
Lytton’s The Coming Race had become very popular with various occult groups in England
and Germany. In 1891, a group of fans of Bulwer-Lytton’s work organized a “Coming Race
Bazaar” fundraiser. For one weekend, the Royal Albert Hall in London was converted into
the cavern of the Vril and participants were encouraged to speak in Vril-ya aided by printed
brochures containing a glossary of the language, including some conversational phrases to be
used in greeting (Anon, 1891: 129)—an event that can easily be considered as a predecessor
of today’s science fiction and fantasy conventions where participants speak art-languages like
Klingon and Dothraki.
It was upon these academic principles and imaginative predecessors that the author and
philologist J. R. R. Tolkien built his own unique body of invented languages intertwined
with his myth-making and world-building. Tolkien both built upon the tradition of language
invention for fiction that preceded him and at the same time pushed forward the role of
art-langs as capable of mythopoeia. Tolkien was also one of the first practitioners to theorize
language invention for fiction, most importantly in his paper “A Secret Vice” delivered at
Pembroke College, Oxford, on November 29, 1931. In this talk Tolkien charts his own expe-
rience with early language play and invention, moving gradually from codes or replacement
languages such as Animalic to languages that exhibited elements of unique phono-aesthetic
qualities that Tolkien found attractive, such as “Naffarin” (see Tolkien, 2016). These early
attempts would lead in circa 1915 to Tolkien inventing the earliest versions of his Elvish lan-
guages that, as they developed, would become inextricably connected to his world-building
of Arda (see “Tolkien’s Arda” in this volume).
In “A Secret Vice” Tolkien outlined several key characteristics that invented languages for
fiction should have, all of which are reflected in his own Elvish language invention. The first
two of these are interrelated and mutually supporting: the creation of word forms that sound
aesthetically pleasing and a sense of fitness between word form and meaning. These ideas are
most prevalent in Tolkien’s Elvish language of Quenya, one of the main languages spoken by
Tolkien’s Elves, and meant to reflect the highest and purest of his imagined beings. An example
of this aesthetic can be seen in the first line of the Elvish poem “Namarië” from The Lord of the
Rings (1954–1955):“Ai! laurië lantar lassi súrinen, / yéni únótimë ve rámar aldaron!” (Tolkien,
2004: 377). As this line shows, Quenya words and names tend to contain open vowels reflect-
ing the Finnish language sound aesthetic that Tolkien had found attractive from an early age.
24
A contrasting use of invented words with a different sound-sense to emphasize the nature of
the peoples speaking it is evident in Tolkien’s Black Speech (a language invented by the Dark
Lord Sauron in mockery of the Elvish languages), as evident in the first line of the inscription
on the Ring of Power with its use of harsh consonant clusters: “Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg
gimbatul” (Ibid.: 254). A third characteristic of Tolkien’s language invention is his construction
of elaborate grammars that very few previous inventors of fictional languages engaged with
in such detail. Tolkien’s language papers are still in the process of being published, and they
reflect a rich corpus of phonologies, grammars, and word-lists from the different conceptual
periods of Tolkien’s creative work. The fourth characteristic that Tolkien emphasized is the
intertwining of myth and language to create “an illusion of historicity” (Tolkien, 1981: 143)
through which art-langs could imaginatively reflect how languages change over (hypotheti-
cal) time and through cross-migration of peoples. Tolkien used these four elements to invent
a complex and detailed system of art-langs that reflected the different conceptual periods of
Tolkien’s creative development of his legendarium. As explored above, Tolkien focused on
ensuring that the nomenclature that built his world, and appeared in such para-textual ele-
ments as maps and family trees, had a coherence and consistency as well as a dominant ele-
ment of sound-symbolism by developing a series of base roots from which words and names
were derived and could be traced back to. In the 1930s Tolkien expanded the two key strands
of his Elvish language invention to reflect the growing world and cultures he was building.
It would be this work that would first appear to readers in his two key published works The
Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955). Tolkien’s use of invented languages to
world-build up to this point is unique and would also greatly influence the art-languages for
fiction that would follow him.
By the late 1960s, the aftermath of two World Wars, the advent of the Cold War, and
growing political and social tensions became reflected in some of the key art-langs that were
developed for dystopian fiction. A linguistic theory of the time that was used by several
authors to conceptualize these types of art-langs is known as the “Sapir-Whorf ” hypoth-
esis. According to this theory, named after linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, the
structure of language influences the modes of thought of the culture in which it is spoken.
Authors of fiction would explore this concept in their world-building by reflecting the type
of culture they invented in the vocabulary of the invented language. In his dystopian novel of
the future, Nineteen Eighty-Four (written in 1947–8), George Orwell imaginatively explored
the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis by depicting a linguistic horror in which thought is suppressed
through the diminishment of words (and thus ideas) in the language of Newspeak. Orwell
invented the a posteriori language of Newspeak to represent the thought control applied by
“Big Brother” (IngSoc). As with other art-languages surveyed above, Orwell drew his inspira-
tion for Newspeak from an attempt by a real-world philologist, C. K. Ogden, to distill the
English language down into 850 core words, called “Basic English” (see Okrent, 2009: 139).
In A Clockwork Orange (1962) Anthony Burgess invented an a posteriori language called
Nadsat that falls more into the category of slang, cant, or argot, from elements of Russian
and Eastern European languages. Nadsat represents the rebellious language that Alex and
his band of delinquent “droogs” speak. It is through Alex’s first-person narration of the text
in Nadsat that the reader becomes part of the dystopian and violent world of A Clockwork
Orange. Another example of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis influencing the use of language in
fiction is Jack Vance’s Languages of Pao (1958) in which Vance explores how a whole race’s
mental framework can be converted from one of pacifism to one of aggression by changing
the nature of the language the next generation of the Paonese is taught. This is achieved by
developing a new language in which words and grammatical structure are designed to c reate
25
more aggressive feelings and attitudes among the new generation of learners. This use of
language to change thinking prevents the planet of Pao from being invaded but also creates a
new more aggressive race that becomes a threat itself.
In the late 20th century and up to the present day, language invention as part of world-
building would ultimately become the domain of professional linguists hired by producers of
motion-pictures, television shows, and computer games to include invented languages in the
transmedial storytelling of such franchises as Star Trek, Star Wars, and most recently George
R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones series. With the rise of the Internet in the early 1990s, many
of these art-languages would become part of online communities of fans who would both
learn and use the languages as they engaged with, and built upon, these transmedial texts.
For example, linguist Mark Okrand was hired to invent Klingon, an art-lang spoken by the
fictional Klingons in the Star Trek universe, one of the largest and most popular science fic-
tion franchises that has been created around a secondary world (see Mary McAuley’s chapter
in this volume, “Roddenberry’s Star Trek Galaxy”). As Okrent (2009) has discussed, Klingon
is one of the first art-languages that has truly superseded its role as a fictional language in a
diegetic secondary world environment (the transmedial world of Star Trek) to become a lan-
guage that is used in a community for social communication (in varying degrees) by a group
of speakers who dress up as Klingons and celebrate the Klingon culture at conventions called
“qep’a.”What started as an art-language for fictional characters has now moved into the realm
of a type of auxiliary language for communication among a group of people who are inter-
acting and immersing themselves in the imaginary culture this language helped shape (see
Okrent, 2009: 255–272). Another art-language that came out of a fictional television series
was Paku, developed for the American television series Land of the Lost (1974–1976) in which
the Marshalls, a family of modern explorers, become trapped in a prehistoric alternative uni-
verse, ostensibly revising the age-old traveler’s tale trope for television. Paku was invented by
a professor of linguistics,Victoria Fromkin, to be spoken by the small ape-like humanoids that
the family encounters and befriends, the race of the Pakuni. To invent the dialogue Fromkin
created an English-to-Paku dictionary (Conley and Cain, 2006: 107). In a similar fashion, in
2009, Paul Frommer, a professor at the USC Marshall School of Business with a doctorate in
linguistics, invented Na’vi for the world-building of Pandora in the film and later transmedial
computer game of Avatar (Wolf, 2012: 188).
Language invention has also been used in the world-building of computer games, from the
earliest text-based world-building games to the massive multiplayer online games (MMOGs)
of today, like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011) and Dragon Age: Origins (2009). Gargesh, the
language of Gargoyles in Ultima IV (1990), was one of the first languages developed for a
video game.This a posteriori language was designed by Herman Miller and was intended to be
difficult to learn. It features a flexible word order and parts of speech and tenses that are made
clear through gestures and intonations. Another highly complex and enigmatic imaginary
language is D’ni, which was invented for the immersive world of Myst (1993). D’ni was the
diegetic language of an ancient race who had the ability to create portals to other worlds by
writing about them in books. In the sequel to Myst, the video game Riven (1997), the player
needed to understand the numeric system of D’ni to solve puzzles in the game. To aid the
player, additional materials on D’ni were published giving clues as to how to read the language
(see Portnow, 2011: 144–146; and Wolf, 2012: 228–229). To date, the most complex invented
language created for a MMOG has been Logos, created for Tabula Rasa (2007), a MMOG that
failed to catch on with players. Logos was designed to be a highly complex symbolic language
that a player would master through immersing themselves in the environment of the online
secondary world by collecting logos and symbols, which they would add to their Logos Table.
26
However, the game itself had many flaws and after investing millions in its production it was
pulled after one year and taken offline in 2009 (see Portnow, 2011: 154–155). Current games
like Lord of the Rings Online (2007) also use elements of Tolkien’s Elvish languages to build a
virtual Middle-earth environment.
The most recent major example of language invention inextricably linked to world-build-
ing is Dothraki, which was created for HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011–present), the television
adaption of George R. R. Martin’s historical fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire (1996–pre-
sent). In the novels, Dothraki is spoken by a population of Hun-like, loosely confederated
tribes of horse-riding warriors who make their home on the steps of Essos in the invented
world of Westeros. The Dothraki do not have a writing system or use books, and the lan-
guage is used purely for day-to-day communication. In 2008, the creators of the HBO series
D. B. Weiss and David Benioff approached the Language Creation Society about creating the
Dothraki language which, in the first three volumes of his series, Martin gave a fairly small
set of words and phrases for but did not invent as a language that could be used in dialogue.
A contest of linguists from around the world was launched to invent this language. After two
rounds of judging from among 30 language inventors, David J. Peterson’s 300-page Dothraki
proposal was selected and he became the “inventor” of the dialogue for the pilot to the HBO
series. The Sapir-Whorf element of the language can be seen in the Dothraki expression
Ana Dothrak Chek, which is used for “I am fine” but literally means “I ride well,” indicating
the centrality of the horse culture of the Dothraki people. The very name Dothraki comes
from the verb “dorthralat,” to ride (Peterson, 2014: 37–38). For the last season of the HBO
series, Peterson also developed another invented language, High Valyrian, which, again, is only
mentioned in Martin’s original novels. In contrast to Dothraki, High Valyrian is meant to be
a language used for learning and education among the nobility of Essos and Westeros, as well
as in song and literature, not unlike the role that Tolkien’s Quenya would play in the Third
Age of Middle-earth in The Lord of the Rings. Peterson has gone on to invent languages for
other transmedial world-building environments, including Castithan, Irathient, and Omec for
a post-apocalyptic Earth in the science fiction television show Defiance (2013–2015) as well as
the language of Dark Elves, Shivaisith, for the Norse underworld of the movie Thor:The Dark
World (2013) (see Peterson, 2015).
The interlacing of language invention with other elements of world-building is now a nat-
ural element of fantasy and science fiction texts.The prevalence of these languages attached to
some of the most popular transmedial franchises of all time has also inspired people to invent
their own languages not just for fiction (of all types) but also as a purely private pleasure. For
example, the inventor of the art-language Dothraki (and many others) David Peterson has
stated that he was inspired by a puzzling use of a word in one of the Star Wars languages used
in The Return of the Jedi (1983) to start inventing his own languages (Peterson, 2015: 3–4).
The Language Creation Society (http://conlang.org) currently lists hundreds of language
inventors and books such as Mark Rosenfelder’s Language Construction Kit (2010) and David
Peterson’s own The Art of Language Invention (2015) to give aspiring language inventors hand-
books with which to invent new languages. Today, both in the Primary World and secondary
worlds, language invention is being used not only for world-building but also to enhance,
better describe, and illuminate the real world as well.
Further Reading
Adams, M. (ed.) (2011), From Elvish to Klingon: Exploring Invented Languages, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
27
Conley,T. and Cain S. (eds.) (2006), Encyclopedia of Fictional and Fantastic Languages, London: Greenwood
Press.
Okrent, Arika (2009), In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon, Poets, Loglan Lovers,
and the Mad Dreamers who Tried to Build a Perfect Language, New York: Spiegel & Grau.
Peterson, D. (2015), The Art of Language Invention: From Horse-Lords to Dark-Elves, the Words behind World-
Building, New York: Penguin Books.
Tolkien, J. R. R. (2016), A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Language Invention, edited by Dimitra Fimi and Andrew
Higgins, London: HarperCollins.
Yaguello, Marina (1991), Lunatic Lovers of Language: Imaginary Languages and Their Inventors, translated by
Catherine Slater, London: Athlone Press.
References
Anon. (1891), “Revelations of a Reveller,” Punch, 100 (March 14), p. 129.
Brontë, C., Brontë, E., and Brontë, A. (2010), Tales of Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal: Selected Writings,
edited by Christine Alexander, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bulwer-Lytton, E. (2009[1871]), Vril:The Power of the Coming Race, New York: CreateSpace.
Burgess, A. (1962), A Clockwork Orange, New York: Penguin Books.
Clore, D. (2009), Weird Words: A Lovecraftian Lexicon, New York: Hippocampus Press.
Conley,T. and Cain, S. (eds.) (2006), Encyclopedia of Fictional and Fantastic Languages, London: Greenwood
Press.
Eco, U. (1995), The Search for the Perfect Language, translated by James Fentress, Oxford: Blackwell.
Foigny, G. (1676), Les Adventures de Jacques Sadeur dans la Decouverte et la Voyage de la Terre Australe, Paris:
Société des Textes Français Modernes.
Lovecraft, H. P. (2014)The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft, edited by Leslie S. Klinger, New York: Liveright
Publishing Corporation.
Machen, A. (2012 [1899]), The White People and Other Weird Stories, New York: Penguin Modern Classics.
Malkin, B. (1997 [1806]), A Father’s Memoirs of His Child, London: Woodstock Books.
Mandeville, J. (2005), The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, London: Penguin Classics.
More, T. (2003 [1516]), Utopia, London: Penguin Books Ltd.
Morris, J. (1994), On Mozart, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Müller, M. (1868), On the Stratification of Language, London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer.
Northmore, T. (2010 [1795]), Memoirs of Planetes: Or a Sketch of the Laws and Manners of Makar, London:
Kessinger Publishing.
Okrent, Arika (2009), In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon, Poets, Loglan Lovers,
and the Mad Dreamers who Tried to Build a Perfect Language, New York: Spiegel & Grau.
Orwell, G. (1954), Nineteen Eighty-Four, New York: Penguin Books.
Peterson, D. (2014), Living Language Dothraki: A Conversational Language Course based on the Hit Original
HBO Series Game of Thrones, New York: Random House.
Peterson, D. (2015), The Art of Language Invention: From Horse-Lords to Dark-Elves,The Words behind World-
Building, New York: Penguin Books.
Polo, M. (2015), The Travels, New York: Penguin.
Portnow, J. (2011), “Gaming Languages and Language Games” in M. Adams (ed.), From Elvish to Klingon:
Exploring Invented Languages, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 135–160.
Rogers, S. (2011), The Dictionary of Made-Up Languages, New York: Adams Media Corp.
Root-Bernstein, M. (2014), Inventing Imaginary Worlds: From Childhood Play to Adult Creativity Across the
Arts and Sciences, New York: Bowman and Littlefield Publishers.
Rosenfelder, M. (2010), The Language Construction Kit, Chicago:Yonagu Books.
Swift, J. (2005 [1726]), Gulliver’s Travels, edited with an introduction by Claude Rawson and notes by Ian
Higgins, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tolkien, J. R. R. (1981), The Letters of J.R.R.Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter, with the assistance
of Christopher Tolkien, London: George Allen & Unwin.
Tolkien, J. R. R. (2004), The Lord of the Rings, 50th Anniversary Edition, edited by Wayne G. Hammond
and Christina Scull, London: HarperCollins.
Tolkien, J.R.R. (2007 [1937]), The Hobbit, London: HarperCollins.
Tolkien, J. R. R. (2008), Tolkien On Fairy-stories, edited by Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson,
London: HarperCollins.
28
Tolkien, J. R. R. (2016), A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Language Invention, edited by Dimitra Fimi and Andrew
Higgins, London: HarperCollins.
Vance, J. (1958), The Languages of Pao, New York: Avalon Books.
Wolf, M. J. P. (2012), Building Imaginary Worlds:The Theory and History of Subcreation, London: Routledge.
Yaguello, M. (1991), Lunatic Lovers of Language: Imaginary Languages and Their Inventors, translated by
Catherine Slater, London: Athlone Press.
29
4
Invented Cultures
Mark J. P. Wolf
By the loosest definition, culture includes everything made by human beings, as opposed to
nature, which is what exists without human interference. According to a widely accepted
definition by Almaney and Alwan,
cultures may be classified by three large categories of elements: artifacts (which

include items ranging from arrowheads to hydrogen bombs, magic charms to anti-
biotics, torches to electric lights, and chariots to jet planes); concepts (which include
such beliefs or value systems as right or wrong, God and man, ethics, and the gen-
eral meaning of life); and behaviors (which refer to the actual practice of concepts
or beliefs).
(1982:5)
Additionally, artifacts are related to concepts and beliefs, since the latter usually help deter-
mine the design of the former; a culture’s worldview, combined with the natural resources it
has available to work with, produces the solutions to problems encountered by the members
of the culture, such as how to construct shelter, design clothing, prepare food, and so forth. In
imaginary worlds, then, one can start with the environment in which the culture develops (for
example, a desert, a swamp, tropical or snowy regions, and so on), what natural resources are
available to build with and supply needs (what kinds of stone, wood, or other building materi-
als, plants, animals, and so on are available), and extrapolate what sort of cultures might arise.
For example, in James Cameron’s Avatar (2009), the Na’vi culture in the jungles of Pandora
is built on the planet’s unique fauna and flora, and like Earth’s jungle cultures, is technologi-
cally limited, whereas the desert cultures of the planets Arrakis and Tatooine (from the Dune
and Star Wars franchises, respectively) are both built around the need for shelter and water in
the arid regions of the desert. Even these last two examples differ somewhat based on their
planets; Arrakis is much drier, requiring the Fremen to wear stillsuits that recycle the body’s
water, whereas Tatooine, which appears to have more greenery, gets its water from moisture
farms like the one run by the Skywalker family.
Invented cultures are occasionally developed beyond the immediate needs of the story
being told, in ancillary materials, or merchandising, especially if there is interest from an audi-
ence. An author may also develop more of an invented culture than what is released, to make
what does appears in the story seem more consistent and realistic, just as creating more back-
story for characters can give them more depth, even when that backstory is not entirely used
within the story.The amount of development given to invented cultures has grown over time
and has changed along with the venues used by imaginary worlds (Wolf, 2012).
30
I n v e n t e d C u lt u r e s
Growth of Invented Cultures in Imaginary Worlds

The earliest imaginary worlds mainly consisted of strange sights and things encountered by
travelers; members of fictional cultures were described very little; it might be noted that they
might have some curious traits, customs, clothing, or physical peculiarities, but rarely more than
this. The traveler, who was also usually the narrator, was often more of an observer than a par-
ticipant, travelling to the other realm and then returning and reporting on it. Later, after works
like Marco Polo’s account of his travels, and with the rise of the traveler’s tales genre of litera-
ture, the amount of detail given about imaginary peoples and countries would grow, as authors
would try to answer more questions regarding the invented culture, and more interaction with
a world’s natives would also require more cultural norms and customs to be developed.
Works like More’s Utopia (1516) described their invented cultures to some extent, particu-
larly their way of life and governmental aspects that pertain to the organization of society,
often as a kind of proposal or thought experiment. Utopia also included a bit of the Utopian
language and its alphabet, one of the first imaginary cultures to do so, though it was only a
small sample in the form of a quatrain. A short history of the country is also given, adding
some depth to the description. By the mid-1700s, works like Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
(1726) and Robert Paltock’s The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1750) would see the
main character interacting much more with the cultures encountered, and greater detail and
explanation given to the cultures and customs encountered (see the chapters on the books
by Swift and Paltock elsewhere in this volume). Whereas Swift used cultural differences for a
satiric effect, Paltock’s invented culture is quite elaborate, with invented food, clothing, archi-
tecture designed for people with wings, and enough invented language for an “Explanation of
Names and Things mentioned in This Work” listing 103 terms, most of which are specific to
the culture. Paltock’s protagonist marries one of the natives, and much of the cultural explana-
tions are given through her.
In the 19th century, the utopian tradition continued, and several imaginary worlds appeared
whose stories seemed to be little more than a vehicle for the presentation of new foreign
cultures. For example, Charles Ischir Defontenay’s Star (Psi Cassiopeia) (1854) has no main
character or storyline, but is made up almost entirely of the history of its imaginary world,
including lengthy samples of its literature (even complete short plays) and poetry. One piece
is even a book-within-a-book, The Voyage of a Tassulian to Tasbar, in which a member of the
Tassulian culture describes his experiences visiting another culture, in Tasbar. Throughout
most of the book, alien cultures are described directly to the reader, and the entire book is
designed to be a set of documents supposedly found inside a meteor by an explorer in the
Himalayas. Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) and Edwin Abbott Abbott’s Flatland (1884) both
contain satirical elements, and use their narratives as vehicles for the descriptions of their
unusual cultures, which parody cultural norms and customs of the Victorian era.
By the 20th century, invented cultures could appear with a wealth of detail, and the rise
of audiovisual media venues for worlds meant that invented cultures could now be visual-
ized instead of merely being described (see the “World Design” chapter in this volume).
For example, the planet Mongo first appeared in Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon comic strips
(1934–1946), and featured several countries and cultures, including Coralia, an underwater
city carved from coral, populated by water-breathers, and ruled by Queen Undina; the Ice
Kingdom of Naquk; the Land of the Lion Men; Fria’s Kingdom; Desiria’s Kingdom; Barin’s
Kingdom; and others. Technology amongst these cultures ranges from Stone Age level to
highly advanced, and detailed depictions of these cultures, including native costuming and
architecture, can be seen in the drawings of the comics. Later, the franchise would become a
31
M a r k J . P. Wo l f
movie serial (1936–1940) that visualized the world in low-budget black-and-white imagery
(which often did not equal the imagery of the comics). A feature film of 1980, directed by
Mike Hodges, featured a larger-budget and color version of Mongo and its cultures, with
more elaborate detail and production design. And as of 2017, a new feature film of Flash
Gordon is apparently underway.
Audiovisual media require invented cultures to be designed and made into material arti-
facts, with their own visual and sonic appearances. Sometimes the aesthetic choices made
in the development of invented cultures strive more for exoticism than realism, resulting in
interesting but ultimately impractical designs (for example, several of the cities and space-
ships in the film Jupiter Ascending (2015)). To produce plausible new cultures, there needs to
be a unifying worldview and outlook that shapes the customs and designs of everything in
the culture, so that whatever glimpses the audience gets of that culture will be consistent and
appear to have a cultural logic behind them. Thus, even if not much of an invented culture is
needed for a particular work, all the elements involved should be thoroughly worked out in
conjunction with each other. This is especially important when there are multiple invented
cultures within the same story that are intended to be distinct from each other.
Culture Clashes in Imaginary Worlds

In many stories set in imaginary worlds, a clash between cultures provides much of the nar-
rative conflict, resulting in everything from humorous misunderstandings to full-scale wars.
Many large-scale franchises, like those of Dune, Star Trek, and Babylon 5, as well as novels like
A Princess of Mars (1912) or The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955), and films like Avatar (2009),
include cultural clashes that are also wars, but also other clashes that result in characters com-
ing to learn more about each other’s cultures, bringing them to work together (for example,
the nine-member Fellowship in Tolkien’s novel includes four hobbits, two human men, an
Istari, a Dwarf, and an Elf, the last two of which were naturally suspicious of each other, stem-
ming from a long-running animosity between Dwarves and Elves).
The centuries-long tradition of utopias, and the utopia’s dark mirror image, the dystopia,
feature stories that are often centered on a cultural clash between the utopia and visitors from
outside of it, or its own dissidents. In these cases, and others, cultural clashes can comment
on real-world cultures and their norms without specifically naming particular cultures, and
invented cultures can be constructed and fine-tuned to make whatever points the author
deems necessary. Occasionally, the cultural clashes found in imaginary worlds can also com-
ment on the unbridgeable nature of the gap between cultures that can exist. In Stanisław
Lem’s novel Solaris (1961), for example, scientists study the planet Solaris from an orbiting
space station. The planet is almost completely covered by a sentient ocean, a vast, alien intel-
ligence with whom the scientists try to communicate, but are unable to find a way, and the
novel ends with no understanding being made.
Ultimately, stories about clashing cultures can be used to help to make audiences more
aware of their own cultural norms and assumptions. For the same reason, invented cultures
are often compared with or in conflict with actual world cultures, either to satirize them or
to critique them from an outside point of view. For example, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon: or,
Over the Range (1872) features an invented culture in a satiric country that parodies practices
and institutions of British Victorian culture, while many of the foreign cultures in the Star
Trek and Babylon 5 universes can often be compared with aspects of existing human cultures.
In science fiction one also finds many planetary cultures, which has the effect of combin-
ing Earth’s cultures into “human culture,” a single thing, rather than the diverse set of many
32
cultures as it is normally seen, underscoring the similarities found across all human cultures
by providing alien cultures where such things are apparently lacking. In many stories, alien
attacks on Earth cause different human cultures to form an alliance against a common enemy,
forcing them to find common ground in order to work together. More often than not, how-
ever, invented cultures share aspects and structures of Primary World cultures.
Overlaps with Primary World Cultures

Just as secondary worlds use the Primary World as a template, changing world defaults until
a unique imaginary world is achieved, invented cultures often are inspired by actual world
cultures of Earth and then are changed and fictionalized with the addition and subtrac-
tion of various cultural traits. Thus, Frank Herbert’s Fremen culture of the desert planet of
Arrakis (from Dune (1965)) shares similarities with Islamic and Middle-Eastern cultures, while
a jungle-based culture like the Na’vi of Pandora (from Avatar (2009)) shares cultural similari-
ties with jungle cultures of Earth, like the human cultures found in the Amazon rain forests.
Invented cultures that appear in transmedial worlds take on an audiovisual form and mate-
riality, which in turn also makes them more like real-world cultures. In order to synthesize a
new culture, audiovisual designs of invented cultures may take their inspiration from multiple
real-world cultures and meld them together in new ways. For example, the culture of the
planet Naboo in the Star Wars franchise includes designs inspired by Tibetan culture (several
of Queen Amidala’s robes and headdresses), with African-inspired designs (found in Naboo’s
military vehicles and droid army), Italian architecture (the interiors of Theed Palace, shot
in Reggia Palace in Caserta, Italy), and the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright (Wright’s
blue-domed Marin County Civic Center was the inspiration for the Theed Palace exteriors)
(Bouzereau and Duncan, 1999).
At the same time, many invented cultures strive to move away from the designs and out-
looks of existing cultures. In Austin Tappan Wright’s country of Islandia, from the novel of
the same name, Islandian culture is carefully thought out in detail and described at length, as
the main character, John Lang, experiences Islandia and learns about it along with the book’s
readers. Whereas many invented cultures find their roots in either the Western or Eastern
cultures of Earth, Islandian culture is a subtle combination of traits from both Western and
Eastern cultures, resulting in a very consistent and believable culture that is neither Western
nor Eastern in design and outlook. Many of the culture’s concepts are given their own words
in the Islandian language, including tanrydoon (literally, soil-place-custom, which is the privilege
of having a room set aside for you in a friend’s home); ania, amia, apia (three types of love);
and solvadia, which Lang attempts to translate into English: “Sol- was an intensive prefix; di or
dee was green; the final a was feminine; but the va puzzled me until I had a happy thought.
Va- or van was the word for eye; a far-seen thing was vant-; Vantry was the place seen far
away…. The idea conveyed to me … the girl with the very green-green eyes” (Wright, 1942:
221).The resulting culture and country of Islandia was so believable that sixteen years after the
novel’s publication, the press was still receiving “footnotes and confessions of homesickness”
for Islandia (Finch, 2016).
Some invented cultures strike a chord and become so popular with audiences that they
inspire people to adopt some of their elements into their own lives and cultures.The invented
language of Klingon from the Klingon culture in the Star Trek universe inspired the creation
of the Klingon Language Institute (KLI) in 1992, which has members from all around the
world and even published a quarterly journal, HolQed (Klingon for “linguistics”), for thirteen
years. Institute members have made translations of literary works including Shakespeare’s
33
Hamlet (circa 1602) and Much Ado about Nothing (1612), and the Epic of Gilgamesh from antiq-
uity. Some fans have attempted to learn to speak Klingon conversationally (Marc Okrand’s
The Klingon Dictionary (1985) has sold more than 250,000 copies), and one man, d’Armond
Speers, even attempted to raise his son bilingually, speaking to him only in Klingon while his
wife spoke to him only in English (Dean, 1996). Likewise, on censuses worldwide, thousands
of people have declared “Jedi” as their faith or religion, a trend now referred to as the “Jedi
census phenomenon,” which even has its own Wikipedia page. For example, in England and
Wales alone, on the 2001 census, 390,127 people stated their religion as Jedi, making it the
fourth-largest religion reported in the country that year.
Social and religious ideas are not the only ones to spill over from invented cultures into
existing real-world cultures. Invented cultures can also include technological ideas and arti-
facts that audiences may come to desire, or that suggest new designs or solutions to problems.
The world of the film Minority Report (2002) began with the short story of the same name by
Philip K. Dick, but was opened up and further developed when it was turned into a feature
film. In 1999, Steven Spielberg convened a 15-member three-day think tank of futurists and
other experts to come up with a vision of what the year 2054, in which the film is set, could
realistically be like. The film’s production designer, Alex McDowell, collected all of the ideas
in the 80-page “2050 bible,” which integrated them into the world of the film. Eventually,
ideas from the world of Minority Report would result in over 100 patents spread over such
areas as gestural interfaces, driverless cars, multi-touch interfaces, retinal scanners, 3-D video,
personalized advertising, electronic paper, and crime prediction software. Thus, a complex
interaction exists between Primary World technologies and those of secondary worlds, with
inspiration moving in both directions between them. One could even consider invented cul-
tures to be a means of accelerating cultural change in the Primary World, since the develop-
ment of invented cultures is more deliberate and often occurs in a more concentrated form
and at a faster rate.
When one considers the vast number of cultural references to the worlds of Star Wars, Star
Trek, Oz, and other worlds, it becomes clear that imaginary world cultures are firmly a part of
our Primary World cultures.Worlds like those of the franchises mentioned above have resulted
in an enormous amount of fan productions, including fan fiction, film and videos, artwork,
re-creations, and so forth, as well as billions of dollars of merchandise. As popular aspects of
invented cultures become adopted into existing real-world cultures, such cultural elements
call into question traditional notions of what is considered culture. Since all culture is made
by human beings, can we really distinguish between “invented culture” and “authentic cul-
ture”? Or is it more a matter of scale; the number of people adopting a cultural element, the
number of people involved in its development, the length of time required for its adoption?
The boundary between “invented” and “authentic” culture, then, appears either arbitrary at
best or artificial, just as the boundary between “high” and “low” culture has been questioned
and critiqued (Inglis, 2005). Perhaps it becomes more a question of how a particular cultural
element is generated; for while all culture is made by human beings, the tools used to make it
have changed drastically, changing the nature of cultural artifacts.
Generating Cultures
While all culture is human-made, the methods of its making have changed over time, from
handmade cultural artifacts to machine-made ones. Today, computer technology even allows
programmers to write algorithms that can select and combine elements of design, generating
artwork according to a set of rules.When enough parameters are defined, this can be extended
34
to the production of entire styles, and even families of styles. If culture can be seen as design
solutions combined with styles, then perhaps aspects of culture can be procedurally generated.
Procedural generation techniques have already been used in video games to generate terrain,
architecture, names and languages, and events and histories (Wolf, 2015), and continue to be
extended to other kinds of content. Writing in 2016 about the procedural generation of cul-
ture in his work-in-progress game Ultima Ratio Regum, Mark Johnson explained,
The core technical and creative objective of the game is the procedural genera-
tion of culture. Ultima Ratio Regum generates aesthetic choices for each culture
(preferred shapes, colours, ideas, symbols, and so forth), a massive range of ideologi-
cal choices which then influence what the player finds in those cultures, variation
within clothing styles, cultural signifiers (like facial tattoos, or turbans, or particular
jewellery, scarification, etc), and also different architectural styles. Religions pro-
cedurally generate their religious altars which are always logical to their beliefs
and make aesthetic/thematic sense, their prayer mats, holy books, anything like
incense stands, and so forth. To further deepen this kind of cultural detail, the cur-
rent version has what I think is the first ever dialect generator implemented into a
game; people from different cultures say the same things in different ways depend-
ing on their cultural and religious background (with tens of millions of potential
sentences), and these statements are designed in such a way that the game makes
sure people sometimes give little “hints” about their background for the observant
player. I’m also starting to develop future systems that will generate artistic styles
and painting, poetry styles and poems, and there are also a few remaining cultural
items I want to generate for particular cultures such as statues, obelisks, and the like.
With all of that in place, I can finally begin implementing the actual game – finding
clues in the world’s cultures to solve the world’s central riddle/mystery – which is
fundamentally dependent on creating so much cultural detail, and so much detail
within that variation.
( Johnson, 2016)
In such a system, the settings and parameters used by the algorithm still represent a particular
approach to culture, but once the lower-level decision-making processes are automated, there
is no reason why the setting of the parameters themselves might not be automated in later
iterations of this kind of program.
Invented cultures are one of the infrastructures of imaginary worlds, and are often one of
the main things that attracts or repels audiences, since they determine so much of the audi-
ence’s experience of a world. Invented cultures also provide a tool with which to examine
existing cultures by comparison and to explore cultural possibilities. Successful invented cul-
tures may become adopted into real-world cultures, and reflect not only the audience’s atti-
tude toward the invented culture, but to their own cultural background as well, as they blur
the boundaries between the culture we consider “real” versus that which is invented.
References
Almaney, A. J.; and A. J. Alwan (1982), Communicating with the Arabs, Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland
Press.
Bouzereau, Laurent; and Jody Duncan (1999), Star Wars, The Making of Episode I: The Phantom Menace,
New York, New York: The Ballantine Publishing Group.
35
Dean, Eddie (1996), “Klingon as a Second Language: D’Armond Speers Teaches His Son an Alien
Tongue,” Washington City Paper, August 9, 1996, available at http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/
news/article/13011269/klingon-as-a-second-language.
Defontenay, Charles Ischir (1854), Star (Psi Cassiopeia):The Marvelous History of One of the Worlds of Outer
Space, first published in 1854, adapted by P. J. Sokolowski, Encino, California: Black Coat Press, 2007.
Finch, Charles (2016), “The Forgotten Novel That Inspired Homesickness for an Imaginary Land,”
The New Yorker, November 2, 2016, available at http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/
the-forgotten-novel-that-inspired-homesickness-for-an-imaginary-land.
Inglis, David (2005), Culture and Everyday Life, New York and London: Routledge.
Johnson, Mark (2016), E-mail sent to the author, December 13, 2016.
Wolf, Mark J. P. (2012), Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation, New York, New
York: Routledge.
Wolf, Mark J. P. (2015), “Procedurally-Generated Space in Video Games,” Invited presentation at the
University of Warwick in Coventry, England, June 10, 2015.
Wright, Austin Tappan (1942), Islandia, New York, New York: Farrar & Rinehart Inc., Quote taken from
the 1992 Reprint Edition, Salem, New Hampshire: Ayer Company Publishers, Inc.
36
5
Backstory
In the simplest sense of the term, backstory refers to any and all events that have taken place
prior to the main events of a given narrative, whether related in the main story, developed in
prequels or ancillary or paratextual materials, or only implied. In a somewhat more complex
sense, backstory can refer to those specific past events that in some way explain or ground
the plot of a given narrative. In the study of imaginary worlds, this latter definition provides
a good place to start, with the caveat that the backstory of an imaginary world reveals the
way in which it stands distinct from the Primary World of the reader and therefore not only
explains or grounds the events that take place in that world, but participates in a set of assump-
tions about how that world operates, which stand in some degree of contrast with those the
reader makes while navigating her own world. As Mark J. P. Wolf writes, “Stories set in sec-
ondary worlds may need to rely on backstory more than those set in the Primary World, since
much Primary World history is already known, or at least accessible, to the audience” (Wolf,
2012: 202). In other words, the backstory of an imaginary world is part and parcel of what
makes it imaginary rather than “real.” To be clear: although not always explicitly described or
related, backstory must involve some form of explanation, even if the reader is left to imagine
an explanation for herself and even if the reader remains, in the end, unsatisfied with a stated
or implied explanation for whatever reason (see the “World Completeness” chapter in this
volume). The reader cannot assume an imaginary world’s backstory as she might that of her
own world. Even the worlds in which naturalistic, realist, and mimetic fictions are set must
deviate from those of the Primary World of the reader and thus imply backstories contrary to
historical fact, even if contradiction remains minimal and wholly believable. However, because
“backstory” remains relatively untheorized in discussions of narrative, possible worlds, and
genre fiction, this definition must itself make no assumptions and therefore must be explained.
This explanation requires several steps. First, I will discuss other uses of this term, in relation
to dramatic performance and in the context of narrative theory, and a related concept, “origin
story” (borrowed from discussions of superhero media). Second, I will discuss several critical
and theoretical concepts in order to ground the present definition of “backstory” in related
scholarship. Finally, I offer a brief discussion of Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974),
which exemplifies these concepts in this context and allows for further development of the
term here under question.
One of the most prominent, if colloquial and difficult to trace, uses of “backstory” comes
in the context of dramatic performance, where it refers to those aspects of a character’s past
upon which an actor focuses and draws to motivate, define, or otherwise comprehend the
character in the present (for a brief but telling discussion of backstory in the context of per-
formance, see Bryon, 2014: 24–25). While we may glimpse in this concept certain elements
37
B e n j a m i n J . Ro b e rt s o n
of a more r igorous understanding of the term, namely the causal relationship of past to pre-
sent, it remains nonetheless largely unsatisfactory. Specifically, aside from the lack of schol-
arly grounding, this understanding of backstory implies, or perhaps even requires, a certain
selectivity on the part of the actor with regard to her character’s history. That is, an actor does
not (indeed cannot) focus on her character’s entire past and use it to create for that character
a coherent present. Indeed, to the extent that narrative involves selection and exclusion, such
must always be the case. However, such selectivity—the capacity to choose which aspects of
the past define the present—makes little sense when we are speaking of the brute materiality
of a world where ignorance of cultural norms, criminal law, gravity, and/or magic does not
free a character from the effects and constraints thereof. Of course, any imaginary world, like
the characters who populate it and the narratives in which they participate, is bound to prin-
ciples of selection; no description of any world can, finally, be complete in an absolute sense.
However, even if no narrative fiction offers a complete backstory, many nonetheless imply
such a backstory as they strive for completeness and consistency.
Slightly more useful here is the definition given the term in the Routledge Encyclopedia of
Narrative Theory:
A type of exposition often involving analepsis or flashback; a filling in of the cir-

cumstances and events that have led to the present moment in a storyworld, and that
illuminate the larger implications of actual or potential behaviours [sic] by characters
occupying a particular narrative ‘now’. Narrative techniques such as beginning a
story in medias res require that backstory be given analeptically, whereas in other
cases (e.g., in many realist novels) the backstory is provided at the outset.
(Herman et al., 2010: 39)
That the term warrants only this brief entry suggests its relative lack of utility in a field with
other, more developed tools—such as “exposition,” “analepsis,” etc.—for discussing similar
issues. Thus, in a manner similar to the definition given the term in relation to performance,
backstory in narrative theory becomes a shorthand for that which precedes the narrative
being told now, whether actually stated or implied, whether related as flashback in the course
of the present narrative or provided at that narrative’s outset, etc. Odysseus’ journey to Ogygia,
where he is imprisoned by Calypso (which precedes the beginning of The Odyssey but is only
told later) exemplifies a stated backstory, whereas the history of the Trojan War up to Book I
of The Iliad represents an implied one (although these matters are told of elsewhere). Like the
previous definition, this one provides some grounds for the present discussion; namely the
sense of exposition and/or causality that backstory provides for present concerns. However,
given that the study of imaginary worlds, in contrast to narratology, foregrounds discussions
of the world itself over the stories set within those worlds (to the extent such prioritization
is possible), backstory might best be theorized not as simply the stated or implied prologue
to present events, but such prologue as it intersects with the ontological rules as well as the
cultural, social, political, and economic conditions that emerge out of these rules, all of which
distinguishes the imaginary world from the Primary World. For example, although each of
Homer’s epics deals with backstory in some manner, in both cases the backstory is mainly
of interest as a prologue to the narrative itself rather than serving as an explanation for the
world. Even if the intervention of the gods in each epic does not accord with the sensibili-
ties of the modern reader, the assumption of such intervention was likely shared by Homer’s
audience making the world in question “naturalistic” rather than “imaginary.” Again, in the
present context, a discussion of backstory requires not only recognition of its importance to
38
B a c k s t o ry
what takes place in a given world in the form of narrative, but the underlying conditions of
that narrative, the ontology and epistemology of the world itself.
A definition apposite the present context emerges when we draw together an under-
standing of backstory as those events that condition the present narrative with the notion of
origin story common to superhero comics, film, and television. Such origin stories—Bruce
Wayne becoming Batman as a result of seeing his parents murdered during a mugging, Peter
Parker becoming Spider-man by way of a radioactive spider bite—are, of course, conven-
tions of the genre. Beyond mere convention, however, they speak to the manner in which
the rules governing the world of the superhero are not those that govern the world of the
reader. Thus, the origin story of a given superhero will explain why that hero does what
she does—that is, how this narrative came to pass rather than another. As one study puts it,
“The origin stories of these characters then become the basis for a reader’s understanding
of who these characters are, where they come from, and how they’ll reflect on the character
going forward” (Romagnoli & Pagnucci, 2013: 109–110). Most important, for a discussion of
imaginary worlds, are the fantastic aspects of most of these stories, those parts of the stories
that explain “where they come from” not only in a psychological or sociological sense, but
in an ontological one. That is, origin stories make clear that subsequent stories are author-
ized not only because of select personality quirks cemented in the hero by way of some past
trauma, but also because the world in which the superhero lives operates in such a way as to
make possible her becoming a true superhero, one with this or that superpower or ability.
The following statement about origin stories, although focusing on the psychological, makes
this point clear by also cataloging the ways in which a superhero’s world likely stands distinct
from that of the reader:
To read origin stories about destroyed worlds, murdered parents, genetic mutations,
and mysterious power-giving wizards is to realize the degree to which the superhero
genre is about transformation, about identity, about difference, and about the tension
between psychological rigidity and a flexible and fluid sense of human nature.
(Hatfield et al., 2013: 3)
To be clear: Spider-man exists in a world in which not only can the death of a loved one
prompt vigilantism, but also a world in which radioactive spider bites can confer superpowers
derived from a spider’s nature.
The necessity of this discussion of origin stories becomes clear when we turn our attention
to the discussion of imaginary worlds by way of theorizations of the genres of the fantastic.
Among other genres, science fiction and fantasy often (or perhaps even exclusively) deal
with worlds that in some more than trivial manner depart from the empirical environment
of their readers. Whatever distinctions exist between these genres, they nonetheless share a
concern with subcreation (even if this term would be anathema to many writers of each
genre). Consider Darko Suvin’s account of the distinctions amongst naturalistic fiction, fan-
tasy, and science fiction. Drawing upon Robert M. Philmus, Suvin writes: “naturalistic fiction
does not require scientific explanation, fantasy does not allow it, and [science fiction] both
requires and allows it” (Suvin, 1979: 65). Suvin intends in this passage to differentiate sci-
ence fiction from fantasy by aligning it in a certain respect with the empirical environment
of the author writing it; that is, like naturalistic fiction, science fiction in some ways obeys
cognitive laws and remains—at least insofar as the fiction in question explains its plots, events,
and devices—possible. In the present context, we might redraw this distinction to differenti-
ate science fiction and fantasy from naturalistic fiction, the latter a category that makes the
39
same assumptions about how reality operates as does the reader of the text (accounting for
historical differences in knowledge practices and numerous other caveats). Science fiction
and fantasy may each enjoy a different relationship with the conventions of science and the
scientific method of the Primary World in which the reader reads, but insofar as it requires
any explanation at all on this front, beyond whatever clarifications a reader may seek out in
a reference text such as Wikipedia, science fiction reveals itself to be part of an imaginary
world, one whose backstory in some manner departs from both what the reader understands
as history but also what the reader understands as nature. With regard to fantasy, even if the
genre cannot be explained cognitively and must resort to non-cognitive explanations (e.g., “A
wizard did it!”), the necessity of explanation again implies a backstory to the world altogether
different than that of the world to which the reader belongs, where the operation of gravity,
transportation infrastructure (or lack thereof), forms of government, etc., are given and there-
fore require no explanation beyond the factual.
Farah Mendlesohn’s discussions of the portal fantasy and the immersive fantasy clarify this
line of argument while adding nuance to it. In Rhetorics of Fantasy, Mendlesohn defines the
portal fantasy as “a fantastic world entered through a portal” (Mendlesohn 2008: xix; see the
“Portals” chapter in this volume). Because the world of a portal fantasy must be entered, that
world will likely, if not always, be unfamiliar to the one who enters (and the reader as well).
Moreover, the presence of the portal itself, which serves as a threshold between one world
and another and thus between one set of rules and another, signals a difference in backstory.
Mendlesohn notes that portal fantasy nearly always involves explanation by a character famil-
iar with the world to a character not familiar with the world. Thus, Gandalf (and Elrond and
Aragorn, etc.) explain Middle-earth and its backstory (why the Ring must be destroyed,
the nature of the stakes in the battle between good and evil, key moments in said battle) to
Frodo (see the “Tolkien’s Arda” chapter in this volume). In similar fashion, Holmes explains
to Watson, Obi-wan to Luke, Doctor Who to with whomever he is traveling. The latter half
of each of these pairs stands in for the reader, who benefits from such explanation and comes
to understand how the world beyond the threshold differs from her own. By contrast, “The
immersive fantasy invites us to share not only a world, but a set of assumptions” (p. xx). These
assumptions differ from those the reader unconsciously makes in order to navigate her own
world. Thus, the immersive fantasy is, for the reader, often more difficult to apprehend than
the portal fantasy by virtue of the fact that the reader must learn to intuit the assumptions of
the imaginary world from hints given in the narrative rather than through direct (if vicarious)
explanations from experts on the world’s backstory. Importantly, Mendlesohn also makes clear
that the immersive fantasy is, in many respects, close to naturalistic fiction insofar as it refuses
to directly explain its world. However, as Suvin claims, naturalistic fiction does not require
explanation. Given that immersive fantasy does, we must therefore note that the backstory of
a given imaginary world may be implied rather than stated.
The definition of backstory offered here relies not so much on imaginary worlds being
explainable in a manner satisfying to readers grounded in the scientific method, secularism,
or other modern sensibilities, as in Suvin’s distinction between science fiction and naturalistic
fiction on one hand and fantasy on the other. Rather, both Suvin and Mendlesohn point us
toward the fact of explanation itself, regardless of its merits in the Primary World, as full or
definitive. Thus, we should take explanations of imaginary worlds, whether stated or implied,
less in terms of their truth than in terms of their sheer existence, which itself points toward
the difference between the Primary World and the imaginary one. Some examples of such
explanations, the manner in which these examples are conveyed to readers, and some further
reflections on the significance of backstory will further clarify this discussion.
40
B a c k s t o ry
Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan (1946) and Steph Swainston’s The Year of Our War (2004)
exemplify the immersive fantasy. In Titus Groan, the denizens of Gormenghast Castle live
according to rigid, inscrutable, and unquestionable rituals. As such, they cannot imagine a world
beyond their own and remain always and inextricably caught up in the assumptions of it. Peake
describes the relationship between Lord Sepulchrave, the Earl of Groan, and the castle, thusly:
How could he love this place? He was part of it. He could not imagine the world
outside it; and the idea of loving Gormenghast would have shocked him. To have
asked him his feelings for his hereditary home would be like asking a man what his
feelings were towards his own hand or his own throat.
(Peake, 1992: 46)
Because Sepulchrave and most of the other characters in the novel cannot distance themselves
from their surroundings, they are never able to explain their world to anyone (or even capable
of contemplating doing so). Everyone operates according to the same assumptions. However,
even if the reader never receives such an explanation, she nonetheless understands, because
of the sheer difficulty of inhabiting the assumptions made by Sepulchrave and others, that
some explanation, which is to say some backstory, must exist for this situation even if it would
never satisfy her desire for realism or naturalism. In contrast to Titus Groan, The Year of Our
War presents itself with less difficulty to readers, even if it too denies them the satisfaction of
a well-defined backstory. In one notable passage, Jant, an immortal (or Eszai) unique for his
ability to fly, lands before a mortal, common soldier during a battle:
[He] gasped at me and threescore emotions appeared on his face—fear was the first
and reverence the last. It was easy to recognize me—who else can fly?—but he found
it hard to believe that an Eszai would ever cross his path.
(Swainston, 2004: 25, my emphasis)
Jant’s question, within the context of this world, remains rhetorical. The story we are reading,
within that world, is his; he has written it and anyone reading it (including, the text assumes,
the actual reader) would know that the only person in the world capable of flight is he.
However, for the reader this question provides crucial information about the world and its
backstory without the need for explicit statement, namely that Jant is the only person in this
world who can fly. The reader comes to understand why Jant alone can fly in this world and
thus gains more of the backstory. However, even before she learns explicitly why Jant alone
can fly, merely knowing that only Jant can fly tells the reader that there is some backstory here,
one grounded in a very different reality and the rules thereof, even if she does not yet know it.
The conception of backstory as not only what came before, but that which conditions the
present and what can happen in it, is further explained through recourse to several Marxist
notions, namely those having to do with history. In the opening pages of The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), Marx himself famously writes of the manner in which his-
tory constrains action in the present:
Men make their own history, but not spontaneously, under conditions they have
chosen for themselves; rather on terms immediately existing, given and handed
down to them.The tradition of countless dead generations is an incubus to the mind
of the living.
(Marx, 1983: 287)
41
If Marx at this point remains somewhat of an idealist, his further development of a materialist
dialectic would authorize a materialist determinism. As an example of this determinism,
Fredric Jameson offers the manner in which the United States, by prioritizing the compact-
ness of its nuclear arsenal, fell behind the USSR in the space race because of the fact that their
smaller bombs did not require the large rockets the Soviets needed for their larger bombs:
In further development, of course, the situation is once again reversed: the Americans,
precisely because their missiles are not so powerful, find themselves forced to develop
smaller and more sophisticated packages of transitorized instruments for projection
aloft; while the less refined machinery of the Soviets, who are under no such pres-
sure, transmits back relatively smaller amounts of information. And so forth.
( Jameson, 1974: 310)
In other words, one development leads to another, but also constrains and in part determines
future development because of the material conditions it manifests. Neither Jameson nor
Marx means to say that the present is fully determined by the past, but rather that what has
come before retains considerable power in the present as it sets the stage for what can be
thought, what can be said, what can be done, what can be built. Both, of course, assume that
the physical rules of the world they describe are those of the real world, the world in which
the reader reads. In the study of imaginary worlds, as we have seen, no such assumption can be
made. In this sense, historical determinism is not synonymous with backstory. It nonetheless
suggests the tenor of the current concept, namely the manner in which it grounds the present.
The concept of totality further adds to this definition. Martin Jay begins his study of totality
in Marxist theory with a discussion of the manner in which intellectuals in the Marxist tradi-
tion explicitly or implicitly claimed to speak for all, to offer a total or totalizing view of cul-
ture and society (Jay, 1984: 10–14). In his own work on the concept, John E. Grumley writes,
“The idea of a totalising [sic] historical process can be viewed as a modern reaction to a later,
seemingly permanent, historical crisis; the epochal transition to dynamic, bourgeois socio-
economic relations and forms” (Grumley, 1989: 1). In other words, totality offered thinkers
a means by which to contemplate the world all at once, at a moment when that world had
begun to fragment under the pressures of modernity and capitalism. Georg Lukács, one of
the concept’s biggest proponents and the thinker who did the most to import the concept to
literary theory, offers the following explanation:
History as a totality (universal history) is neither the mechanical aggregate of indi-

vidual historical events, nor is it a transcendent heuristic principle opposed to the
events of history, a principle that could only become effective with the aid of a
special discipline, the philosophy of history. The totality of history is itself a real
historical power—even though one that has not hitherto become conscious and has
therefore gone unrecognised [sic]—a power which is not to be separated from the
reality (and hence the knowledge) of the individual facts without at the same time
annulling their reality and their factual existence. It is the real, ultimate ground of
their reality and their factual existence and hence also of their knowability even as
individual facts.
(Lukács, 2013: 151–152; see also Lukács, 1983)
In short, totality refers not to a simple addition of everything that exists in the world, nor does
it refer to some principle apart from the world itself. Rather, it is that which grants the world
42
B a c k s t o ry
its reality and out of which our capacity to know it emerges. Totality, therefore, refers not to
a static condition, but the grounds of a process by which we are enabled to know what we
know. Subsequent Marxist literary critics, especially those interested in science fiction such as
Jameson (2005: 4–5) and Carl Freedman (2000: 45–48), make use of Lukács in their discus-
sions of the generic utopia and the nature of the science fiction text.
By way of conclusion, I offer the following brief discussion of Ursula Le Guin’s The
Dispossessed (1974) as a means to better understand Mendlesohn’s discussion of the immer-
sive fantasy and the Marxist conceptions of determinism and totality, as well as the manner
in which these critical and theoretical tools inform a definition of backstory. The novel takes
place on two planets, Anarres and Urras, the former settled by refugees from the latter who
sought to establish an anarchist community devoid of private property. Its protagonist, Shevek,
is a physicist on Anarres who travels to Urras to discuss his cutting-edge work with other
physicists there. Throughout the novel, which moves between Shevek’s present trip to Urras
and the “backstory” that brought him to that trip, characters constantly misunderstand one
another based on the fact that their assumptions about what things mean, how the world
works, etc., are so informed by the historical circumstances and material conditions in which
they were raised. Shevek, whose homeworld is nearly without any plants whatsoever and
whose water resources are scarce, does not understand the way people on Urras waste paper
and water, each of which is carefully managed on Anarres. The lack of paper, for example,
limits publication and dissemination of scholarship and, in part, results in science on Anarres
being impoverished relative to science on Urras. Cultural misunderstandings are even more
pronounced. In one scene, Shevek wonders how women on Urras are able to respect them-
selves, when they are clearly not respected by the men there. Shevek assumes that these
women do, in fact, respect themselves because on Anarres women and men are considered
equal, so much so that Shevek admits at one point a desire to be a woman, which is cause for
some extreme confusion on the part of his listener from Urras. Some of the long backstory
that explains such confusion is offered explicitly in the text through analepsis, flashback, and
other devices. Some of it, however, must be intuited or discerned by the reader from clues and
hints. Some of this backstory is that of an individual, Shevek, who is from the community-
oriented Anarres but is still somewhat susceptible to “egoizing,” behaving selfishly and
prioritizing his own thoughts and being over that of others. However, the novel makes clear
that Shevek’s backstory has material foundations, that a history grounds and determines what
he can do and think and, by extension, the manner in which the societies of the individual
planets and the exchange between them might develop.While the novel does not suggest that
the reader can or should understand the whole of this history, it nonetheless suggests that this
history is totalizing, that it creates not only the manner in which things take place, but also the
manner in which characters understand what takes place. It does not seek to draw upon what
the reader already knows, to show the reader a world that can be explained through recourse
to her assumptions about her own world, but rather to distinguish this imaginary world from
the Primary World. In short, it offers a backstory proper to the study of worlds themselves.
References
Bryon, E. (2014) Integrative Performance: Practice and Theory for the Interdisciplinary Performer, London:
Routledge.
Freedman, C. (2000) Critical Theory and Science Fiction, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Grumley, J.E. (1989) History and Totality: Radical Historicism from Hegel to Foucault, London: Routledge.
Hatfield, C., Heer, J. & Worcester, K. (eds.) (2013) The Superhero Reader, Jackson, MS: University Press
of Mississippi.
43
Herman, D., Jahn, M. & Ryan, M.-L. (eds.) (2010) The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London:
Routledge.
Jameson, F. (1974) Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature, Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Jameson, F. (2005) Archaeologies of the Future:The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, New York:
Verso.
Jay, M. (1984) Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas, Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Lukács, G. (1983) The Historical Novel, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Lukács, G. (2013) History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Marx, K. (1983) The Portable Karl Marx, E. Kamenka (ed.), New York, NY: Penguin Books.
Mendlesohn, F. (2008) Rhetorics of Fantasy, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Peake, M. (1992) Titus Groan, Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press.
Romagnoli, A.S. & Pagnucci, G.S. (2013) Enter the Superheroes: American Values, Culture, and the Canon of
Superhero Literature, Lanham: The Scarecrow Press, Inc.
Suvin, D. (1979) Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre, New Haven:
Yale University Press.
Swainston, S. (2004) The Year of Our War, New York: Eos.
Wolf, M.J.P. (2012) Building Imaginary Worlds:The Theory and History of Subcreation, New York: Routledge.
44
6
Narrative Fabric
Mark J. P. W
olf
A narrative thread is usually defined as a particular storyline either following a character,

object, place, or a causal chain of events, over some duration of time. Several narrative threads
following a similar trajectory together could then be referred to as a narrative braid, but a large
number of narrative threads that crisscross each other, sharing moments in time and spatial
locations, could be referred to as a narrative fabric (Wolf, 2012: 199). In such a case, one could
map out all the events occurring in a world along synchronic and diachronic dimensions,
which could be seen as the warp and the woof of the fabric, resulting in a network or fabric
of narrative moments that make up a world. While most of this chapter’s discussion of narra-
tive fabric will be concerning the fabrics that make up imaginary worlds, it should be pointed
out that narrative fabrics can exist regarding real-world events that involve large numbers of
people and timelines of events;World War II, for example, has thousands of stories all of which
intersect each other, with many important events occurring simultaneously and large-scale
events affecting everyone’s lives. Since it is the deliberate construction of narrative fabric that
concerns this chapter most, the discussion shall be limited to fictional narrative fabrics.
Forming the Fabric: Interconnecting Stories

Multiple stories or storylines set in the same world need not overlap at all, but typically an
author will have some link between them, by having some kind of shared assets that appear
in both stories. These can include characters, objects, locations, and events. Each character’s
life can be seen as a narrative thread woven through the world, from birth to death (and after-
ward), crossing the lives of other characters, passing through locations, and so forth. If each
character, location, and significant object is seen as having a narrative thread tracing out its
history over time, then we can see that each narrative will cross many others during the course
of a story. If we are aware that all these threads that we encounter each contains its narrative
line that could be followed, the sense of a rich, interconnected world will be greatly enhanced,
and the world will feel more like a real place.
Likewise, events at different scales can be shared by multiple storylines. In the tales of J.
R. R. Tolkien’s Legendarium, Beren and Túrin each has his own tale in the stories, and the
scene in which their paths cross briefly appears in both stories. Such shared events, even small
ones, serve to link stories together and strengthen the narrative fabric of a world. Large-scale
events, like wars, technological revolutions, the rise or fall of empires, or extreme weather can
link together even more narrative threads, even if they remain relatively distant and in the
background of the characters’ lives. Mythologies and national histories also tie together entire
peoples, and add depth to a culture and society.
45
Interconnected stories, when read in sequence, can also recontextualize each other, as
events are seen from new perspectives, and missing information completes a picture and
forces a new interpretation of known events. The film Vantage Point (2008), for example,
relates the events of a presidential assassination six times, each time from the viewpoint of a
different character, revealing more and more of what is actually going on. Comparisons of
events from competing accounts can reveal biased or unreliable narrators, hidden motives, and
unseen consequences, when the actions in one storyline result in consequences in another.
Episodes of the television show Once Upon A Time (2011–2016) are continually revealing new
information about the linked imaginary worlds of Storybrooke, Maine, and The Enchanted
Forest, with characters’ backstories interwoven with each other as well as with the present-day
events of Storybrooke. Evil characters have their motivations revealed, making them better
understood and more sympathetic; kinship connections are revealed, linking characters into a
family tree; and earlier moments where characters’ lives crossed paths are continually revealed.
As the narrative web thickens, making it increasingly difficult to weave in new threads, the
web is extended and expanded.
Extension and Expansion

Narrative fabric is extended into space (through the additions of new locations for new events
and for which additional history can be given) and through time, through sequels carrying
narrative situations forward in time, and prequels that reach backward in time, filling in back-
stories. Extensions are the easiest way to continue a narrative fabric because the new places
and times can move the storylines in new directions. Sequels are the most flexible, since they
depend only on what has gone before them, while prequels must connect to what comes after
them, limiting them more than sequels, since we already know something about some of the
characters, objects, and locations seen in prequels that appear in the works set in a time after
the prequels. Watching the Star Wars prequel trilogy after the original trilogy, for example, we
know that Anakin, Ben Kenobi, Yoda, and others will not die, since they appear in Episodes
IV–VI. Thus, prequels inevitably lack some of the suspense and uncertainty that standalone
works and sequels can use to dramatic effect.
Narrative fabric can also be expanded by filling in gaps, going into greater detail regarding
already existing events, and elaborating upon existing material in other ways. Following the
example of sequels and prequels, we could call such additional works midquels, paraquels, and
transquels. Midquels, which occur in between existing story elements, can be divided into
interquels (which take place in between already existing works in a narrative sequence) and
intraquels (which fill in a narrative gap occurring within a single already existing narrative
work). Facing even tighter constraints than prequels, interquels and intraquels are challenged
with presentation of an interesting story even though the audience knows the beginning
and endpoints of the story, which are found in the existing stories that surround the gap
into which the interquel or intraquel is set. Thus, it is not surprising that many midquels
are more about the journey or transition between two states of affairs, since the outcome
is generally known. Or, such a story could occur in a different setting and use many new
characters, though the more this is done the more tenuous its link back to the other work
or works becomes. Star Wars Episodes II and III could be considered interquels, since each
came between existing episodes, as well as Rogue One (2016), which has action set between
Episodes III and IV; thus, interquels can join existing storylines together (like Episodes II
and III) or present a new story that arises from the background events of other works (like
Rogue One).
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N a r r at i v e F a b r i c
An example of an intraquel is Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather (1969); there is a narrative
gap in Michael Corleone’s storyline during the time when he is exiled in Sicily. This two-
month gap is mentioned in the last paragraph of Book VI, and it is within this gap that the
story of Puzo’s The Sicilian (1984) takes place. Michael Corleone appears only in scenes at the
beginning and end of the book, tying it to The Godfather, while most of the book is about the
title character, Salvator Guiliano, who is not even mentioned in The Godfather.
Paraquels are stories or storylines that run in parallel with existing ones, along with their events.
While they may share many assets with the already existing works, they usually have a dif-
ferent main character and storyline, though one that ties into an existing one enough to war-
rant the presence of the paraquel. Paraquels can show what was going on behind the scenes of
an existing work—for example, Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)
takes place at the same time as Shakespeare’s Hamlet (c. 1602)—and include events from the
latter seen from a different perspective.
Transquels are works that extend across or beyond multiple works, and usually are histo-
ries or chronologies meant to tie together the history of a world. The Silmarillion (1977), for
example, covers the entire history of Tolkien’s world, with The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord
of the Rings (1954–1955) both summarized within the last nine paragraphs of the book. Due
to their nature, transquels only appear once a world is well-established enough to have a
lengthy history and the audience’s desire for it. One might also consider reference works, the
chronologies available for Star Wars and Star Trek, to be transquels, since a number of them
compile the narrative spanning the whole world’s history.
In both extension and expansion, the question is always what balance between old and new
material will be right, since old material is needed to connect with existing works set in the
world. Another consideration is how the additional material will affect other aspects of the
narrative fabric.
Fabric Size, Scope, Shape, and Density

In order to discuss narrative fabrics, it is useful to have a set of characteristics by which they
can be measured and compared. Each narrative fabric can be described according to its size,
scope, shape, and density. The size of a narrative fabric refers to how many narrative threads it
involves, and the number of narrative works that make up the world, whereas the scope of the
narrative fabric refers to the amount of space and time covered by the fabric. Some narrative
fabrics may cover whole planets or series of planets, and thousands of years, or only cover the
events of a few days in a small town; and a fabric may do either of these in a single story or in
a vast array of works across multiple media.
Considering the warp and woof of the fabric as the synchronic and diachronic dimen-
sions, we can see that worlds can lean heavily (or lightly) in either dimension. For example,
the world of Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual (1978) is an apartment building at the
address 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier in Paris, and it takes place at just before 8 p.m. on June 23,
1975, describing what all the residents are doing at that precise time, interweaving their
stories and backstories together and giving detailed descriptions of all their apartments, one
chapter per room. Thus, the book’s narrative fabric is heavily synchronic, since all of its nar-
rative threads all coincide at the same moment, although they are extended through time to
varying degrees; and the book contains a chronology of events pertaining to the story that
begins in 1833. A world can be heavily diachronic as well; Richard McQuire’s Here (1989 and
2014) chronicles the entire history of a small plot of land where a living room of a house is
eventually built, spanning across time from 500,957,406,073 BC to 2213 AD. All the narrative
47
threads present cross through this little space, some remaining there for a while, some crossing
it only once. Both works trace out the extremes of the possibilities involved in the construc-
tion of a narrative fabric.
Narrative and narrative fabric can also be discussed in terms of their density as well. Long
novels that take place in a single day (like Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003),
or Murakami’s After Dark (2004)) give a great amount of detail to the happenings of a short
period of time resulting in a high-density fabric, while the narratives of other books like Olaf
Stapledon’s Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future (1930) and Star Maker (1937)
cover millions of years, resulting in a low-density fabric. Likewise, some films have narratives
covering months, years, or more, while others take place in real time (like Rope (1948), Nick
of Time (1995), Timecode (2000), and Birdman (2014)). Of these, Timecode is interesting in that
it has four narrative threads, each following a different character, which are present on-screen
simultaneously during the film. Naturally, the narrative density of a story or a narrative fabric
can also vary greatly across even a single work, much less a fabric spanning an entire world.
Certain areas may have a greater degree of detail and examine events moment-by-moment,
while others may ellipsize heavily or even leave out whole sections. Once a narrative fabric
has been mapped out, the variations in narrative density can be overlaid, revealing patterns
that may lead to new insights in narrative and world analysis.
Narrative fabric may also have a tight or loose weave, a measure of how much the vari-
ous narrative threads depend on each other, how close their timing is, and how many shared
assets they have in common. One book with a tight weave of many threads is The Lord of
the Rings (1954–1955), which has multiple storylines running simultaneously that Tolkien
mapped using extensive timelines to coordinate the action during the writing of the book.
The travel of characters on different journeys who cross paths had to be carefully timed, and
other larger events such as weather or phases of the moon had to also coincide between all
storylines taking place at the same times. Other narrative fabrics may have a loose weave,
where few events coincide or have to be carefully timed, or where events take place far apart,
spatially and temporally, so that there is less overlap and less of a chance that problems of in
consistency will arise; the Narnia stories, for example, are set far enough apart that they do not
overlap very much, other than featuring some of the same characters and lands.
Popular worlds will often have narrative fabrics that continue growing, as new works add
new characters, places, and events to them. As they grow, and new sections are added, one
problem encountered is that the new materials will likely grow farther and farther away from
the original material that made the world or franchise popular in the first place.
Growth Away from the Origin

The growth of a narrative fabric occurs due an author’s (or group of authors’) interest in
expanding it, and sometimes it even expands in directions chosen by the interest shown by
fans (for example, the expanding role of Boba Fett within the Star Wars franchise). Whatever
the reasons for growth, the addition of sequels and prequels moves the story further into the
future or into the past. As story material is added, the content of the sections being added
inevitably moves farther and farther away from the original material that made it popular in
the first place, risking declining popularity and eventual discontinuation. Solutions to this
problem include new material of equal quality as the old material, characters with long lives,
midquels, adaptations, and remakes or reboots.
New material as good as the old material is the best solution, but is easier said than done.
Audiences will reject new material that does not match the quality and spirit of the original,
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N a r r at i v e F a b r i c
or is too disconnected from and dissimilar to the original, or is too derivative and similar to
the original; such problems have given sequels a bad name. There are, of course, sequels that
are arguably better than the originals they follow, including The Lord of the Rings, The Empire
Strikes Back (1980), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), and Riven: The Sequel to Myst (1997).
The question is how long a certain of level of quality can be attained as additions keep being
made.
The next solution involves extending the original narrative threads into new material,
particularly those of characters’ lives. As franchises age, their characters do as well, leading
to limitations as to what kinds of stories could be told about them. Some franchises simply
have characters that age slowly or not at all; for example, DC Comics and Marvel Comics
characters do not age as one would expect them to, and both companies like to keep many
of the superheroes in their 20s and 30s. Detective Nancy Drew also never ages. Other char-
acters age but have long lives whose stories can be carried on over long periods of time.
There are some characters who live thousands of years, for example, Swift’s Struldbruggs,
Defontenay’s Nemsédes, and Tolkien’s Valar, Maiar, Elves, and Ents. Vampires and robots also
typically have unlimited lifespans in many works, due to their supernatural and technological
natures, respectively. Such characters can tie together multiple eras of history, and can appear
in many stories, becoming the central thread to a franchise, spanning its entire narrative fabric
and even holding it together.
The problems with long-lived characters are the inevitably changing situations they are in;
quests and wars have to eventually end, and characters themselves change through character
arcs, although these can be slow and drawn out as well. Audiences may grow tired of charac-
ters who do not change (or do not change enough), or cease to identify with them; a lack of
change also usually means a lack of depth. If an entire franchise depends heavily on a single
character, it will be difficult to believably put the character’s life in any real jeopardy, since the
audience does not expect the author to kill off the character, since it would end the franchise.
Thus, neither stasis nor change can guarantee continued success.
Another solution is to return to the original sections of narrative fabric and find holes to
patch and fill. Midquels can be set in the gaps between existing works (interquels) or in the
gaps within a single existing work (intraquels), and paraquels can feature events occurring
simultaneously with those in existing works (Wolf, 2012: 208–212). These new works are
close to the works into which they are integrated, with characters, places, and situations close
to the original works. Such works can even provide greater insight into the original works,
recontextualizing elements of their stories and providing explanations or motivations that
may have been lacking or absent in the original. Stories that run in parallel with existing sto-
ries can introduce new characters connected to events of existing works, giving them moti-
vation or additional consequences. For example, Electronic Arts’s video game The Godfather
(2006) ties into the book and films by having the player-character, named Aldo, complete
actions whose consequences appear in the book and films; for example, Aldo helps put the
decapitated horse’s head into Jack Woltz’s bed and hides the gun that Michael Corleone uses
to kill Captain McCluskey.
The main difficulty with the midquel approach is that the more that the new material is
connected to existing events, the harder it will be to fit into those events without disrupting
continuity; and narrative possibilities will be limited by events and outcomes already known
to the audience. Another difficulty midquels face is that so much of their design is determined
by the need to fit into a particular gap in the franchise that the midquel’s own dramatic
structure and emotional impact are compromised, often turning the work into just a piece
of connective tissue within the franchise, rather than something that could stand on its own.
49
A fourth solution, and one particularly used for closed worlds (for which no new canonical
material is being made), is the adaptation of existing works into other media. For example,
new interest in The Lord of the Rings occurred as a result of Peter Jackson’s film adaptations,
which provided an interpretation and visualization of the books without providing any new
canonical material. Adaptations can help maintain an audience’s interest in a franchise, by
enabling the discussions sparked by the adaptation itself, be they good or bad. An adaptation
can also spoil the experience of the original work on which it is based, and it inevitably colors
what one thinks of it (children first encountering Darth Vader as a LEGO minifigure are less
likely to find him menacing in the movies). Thus, adaptations are a double threat; they may
change material too much while at the same time not offer anything new (canonically speak-
ing) to interest the audience.
The last solution is a reboot that resets a franchise back to its starting point, reimagining
and retelling its origin stories and updating everything to the present. Reboots are perhaps the
most drastic and troublesome solution, because they wreck the canonicity of the previously
existing franchise material. Although, like retroactive continuity (retcon), a reboot changes the
past, reboots are the opposite of retcon insofar as they break with the past; instead of trying
to strengthen continuity, they deliberately restart continuity, most often to update characters
to the present day (such as James Bond and Batman) or to clear out years of tangled continu-
ity that has grown too complex (like the reboots found in DC Comics and Marvel Comics).
While reboots can bring in new audiences to a franchise, they also alienate old audiences
who are familiar with the earlier version (or versions) of the franchise. Reboots are almost
never done by the franchise’s original author, and are typically ordered by corporations who
have come to own franchises and are hoping to keep them alive and profitable. Reboots also
rely heavily on the history of a franchise to sell the new version, and this instant familiarity is
what makes them a better risk than brand new material that is unknown to an audience.Thus,
there is a tension between old and new within a reboot, and the question of what balance will
be the most palatable to the combined audience of old and new audience members.
In the end, narrative fabric inevitably grows away from its point of origination, and even
with frequent rebooting, what made the original material popular may become lost. In the
end, it will be the experience of the world and the new material added to it that will largely
determine whether audiences will want a particular narrative fabric to continue growing.
References
McQuire, Richard (2014), Here, New York, New York: Pantheon Graphic Novels and Penguin Random
House.
Perec, Georges (1978), Life: A User’s Manual, translated by David Bellos, Boston, Massachusetts: David
R. Godine, Publisher.
Puzo, Mario (1969), The Godfather, New York, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
Puzo, Mario (1984), The Sicilian, New York, New York: Random House.
Tolkien, J. R. R. (1937), The Hobbit, London, England: George Allen & Unwin.
Tolkien, J. R. R. (1954–1955), The Lord of the Rings, London, England: George Allen & Unwin.
Tolkien, J. R. R. (1977), The Silmarillion, London, England: George Allen & Unwin.
York: Routledge.
50
7
Saviors
Mark J. P. W
olf
Imaginary worlds allow authors to tell stories that require everything in those worlds to rely
on individual characters and events for their well-being, or even their continued existence, to
an extent that one rarely sees in the Primary World in which we live. This is expressed collo-
quially as “saving the world,” a way of raising the stakes (which hinge on the success or failure
of a story’s main character or characters) as high as they can be raised, for maximum dramatic
impact and suspense. The urtext for such stories is, of course, the Christian Bible, which tells
of Jesus Christ, the prophesied and long-awaited Savior and Messiah. While these stories fol-
low the structure of the Biblical story to varying degrees—occasionally even allegorically, as
with Lewis’s Aslan, who is very blatantly positioned as the Christ-like savior of Narnia—the
“saving of the world” that occurs in most worlds tends to be less spiritual and more of the
materialistic and militaristic kind, and centuries of stories have also added many new tropes
to the tradition.
Most of the time, saviors are not Divine but begin as average people who gradually dis-
cover their special role in the world, allowing the audience to better identify with them, since
they are often the story’s main character. Typically, they either come from the Primary World
and journey to the secondary world (like Niels Klim going to Nazar, Dorothy going to Oz,
or the Pevensie children going to Narnia) or they reside in a rural, remote, or marginalized
part of the secondary world (like the Shire or Tatooine) and then journey further into the
world, experiencing it for the first time along with the audience; thus, the savior is often a
newcomer or even a stranger to the place being saved (and many will often leave once their
work is done). Similar to the hero of the Monomyth or Hero’s Journey (which some saviors
undergo; see the “Hero’s Journey” chapter in this volume), the savior usually must adjust to
his or her role, and may even be reluctant to take it on at first, but in the end he or she accepts
the responsibility (if not, there would be no story).
The Savior Arrives

As the world is first introduced, there is often a people of a land or some common background
who were once free but are now oppressed by another group, dark lord, or evil force of some
kind.This dark force may be threatening to take over the world (like Sauron in Middle-earth),
or may have already done so (like the White Witch in Narnia), and it may even be the case
that there are people unaware of the threat or takeover (like many of the people growing up in
the Matrix without realizing it, until they are freed; or hobbits of the Shire who are unaware
of what transpires beyond their borders).The oppressed populace are given hope, however, by
prophecies that predict the coming of a savior who will help them, and quite often the savior
51
is unaware of the prediction until people start to identify him or her as the awaited savior.
Probably the first instance of the main character traveling to a secondary world only to find
he is inadvertently fulfilling the prophecy of a long-awaited savior occurs in Robert Paltock’s
The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1750), in which Wilkins, the main character, is ship-
wrecked and later finds himself meeting the flying people of Normnbdsgrsutt. In chapter 37
of the novel, he learns that he is expected to fulfill a prophecy and destroy a “tyrant-usurper”
that threatens to enslave the kingdom, “a thing foretold so long ago by a holy ragan, kept up
by undoubted tradition ever since, in the manner I have told you, in part performed, and now
waiting your concurrence for its accomplishment,” as Nasgig, one of the natives, tells Peter,
and then proceeds to show how Peter matches the description of the prophesized savior.
The savior can be identified by prophecy, or by an unusual ability (for example, in the
Arthurian stories, Arthur is the only one who can remove the sword from the stone), or by
their parentage, or even by the mere circumstances of their appearance, like Dorothy Gale’s
house landing accidentally on the Wicked Witch of the East when she entered Oz. More typi-
cally, someone in the know usually recognizes and identifies the savior early on, and the savior
is often given different titles (as in Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965), where Paul Atreides is said to
be the Kwisatz Haderach, the messiah bred by the Bene Gesserit). A title that often occurs is
that of “The Chosen One,” and expectations that this person will become the savior and free
the people from their bondage often set in motion the machinations that bring him or her
(sometimes getting pushed, or even forced) to the forefront of the conflict; for example, Bastain
Balthazar Bux in The Neverending Story (1979), Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars galaxy, Neo
in the Matrix franchise, and Emma Swan in the TV series Once Upon A Time (2011–present),
all of whom are “discovered” and urged on to their destinies. In the film The Last Starfighter
(1984), teenager Alex Rogan is chosen as a Starfighter based on his high-scoring performance
at a video game (placed on Earth to find worthy recruits), but after receiving the invitation, he
turns down the role and returns to Earth. While on his way back, all the other Starfighters are
killed, and Alex finally accepts the role.The idea of “the Chosen One” is occasionally parodied
as well. On “Vacation” (Episode 33, Season 1) of Uncle Grandpa (2013–present), Uncle Grandpa
finds that he fulfills an ancient prophecy on a tropical island, and tries his best to get out of the
supposed responsibilities forced upon him. And on the BBC radio program Elvenquest (2009–
present), the Chosen One turns out to be Amis, the main character’s dog.
As several of these examples show, the savior is sometimes identified as such at an early age,
so that burden of the role can be a large part of the character’s development. Saviors often
have missing parents and are on their own to some extent; for example, Dorothy Gale, Frodo
Baggins, Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter, and Emma Swan all begin as orphans leaving them in
need of a mentor figure, but also free to go off on adventures without anyone worrying about
them. (Some saviors, however, later learn that one or both of their parents is actually not dead;
saviors often discover that they are related to other characters in the story, including even the
main villains that they are fighting against; though this has become somewhat overused since
its appearance The Empire Strikes Back (1980).)
Saviors often will not believe that they are saviors, doubting themselves and those who
identify them as saviors; trust, self-acceptance, and acceptance of their savior role are often
part of the character arc that they undergo, and among the earliest narrative obstacles faced in
the story. Ironically, it can be the strong belief of the enemy, who tried to stop or destroy the
discovered savior, that finally convinces some saviors of their role, or at least spurs them on to
accepting it, and giving them a reason to fight.
Another aspect of the savior’s growth as a character is often the learning of the special
powers that he or she possesses; either from an older mentor figure, or from trial and error, or
52
S av i o r s
both.The savior must learn to control and use these powers to fight enemies who have similar
powers, powers that are unique to the imaginary worlds in which they occur (and to some
extent, which require them), like the Force in the Star Wars galaxy, or Tuning in Dark City
(1998), or the manipulation of the Matrix world in The Matrix (1999). The savior’s learning
period is also usually used for expository purposes in which the history of the conflict can
be given, and the powers and workings of the world involving them can be explained. This is
usually done under the guise of the savior asking questions and getting them answered, or the
making of plans to attack the enemy or oppressor’s forces.
While the savior learns to fight his or her friends’ enemies, the enemy learns of the savior’s
appearance or arrival, and readies an attack, first trying to stop the savior and then trying to
kill the savior. The early encounters between the savior and the enemy tend to be inconclu-
sive, with the two sides learning about each other’s abilities, and looking for weaknesses as
well; often, the savior is underestimated and proves to be more resourceful or powerful than
the enemy expects, or even more than the savior expects of himself or herself. But soon the
enemy no longer underestimates the savior, and new attacks, at a more lethal level, are planned.
Not only does the savior have an enemy to contend with, but there is often trouble on
the home front, as saviors have doubters and betrayers among their followers and the peo-
ple who are supposed to be supporting them. For example, Edmund Pevensie betrays Aslan,
Dr. Wellington Yueh betrays the Atreides family, and Cypher betrays Neo (each traitor also
receives punishment or a bad end as a result of his betrayal; but, oddly enough, usually not by
the hand of the savior). Often, betrayers are an effective threat to the savior because their deeds
are unexpected and unforeseen by everyone, providing some of the harshest setbacks to be
experienced by the savior. Less damaging than betrayal, some supporters may just doubt the
approach taken by the good side against the evil side, or give in to a momentary temptation,
as when Boromir attempts to seize the Ring in The Fellowship of the Ring (1954). In both cases,
these kinds of characters provide additional dramatic tension and make life even more difficult
for the savior (and thus, narratively more interesting for the audience).
The savior’s understanding of the savior role continues to grow, sometimes along with the
savior’s powers. Despite the fact that the savior typically has a loyal band of companions, even-
tually the savior will have to take a stand and fight evil alone, usually in a part of the world
some distance from home and under the control of the evil side, possibly even in the evil
side’s headquarters (for example, Mount Doom, the Death Star, the Matrix, or the Castle of
the Wicked Witch of the West). The evil side is often quite confident that they will win, often
overconfident, though they usually have some reason for believing that they have the upper
hand. But, naturally, something important has been overlooked.
Saving the World, and Afterward

Unless the victory is being planned for a later sequel, the savior will win over evil at the
end. Even if such a major, final, victory is being saved for a sequel, the initial story will
end with at least a smaller victory of some kind, with the main enemy being temporarily
conquered, set back, or chased away for a time. For example, at the end of the first Star Wars
film, Luke Skywalker successfully destroys the Death Star but Darth Vader gets away and
eventually builds another (and the Emperor is still in power as well); at the end of the first
Matrix film, Neo rescues Morpheus and fights off the Agents, whose bullets are no longer
effective against him, yet Agent Smith gets away and is able to return en masse in the sequel;
and in the first Dune novel, Paul Atreides takes the throne and control of Arrakis, but in the
sequel there is trouble and dissent in the empire he now rules, as the Bene Gesserit, Spacing
53
Guild, and Tleilaxu form a conspiracy to overthrow him. In a sense, this kind of ending, of
the first work in a series, is similar to the point in the story mentioned above where the
first encounters between the savior and the enemy are concluded and both sides plan their
next moves.
And although the savior eventually wins, it is often at a cost. The savior may sacrifice his
or her own life in order to save the world, though the occasional resurrection will bring the
savior back for a happy ending. Or, it may be that the savior is unable to stay with those who
were saved, and departs the world that was saved, like the cowboy riding off into the sunset.
For example, due to homesickness, Dorothy returns home to Kansas, and Frodo’s injuries still
pain him and keep him from living out the rest of his life in Middle-earth; yet, in both cases,
companions who accompanied them on their journeys remain and rule over various parts of
the world (Aragorn as King of Gondor, Gimli as Lord of the Glittering Caves, Sam as Mayor
of Hobbiton, the Tin Woodsman as ruler of the Winkies, the Lion as King of the Forest, and
the Scarecrow as ruler of Oz). In earlier works, there was thought to be a need to bring the
main character back to the Primary World so that the story could be told there, which meant
forcing the main character to return even if such a return seemed unlikely. For example, in
Paltock’s tale, Peter Wilkins marries one of the native women and starts a family with her,
stops an attempt to overthrow the kingdom, brings about a technological revolution by intro-
ducing European technology, persuades the kingdom to abolish slavery, creates alliances with
neighboring countries and joins them to the kingdom, and even renames the country, but
still wants to return to England after his wife’s death, despite the fact that he is much loved in
the land he has saved, and has been away from England for so many years that he could not
possibly have much there to which to return.
Occasionally, the savior returns to the world, or does not depart at all. If this happens, the
savior sometimes ends up ruling the world; but, in order to provide new narrative conflict,
this does not go well, or else some new threat or evil appears. Niels Klim becomes the king of
the Quamites, marries and has a son, and greatly changes the world by leading the Quamites
to conquer other nations, starting an empire, but he eventually becomes a tyrant who is over-
thrown and must flee the country; when the Childlike Empress is gone, Bastian Balthasar Bux
decides to take the throne of Fantastica himself, and ends up battling his friend Atreyu who
tries to stop him; and Paul Atreides, as Emperor, finds himself a religious leader responsible for
a bloody jihad across the universe. In other cases in which saviors return and rule in sequels,
they find themselves fighting new evils and threats, like the Pevensie children who rule in
Narnia, or Dorothy who becomes a princess of Oz in The Emerald City of Oz (1910).
Variations on the Saving of the World

Saviors may save their respective worlds from destruction, domination, or enslavement, either
permanently or on a temporary basis. Some “saving-the-world” stories represent variations
on the trope; in superhero stories, saviors like Superman, Batman, or Spider-man may save
their worlds multiple times from various villains, or even the same villain who becomes a
nemesis and keeps returning for further encounters.The savior role can be taken on as a team,
for example, groups of superheroes like the Avengers, or an ensemble like the four Pevensie
children, or the main character along with companions, like Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin
Woodsman, and Cowardly Lion in Oz. In the case of superhero saviors, the superhero some-
times keeps his or her identity secret, and is known to others through an alter ego that allows
the superhero to go unknown among the people whom he or she has saved, making it only
appear that the hero has departed after saving the world.
54
S av i o r s
In video games, the player-character is often given the savior role, as in The Elder Scrolls IV:
Oblivion (2006), or like Link in the Legend of Zelda series of games, who is sometimes even referred
to as the Chosen Hero. Playing as the Chosen One in these games sometimes results in every
major power wanting to kill you, as in Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011). The Bard’s Tale (2004) even
parodies the idea of the Chosen One; the player-character begins as the Chosen One and then
meets a series of characters throughout the game, each of who also claims to be the Chosen One.
Other structures and variations are also possible. George Lucas uses the savior story struc-
ture at two different scales in the Star Wars galaxy. In the original trilogy of films, taken by
itself, Luke Skywalker is the main character, and he saves the galaxy by defeating Darth Vader
and turning him back to the side of good. But when all six of Lucas’s films (Episodes I–VI)
are taken together, then Darth Vader (also known as Anakin Skywalker) is the main character,
and he saves the galaxy by killing the Emperor and “restoring balance to the Force.” Thus, in
Return of the Jedi (1983), Luke’s saving of Anakin becomes repositioned as one of the necessary
events needed for Anakin to save the galaxy by overthrowing the Emperor, which Luke could
not have done on his own.
Ironically, while saving the world, the savior often makes it difficult for a sequel and the
continuation of a franchise, because once the main evil facing the oppressed people is elimi-
nated and the world is saved, the main narrative conflict is gone.Tolkien tried writing a sequel
to The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955), only to abandon it for lack of real conflict, and many
worlds have not had sequels due to the happy state of equilibrium reached after the world is
saved. Subcreators who continued their worlds had to either show that their savior was not
yet done saving the world (as in Matrix Reloaded (2003) and Matrix Revolutions (2003)), or find
new villains and disasters to trouble the world with new narrative conflict (some of which
might give the savior more to do), for example, when Rey approaches Luke Skywalker in
the final scene of Star Wars Episode VII:The Force Awakens (2015) and hands him his lightsaber,
with the unspoken request that he return to action and help vanquish the First Order, a rem-
nant of the evil left after the fall of the Empire.
The value of the savior trope is that it demonstrates how a single person can make a difference
and have an enormous impact on the world he or she inhabits.While often exaggerated or heav-
ily dependent on the particular peculiarities of the imaginary world in which the story takes
place, the trope of the savior remains popular and a celebration of the power of the individual.
References
Baum, L. Frank (1900), The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Chicago, Illinois: George M. Hill Company.
Baum, L. Frank (1910), The Emerald City of Oz, Chicago, Illinois: Reilly & Britton.
Ende, Michael (1979), The Neverending Story, Stuttgart, Germany: Thienemann Verlag.
Herbert, Frank (1965), Dune, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Chilton Books.
Herbert, Frank (1969), Dune Messiah, New York: Putnam Publishing.
Holberg, Ludvig (1741), The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground, available at http://www.
archive.org/stream/nielsklimsjourne00holb/nielsklimsjourne00holb_djvu.txt.
Lewis, C. S. (1950), The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, London, England: Geoffrey Bles.
Lewis, C. S. (1951), Prince Caspian, London, England: Geoffrey Bles.
Paltock, Robert (1750), The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, available at https://archive.org/details/
lifeandadventur02paltgoog.
Tolkien, J. R. R. (1954–1955), The Lord of the Rings, London, England: Allen and Unwin.
“The Chosen One,” TVtropes.com, available at http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/
TheChosenOne.
55
8
Portals
Farah Mendlesohn identifies portal and quest fantasies as having similar structures: both
involve the protagonist leaving their known world, and passing through a portal into an
unknown place, though she elaborates that not all portal fantasies become quests, though they
are commonly so (2008: 1). While Mendlesohn’s focus was on fantasy, her observations on
portals help to define the limits of this chapter. By taking her definition that a “portal fantasy
is simply a fantastic world entered through a portal” (2008: xix), and John Clute’s definition of
a portal as “a liminal structure or aura” (Clute and Grant, 1997: 776), we can interpret portals
as identifiable thresholds leading to another world. For the sake of brevity, this chapter will
study the portal in both science fiction and fantasy as it appears as an identifiable threshold,
which literally removes the protagonist from their own world at some point in the narrative
to another place, time, or both. Thus, this chapter will not include such texts as Back to the
Future (1985) as time travel is established through a moving object rather than a defined or
relatively fixed portal. It will also exclude allegorical texts, such as The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678),
or texts explicitly dealing with virtual reality, such as The Matrix (1999). This definition will
differ slightly from Mendlesohn’s in one crucial aspect: where she defines the fantasy portal as
one-way, in that magic does not come back into the protagonist’s world (2008, xix), the sci-
ence fiction or horror portal has the effect of exposing the first world to outer dangers, which
would not be present without the portal, such as the Stargate series (1994–2011), in which
the reactivation of the Stargate serves to the Earth at risk of invasion. This difference can be
understood to represent a difference in the physical laws of the worlds; in fantasy portal fic-
tion, the portal brings the protagonist to another world, where the universal laws can be sig-
nificantly different, while in science fiction, the protagonist is more often than not transported
to a different part of their own world (this changes when the protagonist in science fiction is
removed from their universe entirely, and the portal behaves as it does in fantasy, such as the
interuniversal portals in Sliders (1995–1999)). In horror, magic can move back through the
portal in order to threaten the safety of the protagonist’s world, though this need not always be
the case. In this chapter, I will explore the purposes and types of portals, as well as discussing
the ultimate purpose of a portal in world-building. Finally, I will examine some of the more
extensive portal texts with a view to demonstrating how portals function both as narrative
catalyst and as a fundamental act of world-building itself.
Why did portal fiction arise? It could be argued that it shares its impetus with space fiction,
in that it gives writers the opportunities to create new worlds with new rules, without need-
ing to refer to the ever more detailed maps of the author’s world. Portals therefore fall easily
into exploration or travel fiction, as their structures typically have an innocent entering a
strange world that must be explained to them, as in Mike Resnick’s Stalking the Unicorn (1987),
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where John Justin Malllory is introduced to the magical version of New York that exists
alongside his own. The earliest portals in literature include Aeneas’s journey to the under-
world (The Aeneid), and, as Mendlesohn argues, early Christian texts in which the journey to
heaven is the ultimate portal journey (2008: 3–4). However, these are religious journeys, and
could be considered more allegorical than literal. By the definitions that limit this chapter,
the earliest portal text is arguably Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), in
which Alice enters Wonderland via a rabbit hole. Wonderland’s nonsensical rules demonstrate
the artistic freedom portals present, as real world laws can be completely suspended after a
journey through a portal.
Portals have three main functions: the first two are connected, as they can be used to see
other places and/or communicate, as with the palantír in The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955);
the third function, travel, is arguably the most common. Portals can serve an important narra-
tive purpose, as they allow the protagonist to move to new locations instantaneously or at least
faster than would normally be allowed. This narrative convenience can create restrictions on
the text, as will be explored later.This chapter will only focus on portals whose primary func-
tion is travel, not due to just their ubiquitousness, but also because of their sheer variety. Clute
provides a list of a wide range of portals, including doors, gates, and other thresholds, which
can sometimes function as a method of selecting or finding the hero or heroine for a specific
purpose (Clute and Grant, 1997: 776).The introduction of a portal can be the audiences’ clue
that pure subcreation, the replacement or resetting of the Primary World’s “defaults” (Wolf,
2012: 24), has happened in the text. No matter their shape or purpose, portals can be divided
into two types: natural and artificial. Natural portals are often seen through waterways, as in
Once Upon a Time (2011–present), where mermaids are capable of moving between worlds
through the seas, or tunnels or caves, as in the rabbit hole in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
(1865), or even through bad weather, such as the whirlwind that carries Lucian to the moon
in A True History (Lucian of Samasota, 2nd century), or the tornado that carries Dorothy Gale
from Kansas to Oz in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900).These previous examples are all fan-
tasy, and all share a level of permanence, even Dorothy’s tornado, as a similar event brought the
Wizard himself to Oz. In comparison, in science fiction, natural portals are much more dan-
gerous and impermanent: one of the few natural wormholes in Star Trek appears in The Next
Generation episode “The Price” (1989) and the Voyager episode “False Profits” (1996), and is
one that shifts to different points in the galaxy, making it an unreliable means of travel, while
the wormhole in Voyager’s “Eye of the Needle” (1995) is not only collapsing, but also connects
disparate times, again proving unreliable. The original significance of the wormhole in Deep
Space Nine (1993–1999) is in its presumed natural state; however, this is overturned when its
artificial nature is discovered, and natural portals remain unreliable and relatively unusable in
the series. Sometimes, natural portals are an indication of the disintegration of the bound-
ary between worlds, as with the thinnies in Stephen King’s Dark Tower novels (1982–2015).
Natural portals require no real effort on the part of the protagonist; they will either be guided
to them or stumble upon them accidentally, as Alice did. Human or other ingenuity is absent
beyond the occasional sacrifice to the gods.
By comparison, artificial portals are representations of invention and brilliance, and typi-
cally take the forms of wormholes, mirrors, and doors. The aforementioned wormhole in
Deep Space Nine (1993–1999) is the home to non-linear, incorporeal beings, with the stable
conduit to another part of the galaxy apparently a side effect and not an intention, though
its presence is the catalyst for a war reaching across the galaxy. This significant sociocultural
impact can also be seen in the Stargate series (1994–2011), in which wormholes are gener-
ated by large circular gateways, created by a race known as the Ancients, presumably with
57
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the intention of encouraging interplanetary travel in at least four galaxies in the series. As
with Deep Space Nine, the wormhole in Stargate is the catalyst for war, though this time on
an intergalactic scale. Stargate also experimented with the smaller mirror portals, which lead
to alternate universes, first introduced in Stargate SG-1’s “There But for the Grace of God”
(1998), which is reminiscent of Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1871).
Mirrors as portals to a specific realm of mirrors can be seen in the Doctor Who episode “The
Family of Blood” (2007), in which a villain is trapped in a mirror; similarly, in Once Upon A
Time’s “I’ll Be Your Mirror” (2016), the protagonists actually enter the mirror world, shown
as a shadowy realm touching on the real world. The third form of artificial portals, doors,
are perhaps the most evocative image; doors are solid, real objects that should not lead to
another world, and door portals are often associated with monsters and horror. In Monsters
Inc. (2001), children’s bedrooms are accessed through door portals by monsters, and a similar
form appears in the witch’s cottage in Brave (2012). The free-standing doors in The Dark
Tower II:The Drawing of the Three (1987a) and series four of Haven (2010–2015) are uncanny in
their ordinary appearance in unusual locations, typically free-standing on beaches or hillsides.
However, artificial portals need not be limited to the aforementioned forms: the back of the
wardrobe in C.S. Lewis’s The Lion,The Witch, and The Wardrobe (1950) is a portal too, while in
The Magician’s Nephew (1955), the magician has created rings capable of bringing the wearer
to the wood between the worlds, a place that touches on multiple parallel worlds, accessible
through pools, as long as one is wearing the correct color of ring; this becomes a rare mix
of portal object and threshold. In Sandman, Destiny’s realm must be reached first by entering
any other maze, which will mirror the maze Destiny constantly walks, in a kind of universal
hypermaze (Gaiman, 1994). There are also the portals inadvertently created by scientists who
do not understand how the universe works, from the ruptured thinny in “The Mist” (1985),
which releases a mist full of horrors, to the gateway to the Upside Down in Stranger Things
(2016–present); both are accidental portals that claim lives because scientists overreached their
knowledge and caused a rip in the fabric of the universe.This is by no means an exhaustive list
of artificial portals; however, whether created by magic or science, these particular portals and
portal items all imply an implicit understanding, or misunderstanding, of how the universe
works, and how to control it.
It is this last point that makes portals interesting to world-building criticism. At their core,
portals inform the audience of the otherness of the fictional world, and a significant dif-
ference between its laws and the Primary World’s, as currently there are no known natural
or artificial portals to other worlds. A universe with a portal is one in which, naturally or
artificially, places or times far apart can be connected. The challenge in world-building with
portals is in establishing the rules for portals, and enforcing them; as Mark J.P. Wolf says, con-
sistency, “the degree to which world details are plausible, feasible, and without contradiction,”
is necessary to successful world-building (2012: 43). This means portal narratives must work
to enforce their own laws, as they cannot be dependent on only those of the Primary World.
In Sliders (1995–1999), the inventor of sliding between universes finds he is unable to control
where and when he travels; thus, narrative tension is caused by the episodic working within
the timeline of the visit to another world in order to avoid being stranded, and the overall
objective of attempting to return home. In the Aeneid, the underworld can be reached, but
first one must make a sacrifice to the gods to ensure the safety of the quest. These rules are
necessary for the audience to invest in the subcreation: Mendlesohn describes this by defin-
ing the fantastic as “an area of literature that is heavily dependent on the dialectic between
author and reader for the construction of a sense of wonder, that it is a fiction of consensual
construction of belief ” (2008: xiii). David Gerrold, in his guide to writers, advises that the
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“reader will suspend disbelief—he won’t suspend common sense” (emphasis in the original, 2001:
29). By keeping to the rules of portals, the author allows the reader to engage with the text
without having to question their fundamental laws.This can be accomplished even if the rules
are not laid out: this can been in the Narnia sequence, in which the protagonists and audi-
ence are never made privy to how and why someone—presumably Aslan—chooses when and
where to open portals to Narnia. The only rule ever alluded to is that past a certain age—or
in Susan’s case, maturing into a young woman—the children cannot return. However, the dif-
ferent portals, from the train in Prince Caspian (1951) to the painting in The Voyage of the Dawn
Treader (1952), all imply an apparent randomness to how entering Narnia functions. This is
not to say there is not an in-depth explanation, but it is not explained in-text. However, the
consistency of the randomness of these entries into Narnia serves to reinforce the unknown
rules and make it clear that ultimately the protagonists cannot choose to enter Narnia, but will
be acted upon by an outside force.
The presence of portals also influences sociocultural world-building, often by inciting or
worsening wars, as discussed above for Deep Space Nine and Stargate. While the presence of
the wormhole near the planet Bajor in Deep Space Nine allows it to become important on a
previously unknown scale, and arguably allows the government to bargain for more resources
to rebuild after decades of annexation, positive results of wormhole travel are relatively rare.
In Farscape:The Peacekeeper Wars (2004), it is revealed that the knowledge of wormhole science
embedded in John Crichton’s brain not only holds the key to intergalactic travel, but also
to weaponized black holes. This “ultimate weapon” allows Crichton to broker peace in a
centuries-old war, though to do so he must sacrifice all knowledge of wormholes, and give up
his return to Earth. In the Star Trek episode “City on the Edge of Forever” (1967), the portal
that allows time travel is shown to be potentially devastating to history; as it never appears
again in any Star Trek series or movie, it can be presumed the Federation decided not to use
it again. Portals, like all means of travel and communication, give power to those who control
them, and serve to reshape power structures on a sometimes interplanetary scale, as seen in
Stargate SG-1 (1997–2007), in which the Goa’uld, who ruled the galaxy for thousands of
years, are defeated within a decade of humans from Earth activating their Stargate.
There is a more basic function to portals in world-building, and that is to allow world-
building itself. Portals provide instant access to other places, be they alien or fantasy worlds.
Mendlesohn points out that portal fantasies have a point of entry, and are highly descriptive,
with the protagonist helping to tell the audience about the new worlds they are encountering,
with elaborate descriptive elements (2008: xix). These make portal fantasies similar to travel
narratives (xix), with perhaps one significant difference: travel narratives often include details
about the journey, while portal narratives omit the journey in favor of exploring only the
destination. There are some suggestions that journeys through portals can be dangerous, as in
King’s short story “The Jaunt” (1981), in which a teleporter must be used while unconscious,
as madness inevitably follows. Whether consciousness in a portal is a positive or negative, in
general, portal travel is near instantaneous, with perhaps the most evocative example being in
the Valve computer game Portal (1997). With the right aim, the player is capable of looking
through a portal and seeing themselves looking into the same portal.While Portal is limited in
its world-building, Portal 2 (2007) takes the player through successively stranger levels, meta-
phorically moving the player through time by showing an alternate history of mad science
culminating in the psychotic computer GLADOS running a nightmare facility. Portals give
the author the opportunity to show the audience another world, be it magical, scientific, or
ahistorical, while taking a shortcut to get there. Rather than having to invent a warp drive,
as in Star Trek, portals allow authors to skip to pure world-building. It is this world-building
59
that I will examine next, in the first of two extensive portal narratives: the Stargate series
(1994–2011).
Stargate was a motion picture released in 1994, in which an archaeologist deciphers the
hieroglyphs that allows the titular Stargate to open a wormhole to another world. Not only
does this challenge echo the hero’s challenges of legend, such as Aeneas plucking a golden
bough to bring as a gift to the underworld (Book VI, Lines 206–213), the Stargate itself has
intimations of both natural and artificial portals. While it is clearly an alien artifact, its event
horizon resembles a pool of water, and the journey through it is represented by what looks
like a tunnel through both water and stars. The team who goes through in the film finds
themselves spurring a revolution, but more importantly, discovers their history is not as they
presumed: Egyptian gods were in fact aliens who enslaved the Earth, and the pyramids are
landing pads for alien vessels. Not only does the Stargate, by its very existence, challenge pre-
sumptions about extraterrestrial life and the nature of the universe, but what they find beyond
it challenges their own history. The god Ra’s attempt to send a nuclear weapon back through
the Stargate to destroy Earth contrasts the series against Mendlesohn’s fantasy portals where
magic cannot touch the original world (2008: xix): alien interference can, if left unchecked,
reach back through the portal to Earth.
Stargate SG-1 ran from 1997 to 2007 and picks up a year after the events of the film, and
begins with another Egyptian “god,” Apophis, coming through the Stargate to Earth and
kidnapping a female soldier while killing three others, so where Ra failed to bring his threats
to Earth, Apophis succeeds. Within the first episode, the world-building from the film is
expanded; there are thousands of Stargates, not two, and potentially thousands of civilizations
waiting to be explored. With the addition of more gods, or Goa’uld as the species is called,
this threat is amplified, all the more so in the episode “The Enemy Within” (1997), where a
major character from the film is possessed by a Goa’uld, and must be killed to protect Earth.
The Stargate thus becomes not only a means of travel to new wonders, but also a threat; its
dichotomy lies in its use being necessary to undo its own threat.
The wormhole’s similarity to a tunnel is evocative of Alice’s rabbit hole, including the
disorientation from the first trip through; similarly, the second portal in the series, the mirror
device in “There But for the Grace of God” (1998) that permits travel to alternate universes,
is reminiscent of Alice’s looking glass, though the universe that archaeologist Daniel Jackson
finds himself in is closer to Star Trek’s “Mirror, Mirror” (1967) episode, going so far as to fea-
ture an evil doppelganger of a main character, complete with sinister facial hair. While nar-
ratively this served as a warning to the usual world of an impending attack, it fundamentally
alters the view of physics in the subcreation; not only can one travel to other worlds, but
other universes. As the series progressed, travel through the Stargate brought new revelations,
such as the potential for human beings to ascend to a higher plane of existence (“Maternal
Instinct,” 2000). World-building in Stargate then becomes a feedback loop: with each new
world explored, more is revealed about the history of Earth and humanity. When seeking a
weapon to destroy the Goa’uld, they learn the Norse gods are benevolent small grey aliens, of
the type known often as Roswell Greys (“Thor’s Chariot,” 1998). While attempting to defeat
religious jihadis from a third galaxy, they learn Merlin and Morgan Le Fay were Ancients who
ascended to a higher plane of existence (“The Pegasus Project,” 2006). History then becomes
warped and changed, questioned and re-examined through the eye of the Stargate. The spin-
offs, Stargate Atlantis (2004–2009) and Stargate Universe (2009–2011), both participated in this
expansion, but in Stargate SG-1, it is the consistent return to Earth, the drawing of the uni-
verse back through the Stargate, that reinforces the world-building effects of the portal. The
portal, therefore, works not only through where it goes, but also through what it brings back.
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The sociocultural effects become apparent through an initially rocky but ultimately successful
global cooperation in the Stargate program (“Disclosure,” 2003). The Stargate, then, acts as a
unifying force in its subcreation; however, there is a utopianist element to the series. Despite
running through to 2007 and featuring the U.S. Air Force, Stargate SG-1 never references the
9/11 terrorist attacks, or the subsequent War on Terror. By failing to do so, it identifies itself
as an idealized version of the Primary World, and in this regard, the Stargate itself can never
be anything other than a benefit. However, not all extensive portal fantasies are so idealistic.
King’s Dark Tower series is unusual in that it leaks out beyond the main novels of the series,
and it does so precisely because of portals. In the 1982 novel The Gunslinger (1988: 211), other
worlds are first suggested by Jake’s final words before he falls to his second death: “Go then.
There are other worlds than these.” This is proven true as Roland Deschain later encounters
Jake through a free-standing door on a beach. There are three doors on the beach in The
Drawing of the Three (1987a), which lead to different times in what could be the same version
of Earth, but are possibly different ones. By entering these doors, Roland does not physically
travel, but rather takes over the bodies of those he encounters on the other side. Crucially
though, Roland is able to draw them back with him to his world. While these are undeniably
fantasy portals, magic is seeping between the worlds. Whether this is because it is the nature
of the subcreation, or only because the walls between the worlds are weakening as the Dark
Tower is attacked, is never made clear. However, King’s world-building is one that experiences
multiple layers; as a self-inserted character in his own works, his works can be present in other
works, such as the novels investigated by Toren in Song of Susannah (2004a). Because of these
unusual layerings, doors and thinnies in King’s works are not only clues to the somewhat porous
nature of his universe, but also signifiers of the text’s position in the series. In Haven, a TV show
working within the Dark Tower’s sphere of influence, there are references to Shawshank Prison
from Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (1982), and a particularly gruesome reference to
Misery (1987b), with a first edition of Misery Unbound, the last novel written by Paul Sheldon
“before that lady cut off his foot” (“As You Were,” 2010). However, it is the doors that identify
Haven as a Dark Tower text, as well as a magic portal that can only be opened by those from
another world, and more of King’s thinnies. Portals for King then become signifiers of risk; the
magic of the other world was brought into the town of Haven and has been terrorizing the
citizens of the town ever since. This magical seepage is likely because King is a horror writer
first, and a fantasist second: it is far more frightening for portals to be permeable, and for magic
to be able to invade. This seepage allows for cultural items to be spread among worlds: The
Beatles’ “Hey Jude” appears in nearly all worlds encountered in the series, as do references to
“The Man Jesus,” while in Wolves of the Calla (2003), the Calla folk find themselves attacked by
creatures brandishing lightsabers and explosive Harry Potter snitches.
Portals in the Dark Tower also appear to serve a slightly different function to portals in other
fantasy fiction, as they are part of the quest, but are not necessarily placed at the beginning
of the quest. In the Stargate series, the Stargate serves as a bracket to the narrative; while it is
used mid-narrative on occasion, it is the beginning and end of all quests, with the departure
and return through the wormhole serving as iconic steps for the adventurers. However, in
The Dark Tower series, portals serve mid-narrative functions. They allow movement between
worlds for the purpose of moving the quest along, or, in the case of The Drawing of the Three,
bringing others into the quest. Indeed, from Song of Susannah onwards, portals become almost
ubiquitous, with Roland and his gunslingers crossing between worlds with relative ease as
they approach the end of their quest. However, this is not entirely as it seems, as can be seen by
Roland’s arrival at the Dark Tower itself (2004b: 629–652). Each floor of the Tower is a jour-
ney to an earlier point in Roland Deschain’s life, but at its peak, where Roland is inexorably
61
drawn, is the ultimate portal, which forces Roland back toward the beginning of the series
though, interestingly, not the beginning of his quest, but back to the chase across the desert.
Roland’s scream as he remembers that this has happened before is a horror that is tinged by
hope when something has changed from the last iteration. This places the first line of The
Gunslinger, “The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed” (1988: 1),
into an entirely new context: Roland is not in the middle of a journey across the desert, but
has just emerged from a portal. The poster for the upcoming film, which declares “Last Time
Around,” implies it is not an adaptation of the novels, but a continuation from the end of
the last book, and once again the portal that starts the quest is forced into the recent past,
unseen but implied. This effect helps to embed portals in The Dark Tower’s world-building;
they become an intrinsic, necessary part of the subcreation, even necessary to the survival of
the subcreation, which rests on Roland’s actions.
This brief examination of portals should serve as a starting point for how they function and
what questions world-building criticism should raise about them. Portals in fiction serve to
rewrite universal laws and culture, and allow authors extraordinary freedom in building new
worlds reached by merely crossing a threshold. Whether the quests they launch are magical,
science fictional, or supernatural in nature, they are an integral part of storytelling, and are
vital to understanding the complexity of the subcreations they inhabit.
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Press, pp. 3–116.
King, S. (1985a) “The Jaunt” in Skeleton Crew, London: Penguin, pp. 232–257.
King, S. (1985b) “The Mist” in Skeleton Crew, London: Penguin, pp. 24–154.
King, S. (1987a) The Dark Tower 2:The Drawing of the Three, New Hampshire: Grant.
King, S. (1987b) Misery, New York:Viking.
King, S. (1988) The Dark Tower 1:The Gunslinger, London: Sphere.
King, S. (2003) The Dark Tower 5:Wolves of the Calla, New Hampshire: Grant.
King, S. (2004a) The Dark Tower 6: Song of Susannah, New Hampshire: Grant.
King, S. (2004b) The Dark Tower 7:The Dark Tower, New Hampshire: Grant.
Lewis, C.S. (1950) The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, London: Geoffrey Bles.
Lewis, C.S. (1951) Prince Caspian, London: Geoffrey Bles.
62
P o rta l s
Lewis, C.S. (1952) The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, London: Geoffrey Bles.
Lewis, C.S. (1955) The Magician’s Nephew, London: The Bodley Head.
Lucian of Samosata (1913) A.M. Harmon (trans) A True Story/True Histories. New York: G.P. Putnam’s
Sons.
“Maternal Instinct” (2000) [television] Stargate SG-1, Series 3, Episode 20, MGM Television, 28 January.
The Matrix (1999) [film] Hollywood: Warner Bros.
Mendlesohn, F. (2008) Rhetorics of Fantasy, Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press.
“Mirror, Mirror” (1967) [television] Star Trek, Paramount, 6 October.
Monsters, Inc. (2001) [film] Hollywood: Walt Disney Pictures/Pixar Animation Studios.
Once Upon A Time (2011–present) [television] ABC Studios.
“The Pegasus Project” (2006) [television] Stargate SG-1, Series 10, Episode 3, MGM Television, 28 July.
“The Price” (1989) [television] Star Trek: The Next Generation, Series 3, Episode 8, Paramount, 13
November.
Portal (1997) [computer game] Valve Corporation.
Portal 2 (2011) [computer game] Valve Corporation.
Resnick, M. (1987) Stalking the Unicorn, New York: Tor.
Sliders (1995–1999) [television] Universal Television.
Stargate (1994) [film] Hollywood: Roland Emmerich.
Stargate Atlantis (2004–2009) [television] MGM Television.
Stargate SG-1 (1997–2007) [television] MGM Television.
Stargate Universe (2009–2011) [television] MGM Television.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993–1999) [television] Paramount.
Stranger Things (2016–present) [television] Netflix.
“There But for the Grace of God” (1998) [television] Stargate SG-1, Series 1, Episode 20, MGM
Television, 20 February.
“Thor’s Chariot” (1998) [television] Stargate SG-1, Series 2, Episode 6, MGM Television, 31 July.
Tolkien, J.R.R. (1994) The Lord of the Rings, London: Harper Collins.
Virgil (2003), D. West, (trans) The Aeneid (Penguin Classics), London: Penguin Classics.
Wolf, M.J.P. (2012) Building Imaginary Worlds:The Theory and History of Subcreation. London: Routledge.
63
Part 2
Form and Structure

9
World Design
Mark J. P. Wolf
All stories occur within some kind of setting, which becomes the world of the story and its
characters. Storyworlds can be developed to varying degrees, with the minimum development
including only the world data necessary to tell the story for which the world exists. Even in
such a case, the information we receive about a world will suggest a certain type of world,
along with an attitude or feeling toward the world being depicted, one which is particularly
crafted to suit the needs of the story. Many imaginary worlds go well beyond the world data
needed for the story or stories set in the world, providing a great degree of detail about the
world and its locations, inhabitants, cultures, technologies, flora, fauna, and so forth. Some
worlds do not even have any stories set in them, like the world of Iblard and the world of the
Codex Seraphinianus (1981). In all these cases, the design of the world not only makes it distinct
from the Primary World, but gives it its particular identity, with its own unique aesthetic feel
and flavor. From a commercial standpoint, world design is also what determines much of what
defines a franchise and makes it distinct from other franchises.
Practically all imaginary worlds begin with the template of the Primary World, the world
we live in, gradually replacing its default assumptions and structures with invented mate-
rial. This is necessary if the new secondary world is to be recognized as a world, and it also
allows us to naturally fill in parts of the world that are neither seen nor described, through
assumptions based on Primary World defaults; a gap-filling process that has been referred to
by Kendall Walton as the “reality principle” (Walton, 1990) while Marie-Laure Ryan calls it
the “principle of minimal departure” (Ryan, 1980), writing:
We construe the world of fiction and of counterfactuals as being the closest possible
to the reality we know. This means that we will project upon the world of the state-
ment everything we know about the real world, and that we will make only those
adjustments which we cannot avoid.
(Ryan, 1980: 406)
A few changed world defaults is often enough of a starting point to begin the design of a
world, when all the consequences of such changes are extrapolated and applied to the world.
Even a single, profound difference can generate a very different world; for example, every-
thing in A. K. Dewdney’s Planiverse, even its physics, chemistry, and optics, is different from
the Primary World due to its existence in only two dimensions instead of three.
Typically, a world is designed as the backdrop for a story, so the design of the world devel-
ops out of the needs of the story and its audience. Genre conventions may influence what is
available in a world, for example, faster-than-light travel and wormholes in science fiction, or
67
magic and dragons in fantasy. Usually, there is also something unique in the world that is not
found anywhere else, which makes the imaginary world distinctive. The way all these things
are connected together in world infrastructures, and the author’s attitude toward them, are
the basic elements of world design, and the start of the design of a specific imaginary world.
Aspects of World Design

A world can be described according to its size, scope, shape, and boundaries. The size of the
world depends on the number of world data describing it; a world described in a single short
story would have very few world data describing it, whereas some worlds are built from the
data of hundreds of hours of television shows, dozens of novels and video games, and so on.
The scope of the world describes the extent of the space covered by the world itself; a world
could be as large as a universe or as tiny as a small town. Note that size and scope are inde-
pendent of each other; a short story could describe a whole universe, while a large amount
of data could be used to describe and build a world no larger than a town. Size and scope
combined largely determine the level of detail to which a world is described, and this level
of world density will also affect the audience’s experience of the world, and their ability to
vicariously imagine themselves in it.The greater the density of world detail, the more immer-
sive the world will be.
The shape of the world, along with its boundaries, also determines much of the audience’s
experience. A story usually only takes the audience through part of the world, and even mul-
tiple stories may not exhaust all there is to see and visit. Maps may extend the world beyond
what is seen in the stories, and unless an entire planet is mapped, the map will likely end at
such boundaries as oceans, mountains, arctic regions, deserts, or other impassable terrains. For
planets, an author will usually prefer to leave some sections unmapped, not only for the pur-
pose of speculation, but also to connect new lands in later installments of a world. If a world is
overlaid on the Primary World or some future version of it, then maps of the Primary World
are assumed to fill out what remains to be seen, although this assumption is often played with
and overturned.
The design of the inhabitants of a world tends to be, not surprisingly, those of humans or
humanoid beings, to make them relatable to the audience. As worlds like Oz, Arda, and the
Star Wars galaxy have shown, one can have a wide range of variations on creatures, robots,
and so forth, while still making the characters close enough to humans to be understandable.
Sometimes, of course, when difference and a lack of understanding is a part of the point
being made by the story, the inhabitants may be quite different from humanity, like the sen-
tient ocean of Stanisław Lem’s planet Solaris, with whom the scientists fail to communicate.
Whatever the design of the inhabitants, it should correspond to the design of the world itself
in some way; for example, a planet with high gravity would more likely have inhabitants
who are short and muscular of stature, rather than very tall and thin, and inhabitants who live
underwater would likely propel themselves differently than those who live on dry land.
Once the basic elements of the world are set, one can use those parameters to determine
the possibilities open to the flora and fauna of a world, which may play an important role
in the stories of that world (for example, the role played by sandworms on Arrakis in Frank
Herbert’s Dune universe). The natural world, which includes terrain, weather, food, clothing,
shelter, and other natural resources, is the basis upon which the foundations of culture can
be built, as a world’s inhabitants begin solving individual and societal problems and needs
with whatever is available. If the story takes place in a technologically advanced and devel-
oped world, then these things can help provide the culture’s early history on which further
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Wo r l d D e s i g n
developments can build, creating a history of the world in the process. Cultures, languages,
names, and philosophy should be developed organically if possible, in order to seem natural
and believable, with designs that make sense based on the circumstances, as opposed to wild
and fantastic designs that do not appear feasible or seem to serve no purpose.This is especially
important for long-running worlds, the earlier works of which may appear more and more
dated over time, or whose illogical or poorly designed elements become more noticeable as
the quality of world design increases as the world is expanded. Later additions to the Star Trek
universe, for example, redesigned and improved the makeup used to define the Klingons, and
then explanations had to be given as to why the Klingons seen earlier looked the way they did
(it was said to be the result of a virus, which caused the physical changes as well as a change
in the Klingons’ temperament and disposition).
As cultures are developed, each will inevitably have particular worldviews and philoso-
phies arising from their experience of the world. These may also have served as the starting
points of world design, with the world and its cultures designed to embody certain ways of
thinking. Worlds will often have multiple cultures within them, and conflict that arises out
of clashes between them (see the “Invented Cultures” chapter in this volume). The design of
cultures should also influence aspects of how they appear in audiovisual media, with distinc-
tive costumes, architecture, vehicles, technologies, and other concrete details, and the visual
design and sound effects accompanying them; yet all of these things should be coordinated
so as to fit together in a sensible and plausible whole. If this is done well, sometimes a single
piece of the culture—a building, a weapon, a sound effect, or a vehicle—may be recogniz-
able enough to evoke the entire world in the mind of an audience, allowing the world to be
easily referenced as well. For example, the sound of a lightsaber hum, a yellow brick road,
the U.S.S. Enterprise, and the sword Excalibur all effortlessly evoke the worlds from which
they come.
Finally, a set of iconic objects, characters, and other world data will aid worlds as they make
the transition from one medium to another, connecting the expected world materials even
though they appear in slightly different forms. This recognizability is especially important in
transmedial worlds, where world data may take on different appearances in different media,
while trying to maintain the overall integrity of the world.
World Design across Media

Prior to 1900, worlds mostly appeared only in books, so that written description was the main
means used to design worlds. Authors were limited by nothing except their imaginations; and
only those details that they wished to focus on were elaborated for readers. Difficult design
questions could be omitted or given vague descriptions, leaving the visualization to the audi-
ence. Fantastic and even impractical or illogical worlds could be described, that would be
difficult or ridiculous to visualize. For example, François Rabelais wrote of the outrageous
country of Aspharage, located in the giant Pantagruel’s mouth:
I passed amongst the rocks, which were his teeth, and never left walking till I got
up on one of them; and there I found the pleasantest places in the world, great large
tennis-courts, fair galleries, sweet meadows, store of vines, and an infinite number of
banqueting summer outhouses in the fields, after the Italian fashion, full of pleasure
and delight, where I stayed full four months, and never made better cheer in my life
as then.
(Rabelais, 1532)
69
Description not only allows selective world-building that only gives certain details and not
others, but also tells the audience what the characters think and feel when encountering
things; an author can describe something as scary or awe-inspiring, without having to come
up with a concrete visual design that would evoke the necessary emotions.
While the imaginary worlds that appeared before 1900 were mainly literary ones, some of
them did feature illustrations, from woodcuts to hand-drawn images, which gave a concrete
appearance to what was being described. Such images were typically redundant with the
written descriptions or held a place secondary to them, with a few exceptions, like William
Wallace Denslow’s illustrations for L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), which
were designed along with the text, carefully coordinating the two together on the page. But
comics would be the first graphical medium to present imaginary worlds primarily through
imagery. (Paintings had sometimes depicted imaginary places, but did not elaborate upon
them beyond a single image.) Although most comics are centered on characters and gags,
Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905–1914, 1924–1926) contained an enormous
amount of world-building, as Nemo ventured further and further into Slumberland over the
years. McCay’s painstaking architectural detail, often dynamically changing from panel to
panel over the course of a full-page installment, is unlike any other comic strip produced then
or since. Comics have been the medium of a number of imaginary worlds from the multi-
layered DC Comics Universe and Marvel Comics Universe, to the small worlds found in
Richard McQuire’s Here (1989 and 2014) or Chris Ware’s Building Stories (2012).
Radio presents world design challenges in that everything must be conveyed through
sound. Character voices, sound effects, music are used along with written description and nar-
ration to convey spaces and events. Some long-running radio soap operas have established not
only sets of characters and their relationships, but the imaginary worlds in which they live. In
American radio, the most recognizable imaginary place is Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, a
fictional Minnesota town that was heard about on A Prairie Home Companion during Keillor’s
time hosting the show (1974–1987, 1992–2016). The longest-running radio show in the
world, however, is the British show The Archers (1950–present), which is set in the fictional
village of Ambridge, itself in the fictional county of Borsetshire. Also similar to literary works
due to their dependence on words to convey story information, radio world-building’s use of
distinct sound effects and voices means that listeners do not have to imagine what characters
or other things sound like, even though they must still visualize them.
Film, and later television, gave world-builders the visual means to create photorealistic
worlds, while at the same time challenging them to make such worlds as vivid and creatively
realized as possible, since books could create anything that could be verbally described. Early
film saw the creation of elaborate worlds through the use of large sets combined with min-
iatures, as in Metropolis (1927) and King Kong (1933), and adapted worlds from other media,
as did MGM’s The Wizard of Oz (1939). From its earliest beginnings, film animation was a
good venue for imaginary worlds, since it was usually not based on live-action referents, and
it was also a way to bring movement into the world of comics, as the early films of Winsor
McCay demonstrate, like his Little Nemo (1911) and Gertie the Dinosaur (1914). Live-action
filmmaking became better suited for depicting imaginary worlds as special effects technol-
ogy developed, particularly after the invention of the Linwood-Dunn optical printer in 1944,
and then later with the growing development of digital effects techniques, and especially
computer animation, from the mid-1970s onward. Today, computer animation has allowed
entire film-based worlds to be made, from the cities like Coruscant in the Star Wars films, to
the jungle world of Pandora in Avatar (2009) and its sequels, to the fantasy landscapes of The
Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings films directed by Peter Jackson.
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Video games gave audiences on-screen virtual worlds that could be interacted with
through a controller, and a player-character or avatar that represented the player on-screen.
Interactivity made these on-screen worlds different than those of other screen media; worlds
were now places that players could explore for themselves, vicariously entering the world.The
geography of these worlds, especially those depicted with three-dimensional graphics seen
from a first-person perspective, are usually navigable ones, allowing the player to move about
and investigate the locations seen from multiple angles and at close range.Thus, environments
must be planned and created in three dimensions, rather than simply be designed to be seen
at a few predesignated camera angles. Environments must be detailed enough to stand up to
a player’s scrutiny, especially now that photorealistic details are a typical expectation of triple-
A, big-budget games. Of course, the world’s locations are still selectively created; just as film
and television sets are often façades lacking actual interiors, many video game locations are
little more than empty shells with limited interactivity and access. For example, in cities like
those of Bioshock Infinite (2013), Remember Me (2013), or the Grand Theft Auto series, only a
few of the buildings present can actually be entered and have interiors, while the majority
are empty shells lacking interior detail. As long as a few building can be entered, the illusion
of a complete city can be upheld, especially if the player is uncertain which buildings can be
entered, or if inaccessible buildings can be unlocked later in the game. The ability to explore
and navigate video game worlds is itself a feature that attracts many players, and the vast sizes
of some game worlds is often mentioned in the marketing of a game to ensure that players
will have enough to explore and will not soon tire of the world (Morris & Hartas, 2004).
The new mass media that became popular and widespread during the 20th century did not
only provide new venues for imaginary worlds, they also allowed worlds to appear in multi-
ple media, becoming transmedial worlds. By appearing in multiple media, imaginary worlds
could be more like the Primary World, which was also viewed through world news and infor-
mation appearing in multiple media. It would also mean a greater reliance on world design,
since transmedial worlds would be seen and heard. Authors could still create worlds within
books, but transmedial worlds would inevitably change the nature of world-building from a
solitary activity to one requiring collaboration between many people. Starting with the trans-
medial worlds like those of Baum and Burroughs, imaginary worlds became big business and
more fan-oriented, as authors started to listen to fan suggestions as they continued designing
and building their worlds (Freeman, 2016).Today, these worlds are among the largest and most
recognizable worlds; some can even be identified by individual iconic images or sounds. The
extremely collaborative nature of these worlds also means that world design is spread among
dozens of designers; thus, those who own such a world as intellectual property must work to
insure that there is an overall logic to the design and design process, lest the world’s unique
design and feel be degraded, inconsistent, or lost.
Invention, Completeness, and Consistency

As I have argued elsewhere (Wolf, 2012), worlds can be evaluated according to the degree of
invention, completeness, and consistency in a given world, and all three are also an important
part of world design. Invention is what makes a world different from the Primary World, and
also what gives it its uniqueness; perhaps more than anything else, invention is what attracts
attention to a new world when it appears, and also plays a large role in continuing an audi-
ence’s interest in it. Completeness (or, rather, the illusion of completeness) is the degree to
which a world is designed to cover all the necessary areas that make a world feasible; it allows
audience members to at least attempt an answer to any question they might have regarding
71
the world. Consistency is the extent to which the elements within a world design agree with
each other without contradiction, so that everything about a world and its design is logically
and aesthetically pleasing. All three of these criteria should be considered by a world designer
who wants to make worlds that are interesting, believable, and unique, and able to support
ongoing additions of story material.
As Lubomír Doležel has pointed out, incompleteness remains “a necessary and universal
feature” of imaginary worlds (Doložel, 1998: 169). The question then becomes, how much
of a world has to be designed and created? There is the amount of the world that is actually
designed and built, and the amount that is suggested, implied, or alluded to, without being
fully constructed.Whether it is the images and sounds depicting a cinematic world, a texture-
mapped three-dimensional environment from a video game, or verbal descriptions given in a
novel, the design of an imaginary world must contain enough detail to evoke enough of the
world to allow the audience a vicarious experience of it, and hint at places and events beyond
what is depicted so as to give an impression of the further reaches of the world that lay outside
the particular story at hand. Gaps will inevitably remain, but good, thoughtful world design
will give the audience the tools needed to speculate as to how those gaps may be filled.
Though at one level “world design” can refer to the construction of a world’s infrastruc-
tures (map, timeline, genealogy charts, etc.), on a more practical level it refers to such things
as terrain, architecture, technology, vehicles, clothing, food and drink, tools and weapons,
customs and cultures, language, and other areas, each of which must be integrated in a plau-
sible way with the others. Thus, world design is a very multidisciplinary activity, which in
audiovisual media at least has become a highly collaborative activity requiring a large number
of people, each with their own area of specialization, working under the guidance of some
creative authority who tries to ensure the overall consistency and believability of the world
being designed. As many popular imaginary worlds have demonstrated, the experience of a
well-designed imaginary world is something that does not necessarily even have to include a
narrative; the world itself can be the reason for the audience’s attention and time spent with
it. World design and world-building is an art in itself, and one that continues to grow as ever-
more elaborate worlds are constructed.
References
Dewdney, A. K. (1984), The Planiverse: Computer Contact with a Two-Dimensional World, New York, New
York: Springer.
Doležel, Lubomír (1998), Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds, Baltimore and London: The Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Freeman, Matthew (2016), Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story
Worlds, London and New York: Routledge.
Herbert, Frank (1965), Dune, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Chilton Books.
Lem, Stanisław (1962), Solaris, Warsaw, Poland: Wydawnictwo Ministerstwa Obrony Narodowej.
McQuire, Richard (2014), Here, New York, New York: Pantheon Graphic Novels, Penguin Random
House.
Morris, Dave, and Leo Hartas (2004), The Art of Game Worlds, New York, New York: HarperCollins
Publishers.
Rabelais, François (1532), Pantagruel, “Chapter XXXII. How Pantagruel with his tongue cov-
ered a whole army, and what the author saw in his mouth,” translated by Sir Thomas Urquhart of
Cromarty and Peter Antony Motteux, available online at http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Pantagruel/
Chapter_XXXII.
Ryan, Marie-Laure (1980), “Fiction, Non-Factuals and the Principle of Minimal Departure,” Poetics 8,
page 406.
Serafini, Luigi (1981), Codex Seraphinianus, Rome, Italy: Franco Maria Ricci.
72
Walton, Kendall (1990), Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of Representational Arts, Cambridge,
Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press.
Ware, Chris (2012), Building Stories, New York, New York: Pantheon Graphic Novels, Penguin Random
House.
York: Routledge.
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10
Ontological Rules
Marie-Laure Ryan
Ontology, defined by Webster’s Dictionary as the philosophical study of “the nature of being
and of the kind of things that have existence,” provides a useful approach to the classification
and differentiation of imaginary worlds. In a possible worlds perspective, imaginary worlds can
be situated at variable distances from the world we regard as actual or primary; for instance,
the world of a realistic novel such as Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2010) stands closer to the
actual world than the world of a fantasy such as The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955) because
its description requires fewer modifications from the assumed description of reality than the
description of the world of The Lord of the Rings. We can build the storyworld of Freedom by
adding a few individuals to the inventory of the real world, while leaving everything else
unchanged (physical laws, natural species, history, geography), but we can only build the world
of The Lord of the Rings by adding species (orcs, elves, hobbits), changing natural laws, and cre-
ating a brand new geography. Ontological rules specify what can and cannot exist, what is and
isn’t possible in a particular type of storyworld, thereby determining its distance, or conditions
of accessibility, from the Primary World in which we live. When a number of texts share the
same ontological rules, we can speak of genre.
Imaginary worlds, and the ontological rules that describe them, can be classified on various
levels of abstraction. Aristotle provides a useful starting point by distinguishing the task of the
historian, which is to represent what is, from the task of the poet, which is to represent what
could be according to possibility and probability (Poetics, 9.2). The domain of the possible, in
turn, can be conceived in two ways: in a narrow sense, the possible is what could happen in
the Primary World, while in a wide sense, it encompasses every type of world that differs from
the Primary World. If we split the possible into “what could happen in the Primary World,
given the proper circumstance” and “what can be imagined but cannot happen in the Primary
World,” we obtain a three-way typology (Maître, 1983, who adds a category of hesitation
between 2 and 3 inspired by Todorov):
Alethic value (= modalities of truth)

1. True/false (= nonfiction)
2. Possible (= realistic fiction, science fiction)
3. Impossible (= fantastic genres)
This rule specifies conditions of truth with respect to the Primary World. However, if we
shift perspective from the Primary World to the storyworld, if in other words we immerse
ourselves in the storyworld, then the textual assertions become automatically true in the sto-
ryworld by virtue of the performative power of fiction, a power that enables fictional texts to
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O n t o l o g i c a l Ru l e s
create imaginary objects and worlds by simply referring to them. There cannot, consequently,
be a divergence between what the text says about the world it represents and the represented
world. In the case of nonfiction, by contrast, we must distinguish the world referred to by the
text (i.e., the actual world) from the world described by the text; when the text is true these
two worlds coincide; when the text contains falsehoods, these two worlds diverge.
Nonfiction obeys very strict ontological conditions, since for the text to be accepted as true,
all the rules that define the Primary World must also define the storyworld. The world of fic-
tional texts, by contrast, can stand at various distances from the Primary World; its description
requires, consequently, a wider variety of ontological rules. The main difficulty in postulating
rules that measure ontological distance resides in cultural and individual divergences concern-
ing what is possible and what is not in the Primary World; for instance, the entertainment
screen of Icelandic Airlines states, probably tongue-in-cheek, that about 50% of people in
Iceland believe in elves. While I am skeptical of this claim, if taken literally (but isn’t belief a
matter of degree?), we should consider the possibility of it being true. Will the people who
believe in elves consider stories dealing with these creatures to be possible? Conversely, should
Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1611) be considered impossible on the ground that witches have disap-
peared from recent ontologies? And just because religious faith was more widespread and more
literal than now, did people in the Middle Ages regard hagiographic stories about saints per-
forming miracles and ribald stories about cheating wives as equally possible in the real world?
I would rather suggest that medieval people attributed these two kinds of stories to different
ontological domains within reality, the sacred and the profane (Pavel, 1986), one of which is no
longer eliciting strong belief in a large part of the population of Western c ivilizations.
In my formulation of rules, I take as standard a minimalist ontology based on scientific
observation that excludes empirically non-verified phenomena such as the paranormal and
the occult. I assume that people who do believe in elves, in flying objects of alien origin
(UFOs), or in communication with the dead will recognize that novels or films that deal with
these phenomena differ ontologically from strictly realistic texts such as Jonathan Franzen’s
Freedom. In other words, even users who personally adhere to a broader ontology may invoke
the culturally dominant “scientific” ontology as a standard when making judgments of genre.
Alternatively, a distinction could be made between what everybody believes (i.e., dogs exist),
what some people believe (i.e., UFOs exist), and what no mentally sane person believes
(unicorns exist). The corresponding genres would then be realism, the paranormal, and the
fantastic (Traill, 1991). As for the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, their ontological impact
depends on how the opening passage is interpreted: do the witches exist objectively in the
world of Macbeth, are they a figment of a character’s imagination, or are they purely allegorical
figures? Only the first interpretation is compatible with a fantastic classification. If we cannot
decide between the three interpretations, the play remains in limbo between the possible and
the impossible.
I propose to account for the ontological variety of imaginary worlds by distinguishing a
number of cognitively important semantic domains, and by dividing them according to vari-
ous degrees of departure from the implicit standard of the Primary World. This taxonomy
draws on Ryan (1991) but uses a different formulation of rules. The resulting system should
not be taken as definitive nor comprehensive: since new types of imaginary worlds are con-
tinually being created, it takes an ever-expanding catalog of rules to describe them, and to
draw finer and finer generic distinctions.
Inventory of Individuals
1. Same
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M a r i e - L au r e Rya n
2. Augmented
3. Different
The first option means that the storyworld is limited to historical individuals. This does not
mean that the work is history, since the individual properties and biography of these individu-
als could be deliberately altered. For instance, a work of fiction could show Hitler winning
the Second World War without introducing a single invented character. The second option is
the most common in realistic novels such as Freedom. It introduces some imaginary characters
into the storyworld, usually as protagonists, but real-world characters exist in the background
and form targets of reference. By a principle of solidarity, if only one real-world individual
is introduced in a fiction, one must assume that, unless otherwise specified or implied, the
entire inventory of the real world is also part of its ontological background. It would take an
extensive rewriting of history and personal biography for a novel to include Hillary Clinton
but to explicitly exclude Bill Clinton. In the third option, no real-world individual is men-
tioned, and the cast of characters is entirely original to the storyworld. This situation occurs
in most fantastic worlds, but also in some worlds that incorporate aspects of everyday reality,
such as Jane Austen’s novels: despite the identifiable geographical and historical setting (the
latter not explicitly specified but conventionally assumed to correspond to the lifetime of the
author), no real-world individual is mentioned. We cannot say that Napoleon exists in Pride
and Prejudice (1813) though he does in War and Peace (1869).
When an inventory obeys 1 or 2, a subrule comes into effect:
Properties of Common Individuals

1. Same,Verified
2. Possible
3. Different
When option 1 holds, and there are no invented characters, the text can be regarded as history.
Option 2 is the trademark of fictionalized biographies of historical individuals. Unlike authors of
historical works, novelists can attribute to historical characters speech acts, private thoughts, emo-
tions, and reasons for acting that are neither verified nor contradicted by documents. Historical
fiction should fill in the gaps in our knowledge of historical figures in a believable way, motivating
the reader to think: this could be true in the Primary World, in addition to being true in the story-
world. Option 3 is found in any fiction that stages an interaction between fictional and historical
characters. It is particularly dominant in a genre that may be called historical fabulation, such as The
Three Musketeers (1844) by Alexandre Dumas, or in counterfactual history, such as Philip Roth’s
The Plot Against America (2004), where Charles Lindbergh is elected President of the United States
during World War II and initiates humiliating measures against the Jewish population.
Imaginary worlds can also be distinguished from the real world in matters of biology and
physics. I propose the following rules:
Kinds of Natural Species

1. Same
2. Augmented
3. (Different?)
Natural Laws
1. Same
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2. Augmented (or: can be broken by magic)

3. (Different?)
These two rules are the principal factor in the distinction of fantastic from realistic story-
worlds. Rule 2 of “Natural Species” introduces supernatural and invented creatures such as
fairies, ghosts, Nazgul, the undead, elves, dwarves, hobbits, orcs, dragons, vampires, and zom-
bies into fictional worlds, where they interact with natural species such as humans, horses, and
snakes. (But if the snakes have magical abilities, they are no longer a natural species.) It is at
least theoretically possible to create a fictional world whose inventory of species presents no
overlap with that of the real world (option 3), but in practice this is hardly ever done, because
readers tend to relate emotionally to the species they know, especially to humans. Even The
Lord of the Rings, whose main protagonists are hobbits, includes a race of men (and, in fact,
hobbits are a subspecies of men, characterized by their small size, but without magical abili-
ties). A remote planet could admittedly contain an entirely different set of species (cf., Pandora
in the film Avatar [2009]), but narratively interesting situations are typically created when the
inhabitants of such remote planets come into contact with the denizens of Earth.
Since species not found on earth are usually associated with magical properties, the two
sets of rules normally imply each other. Fairies can turn pumpkins into carriages, wizards can
cast spells, and witches know how to manufacture magic potions. If imaginary species present
supernatural abilities, this means that natural laws can be broken.Yet the rules governing natu-
ral species do not make the rules of “natural law” entirely superfluous because one can imag-
ine a world that breaks natural laws without introducing additional species: for instance, in
Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915), a supernatural event affects an ordinary individual; in most
time-travel stories, humans may move back and forth in history without encountering new
species. (I take it that time-travel breaks natural laws even though Einsteinian relativity theory
suggests that it may be possible for particles.) Conversely, could a world that contains different
species entirely respect the laws of nature? This is conceivable, but narratively unproductive.
What would be the point of introducing new species if they could not do something differ-
ent? Option 3, totally different natural laws, seems cognitively improbable, because readers
would be unable to rely on their life experience and knowledge of the Primary World to infer
causal relations between events. Without causal relations there cannot be a coherent story.
Technology
1. Same
2. More Advanced
3. Absent
This is the feature that distinguishes science fiction from realism on one hand, and from the
fantastic on the other. Insofar as science fiction explores the social and environmental con-
sequences of developing advanced technologies, its relevance encompasses both the actual
world, where it could happen, and the storyworld, where it does happen as a matter of (fic-
tional) fact. In standard science fiction, natural laws are observed and there are no additional
species. But storyworlds can combine some of the attributes of the fantastic with those of
science fiction. The world (or universe) of Star Wars blends, for instance, traditional science
fictional features such as advanced spaceships and smart robots with new species, such as the
Wookiee Chewbacca, or domestic animals resembling dinosaurs and hippopotamuses. It also
presents fairy tale elements such as knights (Jedis) and princesses. The new kinds of species
could, however, be attributed to the fact that the Star Wars universe contains many planets,
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representing different climatic environments in which different life forms did evolve. If one
accepts this explanation, the world of Star Wars is more science fictional than fantastic, though
it lacks the predictive (“this could happen”) dimension of the most sophisticated worlds of
science fiction. Option 3, absent technology, can be used to describe edenic storyworlds, such
as the worlds of Baroque pastoral romances.
For more refinement within the worlds of science fiction (and possibly also within fantastic
worlds) we can apply a set of cosmological rules:
Cosmology
1. One world
2. A universe with many celestial objects (planets, stars)
3. Parallel universes
Option 1, represented in most realistic texts, does not exclude the sun, the moon, planets, and
stars from the storyworld (after all, the characters of a realistic novel may dream while look-
ing at the moon or read about space exploration); it rather means that the narrative action
is physically confined to one world. While science fiction may present the same restriction,
option 2 is much more distinctive of the genre, though not exclusive to it: we find stories of
travel to the moon (Wolf, 2012) long before the technological conditions of the trip received
any consideration. In type 2 cosmologies, celestial objects are unique, and space travel leads
to ever-different worlds. Option 3 dramatizes a cosmology that is gaining traction in theo-
retical physics and popular science, according to which the sum of what exists consists not
only of one universe with its myriads of galaxies, stars, and planets contained in a unified
space-time, but of multiple, parallel universes existing in their own space-time. The birth of
these universes can be attributed to the formation of black holes and wormholes, or to what
is known as the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics. This cosmology inspires
stories in which individuals exist in multiple parallel worlds, and where cross-world travel
enables characters to meet their counterparts, a situation particularly rich in possible dramatic
developments (Ryan, 2006).
Another ontological domain relevant to generic distinctions is the temporal location of the
action. Its variations can be captured by the following rule:
Time
1. Historical
2. Future
3. Mythical/Timeless
The first option locates stories in a specific temporal setting, recognizable for the reader
through references to real-world individuals and events, or, when none is mentioned, through
the kinds of objects and technologies that surround the characters. This does not mean that
the past of the imaginary world must be narrowly faithful to the actual past: just as a world can
introduce imaginary characters in a historical setting, it can present a counterfactual version
of the past, as in alternative history fiction. Option 2 is a distinctive feature of science fic-
tion, as well as of utopias and dystopias that do not make use of advanced technology, such as
George Orwell’s 1984 (released in 1949). Mythical time, or timelessness, the temporal setting
of medieval fantasy and fairy tales, is often signaled by expressions such as “once upon a time,”
“in the time when animals could speak,” or even the Star Wars mantra, “a long time ago in a
galaxy far, far away.” While the mention of kings and queens, knights and castles, and swords
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instead of guns may suggest a medieval setting in fairy tales, The Lord of the Rings, or Game of
Thrones, this setting is de-realized by the presence of supernatural elements.
Genres are not only determined by temporal but also by spatial criteria:
Space / Geography
1. Same
2. Augmented
3. Different
Option 1 locates stories in an actual geographic setting.When imaginary characters are intro-
duced, real-world geography must often be expanded to accommodate their whereabouts: for
instance, the Sherlock Holmes stories encompass the geography of the real world, including
Baker Street in London, but they add the address 221 (which did not exist at the time of
Conan Doyle’s writing) as the residence of the famous detective. In this case the addition is
minimal, but in the Harry Potter novels, most of the action takes place in the augmented part
of world geography. Radically different geographies occur in two cases: (1) when the setting is
fully invented, as in The Lord of the Rings; (2) when there are no place names, or none has refer-
ence in the real world, though the setting as a whole can be fairly ordinary (Kafka’s novels).
In an overwhelming number of texts, encompassing both realistic and fantastic ones, the
geometric configuration of space corresponds to our perception of real world space, but if we
want to account for strange worlds, such as Edwin Abbott’s Flatland (which describes societies
existing in two-dimensional and one-dimensional spaces), we must add this rule:
Number of Spatial Dimensions

1. Same (=3)
2. Fewer
3. (More ?)
Option 3 is questionable, because even though mathematics and geometry can describe
objects of more than three dimensions, which opens the possibility of a science fiction story
taking place in such a space, the human mind is limited to visualizing objects in three dimen-
sions. How, then, would readers imagine such worlds?
The most remote of fictional worlds (so remote that their “worldness” can be called into
question) are those that present contradictions. Their description requires the following rule:
Logic
1. Respected
2. Occasionally Violated
3. Systematically Violated
With option 1, the storyworld respects the two fundamental laws of logic: non-contradiction
(not p and –p) and excluded middle (either p or –p). The rule of non-contradiction is occa-
sionally violated in avant-garde texts, especially in French New Novels. We read, for instance,
in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s In the Labyrinth (1960), “outside it is raining,” and a few lines below,
“outside the sun is shining” (1965:141), but these two statements are part of the same descrip-
tion and no time passes between them that could explain the change in weather. According to
logicians, when a single contradiction enters a system of propositions, anything can be inferred,
and it becomes impossible to imagine a world. I believe, however, that this position is too
79
strong to describe the reader’s experience of postmodern texts. While they do not r epresent a
coherent world, these texts make a number of non-contradicted assertions, which readers can
use as materials to construct partial world versions. In one version of Robbe-Grillet’s text, it
is raining at a certain moment, in another the sun is shining in the same moment, but no ver-
sion will account for the text as a whole. It would take option 3 for the imagination to give
up the attempt to construct a world, and to resign itself to the fact that there is nothing but
words. This option can be implemented in several ways: through systematic contradiction, as
in this translation of a French non-sense poem: “a young old man, sitting on a wooden stone,
was reading a newspaper folded in his pocket in the light of a street lamp that had been turned
off ”; through incoherent content, as in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953): “Given the
existence as uttered forth in the public works of Punch and Wattman of a personal God qua-
quaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time with extension from the heights of
divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons
unknown” (Beckett, 1954: 141; the sentence goes on for two pages); and through the use of
an incomprehensible language, as in Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” (1871): “Twas brillig, and
the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe / All mimsy were the borogroves / And
the mome raths outgrabe” (Carroll, 1975: 130).
While certain combinations of ontological rules have become canonical, thereby defining
culturally recognized genres (summarized in Table 10.1) and creating expectations (we do not
anticipate finding computers in fairy tales), nothing prevents storyworlds from implement-
ing original combinations. As already noted, a breaking of physical laws usually comes hand
in hand with the presence of supernatural creatures, but in the genre of magic realism, or in
Kafka’s stories, physically impossible events, such as transformation or levitation, affect ordinary
people. Fantastic elements are usually incompatible with an inventory that includes real-world
people or a geography that includes real-world places, but in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516)
we find both supernatural creatures (a hippogriff) and historical characters and institutions
(Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Empire), both elements of Greek mythology (participants
in the Trojan war) and Biblical figures (the prophet Elijah), both real-world locations (Paris)
and imaginary ones (the sorceress Alcina’s magic island), and both travel through Europe and
travel to the moon in an ontological cocktail that defies established genres. Contemporary
Table 10.1 An ontological description of genres. A=Alethic value; B=Inventory of individuals;

C=Properties of common individuals; D=Kinds of natural species; E=Natural laws; F=Technology;
G=Cosmology; H=Time; I=Space/Geography; J=Spatial dimensions; K=Logic. Numbers refer to
values described in text. *Values are specified for Robbe-Grillet’s In the Labyrinth.
A B C D E F G H I J K
Nonfiction 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Historical fiction 2 1,2 1,2,3 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
Realistic fiction 2 2,3 1,2 1 1 1 1 1 1,2 1 1
Fantastic 3 3 n/a 2 2 1,3 1,2 3 3 1 1
Fantastic realism 3 3 n/a 1 2 1 1 1 1,2 1 1
Science fiction 2 2,3 2,3 1,2 1,2 2 2,3 2 2,3 1,2,3 1
Pastoral romance 3 3 n/a 1 1 3 1 3 3 1 1
Storyworlds with local 3 3 n/a 1 ? 1 1 3 3 1 2
contradictions*
Generalized nonsense 3 1,2,3 ? 1,2 ? ? ? ? ? ? 3
80
culture has been intensely involved in the creation of daring ontological combinations; a case
in point is the novel (2009) and film (2016) Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which hybridizes
two types of worlds normally located far away from each other.
Strict ontological rules are not the only determinants of genre. For instance, within the
large group of realistic storyworlds, further distinctions can be made on the basis of the-
matic content, such as romance, mystery, or thrillers; on the basis of probability (“escapist”
storyworlds containing hair-raising events vs. storyworlds focused on the ordinary); and on
the basis of emotional impact (tragic, comic). Within the broad domain of the supernatural,
Tzvetan Todorov proposes an epistemic distinction between a subgenre that he calls the fan-
tastic, where there is a hesitation between a natural and a supernatural explanation of events,
and the marvelous, where the supernatural is an accepted part of the real.
Though ontological rules are only one of the criteria that distinguish genres, they play a
major role in determining what types of texts we like. Just as we choose vacation destinations
on the basis of what we expect to find in them (landscapes? wildlife? culture? opportunities
for physical activities?), we choose the worlds in which we transport ourselves in imagination
in a large part on the basis of the ontological rules that predict what kinds of entities we will
encounter, and what kinds of experience these worlds have to offer.
References
Aristotle (1954[1952]) Poetics, trans. and intro. Malcolm Heath, New York: Penguin Books.
Beckett, S. (1954[1952]) En attendant/Waiting for Godot. Bilingual edition translated by the author, New
York: Grove Press.
Carroll, L. (1975[1916]) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, New York: Rand
McNally.
Maître, D. (1983) Literature and Possible Worlds, Middlesex Polytechnic Press.
Pavel, T. (1986) Fictional Worlds, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Robbe-Grillet, A. (1965) Two Novels by Robbe-Grillet: Jealousy and In the Labyrinth, trans. Richard Howard,
New York: Crown Press.
Ryan, M.-L. (1991) Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory, Bloomington: University of
Indiana Press.
Ryan, M.-L. (2006) “From Parallel Universes to Possible Worlds: Ontological Pluralism in Physics,
Narratology and Narrative,” Poetics Today 24.7, pp. 633–674.
Todorov, T. (1975[1970]) The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard,
Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Traill, N. (1991) “Fictional Worlds of the Fantastic,” Style 25, pp.196–210.
Wolf, M. J. P. (2012) Building Imaginary Worlds:The Theory and History of Subcreation, New York: Routledge.
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11
World Completeness
Completeness, or the illusion of completeness, in the present definition, refers not to a given
or static condition of an imaginary world in which that world’s every property or occupant
is fully accounted for a priori, whether actually or ideally. Rather, it refers to an emergent phe-
nomenon arising out of the interactions amongst the objects that make up that world. Here
“emergent” can be understood in its common usage—“to come into view after being con-
cealed” or “to come into existence”—as well as in a more technical sense, which refers to the
properties of a system that obtain through the “bottom-up” interactions of small components
over time rather than being set a priori in a “top-down” fashion (see Johnson, 2004). These
objects may be described in the textual fictions set in that world, but also gain coherence
by way of those fictions’ paratexts and other ancillary materials as well as by way of generic
and other intertexts with which these fictions might engage or to which they might refer,
through allusion, generic convention, etc. (on paratexts see Genette & Maclean, 1991, and
Gray, 2010; on intertextuality see Allen, 2011). This coherence obtains through the labor of
readers, viewers, or players who piece together information from these various sources and
speculate about the world in question in response to gaps in the descriptions of that world.
This definition thus understands imaginary worlds to be necessarily incomplete for the fact
that the processes by which they tend toward completion can never themselves be completed.
Mark J. P. Wolf provides the starting point for this definition when he writes that complete-
ness “refers to the degree to which the world contains explanations and details covering all
the various aspects of its characters’ experiences, as well as background details which together
suggest a feasible, practical world” (Wolf, 2012: 38). The usefulness of this definition of com-
pleteness—namely as a tool for the study of imaginary worlds—will become clear after I
summarize some previous accounts of the concept and explain both their shortcomings and
utility in the present context.
The definition of completeness offered here stands somewhat at odds with the history of
the concept, in which “completeness” has mainly referred to the question of whether one can
account for all of the properties of a real or fictional object (or the world that contains that
object). Completeness, and related concepts soundness and consistency, derives from formal
logic and metalogic and has been of interest to scholars working in the fields of possible and
fictional worlds since at least the 1970s (see the “World Consistency” chapter in this volume).
In formal logic, the completeness of a formal system with respect to a particular property
depends upon whether one can derive every formula having that property from the system
itself. In the context of possible worlds theory, and moving us much closer to a discussion
of completeness useful for a theory of imaginary worlds, Marie-Laure Ryan writes, “Insofar
as they owe their existence to an act of the mind, the entities found exclusively in possible
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Wo r l d C o m p l e t e n e s s
worlds differ in ontological status from the objects of the actual world” (Ryan, 1991: 20). In
other words, the objects we read about, hear about, or see in novels, films, video games, and
other narrative media do not possess the same manner of being as do, for example, the mate-
rial books, films, and video game cartridges that convey to us descriptions of these objects.
The latter exist in a material sense for the reader, viewer, or player; the former do not. This
difference leads Ryan to ask whether the objects present in possible worlds can be said to be
complete. She continues by framing formal logic’s definition of completeness in terms of her
investigation: “According to logicians, an object x is logically complete if for every property
p, the proposition ‘x has p’ is either true or false” (p. 20). For example, the material book that
conveys to me descriptions of Middle-earth does or does not have the property whiteness,
does or does not have the property heaviness, does or does not have the property roundness.
This material book possesses or does not possess every conceivable property in fact, such that
a person who interacts with the book can answer every question about those properties with
either a “yes” or a “no” (even if no single person will actually ask about every conceivable
property a material book might possess). By contrast, a book described in a material copy of
The Lord of the Rings (The Red Book of Westmarch, for example) cannot (perhaps) be complete
in the same manner. No one can know the answer to all of the questions one might ask about
this fictional book’s properties.
In addition to Ryan and scholars of possible worlds, scholars of fictional worlds, such as
Thomas Pavel and Lubomír Doležel, have also taken up the question of completeness. Such
scholars rely on a notion of completeness very close to that which Ryan describes, namely
one based on the characteristics of objects described in fiction and the worlds in which these
objects exist. Because these thinkers start from the definition offered by formal logic they
tend to argue against completeness. Their positions are worth considering here. Pavel notes
that because fictional worlds are of various sizes, “they manage to be rich or poor, more or
less comprehensive” (Pavel, 1986: 105). No matter the comprehensiveness of a fictional world,
however, it will always remain incomplete. In fact, Pavel writes, “For several writers, incom-
pleteness constitutes a major distinctive feature of fictional worlds” (p. 107). He then offers
formal logic’s definition of completeness to frame a question of whether we can know, for
example, if this or that character in a fictional world has a cousin or if another truly has four
children. Such questions remain unanswerable not only in fact but in principle, for Pavel; as
such, the world of which they are asked remains incomplete. The completeness of the actual
world of the reader, in contrast, affords answers in principle to nearly all questions. In those
cases where no answers are possible even in principle, as in the realm of subatomic physics,
such indeterminancy “seems to obey definite constraints” (p. 107). The indeterminancy of
fiction, which obeys no such constraints, suggests that not only are such worlds incomplete
quantitatively (we cannot know all of the properties of all of the objects therein), but also
qualitatively (we cannot fully know the physics according to which these objects accrue
their properties).
Doležel understands that, because humans construct them, fictional worlds must be incom-
plete. According to Doležel, gaps are a necessary consequence of “texture”—the specific
words a writer puts on the page by which she offers information about the world being
represented. Importantly, at certain points in a text there must be “zero texture,” where the
writer offers no description or other information about the world. This gap is part and parcel
of the incompleteness of the fictional world. Drawing upon the reader response theory of
Wolfgang Iser, Doležel argues, “When the reader reads and processes the fictional text, he or
she reconstructs the fictional world constructed by the author” and, simply put, fills in the gap
in the writer’s texture (Doležel, 1998: 170). In so doing, “the Iserian reader reconstructs the
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fictional world guided by his or her life experiences, that is, by his or her communion with
complete objects and worlds,” namely the one in which this reader is reading, the actual world
(p. 171). Interestingly, Doležel goes beyond his claims about the limits of texture in arguing
against completeness. In a footnote, he writes that the “consequences of a complete fictional
world would be frightening” (p. 267). He cites Terence Parsons as evidence: “If a piece of fic-
tion accidentally turned out to be a complete and completely accurate account of the entire
(past, present and future) history of the universe, then all characters created therein would be
identical with real objects” (p. 184). Whether because of the limitations of human construc-
tion or because of an existentialist horror, fictional worlds must always remain incomplete.
Pavel and Doležel focus on worlds insofar as they are constructed in writing, but their gen-
eral observations about the necessary incompleteness of any fictional world also apply to those
worlds represented in audiovisual media such as film and video games. Although such media
offer the impression of completeness, insofar as viewers or players experience them through
more sensory channels than they do literature, they nonetheless remain incomplete. In Pavel’s
terms, we are no more likely to be able to answer questions about a character’s relatives in a
film than we are in a novel. In Doležel’s terms, we must fill in the texture of a visual world
in a manner similar to the way we must fill in that for a literary world. For example, no film
will ever show a viewer the whole of a house, a city, or a planet; the viewer is left to fill in
these absences for herself. Moreover, films and video games can, in some instances, present the
viewer or player with an even greater sense of incompleteness than can a work of literature
precisely because of the types of data they provide. Alfonso Cuarón’s film Gravity (2013), for
example, implies the vastness of space in a manner difficult for any written work to achieve.
Of course the film cannot show the viewer all of space, but for this reason it is able to convey
a sense that its representations must always remain incomplete. The video game No Man’s Sky
(2016) allows players to potentially explore 18 quintillion worlds, each of which is algorithmi-
cally generated as the player plays (alone or in an online mode that coordinates the efforts of
individuals into an atlas of the game space). Although each of these planets exists potentially,
they will never be generated by the game in total as there are more than can be counted by all
humans living on Earth now, much less those playing the game. In short, films such as Gravity
and video games such as No Man’s Sky, if somewhat differently than literary fictions, also
demonstrate incompleteness along the lines that Pavel and Doležel describe.
The present definition agrees that incompleteness seems to be a necessary dimension
of any world described by texts and also agrees that there can be no full account of all of
the properties of all (or any) objects in such worlds. However, it reframes this discussion by
insisting that we must think about objects in worlds in a manner altogether different than we
think about objects in stories or texts (even if the former always come to us embedded in the
latter). Therefore, when we consider objects that exist in imaginary worlds, completeness, as
a concept appropriate to this field, cannot be based upon the potential or actual enumera-
tion of a world’s properties (as in Pavel’s account). Likewise, it cannot rest solely upon the
assumptions of the reader about how her own world operates (as in Doležel’s account). In
short, our understandings of objects in imaginary worlds cannot be limited to the textual
descriptions and implications nor to our experiences with those texts to the exclusion of all
other potential resources. Our considerations must also account for intertextual and paratex-
tual sources in order to allow completeness—which an isolated text cannot produce on its
own—to emerge.
To better understand the manner in which a focus on narratives and texts limits our under-
standing of completeness, we can examine what Roland Barthes calls “the reality effect.” In
his essay of that name, Barthes considers what, for the structural analysis of fiction, had long
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been considered superfluous: small details that do not relate to the more abstract concerns of
this sort of analysis. He writes:
These details are scandalous (from the point of view of structure), or, even more
disturbingly, they seem to be allied with a kind of narrative luxury, profligate to the
extent of throwing up ‘useless’ details and increasing the cost of narrative information.
(Barthes, 1982: 11)
Precisely because these details are insignificant for narrative structure, they signify the real (not
a real or referential object in and of itself, but the category called reality). Although Barthes
himself would not use these terms, such concrete details offer a sort of completeness, but only
for the narrative itself. Barthes considers these details only insofar as they do or do not fit
within a given structure and not insofar as they offer a means by which to understand a world
(which extends beyond that structure). Although no imaginary world can be fully separated
from the fictions that introduce it to the reader, the present definition understands the details
of a world to be never merely details lending reality to a story, but rather intersections of
manifold relationships amongst objects and subjects that extend beyond that story and into
the world in which that story is set.To take a simple example: a T-shirt worn by a character in
a novel, casually mentioned, need not be significant with regard to the narrative in question.
However, if this T-shirt exists in a naturalistic fiction, one that seeks to represent the world of
the reader in as accurate a manner as possible, then its presence indicates, perhaps, a capitalist
mode of production in which T-shirts are mass produced, signify participation in an event or
loyalty to a brand or identity, indicate a leisurely lifestyle, etc. The relationships of production
such a T-shirt implies may not be important for the story being told, but they are of utmost
importance with regard to the world being built and the potential completeness thereof. Even
more importantly, when a T-shirt appears in a work of fantasy in which no such mode of
production exists, such as Steph Swainston’s The Year of Our War (2004), the reader cannot rely
on her knowledge of her own world to explain it. She must therefore puzzle over its existence
and engage in a process that produces the world’s completeness as part of her reading prac-
tice by taking into account, if she can, this fantasy’s relationships with other fantasies, inter-
views with the author, fan speculation, etc. In other words, the completeness of Swainston’s
Fourlands, as a world, cannot be contemplated only within the confines of her novels about
that world. Even if intertextual and paratextual analysis cannot produce completeness finally,
it nonetheless must be involved in a consideration of the world in question.
If understandings of completeness rooted in formal logic and theories of narrative do not
offer a comprehensive theory of the concept for imaginary worlds scholarship, they none-
theless provide important components of such a theory. Both Pavel and Doležel reject the
possibility of completeness, as just discussed, as does the present definition. Moreover, Pavel’s
rejection of completeness leads him to claim that incompleteness may not (only) be an acci-
dental feature of a fictional world, but may in fact be enacted. Such might especially be the
case in modernist and postmodernist fictions (by, for example, Borges, Pynchon, or Acker)
that thematize the gaps inherent to human knowledge practices. For Pavel, therefore, even
if incompleteness is a universal and necessary feature of fictional worlds, it will always be
conditioned by the particular historical circumstances in which those worlds are constructed:
“Cultures and periods enjoying a stable world view will tend to seek minimal incomplete-
ness” and those cultures and periods undergoing transition and conflict tending to “maximize
the incompleteness of fictional worlds” (Pavel, 1986: 108–109). If we understand that the
literary genres most clearly associated with imaginary worlds—science fiction, fantasy, and
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horror—begin in reaction to the Enlightenment idealization of the rational and the secular
and Enlightenment demonization of superstition and dogma, we can subsequently under-
stand the imaginary worlds in which these genres take place to be a manner of grappling with
the question of incompleteness itself. For example, Tolkien justifies his and other fairy-stories
in terms of the belief they afford readers, a belief that is lost with the advent of modernity
and becomes all too apparent in the midst of the wars of the first half of the 20th century
(see Tolkien, 1964). For Tolkien, the secondary world of Arda, which contains Middle-earth,
produced belief (or, as Tolkien put it, “secondary belief ”), a complete and total knowledge
that had been under assault from sciences that insisted upon a skeptical approach to the world
and evidence for claims based in the material rather than the ideal. Tolkien therefore shows a
desire for completeness, even if he cannot finally produce it. By contrast, more contemporary
fantasies such as Swainston’s The Year of Our War or China Mieville’s The Scar (2002) build
worlds in order to question such desires and to thwart them in more obvious ways. These
fantasies, written in the wake of the incredulity toward metanarratives (Lyotard, 1984) and the
impossibility of totalizing contemporary culture (Jameson, 1991) that characterize postmo-
dernity, are not simply or naturally incomplete because they are texts written by humans, but
produce, enact, or represent incompleteness in order to therefore thematize it. Such texts—
and innumerable others such as Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), Felix Gilman’s
The Half-Made World (2010), Jeff Vandermeer’s City of Saints and Madmen (2001), and even Star
Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)—seem to say that no amount of imagination or
further information can save humanity from the crises it faces in the actual world.
Although Doležel’s claims about a reader’s reliance on her experience of her own world
to fill in gaps in a fictional world do not account for how that reader might make sense of an
imaginary world whose backstory is so very different from her own, the reader nonetheless
plays an important role in the present definition. After all, no experience of the actual world
could possibly allow a reader to understand how magic works in fantasy or how vampires
exist in horror, unless that experience itself comes in the form of having read other generic
texts. In that case, the reader would know that magic comes from the gods and that vampires
exist because of a curse. In short, these phenomena, impossible to explain in any other way,
have been explained by previous generic texts. For example, the characters in Mira Grant’s
Feed (2010) understand that the zombies they encounter result from several scientific experi-
ments, but their methods of dealing with these zombies derive from the zombie sub-genre
of horror (to the extent that numerous children, even girls, are named “George” in honor of
George Romero, who taught the world to survive). Feed, and other generic horror narratives
such as Glenn Duncan’s The Last Werewolf (2011), thus thematizes the manner in which read-
ers come to understand one imaginary world by virtue of having already understood another
imaginary world that exists in an intertextual relationship with that world. Along similar
lines, the world of The Matrix (1999) cannot be fully explained by the characters in the films
because so much knowledge of the past has been lost for them. However, as viewers of the
films, we can watch the paratextual Animatrix (2003) in order to understand how this world
came to be the way it is. Likewise, we can play the video game Enter the Matrix (2003) to fill
in absent details in the film (how Niobe, for example, saves Morpheus when he is thrown
from a moving truck in The Matrix: Reloaded [2003]). In each case, the reader must consume
and coordinate materials exterior to the text in question in order to fill in the textural gap
in that text. This process can be even more complex, as Wolf notes in his discussion of the
planet of Tatooine, which serves as a major setting in the Star Wars saga. As a planet entirely
of a desert waste land, Tatooine does not, at first glance, suggest an environment hospitable to
life (human or otherwise). However, viewers might piece together information from the films,
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from other generic texts to which the Star Wars saga might relate (such as Frank Herbert’s
Dune [1965]), and from ancillary/paratextual materials from the Star Wars expanded universe
(such as novels, video and role-playing games, and television shows) to come to a rough (if
non-definitive) understanding of how such an ecosystem might operate. Thus, the complete-
ness of the world (both Tatooine specifically and Lucas’s Star Wars galaxy generally) emerges as
a product or consequence of a process involving numerous actors and objects, with the reader
taking a central role in this process. This process can lead to both statements about the world
in question (fan theories, academic debate) as well as fictions that expand a given imaginary
world (or cause one imaginary world to intersect with another), even if in a non-canonical
way (see the “Fandom” and “Canonicity” chapters in this volume).
Before turning to a final word about the usefulness and limitations of completeness as a
concept in the study of imaginary worlds, I wish to introduce one further point of discussion,
namely that of the immersive fantasy. In Rhetorics of Fantasy (2008), Farah Mendlesohn writes:
The immersive fantasy is a fantasy set in a world built so that it functions on all levels
as a complete world. In order to do this, the world must act as if it is impervious to
external influence; this immunity is most essential in its relationship with the reader.
The immersive fantasy must take no quarter: it must assume that the reader is as
much a part of the world as are those being read about.
(Mendlesohn, 2008: 58)
The immersive fantasy stands in contrast to the portal-quest fantasy, the rhetoric of which
involves a worldly narrator or character (such as Gandalf, Dumbledore, or Obi-wan Kenobi)
who speaks authoritatively about the nature of the world to the reader and her analog (the
character on the quest who has never left home before; for example, Frodo, Harry Potter,
or Luke Skywalker). The reader, lacking knowledge of this world, must take the narrator/
guide at her word. Thus, the reader may never question the world or know anything about
it beyond what she is told. In the present context, this would mean that the reader can know
of the objects or events the narrator describes, but would find it difficult to discover or intuit,
for herself, further information about their relationships to each other or the underlying
logic that governs these relationships. In immersive fantasy, by contrast, the narrator relates
objects and events to the reader as if the reader is already familiar with them and the logics
that govern their relationships to one another. What the reader does not know she might
discover (ideally, at any rate) because she is positioned by the text as someone who makes
the same assumptions about the world that the narrator does and the characters in the world
do. Although, in truth, the reader can never actually make these assumptions, the rhetoric of
the immersive fantasy implies a complete world through which the reader might move, as
opposed to one she might only have described to her piecemeal, from beyond a barrier she
might not cross (see the “Portals” chapter in this volume). Mendlesohn notes that immersion
is not characteristic of only fantasy, but also of realist fiction, which also assumes the reader’s
familiarity with the world presented in the text. Thus, this concept might apply to any text
that assumes the reader’s knowledge of its world and presents to her the challenge of piecing
together its backstory, the logic and physics that govern what happens within it. Importantly,
we must note that no narrative can simply be immersive. Just as no portal-quest can tell the
reader everything she needs to know (she must discover some things for herself), no immer-
sive fiction can avoid all description or texture. Such fictions must offer some clues for the
reader to put together. The narrator of the aforementioned The Year of Our War, a character
from the text writing in the first person, often describes his world to the reader. However,
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because he rarely offers more than literal descriptions of objects or events, readers are left to
discover, indirectly very often, bits of information about the history of the Fourlands and,
more importantly, come to understand the manner of thinking—the assumptions—accord-
ing to which the several races who inhabit the world operate. Further study of the nature
of the immersive fantasy will no doubt yield further insight into the manner in which texts
produce completeness in relation to their paratexts and intertexts and by way of the labor of
the reader.
With all of this in mind, the present definition of completeness offers greater utility for
scholars of imaginary worlds than do those definitions found in other disciplines, even if all
of these definitions remain compatible with one another. The strength of Wolf ’s discussion
of completeness, upon which the present definition is based, is that Wolf does not demand
that every property of every object (mentioned or implied) be determined or determinable
tout court, but rather that, on the balance, questions about a given world’s overall constitution
be answerable given the willingness of a reader, viewer, or player to produce answers through
their labor. However, Wolf also notes what for us is a complication for completeness, one
that extends beyond the impossibility of answering every question for every object or the
fact that, as a process, completeness cannot be completed. Wolf demonstrates that the more
an author adds details to a world (the more she invents; see the “Subcreation” chapter in this
volume), the more complete the world will be; but such invention often comes at the cost
of consistency, as the established order of the world will be interrupted as these details and
the narratives through which they are conveyed to an audience accrue. Sometimes, a pursuit
of completeness (telling all of the stories possible in a given world and offering all of the
details of that world through those stories) will lead to massive inconsistencies requiring a
“retcon” to eliminate narrative and other contradictions (see the “Reboots and Retroactive
Continuity” chapter in this volume). This problem seems especially common in superhero
comics from major publishers (such as Marvel and DC) and in other large franchises (such as
the Dragonlance novels and the related Dungeons & Dragons campaign settings), in which multi-
ple creators simultaneously produce separate but related stories involving the same characters
and events. Because completeness and consistency are mutually constitutive, because they
rely on each other for their existences and because this reliance sees one increase as the other
decreases, and because completeness itself is a dynamic process rather than a static condition,
in the end, like Pavel and Doležel, we must once again understand that no fictional world is
ever complete finally. Such completeness can only exist ideally, in the future, as something
always to be accomplished.
References
Allen, G. (2011) Intertextuality 2nd ed., New York: Routledge.
Barthes, R. (1982) “The Reality Effect,” In T. Todorov (ed), French Literary Theory Today: A Reader,
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 11–17.
Doležel, L. (1998) Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Genette, G. & Maclean, M. (1991) “Introduction to the Paratext,” New Literary History, 22(2), pp. 261–272.
Gray, J.A. (2010) Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts, New York: New York
University Press.
Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism, or,The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham: Duke University Press.
Johnson, S. (2004) Emergence:The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software, New York: Scribner.
Lyotard, J.-F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Mendlesohn, F. (2008) Rhetorics of Fantasy, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
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Parsons, T. (1980) Nonexistent Objects, New Haven:Yale University Press.

Pavel, T. (1986) Fictional Worlds, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.
Ryan, M.-L. (1991) Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory, Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Tolkien, J. R. R. (1964) Tree and Leaf, London: Allen & Unwin.
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12
World Consistency
Rodrigo Lessa and João Araújo
One of the main topics one has to take into account in the analysis or building of imaginary
worlds is that of consistency, which is generally understood as “the degree to which world
details are plausible, feasible, and without contradictions” (Wolf, 2012: 43). Not by chance,
ever since Leibniz’s pioneer considerations on the notion of possible worlds, the issue of
consistency has been central to the understanding of both the ontological make-up and the
internal organization of such worlds. This is illustrated by the fact that one of the main con-
cepts of Leibnizian philosophy is that of compossibility, which concerns the logical premise that
for a set of entities to be able to coexist in the same world, they must not be mutually con-
tradictory (Leibniz, 1989: 661–662); that is, they must be possible in conjunction (compos-
sible). Conversely, for any world to be possible, the universe of objects populating it must be
internally free of contradictions, which also means each of these objects must follow a given
set of implicit rules governing the overall macrostructure of the world to which it belongs.
Of importance not only to Leibnizian metaphysics and the modal logic theories that derive
from it, the notion of world consistency is also crucial in aesthetics, which is noticeable from
Tolkien’s (1988) considerations that conferring the internal consistency of reality to second-
ary worlds is one of the roles of art, to Wolf ’s assertion that “consistency is necessary for a
world to be taken seriously” (2012: 43). Hence, when it comes to imaginary worlds, it is not
surprising that consistency is something both authors and fans of reasonably realistic imagina-
tive fiction usually strive for. This is demonstrated by the huge bibles and collaborative wikis
that often pop up around the worlds that tend to emerge from works of imaginative fiction
such as the Doctor Who and Oz franchises, as well as by the efforts fans frequently put in
advancing theories that are consistent with the settings, characters, backgrounds, and events
presented in their favorite works of fiction, whether such theories are themselves meant to
explain away inconsistencies or just to deal with mysteries (yet) unsolved in the works them-
selves. On that note, it is remarkable that even when it comes to fan fiction, some writers
try not to go against the canon—dealing, for instance, with events that could have happened
during gaps in the storylines, going out of their way not to contradict any details of the works
upon which their own stories are based.
It is this need that the distinct elements of an imaginary world be mutually consistent that
led many fans of the TV series Lost (2004–2010) to wonder why there were polar bears in
the tropical island where the passengers of flight Oceanic 815 got stranded after their plane
crashed, a fact later made consistent by the information that the island had once been used
by a mysterious research project called the Dharma Initiative for a number of experiments,
some of which involved those animals. Similarly, in the world of The Man in the High Castle
(2015–present), the fact that Times Square is taken over by Nazi iconography while the
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streets of San Francisco are full of signs written in Japanese pictograms, is consistent with the
information that in the alternate world the main characters of the series live in, the Axis won
the Second World War, and Japan and Germany divided the territory of the United States
between themselves after peace was achieved. Nevertheless, it is important to point out that
the internal consistency of an imaginary world does not depend singularly on the compos-
sibility of its various elements, but also on the internal consistency of each of them.
A place that inexplicably changes its features or a character that acts in a way that does not
seem plausible often lead to complaints of inconsistency, despite not always involving blatant
contradictions and impossible entities. Many of the viewers of Game of Thrones (2011–present),
for instance, found Cersei Lannister’s abuse by her brother Jaime in episode 3 of season 4
outrageous not only because of the unnecessarily graphic nature of its depiction, but also
because it didn’t affect Cersei’s psychology or her relationship to her brother in any way, and
was considered especially gratuitous and insulting toward women given how little impact it
had in the character’s behavior afterward. Conversely, information that explains away strange
or otherwise mysterious behaviors of a character throughout a work—behaviors that might
otherwise lead to a feeling of inconsistency—tends to be cherished by its most loyal consum-
ers. In the Harry Potter franchise, for example, the revelation that Severus Snape actually did
all sort of dubious acts because he loved Harry’s mother Lily and promised Hogwarts’s direc-
tor Dumbledore to keep the protagonist safe no matter the cost, gave Snape’s character an
extra level of consistency, since it explained his strange attitude toward Harry from the very
beginning of the first book.
However, despite the efforts of many authors and fans to avoid or explain away inconsist-
encies, irreducibly contradictory fictional worlds abound in any medium, whether they’re
secondary worlds not close to the one we live in or fictionalized versions of cities and regions
of the world we inhabit. Generally called “impossible worlds” in fiction theory (Pavel, 1986;
Doležel, 1988; Ryan, 1991; Eco, 1989), a term also inherited from the modal logic concepts
derived from Leibniz, sometimes these impossible worlds are the product of poor authorial
management of the world or lack of attention to detail.
Often, though, imaginary worlds are intentionally designed to house inconsistencies,
whether through impossible objects or an incompossible set of entities. Occasionally, this
is meant to accentuate the absurdity of a fictional work, mainly for comedic purposes. For
instance, in Comedy Central’s animated series South Park (1997–present), the character named
Kenny dies almost every episode up to the fifth season, and reappears alive in the following
installments with no explanation whatsoever, in a metalinguistic engagement of the series
with classic episodic television’s tendency toward resetting the status quo of the fictional
world week after week. But comedy and metalanguage are not the sole reasons why imagi-
nary worlds might be purposely absurd and inconsistent, and those reasons are as varied as
are the works of imaginative fiction. Such is the case that there are even works whose incon-
sistencies are meant to engage us with mind-bending metaphysical theories, like Jorge Luis
Borges’s Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1997; originally published in 1940).
In Borges’s tale, it is said that in the land of Tlön one usually finds an object they’re looking
for, which means archeologists can actually change the past if they so much as believe they
can find an ancient object in a given place, and that a lost pencil might be found any number
of times by any number of people if the first (or second, or third…) one to find it does not
announce that fact to whomever might also be looking for it. Even though these secondary
objects conform to the expectations of those who find them, the fact that such objects (called
hrönir in the tale) are indeed able to change the past or the future attests to the contradic-
tory nature of Borges’s world. Though Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is noticeably comedic and
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satiric in nature, it is clear that Borges is also trying to explore some logical consequences of
the adherence to a rigorously idealistic metaphysics, which goes to show the elasticity of the
intentional uses of inconsistencies in the design of imaginary worlds.
Another notion that both previous examples help us advance is that a work of imagina-
tive fiction can be consistent in the very way it explores its inconsistencies, even though
the inconsistencies in South Park and Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius stem from different causes. In
Comedy Central’s animated series, the inconsistencies regarding Kenny’s deaths appear in the
form of repeated contradictions in the sequence of story events, given a dead character does
not generally reappear alive with no explanation; while in Borges’s tale the very rules that
make up the world harbor them, since those rules contradict the logical principle of identity.
Yet, as noted before, it is worth observing that both examples are somewhat consistent in their
aforementioned inconsistencies.
In the case of South Park, Kenny’s death was expected to mark the conclusion of almost
every episode up to the fifth season, in a way that some hard-core fans of the show com-
plained online when this ceased to happen, since at that point, the end of Kenny’s regular
deaths became inconsistent with the expectations the series itself built after several seasons. In
the case of Borges’s work, when the hrönir are first mentioned, their absurdity is consistent
with the way Tlön is described up to that point, with its languages based exclusively on verbs
or monosyllabic adjectives, or its metaphysical philosophies seeking not to explore the nature
of reality, but to astonish.
Thus, a case can be made that works of imaginative fiction engage with yet another layer of
consistency, one that has to do not with the internal avoidance of contradictions in the world
itself, but with conformity to expectations laid out by a genre, a franchise, or even the very
work through which the world emerges. This is obviously noticeable in works that, in spite
of their internally contradictory worlds, tune those contradictions in coherent ways when it
comes to tone, genre, and atmosphere, as it is the case with animated audiovisual productions
that go from the first cartoons starring Disney’s Mickey Mouse to Cartoon Network’s hit
Adventure Time (2010–present). More classically organized works that avoid internal contra-
dictions are also expected to be consistent in this fashion, conforming with expectations we
might have for their genres, franchises, or particular worlds.
In this regard, it is worth mentioning that in the fourth of his Six Walks in the Fictional Woods
(1994), Umberto Eco remarks that if we are reading what we suppose is a delicate, romantic
story in which a character is traveling in a carriage, we will probably be baffled if we are told
that upon reaching his destination, the traveler noticed no horses were pulling it. Though this
event might not contradict anything read in the story up to that point, it might challenge
our expectations in terms of genre, which also guide how we as readers reconstruct fictional
worlds, including imaginary ones. We don’t, for instance, have any reason to believe the laws
of electricity and combustion as we know them are any different in Arda, but if a modern car
were to appear in one of The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955) books or films, it would certainly
upset most of us. This is more due to the fact that a modern car would be inconsistent with
what we expect of Tolkien’s (and similar high fantasy authors’) work than with the lack of con-
sistency of a car in itself or of compossibility between a car and other entities found in Arda.
Except perhaps for some modern and postmodern examples, fans and creators of imaginary
worlds generally strive for a level of conformity of those worlds—and also of the very way
they are presented—to some expectations regarding the work’s genre, mode of narration,
tone, franchise, and other parameters that do not constrain the world directly, but the work in
which it is built; we generally expect, for example, stories that start with “Once upon a time”
to depict worlds akin to those found in fairy tales.
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The Final Fantasy video game franchise, owned by the company Square Enix, offers a
c urious example of this. Albeit most installments of the franchise take place in distinct imagi-
nary worlds, a number of elements are common to most of them, even if some of these ele-
ments did not appear for the first time in the original title, but in a subsequent one. Among
these common tropes are birds of mount called Chocobos, which are the size of ostriches
and look like baby chicks; the summoning of gods and godlike entities as a form of magic;
the common use of airships; a mix of modern and archaic weaponry, technologies, and social
constructs; characters named Cid, Wedge, and Biggs; a naming of places after elements of
our own world’s mythologies; and a recurring plant-like enemy called Marlboro. Fans usu-
ally expect to find these world-building elements in any imaginary world built in one of the
installments of the franchise, and at least some of them have to be kept for an installment to
still be recognized as a Final Fantasy game, despite the fact that they only keep the world con-
sistent with other ones found throughout the franchise, and have little to no impact on each
world’s internal consistency.
Therefore, when thinking of an imaginary world’s levels of consistency, whether one
intends to write, analyze, or otherwise evaluate the work through which such a world is
built, it is important to keep in mind that consistency works in at least three dimensions: one
regarding singular entities and elements, such as characters and how they develop throughout
the work; one regarding the compossibility of world elements, and their capability of working
together without blatant contradictions; and another one regarding the world’s conformity to
expectations that stem from its parent work’s mode of narration, tone, genre, or even franchise,
and such expectations might even regard predictable ways of managing intentional internal
contradictions. Of course, some particularities may complicate the situation for the author or
analyst even further, like the length of a work or its possible transmedial extensions, and the
following part of this chapter is dedicated to the examination of some of these complications.
While other chapters in this book may also discuss these topics, we chose to elaborate on
them in the light of the concept of consistency and how we can further understand it.
Some Complicating Factors

It is well established that the bigger the storyworld—and the lengthier the narratives—the
easier it is to fall short regarding internal consistency in works that strive for it. In simple terms,
a two-hour movie is less likely to have unintentional inconsistencies than a 200-episode TV
series. Of course, this does not mean that the quality of any given fictional work may be
assessed considering this fact alone. The extent of a narrative only makes it harder for authors
and critics to evaluate the recurring inconsistencies—and conversely, more pleasant for fans
to dig into the work, since they are then able to canvass 200 episodes rather than a two-hour
film. As Wolf writes, “The likelihood of inconsistencies occurring increases as a world grows
in size and complexity, but it is also important to note where inconsistencies occur when they
do, to determine how damaging to credibility they will be” (2012: 43).
Let’s take as examples the James Bond movies. While they span across several decades with
numerous male actors of varying ages interpreting the 007 role in a fictional world allegedly
very close to our own, it is broadly accepted that the noticeable inconsistencies in time and
age do not affect fruition. Although the movies are always set contemporary to the time of
their launch (insinuating the passing of time), the actors’ ages fluctuate considerably, but not
in a linear way. For example, when the 1967 film You Only Live Twice debuted, its lead actor
Sean Connery was 36 years old. Nevertheless, two years later, when On Her Majesty’s Secret
Service came out, George Lazenby was a 29-year-old performer playing the same role. And in
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1971, Sean Connery, then 40, reassumed the character in Diamonds Are Forever. Why do such
fluctuations in the character’s age (and, even more puzzling, his physical appearance) not seem
to bother anyone, then, not even hard-core fans?
This question leads us to another example: that of 2015’s huge flop, Jupiter Ascending (2015).
Albeit posing a complex—and even superficially interesting—imaginary world, both special-
ized critics and regular audiences left the theaters largely unsatisfied with how incongruent
the world presented in the movie actually was.Why are we so lenient in dismissing 007’s many
inconsistencies over decades of movies and, at the same time, are uncomfortable with the idea
of Mila Kunis character’s Jupiter being the proposed rightful owner of Earth just because
she is genetically identical to the dead matriarch of an intergalactic royal empire? In order to
understand that, we need to be aware of when and where inconsistencies occur.
First, when it comes to the Bond universe, those of us familiar with the numerous sources
of information about the movie series are made well aware that different production teams
lead each project, and informed by the press about the casting choices, always accompanied
by media buzz around it; so, we don’t really care about the passing of time as much as we
do about who plays the spy next. Hence, one could say the inconsistencies occurring in 007
movies are acceptable when you realize they are the result of a specific production context
rather than of a slip in continuity or of creative choices made by an author for specific mytho-
logical reasons. Furthermore, a second way one could explain away these inconsistencies is by
positing that every time a new actor is picked, a new fictional world emerges, a new canon
rises, and the series is rebooted, or at least retconned so the audience pretends to believe the
same actor has been making every film from the get go.
But a third (and even clearer) reason one could point out for the fans’ forgiveness of these
discrepancies is that they are, in a way, “consistently inconsistent” throughout the movies,
something the audiences are willing to look past either by considering the production con-
text or by retconning, given they are predictable inconsistencies in the way the franchise is
organized. In point of fact, there are even fan theories that posit that “007, James Bond” is a
codename given to different spies over the years, which would allegedly explain why each
generation has a different actor playing the main role (see more at http://fantheories.wikia.
com/James_Bond), in spite of the fact that numerous actors embodied the spy between films
in which Sean Connery played James Bond. More than how one explains them, though, what
matters about those blatant inconsistencies is that they are predictable and manageable, and
appear in a consistent way throughout the franchise. In that regard, it is remarkable that what
happens in the Bond movies is very similar to what we see in serial animated cartoons or
comics that stay on air or get published for long, continuous periods of time, such as South
Park or The Simpsons (1989–present) and pretty much every superhero comics: this is a type
of inconsistency that somehow stems from constraints imposed upon the work itself, and we
are thus more accepting of how they affect the world.
In Jupiter Ascending, there are plenty of inconsistencies that keep the audience asking them-
selves about how seriously the movie wants to be taken: after a long while on an alien planet,
the protagonist Jupiter suddenly needs a spacesuit to breathe in, and there is no apparent
reason why she wouldn’t need it earlier; Channing Tatum’s character Caine has gravitational
surfing boots that are not removed from him even when he is tossed in an alien prison cell;
Sean Bean’s character Stinger explains that Jupiter is royal-blooded because of the way bees
(which are designed to recognize royalty in that imaginary world) react to her, only to cast
doubt about her royal background minutes later, which might leave audiences wondering
what the bees were actually designed for and why else would bees act strangely around Jupiter
if not for her royal blood. Even harder to believe is a scene in which Caine tries to explain
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why nobody noticed the massive destruction of Chicago’s buildings and streets after an alien
confrontation took place in the city. Apparently, the aliens are capable of rebuilding everything
by the end of the day and of erasing the minds “of some humans,” which begs the question
if it would ever be conceivable that a significant destruction in one of America’s major cities
could possibly be kept hidden for even minutes.
Contrary to the ones we pointed out in the Bond franchise, these inconsistencies are the
direct result of creative choices and lack of attention to details that end up building a story-
world on weak foundations that are clearly intended to be solid, which in turn make these
inconsistencies obvious to most of the movie’s audience. As mentioned earlier, in order to be
internally consistent, any given world must be plausible, feasible, and internally free of contra-
dictions. It must be sustained, on its own basis, in terms of compossibility and believability.
Of course, however, not all consistency is internal, and we cannot take audience negotia-
tions out of the equation. As the cases of South Park, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, and James Bond
movies demonstrate, we constantly negotiate what we find acceptable and what otherwise
hampers our immersion in a given storyworld. Although these notions of negotiated and
“consistent” inconsistencies are much more (inter)personal than objective, since they deal
with cognitive and emotional dimensions, they also help us understand the various factors
considered in the process of negotiating immersion in seemingly incompossible or otherwise
internally inconsistent storyworlds, or at least those whose inconsistencies are still somehow
predictable. Regardless of the size of the work, what matters the most in those cases, we
believe, are the self-imposed—or at least self-evident—constraints in the creation and presen-
tation of the world to the audience, which is why we have been arguing in favor of a three-
dimensional notion of consistency, one that also takes into account constraints imposed upon
the work or group of works, and not only the imaginary world being portrayed. Moreover,
this leads to the next issue to be discussed, the different levels of consistency that may appear
in narratives that are spread over different media platforms, something commonly referred to
as transmedia storytelling.
In light of the ideas advanced by Jenkins (2006), Mittell (2015), and Lessa (2013), we under-
stand a transmedial extension as a piece of information that is located in a media platform that
is different than that of the main text, which in its turn is commonly referred to as “mother-
ship.” Observing the contemporary creation of transmedia texts, we can divide the extensions
into two simple types, which require different approaches regarding consistency. The first is
intended to be a canonical expansion of the main text’s storyworld, which means it needs to
play by the same rules and follow the same directions seen in the main work. If the world
mechanics or background details are set in a certain way, the canonical transmedial extensions
cannot rupture these logics, or they might render an entire imaginary world inconsistent.
The other type of transmedial extension is not intended to be canonical, which means it may
break the rules previously established by the main text or even make no obvious sense in the
relation to it.
In spite of the fact that only the first kind of transmedial extension described seems to take
consistency into consideration as a key factor, this impression can be misleading, since the very
difference between both types of extensions can be explained in terms of their approaches
to consistency. As Harvey puts it, “Central to transmedia storytelling is consistency—perhaps
of scenario, of plot, of character—expressed through narrative and iconography. What dif-
ferentiates varieties of transmedia storytelling from one another is the extent to which such
consistency is managed” (2014: 279).
In terms of canonical expansions, a good example is the Star Wars franchise, which has
been expanding its storyworld for decades through several movies, companion books, film
95
ovelizations, TV series, animations, and games, in a well-coordinated strategy that seems

n
very consistent and plausible for most of the audience: there is even an official database,
called the Star Wars Holocron, dedicated to cataloging and hierarchically categorizing all the
components of this fictional world. Hard-core fans will certainly find some inconsistencies,
as pointed out by Wolf (2012), but that rarely will affect how the imaginary world is largely
perceived. Therefore, the overall point is that once expanded, Star Wars chooses to keep its
canonical imaginary transmedia world in a (mostly) rigorously compossible manner, with
every piece relating to the events, mythology, and chronology of an already existing universe.
Moreover, another good example of canonical transmediation can be found in the trans-
medial apparatus build upon the highly acclaimed movie District 9 (2009). Bringing forth
fictional elements from the imaginary world to our actual reality through public signs and
billboards emulating the segregational “humans only” motif seen in the movie, all the trans-
medial works related to the film were able to present to the audience some of the movie’s
mythology, rules, and overall tone even before it premiered, in a way that gave viewers access
to a reasonably consistent idea of the imaginary world before watching the film, and allowed
them to judge the film based on that previously shared information.
Of course, since it is difficult enough to maintain consistency in a large storyworld within
a single medium, whether it involves movies with virtually infinite sequels, pages of end-
less volumes of romance novels, or just countless episodes of a long-running TV series with
no planned ending, a storyworld that is spread over multiple media, languages, formats, and
platforms may prove even more challenging. This is especially true when each property is
managed by a different team, or when the transmedial universe grows in a spontaneous or
unpredictable manner; a case in point being the imaginary world created in the works of H. P.
Lovecraft, whose alien gods were later appropriated not only by other authors in noncanoni-
cal works, but also by a successful role-playing game franchise Lovecraft couldn’t possibly have
foreseen. Despite the fact that some of these posterior works were completely inconsistent
with Lovecraft’s original tales and depictions of his invented cities of Arkham or Insmouth in
terms of tone, atmosphere, and structure, most tried to remain faithful to the author’s ancient
mad deities, certainly the main components of his world of eternal, godlike powers and fleet-
ing human characters who ended up mad by the end of every tale.
Hence, it can be argued that even though they are noncanonical and might even contradict
the author’s works in other aspects, these transmedial extensions of Lovecraft’s tales can still
be judged in terms of whether they keep the internal consistency of the writer’s pantheon of
Ancient Old Ones. Still, it is worth noting that this is not usually the case with noncanonical
transmedial extensions. Ranging from alternate imaginary world histories to crossover fan
fiction (which can sometimes be linked to the mothership through shared world compo-
nents, characters, or even a common iconography), non-canonical transmedial extensions
have no place in the main storylines. Instead, what they present are alternate, different imagi-
nary worlds whose internal levels of consistency frequently need to be judged in their own
terms, despite cases such as Lovecraft’s, in which the extensions themselves commit to avoid
contradicting some specific aspects of the mothership’s imaginary world while still disregard-
ing others.
In conclusion, we would argue that consistency shouldn’t be considered only in terms
strictly connected to a world’s internal configuration when it comes to imaginative fiction;
rather, when dealing with the issue of world consistency, authors and critics should gener-
ally take into account the length of the work, its eventual transmedial extensions, and vari-
ous other constraints that limit the work or franchise in which an imaginary world is born.
This is not something that should be done out of benevolence, but because it is exactly what
96
audiences normally do when they negotiate their engagement with a work and assess the
believability of a secondary world.
Still, it is worth noting that this doesn’t mean the internal consistency of a world doesn’t
matter. As we have shown in our exploration of concepts such as character consistency and
compossibility, through examples ranging from Harry Potter to Star Wars, works that want
their world’s internal machinations to appear believable generally have to deal with these
issues in some way. Nevertheless, consistency is more than that, and as a three-dimensional
matter, its study may benefit from a perspective that doesn’t ignore the work’s poetic, aesthetic,
and even production or reception constraints.
References
Borges, J. L. (1997), Ficciones. Madrid: Alianza.
Doležel, L. (1988), “Mimesis and possible worlds,” Poetics Today, 9(3), pp. 475–495.
Eco, U. (1989), Lector in fabula: la cooperazione interpretativa nei testi narrativi. Milan: Bompiani.
Eco, U. (1994), Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. Boston: Harvard University Press.
Harvey, C. B. (2014), A Taxonomy of Transmedia Storytelling. In M.L. Ryan & J.N. Thon (Eds.),
Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology, pp. 278–294. Lincoln and London:
University of Nebraska Press.
Jenkins, H. (2006), Convergence Culture:Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: NYU Press.
Leibniz, G. (1989), Philosophical Papers and Letters. 2nd edition. Dordrecht: D Reidel.
Lessa, R. (2013), Ficção seriada televisiva e narrativa transmídia: uma análise do mundo ficcional multiplata-
forma de True Blood. Dissertation (Masters in Contemporary Communications and Culture), School of
Communication, Federal University of Bahia, Salvador.
Mittell, J. (2015), Complex TV:The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: NYU Press.
Pavel, T. (1986), Fictional Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ryan, M. L. (1991), Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory. Indiana: University
Bloomington & Indiana Press.
Tolkien, J. R. R. (1988), Tree and Leaf: Including the Poem Mythopoeia. London: Unwin.
Wolf, M. J. P. (2012), Building Imaginary Worlds:The Theory and History of Subcreation. New York: Routledge.
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13
Geography and Maps
Gerard Hynes
While imaginary worlds may be experienced through many means—narrative, gameplay,

visual art—the simulation of physical geography still forms an essential element to most world-
building. The cartographic analysis of imaginary worlds may be fit into the larger context of
the “spatial turn” the humanities and social sciences have undergone in the post-war period
(see Tally, 2013: 11–17). In this way, imaginary worlds can potentially make a substantial contri-
bution to geocriticism, the literary analysis of geographical space and its attendant discourses.
Maps are not essential to world-building. Even in fantasy, a genre synonymous with fic-
tional maps, only 30–40% of books contain one or more maps (Ekman, 2013: 22). The physi-
cal setting of imaginary worlds may be conveyed through biology, ecology, and travel, but,
when present, maps play as essential a role as any of these.The University of Chicago’s monu-
mental History of Cartography (1987) defines maps very broadly as “graphic representations
that facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes, or events in
the human world” (Harley and Woodward, 1987: xvi). Recreating the physical world with
scaled-down, mathematical precision is not a defining quality of maps, however central it may
appear. Instead, maps are always drawn with a number of specific purposes, cultural, political,
and metaphysical, which determine what information is worth including and how it is pre-
sented. P. D. A. Harvey describes medieval mappa mundi in these terms:
Indeed, the vast majority of medieval world maps are scarcely maps at all. They are
diagrams—diagrams of the world—and are best understood as an open framework
where all kinds of information might be placed in the relevant spatial position, not
unlike a chronicle or narrative in which information would be arranged chrono-
logically. [...] the map was a vehicle for conveying every kind of information—
zoological, anthropological, moral, theological, historical.
(Harvey, 1987: 19)
Maps do more than just visualize spatial relationships, they may also demarcate and concretize
the historical, linguistic, economic, and cultural relationships of an imaginary world. Maps are
always inherently selective; the quixotic attempt to create a 1:1 scale map has been satirized
by Lewis Carroll, Jorge Luis Borges, and Neil Gaiman.This selectivity applies not just to what
content is included but to how it is represented. “A single map is but one of an indefinitely
large number of maps that might be produced for the same situation or from the same data”
(Monmonier, 1996: 2).
Even while being selective, maps also have a strong unifying tendency, allowing creators
to bring disparate fictional locations together into worlds and connect separated worlds into
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Geography and Maps
larger wholes: “like a painting constructed in linear perspective, [maps] imply a single ideal
reader or onlooker eager to see and know the world depicted” (Padrón, 2007: 281). In the
Japanese versions of the first two Super Mario Bros. games (1985, 1986), the player experiences
eight “worlds” in thirty-two stages. Despite being officially set in the Mushroom Kingdom,
there is, however, no accessible game world map to connect these worlds into a diegetic
universe. From Super Mario Bros. 3 (1988), a world map connecting levels provides a visible
topography and creates the experience of an overarching world. Super Mario World (1990) like-
wise makes use of a world map to generate the world of Dinosaur Land around the discrete
levels composing it.
Maps may also ironically comment upon the world described in accompanying, usually tex-
tual, media. Both the maps in Gulliver’s Travels and Juan Benet’s map of Región are inconsistent
with the textual description, satirizing attempts at conclusive cartographical and spatial knowl-
edge (Padrón, 2007: 281–282). Cartography may even unintentionally undermine the immer-
siveness of the imaginary world it is intended to support. The autonomy of George R. R.
Martin’s Westeros may be lessened if audiences realize that the southern half of the continent
is Ireland turned upside-down, while Robin Hobb’s Six Duchies is a similarly flipped Alaska.
Some imaginary worlds exist only as maps. Artists such as Wim Delvoye and Adrian Leskiw
have produced imaginary world maps as standalone art. As such, their world-building is almost
entirely cartographic. Delvoye’s maps of the countries Rhuuwydho, Ekgurie, Ualle, Bolf, and
others were collected in a catalogue, Atlas, in 1999. The nation of Breda, the Treaty States of
Aultica, and the provinces of Brampton and Cardin exist only as maps and in Leskiw’s brief
commentaries on them (Leskiw, 2016). By redrawing the maps to reflect the infrastructural
changes Breda underwent from 1979 to 2040, Leskiw gives his cartographic world a sense of
chronological depth without recourse to narrative, exposition, or timelines.
Cartography does not, however, have to be expressed visually.Verbal cartography is a cru-
cial world-building component in text-based adventure games such as Zork (1979) but may
also be present in other media where characters discuss and explain the landscape. There are
Primary World analogues in medieval land terriers, boundary clauses, and itineraries that
offered written descriptions where their modern counterparts would rely on maps (Harvey,
1987: 7–8). There is nonetheless a qualitative difference between the audience experience of
verbal and visual maps.
For some worlds, engagement with their maps is an essential element of interacting with
the world. In video game worlds, the use, or even creation, of maps may be essential to game-
play. Travel around the enormous world of Skyrim (2011) is made more manageable in that
the world map allows transportation to previously explored regions. In Dragon Age Inquisition
(2014), scouting operations carried out through the map on the war table open up new loca-
tions to be explored in person.
Despite Diana Wynne Jones’ warning, “If you take this Tour, you are going to have to visit
every single place on this Map, whether it is marked or not. This is a Rule” ( Jones, 2004:
3), maps often extend the imaginary world beyond the portion directly experienced by the
audience or player. By hinting at unexplored areas, maps encourage speculation; by codifying
the geography, they encourage consistency. In this manner, maps both restrict narratives and
generate them (Wolf, 2012: 157).
Imaginary Cartography
There have been few systematic examinations of the relationship between cartography and
imaginary worlds, and most have focused specifically on fantasy worlds. J. B. Post’s Atlas of
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Gerard Hynes
Fantasy (1973; rev. ed. 1979) collects more than one hundred fictional, mythological, moral,
and didactic maps, making a distinction between geographic speculation and literary fab-
rication, but inconsistently accepts some overlaid worlds, such as the world of Sherlock
Holmes, while rejecting others, such as Hardy’s Wessex (see Post, 1979, 33: vii). Pierre Jourde’s
Géographies imaginaire du quelques inventeur de mondes au XXe siècle: Gracq, Borges, Michaux,
Tolkien (1991) includes readings of natural and constructed spaces, and their cartographic
representations, in his analysis of selected 20th-century world-builders. Rob Kitchin and
James Kneale, in “Science Fiction or Future Fact? Exploring Imaginative Geographies of
the New Millennium” (2001), examine the worlds of cyberfiction as cognitive spaces where
the geographic possibilities and challenges of postmodern urbanism may be explored. This is
expanded in their collection, Lost in Space: Geographies of Science Fiction (2002), whose contrib-
utors discuss the production and discourse of geographic knowledge in a number of science
fiction texts. Myles Balfe’s “Incredible Geographies? Orientalism and Genre Fantasy” (2004)
contends that imaginative geographies are not limited only by the author’s imagination but
are always socially embedded and draw upon pre-existing cultural discourses. This leads Balfe
to condemn genre fantasy in general for encoding orientalist prejudices into imaginary car-
tographies. Meanwhile, Deirdre Baker argues in “What We Found on Our Journey through
Fantasy Land” (2006) that sameness of geography between imaginary worlds indicates com-
monalities of metaphysics and politics on the part of creators rather than merely shared car-
tographical conventions.
Ricardo Padrón, in “Mapping Imaginary Worlds” (2007), surveys maps of Dante’s Hell,
fictional islands, and fantasy worlds, as well as cartographic visual art. He suggests that maps
of imaginary worlds affect audiences due to their similarities to Primary World maps and
that mundane maps may be equally powerful at triggering imaginative speculation. Mark J. P.
Wolf ’s Building Imaginary Worlds (2012) deals with maps in the context of world structures such
as chronologies, languages, mythologies, and genealogies. He points out the essential functions
maps perform: filling in gaps not covered in the narrative; giving a sense of the spatial and
topographical relations between places; expressing remoteness, inaccessibility, and isolation (or
their opposites); and allowing the descriptions of travel to be ellipsized by conveying distances
directly (Wolf, 2012: 156–157). He notes how maps, on the one hand, support consistency
from one book to another, while at the same time, by including unvisited locations, encourage
speculation and imagination. Wolf also highlights the differences in geographical conventions
in different genres, pointing to the countervailing tendencies in fantasy and science fiction,
whereby the former juxtaposes multiple types of terrain in a relatively small area while the
latter often features entire planets with one dominant terrain and culture (Wolf, 2012: 158).
Stefan Ekman’s Here Be Dragons: Exploring Fantasy Maps and Settings (2013) surveys previous
scholarship on imaginary cartography before providing a statistical analysis of the number and
conventions of maps in fantasy literature. He makes an important distinction between maps
as paratexts, interpretative apparatus around a text, or as docemes, artifacts from the imaginary
world itself, and examines fantasy geographies in terms of borders, the nature-culture divide,
and the relationship between ruler and realm.
Whereas most criticism of imaginary cartography has focused on modern examples, the
mapping of imaginary worlds has a much longer history. The Garden of Eden (though the
imaginary status of this location has changed with time) has been physically mapped since
the 5th century (Scafi, 2013: 24–35). Dante’s Commedia (c. 1321), which can itself be seen
as a commentary on the cognitive mapping of mythical, spiritual, and political realities (see
Brown, 2005: 737–738), is also an early example of a literary work inspiring fictional cartog-
raphies. The 15th-century maps of Dante’s Inferno by Antonio Manetti and Sandro Botticelli
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could be considered some of the earliest audience-generated maps developed from the verbal
descriptions in an existing text (Padrón, 2007: 261).
The maps that accompanied the early editions of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) were
more playful about their subject’s imaginative status.The map in the first edition was a relatively
simple woodcut by an unknown artist, while the 1518 edition featured a more detailed map
by Ambrosius Holbein. Both were oblique views of the island with little geographical context.
Utopia was accompanied by other paratexts—a sample of the Utopian alphabet, verses in the
Utopian language, and letters by More and Peter Giles—all attesting to the island’s empirical
existence.Yet the foreground of the 1518 map features the narrator Raphael Hythloday, address-
ing a figure who is presumably More, thus reminding audiences that they are receiving the
description of the island through two filters, one a teller of traveler’s tales (Padrón, 2007: 269).
The potential for maps and other paratexts to incite playful or ironic belief in audiences
was more fully developed by the new romances of the late 19th century. Their predecessors,
Jules Verne’s Voyages extraordinaire (1863–1905), were surrounded by maps, charts, footnotes,
and full-page illustrations. These were followed by such examples as the map of Kukuanaland
in H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and the rough chart of Maple-White Land
in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), both claiming to be artifacts from within the
story-world (see Saler, 2012: 62–82).
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) is an important example of a new romance
with an intimate relationship to its cartographical paratext, the map serving as both the origin
of the world as well as the driver of the narrative. It may be helpful to compare Stevenson’s
use of maps with that of his contemporary L. Frank Baum.Whether the map is created before
the narrative, as with Stevenson, or afterward, as with Baum, makes a considerable difference
to the consistency of the secondary world. Stevenson recommended composing the map and
making the narrative fit it:
It is one thing to draw a map at random, set a scale in one corner of it at a venture,
and write up a story to the measurements. It is quite another to have to examine a
whole book, make an inventory of all the allusions contained in it, and with a pair
of compasses, painfully design a map to suit the data.
(Stevenson, 1919: 128)
Stevenson had personal experience of the difficulty of making a map fit a finished text, having
sent the map to his publisher along with the proofs but hearing it was lost in the post.Though
Stevenson composed a replacement, he lamented “somehow it was never Treasure Island to
me” (Stevenson, 1919: 129).
Baum, by contrast, had published seven Oz books before he provided the first official maps
of Oz in Tik-Tok of Oz (1914). The maps appeared on the endpapers, with the first map
presenting Oz alone and the second, crucially, locating Oz and its surrounding deserts in a
larger continent. The inconsistencies between the map and the geographical details in the
published books were counterbalanced by the interconnectedness it gave the world (Riley,
1997: 186–187). As Michael O. Riley puts it:
The map of Oz he had drawn, while eliminating the flexibility he had utilized in the
earlier books to fit the country to his stories, had the effect of causing him to treat
Oz in a more consistent manner. There are no major changes or reinterpretations of
that fairyland in The Lost Princess, but there are several refinements.
(Riley, 1997: 208–209)
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Gerard Hynes
Baum’s second Oz map is not just a paratext to an individual narrative but a means of bring-
ing together a series of constructed worlds, already existing across media as diverse as stage
musicals and comic strips. In this regard, it can be seen as the culmination of Baum’s ten-
dency to connect his created worlds (Riley, 1997: 187) but also as an important milestone in
transmedial world-building. Tellingly, the first map of Oz had been first seen by the public
on a slide in Baum’s multimedia extravaganza The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays (1908) (Riley,
1997: 150).
Baum points ahead to the contemporary use of maps to bring together worlds that had
been constructed piecemeal in different media. The growth of transmedial world-building,
especially in large franchises such as Star Trek and Star Wars, has resulted in a significant increase
in the number of maps per imaginary universe—with maps in novels, video games, visual
companions, and other tie-in materials—but with each individual map having less canonical
weight and being open to constant modification by new material. This cartographic uncer-
tainty may, however, serve as motivation for fan-created maps and atlases.
J. R. R. Tolkien, whose “The West of Middle-earth at the End of the Third Age” is perhaps
the most famous imaginary world map, provides another comparison. Each of three main
works set in his world, Arda, was accompanied by maps. The maps featured in The Hobbit
(1937), The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955), and The Silmarillion (1977) were all created before
the texts were finalized, Tolkien agreeing with Stevenson that an author can never make a
consistent map of a completed story (Carpenter, 1995: 177). Since the publication of The Lord
of the Rings, however, maps of Middle-earth by a number of artists have appeared in calendars,
in posters, in atlases, and as standalone items. Panning shots across small-scale maps of Middle-
earth were essential to establishing geographical context in the Peter Jackson film adaptations
(2001–2003). The launch of the MMORPG, The Lord of the Rings Online (2007–present),
required the creation of dozens of new maps, both of regions unmapped in the books and
of new regions invented for the game-world. By the early 2000s, audiences may in fact be
more likely to have seen a map of Arda than to have engaged with it in its original textual
embodiment.
Authorship and Canonicity

The cartography of imaginary worlds raises important questions about authorship and levels
of canonicity. Maps may be produced by the originator of the imaginary world, an illustrator
(with greater or lesser authorial input), or the fan community. Each of these will have a dif-
ferent canonical status.
Maps may become elaborated as they pass through the hands of different creators. J. R. R.
Tolkien’s original sketch maps of Middle-earth were developed by his son Christopher Tolkien
into the canonical versions found in The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion (Carpenter,
1995: 247). Subsequently, however, maps of Middle-earth have been produced by Pauline
Baynes, “M. Blackburn,” Richard Caldwell, Barbara Strachey, Shelley Shapiro, James Cook,
and John Howe (see Wolf, 2012: 362 n. 16), with the fullest developments being by Karen
Wynn Fonstad in her Atlas of Middle-earth (1981; rev. ed. 2002). Fonstad’s work has more detail
than any of Tolkien’s originals but, being based closely upon the descriptions in the text, does
not necessarily challenge the original cartography.
The map artists for a world will change depending on media and may even change in the
same media as a series progresses. George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series (1996–
present) featured maps by James Sinclair until he was replaced by Jeffrey L. Ward for A Dance
with Dragons (2011). The HBO adaptation (2011–present) features an animated map by the
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design studio Elastic, with a focus on different locations in each episode. While these maps do
not alter the underlying geographical detail, each change affects audience experiences of the
world to a greater or lesser degree.
Fan-made maps, such as the EQ Atlas for EverQuest (1999–present), have no official canon-
ical status, even when they are accurate to the world as it appears in official media, but may
be accepted as canonical by other fans. Tie-in materials also complicate matters. The map of
the Firefly universe included in the Serenity Role Playing Game (2005) is the most detailed
available but makes no claims to be definitive. Its canonical status is thus on the same level
as other officially licenced artworks. With video game worlds, particularly those of MMOs,
the landscape itself, not just its cartography, is constantly open to change by updates. There
is both the ability and incentive to add new continents, such as Northrend and Pandaria in
World of Warcraft (2004–present), and to create new spaces for players to explore and allow for
new scripted game events. As such, the cartography must always be considered contingent
and open to change.
Where maps are collaborative works between originator and authorized illustrator, such
as in George R. R. Martin and Jonathan Roberts’ The Lands of Ice and Fire (2012), the inven-
tions of the artist may be raised to canonical status and become part of the geography of the
world. The maps in the 1871 Hetzel edition of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the
Sea (1870) are especially interesting in this regard as they were attributed directly to Verne—
despite being elaborations by either Alphonse de Neuville or Édouard Riou on Verne’s origi-
nal sketch maps—thus transgressing the usual 19th-century distinction between author and
illustrator and giving the maps an extra canonical authority (Harpold, 2005: 20). This raises
intriguing questions about the boundaries between texts and their paratextual, cartographic
accompaniments.
Paratexts versus Artifacts

It makes a considerable difference whether maps of secondary worlds are presented as arti-
facts from those worlds or as Primary World constructs intended to assist audience immer-
sion (Ekman, 2013: 20–22). As a paratext, a map’s function is to clarify spatial and geographic
relationships for the audience; as an artifact, it must do this and also give an impression of the
culture and worldview that produced it. The same spatial information may be provided in
either a paratext or an artifact: the galaxy map in Jason Fry and Daniel Wallace’s Star Wars:The
Essential Atlas (2009) is a paratext; the galaxy map consulted by Obi-Wan Kenobi in Attack of
the Clones (2002) is an artifact.
Coined by Gerard Genette, the term “paratext” refers to those texts that form a threshold
around every published text—from author name and title to cover art, blurbs, epigraphs, and
notes—and that mediate the text to the reader (Genette, 1997: 1–4). In the case of imaginary
worlds, paratexts are those elements that mediate the world to the audience but do not form
part of the diegetic world itself. For example, the title credits of a film may clarify the nature
of the world for the audience but they do not exist for the characters themselves.
It may not be immediately clear whether a given map is a paratext or an artifact. The maps
that accompany texts are usually not part of the narrative and are normally located outside the
text. Paratextual maps appear on the endpapers of novels, the menu screens of video games,
and the opening credits of films. They serve to assert the reality of the secondary world while
translating its geographical knowledge into terms comprehensible to the audience. A paratex-
tual map may suggest through its art style and geographical biases that it is an artifact but only
becomes one when directly attributed to a secondary world source.
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Gerard Hynes
As artifacts, maps must convey the extent to which the cartographic assumptions of the
secondary world differ from those of the Primary World. One simple way to demonstrate
the cultural differences of the secondary world is the orientation of maps. North has become
the default direction for the top of maps, but there is no intrinsic reason why it should be.
Medieval maps were often east-orientated (hence the term) and focused upon Jerusalem
(Harvey, 1987: 19), and there are Primary World examples of west-orientated and south-
orientated maps, such as Willem Blaeu’s 1635 map of New Netherland and New England, or
Muhammad al-Idrisi’s 1154 world map, the Tabula Rogeriana. These possibilities are, however,
reflected in very few imaginary world maps. One exception is Thrór’s Map in The Hobbit,
which, with its east-orientation and invented script, is more subcreative than most imaginary
maps (see Ekman, 2013: 42). Ekman, limiting himself to maps of fantasy worlds, estimates that
less than 4% of those maps are orientated to a direction other than north (Ekman, 2013: 26).
This demonstrates the difficulty of overcoming certain Primary World defaults, no matter
how simple and effective such a change would be for demonstrating the unique culture of
the imagined world.
Similarly, most maps that depict medievalist or pre-modern worlds still use modern carto-
graphical conventions and fonts, sometimes mixed with medieval or pseudo-medieval details
(Ekman, 2013: 41). While this reflects both the cartographical knowledge of the individual
map maker and their concessions to the cartographic literacy of the audience, it creates a
tension between the map as paratext and as artifact. Terry Pratchett’s Discworld is unusually
inventive in registering the disc’s unique geography through the use of the two main direc-
tions of Hubward and Rimward, along with the minor directions Turnwise and Widdershins
(Pratchett, 1995: 20n). Rather than exploit the potential incongruity of a flat world using the
Primary World cardinal directions, Pratchett created a cartographic vocabulary, and attendant
worldview, native to his own world.
Water Margins
The edges of maps may be as suggestive as their privileged central point, or indeed any of their
content. John Clute uses the term “water margin” to label the unmapped and undescribed
regions that encompass a secondary world and separate its known geography from other
unknown worlds. They “surround a central Land or reality, and fade indefinitely into the dis-
tance, beyond the edges of any Map. Fantasies set in Secondary Worlds are commonly supplied
with maps whose edges are not Borderlands but Water Margins” (Clute, 1997: 997). Clute’s
term derives from The Water Margin (Suikoden) (1973–1974), a Japanese television adaptation
of the 14th-century Chinese novel Shui Hu Zhuan, which features outlaws operating on the
undefined borderlands around the central empire. It also, however, suggests the Ancient Greek
Oceanus, the circumfluent ocean that surrounds the known world. Ekman describes it as such:
“The surrounding water is where the world ends, where even the possibility of knowledge
ends. It frames the known world, establishing that what is on the map is all there is” (Ekman,
2013: 26). Water margins do not, however, have to consist of water. They may describe any
endless or impassable barrier, often desert or mountains. Further, water margins do not neces-
sarily remain impassable and may be breached in later works in a series, as they are in Baum’s
Oz books and C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia (1950–1956).
Most maps of terrestrial secondary worlds are, however, not surrounded by water margins;
less than 25% of fantasy worlds are (Ekman, 2013: 26). Even in the largely aquatic world
of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea, part of Hogen Land extends beyond the edge of the map,
locating the archipelago world in a larger context. The presence of land on the edge of a map
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Geography and Maps
implies not just the existence of further, undescribed land beyond the map’s margins but also
its accessibility. Galactic maps, on the other hand, effectively always have water margins, given
the empty space between planets and galaxies. Blank spaces simultaneously deny the impor-
tance of the unmapped region while highlighting the limited knowledge of the fictional
cartographers. They also invite speculation and raise the possibility of future knowledge on
the part of the audience.
Maps and Temporality

Every map is written in a particular tense. A modern map of Ancient Greece is written in the
past tense; a map of a planned motorway is in the future tense. Most maps are in the present
tense and retain this internal tense even as the map ages (Wood, 1992: 112, 126).This is no dif-
ferent for maps of imaginary worlds. Past maps—Beleriand in the First Age, Alderaan before
its destruction— both provide historical background for the ongoing secondary world narra-
tive and manifest the historical depth of the secondary world. Even maps composed ostensibly
in the present tense encode time, through the presence of place names in different languages,
ruins and abandoned settlements, and reference to the age of sites.
Maps also have a duration, the span of time they cover. The title of Tolkien’s map, “The
West of Middle-earth at the End of the Third Age,” implies change from the first two ages.
Worlds existing in visual media can display the passing of time through direct changes to the
map. In the opening credits of HBO’s Game of Thrones, the map serves to familiarize viewers
with the geographical locations that will feature in each episode and remind them of their
spatial relations, but it also tracks the temporal progression of the universe, with Winterfall
appearing burnt on the map and later flying the banners of house Bolton. This allows for a
constantly updating representation of the political fortunes of the Seven Kingdoms. Similarly,
the opening credits of Amazon’s adaptation of The Man in the High Castle (2015) juxtapose
arrows representing Nazi troop movements across the United States with the finalized map of
the division of the country into the Greater Nazi Reich, Japanese Pacific States, and Neutral
Zone. This recapitulates the conquest of the U.S. and establishes the alternative historical
world of the series.
Temporality points to one area where new technologies have scope to greatly increase the
richness and immersiveness of secondary world maps. GIS (geographic information systems)
have the potential to contribute to both the practice and study of world-building, offering
“real-time” depictions of geographical developments in imaginary worlds as well as tracking
audience interaction with such worlds. The 2005 Corrupted Blood pandemic in World of
Warcraft (2004–present), whereby a glitch caused a highly contagious hit point-draining spell
to escape from its intended location, has already been used by epidemiologists to analyse the
dissemination of infectious pathogens (see Balicer, 2007).Virtual worlds are being constantly
redesigned by their creators according to data analysis of player interactions in different spaces
(see Castranova et al., 2008). One of the oldest tools for world-building, cartography contin-
ues to be an essential element in the 21st century.
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14
History and Timelines
Although we may think about the histories of imaginary worlds independently of the timelines
that sometimes convey these histories to us, the timelines themselves cannot be understood
independently of these histories. As such, this entry does not treat “history” and “timelines”
as separate issues, but rather in terms of their intersection. Importantly, while timelines are
neither necessary nor sufficient to describe and/or communicate an imaginary world’s history,
their use and development by both official/canonical creators and fans suggests the degree to
which they assist with such description and communication. Timelines convey to readers a
sense of the facticity of an imaginary world, the brute events that novels, films, video games,
and other media take up and convey as and through narratives to readers, viewers, and play-
ers. They suggest that there is more to a world than this or that story, that beyond the human
meaning such narratives offer and participate in, there is something like an objective reality.
In short, timelines might simply be understood as pointing to a set of events from a world’s
past upon which the very possibility of narrative in that world is based. Nonetheless, the rela-
tionships amongst the “facts” of imaginary worlds and narratives set in these worlds are quite
complex, requiring that we not only understand how history operates in imaginary worlds.
We must also understand the history of the timeline as well as the ways in which history, as
conveyed through timelines as the raw material of narrative, is founded on certain notions of
thought established in modernity. Such thought in part determines the form that imaginary
world narratives take.This chapter will first discuss how imaginary worlds make use of history
and how timelines support this use but also raise significant and difficult questions about such
history. It then moves to a discussion of the emergence and development of the timeline as
a historiographic tool for visualizing and organizing time since antiquity. The history of the
timeline suggests the manner in which historical thought involves narration, but also the facts
that stand behind narration, a relationship imported into imaginary worlds that subsequently
conditions the ways in which they develop. The chapter concludes with brief discussions of
chronologies and timelines from several imaginary worlds, both those offered in official/
canonical materials and those developed by fans.
For imaginary worlds, history, very simply put, might be: (1) a thematic concern (insofar
as these worlds might question the history of the Primary World or its manner of histori-
cal thought); (2) a structuring principle (insofar as these worlds are organized according to
causality in which the past in some manner determines or conditions the present of a given
narrative); and/or (3) a good deal of the “content” of fictions set in these worlds (insofar as
past events might be recounted in the present plot and/or insofar as current conflicts become
past events in the course of a narrative; see the “Backstory” chapter in this volume). As worlds
develop—through the efforts of creators or of fans, or by way of the expansion of a franchise
107
such as the Marvel Cinematic Universe—timelines become useful, perhaps even necessary,
devices for the organization of events that take place in the world. Those worlds that include
timelines as part of their canon, such as Tolkien’s Arda, tend to favor clear chains of causal-
ity and coherent narratives based on characters’ and readers’ capacity to know the world in
question. Those worlds that eschew timelines, such as China Miéville’s Bas-Lag and Brandon
Sanderson’s Final Empire, tend to thematize their fundamental strangeness and the impos-
sibility of grasping history in a total (or even partial) manner. In such cases, and even in cases
where official timelines exist, fans may step in to develop their own timelines as a means to
better understand an imaginary world and the narratives set within it.
Just as maps organize an imaginary world spatially and genealogies organize relationships
amongst a world’s characters, timelines, according to Mark J. P. Wolf, organize and order the
events of an imaginary world’s past and present, its history, and the plots of the current narra-
tives set within it. Wolf writes:
Timelines and chronologies connect events together temporally, unifying them in a

history.They can be used to chart the cause-and-effect relationships between events,
explain and clarify their motivations and maintain consistency, and give local events
a context within larger movements of historical events. Timelines tie backstory into
a story’s current events and help an audience to fill in gaps, such as characters’ ages
or travel times, or their participation in events described in broader scale. Timelines
also allow simultaneous strands of action, narratives, or other causal chains to be
compared alongside each other, providing both synchronic and diachronic contexts
for events.
(Wolf, 2012: 165)
Thus, timelines provide general information about worlds to an audience interested in the
depth of these worlds in terms of completeness or consistency (even where these events do
not bear on specific narratives), while also providing an audience with a tool whereby plot
points and strands can be subsumed into a larger context. Although world history, which is
to say this “larger context,” might come to the reader by other means (through plot, through
dialogue, through other paratexts such as the sourcebook), the timeline, when present, pro-
vides an elegant solution to the problem of history’s vastness and the difficulties of coordinat-
ing events on timescales beyond that of the individual human being (upon whom so many
imaginary world narratives focus). However, even as timelines make such timescales seemingly
manageable, they also point to the inhumanity of geological, cosmological, and mythological
time by often creating what John Clute and John Grant call a “time abyss” (Clute & Grant,
1999: 946–947). These scales stand in contrast to historical and personal timescales and, as in
the case of the timelines provided by Olaf Stapledon in Last and First Men (1930), serve less to
allow an audience to bridge the gap between now and then so much as force that audience
to confront that gap’s “unbridgibility.” Thus, even as timelines serve as a means to knowledge,
they also dramatize the impossibility of total knowledge.
Keeping this complexity in mind, it becomes clear that, whatever apparently simple func-
tions they serve with respect to the histories of imaginary worlds, timelines in fact raise at
least as many questions as they answer. Beyond the issue of the time abyss, we might ask many
questions of timelines: In the context of imaginary worlds, who compiles them? Why should
we trust these compilers? Why represent these events and not others? What happened in the
“space” between one event and another? Does history simply function in a linear fashion,
with one thing leading directly to another? In fact, do timelines represent a sort of Whig
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H i s t o ry a n d T i m e l i n e s
history, by which the past is understood merely in terms of how it directly and necessarily
produced the present? Timelines’ functions, both practical and epistemological, are irreducibly
complex. To pursue but one such complexity a bit further: as Wolf suggests, timelines work
to create the larger context in which imaginary world narratives are set. In so doing, they in
part create the world itself and therefore serve a practical function. They also, however, pro-
vide that world with a “truthful” and “factual” foundation and thus serve an epistemological
function. Thus, they both create a context and justify that context, and any future text set
within it, at once. Furthermore, even as they add to world completeness and seek to organ-
ize it into world consistency, they (as stated above) also demonstrate that the world is never
quite complete.They also threaten consistency by placing a tremendous burden on any future
narratives set within the world to conform to the “facts” of history. That is, the timeline itself
conveys a sense, as part of its epistemological function, that such and such an event—that is,
the plot of this narrative—did not just happen (as in a “just so” story), but manifested out of
the past conditions of a world. These established facts always run the risk of conflicting with
or constraining the world’s further historical development. Such conflict does not occur in
the Primary World, in which individual actors create history from the bottom up, so to speak,
but becomes a problem for worlds developed in a top-down fashion by individual creators
(or, worse, by multiple creators working somewhat independently of one another). Finally,
given that the facts of a world make possible any number of future events, the timeline, and
the gaps therein, raises, for the skeptical reader, a question: Why this narrative rather than that
one? What claim to importance does it possess, given the long history of the world a timeline
might visualize? Again, Olaf Stapledon’s timelines in Last and First Men, representing billions
of years, prove instructive here as they call into question the importance of what we might
call human history, the width of which is but atoms thick (or even less) when cosmological
time is represented in inches. When we encounter a timeline, in other words, we not only
encounter a great deal of narrative compression, as detail is lost even as it is implied by the
gaps in the chronology, we also encounter choice (on the part of the compiler who created
the timeline) and constraint (in terms of how these events, by becoming facts, dictate the
world in question).
That timelines raise such concerns should not be surprising, given their manner of emer-
gence in relation to the ways in which history, as a discipline, understood the passage of time
and the cultural, political, social, economic, and aesthetic transformations such passage involves.
The timeline, and its related forms, the annals and the chronicle, emerge as historiographic
tools according to developing understandings of how time works, how it might be visualized,
and how the events it “contains” might be organized in relation to one another. Importantly,
as these tools became “naturalized” so too did the understandings of history and time out of
which they emerged. In Cartographies of Time:A History of the Timeline (2010), Daniel Rosenberg
and Anthony Grafton make clear that “time” and “lines” seem to go hand in hand:
In representations of time, lines appear virtually everywhere, in texts and images

and devices. Sometimes, as in the timelines found in history textbooks, the presence
of the line couldn’t be more obvious. But in other instances, it is more subtle. On
an analog clock, for example, the hour and minute hands trace lines through space;
though these lines are circular, they are lines nonetheless.
(Rosenberg and Grafton, 2010: 10)
Indeed, media theorists such as Vilém Flusser (2011a, 2011b) and Marshall McLuhan (2011)
connect linearity and historical thought when they argue that Western forms of writing and
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print, both of which organize information in terms of lines, make historical thinking possible.
I shall return to the influence of the timeline on historical thought momentarily. For now, we
must note that the line, whether explicit and obvious or implicit and nearly invisible, has long
presented itself as a means for organizing time spatially. Rosenberg and Grafton argue, in fact,
that the timeline is not so much an impoverished form of historical accounting, one practiced
by an unskilled or even primitive historian, but rather offers “powerful, graphically dense ways
of describing and interpreting the past” (2010: 12–13).They trace forms related to the timeline
back to at least 264/3 B.C., the production date of the Parian Marble, a Greek chronology of
major events of the previous thousand or so years. By the Renaissance, the chronology became,
along with geography, a source of “unquestionable information, which introduced order to the
apparent chaos of events” (Rosenberg and Grafton, 2010: 17). As such, we might add, the line
(whether manifest or implicit) became naturalized as a symbol of time and its forward move-
ment. (Note that, as Rosenberg and Grafton would remind us, actual timelines involve actual
lines. Many imaginary world “timelines” are, in fact, annals or chronicles, strictly speaking.)
So naturalized (or, better, reified) did the relationship between time and lines become that
champions of subsequent forms of historiography—what came to be known as the “history
proper,” which not only respected the chronology of events but also fit them into a meaning-
ful, narrativized structure—saw earlier forms as nothing but narratives in the offing, albeit
impoverished narratives at best. Hayden White describes the relationship between chrono-
logical sequence and the fully developed history:
In order for an account of events, even of past events or of past real events, to count
as a proper history, it is not enough that it display all of the features of narrativity.
In addition, the account must manifest a proper concern for the judicious handling
of evidence, and it must honor the chronological order of the original occurrence
of the events which it treats as a baseline not to be transgressed in the classification
of any given event as either a cause or an effect. But by common consent, it is not
enough that an historical account deal in real, rather than imaginary events; and it
is not enough that the account represents events in its order of discourse according
to the chronological sequence in which they originally occurred. The events must
be not only registered within the chronological framework of their original occur-
rence but narrated as well, that is to say, revealed as possessing a structure, an order of
meaning, that they do not possess as mere sequence.
(White, 1990: 4–5, my emphasis)
Thus, the annals form—which offers a list of years and the important events of each with
no commentary on those events or a sense of a beginning or an end to the “tale” they tell—
cannot be a history proper, even if it offers the raw materials of which proper history is built.
Likewise, the chronicle—which offers more narrativity by way of a proper subject and a
proper center of action, according to White—fails for the fact that it remains too slavishly
devoted to presenting events in the exact order in which they occurred, like the annals form,
and because, unlike the proper narrative, it offers no conclusion by which the meaning of
the structural whole becomes apparent. Chronicles don’t end; they simply trail off. It, thus,
becomes clear that sequence remained necessary to history proper, but only in a factual sense.
In fact, the history proper need not narrate events in the order in which they took place so
long as it respects the cause-and-effect relationships this order involves. That is, the meaning
of history is not to be found in order itself, but in the narrating of the events. The order itself
is reduced to raw material.
110
However, as White points out, to understand the annals or chronicle forms as simply the
raw materials for—or failed attempts at—narrative is to miss the specific qualities of these
forms of historiography. As an example of the annals form, White offers a section of the
Annals of St. Gall, which covers the years 709–734 A.D. in Gaul (a region of what is now a
good part of Western Europe). According to the Annals, most years saw nothing of impor-
tance happen. Other years offer seemingly, to the modern reader, random events: the death
of a duke or priest, bad or good crops, invasions, and the fact that “Charles fought against the
Saracens at Poitiers on Saturday” (White, 1990: 7). White notes that the list of events which
the Annals comprises “immediately locates us in a culture hovering on the brink of dissolu-
tion, a society of radical scarcity, a world of human groups threatened by death, devastation,
flood, and famine” (1990: 7). These events, each as seemingly incomprehensible (from the
standpoint of narrative) as the rest, are not so much enacted by a human subject as they simply
occur; they are done to these human groups as if by nature or God (even when they involve
other human groups). The mindset that recorded these events was not simply narrating one
thing rather than another, or badly narrating a proper history. For White, this mindset was
fundamentally different than the one that produces the “history proper” due to the fact that
it does not involve subjectivity of the modern sort, a self (or group) distinct from the world, a
self-possessing agency and autonomy, a self that acts against (in several senses) its environment.
Such modern subjectivity takes objectivity as the totality of facts of which it makes meaning,
just as the modern historian takes the events placed on the timeline as the raw materials for
the narratives (and meanings) it constructs.
The relationship between brute fact (offered by the timeline) and narrative (offered by
the history proper and naturalized as meaningful by historical thinking) is reproduced in
the timelines offered by imaginary worlds, which more often than not appear after the nar-
rative proper ends but nonetheless serve as “proof ” for those narratives. Just as historiogra-
phy becomes increasingly dominated by narrative and the tropes thereof according to White
(2000), narrative becomes increasingly reliant on historical thinking to ground itself in reality.
(Lubomír Doležel [2010] claims, in opposition to White, that, while there may be similari-
ties between history as a discipline and the construction of fictional worlds, the two practices
are fundamentally different.) However, historical thought, even as it was becoming powerful
and ubiquitous, does not tell the whole story, so to speak. John Clute argues that fantastika—
which includes genres such as fantasy and science fiction, both of which are clearly associated
imaginary worlds—emerges in the middle of the 18th century in response to not only the
historical transformations taking place at the time, but in response to historical thought itself.
He notes that, around 1750:
the engines of change represented by the scientific and industrial revolutions begin
palpably to increase the speed of history until it races. The planet begins to shake in
the storm; change burns the soles of the residents; things alter so fast that we in the
matured West are no longer able to sort our lives, which begin to haunt us.
(2011: 24)
Georg Lukács (1983) notes that the historical novel emerges at this point and demonstrates
that the people of the past are fundamentally different in their understandings of the world
than are people of the present. Similarly, fantastika emerges as a means to narrate the differ-
ence of the world with itself. That is, fantastika demonstrates that there is always more to the
world than the increasingly rational, scientific, secular, and historical accounts of it suggest.
This “more” can never be captured by means of mimetic, realist, or naturalistic fictions, all of
111
which are indebted to newly emerging forms of thought such as history. Only estranged and
estranging forms, such as fantastika, were able to do so. However, these very forms eventually
found themselves making use of the tools developed by historical thought as a means to grant
the worlds they create a sense of reality.
The timeline (or, rather, chronology, since it does not actually make use of lines) found in
Appendix B to The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien, 1994: 452–472), is perhaps the most famous
example of this technology in the history of imaginary worlds. Along with materials (such as
genealogies) that make up the rest of the appendices, this so-called “Tale of Years” connects
the events of the trilogy to the past (or at least to select events of the past) and also, precisely by
not narrating all of these events, stands as a set of facts that grant reality to the larger, imagi-
nary world of Middle-earth. Each event narrated in The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers,
and The Return of the King was preceded by other events, which in turn were preceded by
still other events, back into the First Age (not included in this chronology likely because the
timescales at which it existed make little sense to historical thought and the subjects thereof
and, by remaining mythical, it grants even further reality to later events by virtue of contrast).
Each event thus stands in relation to each other event in terms of time; for example, Aragorn
finds the sapling of the white tree 3,017 years after Isildur planted the first seedling of that tree
in Minas Anor. Thus, the past provides ground for the present, but also becomes factualized
as the past of the present. This past could not be simply understood as “once upon a time,”
irremediably distant from the present narrative as are fairy tales from day-to-day life. Rather,
the timeline shows it to have taken place at a specific, punctual moment, as a historical (rather
than mythical) event.The facticity that this timeline grants to Tolkien’s world stands somewhat
at odds with his justification for the secondary worlds in which fairy stories are set. These
worlds, he claims, by virtue of their separation from the Primary World, on the one hand, and
their completeness, on the other, afford readers the possibility of belief (Tolkien, 1964: 36–37),
something Clute states Tolkien and other fantasists found in short supply after World War One
revealed the horrors of the modern world to them (2011: 25). However, it seems that Tolkien
and other creators, however much they wanted to escape the rational world through belief,
found the best way to do so involved making use of and thereby repurposing the very tools—
history, science, and rational accounts of time—that destroyed belief to begin with.
By contrast, the timelines Olaf Stapledon offers in Last and First Men do not seek to grant
reality to an imaginary world wholly separate from the Primary World, but rather serve to
connect the past and present history of Earth to the far future of the universe in order to both
bring into relief the destructive course upon which the 20th century has set itself as well as
demonstrate the final insignificance of this destructiveness.The first of these timelines, labeled
Time Scale 1, extends from the birth of Christ through the year 4000 (that is, the period
roughly 2,000 years before Last and First Men was published until about 2,000 years after that
publication). Mainly, this timeline, set at an historical scale, highlights the history of conflict
over this period and draws attention to the American domination of the second half of the
20th century and beyond. Time Scale 2 begins in the Paleolithic Era, 200,000 years before
the 20th century, and ends 200,000 years after that century. A note tells the reader that its
scale, which we might call geological, is “one hundred times greater than the preceding scale”
and that it is “doubtless extremely inaccurate” (Stapledon, 2008: 99). Whatever its accuracy, it
nonetheless already suggests how extremely small and insignificant human history becomes
when considered in the larger context of the geological history of the planet. Time Scales 3
and 4 each increases the scale of the prior one by one-hundredfold; Time Scale 5 increases
the scale from Time Scale 4 by a factor of 10,000. Each further demonstrates that human
history, as we understand that history from within it, is insignificant well before, but also well
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beyond, cosmological timescales. At the same time, however, it demonstrates the continuity
and causality of history as one species of human (the “First Men” to which the reader belongs)
develops into other species, each of which creates new forms of civilization before falling into
decline and decadence. Although Stapledon’s timelines, like Tolkien’s, serve as the facts upon
which Last and First Men’s narrative is based, they also show the uselessness or meaninglessness
of such facts, which are invariably chosen by finite human beings in terms of concerns that
remain forever local when taken in the context of the universe itself. In other words, timelines
are a tool of historical thought as well as the means by which such thought can be called into
question as limited to present points of view and ways of knowing.
Both Tolkien and Stapledon’s timelines organize their respective worlds, if in different ways
and to different effect. However, some worlds, by virtue of the way they are described and
constructed—and in part because they do not offer official timelines (and/or maps or other
such tools) or only offer timelines apart from the medium that conveys the narrative itself—
refuse such organization. In fact, they thematize the degree to which imaginary worlds (and
perhaps the Primary World) resist our attempts to know them. Examples of such worlds
include those of the so-called “Cthulhu Mythos” (created by H. P. Lovecraft and developed
by numerous others; see Lovecraft, 1998, for a non-comprehensive but entertaining selection,
and Joshi, 2015, for a critical account of the mythos), China Miéville’s (2001, 2004, 2005)
Bas-Lag, and Brandon Sanderson’s (2007, 2008a, 2008b) Final Empire. The narratives set in
each of these worlds dramatize the difficulties, if not impossibilities, of understanding history
in neat and orderly ways (especially when such history includes the impossible causality of
magic and the supernatural). Nonetheless, timelines for each of these worlds exist online,
sometimes compiled by individuals and groups not officially related to the worlds (in the case
of the Cthulhu Mythos and Bas-Lag) and sometimes hosted by the author’s official website
(as in the case of the Final Empire). These timelines demonstrate at least two things. First,
imaginary worlds may be created by individual authors or groups of authors, but they are
also maintained by a larger fan community that researches and orders the worlds of their own
accord. In other words, imaginary worlds do not exist solely as narratives or the facts behind
the narratives offered by official sources, but also as part of a process that relates one to the
other through various, diverse channels. Second, the order suggested by the timeline/narra-
tive relationship (that the facts of the former provide the raw materials of the latter), when
reversed (so that the narrative provides the facts that populate the timeline), calls attention to
the fact that facts and narrative rarely—if ever—exist independently of one another.Timelines
operate in a number of ways in imaginary worlds and must be considered as important objects
for the study thereof. However, they rarely, if ever, provide any conclusive answers about the
histories of these worlds without raising even more puzzles that readers, viewers, and players
will need to solve.
References
Clute, J. (2011) Pardon this intrusion: fantastika in the world storm, Essex: Beccon Publications.
Clute, J. & Grant, J. (1999) The encyclopedia of fantasy, New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.
Doležel, L. (2010) Possible worlds of fiction and history: the postmodern stage, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Flusser,V. (2011a) Does writing have a future?, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Flusser,V. (2011b) Into the universe of technical images, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Joshi, S. T. (2015) The rise, fall, and rise of the Cthulhu mythos, New York: Hippocampus Press.
Lovecraft, H. P. (1998) Tales of the Cthulhu mythos, New York: Ballantine Publishing Group.
Lukács, G. (1983) The historical novel, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
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McLuhan, M. (2011) The Gutenberg galaxy:The making of typographic man, Toronto: University of Toronto
Press.
Mieville, C. (2001) Perdido street station, New York: Del Rey.
Mieville, C. (2004) The scar, New York: Ballantine Books.
Mieville, C. (2005) Iron council, New York: Del Rey/Ballantine Books.
Rosenberg, D. & Grafton, A. (2010) Cartographies of time: A history of the timeline, New York: Princeton
Architectural Press.
Sanderson, B. (2007) Mistborn:The final empire, New York: Tor.
Sanderson, B. (2008a) The hero of ages, New York: Tor.
Sanderson, B. (2008b) The well of ascension, New York: Tor.
Stapledon, O. (2008) Last and first men, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.
Tolkien, J. R. R. (1964) Tree and leaf, London: Allen & Unwin.
Tolkien, J. R. R. (1994) The return of the king, New York: Ballantine.
White, H. (1990) The content of the form: Narrative discourse and historical representation, Baltimore: Johns
White, H. (2000) Metahistory: The historical imagination in nineteenth-century Europe, Baltimore, MD: Johns
Wolf, Mark J. P. (2012), Building imaginary worlds:The theory and history of subcreation, New York: Routledge.
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15
Mythology
Lily Alexander
Every metaphor is a little myth, as Vico famously stated, implying that a metaphor (potentially)
turns “into a myth” (Vico, Verene, 1981). This dictum echoes in the idea that (mythological)
symbols unfold into stories, while stories can fold back into symbols (Lotman, 2001). Each
imaginary world is an “imaginative universal” (Vico), a symbolic system (Cassirer, 1929/1970)
and a “universe of the mind” (Lotman), inseparable from its own mythology. A distinctive
system of mythic tales inevitably shapes a unique fictional world, while this world’s life in
time is ensured by the dramatic action unfolding within, in other words, through storytell-
ing. The mythology of an imaginary world reveals itself dynamically only through action, a
story about change. Both mythology and imaginary world establishes itself and unfolds “nar-
ratively” (Wolf, 2012; Alexander, 2013). An imaginary world needs its myths to come alive,
while any original mythology always generates a world of its own. This interdependency
means that mythology—consequentially—creates imaginary worlds, which need tales to exist
and reach the minds of recipients (the ritual participants, readers, and audiences).
World myths and folktales continue playing an active role in global popular culture. Due
to contemporary storytelling media, readers and audiences around the world learn about
characters and events of Greek, Celtic, Slavic, Scandinavian, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese
foundational mythologies (to name a few). Collections of mythic tales have always represented
an effective dynamic order. Mythology can be discussed as an “operational system” of culture.
Mythology is usually defined as an assembly of traditional tales of a tribe or a nation,
which serves as a basis for its worldview, and is revered as an anthology of sacred texts (see for
example: Propp 1928/1968, 1984; Campbell 1968, 1990, 2011; Freeman 2012).Thus, mythol-
ogy emerges as a multifaceted syncretic unity, which would later give birth to the three separate
domains: the knowledge about the world (science, philosophy); belief systems (religion); and
narrative (art).
Typical situations surrounding the origin, essence, and prospects of human communities
have become the recurrent themes across storytelling traditions. Foundational mythologies
will continue serving as the building blocks for emerging narrative systems (Jenkins,Alexander,
2014). Old mythic tales still participate in the production of culture, contributing not only
story characters and events but with influential patterns, such as mythemes and mythologemes—
the mythological leitmotifs, able to form new and fascinating creative fusions. A mytheme is a
dominant and recurrent theme in myths, or a type of mythic leitmotif. A mythologeme is a
dynamic logical unit—part of narrative grammar/semantics as a structural whole; it contains
some form of action or change that is vital to the meaning of the story.
For example, a leitmotif of twin brothers, closely associated with the mythology of the
powerful heroes-demiurges (Jung, 1964; Meletinsky, 2000), is a mytheme, while their bond
and/or rivalry, leading to conflict and story development, is a mythologeme. Other mythemes
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and mythologemes encompass the transformation of chaos into cosmos (establishing of

cosmic order) and, subsequently, of the amorphous ocean water masses (chaos) into the fertile
and cultivated lands (i.e., order). The key mythic patterns also include the parables focusing
on the obstacles and boundaries in creating society, through the mythological framing of vari-
ous forms of prohibition and taboo. With the rise of statehood, the mythologeme of chaos
versus order becomes an ideological foundation for conceptualizing the opposition “us” (the
kinship-related tribal alliance) versus “the Other”—the conquerors, or the “infidels,” those
praying to the “wrong” gods.
Rooted in early religions, such as animism, animatism, fetishism, totemism, the ancestor
belief, and polytheism, and reinforcing their worldviews, the mythological consciousness is
blended with these forms of faith as their sacramental framework. For example, totemism
added to the core mythemes of culture the sacred stories of kinship between the animal or
plant “families” and the socio-familial groups of humans. These early types of religions also
represent the mental modalities that possess the innate ritual-semantic mechanisms of endow-
ing objects with the “living spirits” and linking characters to concepts (Armstrong, 1981).
Such “diffusive” modes of thinking imaginatively merge the signifiers with the signified in a
“fairytale” fashion. To explain the logic of these connections and fusions, stories about magic
inevitably follow.
Mythology emerged as a way of contemplating reality, and making the first steps toward
conceptualizing it. Lucien Levy-Bruhl (1935/1983) emphasized the “prelogical” mental oper-
ations, which determined “sameness” by proximity/similarity, also using the latter in place of
causality.This diffusive consciousness gave birth to the metaphoric, poetic, and artistic types of
logic. Conversely, Claude Levi-Strauss (1966, 1995) revealed the (rational) apparatus of classi-
fication, based on the complex binary system of elementary semantic oppositions.This system,
he showed, can describe the entire mythological model of the universe, as perceived by early
man. Mythic storytelling is an intellectual endeavor of humankind, developed as a passage
between the natural world and the emerging world of ideas. Myth transforms one domain
into another, reflecting a poetic thought-process about the world that is more grounded,
inventive, and fertile than purely abstract thinking. That is why myth, enhanced by the dif-
fusive consciousness of early man, is so prominent for its metaphorical prowess. Mythologies
have the ability of bridging, balancing, and activating the spiritual in the material and vice
versa: convert ideas into physical objects or living beings, and empower objects-images, with
the potent symbolic meaning. Consciousness as a process, taking a form of a sacred narrative,
is an essence of myth.
Metamorphosis, or transformation, is the main subject of myth. All mythic stories deal with,
and contain, the realms of magic.The magically occurring events connote the positive change
that early man desired and thought to facilitate through the scenario of ritual performance
(Turner, 1969, 1975). The ritual practices, hence, were conceived as a tool of reinforcing
advancement and progress. All myths—containing the transformative events in the past or
present—had to be repeatedly reenacted, so such change would be assured again, re-activated,
and reestablished.Thus, in the mind of early man, ritual action was needed to make all desired
changes permanent and active, so the natural world revolves as it should. The supporting
and reenacting myth through ritual ensured the necessary dynamics of meaning-making and
establishing vital change; this links mythology to the heart of culture. One of the main mira-
cles, manifest in mythology, is the human species’ spiritual awakening, or the development of
our collective self-awareness and self-actualization (Losev, 1985/2003). By focusing on trans-
formative processes, ritual-mythological practices, thought to confirm beneficial collective
experiences, effectively establish and transmit them as “culture” to new generations.
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Mythology
Mythic tales are both “fixed” and “flexible.” Based on strict narrative patterns (invariants,
closely linked to the ritual structure), yet supple and pliable (variations), they pivot on vitally
important, foundational, or highly consequential events. Myths always exist as multiple ver-
sions initiated and later fine-tuned by the generations of ritual practitioners and storytell-
ers (and so do the modern stories of Batman and Superman). Such “configurability” and
adaptability make world mythologies an infinitely rich resource for all artistic epochs and
endeavors. Harry Potter, the outcome of J. K. Rowling’s close studies of the Greek myth, is
a persuasive example, as well as Hayao Miyazaki’s examinations of world folklore, from the
Celtic to the Slavic, resulting in the entrancing fictionality of his transcultural animation.
In the worlds of Slavic fantastic realism, and its counterpart, Latin American magic realism,
mythic symbolism plays a crucial part. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, and Franz Kafka
refer to European demonology, Mikhail Bulgakov to early myths of the Israelites in The Master
and Margarita (1966), and Victor Pelevin to ancient Chinese mythology in The Sacred Book of
the Werewolf (2004). And one can add to this the tradition of Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar,
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Jorge Amadu, who fired up their stories with the “explosive”
mythological fusion of European folklore and symbolic rituals of African slaves and South
American natives.
Mythic plots are usually the root-metaphors of culture, such as the myths of creation (of the
world) or the myths of origin (of the tribe/people), explaining how the universe works or how
Mother Nature rules (resonating in the origin myths of Tolkien and Lord Dunsany). Both
types of foundational myths are associated with the sacral time-space continuum of the primal
and wondrous creative beginnings (Frazer, 1890; Propp, 1928/1968, 1946, 1984; Jung, 1964;
Levi-Strauss, 1966; Meletinsky, 2000). Creation myths tend to describe the birth of the world
as the sacral marriage between the Sky and the Earth, while the mythic origins of the people
are found in the procreative ancestral animal figures, to be termed the totem.The mythologemes
of fate became significant when the concept of the individual emerged, and when man began
to ponder if one has any control over his life path.
The mythic goddesses Moirai were believed to oversee the fates of men and women in
ancient Greece. Later, the determinism of this predicament was replaced by such cultural
forms as the tragedy of fate and its alternative, the tragedy of choice, leaving a human being
some decision-making freedom over the future. This opportunity was again questioned by
the Existentialists (Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Max Frisch), who in the aftermath of
World War II revived the mythologeme of fate in literature, in the context of new histori-
cal realities of mass societies, and the diminished power of individual men and women over
their destiny.
Mythic characters are typically the gods or spirits, rooted in the natural world. Gradually,
a range of multifaceted figures is being added to the annals of myth, such as the cultural
heroes-demiurges, who may have human, super-human, or semi-divine qualities, as well as the
human-animal or animal-spirit combinations. As an alternative to a hero, who facilitates the
progress from chaos to order, a trickster figure does the opposite; yet the confusion he creates is
temporary, and is a form of positive adjustment. Many mythic beings (particularly, tricksters:
the cunning Coyote, the Fox, or the mouse, as in Tom and Jerry, etc.) have zoomorphic fea-
tures, often in fantastic combinations. Talking animals, and animal-spirits, revealing the fusion
of the human and the “beast,” have been a substantial part of world mythologies, encom-
passing ritual masks and performance, folktales, literary fables, and modern-day cartoons, all
subliminally carrying elements of animism. Alongside the divine figures presiding over the
world, there emerged the mythic chthonic figures, the underworld beings who represented the
earth (soil, ground, rocks, and mountains). Chthonic figures later morphed into the characters
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symbolizing fire, darkness, and death, eventually becoming the evil beings of folklore and
popular culture (Freud, 2003; Alexander, 2013a/b).
Most mythic figures have fluid characteristics or the dynamic essence: the change of iden-
tity (theft of identity or miraculous transformation) is often the crux of the story. Mythic
beings may obtain or lose their supernatural qualities, while being hierarchically promoted
or demoted in the realms of magic power. Such shifts happen through interactions with the
other gods or anthropomorphic nature forces. These dramatic relations—status loss or gain—
may include conflicts, battles, deception, as well as gifts, marriage, or the heroic feat.
The spectrum of intermediate beings—those between the gods and the mortals—supplies
the situations of social imbalance, resulting in endless mythic tales. Many narrative possibilities
emerge when the change of status constitutes the drama of a myth. Among the influential
mythologemes is the marriage between a mortal and a magical, “totem,” or otherworldly
being; this mytheme is rooted in animism, totemism, and the ancestor belief (such films as
Vertigo (1958), Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965), and Ghost (1990), along with the neo-
mytheme of the romance with a vampire). In the rich, hierarchical universe of Tolkien’s The
Lord of the Rings, such romances occur, assuring the readers that true love has no boundaries, as
proven by the marriage of Melian (a Maia) and Elu Thingol (an Elf), the marriage of Beren (a
Man) and Luthien (an Elf), and the marriage of Aragorn (a Man) and Arwen (an Elf).This par-
adigm has become transcultural since the era of Greek mythology. In Apuleius’ Metamorphoses,
Psyche, who is in love with Cupid, attempts to become a divine entity so she can marry her
beloved, who has a standing of a god.To reach her goal, she must solve a set of difficult riddles,
demonstrating her super-human acumen. The hero’s visit to the Underworld in The Odyssey
highlights that by losing his path in life he becomes (metaphorically-mythically) a “lost soul.”
Yet still alive, the hero overcomes endless obstacles on his way home, even rejecting the semi-
goddess Calypso’s “marriage proposal” that comes with the gift of immortality. Odysseus
proves that he was repeatedly able to cross the threshold of death, and return. Conversely, the
crossing back to life through the threshold of death—the forbidden room—was something
that the wives of the Bluebeard were unable to do (Alexander, 2013a).
Among the patterns of mythic storytelling, there is a rich archive of the mythemes and
mythologemes of space—the active spatial components of mythic chronotopes, the time-space
continua (Bakhtin, 1981, 1965/1984, 1984; Alexander, 2007, 2013a, 2017). Such mythemes
manifest a spatial element necessary to a given story; yet as a potent trope, a mythologeme of
space can itself activate a related narrative. Generated by the human imagination at the dawn
of culture, the mythology of space remains potent in the narrative culture today. Narratively
influential chronotopes, rooted in mythology, include those of the Road, the Crossroads, the
Home, the Secret Garden, Dungeons, the World’s Edge, etc. A typical mythic pattern repre-
sents an identification of the cosmos with a human body, and its upper or lower strata with
the different realms of experience. Depending on the habitual natural environment, folktales
focus on the spatial realms that they must mythically explain and narratively frame: the ocean,
the mountains, or the woods. Other spatial tropes include caves and mazes, the underwater
world, the world tree (i.e., the beanstalk rising to the sky, or the tower as axis mundi) and,
later, the fertile fields in the era of land cultivation, or the other planets in the era of space
exploration. These foundational mythic spatial tropes become the structured semantic envi-
ronment in which action takes place and relevant characters appear, for example, the deities of
waterways, the forest, or other planets, where the gods and aliens reside and rule. One of the
key principles of the mythological geography is the hierarchical organization of meaningful
spatiality by codes and, particularly, by levels, which begin to symbolize value (high heaven
vs. underworld/hell). One of the features of mythological language is the transformation
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Mythology
of semantic channels and codes, which leads to active metaphorical imagination, as well as
informational richness or symbolic superfluity/density. One image or idea is often repeated
on different levels and in different resonating ways.
In modern neo-mythologies, we recognize the mythologeme of the city (emerging in the
image of the capitalist jungle in Romanticism, Critical Realism, and French Naturalism; and
the modernist City-myth, as well as the urban maze in film noir and sci-fi dystopias). There
are even the near-supernatural realms of particular cities, which come across as the mythic
city-entity, a living magical environment, in which strange events and mutations/metamor-
phoses tend to occur. The writers of modernity, while their portrayals of actual geographic
locales are credible, have left us the gifts of cities turning into their own myths: the London of
Dickens, the Petersburg of Gogol or Dostoevsky, the Paris of Zola or Hemingway, the Dublin
of Joyce, and the Prague of Kafka (soon followed by the narrative mythologies of New York,
Los Angeles, Jerusalem, Barcelona, Casablanca, etc.).
The chronotope of mythology is associated with the circular conception of time, also linked to
the initial sacral time—that of the sacred beginnings (examples include such series as Robert
Zemeckis’s Back to the Future (1985–1990) and Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time (1990–2013)).
This mythological chronotope was distinctly replaced by the dramatic advent of the linear
historical temporality, with its breakthrough understanding of the irreversibility of time and, hence,
the finality of death.Taking political advantage of the new revelations on the nature of time, the
Roman Empire invented the performative billboard-style execution “Death on the Cross.”
This new type of capital punishment served as a perpetual vivid reminder, “obey, or else”:
you will irreversibly and graphically perish, in shame, and in public. (This proposition stands
directly opposite to those constituting the moral conflict in Sophocles’s Antigone and in the
episode of Priam’s retrieval of Hector’s body in Homer’s Iliad. Both are based on the divine
taboo of leaving a body unburied, hence, desecrated for eternity.) The new narrative forms—
tragedy, drama, and, later, crime drama, thriller, and horror—will hinge on the very notion
of the “end of time,” particularly that of individual human life. A necessary companion to
the practices of building civilization and the notion of progress, the concept of historical time
comes to replace that of the mythic circular time in the consciousness of humans.
Yet resisting the loss of the precious belief in the afterlife, human cultures make efforts
to combine or reconcile the opposite conceptions of time—the mythic/reversible and the
historical/linear—in a set of new mythologies. This paradigm shift, as well as the defiance
against it, generates multiple religious and cultural myths, including those of major religions,
the Renaissance, and the neo-mytheme of time travel in sci-fi, not to mention the reclaimable
“many lives” of an avatar in the reversible world of video game narrative.
There are many ways of exploring the phenomenon of mythology. This chapter aspires to
emphasize its innate quality of dynamics. Contrary to the view that mythologies represent
“cultural stasis” (frozen symbols), it can be argued that they are better conceptualized as a
system of multi-level and multi-directional dynamic processes. Since the birth of civilization, the
“semantic stillness” or static states of mythologies occur when the ideological conditions lead
to the inflexible, stagnant interpretations of cultural symbols. Such frozen symbolism of myth
exposes the eras that read mythology as a way of supporting the political status quo rather
than an innate quality of mythology per se.The conception of time-space-and-action in mythol-
ogy consists of at least two types. There is the circular and cyclical temporal realm, in which
the universe revolves, according to the established order. Yet there is also (actively!) present
an alternative realm of time, that of the sacred beginnings, when everything was being born,
exists in a state of becoming, the sort of Big Bang of Creation. It is this fruitful “creative
time” that is observed, venerated, and reenacted in ritual celebrations. And that sacral time
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is ritually-symbolically, in its image, present even within the ordinary time of the everyday.
This link is vividly seen, for example, in the artistic mythology of Marc Chagall, and in such
media phenomena involving the witches and wizards next-door in Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
The X-Files, and Harry Potter. In all of them, a door opens from the ordinary world into the
adjoining magical world, in which sacral events of the mythic scale take place.
Mythology first emerged to explain the “reality in action”—the world coming into being:
how it was created, how stars dance around the sky, how the tribe was born, and what its
first heroes achieved, so the future community could understand its roots, learn wisdom,
survive, and strive. Highly adept for the process of meaning-making, mythologies “crystal-
ized” (Freidenberg, 1997) symbols out of raw poetic imagery over the course of millennia.
We may assume that this happened by means of semantic undercurrents and shifts—through
interpretations to revisions, and from versions to narrative adjustments. The acute interest in
the story and the involvement of a passionate audience manifest symbolization as the vibrant
dynamic process of culture.
Individual symbols were also sharpened through interactions, sometimes conflictual, with
other symbols: for example, the tales of gods dividing their spheres of influence reflect how
different realms of nature correlate. Such juxtapositions of interests spawn many mythic sto-
ries. Each era, involved in its own socio-political and economic struggles, had to adjust its
symbolic interpretations to the meaning-making needs of their time. Such characters alone—
Oedipus, Medea, Odysseus—were a subject of reinterpretation by many storytellers and ver-
sions, in ancient Greece, and later in modernity, coming to symbolize (somewhat) different
human qualities and struggles, essential for each author’s time. Multiple versions of the stories
about Sherlock Holmes, Batman, and Superman, as well as about Alice, Cinderella, and Little
Mermaid, highlight this continuous trend.
Newly established mythic symbols proceeded to spread through interrelated stories and the
imaginary worlds in which they were set.They began to symbolize more than individual phe-
nomena but a reality with multiple realms, gradually forming semantic frameworks (the basis)
and networks (continual processes of symbolization by authors). What we call the mythological
systems of meaning then came into being, able to describe the growing civilizations and upkeep
their cultural functions on a grand scale.
Economic and macro-cultural changes, bringing about new types of civilizations and ide-
ologies, required the support of a familiar symbolic framework to signify (give meaning to) or
re-signify (change a meaning of) highly operational semantic units, important to their time.
The Middle Ages, the Renaissance (which means “rebirth”), the Baroque era, Romanticism,
etc. actively employed traditional mythologies of European traditions to redefine and ideo-
logically sharpen their semantic tools, suitable for explaining the entire spectrum of emerging
historic phenomena.
Mass society followed suit. In the 20th century’s “brave new world,” rising fascism was fore-
shadowed by the evil monsters in Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Nosferatu (1922), and Metropolis
(1927), directed by German expressionist filmmakers, as a warning to their contemporar-
ies. Conversely, the Nazi sympathizer, filmmaker, and myth-maker, Leni Riefenstahl, signi-
fied Hitler as a “god” in Triumph of the Will (1935), effectively supporting and spreading his
ideas. On the other hand, the dissidents and resistance figures of totalitarian regimes were
often glorified by the counterculture as modern-day Icarus or Prometheus figures, hence
empowering them by placing them on a cultural pedestal (as in Aldous Huxley’s The Brave
New World (1932), as well as the Strugatsky Brothers’ Hard to Be a God (1963), with multiple
screen versions and video games, and Roadside Picnic (1971), adapted as Stalker (1979) by
Andrei Tarkovsky).
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Mythology
The ideological signification of political process by means of traditional myths may lead
to the reinforcement of a dominant regime. This shows a powerful, yet often controversial,
dynamic between mythology and political realities. Shaped at the dawn of culture, mytholo-
gies tend to accumulate a qualitative change, periodically re-shaping into neo-mythologies, or
the symbolic-narrative systems of a new order, based on cultural paradigm shifts. Traditional
mythology reveals a potency to continually spring and branch into many new mythos (mythic
systems). Neo-mythology is a cultural system of modernity, which emerges around a new
phenomenon of supreme socio-political significance, and is accompanied and supported by
the continual stream of thematically linked stories, with a similar meta-conflict (the one
mirroring the dangers of reality). Neo-mythology constitutes a novel semantic order, which
actively employs the units of old myths, but its emerging ideological framework ensures the
integration of topical components: original artistic imagery (via emerging books and media),
a catalog of figures from the cultural discourse (recognizable characters), embedded political
conflicts (“ripped from the headlines”), open political debates, and often commercial slogans
(advertising and the consumer culture agenda).
“What is Hecuba to us?” is the question posed by Shakespeare in Hamlet, while the play-
wright comments on the active role of mythic/fictional figures in the production of cul-
ture, as well as in (re)defining its values and political realms. Known as the last Trojan queen
and granddaughter of the fertility god, Hecuba, as a devoted mother (of fifty!—including
Paris and Cassandra) and a “resistance fighter,” has already served Homer, Euripides, and
Shakespeare in actualizing the political agendas of each writer’s era. (The several pacifist,
politically relevant versions of Euripides’s The Trojan Women—on-screen, 1963, 1971, 2004,
and 2006—follow suit.) The world of the Trojan war—itself an imaginary world, based on
obscure legend—had to be independently construed by such myth-making giants as Homer
and Euridipes. Ironically, this mythic Symbolic Mother was omitted in the “men’s world” of
the 2004 interpretation of The Iliad, the movie Troy (written by David Benioff and directed
by Wolfgang Petersen). Conversely, in a self-ironic, yet prominent directorial gesture, Woody
Allen in Play It Again, Sam (1972) and Hayao Miyazaki in Rorco Rossa (1992) have Humphrey
Bogart’s fictional Private Eye visiting, with much regard.
Through the active process of mutual absorption between the symbolism of mythology
and ever-updating “media culture”—literature, theater, music, film, television, comics, video
games—the mythos’ pantheon of traditional gods grows to include new cultural heroes.
Emerging fictional figures and their authors-creators—by means of their colorful identities,
utterances, and actions—partake in the ever-expanding catalog of symbolic meanings (catch-
phrases emerging from Star Wars, Star Trek, The X-Files, Seinfeld, and Curb Your Enthusiasm).
What is called classical, topical, or even “cool” (trendy, hip) is the (media) narrative in the
process of entering the alphabet of culture. New, recognizable characters assume the functions
of semantic units and permanent points of reference.
Finally, in the era of globalization, cultural fusion occurs between/among multiple mytho-
logical traditions. In such a global-scale transnational meaning-making process, the new forms
of complex dynamics are unavoidable, since mythic symbols actively interact, influencing each
other, adjusting, and producing new meaning and values. For example, Tolkien fused Celtic
mythic figures with the symbolism of folklore and 19th-century classical literature in The Lord
of the Rings (1954–1955); and Rowling expertly used the patterns of Greek mythology, enhanc-
ing them in her Harry Potter series with the motifs of Celtic myth and British Romanticism.
The mythemes of German Expressionism—those of the monster-city Metropolis and the
evil magi Dr. Caligari—have become the recognizable symbols of the 20th-century political
(neo)mythology (Kracauer, 1966). The creative use of world mythic themes in George Lucas’s
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Star Wars and Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek has been widely c elebrated by the scholars of
myth-criticism and media critics alike. Holocaust survivor Stanisłaus Lem’s Solaris (1961), a
new sci-fi mythologeme of the thinking (God-like) planet-being, is rooted in at least four
narrative traditions: the Jewish-Biblical, Slavic mythology, Russian classical literature, and
American media culture, carrying via the narrative roots of its creators the essential mean-
ings of each. The same may be said about the neo-mythologemes of Arthur C. Clark, Ray
Bradbury, and Philip K. Dick. One such mytheme, that of the struggle of advanced civiliza-
tions as to whether to interfere in other worlds’ courses of history (be aware of unintended
consequences!), came from the Strugatsky Brothers’ sci-fi story Hard to Be a God (1964), which
encompassed a book, two film versions, and a video game. Yuri Norstein’s enigmatic mythic
Little Wolf of the woods, at once scary and protective, emerging from the depth of Slavic folk-
lore and Russia’s key lullaby, accompanies an aspiring artist and 20th-century history in Tale of
Tales (1979, named the “best animated film since Disney” by the American guild of animators).
A friend and colleague of Norstein’s, the Japanese master of experimental animation, Hayao
Miyazaki, throughout his career exuberantly keeps blending his own Asian tradition with the
multiple sources of European folklore and global popular culture. In Spirited Away (2001), he
admittedly combined (8,000!) spirits and gods from Japanese mythology with many trans-
national characters of world folklore. Yet, he creatively split the Russian female forest spirit,
witch Baba Yaga, into two—the good and evil twins, wisely highlighting that this enigmatic
folk character in most tales serves as a hero’s magic helper and is a dark figure in other
tales. Intriguingly, Miyazaki’s antagonist No Face in Spirited Away carries some Dostoevskian
motifs, since he is “evil” because he is lonely, desperate, and “nobody loves him.” As soon as
he is “accepted,” he is tamed and is no longer a villain. Mythology, therefore, is not merely a
“mirror to its age,” but a magnetic sphere of (re)signification. It is an active semantic field of
empowerment. Within this (magic) realm of endowment, the artist-thinker actively creates
new values, sharing their insights and hopes for the path of humanity. They use the build-
ing blocks of familiar and cherished mythic symbols to empower and spread their ideas. The
above outlines the multiple forms of dynamics and influence, embedded in mythology as an
“operational system of culture.”
To sum up, there are at least several vital reasons why mythology has maintained a continual
cultural influence in narrative history: (1) its innate prowess for imagery, (2) its immanent “rid-
dle” quality or “semantic vibrations,” (3) its meaning-making expertise (i.e. symbolization),
(4) its “orderly” systematic nature, (5) its catalytic and modeling capacity, (6) its world-building
skills, (7) its “translatability,” hence an ability to bridge cultural gaps, and (8) its communicabil-
ity/sociability, the propensity for establishing ever-growing social networks with other groups
or nations through intelligible (transcultural) storytelling.
Mythology contains and activates the forces of poetic expression. Since the entire concep-
tual-communicative apparatus of early mythic systems relied on images rather than logic, the
elaborate languages of art developed to carry out these tasks. Readers and scholars admire the
supreme expressiveness of the figurative language embedded within mythic narrative. Our
attraction to myth can be explained by the captivating power of its picturing, the astonishing
richness of its images, and the intricate weavings of metaphoric levels. We are still in awe of
the symbolic imagery of the original mythic tales, and inspired by their artistic prowess. The
old myths’ verbal and narrative inventiveness, as well as the dexterity of their imaginings, con-
tinue to enlighten authors.The rich, creative potency of mythology is manifest in its ability to
inspire new art, generate stories, and stimulate the birth of imaginary worlds.
Myth is a riddle of sorts and always contains an enigma. Its enchanting nature stems from
its capricious, mighty divine characters; the astonishing wondrous nature of its milieu; and the
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fluctuating uncertainty of its symbolism, which we could call “semantic vibrations.” An array
of mazes, miracles, and puzzles is a staple of its narrative environment, in which challenges,
problem-solving, and finding answers to the riddles of the gods (to later become Aristotelean
anagnorisis, or recognition/revelation) are a vital part. By doing so, characters step from their
“ordinary time” into the “sacral time” of Creation. Such a penchant for the “guessing game”
also involves the audience, making mythic storytelling “interactive” (with far-reaching con-
sequences for the video game as a cultural form). This openness of the original myth to the
Unknown reflects early man’s naïve yet ardent curiosity for the enigmatic big world, yet to be
discovered, with all its infinite wonders and marvels.
The enigma of the character is one of myth’s key features, which influenced narrative cul-
ture per se, ensuring the presence of “mystery types” in many genres. The roads of myth are
populated by known and unknown (divine) beings, as well as odd or fantastic figures whose
nature is obscure, and whose impact can range from those of the magic helper to the devour-
ing monster. This pulsating meaning-making adjustment process leads to what we can term
oscillating symbolism (which, it may be argued, is a feature of true art).
Fantastic beings on the roads of myth are principally “undefinable”—to grasp their essence
often means to survive. Are the mythic figures Oedipus and Electra “right” or “wrong”?
Should they be forgiven? Is Lear a cruel old fool or a deeply suffering soul? Is Hamlet a reluc-
tant hero or a Renaissance man, a humanist who despises the idea of revenge and murder?
Is Othello a courageous military leader or a paranoid, possessive husband? Is Raskolnikov a
proud young philosopher or a vulgar killer?
This alternative to the set or clear meanings behind mythic-fictional images signals the
unfinished process of symbolic crystallization. This adds the fascinating dynamics of guessing
in narrative art, as an heir to myth, when a symbol is not glued to a face of a fictional character.
This “incompleteness of symbolization,” or meaning-making vibration, remains an intellec-
tual puzzle, adding to our cultural experiences the never-ending pleasure of semantic riddles.
Along with the process of semantic pulsation, symbolic clarity must also be achieved for
communities to have a flawless grasp of their “Ten Commandments” and other sacred rules.
This is also necessary for maintaining a civil society. Thus, the dual process of symbolic vibra-
tion (defying certainty) and the crystallization of meaning (defying uncertainty) through the
layers of the same (mythic) tale has been a major part of the construction of culture. The
meaning-making mechanisms generated by the myth’s many versions, adjusted to cultural
debates, oscillate along the lines of multi-generational reception and interpretation. For
example, the symbolic essence of the lead characters in Oedipus Rex and Phaedra accompa-
nies humankind’s struggle against incest, understood as encompassing both types of taboo—
respectively, the biological (mother and son) and the cultural (stepmother and stepson). The
mythologemes of matrimony, examining the “rightful” and “wrongful” types of marriage and
family structure, have been among the most significant, accompanying the process of the basic
kinship unit expanding from a family to society.The mythologemes related to family have led
to the types of stories examining the roles of the Symbolic Father and Mother, their rights and
obligations to their nearest relations and to the community. The mythemes of the Symbolic
Fathers, Sons, and Daughters, focusing on the expected versus unpredictable dichotomies—
the compliant/rebellious or cowardly/courageous—have fertilized many plots, such as those
about Iphigenia and Antigone.
Who is Medea? What is her (social) essence, and, thus, what does she symbolize to a com-
munity, society, humankind? Is she a murderess, a monster, an abandoned lover, one with an
injured pride, a betrayed wife, a traitorous daughter to her own people, a good parent? The
figure of Medea, a disobedient daughter, a loving spouse, but a vindictive “wife scorned” and
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a cruel “devouring” mother, persistently reappeared in the three ages of ancient Greek drama,
resonating with the centuries of disequilibrium between the matriarchy and patriarchy. The
“nerve” of the story signals the debate on the unresolved conflict between the socio-familial
rights of the father and those of the mother.With all present oscillation/pulsation of meaning,
the images (mythic/fictional characters) that were a subject of intense cultural discussion have
eventually led to the certainty of symbolism, allowing the creation of a cultural system based on
a stable semantic order. (Any symbolic organization, of course, had to be periodically chal-
lenged and rebalanced by the cycles of social and semantic change.)
This methodical fictional model-building and modeling systems by means of mythology
connote the persuasive power of storyworlds. Effective and operative imaginary realms have
their rationality; all their cogs and parts are tightly organized. When factoring in all levels of
the “poetic truth,” mythology is systematic and orderly: behind any fictional world of myth,
there is balanced and coherent logic, penetrating all interwoven realms of its narrative uni-
verse. All the gods, deities, and spirits oversee allocated segments of reality. Even if their spheres
of influences overlap, each is part of the system and subject to its synchronization mechanisms.
If the influences collide, the gods’ clashes lead to a story, a mythic tale, meant to explain how
two deities deal with their conflicting interests, where the alliances or boundaries reside, and
what humans should learn from the parable’s “teaching moments.”
Intriguingly, the systematic nature of mythological models of reality is not explicitly
revealed to their recipients. Many enigmas remain in mythic narratives. Humans, thus, must
look beyond the obvious and approach myth as a (sacred) mystery. Participating in any reen-
actment of ritual-mythological narratives means to ultimately grasp the world’s concealed,
hard to detect (i.e., to be revealed, as in detective fiction), orderly and consequential nature.
The embedded symbolic order of mythology tends to reproduce itself. Art imitates life, and
reality, in turn, is shaped by the powerful forces of picturing. This mechanism, involving
dynamic systems of symbols, termed the modeling system (the Tartu school’s Yuri Lotman and
Vyacheslav Ivanov) and model of/for (Geertz, 1993), is vividly present in mythology. Modeling
systems not only reflect reality (models of), but reproduce it by means of (ritual) representa-
tion in the process of shaping the future (models for); the latter exhibits the power of catalysis,
reactivating the inherent symbolic order.
Where has this catalytic quality initially come from? A mythic realm is rooted in, and pivots
on, its deity.This superior being is the one who either creates his domain or represents it, thus,
supporting, maintaining, and guarding it. Hence, a magic realm originates from its supernatu-
ral creator-being who “causes” it (later, a god of monotheism does exactly that). One of the
reasons for this “catalytic” ability of mythology is hidden in the historical mentality behind
ritual magic (a subject of the anthropology of consciousness). The pivotal images depicted
in a mythic tale are the (divine) entities, which are being called for, to come into view (or
revealing invisible presence), and help. This “petition” for divine assistance and manifestation
is a form of a prayer. In myth and ritual, a representation is not merely a semantic act, an icon,
deprived of natural substance. The picture of the Sun is viewed as a direct and active link
to the Sun-god entity, rather than a sign. Like a dial on the modern phone or clicking on a
website address, the ritual representation serves to establish a fast and much-needed connec-
tion, necessary for an appeal to support the survival of human communities. In mythic realms,
despite their alleged “frozen present,” things interact and change, therefore, generating narra-
tives. Storytelling, beyond other reasons, emerged as an action of ritual magic for reinforcing
a desired deity-realm’s being and presence, by re-presenting it.
Narrated side by side, mythic tales follow one another, gradually streaming together as a
cultural storytelling system. The recent concept of intertextuality was proposed to highlight
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the dialogic and polyphonic relationships (Bakhtin, 1928/1984) among texts and narrative
resonances, already in place in myth and storytelling culture. The resulting systemic order
must be periodically reestablished, semantically updated and reactivated. This is achieved
though ritual performance, which historically gave birth to, and encompasses, film, television,
and interactive activities like (video) games. All of them manifest the symbolic empowering
through reenactment—a dynamic, narrative modeling system.
This quality of mythology facilitates the transformation of a singular tale into a symbolic
network. Hence, another reason for mythology’s continuously sturdy place in contemporary
art is its fictional world-building skills. Particularly useful is the ability of fictional realms to
introduce emerging world-models, based on newly discovered, or yet unknown, laws (sci-
entific hypotheses), without “spelling it all out” or resorting to lengthy essayistic explana-
tions.Via mythopoeia (also mythopoesis or mythmaking through art), the outlined imaginary
worlds propose new conceptions of reality. Gently, gradually, subliminally, they show “what
ifs,” the realms of make-believe, while suspending the voicing of ideas we are yet unable to
discuss. Mythology is adept for representing the emerging reality by means of nonverbal
modeling systems.
Myth’s transcultural openness and ability to “translate” its symbolic images across cultures
and eras continue to empower mythopoeia, proven to remain indispensable for the media
and popular entertainment. We can use the treasure chest of world mythology at any given
time, and recombine/reconfigure its building blocks in the meaning-making process, be it the
fantastical/metaphorical elements in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Gene Roddenberry’s Star
Trek, or Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirted Away. Active, developing societies need refreshing flows of
symbolic images. They depend on the semantic alphabet of mythology, and utilize its catalogs
whenever their changing cultural needs require them.World mythology helps in transcultural
socialization, expanding the boundaries of what we perceive as “our own” symbolic tribe in
the global community.
References
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Armstrong, Robert P. (1981), The Power of Presence: Consciousness, Myth, and Affective Presence. Philadelphia:
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Bakhtin, Mikhail (1965/1984), Rabelais and His World. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
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Freeman, Philip (2012), O My Gods. A Modern Retelling of Greek and Roman Myths. New York: Simon
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16
Philosophy
Edward Castronova
Imaginary worlds flip the philosophical problem on its head. Normally we spend our time
trying to discover what is and then judge whether it accords well with what ought to be.
With an imaginary world, we first decide what should be, and then bring it into being. This
backwards exercise was a scholar’s toy for many centuries, but of late, due to the ability of
technology to fully immediate our sensations, the making of imaginary worlds has become a
seriously pragmatic undertaking. In this chapter, I will discuss the implications of imaginary
worlds for human philosophical practice. A disclaimer: I will not be discussing particular
philosophies in any great detail. Rather, I’ll discuss how the tools of imaginary worlds enable
and channel the philosophical drive that exists among our race. What can we say about the
future of humanity’s philosophical impulse, now that we are able to make imaginary worlds
that people actually inhabit?
The Technology (Once Again)

Most essays about virtual worlds, and many of the chapters in this book, spend time on the
progress of technology. This matters deeply for philosophical practice, too. It is important to
understand the situation of the immediated mind. Immediated means, all of its sensations come
to it from a crafted environment.This mind is fully immersed in a synthetic reality. How close
we are to this status already, as I write in late 2016! When do my feet touch the grass? How
often when I am talking to people am I speaking to their faces? How many of my interests
are pursued (my desires satisfied) through direct contact with humans rather than interaction
with digital stories and games?
The ability to craft experiences for others has expanded dramatically. With existing digital
technology, it is possible to keep the minds of billions of people immediated on a 24/7 basis.
The technology has been achieved. Only the social structures and content are missing. The
social structures are changing, and the content base is growing. Billions of people are now in
a position to make films, songs, books, and games. Software continues to advance in sophisti-
cation. Interaction designers are becoming ever more adept at crafting worlds in which each
player entertains the others, thus harnessing the whole population of the world as a source of
entertainment for its inhabitants. There is no limit in sight to these developments. And tech-
nology will almost certainly get better.
Imaginary worlds were once a hobby for the occasional novelist. Now they represent the
future of human experience. Future humans will spend almost all of their time in the imagi-
nary worlds of someone else. The people making those imaginary worlds will have decided
that some type of world ought to be, and then they will craft it. In so doing, they will live
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E dwa r d C a s t ro n o va
out the philosophical problem exactly in reverse. Fun times for philosophy! It is a new (albeit
backwards) dawn for pragmatism.
While technology is making things more pragmatic, this move, from philosophy to world
instead of the other way around, has been an imaginative part of the world-builder’s craft
for a long time. Plato’s Republic (380 B.C.) is a type of world-building, where the father of
philosophy imagines how a state should be. Similarly, More’s Utopia (1516) directly expresses
the author’s philosophical project of a more reasonable way to live. Asimov’s Galaxy, in the
Foundation series, has its brilliant scientists and engineers, who hope to use reason and math-
ematics to preserve civilization through a dark age. Philip K. Pullman’s His Dark Materials tril-
ogy is far less hopeful about science and technology, indeed not particularly hopeful about any
possibility; his is an existentialist world. The locale of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) is a deconstructed
Dublin. George R. R. Martin’s Westeros is a nasty place, a world in which fate seems bent on
destroying anything held sacred by anybody.
World builders also express religious commitments, some more directly than others. C. S.
Lewis’s Narnia is a world that expresses the author’s Christianity in an almost tiresomely
direct and allegorical way. As history moves along, the philosophical commitments of authors
become less and less obvious in the worlds being built. Middle-earth, the creation of J. R. R.
Tolkien, reflects his Roman Catholicism in hundreds of indirect ways. “Aragorn” is a modifi-
cation of “Aragon,” a reference to Catherine of Aragon, according to some Catholics the only
true queen of Henry VIII. The Ring was destroyed on March 25, in olden times the Catholic
Feast of the Annunciation, that is, the Incarnation of Jesus, which is to say, the moment that
God entered our world and destroyed sin; thus the Ring is apparently Sin—in a very indirect
way. One hardly sees Catholicism in Gene Wolfe’s post-apocalyptic worlds—in the Book of the
Long Sun series there are augurs who make animal sacrifices, suggesting a far-distant future in
which religious observance has returned to earlier roots.
All of these world-builders turn the task of philosophy on its head, but they do so in the
pages of books.Technology is in a position to take up these books as blueprints for new places.
Reverse Pragmatism
The early pragmatists, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, built their
school of thought on the hope of using the consequences of a concept to resolve metaphysi-
cal disputes about it or related matters. James used the famous example of a man trying to
observe a squirrel on a tree trunk.The squirrel keeps moving, though, and stays forever on the
other side of the tree; man and rodent are never on the same side. He, the man, then wonders
whether it can be said that he went around the squirrel (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/).
A dispute may erupt in his mind, because in one sense he did and in another he did not. If
“go around” means, be to the squirrel’s North, then East, then South, then West, then North
again, then yes; he did go around the squirrel. If “go around” means facing the squirrel, then
being to its right, then behind it, then to its left, then facing it again, he did not. The dispute
is resolved by bringing to the fore the practical meaning of different understandings of the
concept “go around.”
We might call this “forwards pragmatism.” The idea is to take a concept and consider it as
a bundle of consequences. The concept of “hate” is not something we set aside once we have
defined it in a sentence or two. Rather, whenever we bring the idea of “hate” into our minds,
with the purpose of using it somehow, we consider not just the dictionary definition but also
everything that will happen if we use “hate” in the way we are considering. Do I “hate” this
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essay? Yes and no. If “hate” means “I will abandon the writing task and go off and take a nap,”
then no, I do not hate it. But if “hate” means “I will despair of its quality and suffer depression
as long as it remains in a poor and unfinished condition,” then yes, I do hate it, very much.
I could use “love” to describe the same thing. Thus, the apparent difference in the two sen-
tences “I love my essay” and “I hate my essay” is resolved by the fact that, practically speaking,
both sentences mean the same thing in terms of consequences. Pragmatism is, thus, almost a
way of thinking, an empiricist approach to questions that tries to focus the mind on the effects
of thinking. I call it “forwards” here to emphasize the idea that the concept comes to mind
first and then consequences are traced from it.
Imaginary worlds, I would argue, have now come to present a reverse of the pragmatic
way of thinking. They begin by defining what the consequences of a concept will be, and
then create the concept as whatever the author intends.To return to the squirrel example, the
builder of an imaginary world could create a spatial physics such that all objects were always
facing one another.This could be accomplished, for example, by declaring that all objects have
an infinite number of faces, and thus all of them are always oriented in every direction. This
being the case, then it would be impossible for our philosopher to go around the squirrel in
one of the two senses. By design, the concept “go around” could only have meaning with
respect to the compass rose.
Alternatively, a world-builder could define “go around” as having nothing to do with
cardinal direction, simply by removing cardinal directions from his world. It could be, for
example, that all objects are always behind all other objects. Imagine, for example, a vast traffic
jam, in which cars are lined up behind one another all the way around the globe. Thus the
car immediately in front of me is also billions of cars behind me. And my own car is behind
itself. In this world, “go around” has no meaning in terms of North, South, East, and West. It
does have meaning in terms of orientation: If my car moves ahead of another, I indeed “go
around” it. These examples show how reverse pragmatism works: The world-builder defines
what may and may not happen in his world, and concepts receive their meaning accordingly.
In this way, the craft of creating imaginary worlds is an application of the pragmatic way
of thinking, albeit in reverse. This is not to say that all world-builders are pragmatists. On
the contrary! A pragmatic philosopher seeks to resolve metaphysical disputes by tracing the
consequences of concepts in “the real world.” This reverse process, of building worlds, does
not achieve any such goal. Rather, world-building puts any desired meaning, any desired set
of consequences, onto concepts. One would think this would appeal not so much to prag-
matists as to philosophers with a distinct interest in conceptual purity. A world-builder can
make a place where all concepts are completely clear, and all equilateral triangles have exactly
60° angles. The itch being scratched in world-building involves making a place that is exactly
as we wish it to be.
It perhaps goes without saying that “a world as we wish it to be” does not mean a world
with only happy things. Nobody wants that, however much we may say we do.The motives of
world-builders are many, but the worlds that are built, as this volume attests, bring all kinds of
feelings and moments to bear. We will discuss the drives behind world-building in a moment.
The role of pragmatic philosophy in imaginary worlds is to have identified and described a
nice way of understanding what world-building is, in philosophical terms.
From Pragmatism to Power

Reverse pragmatism, as I have discussed it above, can be viewed through other lenses.Wittgenstein
laid heavy emphasis on the idea of language games (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations).
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Every statement is a move in a game, an effort to alter how a term is understood. If uttering a
word is a shot in a social game, then building a world is the thunder of heavy artillery.
Suppose my colleague utters a word and I disagree with the usage. Very well; I utter a
different word, or use his word in a different way. We go back and forth. “Let me introduce
my husband,” says one. “I am very pleased to meet your partner,” says another. A man, two
women, and a dog walk away from a government office carrying a signed sheet of paper.
“We are married!” they say (the quadruped merely wags his tail). A man and a woman leave a
Roman Catholic church carrying a signed sheet of paper. “We are joined in the Sacrament of
Holy Matrimony!” they say. Which one is married? Is there a universal notion of “marriage”
to which one of these statements applies accurately and the other does not? Or is it merely
a matter of power, of which party has more guns? For the language games of real life have
their ugly side. The word-enforcement regime envisioned in Orwell’s 1984 (1949) is now
an everyday reality. By accepting that language is merely a social game, resolved ultimately by
power, we have guaranteed that there will be language tyranny. The alternative view, that we
can have long-running and universal rules of proper and improper uses of words, and that we
can collectively agree to these rules (and be neutral and unoppressive about it), is now out of
fashion. Yet it is the only non-tyrannical way to approach language. If we want to have any
hope of language freedom, we must agree beforehand on the rules of the game. That is how
all games work. By abandoning the idea that there can be rules to the language game, we have
guaranteed a free-for-all in which the strong dominate everyone else.
These connections between signs and consequences have been plumbed by many others,
indeed the more popular of the last 100 years of philosophers and applied philosophers in a
social construction vein: Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, McCluhan, and so forth.
They all share the view that there are no absolutes; that what was in the past viewed to be
absolute, the rules, were nothing more than the imposition of preferences by the people who
happened to be powerful. According to these schools, society has never been anything more
than a series of brutal, free-for-all power games. Indeed, brutal, free-for-all power games are
all that society can ever be.
So be it. Into this free-for-all come technologies of full immediation, like heavy tanks across
a battlefield of naked warriors with spears. No mere utterances of words can stand up to the
power of current world-building technologies. To build a world is to define everything that
can happen between people. Speech, sight, even movement. In virtual worlds, code defines
the possible (Lessig, 2000). Mere presence and life in a virtual community depends on how
one’s behavior is handled by the system. Take speech, for example. It is quite common for
developers to use language filters to identify and remove “offensive” terms. People who use
too much “offensive” language can be banned from the world.World-banning is equivalent to
a permanent exile, which is to say, being effectively killed.This is execution. “They lifebanned
me!” writes the angry forum poster. The “lifeban.” What a delicious euphemism for the death
penalty; how surprising that it has not been adopted by some dictator or other.
In our current philosophical environment, which admits no absolute limits on what a man
may or may not do, no one can complain when those who have power determine what can
and cannot be said and done inside virtual worlds. We have no grounds for criticism. This is
a game without rules. No holds are barred. As more people become fully immediated, the
makers of their worlds will decide absolutely everything about the social world in which they
live their lives.
There will be two constraints on world-builders. Neither of them is moral, but they will
tend to moderate the abuse. One is competition. Making worlds costs money. World-builders
with small populations will find their freedoms restricted. The other is the human mind.
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World-builders will do everything in their considerable power to keep people in their worlds.
Indeed, they do so already. What are the ultimate powers of the human mind, to recognize an
ongoing ensnarement? How far can people be pushed? Suppose people stay in worlds when-
ever Pleasure exceeds Pain. Suppose both of these can be measured by numbers. Suppose
further that Pain gains revenues for the world-builders. In this model, we would have world-
builders seeking to put the Pain level as high as possible without losing the customer. The
world-builder offers bundles of Pleasure and Pain and hopes to make money with them.
Consider some Pleasure/Pain bundles. Suppose right now, virtual worlds offer something
like 100/50. Soon technology will offer 200/100. Then 400/200. But what prevents world-
builders from learning how to fine-tune their offerings to make more money? Then we get
bundles like 400/399 … 1 million/999,999 … 300 trillion/300 trillion and 1. The most
intense pleasures, coupled with the most intense tortures. How much can a person stand? Will
people retain enough willpower to get out? Is there any justification for helping people who
become trapped? Not under any of the contemporary philosophies, unfortunately. On the
contrary, this situation is the perfect dream from a pragmatist, constructionist point of view.
Hurray! Now, not merely language but all conditions of mental existence are to be controlled
on the basis of naked power! It is the apogee of the constructionist view of existence.
Pragmatism’s handmaiden, utilitarian public policy, will be of no consequence here.
Governments will ask people if they are happy. They will say YES! I am insanely happy! I
am happy beyond all measure, sitting here in my vibrating lounge chair for the 47th day
in a row, wearing my sweaty headset, and living my life as the greatest and sexiest hero my
mind can possibly conceive. On net, these people are happy. They will insist that they not be
removed. But is this situation GOOD? Certainly not. And yet in the power games of reverse
pragmatism, no one will have philosophical grounds for saying so. Naked power will drive
everything. Those who rule will decide what to do. Now it may be the case that the result of
society’s power games will lead to rule by reasonable, level-headed, nice people. But probably
not. Therefore it would be nice to have a philosophical basis for criticizing the virtual world
abuses that are sure to come. Fortunately, such a basis can be found in the work of one of the
most influential world-builders, J. R. R. Tolkien.
The Moral Heft of Subcreation

Tolkien clearly anticipated these problems. He asked himself what he was doing in his world-
building and how it stacked up to an external, absolutist standard of good conduct. For he
was an adherent of that old way of thinking, that there are rules to life’s game, rules not of our
authoring. The power games of our world, in this view, are contained within a separate set of
immutable norms. When people are able to agree with one another on the general shape and
application of these norms, they can get along peaceably as they fight out those conflicts that
the norms permit. Not every move is trumped by a power grab. On the contrary, if everyone
agrees that there are rules to the social game, then power can be obtained by making reference to
the rules, not merely by shooting your opponents. Tolkien wrote an essay, “On Fairy-Stories”
(1939), where he directly addressed the question of whether making virtual worlds is within
the rules, and if so, how.
Subcreation
To set the context, here is how C. S. Lewis, Tolkien’s contemporary and philosophical
fellow-traveler, described the origin of the rules of language: “For this was the language
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spoken before the Fall and beyond the Moon and the meanings were not given to the syllables
by chance, or skill, or long tradition, [or the powerful], but truly inherent in them as the shape
of the great Sun is inherent in the little waterdrop. This was Language herself, as she first
sprang at Maleldil’s [God’s] bidding out of the molten quicksilver” (Lewis, 1945: Chapter 10,
italics added).
In his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” Tolkien discusses at length the nature of fantasy writing in
a context where one assumes the prior existence of a grand creator of everything (known by
whatever name, God, Maleldil, Iluvatar,YHWH, etc.). He asserts that humans also have crea-
tive power, but that their creative works are “subcreations,” creations that exist in and through
the greater creation. As such, subcreations carry along all the features of creation. In Tolkien’s
particular worldview, orthodox Roman Catholicism, some of the relevant features of creation
for our discussion would be:
•• Creation is good. The world and everything in it begins as a good thing. All things and
events are ultimately pointed to the good.
•• Therefore all subcreations are inherently good and are necessarily pointed to the good.
•• Creation is fallen.The goodness inherent in creation is not often manifest. It fails.Though
everything is ultimately pointed to the good, it is not constantly pointed that way. On the
contrary, things are generally in a bad way. Nothing ever appears to be headed toward a
good outcome.
•• Therefore subcreations, being the work of human hands, are not perfect. They only
remotely approach the sublimities of the great creation. They are frail; asking too many
questions, approaching them with too much skepticism, causes them to break. Tolkien
did not address this directly, but the frailty he expresses about fantasy worlds must also
encompass the possibilities of misuse. As subcreations, fairy-stories can be written in ways
that lead people to bad ends.
•• The ultimate goodness toward which everything is tending involves the final destruction
of the fallen world and its replacement with a perfect world. In the same way, the ultimate
good destination of a human life is achieved only after death. During life the path is one
of decay, loss, illness, and finally death. Yet death brings the final and ultimate reward.
The path that leads to heaven is a good one, even though it may be unhappy all the way
until the end. At the final step, those who have not turned away from God emerge into a
Blessed Realm, a place out of space and time, and the reward for arriving there is so great
as to redeem any pains suffered on Earth.
•• This assumption about reality allows Tolkien to make a rather shocking assertion, yet one
which one finds in Plato as well: The content of imaginary worlds is not wholly imag-
ined. Rather, it is recalled from another plane of existence. Platonic realism asserts that true
forms exist. The Catholic Christian tradition agrees and says that heaven, the plane of
existence outside the physical world, is loaded to the brim with all the absolutes, includ-
ing souls. We humans, down here on Earth, have souls that have partaken in that place,
that realm that exists out of space and time. We know it, at some level. When we imagine
an alternative world, then, we cannot help but bring to mind elements of the Blessed
Realm.Thus what we view as world creation is true subcreation: It is not the imagination
of entirely new things, but rather the reuse of things that have existed forever.The Realm
of the Forms is like a massive asset database, from which all imaginative writers, thinkers,
and artists have borrowed.
•• Badness is not a force in itself. Evil is not a thing. Rather, evil is the absence of good.
All creatures are good, but those who refuse the good are, in effect, reducing themselves.
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The evil man is not evil per se, he is the empty shell of a man who could have been
good. He is a man with weak moral understanding and resolve, and therefore many of his
actions are necessarily harmful, offensive, and selfish. Nothingness is the most evil thing
of all; nothing is more terrifying than a serial killer. Terrorists kill but they still care about
something. Serial killers are colder than the coldest realms of deep space.
•• It follows that no subcreation is bad, nor is any subcreator. Rather, the subcreator is less
good than he could be, and his subcreation is similarly below standard. This framing is
critical in that it places a burden on subcreators and their worlds, to be as good as they can
be. In this final recognition that world-builders can be less than good, we find a precious
ability to criticize the worlds of the powerful. If Tolkien is right, then we can apply to
world-building our concept of the Good in general. We can have a discussion about the
good of the human person and then assess whether Person X in World Y is actually living
a good life. We can react to Martin’s Westeros and say that it lacks something important:
A way out. Westeros is too sad, we could say, in that it falls too far from the way humans
were meant to live. We need not accept that the essence of human social life is a brutal
power struggle among selfish people. Rather, through an idea like subcreation, we can
say that while life in the 21st century often does look the way Martin depicts it, it is not
supposed to look this way. We can ask Martin to build a world with more hope.
These ideas about subcreation also allow us to develop healthy rules for building the techno-
logically advanced worlds that we will come to inhabit. These are rules for healthy immedia-
tion and, as such, desperately needed. Instead of computerized world-building continuing as
a free-for-all, and accepted as such, we could move toward a struggle in which the inevitable
drive to brutality and lawlessness in world-building would be combated by an equally power-
ful commitment to playing by some rules involving the good of the human person.
Finally, lest all this “noble subcreation” be viewed as mere religion, it is to be recalled that
Augustine and Aquinas, from whom this worldview is drawn, were not merely religious
figures. They were philosophers in their own right, indeed, members of one of the most con-
vincing, universal, and persistent philosophical traditions the world has ever seen. Their views
have been generally seen as outmoded since about 1950.Yet they first came into human con-
sciousness in the Greek golden age some 2,500 years ago.Those who attack this position very
often use arguments that have appeared many times before, and ultimately faded away. The
tradition to which Tolkien contributes is well worthy of serious consideration. And indeed
it may be the only basis we have within philosophy for making sound judgments about the
crafting of the future imaginary worlds in which we seem destined to live.
References
Lessig, Lawrence (2000), “Code Is Law: On Liberty in Cyberspace,” Harvard Magazine, January 1, 2000,
available at http://harvardmagazine.com/2000/01/code-is-law-html.
Lewis, C. S. (1945), That Hideous Strength, London, England:The Bodley Head Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, available at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatism/.
Tolkien, J. R. R. (1939), “On Fairy-Stories,” given as the Andrew Lang Lecture of 1939.
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17
Transmediality
Lars Konzack
Transmediality has become more important in recent years due to easy access to different
kinds of media and the lowered costs of media productions. Furthermore, it seems that a
transmedial world, or, in marketing terms, an Intellectual Property (IP) domain, has increased
sales potential when encountered on several media platforms (Harvey, 2013; Harvey, 2014;
Jenkins, Ford, and Green, 2013). To the audience and participants of transmedial worlds,
however, there is more to such a world than merely IP. They invest their time in the set-
ting, the characters, and the overall theme of the transmedial world—regardless of media
platform.
Marsha Kinder was one of the first to acknowledge transmedia, or as she calls it, transmedia
intertextuality:
What I found was a fairly consistent form of transmedia intertextuality, which

positions young spectators to recognize, distinguish, and combine different popular
genres and their respective iconography that cut across movies, television, comic
books, commercials, video games, and toys.
(Kinder, 1991, p. 47)
In order to fully understand transmediality it would be fruitful to grasp the concept of medi-
ality beforehand. There are two ways to understand the concept of mediality: (1) mediality is
the reality that media creates, and (2) mediality is the materiality of media. As one can imag-
ine, the concept of mediality, as regards to transmediality, is highly dependent on what kind
of definition has been chosen. If we choose to perceive mediality as the reality that media
creates, then transmediality is a media reality transferred between several media outputs. And
if we choose to perceive mediality as the materiality of media, then transmediality becomes a
discussion of what happens when a media product is adapted to another media platform, and
how this content becomes changed by the media.
If, then, transmediality is recognized as a media reality, a transmedial imaginary world is
the fictional structure or subcreation of this imaginary world, and what ought to be studied,
while if transmediality is seen as the materiality of transmedia, then it becomes the media
study of adaptions between different media representations. In the field of transmediality,
both ways of studying transmediality are possible. The researcher can study a transmedial
world as a more or less coherent transmediality in the sense that it conveys a mediated
imaginary world or subcreation; or transmediality as an examination of the materiality of
media productions and the effects upon the content of shifting modalities within different
media representations.
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Transmedial Adaptations
The first adaptation of a story from aural to visual output may, in fact, have been that of
cave men telling a story at the campfire about their hunting trips and subsequently painting
these adventures on the cave wall. When an ancient vase shows the figure of an event in The
Odyssey, when a medieval church is filled with illustrations of Biblical events, and when a
tapestry is woven based on the legend of King Arthur and the Quest for the Holy Grail, then
an adaptation of spoken or written narrative turned into an image has taken place.
Ever since humans created cultural modernity, a symbolic use of space and material cul-
ture (Wadley, 2001), transmedial adaptations have been possible. Of course, as human culture
progressed from oral culture and cave paintings to new media forms (e.g. theater and writing,
and, later, photography, radio, television, and computers) (Briggs and Burke, 2009; Kovarik,
2011), transmedial adaptations have become correspondingly extensive. All media forms can
potentially be used to make transmedial adaptations—and when (almost) all available forms of
media outlets have been used to portray one story or concept then this is called a 360-degree
transmedial adaptation.
Mark J. P.Wolf identifies five different forms of adaptation: description, visualization, aurali-
zation, interactivation, and deinteractivation (Wolf, 2012). Description is when an audiovisual
work is turned into a written description, such as a narrative. Visualization is when a non-
visual work of art is turned into still or moving imagery. Auralization occurs when written
text is read aloud—but also when it is turned into a radio play. In this process, non-verbal
sound may be turned from description into sound effects. Interactivation happens when a
non-interactive work is turned into an interactive one (e.g., an interactive narrative or a
game). Deinteractivation is the reverse of interactivation; that is, an interactive narrative or a
game is turned into a non-interactive work. What about the adaptation of comics to film?
Of course, auralization is involved, but other than that it is an adaptation from one kind of
visualization to another, from still images to moving imagery.
Making an adaptation always involves a displacement.The adapted work will lose some quali-
ties of the original, and also gain some new ones. In an adaptation of a novel into a film, the words
are lost to visualization and auralization but, in the same process, visualization and auralization
add images and sound.This means an adaptation is never quite the same work as the original. In
some cases the adaptation is very close to the original (e.g., Much Ado About Nothing (1993)) and
in other cases the adaptation is loose and far from the original (e.g., The Sword in the Stone (1963)).
Making a successful and faithful adaptation is not just about re-creating a work as close to
the original as possible. Being faithful to the original work also involves conveying the senti-
ment of the original into another artistic product. That is why it becomes important for the
maker to achieve familiarity with the media platforms he or she is working with and the dif-
ferences in how they convey meaning. When the movie The Wizard of Oz (1939) was made,
the beginning and the ending, set in our world’s Kansas, were in black and white, while the
rest of the movie, set in the Land of Oz, was in technicolor. This idea was not taken from
the book or from any theatrical adaptation, but was a technical advantage only possible in the
format of film, added aesthetically in order to convey one of the book’s original concepts.The
present example shows that the technical features and possibilities of different media platforms
may enhance or (if the possibilities at hand are inadequate) limit the adaptation.
Henry Jenkins recognizes spreadable transmedia storytelling:
A transmedia story unfolds across multiple media platforms, with each new text
making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole. In the ideal form of
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t ransmedia storytelling, each medium does what it does best—so that a story might be
introduced in film, expanded through television, novels, and comics: its world might
be explored through game play or experienced as an amusement park a ttraction.
(Jenkins, 2006, pp. 95–96)
It should by this point be obvious that it is not an easy task to make a successful and faithful
adaptation of an original work. The original work must be reinterpreted and the maker must
decide what to remove and what to add to the adaptation. Still, some adaptations are harder
than others.
It is common in Hollywood to adapt a film from a book, while the other way around,
adapting a film into a book, is a less common phenomenon. In order to adapt a book into
a movie, the maker has to add visual and aural stimuli based on the written text, while the
adaptation from movie to book, novelization, means that the maker of the adaptation has to
add coherent textual descriptions of thoughts and feelings, sounds and images. In addition, the
dramatic structure typically has to be changed to a literary narrative format. This is difficult
because theatrical drama is generally less abstract than literary narrative and, consequently, the
adaptation has to increase its abstraction level. Making a movie based on a book, however,
decreases the abstraction level, in the sense that it decreases the need for the reader to imag-
ine what things look and sound like. (Though this is not to say that a movie cannot inspire
a novel.)
This level of abstraction is not just limited to movies and books. A computer role-playing
game based on a book series is easier to make if there also happens to be a tabletop role-
playing game book based on the book series. A tabletop role-playing game book is a textual
adaptation from a textual narrative. In this particular transmediation, the book series under-
goes a denarrativization, and is turned into encyclopedic knowledge about the book series—
additionally, interactivation occurs as the game rules are developed. When this effort has been
made, it becomes easier to visualize, auralize, and dramatize the tabletop role-playing game
into a computer role-playing game because it is a decrease in the level of abstraction, not for
the programmer, of course, but from the perspective of the video game player because much
of this interpretation has already been done by those adapting the game, leaving less to be
interpreted by the player.
Transmedial Worlds
A transmedial world is an imaginary world presented on different media platforms. Lisbeth
Klastrup and Susana Tosca clarify: “Transmedial worlds are abstract content systems from
which a repertoire of fictional stories and characters can be actualized or derived across a
variety of media forms” (Klastrup and Tosca, 2004, p. 409). Or, as Henry Jenkins would say:
“Transmedia storytelling is the art of world making” (Jenkins, 2006, p. 21). A transmedial
world can take various forms, such as narratives, games, encyclopedias, maps, and other kinds
of representations. Each representation of the imaginary world adds to the transmedial world
as a whole. This means that an imaginary world can in principle develop endlessly. It also
means that a transmedial world may develop to become so huge and detailed that it requires
constant scholarly work and effort to get an overview of and to handle all the different parts
of the imaginary world.
Examples of grandiose transmedial worlds that have grown to become almost unmanage-
able are the DC Universe (DCU), the Marvel Universe, and the Star Wars universe. These
elaborate transmedial worlds are media franchises and collaborations between multiple
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g enerations of authors and artists working over a prolonged period of time. They become so
vast due to not just the work of one or a few world creators but a varied multitude. In order to
manage these complex transmedial worlds it has been necessary to make critical distinctions
as regards to retroactive continuity, reboots (see the “Reboots and Retroactive Continuity”
chapter in this volume) and canonicity (see the “Canonicity” chapter).
According to Mark J. P. Wolf, the world of Oz created by L. Frank Baum was the first truly
transmedial world (Wolf, 2012). The imaginary world of Oz encompasses everything from
literature, stage plays, films, games, and comic books to music, trading cards, toys, and candy.
This full-blown exploitation of an IP has worked as inspiration for marketing other trans-
medial world franchises. But it all comes down to the need for an imaginary world that can
function as IP.
Designing a transmedial world is a world-building process, as is commonly seen in sci-
ence fiction and fantasy literature. Matthew J. Costello, for example, presents a step-by-step
guide to making a science fiction world in which he begins with theoretical planetology,
then continues to sentient creatures, history, religion and magic, culture, and finally science
(Costello, 1992). Wolf suggests something similar, namely the following world-building infra-
structures: maps, timelines, genealogies, nature, culture, language, mythology, and philosophy
(Wolf, 2012). Anyone can world-build according to a list, but to really create an interesting
transmedial world, the world-builder has to ask himself or herself the essential question: What
do I want to express with this imaginary world that cannot be expressed better in other ways, or sometimes
even at all; because at times it’s the only way to express something?
Answering this question reduces the complexity of creating the imaginary world. If the
world-builder is able to satisfactorily answer this vital question then probably everything
else will fall into place naturally, and consequently it will be a lot easier to create and design
multiple media productions of the imaginary world such as literature, theatrical performance,
film, television series, comics, board games, role-playing games, video games, and merchandise.
It is important to grasp the concept that even though we cannot visit imaginary worlds
with our bodies they still influence our world; they are, in fact, part of our world. Imaginary
worlds, however uncanny and peculiar, are a part of our real world and influence our thoughts
and feelings. The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges expressed this idea in his famous tale
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940), in which the imaginary country Uqbar in the imaginary
world known as Tlön gradually invades the real world in the story. It is hinted at that the con-
spiracy that created Uqbar and Tlön actively tries to make references to this imaginary world
by writing fake encyclopedia passages, and even craft physical artifacts known as hronir, to be
embedded in our reality. Meanwhile, the story of Borges has itself been referenced in other
cultural works such as the adventure video game Tlön: A Misty Story (1999) and the Marvel
Comics series Secret Avengers #9 (2014), thereby becoming a transmedial world.
Another example of this intrusion process similarly took place when Dr. Martin Cooper
took inspiration from Star Trek to invent the first handheld mobile phone (Cuneo, 2011).
Whether or not this counts as a transmedial phenomenon on the same level as selling cof-
fee mugs, T-shirts, and action figures is debatable. But it certainly tells us that transmedial
imaginary worlds may have real impact on our real world, a process that may seem literally
supernatural if one insists on perceiving them as completely different realities; less so if one
can retain awareness of them as merely aspects of a single multifaceted reality.
Lisbeth Klastrup and Susana Tosca have developed terms specifically created for analyzing
transmedial worlds, though they may be used to analyze imaginary worlds in general. These
are the three core features called mythos, topos, and ethos (Klastrup and Tosca, 2004; Klastrup
and Tosca, 2014). They define these categories as follows:
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Mythos—the establishing story, legend, or narration of the world, with the defining
struggles. It is the backstory that gives meaning in current situation of the world, and
it includes creational myth and legendary characters and gods. Topos—the setting of
the world in both space (geography) and time (history). It shows how places have
changed and events unfolded. Ethos—the explicit and implicit ethics, or the moral
codex of behavior for characters.
(Klastrup and Tosca, 2014, p. 297)
This analytical framework can be expanded with Colin B. Harvey’s hierarchical taxon-
omy of transmedia storytelling, in which he presents six categories: (1) intellectual prop-
erty, (2) directed transmedia storytelling, (3) devolved transmedia storytelling, (4) detached
transmedia storytelling, (5) directed transmedia storytelling with user participation, and (6)
emergent user-generated transmedia storytelling (Harvey, 2014). Intellectual property is the
original work. Directed transmedia storytelling is when the IP holder exercises close control
of IP usage of works derived from the original work, while devolved transmedia storytelling
refers to much looser control by the IP holder. Detached transmedia storytelling describes
works that are inspired by the transmedial imaginary world but are not licensed and not under
the direct control of the IP holder. Directed transmedia storytelling with user participation
describes content produced by consumers of the franchise that is under restricted license
by the IP holder. And the last category, emergent user-generated transmedia storytelling, is
diverse content created by fans of the franchise that is not licensed, what is commonly known
as fan art and fan fiction.
As one can tell from Harvey’s taxonomy, fandom is considered the lowest level in this
hierarchy. However, the influence of fans is growing, as they communicate easily with each
other via the Internet, and because at the end of the day the fans are the real job creators in
this business. If there are no fans of an imaginary world IP, then there is no business. They are
the consumers.
Fandom
Science fiction and fantasy fandom developed in the early 20th century (Moskowitz, 1974;
Reid, 2009). A fan is someone who is into a hobby, such as sports, music, television series, or
video games. Fandom, on the other hand, is a social and media structure that uses conven-
tions (cons), fan magazines (fanzines or zines), amateur press associations (APAs), and, today,
the Internet to keep in contact with one another, communicate ideas, and for crowdsourc-
ing. Hugo Gernsback did not create science fiction and fantasy fandom, as such, but in 1926
he launched the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories and later Science Wonder Stories
(1929), in which he published the addresses of people who wrote extensive commentar-
ies for the letter columns. This contact information was used by fans to organize outside
the control of Gernsback (Gunn, 2002; Reid, 2009). Jerry Siegel, who together with Joe
Schuster would later create the character Superman (1938), produced probably the first sci-
ence fiction fanzine, Cosmic Stories, in 1929 (Gardner, 2012). In 1936, the first science fiction
convention took place in Philadelphia; the first science fiction amateur press association,
FAPA (Fantasy Amateur Press Association), was established in 1937; and the first interna-
tional science fiction convention was held in 1939 (Moskowitz, 1974). Science fiction and
fantasy fandom structure was, eventually, in the late 20th century, co-opted by other fan
culture media such as comic books, board games, and role-playing games (Gardner, 2012;
Peterson, 2012; Konzack, 2014).
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Transmediality
Apart from discussing fan culture in an (albeit underground) academic manner, fandom
also provided opportunities to publish and debate fan-produced fiction, fan fiction, and fan
art. In other words, fandom began making its own transmedial works. Although science fic-
tion fandom is often thought of as a male pursuit, fan fiction, fan art, and cosplay are primarily
female-dominated hobbies (Reid, 2009; Busse, 2013). The Star Trek fan community (Trekkers
or Trekkies) of the late 1960s popularized fan fiction in their fanzines—notably the first Star
Trek fanzine, Spockanalia (1967), and the second, ST-Phile (1968). The creator of Star Trek,
Gene Roddenberry, chose to turn a blind eye to fan fiction and fan art—and soon this fan-
dom flourished (Coppa, 2006). One of the best known commercial successes of fan fiction
is Fifty Shades of Grey (2011) by E. L. James. The book was originally written as Twilight fan
fiction; later, names were changed and references to vampires removed (Illouz, 2014). The
Twilight series and Fifty Shades of Grey have both been adapted for the silver screen.
Not all IP holders have had positive attitudes toward fan fiction. Anne Rice, the author of
The Vampire Chronicles, has been particularly harsh toward fan fiction writers. She stated in a
message on her website to her fans:
I do not allow fan fiction. The characters are copyrighted. It upsets me terribly to
even think about fan fiction with my characters. I advise my readers to write your
own original stories with your own characters. It is absolutely essential that you
respect my wishes.
(Parish, 2016, p. 110)
As a result, fanfiction.net decided in 2010 not to archive entries based on the works
of Anne Rice.
(Parish, 2016)
Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green take the opposite stand, stating:
We all should be vigilant over what gets sacrificed, compromised, or co-opted by

media companies as part of this process of mainstreaming the activities and the inter-
est of cult audiences. In this context, it matters how media companies understand
the value that fans create around their property.
(Jenkins, Ford, and Green, 2013, p. 151)
The problem is that fan communities can be unpredictable. In 2010, a new fan commu-
nity rose to fame—the so-called bronies. The term brony comes from a portmanteau of
brother and pony. Based on a characteristic pony plastic toy primarily produced by Hasbro for
tween girls, the television series My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (2010—present) by Lauren
Faust suddenly attracted an unexpected fan audience of adolescent boys and even adult men
(Johnson, 2013). There had been a My Little Pony television series back in the 1980s, but
Lauren Faust’s series was created as a coherent fantasy setting rather than the old series por-
trayals of the romanticized daily life of tween girls—only with ponies instead of tween girls
as characters. What happened was that the bronies made fan fiction and fan art—and bought
a lot of brony merchandise. The primary focus changed; it was no longer the pony toy series
but the television series—and the toys in this process were reduced to being a supporting
prop in brony culture rather than the essential artifact. What this tells us is that transmediality
and transmedia storytelling is more than just a Hollywood marketing strategy, it has deep ties
within fandom culture and may sometimes even be at odds with the official IP holders.
139
L a r s Ko n z ac k
References
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18
World-Building Tools
David Langdon
This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing
myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world
within me.
—Franz Kafka
Human beings have long been drawn to imagine worlds beyond the one they perceive around
them, for a variety of different purposes. An imaginary, or constructed, world can range from
a complex allegory utilized within a rhetorical argument such as Plato’s Atlantis or Thomas
More’s Utopia, or they may be little more than a children’s toy. But all imaginary worlds pos-
sess one thing in common: all have been definitively created by human, knowable intelligence,
utilizing tools that can be described, replicated, and, in turn, studied. It is these tools that will
form the focus of this chapter.
Critical approaches to imaginary worlds have been many and varied. Mark J. P. Wolf
writes in the introduction to Building Imaginary Worlds that the advent of Media Studies as
a discipline codified the study of imaginary worlds, building upon the foundations laid by
literary theory and philosophy (Wolf, 2012, p. 7). The reasoning for this is that many virtual
worlds, as Wolf notes, are examples of transmedia storytelling, “the distribution of stories
over and across a variety of media” (Wolf, 2012, p. 9). There have been many different
approaches to comprehending imaginary worlds, drawing together many disparate strands
from across media. However, few have explored the systems by which imaginary worlds
are created.
This chapter will explore these world-building tools, and the varying forms of media in
which they exist, and explore the advantages and disadvantages of each. It will be demon-
strated, through analysis of the forms themselves, that the types of tools used to construct an
imaginary world have a major impact on its functionality and impact upon its audience.
Textual Tools
In its purest, most basic form, the only thing needed to create a world is a human being pos-
sessing at least a little imagination, the more the better. Children can and do routinely create
imaginary worlds as a matter of course. In order for a world to be made publicly accessible,
however, some means of representation is required, of which the most immediately appar-
ent is the written word. This has been a traditional staple of fictive world construction since
(at least) 360 B.C., when Plato’s dialogues Timaeus and Critias were written, outlining the
fictional island of Atlantis.
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Dav i d L a n g d o n
The advantages to textual world construction are manifold. Writing allows a creator a vast
deal of freedom and scope, with the only limitation on the world’s outlandishness being the
reader’s patience. Tolkien’s noted essay on the subject, “On Fairy-Stories,” talks of the power
of the textual world-builder, declaiming that:
how powerful, how stimulating to the very faculty that produced it, was the inven-
tion of the adjective: no spell or incantation in Faerie is more potent […] The mind
that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that
would make heavy things light and able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and
the still rock into a swift water.”
(Tolkien, 1947, p. 50)
This claim is remarkably reminiscent of David Hume’s discussion of the means by which
original ideas are formed: he argues, “all this creative power of the mind amounts to no
more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materi-
als afforded us by the senses and experience.” He goes on to provide the example of a golden
mountain, a seemingly original and organic idea that Hume argues we arrive at by “only
join[ing] two consistent ideas, gold, and mountain, with which we were formerly acquainted”
(Hume, 1748, 2007, p. 13). Writing, then, allows for the swift creation and evocation of these
original ideas, allowing a textually constructed world to be as original and distinct as possible.
However, writing alone cannot specifically be termed a world-building tool, as it serves a
myriad of other purposes: shopping lists, council tax bills, and so on. If a ‘toolset’ for textual
world construction can be said to exist, then it consists of various methods for assisting a crea-
tor to explore as many facets of a world as possible, in order that their world feels real to the
perceiver. Atlantis stands as one of the earlier examples of this: though it is a relative footnote,
constructed by Plato to demonstrate the superiority of his ideal state, he provides a wealth of
apparently pointless information about Atlantis. Among his description is included the history
of the island’s peoples, descendants of Poseidon, his son Atlas serving as its first king. Plato
even describes the variety of resources available to the residents of Atlantis, including:
that metal orichalcum […] and it produced an abundance of wood for builders, and
furnished food also for tame and wild animals, […] And, yet, further it bore culti-
vated fruits, and dry edible fruits, such as we use for food;—all these kinds of food
we call vegetables.
(Plato, 1849, p. 422)
This is then followed by an elaborate, lengthy description of the precise composition of

Poseidon’s temple. This focus and attention to detail gives Atlantis the illusion of true exist-
ence, an illusion so compelling that many still believe it exists to this day. It is the creation of
this same level of detail that is the goal of textual world-building tools, which may be subdi-
vided further into two categories: “guides” and “generators.”
If there is a statement that sums up the attitude of guides, it would be Simon Provencher’s
“Golden Rule of Worldbuilding,” as expressed on Provencher’s blog, World Builder: “unless
specified otherwise, everything inside your world is assumed to behave exactly as it would
in the real world” (Provencher, 2012). This “Golden Rule” is similar in tone to the “Reality
Principle” expressed by Kendall Walton in his 1990 work Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the
Foundations of the Representational Art and Marie-Laure Ryan’s “principle of minimal depar-
ture” first expressed in 1980 (Ryan, 1980). The aim of guides is to provide world-builders
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Wo r l d - B u i l d i n g T o o l s
with a degree of understanding of various real-world concepts, in order that they may imbue
the worlds they create with a degree of verisimilitude. For example, Mark Rosenfelder is the
author of three works: The Language Construction Kit (2010), The Planetary Construction Kit
(2010), and The Conlanger’s Lexipedia (2013), which address the creation of fictional languages,
fictional planets, and fictional words, respectively.The key to all of these works is encouraging
the reader to analyze and appreciate the complexity of world-building.The “basics” section of
the Language Construction Kit consists of a detailed breakdown of the various components of
speech and language, including a diagram of the human throat accompanied by annotations
indicating which sounds are produced by each region. Similarly, the table of contents for the
Planetary Construction Kit contains subjects as diverse as “Astronomy and Geology,” “Religion,”
“Biology,” and “War” (Rosenfelder, 2010).
These guides serve as one variety of textual world-building tool. By presenting readers
with these detailed compilations of information, they not only provide novice writers with
information to make imaginary worlds feel more realistic and detailed, but, crucially, they also
prompt thinking about their worlds in the light of these complex issues. A writer who has
given some thought to how the geology, or language, of their world works will in all likeli-
hood find that this process of thought will add depth to the peoples that inhabit it—and will,
therefore, be able to create more realistic, deeper characters as a result.
Generators, meanwhile, provide randomly generated ideas and elements to supplement
or inspire the creation process, echoing the idea-conjunction process mentioned by Hume
and Tolkien above. A website named Donjon.bin.sh collects together several such systems:
examples include a world map (complete with named towns and castles), characters, and even
random events or occurrences.These are generated from a series of different textual fragments
that the program places together.
There are, of course, inherent limitations with these systems. Guides cannot truly cre-
ate a world; they can only provide assistance and detail for the process of world-building.
Generators, meanwhile, are somewhat limited in scope, being able to produce variations upon
a pre-defined theme. It is not possible, for instance, to use the world map generator on Donjon
to produce a non-Euclidean world, or create an alternate history for a realistic Earth. Likewise,
its random events and character generators only cover the fantasy genre; whilst it is of course
possible to program generators of other genres and modes, the amount needed to cover all
angles is technically infinite.There is a twofold problem with text as a tool for world-building;
paradoxically, it is both too rigid and inflexible, and too prone to mutation and change.
Taking Tolkien’s Middle-earth, itself something of a textbook example of a textual world,
it becomes possible to demonstrate the problems with textual world-building. Middle-earth
is a complex world, crafted with the knowledge of various academic disciplines and personal
experiences. Patrick Curry, while discussing attempts to apply academic theories to Middle-
earth, notes a number of influences ranging from “Anglo-Saxon history [and] medievalism”
to “memories of pre-war rural England,” leading him to term it “a complex but ultimately
tightly determined and defined place” (Curry, 2004, pp. 7–8). He then goes on, however, to
note that “for the sympathetic reader, it is not like that at all […] it is effectively unbounded,
in extent or variety” (Curry, 2004, pp. 7–8). For Curry, attempts to map the principles of
Marxism or Jungian psychology onto Middle-earth fail precisely because of this “unbounded”
nature—the world comes to mean something different to everyone who encounters it.
The inability to bring outside influences to a traditionally textually constructed world dem-
onstrates the key problem with text as a tool for constructing imaginary worlds. Traditional
text, once produced, is fixed and inviolate; it does not change based on reader input, and the
reader cannot engage with the world presented on any level save the imaginary. This means
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that traditionally textually constructed worlds cannot function interactively. Chris Crawford’s
definition of interactivity is “A cyclic process between two or more active agents in which
each agent alternately listens, thinks, and speaks” (Crawford, 2005, p. 29). The inability of tra-
ditional text to respond to its reader means it cannot function as an active agent.
In Tolkien’s case, as vivid and compelling as the descriptions of Middle-earth may be, the
reader can only imagine the world, based upon the descriptions provided, but may not do
anything further without recourse to further textual world-building itself; in other words,
readers may listen, think, and speak about the world they are presented with, but the world
cannot answer them back. In order to have, for example, an interactive experience such as
an encounter with a Balrog, or interactive exploration of the halls of Rivendell, with noth-
ing more than Tolkien’s writings at hand, one can only imagine how these interactions might
occur, based on the way both experiences are described within the text. For any interaction
more concrete, it becomes necessary to indulge in world-building ourselves, such as writing a
story in which Rivendell is explored in detail, or a Balrog is fought in an encounter, differing
from the example given to us by Tolkien’s text.
This may well be a driving force behind the many and varied adaptations of Tolkien’s
work, in formats ranging from text to film to video games. This multiplicity of adaptations
demonstrates the fundamental incompleteness of a textual world. There will always be paths
not explored, events not chronicled, that inspire the creative mind to imagine and reimagine
the world over and over again, never arriving at any conclusive picture of it. As Kim Ballard
summarizes, “There are as many interpretations of a text as there are people who have read it
(or heard it)” (Ballard, 2013, p. 66).This means that a traditionally textually constructed world
will naturally be subject to mutation and change when adapted, meaning that it will have a
nebulous, indistinct form that cannot support consistent interaction.
It is, of course, possible to combine text with computer technology to create a text that
does respond to its audience in a manner consistent with Crawford’s definition. It is, for
example, possible to create a version of Tolkien’s Middle-earth where the user can indeed fight
a Balrog and explore Rivendell without the need to provide the detail for these encounters
themselves.The earliest example of this was MUME (Multiple Users in Middle Earth), a text-
based multi-user computer game from 1991. Though still based in text, MUME allows users
to create representations of themselves, or avatars, which may explore and interact with the
world; they may select directions to move in, and actions to take when encountering elements
or inhabitants of the world. This means that, unlike in a traditional text-based world, the user
has a degree of control over the way the world is experienced. Unlike the reader of The Lord of
the Rings, they do not have to encounter first the Shire and thence follow the narrative “road”
to the town of Bree; they may elect to explore the world presented to them as they see fit.
This ability to explore an imaginary world according to one’s own desires is the first step
toward creating imaginary worlds that possess a greater degree of “virtual existence.” By
allowing a user to explore an imaginary world according to their own desires, the world itself
has a greater illusion of existence. The user’s interaction is answered by the world in the form
of logical replies; if we choose to enter a dangerous forest, we may expect to encounter dan-
gers in reply. It becomes possible to draw a consistent map of the world, which others can use
reliably, purely by exploring it. Unlike the traditional textually constructed world, the act of
drawing a map of an interactive world is not an act of world-building, as it does not involve
the use of the imagination, but rather the observational faculties, in this example, sight. The
world has become a place with its own publicly recordable existence. It is a world that can
be experienced through interaction. It is a “cohesive” world, possessing a degree of verifiable
public presence.
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However, the degree to which an imaginary world functions as “cohesive” still relies heavily
on the form within which it is incarnated or created, and hence the tool used to construct
a given imaginary world can alter its viability as a virtual object. Interactive textual worlds
do not possess a physical component, nor do they present the user with anything beyond
description. The additional complexity provided by the interactive element may allow for
greater nuance in description; it may be possible to describe the differing reactions of various
entities in response to player action, for example, or provide a detailed and in-depth portrait
of an ancient dungeon, incorporating history and so forth. However, fundamentally all these
elements will still only be perceivable through the use of the player’s imagination. It is possible
for a world to attain a still greater sense of verisimilitude if a different variety of tool is used
to construct it, as will be demonstrated.
Tactile Tools
World-building using tactile components or materials is decidedly different to textual world-
building. The most obvious distinction to draw is that tactile world-building tools operate in
the material world, and are thus bound by physical laws—Borges’s Library of Babel, to give
one example, would be impossible to reproduce faithfully using physical world-building tools,
as the amount of space and material required (which are infinite) would be impractical.
However, this dimension of physicality does confer benefits as well. By adding a physical
dimension to an imaginary world, that world gains visual and tactile dimensions, allowing for
the creation of worlds that can be directly perceived by the senses as opposed to the imagi-
native faculties. This, correspondingly, strengthens the potential for interaction. For example,
building a train set allows the user to run trains in real-time through the constructed world.
Similarly, a Meccano or LEGO model can be changed and customized with relative ease, even
some time after its construction—something that can only be achieved in textual worlds by
extensive rewrites can be achieved in moments.
LEGO construction sets are perhaps one of the more well-known examples of tactile
world-building tools. As of 2015, LEGO has become the world’s most powerful brand (Tovey,
2015). The concept behind LEGO is extremely simple. From a variety of different physical
parts, users can assemble constructions of varying depth and complexity, from simple houses
to detailed replications of real-world structures. A wide variety of LEGO models exist, rang-
ing from simple vehicles and structures to complex recreations of real-life constructions: the
Empire State Building, Big Ben, and the Brandenburg Gate are among the various world
landmarks available in the LEGO Architecture product range.
The great strengths of LEGO are its relative simplicity, and the versatility and utility of the
worlds that can be produced with it.The simplicity of the system, evident from its widespread
popularity as a child’s toy, means it can be easily combined with more complex concepts,
and thus has the potential to produce worlds that can function on multiple levels. Mitchel
Resnick and Brian Silverman, designers of (among other tactile construction kits) the LEGO
MINDSTORMS sub-brand, state: “When we evaluate the use of our construction kits, we
consider diversity of outcomes a measure of success” (Resnick and Silverman, 2005). By this
logic, the LEGO brand has been extremely successful; MINDSTORMS has been utilized as
a teaching tool for high-level engineering by researchers at the University of Nevada (Wang,
LaCombe, and Rogers, 2004), while LEGO modeling itself has also been used within the
classroom at various levels. Of particular interest is the use of LEGO Education StoryStarter
sets made specifically for the purpose of storytelling, something that purportedly “helps pupils
visualise their stories more clearly” (Marsh, 2015). The same article also includes examples of
145
teachers utilizing the LEGO model as a metaphor for literary analysis. LEGO construction
has also been used to teach complex mathematical concepts, with a study asserting that:
use of concrete materials such as Lego offer a mathematically rich environment

where the powerful idea of ratio is used by students in problem solving […] The stu-
dent results […] indicated that the activities were rich in opportunities to promote
the learning of ratio.
(Norton, 2004, p. 420)
LEGO has also found usage within the laboratories of MIT to create an “urban observatory”—
a scale model of Cambridge, Massachusetts’s Kendall Square, “onto which research scientists
project digital data” (Gillies, 2014).
What does this multiplicity of uses mean for LEGO’s status as a world-building tool? The
key theme to notice here is LEGO’s capability to serve as a means to focus, consolidate, or
otherwise express complex concepts or ideas. Therefore, it is possible to view LEGO mode-
ling as a bridge between the imaginative and material worlds—a means to incarnate theoretical
constructed worlds and concepts. Its frequent deployment as a method of engagement with
a complex subject, such as mathematics, programming, or engineering, demonstrates this, as
does the frequent intersection between LEGO and other branded worlds. Sets exist based on
properties such as The Lord of the Rings, the Star Wars universe, and others—meaning that these
worlds can be “incarnated” in the physical world via the LEGO set. It is worth pointing out
that, commonly, the design of the sets is influenced by the movie adaptations of these worlds,
meaning that LEGO “is at the heart of a transmedial empire,” as Mark J. P. Wolf has claimed
(Wolf, 2014, p. xxii). Re-creating scenes in LEGO format, however, allows the user a greater
degree of interactivity than that posed by a filmic adaptation of a textually constructed world.
It is possible, for instance, to add blocks from other sets to create unlikely scenarios and com-
binations—there is nothing to stop an imaginative world-builder from combining characters
from Star Wars LEGO sets and The Lord of the Rings sets, for example, opening both worlds up
to unusual conjunctions and combinations, and encouraging the user to experiment with the
boundaries of either world.
It is important to recognize that this is a process that works both ways—it is possible to
build, for example, a house or a castle, and then invent inhabitants for the house or a his-
tory for the castle. This is the same principle as utilized by the StoryStarter set mentioned
above—the tactile tools of the LEGO set are used as a “springboard” of sorts for a process of
textual world-building. Either process allows for LEGO, and similar tactile construction sets,
to serve as a way of allowing a traditionally textually constructed world to be opened up for
experimentation, interaction, and re-creation, or to provide a jumping off point for further
textual world-building, similar in some regards to the function of the textual generators dis-
cussed previously.
Most interesting is the extension of the brand beyond tactile world-building, and into the
newly emergent sphere of world-creation via digital media, incorporating computer games
and programs. LEGO has released several such programs that emulate its tactile construc-
tion tools in digital form. An application named LEGO X aims to allow users to “create 3D
printable models by playfully stacking sensored LEGO bricks” (Rosenfeld, 2015). This allows
construction to take place simultaneously in the physical and virtual environments. LEGO has
also recently launched the title LEGO Worlds (2015), described as a “rival to popular video
game Minecraft” (BBC, 2015), a game that utilizes the arrays of blocks and designs available
in physical LEGO sets and applies them to construction in the virtual world. The appeal of
146
this is self-evident; the same principles of interaction and experimentation that drive LEGO
modeling are in effect, but the restrictions of the physical world are relaxed, allowing for
creation to approach the level of imaginative depth of worlds created with textual world-
building tools.
These programs, however, merely scratch the surface of digital world-building. They serve
as mere attempts to translate or map the conventions of LEGO world-building into the digital
sphere. There is, however, an entire range of digital world-builder tools that have emerged in
parallel with the technological innovations of the late twentieth and early twenty-first cen-
tury, something that will be detailed in the next section.
Digital Tools
World-building in a digital environment is something of a hybrid of textual and physical
world-building. Computers remove the restrictions of the physical universe, allowing for a
degree of flexibility similar to textual world-building. Yet digital worlds are all but entirely
constructed around user interaction by various degrees.
The core of a digitally constructed world is programming code, the means by which a
computer is given instructions. Programming code is, of course, used for a good deal of many
other things besides world-building—one can write a program that conducts mock therapy,
such as Wiezenbaum’s ELIZA (1966), or that runs a nuclear power station. This can make
the task of using code to create an entire world somewhat daunting. There are, of course,
several engines that are specifically designed to build digital worlds. The problem, however,
is that their use requires sophisticated knowledge of computer programming. The job of
world-building tools is to impose limitations, to present the user with a scaled-down, easy-to-
manipulate version of the code.
One of the earliest examples of this is the World Builder software that was released for the
Apple Macintosh in 1986. The program allowed the user to manipulate code at various levels
to construct text-based worlds (incorporating static images as backdrops) that could be navi-
gated in the manner of early textual adventure games. These were presented as paragraphs of
text describing locations and situations, which the player could manipulate by entering com-
mands. For example, 1977’s iconic Zork adventure game begins by presenting the player with
the following text:
West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
(Zork, 1977)
From this simple beginning, players are able to move about and explore the world by typ-
ing “go” followed by a cardinal direction. They are able to interact with objects (such as the
above-described mailbox, which can be opened to reveal a leaflet you can then take) by typ-
ing “open/take [item],” and they are able, more than anything, to die in various creative ways,
by interaction with hostile elements.
These adventure games are the most basic example of a digitally constructed world. The
later MUDs (multi-user dungeons) presented essentially the same concept, but with the
capacity for multiple users to inhabit the same digital world simultaneously. Though the con-
cept of multiple players inhabiting a game world dates back to the mainframe game Spacewar!
(1962), MUDs allowed for many users to be present in different areas at the same time, and
147
supported real-time text communication between players. However, MUDs could not be
created by the average unskilled user, since they required exceptional fluency in computer
programming. Richard A. Bartle, the inheritor/co-creator of the first MUD, summarizes the
problem neatly when he claims: “Deities create virtual worlds; designers are those deities”
(Bartle, 2004, p. 247). The advantage of programs like World Builder is that they allow non-
deities to create—interfaces are usually designed to be accessible to the novice, and may also
come packaged with pre-made titles that can be dissected in the editor. Other, more modern
examples of World Builder-type programs include the RPG Maker series of programs, which
allow users to create RPG games using a simple-to-use editor.
A subspecies of this type of world-building tool is the map editing software that is often
included with an existing, created game. These allow players of a given game to play around
with a simplified version of the game’s resources and graphical elements, in order to cre-
ate new worlds within an existing game. Many different games offer this functionality, from
real-time strategy (RTS) titles such as Blizzard’s StarCraft (1998), role-playing titles such as
Bioware’s Neverwinter Nights (2002), and numerous others, to the recently released (at time of
writing) Super Mario Maker (2015), a “level construction kit” (Otero, 2015) that allows players
to create their own levels to traverse as the iconic plumber.
This is, however, only to scratch the surface of digital world-building tools. For instance,
both these types of world-building tools are limited in scope by the fact that the worlds they
construct are typically only inhabitable by one user at a time. The nature of the interface
means that only a single user, as opposed to a large group, can work on the world at any
given time. Exploring further, however, reveals a dizzying wealth of complexity and layers-
within-layers of construction tools.The best way to approach this is via a single case study that
incorporates a number of different elements common to modern digital world-building tools,
Mojang’s Minecraft (2011, but released in an alpha, or early, build in 2009).
Minecraft has, in a relatively short time, become a major cultural phenomenon, not only
reaching sales figures of 20 million as of July 2015 (Domeninquez, 2015) but also inspiring
an entire genre of Internet entertainment in the form of channels on the video-sharing site
YouTube dedicated to uploading footage of user-created worlds, and interactions between
players within those worlds. The game’s characteristic style has inspired clothing, accessories,
and even a series of LEGO sets.
It is important to recognize, however, that though LEGO is an acknowledged influence
on Minecraft, it represents something far more complex. Daniel Goldberg and Linus Larsson
define Minecraft as “Lego pieces on steroids” (Goldberg and Larsson, 2013), which is to say, it
offers all the functionality of LEGO whilst extending its capabilities considerably. The most
obvious similarity is in the design. Unlike most other digital world-building tools, Minecraft
does not require the user to negotiate menus and options to create their world, but places
the user as an avatar within a randomly generated world. Users are thus able to make altera-
tions and additions to the world as they explore it, by cutting down a tree in one location
and using its wood to create a building in another, for example. This allows the game to
simulate the dimension of tactility offered by physical world-building tools; while this is not
true tactility, rather an audiovisual approximation of the concept, it still ultimately affords a
high sense of “cohesion,” as the world can be perceived by users as reacting directly to their
input, whilst still retaining the wide flexibility afforded by traditional and interactive textual
world-building.
This flexibility can be seen in the fact that, while a high-end LEGO set features, at best, a
one-foot-square baseplate, the randomly generated spaces of Minecraft are estimated, on the
game’s wiki, to cover just over 8 times the surface area of the Earth (Minecraft Wiki), liberating
148
the worlds constructed from the constraints of the material world that apply to tactile world-
building tools. There is also scope for a great many approaches to world-building. “Creative”
mode allows the player to place as many blocks of any material wherever they desire, whilst
“Survival” mode requires the player to physically acquire resources from the game world, the
challenge and strategy inherent in the mode providing a large part of the game’s appeal. The
player has the option to include an ecosystem of hostile entities in their created world, some
of which can destroy player-created structures, meaning that the act of world-building itself
becomes a challenge.
This is an example of a hybrid form. Minecraft is both a digital world-building tool and a
form of entertainment in its own right. Its appeal stems from many sources, including the
blocky visual design, the intuitiveness of its design, and its high level of complexity. Foremost
among these advantages, however, is the fact that it can be enjoyed in many ways—as a single
player “survival” game, as pure world-building, or as a multiplayer experience that can be
either collaborative or competitive. From a single title, a huge variety of differing worlds can
be constructed—some that are physical imitations of pre-existing imagined worlds (it would
be quite feasible to re-imagine Atlantis, given Plato’s description), and others wholly unique.
The game’s combination of the online experience of a MUD or MMOG with the experi-
ence of world-building allows for collaborative projects to be undertaken with ease.
Minecraft’s utility does not stop with the base game. As with many games, it has proven a
popular title for player-authored modifications (or “mods”) to the game’s base content. Mods
have introduced a wide variety of extra content to the game, ranging from a sophisticated
set of tools for creating railways to the elements used to create nuclear reactors. Mods allow
the game to exceed its original design specifications and add almost limitless potential to the
variety, scope, and scale of worlds that can be created.
Conclusion
This chapter has explored the various varieties of world-building tools that are available to
the general public. What has become clear is that there are many different ways to world-
build, and that the medium a world is built within dramatically affects the function and
variety of tools available. The broad scope of both traditional and interactive textual world
building, combined with the immutability of text as a medium, means that textual tools are
limited to prompts, idea generators, and general guidance. Tactile world-building tools, con-
versely, can provide new dimensions to imaginary worlds, allowing them to better support an
interactive dimension and to attain a public-accessible and objective presence. This, in turn,
has allowed these toolsets to gain application within various fields, including education and
the sciences. Overall, however, it is digital world-building tools that offer the greatest versatil-
ity, and afford the greatest sense of “cohesion” to an imagined world. The worlds they con-
struct boast all the functionality of worlds constructed with tactile tools (with the additional
capacity to simulate extra detail, such as weather, ecosystems, etc.), as well as incorporating
the broad scope of textually constructed worlds. As such, they provide the greatest flexibility
for world construction, and look as though they will continue to increase in popularity in
the near future.
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Part 3
Types of Worlds
19
Island Worlds
Ian Kinane
For as long as human cultures have been imagining and constructing worlds there have been
island worlds. Island topographies have occupied a considerable place in the cultural imagi-
nation from some of the earliest recorded literature, and they are to be found in discussions
of mythology, philosophy, and religion across vastly divergent historical and literary cultures.
They are important symbolic landscapes that carry a weight of cultural meaning within the
popular imagination. In attempting to define precisely what an island is, however, we find that
these divergent meanings often collide. Islands are at once insular and small, as well as vast
and unbound; they are cut off from the mainland but occupy an important structural relation
to it. Islands imply isolation and oneness, but they are also the symbols of interconnectivity,
representative of the continuous geomorphological processes occurring beneath the earth’s
surface. They are microcosms and entire worlds, places of refuge as well as suffering, sites of
freedom and imprisonment, and landscapes of punishment and redemption. They are neither
small nor big, neither one thing nor the other, but represent what Godfrey Baldacchino terms
a “nervous duality” (2005, p. 248).
Rather than thinking of islands in isolation, an island “confronts us as a juxtaposition and
confluence of the understanding of local and global realities, of interior and exterior refer-
ences of meaning” (Baldacchino, 2005, p. 248). Islands are thus characterised by their intersti-
tiality and the polyvalency of their cultural signification.They have been defined variously in
terms of their “boundedness” and as “places of possibility and promise” (Edmond and Smith,
2003, p. 2). They are “laboratory environments” (p. 3) for various social, anthropological,
and botanical experiments, and serve “as early warning signals from which we can examine
human impacts on a small scale” (Walker and Bellingham, 2011, p. xii). The concept of an
island “brings with it at once the notion of solitude and of a founding population” (Beer,
2003, p. 33), as well as serving as an “aesthetic refuge from the confused, congested public
realm” (Conrad, 2009, p. 15) and as a place of “healing, inspiration and perspective upon the
vulnerability of our own present civilization” (Manwaring, 2008, p. 1). Islands are “reflections
on origins” (Loxley, 1990, p. 3), “places of arrival and departure” (Edmond and Smith, 2003,
p. 7), and “metaphors for individual lives, with a beginning, middle, and end” (Rainbird, 2007,
p. 13). They are an “existential terrain” upon which the individual is “confronted by edges,
or by the end” (Conrad, 2009, pp. 7–8). The island metaphor also functions as a “dynamic
space of becoming” (Lane, 1995, p. 16), a “place of reflection where one knows oneself as
is and would be” (Denning, 2004, p. 100) as one is forced to fend for oneself. Indeed, it is
upon the island that the “conditions for a rebirth or genesis are made possible” (Loxley, 1990,
p. 3). Islands are “site[s] of double identity” and are “always-already in the process of trans-
forming the particular into something other than its (original, essential) self ” (Bongie, 1998,
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Ian Kinane
p. 18). Indeed, islands should enable people “to enter into a different state of consciousness”
(Manwaring, 2008, p. 9). The appeal of the island image within the cultural imagination “is
both fed by and feeds upon the use of the concept of island in reality or metaphor by artists
and writers” (Royle, 2001, p. 13).The island image has been rehearsed and reused throughout
literary history, and its symbolic function has been informed both by the uniqueness of its
physiological characteristics and by the various historical periods across which the trope has
been carried—from mythological antiquity to those fictional voyages of discovery, and from
European exploration into the Southern Seas to contemporary islomania and the cultural
obsession with islands.
It is precisely the fluctuation “between the perceived and the projected, between the actual
and the imaginary” (Manwaring, 2008, p. 63) that constituted early imaginings of islands as
fictive worlds. Islands are “the most glorious map of the imagination” (Manley and Manley,
1970, p. 228) for it is through and with islands that our early fictions began to spatialize our
earliest literary-historical mythologies. Island landscapes provide “metaphors that allow us to
give shape to a world that would otherwise be formless and meaningless” (Gillis, 2004, p. 1);
they are originary topoi upon which narratives of birth and rebirth have been written. John
Gillis rightly notes that “any history of islomania must begin with the Odyssey” (2004, p. 5).
It is no coincidence that Homer elects to set so much of the action of his Greek epic on the
islands of the Ionian Sea, the birthplace of much of the earliest historical Greek myths. Islands
are essential to the spatial narrative of The Odyssey, and Odysseus’s journey from one island
to another affords the narrative an expansive imaginative geography that often, though not
always, overlaps with the material geography of the extant Ionian. Most famous of the islands
encountered in The Odyssey, perhaps, is Aeaea, belonging to the sea-witch Circe, and Siren
Island, home to the infamous sirens, creatures who in all respects resemble beautiful young
women, and who lure passing sailors to their deaths. From their earliest inception, islands were
cast as threatening, corrupting places to and from which men were exiled; they were places
that impelled action and travail, and that called out to be explored. Most significantly, Circe’s
island is reported to be located at the edge of the known world, far beyond the oceans that
Homer’s contemporaries had explored. While the islands of The Odyssey represent mytho-
logical geographies upon which we can imagine our own conception, they also plot a fictive
cartography within the cultural imagination of other islands yet to be discovered.
In the era of antiquity, islands were speculative utopias, “no-places” that were rumoured to
exist elsewhere that were perceived to be idealized landscapes for the settlement and devel-
opment of human society. It was, for example, upon the island of Atlantis that Plato elected
to set his allegorical vindication of ancient Athens’ military superiority in the Timaeus (circa
360 B.C.). According to Plato, the island-state of Atlantis represented a cultural and social
ideal that was bested only by Athens’ great might, and served as a testament to Plato’s ideals
for the constitution of a sustaining political and social nation-state. That Atlantis is eventu-
ally submerged beneath the ocean toward the end of Plato’s allegory is an important detail
in the cultural conception of islands: the cultural mythology that has grown up surrounding
Atlantis—the lost city that has yet to be rediscovered—only further underlined the mythic
quality of islands as speculative landscapes that emerged from and submerged beneath the sea
in a continuing cycle, and that were at once both fictive, imagined landscapes and physical,
geological landmasses. The ambiguity as to whether island utopias were real or not further
fuelled the human imagination. Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, written considerably later in
1626, is a continuation novel, of sorts, of the Atlantis myth laid down by that compounds the
notion that islands are sites for the discovery and nourishment of human ideals. Much like
Atlantis, the mythical island of Bensalem is presented as a functioning u topia, a place in which
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I s l a n d Wo r l d s
the political, social, and economic structures of governance are of great benefit to its inhabit-
ants, who coexist peaceably upon a tropical idyll.
However, given the limited advances in exploration at this time, there remained much
debate as to the validity of these accounts, as very few people traveled beyond their own
homeland. Island utopias were always reported to exist in faraway places, “for every culture
has tended to assume a location compatible with its own limited knowledge of the world,
and to the detriment of any real geographical investigation” (Ford, 1981, p. 17). Early travelers’
accounts of islands were treated with a mixture of awe and suspicion, and though Europeans
longed for the promise of these islands, there was no direct evidence to support the (often
fabricated) reports of travelers. This shifted somewhat in the intervening years, following the
publication of Dante’s Divine Comedy (1321). That Dante envisioned purgatory, the meta-
physical gateway between Heaven and the earthly paradise, as a mountainous island floating
in the unexplored oceans of the southern hemisphere led many religious pilgrims to conclude
that the lost paradise was indeed to be found on an as-of-yet undiscovered island. Coupled
with the burgeoning mythology of utopian islands that had sprung up in the wake of Plato’s
Atlantis, it is not difficult to imagine the conflation made in the minds of 14th-century reli-
gious scholars and devout pilgrims, who desperately sought evidence of the Biblical Eden.
Though Julian Ford is correct to note that no unilateral opinion on the location of the earthly
paradise exists, he also asserts that “nearly all the myths concur in saying that the original seat
of gods and men lay in a land of perpetual sunshine, light, and warmth, and this definitely tal-
lies with the extraordinary assumption expressed by Dante” (Ford, 1981, p. 26).
From the 14th century onward, advances in navigation and sailing technologies enabled
European explorers to travel further than ever before, which brought them in to contact
with previously unreachable oceans. The desire for knowledge of the unknown, to verify the
reputed existence of these islands, was coupled with the economic potential of untouched
islands, replete with an abundance of raw material wealth. John Gillis has noted that European
explorers often “filled their maps with unknown islands, betting that they would surely turn
up some day” (2004, p. 55). A flurry of voyage narratives appeared at this time, all of which
purported to have discovered lost tropical islands, and that gave credence to the widespread
belief in the existence of hitherto imagined islands. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, which
appeared circa 1357, details the journey of an English knight who, the narrative contends,
ventured to several islands in the regions of modern-day India, Persia, and Turkey, and encoun-
tered all manner of fantastical inhabitants (Homo sapiens with canine heads, one-legged men,
etc.). Though the account—and the personage of Mandeville himself—was fictitious, much
of the text’s geographical descriptions remain accurate, thus underlining the difficulties faced
by early cultures in disproving inaccuracies in these fictional accounts. Perhaps the most
famous imagined island of the early modern imagination is that of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia.
Published in 1516, More’s account of a fictional island society is told by another traveler-
figure, Raphael Hythloday, who has supposedly spent several years on the island of Utopia
observing its peoples and customs. Much like Plato’s Atlantis, Utopia is an exemplum of a
perfectly realised socio-political model, but one that nevertheless remained elusive. Despite its
lack of basis in reality (or perhaps in spite of it), Utopia realised the idea of a humanist paradise
that had long been sought for in the early modern imagination, and many Europeans viewed
it as an attainable possibility for future living, and as “a way of understanding possible worlds
and hence their own world” (Porter and Lukermann, 1976, p. 203).
In much the same way that “writers did much to encourage such superb fantasies” (Manley
and Manley, 1970, p. 118) about islands, so too were islands “being discovered all over the
world and were exciting the readers of diaries, letters and reports from early mariners” (1970,
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Ian Kinane
p. 229). While a certain ambiguity as to their authenticity persisted, the discovery of the
Pacific region by European explorers in the 16th century gave much credence to the view
that a tropical Arcadian garden-island was to be found, and that would prove to be the elusive
pairidaeza of Eden. Indeed, as Gillis noted, “each tropical island encountered seemed at first
to fit the description of paradise” (2004, p. 70) that had been laid down in earlier writings.
Ingrid Daemmrich has also asserted that “the last earthly paradise locations to be discovered
were the Pacific Islands” (1997, p. 11), which may, in part, account for the cultural mania for
islands, and for the many voyages of exploration into the Pacific that were to shortly follow. In
addition to the paradise myth, a concurrent secular mythology grew out of these discoveries,
which asserted that islands were, by their often natural abundance of plants and vegetable mat-
ter, bucolic idylls for the restitution of jaded urban(e) societies of the continent. This secular
mythology is linked to the “‘long’ modernity of the capitalist world-system, implicated in the
discourses of material exploitation and colonization that originated in the fifteenth century
and developed throughout the Enlightenment” (Deckard, 2010, p. 2). There was, at the time,
a growing feeling of nostalgia that coincided with the growth of early modern industrial
nations in the global north, and the tropical haven provided by seemingly untouched and
remote islands was believed to be restorative in its “vision of perfect bliss” (Daemmrich, 1997,
p. 205) and reminiscent of a prelapsarian time prior to modern society. This secular mythol-
ogy was another motivating factor in European exploration, but it later evolved into a new
myth, “justifying imperial discourse and praxis” (Deckard, 2010, p. 2). These newly discovered
islands became colonial outcrops and literal gardens for the mining of natural resources and
the (re)production of the colonizing culture. Islands, thus, have repeatedly been employed as
settings for narratives of “management, control, and a simplified replication of the Old World”
(Lane, 1995, p. 2).
Jill Casid has asserted that the “most influential imperial gardens of the eighteenth cen-
tury were the island gardens of narrative fiction, particularly Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe”
(2003, p. 283). Following the publication of Defoe’s most influential novel in 1719, islands
became synonymous with tales of castaway-adventurers; they were seen as colonial metaphors,
landscapes for the reproduction of colonial culture, and spaces of conquest, upon which
imperial narratives were staged and British expansionism justified. Crusoe’s self-reliant indi-
vidualism posited him as an ideal cipher for the colonial mandate, as his will to conquer
and possess his island became emblematic of Britain’s wider colonial projects. The Robinson
Crusoe story has become universally synonymous with popular cultural understandings of
shipwrecked islander narratives, and the myth of Crusoe himself has become “inexorably
bound up with that imagined island” (Downie, 1996, pp. 13–14). Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish
sailor who was marooned in 1704 on the island of Más A Tierra off the coast of Chile, in
the Pacific, is believed to be the real-life inspiration for Defoe’s castaway-hero. But the fact
that Defoe elects to strand his Crusoe on an unnamed (fictional) island off the coast of
modern Venezuela, in the Caribbean, further added to the obfuscated mythology surround-
ing islands, and the impossibility faced in authenticating castaways’ accounts. As Elizabeth
DeLoughrey has noted, “Defoe’s conflation of a Pacific island (Más a Tierra) with a Caribbean
one (Tobago) led to a confused geographical setting for Robinson Crusoe” (2010, p. 11). Defoe’s
novel, then, and the imagined world of Crusoe’s island, became “the fictional elaboration of a
non-fictional adventure,” wherein “fiction has achieved the substance of history” and “inven-
tion has become event” (Smith, 1996, pp. 62–63). Islands were no longer imagined topoi made
real for the global north through historical discovery; rather, the symbolic power of the trope
had, with Crusoe’s island, transcended its own speculative nature and had solidified itself as
an essential feature of Western (broadly, European) political, economic, and cultural thought.
156
Más a Tierra was later renamed “Robinson Crusoe Island,” thus underlining the supremacy
within the cultural imagination of mythological islands. Defoe’s novel soon took on an atem-
poral, ahistorical quality (Stimpson, 1996, p. 299), as several hundred incarnations of Crusoe
and his island appeared in its wake.
Jonathan Swift’s 1726 novel, Gulliver’s Travels, appeared not too long after Defoe’s, and is
perhaps the most well-known of its contemporaries—not least of all for its deliberate satiriz-
ing of the accounts of pseudo-travelers such as John Mandeville. Swift’s protagonist, Lemuel
Gulliver, tells of his journeys across many far-flung and fantastical island cultures—from the
island country of Lilliput, home to a race of tiny people, to Glubbdubdrib, where he appar-
ently converses with the spirits of long-dead historical figures, and to the floating island of
Laputa. Indeed, the conceit of the floating or transitory island was an important symbol for
the new discoveries and exchanges in cultural influences that were taking place at this time.
Islands have been ubiquitously present in the later-modern literary and cultural imagination
as floating signifiers, collective sites of meaning that signify not just the plight of the individual
castaway-figure marooned in isolation, but wider social and historical issues that have come
to characterize the post-Enlightenment period. Indeed, the metaphoric floating island itself
becomes a floating signifier linking “the metaphoricity of floating or travelling islands with
the translatability of culture” (Stephanides and Bassnett, 2008, p. 8).
The global West’s fascination for and obsession with desert islands, or “islomania,” reached
its apex from the mid-18th century until approximately the mid-to-late 19th century, during
which time some of the most enduring works of Robinsonade fiction (or desert island stories
in the tradition of Robinson Crusoe) were written. In 1812, Johann David Wyss marooned his
family Robinson upon an unnamed tropical desert island in the East Indies, in the hugely
popular work The Swiss Family Robinson. Wyss’s island idyll—which the characters christen
“New Switzerland”—is not only a pseudo-colonial site for the reproduction of the colo-
nizer’s culture (and, indeed, his family), but, as Wyss infers through the vast array of animals
and plants that populate it (ranging from wolves to onagers, and from fir trees to an entirely
fictitious root of sugar cane), it is a geographical and biotic impossibility.Thus, the more detail
Wyss applies to authenticating his story, the more the fictitiousness of his island topos is under-
lined. In the story, the Robinson family (an unambiguous nod to their literary predecessor) is
shipwrecked on the island, and the narrative revolves around the patriarch William’s attempts
to instruct his young children (all boys) in the ways of providing and fending for themselves.
The same is true of the triumvirate of British schoolboys shipwrecked on an imaginary
Pacific island in R. M. Ballantyne’s 1858 work of juvenile fiction, The Coral Island. However,
Ralph, Jack, and Peterkin are left without parental guidance, and as such are free to under-
take whatever manner of adventure they wish. Ballantyne’s tale is a morally didactic one, and
the island serves as a space upon which nascent muscular Christian practices are nurtured
and imperial ideology is successfully inculcated within the young. This sense of unrestrained
freedom is important, as it not only affords the (presumably juvenile, male) reader an oppor-
tunity to follow the exploits of his literary counterpart and to learn the “correct” codes of
masculine behavior, but it is also “the first and essential prerequisite for personal Bildung”
(Kontje, 1993, p. 4). The 19th-century island becomes a site of bildungsroman, whereupon
the castaway develops a righteous self-dependence and matures through interaction with
the physical landscape. The German term “Robinsonalter” thus came to be used to signify
the point at which a young boy on the verge of puberty “discovers himself on the island
of responsible life” (James, 1996, p. 2). Similarly, Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island (1874)
may be conceived as a coming-of-age story of Ballantyne’s schoolboys: it follows a group of
grown men who have been shipwrecked, once again, somewhere on a fictionalized Pacific
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island, and who apply the skills of the endeavouring engineer Cyrus Smith to colonize the
land, making fire, building bricks, and a rudimentary telegraph system.Verne’s all-male island
colony reinforces contemporary homosocial norms, and underlines the productive economy
of earlier muscular Christian ideals. The eponymous “mystery” of the island—the revela-
tion that the paternal Captain Nemo has been watching over and sanctifying the castaways’
actions from the time of their arrival—only consolidates the popular appeal of this and other
boys’ adventure novels as loosely coded imperial narratives. Indeed, so successful was this
form that many well-regarded writers of the period turned their hands to creating islands,
such as the fictitious Treasure Island of Robert Louis Stevenson’s titular 1883 novel, Noble’s
Isle in H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), and Neverland in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan
(1904). Given the popular weight of these authors, and the longevity of their fictional islands
within the cultural imagination, it is not without consideration that John Gillis asserts that
islomania is a “central feature of Western culture,” and that the West “not only thinks about
islands, but thinks with them” (2004, p. 1).
Due, in part, to the sheer saturation of the Robinsonade genre for most of the 19th cen-
tury, there was a dearth of fictional and imaginary islands within mainstream culture for the
first half of the 20th century, with the notable exceptions of Neverland in J. M. Barrie’s Peter
Pan in 1904, the unnamed island in H. DeVere Stapoole’s The Blue Lagoon (1908), the island
of Caspak in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Land That Time Forgot (1918), and Skull Island in
the monster movie King Kong (1933). It was not until the advent of the Second World War
that islands became politically important features in the global polis once again. Some of the
fiercest battles of World War II took place in the Pacific theater, and many island countries
(particularly Palau in Western Micronesia and Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands) became
strategically important sites that were occupied by Allied forces, in order to impede further
incursions into the Pacific by Japan’s imperial army. As such, islands re-entered the cultural
imagination as radically altered sites of meaning: whereas prior to the mid-20th century
they had, broadly, been viewed as utopian idylls, paradisiacal gardens, and sites of plenitude
and freedom, islands were now seen as dystopian symbols of loss and destruction, upon
which individual lives and the course of history were irrevocably changed. Much of the
cultural output of this period reflected these shifts: Aldous Huxley’s 1962 novel, Island, for
example, charts the final days and decline of the fictional Polynesian utopia of Pala, as the
military leaders of a neighboring country attempt to assail the island and covet its lucrative
oil assets. Indeed, Huxley’s island is a testing-ground for the exploration of such modernist
themes as overpopulation and the exhaustible limits of democracy, two particularly salient
issues in global politics at the time of his writing. Most famous of the post-war dystopian
islands, perhaps, is that of the unnamed Pacific island in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies
(1954). Inspired by The Coral Island, Golding’s island plays host to a cultural and sociological
experimentation of sorts, during which a troop of young British schoolboys descend from
civilized, well-educated children into primitive, murderous savages in the absence of parental
control or authority. Unlike the responsible freedom and the potential bildung of the pro-
tagonists in Ballantyne’s tale, however, Golding makes it clear that his island topos is symboli-
cally representative of humankind’s essential capacity for both good and evil, and that it is a
testing-ground for exploring the limits of human interaction beyond traditionally repressive
socio-political structures.
While the advent of new media and film technologies has allowed for the replication
of traditional island imagery in new forms, films such as the 1958 musical South Pacific and
popular mainstream television series such as Gilligan’s Island (1964–1967) and Fantasy Island
(1977–1984) nevertheless display a tension between staging islands as ahistorical, atemporal
158
tropical utopias and re-presenting the vast cultural, historical, and ecological global shifts
that have occurred since the Second World War, such as the testing of nuclear weapons on
many Pacific islands. More contemporarily, the island trope has been employed as a caution-
ary symbol for the cultural and ecological effects of globalization and political capitalism:
films such as Jurassic Park (1993) and The Beach (2000) highlight variously the exploitative
economics of harnessing island ecologies for post-globalized tourist practices and underline
(in the extreme) the adverse consequences of commercializing islands. It is now upon islands
that contemporary societies “learn lessons for applications to mainland habitats, and attempt
to reverse the unfortunate trend of environmental damage” (Walker and Bellingham, 2011,
p. xii). Television programs such as Survivor (2000–present), however, continue in many ways
to undermine this move toward ecological mindfulness, merely reinforcing the economiz-
ing of small island communities for the staging of North American neo-colonial narratives;
while the submergence and emergence of the island across time and space in the popular
serial drama Lost (2004–2010) can be seen as the logical progression of this global ecological
exploitation, as well as a metaphor underlining the ultimate potential for the island signifier to
collapse under the weight of its own culturally polyvalent meaning. Islands have also been uti-
lized to great effect in computer games, as interactive topoi through which spatial construction
and navigation is practiced. The traditional bounded nature of islands in games such as The
Secret of Monkey Island (1990), Myst (1993), Yoshi’s Island (1995), Riven (1997), Tropico (2001),
Just Cause II (2010), Dead Island (2011), and Far Cry III (2012) has provided developers with a
certain narrative logic, which allows them to contain their interactive worlds within a specific
and (usually) isolated location.
What is needed even more contemporarily, however, is a meta-discourse on the epistemo-
logical nature of islands in the 21st century, encompassing various interdisciplinary fields of
study, and incorporating a discussion on the ways in which we talk about, utilize, and con-
struct islands for and within a shared cultural imagination. Critics and scholars need to move
beyond Robinson Crusoe and his lofty individualism, and to address more contemporary liter-
ary and filmic island worlds, teasing out the archipelagic connections between these fictional
island topoi. In a time of increased social isolation, mirroring the decline of traditional tribal
and communal social structures, it is not without resonance that we read Thurston Clarke’s
words: “we love islands because they are the only geographic feature that echoes our isola-
tion and individuality” (Clarke, 2001, p. 328). It is through these archipelagic connections,
re-positioning islands within our social and cultural imaginary frame, that we might begin
to reclaim a sense of how islands function communally, and beyond the micro-world of the
isolated castaway.
References
Baldacchino, G. (2005) “Islands: Objects of Representation,” Geografiska Annaler, 87 (4) pp. 247–51.
Beer, G. (2003) “Island Bounds,” in R. Edmond and V. Smith (eds) Islands in History and Representation,
London: Routledge, pp. 32–42.
Bongie, C. (1998) Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Casid, J. (2003) “Inhuming Empire: Islands as Colonial Nurseries and Graves,” in F. A. Nussbaum (ed.)
The Global Eighteenth Century. London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 279–95.
Clarke, T. (2001) Searching for Crusoe: A Journey Among the Last Real Islands. London: Little, Brown &
Company.
Conrad, P. (2009) Islands: A Trip Through Time and Space. London: Thames & Hudson.
Daemmrich, I. (1997) Enigmatic Bliss:The Paradise Motif in Literature. New York: Peter Lang.
Deckard, S. (2010) Paradise Discourse, Imperialism, and Globalisation: Exploiting Eden. London: Routledge.
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Dening, G. (2004) Beach Crossings: Voyaging Across Time, Cultures, and Self. Philadelphia: The University
of Philadelphia.
DeLoughrey, E. (2010) Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literature. Honolulu:
University of Hawai’i Press.
Downie, A. (1996) “Robinson Crusoe’s Eighteenth-Century Contexts,” in L. Spaas and B. Stimpson (eds.)
Robinson Crusoe: Myths and Metamorphosis. Hampshire: Macmillan Press Ltd., pp. 13–27.
Edmond, R. and V. Smith, Eds. (2003) Islands in History and Representation. London: Routledge.
Ford, J. (1981) The Story of Paradise. Aylesburg: Hazel Watson & Viney Ltd.
Gillis, J. R. (2004) Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World. Hampshire:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Kontje, T. (1993) The German Bildungsroman: History of a National Genre. Columbia: Camden House.
Lane, D. F. (1995) The Island as a Site of Resistance: An Examination of Caribbean and New Zealand Texts.
New York: Peter Lang.
Loxley, D. (1990) Problematic Shores:The Literature of Islands. Hampshire: The Macmillan Press.
James, Louis. (1996) “Unwrapping Crusoe: Retrospective and Prospective Views”, in L. Spaas and B.
Stimpson (eds.) Robinson Crusoe: Myths and Metamorphosis. Hampshire: Macmillan Press Ltd., pp. 1–9.
Manley S. and R. Manley (1970) Islands:Their Lives, Legends, and Lore. London: Chilton Book Company.
Manwaring, K. (2008) Lost Islands: Inventing Avalon, Destroying Eden. Loughborough: Heart of Albion
Press.
Porter, P. and F. E. Lukermann (1976) “The Geography of Utopia,” in D. Lowenthal and M.J. Bowden
(eds.) Geographies of the Mind: Essays in Historical Geosophy in Honor of John Kirkhead Wright. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Rainbird, P. (2007) The Archaeology of Islands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rolye, S. A. (2001) A Geography of Islands: Small Island Insularity. London: Routledge.
Smith,V. (1996) “Crusoe in the South Seas: Beachcombers, Missionaries, and the Myth of the Castaway,”
in L. Spaas and B. Stimpson (eds.) Robinson Crusoe: Myths and Metamorphosis. Hampshire: Macmillan
Press Ltd., pp. 62–78.
Stephanides, S. and S. Bassnett (2008) “Islands, Literature, and Cultural Translatability,” Transtext(e)s,
Transcultures: Online Journal of Global Cultural Studies: Poetry and Insularity, pp. 5–21.
Stimpson, B. (1996) “‘Insulaire que tu es. Île–’:Valéry, the Robinson Crusoe of the Mind,” in L. Spaas and
B. Stimpson (eds.) Robinson Crusoe: Myths and Metamorphosis. Hampshire: Macmillan Press Ltd., pp.
294–315.
Walker, L. and P. Bellingham (2011) Island Environments in a Changing World. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
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20
Underground Worlds
Peter Fitting
In its earliest forms, descriptions of an underground world were prompted by the existence
of caves and grottoes. The underworld held a strong fascination for older traditional cultures,
in terms of the afterlife, for instance (the Realm of the Dead, Hades, etc., from Orpheus
to Dante’s Inferno); and in myth and folklore as the home of various creatures (benign and
threatening), including elves and fairies, dwarfs and trolls, and even giants and dragons. But in
terms of depictions of inhabited imaginary worlds beyond those of simple cave dwellers, there
are few examples before the 18th century. Then, in the space of twenty years, three different
approaches to the imagination of the subterranean world appeared. In 1720, Tyssot de Patot
published his La Vie, les Aventures et le Voyage de Groenland du Réverend Père Cordelier Pierre de
Mésange. Avec une relation bien circonstanciée de l’origine, de l’histoire, des moeurs et du Paradis des
Habitans du Pole Arctique, which depicts people living in underground cities near the North
Pole. In 1721, the anonymous Relation D’Un Voyage Du Pole Arctique Au Pole Antarctique Par Le
Centre Du Monde, Avec la Description de ce périlleux passage, & des choses merveilleuses & étonnantes
qu’on a découvertes sous le Pole Antarctique recounts a passage through the Earth and introduces
the idea of the “Holes in the Poles.” Finally, in 1741, Ludwig Holberg published Nicolai Klimii
iter subterraneum, Novam Telluris theoriem ac Historiam Quintae Monarchiae adhuc nobis incognita
exhibens, which was immediately translated into a number of European languages (The Journey
of Niels Klim to the World Underground, with a new theory of the Earth and the History of the previ-
ously unknown Fifth Kingdom) and which introduced the idea of the Hollow Earth.
Subterranean Passages
One of the earliest proponents of hollows and cavities within the Earth was the Jesuit priest
Athanasius Kircher, who poured his encyclopedic knowledge into a variety of treatises,
including the Mundus Subterraneus (1665), which was intended to serve as a refutation of
alchemy as well as a general overview of the new sciences, with particular attention to the
workings of the elements of the Earth. Kircher did not actually propose a hollow Earth, but
rather one composed of the four elements in “an intricate system of intercommunicating
cavities” beneath the planetary crust, the most important of which was a subterranean chan-
nel of water, running “through the earth from the north pole to the south” (Collier, 1934,
p. 372). This notion can be seen then in the Relation D’Un Voyage Du Pole Arctique Au Pole
Antarctique Par Le Centre Du Monde in which the narrator is caught in a whirlpool near the
North Pole and rushed through the Earth to emerge at the South Pole. There is no descrip-
tion of the inner world since the crew spends their time huddled inside their ship, but there
is a lengthy description of the strange fauna and flora of Antarctica. The whirlpool becomes a
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familiar entrance to the inner Earth as can be seen in Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Descent into the
Maelstrom” (1841) as well as in his The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838)
with its abrupt ending and the strong hints of an opening into an underground world at
the South Pole. Poe’s only novel inspired a number of sequels, including Jules Verne’s An
Antarctic Mystery (Le Sphinx des glaces, 1897, although there is no underground) as well as Rudy
Rucker’s Hollow Earth (2006).
The notion of openings at the poles is important in both fiction and in esoteric writing,
and was visually epitomized in archaic maps, as in Poe’s own note at the end of a later edition
of his story “MS. found in a Bottle”:
The “MS. found in a Bottle,” was originally published in 1831, and it was not until
many years afterward that I became acquainted with the maps of Mercator, in which
the ocean is represented as rushing, by four mouths into the (northern) Polar Gulf,
to be absorbed into the bowels of the earth; the pole itself being represented by a
black rock, towering to a prodigious height.
(Poe, 1938, p. 126)
(In Poe’s story “The Unparalleled Adventure of one Hans Pfall,” there is another reference as
the hero passes over the North Pole in a balloon and glimpses what seems to be an opening.)
Cavern Worlds
The second and most familiar type of underground world is that set in cavities beneath the
Earth’s crust and follows from myths and legends about the obscure dwelling places of strange
creatures.There are numerous examples of other peoples and races living in caves and caverns
as well as humans who have somehow taken refuge there. Frequently, these inhabited caverns
are set at the as-yet unexplored poles, as in Tyssot de Patot’s Voyage de Groenland (1720), which
shows people living in underground cities in an immense cavern beneath the North Pole.The
“Austral” lands at the South Pole are also the setting for numerous imaginary voyages in the
18th and 19th centuries, as in Robert Paltock’s The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1750),
where the hero travels to the kingdom of Doorpt Swangeanti located in the darkness of the
polar regions inhabited by the flying Glumms and Gawreys.
It is worth noting here that Paltock’s novel is just one of many works that have been
misidentified as a subterranean world, a misidentification that often follows from the charac-
ter’s passage to a hidden land through some sort of subterranean passage, as is the case with
Voltaire’s Candide (1759), for instance, in his travel to the land of El Dorado. There is a similar
subterranean passage in Paltock’s work in which the hero, while exploring the exterior of the
seemingly impenetrable rock on which he is stranded, is sucked into a underground channel,
exiting weeks later on a lake in the center of the island. But this inaccessible island surrounded
by unscalable cliffs is open to the sky and one day he is visited by a flying woman who he
eventually marries. But after seven children their idyll is interrupted by the arrival of other
flying people who take him to their kingdom (Doorpt Swangeanti).
More marginal underground worlds would include Charles de Fieux Mouhy’s Lamékis
ou les voyages extraordinaires d’un Egyptien dans la terre intérieure; avec la découverte de l’Isle des
Sylphides (1735–1738) where the interior world of the title is in fact a deep system of caves
into which the hero is lowered in a basket and where he encounters and battles the worm
men. Moreover, the first part of this sprawling fantastic novel includes some scenes set in the
catacombs beneath a temple in Egypt.
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U n d e r g ro u n d Wo r l d s
There are of course many explorations of an underworld without intelligent life, as in Jules
Verne’s celebrated Voyage au centre de la terre (1864). There, Lidenbrock and Axel descend into
an immense cavern (“capable of containing an ocean”) via an extinct volcano in Iceland
and are later expelled from a volcano in Sicily, which returns us to the cavities and channels
of Kircher’s Mundus Subterraneus. (Interestingly enough, in later editions of the novel, Verne
added a glimpse of a giant prehistoric man and his flock deep within the earth.)
The notion of the descent through caves and tunnels deep into the bowels of the earth is
well represented in the 1959 film version of Verne’s novel, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and
there is a whole category of accounts of explorations of caves and even drilling expeditions
that occasionally result in the discovery of some intelligent subterranean race, while in popu-
lar cinema this leads to monsters or uninhabited caverns. Similar to Verne’s novel (in the con-
text of the “lost world” genre, like the Arthur Conan Doyle novel of that name [1912], which
served as the model for numerous films), the Russian paleontologist Vladimir Obruchev’s
Plutonia (1915) is set in an underground area north of Alaska of rivers, lakes, volcanoes, and
strange vegetation, a world that has its own sun and is inhabited by monstrous animals and
primitive people. As the characters venture deeper into the underground area, they encounter
the animal and plant life of previous geological periods, all the way to dinosaurs and other
Jurassic species.
One of the best known examples of a race of intelligent beings living underground is that
of the vril-ya of Edward Bulwer Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871), which describes the narra-
tor’s discovery of a race of near supermen who fled the great Deluge and took refuge beneath
the Earth’s crust millennia earlier. But, of course, there are entire sub-genres of adventure
stories that include people living in caves (as in the prehistoric novel, epitomized in Jean
Auel’s “Earth’s Children” novels); or like the Africans set adrift in Tyssot’s Voyage de Groenland,
there are continuing narratives of people fleeing underground, beginning with novels deal-
ing with the survivors of the destruction of the mythical lands of Atlantis or Mu, or even lost
world novels like H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887), which is set beneath an extinct volcano in
North Africa.
A more modern example of this is the Gene Autry serial The Phantom Empire (1935). In this
entertaining six-hour science fiction Western, the inhabitants of Murania are descendants of
the lost tribe of Mu, who were forced underground in the “First Ice Age” 100,000 years ago,
and who now live in a fantastically advanced city (visually reminiscent of the futuristic city of
the film Metropolis [1927]) 25,000 feet below the surface.
The Hollow Earth

The most unusual and complex iteration of the world underground is that of the Hollow
Earth. Probably the earliest manifestation of this idea is Ludvig Holberg’s The Journey of Niels
Klim (1741), which recounts the adventures of Niels Klim after his fall through the Earth’s
crust into the center of the Earth where a solitary planet moves around a subterranean sun.
The first utopian part of his adventures is set on the planet Nazar, which is inhabited by vari-
ous species of intelligent and mobile trees. Later, Klim is banished to the “firmament,” the
underside of the Earth’s crust, to which he is carried by a giant bird. The crust is inhabited
by various strange creatures, including primitive humans. Klim eventually returns to Earth
when he falls into a hole. Thus, Holberg’s novel presents both types of the Hollow Earth—an
inhabited inner crust as well as a planet floating in the inner void at the center of the Earth.
There is no agreement about where Holberg got the idea of the Hollow Earth. There
was certainly speculation about the composition of the Earth, as in Athanasius Kircher’s
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Mundus Subterraneus or in Thomas Burnet’s The Sacred Theory of the Earth (1691), while some
have seen the origins of the hypothesis of a Hollow Earth in Edmund Halley’s “A Theory of
the Magnetic Variations,” a paper read to the Royal Society in 1691. Halley hypothesized that
the motion of the magnetic poles could be explained by positing a Hollow Earth in which
several concentric globes were turning coaxially. But the popularization of the idea comes
more than a century later, with John Cleves Symmes Jr’s 1818 “Circular No. 1,” in which he
declared that “the earth is hollow, and habitable within; containing a number of solid concen-
trick spheres, one within the other, and that it is open at the poles 12 or 16 degrees.”
Symmes’s ideas, however absurd they may seem today, have had an enormous influence
and are referred to in the writing of both Poe and Verne, for instance, and were championed
throughout the 19th century by an eccentric band of devotees. But even before Symmes’s
work, there were novels set in the Hollow Earth (most certainly inspired by Holberg). The
first of these is a fascinating and almost completely unknown work: the anonymous A Voyage
to the World in the Center of the Earth giving an Account of the Manners, Customs, Laws, Government
and Religion of the Inhabitants, their Persons and Habits described with several other Particulars. In
which is introduced the History of an Inhabitant of the Air, written by himself, with some Account of
the planetary Worlds (1755). Like Klim, the narrator falls through a hole while exploring the
crater of Mount Vesuvius and lands on an inhabited planet in the center of the earth. Unlike
Holberg’s world, however, there is no inner sun. Instead, the inner world is illuminated in a
doubly fanciful manner, since the inner planet is “enlightened by the concave Part of your
World, which is entirely cover’d with Jewels of different Sorts and immense Sizes. . . .” These
jewels reflect light onto the inner world, but this reflected light comes not from an inner sun,
or from light streaming through holes in the Earth’s crust, but from that inner planet itself.
Another Hollow Earth utopia is Giovanni Giacomo Casanova’s Icosaméron, ou Histoire
d’Edouard et d’Elisabeth qui passèrent quatre vingts ans chez les Mégamicres habitans aborigènes du
Protocosme dans l’intérieur de notre globe (1788), a sprawling, 1,700-page novel that describes the
adventures of a brother and sister (the Edouard and Elisabeth of the title) who join an arctic
exploration expedition. After their ship is caught in the Maelstrom, they are saved when they
are knocked into a lead chest that then sinks to the center of the Earth, passing through water,
air, and fire, landing finally in a river on what they come to realize is the inner crust of the
Earth with a sun floating in the center of the inner void. (The novel begins with a lengthy
exegesis of Genesis to defend the idea that there are people living inside the Earth.)
In Adam Seaborn’s Symzonia (1820, often mistakenly described as having been written by
Symmes himself), the inner world is reached by sailing over the edge (or the “verge” as he
calls it) at the South Pole, onto the concave inner surface of the Earth where the explorers
discover an internal continent (which, in honor of Symmes, they name Symzonia). Here, the
inner world is lit not by an internal sun but by the sun shining through the openings at the
poles. Like Symzonia, Jacques Collin de Plancy’s Voyage au centre de la terre (1821) is an attempt
to explain and defend the existence of an interior world.This relatively unknown work (more
fantastic adventure than utopia) begins with an explicit reference to Symmes, and includes
apparent borrowings from Holberg’s Niels Klim and from the geological theories of Edmund
Halley and Cotton Mather. The novel begins after a fishing expedition is stranded on the
island of Spitzberg and in their wanderings, they are violently sucked into the underworld by
a whirlwind.
Mary Lane’s utopian society of women (Mizora, 1890) is also set in the “inner world.” As
with so many of the works under consideration, the novel begins with a shipwreck in the
“Northern Seas” where the heroine is rescued by “Esquimaux.” After she sets off alone to
sail south, she is caught in a whirlpool, and after hours in a “semi-stupor, born of exhaustion
164
and terror,” she finds herself in a beautiful, “enchanted country” in the interior of the Earth.
Although the author explicitly refers to the society as set inside a “hollow sphere, bounded
North and South by impassable oceans,” the setting is of little importance and there is lit-
tle description of the subterranean world as a whole. There are, however, some rather vague
descriptions of the illumination of the inner world. Six months of the year, the primary
source of daylight is the sun, shining through the opening at the pole while, during the winter
months, light is provided by the Aurora Borealis.
Continuing into the 20th century, Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote seven novels set inside
the Earth, beginning with At the Earth’s Core (1922), which tells of the narrator and a friend
and a remarkable excavating machine. Burrowing some 500 miles into the Earth’s crust, they
emerge into the unknown interior world of Pellucidar situated on the internal surface of the
Earth (as in Symzonia). Pellucidar is inhabited by prehistoric creatures and dominated by a race
of intelligent flying reptiles who enslave and prey on the stone-age humans. Like Burroughs’s
Martian novels, the setting is the occasion for some fabulous adventures with some vague
scientific justification and little interest in depicting an alternative or more advanced society.
(The novel does herald a new method of exploring and penetrating the underworld—one
that has resurfaced in some recent popular films, for example, Rodney McDonald’s Deep
Core [2000].)
Fiction Versus Non-fiction

Of course, in presenting imaginary underground worlds, I have restricted myself to fictional
works, when in fact there are any number of works that argue for the existence of the Hollow
Earth, beginning with John Cleves Symmes Jr.’s 1818 “Circular No. 1.” Walter Kafton-Minkel’s
Subterranean Worlds: 100,000 years of dragons, dwarfs, the dead, lost races & UFOs from inside the
earth (1989) describes in detail many of these writers and their systems. As Kafton-Minkel’s
book makes clear, however much imagination the various theories of underground worlds
display, they are not meant to be seen as imaginary worlds, but as revealed truth, as in the case
of Cyrus Teed (The Cellular Cosmogony, or the Earth in a Concave Sphere, 1898) who declared
himself the Second Coming of Christ. And, as a quick search on the Internet will show, there
continue to be those who argue for the reality of the Hollow Earth. (See, for instance, the
online catalog of Health Research Books: http://www.healthresearchbooks.com.)
Willis George Emerson’s The Smoky God Or A Voyage to the Inner World (1908) is another
example of a book written by someone who believes in the Hollow Earth. It begins with
a preface in which the author wonders “whether it is possible that the world’s geography is
incomplete, and that the startling narrative . . . is predicated upon demonstrable facts.” Indeed,
the novel is larded with footnotes to accounts of polar explorers and sailors, as well as to
books of mythology and anthropology—but there is no reference to Symmes or to any other
book dealing with the Hollow Earth, although the author mentions some recent geographi-
cal speculation that there might be “a land inside the earth.” Repeating some of Casanova’s
arguments about God situating Eden within the Earth, he writes that “the world was cre-
ated by the Great Architect of the Universe, so that man might dwell upon its inside surface,
which has ever since been the habitation of the chosen.” The novel begins with a fishing trip
along the coast of Franz Josef Land in search of a land of legend “more beautiful than any that
mortal man had ever known . . . inhabited by the Chosen.” After a terrible storm, they find
themselves on a calm sea under a smoky red sun. In fact, they have sailed over the verge into
the inner world, where they encounter an electric boat filled with happy twelve-foot tall men
who take them to the city of Jehu, and later they are taken on an electric monorail to the
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capital city, Eden. There is only a brief description of the giants’ society: this is not a utopia,
but the description of paradise. It is also interesting to find again the notion of the inner Earth
as the original site of the Garden of Eden, a point which is emphasized here by the discovery
that “the language of the people of the Inner World is much like the Sanskrit.”
The other type of Hollow Earth text described by Kafton-Minkel is what might be called
the esoteric or occult, beginning with accounts in which the descent is an allegory of a spir-
itual journey as in John Uri Lloyd’s novel Etidorpha (1895).The hero is led by a cavern dweller
through a cave in Kentucky, but this long subterranean journey becomes an inner journey of
the spirit. There are also more explicit visions of secret underground societies, a tradition that
dates back at least to Madame Blavatsky (Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient
and Modern Science and Theology, 1877), and the Theosophists. These are accounts of the secret
“masters of the world” located in a hidden Tibetan valley, Shambhala (the Shangri-La of Frank
Capra’s 1937 film version of James Hilton’s Lost Horizon [1933]); or in the underground world
of Agharti, also located beneath Tibet. More local versions of these hidden masters (who are
often from outer space) can be found in the various legends centered around Mt. Shasta or
in the so-called “Shaver Mystery” stories popularized by Ray Palmer in the pages of Amazing
Stories in the 1940s. All of these occult systems are described at length in Kafton-Minkel, as are
the strange links between Hollow Earth schemes and the Nazis (described as well in Joscelyn
Godwin’s Arktos:The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival [1993]). And of course,
connected to the holes in the poles are the ongoing debates about what Richard Byrd may or
may not have seen when he flew over the South Pole in 1928. But these conspiracy theories
and esoteric philosophies take us away from the realm of explicitly fictional constructions of
an underground world.
Built Worlds Versus Found Worlds

Thus far, the inner worlds under consideration, whether located in caves or in some Hollow
Earth, were for the most part “natural,” with only minimal human intervention or technolog-
ical development. In Tyssot de Patot’s Voyage de Groenland, while the caves are not very deep
(the cave dwellers go out to hunt, for instance), there are actual cities and the caverns have
been hollowed out over time. And in Paltock’s Peter Wilkins we read that the cave dwellers
“were forced to inhabit the Rocks, from an utter Incapacity of providing Shelter elsewhere,
having no Tool that would either cut down Timber for an Habitation, or dig up the Earth for
a Fence, or Materials to make one: But they had a Liquor that would dissolve the Rock itself
into Habitations.” The most advanced cave dwellings are to be found in The Coming Race,
where there are “lamp lit roads” for example, as well as buildings, books, and “automata” and
even flying machines. But all the technologies and machineries of the Vril-ya reside in their
mental domination over nature rather than in technology per se, in the electrical properties of
Vril, which “is capable of being raised and disciplined into the mightiest agency over all forms
of matter, animate or inanimate.”
As for an actual constructed underground world, an early example is found in H. G. Wells’s
The Time Machine (1895) in which the Time Traveler goes into the future (to the year 802,701)
to discover that the class divisions of his time have led to a gradual division of the human
race into two types, the effete descendants of the ruling class, the Eloi, and their servants, the
brutish Morlocks who live beneath the surface where they mind the machines (and who
feed on the Eloi in a perverse reversal of the class struggle). (There are several film versions
[1960, 2002] that give a limited view of the dark machine domain of the Morlocks.) Although
situated beneath the surface, the Morlocks’ dark realm is not truly an underground world,
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resembling rather the crypts and catacombs of so many novels, like the hidden city beneath
the Egyptian temples of Fieux de Mouhy’s Lamékis. And there are the underground rituals
to be found in Jean Terrasson’s Sethos: histoire ou vie, tirée des monumens anecdotes de l’ancienne
Egypte, traduite d’un manuscrit grec (1767), which for some time was considered a source for
Masonic rituals and ideas, although it is now agreed that Terrasson took the rituals of the
Freemasons, already popular in the France of his day, and projected them backward into his
imaginary Egyptian mystery cult. This type of underground setting for cults and strange ritu-
als continues to the present as in Stephen Baxter’s repurposing of the Roman catacombs in
his novel Coalescent (2003).
The most obvious constructed underground world is that of the bomb shelter and the
larger theme of humanity’s flight underground after a nuclear war. A good example of this is
Harlan Ellison’s story cycle “A Boy and His Dog” and L. Q. Jones’s film version (1975) where
the hero and his dog roam a post-holocaust wasteland before discovering “Downunder,” a
society located in a large underground vault with an artificial biosphere, complete with forests
and underground cities. Philip K. Dick’s The Penultimate Truth (1964) is set in a future where
the bulk of humanity lives in large underground shelters, believing that World War III is still
raging above their heads, although in reality the war ended years before. Unable to exist in
the atmosphere created by robot war, vast “ant tanks” are constructed underground to save
the diminishing human population while the government remains on the surface. When the
war does eventually end, the elite decide to keep the wealth of the Earth for themselves.They
live in immense villas on private parks, in a newly green and almost deserted Earth while
most of the population remains underground in miserable conditions, believing that the war
is continuing above ground. And the robots that they build to fight the war are used by the
elite on the surface as personal servants. There is a similar flight underground in The Matrix
films where the humans, realizing that they were losing the war with the Machines, began the
construction of an underground city (Zion) to preserve the human race. The idea of fleeing
to an underground world after a holocaust can be found in a number of young adult novels
as well, including Suzanne Martel’s Quatre Montréalais en l’an 3000 (The City Under Ground,
1963), Helen Mary Hoover’s This Time of Darkness (1980), and more recently Jeanne DuPrau’s
The City of Ember (2003), all of which portray societies set underground that were established
to escape a post-holocaust Earth.
Conclusion
The imagination of underground worlds differs from most of the other types of imagi-
nary worlds described in this book, first of all because in most cases, there, worlds are found
rather than built, whether it is a Hollow Earth world discovered by a visitor from the surface
(Holberg, Casanova, Symzonia, etc.), or a cave world to which people have fled (like Bulwer-
Lytton’s Vril-ya or the inhabitants of Murania in The Phantom Empire). There are some 20th-
century exceptions following from the idea of the fallout shelter, although one could also
include E. M. Forster’s dystopian short story “The Machine Stops” (1909). In Forster’s fearful
response to a rapidly developing modern world, people no longer live on the surface of the
Earth but underground in cells, with all bodily and spiritual needs met by the omnipotent,
global Machine, separated from each other, connected only via the mechanical threads of
the Machine.
But as this latter example suggests, a second difference between the underground world and
other types of imagined worlds lies in the fact that the former are almost always settings rather
than the purpose or subject of the fiction. It is irrelevant that Forster’s world is underground;
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Peter Fitting
the story calls attention to the isolation and stultification of humans in a world given over
to technology, and the hero’s trip to the surface is a rebellious return to a natural, real world.
These worlds are not so much interesting in themselves, but as backgrounds—for utopias and/
or social satire (as in Klim’s adventures in the underworld), or as in E. R. Burroughs—a place
whose mystery and unfamiliarity allows for a series of fantastic adventures. The difference
between an imaginary world that is merely the setting for something else and those worlds
whose description is an end in itself can be seen by contrasting the Mars of the John Carter
novels with the terraforming of Mars in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy (1993–1996),
which is described in careful detail and might be said to be the subject of the three novels (as
much as is the gradual emergence of alternative societies).
The need to turn to science fiction to find an example of human agency in an imaginary
world points to the third difference between the underground and other types of imaginary
worlds discussed in this volume, namely the lack of attention paid to the practical physi-
cal details of the world. This situation is well expressed by Wells’s Time Traveler in The Time
Machine, when he pleads ignorance about the mechanical workings of the future world: “And
here I must admit that I learned very little of drains and bells and modes of conveyance, and
the like conveniences, during my time in this real future.”While attention is paid to the social
and political in some of the utopias set underground, we learn little of the practical side of
things in these subterranean worlds.
As this brief survey has shown, even though the idea of life inside the earth is generally
considered to be no more scientifically plausible than life on the moon, it still flourishes in
fiction and film, and in conspiracy and occult theories. Robin Cook’s novel, Abduction (2000),
for instance, expands on the acknowledged gap between the Earth’s crust and the Earth’s
mantle (known as the “Mohorovicic discontinuity”) to imagine that an advanced human civi-
lization took refuge there millions of years ago to avoid the sterilizing effects of a prolonged
meteor shower. Even less concerned with plausibility, James Rollins’s Subterranean (1999)
describes a vast underground civilization beneath the continent of Antarctica—a continent
that, however remote and unfriendly, can hardly be described as uncharted or unexplored.
Rudy Rucker’s Hollow Earth (2006) is a pastiche based on Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon
Pym in which Reynolds and the young Edgar go to the South Pole to search for Symmes’s
opening.What follows is a fantastic and rowdy voyage through the inner world that makes no
attempt at plausibility, while emphasizing the burlesque and the morbid.
References
Collier, Katharine Brownell, Cosmogonies of Our Fathers: Some Theories of the Seventeenth and the Eighteenth
Centuries, New York: Columbia University Press, 1934.
Kafton-Minkel,Walter, Subterranean Worlds: 100,000 Years of Dragons, Dwarfs, the Dead, Lost Races & UFOs
from inside the Earth, Port Townsend, Washington: Loompanics Unlimited, 1989.
Poe, Edgar Allan, The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, New York: Modern Library, 1938.
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21
Planets
The creation of planets is perhaps the most literal form of world-building that takes place in
fiction. They are physical embodiments of Mark J. P. Wolf ’s assertion that worlds “often exist
to support the stories set in them” and have stories embedded in them (2012: 29). Typically
seen in science fiction, but also common in fantasy, planets can be some of the most success-
ful and some of the biggest failures in world-building. The reason for this is the real-world
complexity of planets. Earth alone has five different environments, called biomes, divided
between aquatic, forests, deserts, grasslands, and tundra. Each of these has different subtypes
based on where on the planet it is located; the forests of Scandinavia are significantly dif-
ferent from the forests of the Amazon in terms of flora, fauna, and weather patterns. This
complexity extends beyond Earth, though knowledge of other planets is limited by technol-
ogy; in the 1968 collection Farewell, Fantastic Venus! (Aldiss and Harrison 1971), each story
in the collection posits a completely different version of Venus, some of which speculated
that it was simply a hotter version of Earth. All of them proved to be completely incorrect;
however, the collection should not be considered a failure, as it did attempt to imagine dif-
ferent but still probable versions of V enus. This chapter will examine a number of planets to
try to identify the elements of successful and unsuccessful planet-building, and attempt to
understand why some world-builders are more successful than others in their attempts at
imagining other worlds.
The first question in planet-building should focus on complexity; with the exception of
planets in extreme circumstances, it must be presumed that a planet of sufficient mass should
have different climates and biomes.This presumption makes certain science fiction texts, such
as the Star Wars film series (1977–present), appear lazy and incomplete. Star Wars has three
worlds that appear to have a single biome: the desert planet of Tattoine in A New Hope (1977),
The Phantom Menace (1999), and The Attack of the Clones (2002); the ice planet of Hoth in The
Empire Strikes Back (1980); and the forest moon of Endor in The Return of the Jedi (1983). It
is their identification as planet-wide ecologies that raises disbelief; had the series referred to
these as the desert, ice, and forest regions of Tattoine, Hoth, and Endor, these planets would be
somewhat more believable. And while Tattoine has two suns, it is difficult to believe that even
the polar regions are Sahara-like deserts, though they could be Antarctic deserts. Complexity,
then, will help to create planets that are believable to the audience.
Three fine examples of single biome planets are Gethen, also called Winter, in Ursula Le
Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Anarres in Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), and
Arrakis in Frank Herbert’s Dune series (1965–2016). In the former, Le Guin crafts a world
going through a massive ice age, such that all areas of the planet are in a permanent state of
winter. Frederic Jameson (1975) suggests Le Guin uses:
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a principle of systematic exclusion, a kind of surgical excision of empirical reality,

something like a process of ontological attenuation in which the sheer teeming
multiplicity of what exists, of what we call reality, is deliberately thinned and weeded
out through an operation of radical abstraction and simplification which we will
henceforth term world-reduction.
(1975: 223)
This “world-reduction” could be understood not only for the function of focusing the
reader on the intriguing gender dynamics of Gethen, inhabited by a race of androgynes,
but also for the sheer practical purpose of describing an alien world without devoting the
entire novel to it. Jameson describes Le Guin’s non-inclusion of animals and insects on
Gethen as a method of world-reduction, and simultaneously historical world-building, as
it implies there is no natural life on Gethen and the inhabitants are a forgotten colony or
experiment (1975: 223–224). Thus, world-reduction, while reducing the amount of infor-
mation that needs to be included in the text, does not necessarily reduce the complexity
of the world. Similarly, Anarres in The Dispossessed is a largely barren moon, which the
Anarresti work hard to make liveable. However, the barrenness of Anarres is understood
by the inhabitants:
In the previous geological era the Dust had been an immense forest of holums, the
ubiquitous, dominant plant genus of Anarres. The current climate was hotter and
drier. Millennia of drought had killed the trees and dried the soil to a fine grey dust
that now rose up on every wind, forming hills as pure of line and barren as any
sand dune.
(Le Guin, 1974: 59)
Unlike Tattoine, Anarres is understandably barren. However, the Anarresti are working against
it:“[The Anarresti] saw what they had done.There was a mist of green, very faint, on the pallid
curves and terraces of the desert. On the dead land lay, very lightly, a veil of life” (67). These
notions of natural geological change and terraforming add to Anarres’s complexity; it is more
than a simple desert, it is a history.
Herbert’s Dune series is arguably one of the most complex ecologies in science fiction.
At first presented as a barren desert, it is home to the Spice Melange, a substance that allows
prescience, long life, and, crucially, space travel. The Melange is connected to the sandworms
of Arrakis, terrifying creatures that sense movement on the sands of Arrakis and devour
anyone unlucky enough to be caught in their path. In the first novel, Dune (1965), the plan-
etologist Liet Kynes is attempting to restore plant life to Arrakis; however, by Children of Dune
(1976), it is revealed there is a symbiotic relationship between sandworms, Melange, water,
and the desert. Specifically, sandtrout—juvenile sandworms—excrete fungus that interacts
with water to create pre-spice masses, which then explode and turn into Spice Melange.
Sandtrout also serve to isolate bodies of water to help create deserts, as sandworms are killed
by water. Between Children of Dune (1976) and God-Emperor of Dune (1981), the sandtrout
are drawn out of the planet surface by Leto II, to become part of his quasi-sandworm body,
which transforms Arrakis into a pastoral paradise. Upon his death in a river, the sandtrout are
released, and Arrakis is once again on the path to becoming a great desert. This complicated
relationship between different elements of the planet is world-building of the highest order;
Arrakis’s state, whether as a desert with plentiful Melange, or as Leto II’s lush paradise where
Melange is rare and immensely valuable, has an intergalactic effect on space travel and politi-
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Planets
cal power. Unlike Tattoine, Arrakis’s ecological history is as important as the people living on
it, if not more.
Like Star Wars, Star Trek (1966–present) is known for its visual planet-building, with The
Original Series (1966–1969) famous for monochrome planets appearing next to The Enterprise.
However, as the recent remastering of the series shows, this is perhaps indicative of technol-
ogy rather than intent; the bizarrely coloured planets of the series have been replaced with
opulent oceans, clouds, and landmasses. However, the series can be confusing in terms of
planets, particularly in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), in which the planet Ceti Alpha
V is mistaken for the destroyed Ceti Alpha VI. As planets are traditionally numbered outwards
from the sun, the destruction of the sixth planet should not affect the numbering of the fifth.
In addition, the mysterious “explosion” of Ceti Alpha VI, while effective for turning Ceti
Alpha V into a barren wasteland, is inexplicable to the audience. This is a prime example of
narrative overwhelming world-building, as Khan’s thirst for revenge only makes sense in light
of the horror of living on Ceti Alpha V. This sacrifice of world-building in favor of story is
relatively common in Star Trek: in the pilot of Star Trek:Voyager, “Caretaker” (1995), the planet
Ocampa is a desert planet.The explanation given is that the titular Caretaker had accidentally
destroyed the planet’s ability to create clouds by scanning it; while this does create the circum-
stances for the premise of the series, it is a bizarre explanation, apparently purely for the sake
of creating a barren planet in need of protection. However, Star Trek is apparently somewhat
aware of the complexity of planets, as in the Genesis planet in Star Trek III:The Search for Spock
(1984). Genesis is a planet of overwhelming complexity, with multiple biomes existing in
small areas. The speed with which it is created and ultimately collapses upon itself is not only
a judgment against scientific hubris, as an unstable substance was used to create it, but also a
healthy respect for the natural history of planets. Genesis is an impossible planet: thus, while
planets should be at least somewhat complex in Star Trek, building them is deemed impossible.
In Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1978–2005), planet-building is not
only possible, but so popular that an industry based on it bankrupts the galaxy. As I discussed
in “Destroying Arcadia: The Construction and Deconstruction of Earth in The Hitchhiker’s
Guide to the Galaxy” in Revisiting Imaginary Worlds: A Subcreation Studies Anthology (2017), the
purpose of this literal world-building functions to destabilize and question concepts of sup-
posedly natural landscapes. Arthur Dent’s preconceived notions about the universe, which
are already altered by his experiences since the destruction of Earth, are completely shat-
tered by the revelation that Earth itself is a construction (Adams, 2003: 21–83). However, this
uncertainty about the naturalness of landscape extends far beyond Earth, as it is impossible to
know which planets in the series were built by the Magratheans, and which formed naturally.
Planets, then, lack the history inherent in Anarres and Arrakis; Slartibartfast’s pride in creating
and winning awards for fjords further reinforces this lack of history; while Earth is a computer
with a six-billion-year program, it can be rebuilt to any point in its history. Geological history
then becomes meaningless in the face of the relative ease of planet-building. The existence of
the alternate Earths seen in Mostly Harmless (1992), from NowWhat to the final Earth Arthur
visits before they are all destroyed, further destabilizes the solidity of planets. In the Hitchhiker’s
subcreation, the very ground under their feet is inherently unreliable.
Perhaps one of the most interesting attempts at planetary world-building in recent years
is Pandora in James Cameron’s Avatar (2009). Despite a simplistic plot that closely resembles
Pocahontas (1995) and the preposterously named mineral “unobtanium,” Pandora is a richly
imagined subcreation, with the ability of all species to connect with each other and the planet
a fascinating experiment in alternate evolution. Pandora is a moon quite literally packed
with life, much of it dangerous in some way to humans, with even the air toxic to them.
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Far from the beautiful if static matte paintings of Star Trek, and the alien worlds of Stargate
SG-1 (1997–2007), which largely resemble the woods near Vancouver, Canada, Pandora is a
fully imagined other world, whose laws differ so far from Earth’s that islands can float in the
sky. However, Pandora is still rather anthropocentric; the native Na’vi look like large blue
humans with odd ears, and the animals are all similar to real world creatures such as wolves or
birds, albeit on a much larger scale.
Pitch Black (2000), The Chronicles of Riddick (2004), and Riddick (2013) are all films that
explore planetary world-building, but while their sentient inhabitants are all similar to
humans—which could be presumed to be the result of a massive colonization effort from
Earth—their landscapes and non-sentient inhabitants are far more interesting. In Pitch Black,
the planet on which the crew and passengers of the Hunter-Gratzner are stranded is another
desert world; however, this one has three suns of varying intensity and experiences darkness
only once every twenty-two years. However, Pitch Black, as well as its sequels, does operate
against what could be called sensible world-building.The creatures in Pitch Black only emerge
in darkness; for a species that evolved on a planet of near constant light, this seems unlikely,
though it does hint perhaps at a significant subterranean ecosystem not explored in the series.
More extreme is the prison planet Crematoria in The Chronicles of Riddick, which at night
reaches the extreme temperature of -295ºF (-182ºC)—an impossibly low temperature since
absolute zero is -273 ºF—and in daylight rises to 702ºF (372ºC), almost literally setting the
surface on fire, and immolating anyone unlucky enough to go out in daylight. This bizarre
planet is an ideal prison, and gives Riddick and his companions the opportunity to “outrun
the sunrise,” moving in the survivable space between night and day. However, it is Riddick
that returns to investigating alternate ecosystems; once stranded on a barren region of an
uninhabited planet, Riddick discovers two predatory species. The first is a pack of dog-like
creatures that can apparently be tamed. The second is a race of creatures that appear to be a
cross between a scorpion and a velociraptor; like the creatures of Pitch Black, they are limited
in their movements, requiring heavy rain for the majority to become active and become a
threat. While somewhat unlikely in its execution, the Riddick series at least attempts to con-
nect biological evolution with planetary conditions, and makes an attempt at demonstrating
truly unique alien life.
From these examples, it can be determined that successful planetary world-building
requires complexity, some reasonable attention to scientific details, and, perhaps most
importantly, time and effort spent on understanding how an alien world will affect its
inhabitants. However, planets in world-building need not only take place on other worlds;
reimagining Earth is as much planet world-building as designing alien worlds. Perhaps one
of the best known examples is Planet of the Apes (1968); the film’s title and the opening
crash of the astronauts serve to fool both the viewer and Charlton Heston’s George Taylor
that he has landed on another world. Human cities are long gone, replaced by the apes’
primitive structures, so there is none of the typical signifiers of Earth present. The result of
this is that the final vision of the half-buried Statue of Liberty is shocking to both Taylor
and the viewer, and the entire film must be reevaluated and reexamined in this new frame-
work. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014), shows how the landscape of Earth changed,
with the death of most of humanity and the natural landscapes of Earth reclaiming the
cities. A similar effect can be seen in Futurama’s “The Late Philip J. Fry” (2010), in which
Fry, Bender, and the Professor find themselves in a time machine that can only travel into
the future. They move through various future versions of New New York, beginning with
a salute to Planet of the Apes, in which humans, apes, birds, cows, and slug-like creatures all
destroyed their own societies in the same way, depicted by multiple half-buried Statues of
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Planets
Liberty lined up in a row. This is followed by an ice age landscape, a return to medieval
landscapes and buildings, an oceanic landscape with giant carnivorous shrimp, another
medieval landscape ruled by giraffes, a Wellsian future society terrorized by “Dumlocks,” a
Terminator (1984)-inspired landscape filled with human skulls, a pastoral idyll with scant-
ily clad genius female scientists, and finally a barren, lifeless surface scorched bare by the
expanding sun. From this and Planet of the Apes, planet-building on Earth will always have
a chronological aspect; time travel texts that remain on Earth must invariably engage with
Deep Time, with changes not only in vegetation and buildings, but also in mountains, riv-
ers, and even tectonic plates.
Planets are most often linked with science fiction world-building, but they can also be
present in fantasy texts. Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Death Gate Cycle (1990–1995)
describes a series of worlds made out of a fractured Earth, none of which is self-sufficient.
Chelestra, the world of water, intended for general habitation, consists of islands that float in a
never-ending sea of breathable water; Arianus is the world of air, intended to act as a massive
manufacturing plant; Pryan is the world of fire, a massive shell surrounding four small suns,
intended as the power plant for all worlds; Abarrach is the world of stone, intended as a source
of minerals; finally, the Labyrinth is intended as a prison planet for a race of superhumans
known as the Patryn. The sundering of Earth into these worlds was intended to protect the
elves, humans, and dwarves from the ostensibly negative influence of the Patryn. However,
these worlds are all dependent on each other; without energy from Pryan, Abarrach is toxic,
Chelestra freezes, and Arianus cannot pump water to the upper islands. Pryan falls because
the superhuman Sartan from Abarrach use necromancy to unwittingly kill the Sartan in other
worlds, causing the power plants of Pryan to become unmanned. This deconstruction of
Earth, an attempt to make a whole into its parts and still force it to work, is a commentary on
the arrogance of the Sartans; they believe they can, by force of magic, create a better version
of the universe, one that only they can rule magnanimously.This fracturing opens the door to
the serpents of Chelestra, powerful magical creatures who seek to encourage war. However,
ultimately the Death Gate Cycle is a text about the need for natural balances and working
together as the dragons of Pryan also come into being and seek to encourage peace.The exact
physical relationship of these worlds to each other is never clear: they could exist at different
points on the same orbit Earth once held, or in different dimensions.The nonsensical appear-
ance of these worlds would be out of place in science fiction, but fantasy has the freedom to
recreate scientific laws, as can be seen in perhaps the most unique fantasy planet ever created:
the Discworld (1983–2015).
Terry Pratchett’s Discworld is a flat disc, lying on the back of four elephants, who in turn
stand on the back of the Great A’Tuin, a giant space turtle. The reason this world can exist
is because it is run by magic; however, Pratchett’s 1981 novel Strata, published two years
before The Colour of Magic (1983), shows the possibility of a science fictional Discworld, an
inside joke by the creators of the universe, similar to Slartibartfast’s signature in a glacier in
Norway. The Discworld of the novel series is, by comparison, a magical world, but it does
have certain laws that help it to make some sense. Even from The Colour of Magic (1985),
Pratchett introduces the Counterweight Continent, which has the same mass as the rest
of the landmasses put together; this helps explain the map of Discworld, in which almost
all the land is clustered to one side of the Disc, with a relatively small continent on the
other side somehow creating a balance. The Disc also has its own sun and moon orbiting it,
and, as can be seen in The Light Fantastic (1986) by the panic when it appears to be flying
straight into a red star, the inhabitants are used to a moving field of stars, as long as they
do not get too close. In fact, the refusal of the Omnians in Small Gods (1992) to believe in
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the Great A’Tuin is seen by the rest of the Disc as the height of ignorance; for the people
of Discworld, it makes perfect sense that they are flying through space on four elephants
and a turtle. It is fitting that the eight planets that circle the red star are revealed to be eight
Discworld eggs; they are fantastic and impossible worlds that emerge from normal plan-
ets. This can be seen as almost a premonition of how the Discworld would function as a
reflection of the Primary World: Ankh-Morpork could be equated with an early industrial
age London; Fourecks in The Last Continent (1998), with its plethora of deadly creatures,
is clearly an analogue of Australia; finally, The Truth (2000), Snuff (2011), and Raising Steam
(2013) show the emergence of Discworld’s culture from medievalism/Renaissance level to
true industrialization. In the final novel, The Shepherd’s Crown (2015), the coming of the
railways to the Ramtop mountains and their surroundings is not only a sign of industriali-
zation, but also the end of a certain age of magic; in this new land of iron, the elves, a staple
of the Ramtops, will be driven away for good. This interaction with the Primary World
finds its height in the The Science of Discworld (1999–2014) series, in which the wizards
create “Roundworld,” a bizarre planet that simply drifts through space without the aid of
a turtle. Working with Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, Pratchett used Roundworld to help
explain the scientific history of Earth’s formation and development. So not only does the
Primary World shape the Discworld, but the Discworld can demonstrate the nature of the
Primary World in an entertaining manner.
There are many other fantasy planets, such as Le Guin’s Earthsea; however, the Death Gate
Cycle and Discworld both serve to demonstrate a particular requirement of such planets: while
they need not be possible in the Primary World, or, indeed, in science fictional subcreations,
they should still make sense in their own way, and have the consistency Wolf identifies as a
core element of world-building (2012: 43). This is why Pratchett could claim the Discworld
runs on Narrativium; as his narratives do, generally, make sense, the Discworld does too.This is
shy of the requirement in science fiction in which the world must make sense on some level
of scientific thinking. Two exceptions to this are Hitchhiker’s and Futurama; however, they are
mitigated by also being comedy texts and needing to follow a second requirement: making
the audience laugh. Thus, the 2005 Hitchhiker’s film is able to feature square, donut, and ring-
shaped planets in the Magrathean showrooms, and Futurama can reference H. G. Wells’s The
Time Machine (1895) alongside Planet of the Apes.
So what defines a successful approach to planets and planet design? While world-reduction,
as seen in Le Guin, can be helpful, the popularity of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars series
(1993–1996), which charts the colonization and terraforming of Mars over two centuries in
detail, implies a readership who wants to engage with more detailed planet-building.The best
course, it seems, should be one of research, particularly when attempting to describe Earth in
a different epoch. Wolf ’s differentiation between world-building and storytelling suggests the
best planetary world-building is not necessarily seen in the text (2012: 29). To overload the
reader with too much detail about a world would render the text dry and flat; Le Guin tells
the reader about the desertification of Anarres because the protagonist, Shevek, is conscripted
to help reverse the process. In Dune, the nature of Arrakis is politically important, and so its
inclusion in the text is necessary. However, in Avatar, an explanation of the evolution of the
interconnected consciousness on Pandora would disrupt the flow of the narrative of the film.
Such world-building, in novels at least, is often contained in Appendices or other supple-
mentary material, such as maps. Ultimately though, the success of planets in fiction, and the
audience’s willingness to believe in them, depends on the consistency of the planets’ laws and
their applications.
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Planets
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Adams, D. (2003), The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:The Original Radio Scripts, G. Perkins, ed, London:
Pan Macmillan.
Aldiss, B.W. and Harrison, H., eds (1971) Farewell, Fantastic Venus!, London: Grafton.
Avatar (2009) [film] Hollywood: James Cameron.
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Harwood-Smith, J. (2017) “Destroying Arcadia: The Construction and Deconstruction of Earth in The
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” in M. J. P. Wolf, ed, Revisiting Imaginary Worlds: A Subcreation Studies
Anthology, London: Routledge.
Herbert, F. (1965) Dune, Philadelphia: Chilton Company.
Herbert, F. (1976) Children of Dune, New York: Putnam.
Herbert, F. (1981) God-Emperor of Dune, New York: Putnam.
Jameson, F. (1975) World-Reduction in Le Guin: The Emergence of Utopian Narrative. Science Fiction
Studies, [online] Volume 2(3), pp. 221-230. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4238971
[Accessed 30 Aug. 2016].
“The Late Philip J. Fry” (2010) [television] Futurama, Series 7, Episode 7, 20th Century Fox Television,
29 July.
Le Guin, U.K. (1969) The Left Hand of Darkness, New York: Ace Books.
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Pocahontas (1995) [film] Hollywood: Walt Disney Pictures.
Pratchett, T. (1981) Strata, New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Pratchett, T. (1983) The Colour of Magic, Buckinghamshire: Colin Smythe.
Pratchett, T. (1986) The Light Fantatstic, Buckinghamshire: Colin Smythe.
Pratchett, T. (1992) Small Gods, London:Victor Gollancz.
Pratchett, T. (1998) The Last Continent, London: Doubleday.
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Pratchett, T. (2011) Snuff, London: Doubleday.
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22
Utopias and Dystopias
Peter Sands
Utopias and dystopias are always imaginary worlds, for they do not exist anywhere in
actuality. But they are not merely expressions of perfection or horror, in spite of common
usage (Sargent, 1994, p. 6). They are imagined alternatives to the author’s present, either pre-
senting a positive or negative commentary on society. One of the most commonly accepted
definitions of utopia is that it is “a non-existent society described in considerable detail
and normally located in time and space” (Sargent, 1994, p. 9). In other words, a utopia is an
imaginary world presented in narrative form and located in a when or a where in relation
to the reader. Another definition more specific to fiction is that “a literary utopia is a fairly
detailed description of an imaginary community, society, or world—a ‘fiction’ that encour-
ages readers to experience vicariously a culture that represents a prescriptive, normative
alternative to their own culture” (Roemer, 1981, p. 3). Utopias can describe either a different
and better way of being in the world (utopia or eutopia) or a worse world extrapolated from
consequences of the poor choices being made in the author’s time (dystopia). But they are
not necessarily reflections of ideals or perfection; utopias are as flawed as any other human
creation, no matter the level of detail they involve or the likelihood that their prescriptions
and proscriptions might actually come to be. Even those utopias that spawned actual social
movements or attempts to put into practice the author’s vision, such as the 19th-century
utopian communities called phalanxes after the plans of Charles Fourier, or the Bellamy
Clubs that arose around the United States after the publication of Edward Bellamy’s Looking
Backward (1888), were as flawed as any other engineered human society. What really dis-
tinguishes the utopia and dystopia from other forms of utopianism or “social dreaming”
(Sargent, 1994, p. 1) is that utopia and dystopia come to us as stories; they are “in the first
place a piece of fiction” or imaginary world that reflects on the author’s own society or
world (Kumar, 1991, p. 20).
Society—government, politics, regulation, ideology, all the activities and concepts that
characterize people living in community—is the heart of the utopian enterprise. As Ernst
Bloch showed in his magisterial study of all forms of utopia, Principle of Hope (1986), utopian-
ism includes various forms of intensely personal dreams, but the utopia—the written, detailed,
imagined alternative to the present—is necessarily about society rather than the individual,
and exists on a continuum from those personal, abstract dreams to the concrete public and
political action in the world (Bloch, 1986: 3–18; Levitas, 1990: 1; Levitas, 2003: 3). Utopianism
encompasses the dreams and daydreams of the individual as well as the formal, fictionalized
dream of the complete alternative; it expresses a longing or desire for an alternative. But
utopias and dystopias are a particular, narrative expression of that longing or desire. As Darko
Suvin wrote, utopias are “a discourse about a particular historically alternative and better
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community” that is isolated either in space or time and presents an “anatomy” of society to
fully outline the alternative (Suvin, 1988, pp. 39–40).
The sections that follow selectively survey utopias and dystopia, including some of their
sub-genres, and concentrating mostly on English-language literary utopias. It is not pos-
sible to be comprehensive. Even dating the genre from the publication of Thomas More’s
Utopia (1516), the list of utopias is so extensive as to preclude full discussion: by 1988, Lyman
Tower Sargent, the field’s preeminent bibliographer, listed around 3,200 titles in his British and
American Utopian Literature, 1516–1985. Since then, his list has expanded and become search-
able online, including English-language texts from around the world (Sargent, 2016). Many
scholars would argue as well for the inclusion of works from before More named the genre.
Doing this is beyond the scope of this chapter.
Utopias
Forms of utopia appear in nearly every epoch of literary history, if one extends the defini-
tion to religious works about Heaven and Hell or Edenic spaces, folk fantasies about lands of
plenty such as Cockaigne, or stories of nonexistent cities such as Atlantis, which Plato wrote
about in Timaeus and Critias. Others point to representations of ideal cities and states, such as
Plato wrote about in The Republic and The Laws. Some scholars do not necessarily consider
those earlier works to be utopias, but only expressions of utopianism. Krishan Kumar, for
example, and others reserve “utopia” for works that come after and are generically influenced
by Utopia (1516), a work by Thomas More, an English lawyer and Lord High Chancellor of
England from 1529 to 1532. It was written in Latin and translated into English only after
More’s death. Utopia gives the genre its name and its most significant generic features: travel to
another place; a dialogue between traveler and resident about the features of the other place;
implied and sometimes direct comparison to the traveler’s home country, which is also the
country of the reading audience. It also gives the lie to the notion that utopia = perfect, as
its alternative to More’s Tudor England includes slavery, capital punishment, and a significant
divide between social and economic classes, among other features not likely to appeal to
today’s readers.
Utopian fiction has been particularly important in the literary history of the United
States, itself a country born from the imagination of another, possible world, and in which
more science fiction and utopian literature appeared than in other countries, particularly
during the genre’s heyday in the 19th century (Clareson, 1985, p. 103ff ). The first American
utopia is generally acknowledged to be John Cleves Symmes’s Symzonia (1820), a hollow-
earth tale that is one of the sources for Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of
Nantucket (1838). The first known utopia by a woman writer in the United States is Mary
Griffith’s Three Hundred Years Hence (1836), a story of the evolution of the U.S. from the
Revolutionary period into the future, which includes much commentary on public health
issues, transportation, industry and agriculture, and the crucial role of public education in
bringing about gender and class equality. Toward the middle of the 19th century, a great deal
of utopian fiction appeared, alongside hundreds of utopian social experiments. And the last
decades of the 19th century saw a great flowering of utopias and utopianism in the U.S.,
with an uptick in the number of communitarian living experiments and about one new
novel a year up to 1888. Between 1886 and 1896, there were over one hundred new utopian
works, according to Jean Pfaelzer (1983, p. 114). This is often represented through stud-
ies of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) and its sequel Equality (1897); Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852)—loosely based on his experiences living in a
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U t o p i a s a n d Dy s t o p i a s
commune at Brook Farm in Massachusetts; William Dean Howells’s A Traveler from Altruria
(1894); and the frequently appearing short fiction in the popular press and literary journals.
By the early 20th century, Charlotte Perkins Gilman was well into both her utopian short
fiction and a trilogy of utopian novels, Moving the Mountain (1911), Herland (1915), and With
Her in Ourland (1916). The first is an imagined future United States characterized by gender
equality, the second is a gynotopia or imagined world populated only by women, and the
third moves the action from the gynotopia to the United States and Europe, then back to
Herland, to explicitly contrast the peaceful women’s world of Herland with Gilman’s lived
reality. Around the same time, Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908) explores socialist revolu-
tion. A significant body of non-U.S. utopias appears as well from the 19th through the 20th
century, including works by H. G. Wells such as A Modern Utopia (1905) and The Shape of
Things to Come (1933); William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), a response to Bellamy;
as well as others.
Feminist and Ecotopian Fictions

Two important subgenres of utopia are feminist utopias and ecotopias, coming into promi-
nence in the genre at roughly the same time in the 1960s and 1970s, and often having over-
lapping themes regarding gender and class equality, the relationship of humans to the rest
of the natural world, and social organizations presented as alternatives to masculinist modes
characterized by relationships of dominance and aggression.
Feminist utopias imagine alternative worlds characterized by gender and class equality—
often brought about by improvements to and rationalization of education and economic sys-
tems. Some feminist utopias explore or extrapolate the consequence of the separation of men
and women into completely separate spheres. Such female-centered utopias are sometimes
called gynotopias; male equivalents, much more rare, such as the Jack London story “The
Strange Experience of a Misogynist” (1897), are called androtopias.
Particularly in the 19th century, feminist or women’s utopias often concerned themselves
with domestic spheres and concerns, but it is important to note that these texts raised impor-
tant social issues through engagement with domesticity. Early U.S. examples of feminist uto-
pias include Griffiths’s Three Hundred Years Hence and Gilman’s Herland.The earliest example of
a utopia written in English by a woman is The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-
World (1666), by the English writer Margaret Cavendish. Another early English women’s
utopia, particularly concerned with the domestic sphere, is Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1853).
More recognizably feminist themes appear in the short fiction collected by Carol Farley
Kessler in Daring to Dream: Utopian Fiction by United States Women Before 1950 (1995).
Some gynotopias overlap with hollow-earth utopias, locating their worlds within the planet
as did Jules Verne in A Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), such as Mary Bradley Lane’s
Mizora: A Prophecy (1890), which depicts a society of voluptuous, educated women living
without men in the center of the earth and reproducing through their superior knowledge
of chemistry.
In the 20th century, feminism added to the domestic sphere more explicit engagement
with other topics and spheres that make the period’s feminist utopias much more politically
engaged. Representative examples that range across ecological, postapocalyptic, and gendered
themes include Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), Johanna Russ’s The Female
Man (1975), Sheri S. Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country (1988), Susy McKee Charnas’s
Walk to the End of the World (1974) and Motherlines (1978), and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left
Hand of Darkness (1969). A useful, cross-cultural survey of examples of the genre is Frances
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Bartkowski’s Feminist Utopias (1989), which analyzes works by writers from the United States,
Canada, and France.
The ecotopia arises at the same time as the contemporary feminist utopia and often car-
ries overlapping themes. The sub-genre is concerned with the imagination of an alternative
in light of the so-called Anthropocene—the geological epoch most characterized by human
influence on the world. The genre takes its name from Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1975)
and its sequel Ecotopia Emerging (1981), which depict a secessionist, ecologically minded state
in the Pacific Northwest. Other significant works of ecological utopianism include Kim
Stanley Robinson’s Pacific Edge (1990), which, along with The Gold Coast (1988) and The Wild
Shore (1984), imagines three alternative futures, ecological, postapocalyptic, and corporate,
for Orange County, California; and his trilogy set among the policy and science worlds in
Washington, D.C.: Forty Signs of Rain (2004), Fifty Degrees Below (2005), and Sixty Days and
Counting (2007). Robinson’s ecological interests are also on display in his Red Mars (1992),
Green Mars (1993), and Blue Mars (1996), as well as 2312 (2012), which imagine the ter-
raforming and constitutional problems of colonizing Mars, and then take the action a few
hundred years into the future to explore the consequences of a destroyed Terran ecosystem
and a civilization that has largely moved out into and terraformed the rest of the solar system.
Robinson’s impressive utopian output also includes Aurora (2015), which concerns a “genera-
tion ship” or starship intended to support several generations of life en route to another plan-
etary system, a common trope in science fiction that has also appeared in more conventional
nonfiction works of science such as the ecologist Garrett Hardin’s Exploring New Ethics for
Survival:The Voyage of the Spaceship Beagle (1972). Ecological science fiction and utopian fiction
frequently veer into the dystopian as well, particularly in the genre of postapocalyptic fiction.
Recent examples are Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), which depicts a post-nuclear
wasteland devoid of most plant and animal life; Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014),
exploring a world changed by a global pandemic, and the attendant effects on human society
and the planet itself; and Finnish writer Johanna Sinisalo’s The Blood of Angels (2014), which
imagines an alternate future world devoid of humans following the worldwide collapse of the
bee populations so important to food production.
Dystopias
While utopias present a positive alternative to the present, dystopias are their obverse, pre-
senting an alternative that is noticeably worse than the present. Some scholars refer to them
as negative utopias or anti-utopias. The word dystopia dates to 1747, according to Lyman
Tower Sargent (2010, p. 4). But it does not describe a recognizable literary genre until the late
19th century. Since that time, dystopia has overtaken utopia as the more popular expression
of utopianism. That is, the production of dystopias far outpaces the production of utopias
throughout the 20th century and well into the 21st. Examples abound, particularly in young
adult fiction and Hollywood film. Many attribute this development to the shocks of the 20th
century: economic upheavals, the horrors of World Wars I and II, the long standoff of the Cold
War, the disillusionment of the Vietnam era, the rise of ecological consciousness, and the bat-
tles for gender and civil rights.
If utopias present positive alternatives to the author’s lived experience or historical present,
dystopias can be thought of as warning cries: continue on this path or make these choices and
here are the horrible alternatives. With the rise of a global science fiction publishing industry,
and the increasing industrialization and technologization of the developed world, signifi-
cant utopian and dystopian works appeared in both English-language and non-Anglophone
180
literatures, most notably Evgeny Zamiatin’s We (1920) and Karel Čapek’s R. U. R. (1920), a
play about a dystopian future conflict between humans and robots. Aldous Huxley’s Brave
New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) are among the most com-
monly used examples of dystopian literature; the first taking place in 2540 and extrapolating
negative consequences of eugenic technologies, psychological control of populations, and
world governments; the second depicting a totalitarian surveillance society that emphasizes
groupthink and criminalizes individuality.
One of the most popular contemporary forms of the dystopia is the postapocalyptic
dystopia, some of which have already been discussed. These are dystopias that take place
after a natural or man-made disaster, such as catastrophic climate change or nuclear war.
On television, the zombie series The Walking Dead (2010–present) is a good example of a
postapocalyptic dystopia—a landscape littered with the detritus of modern society, and a few
survivors struggling to stay alive amid hordes of zombies created through man’s interference
with nature. Most zombie narratives are forms of dystopia, using the figure of the zombie
to critique contemporary society. But zombie narratives are not the only form of the
postapocalyptic dystopia.
An early example is Ignatius Donnelly’s Caesar’s Column (1890), a novel the Progressive
politician and writer wrote in response to Bellamy. In his vision of a future New York City, a
Swiss sheep farmer from a colony in Uganda arrives in New York to attempt direct sales of the
colony’s wool without the costly intervention of middlemen. He does not succeed, but does
fall in with a conspiracy to create a worldwide uprising of labor against the monied Oligarchy
that rules throughout the developed world. This conspiracy, the Brotherhood of Destruction,
unleashes a terrible revolution that overthrows all civilization, creates a war of all against all,
and reveals the baser and undisciplined instincts of the majority of the world’s people as cities
fall and descend in riots, cannibalism, and fire. Gabriel, the Ugandan colonist, escapes with his
new bride (a lateral descendant of George Washington), one of the chief conspirators (who
had been working the conspiracy in order to free his unjustly imprisoned father), and a few
others to the colony in Africa, where they create a pocket utopia in the final section of the
novel, replicating a version of the originary narrative of the United States while at the same
time walling themselves in and arming themselves against the outside world. Earlier dystopian
fiction in other countries often ended with conflagrations consuming civilization, such as the
English works After London (1885) and A Crystal Age (1887) (Clareson, 1985, p. 103); in some
cases a cyclic theory of history is implied or elucidated, as in Walter Miller’s A Canticle for
Liebowitz (1959), which recounts the efforts of a far-future monastery to understand the mys-
teries of a shopping list from our own time, long after a nuclear war has devastated the earth,
or in Russell Hoban’s innovative and influential Riddley Walker (1980), which explores the
linguistic and civilizational renewal of England after a similar war. Other examples abound,
with H. G. Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come (1933) in many ways setting the parameters of
such collapse-and-rebound narratives. Wells’s novel, made into the film Things to Come (1936,
directed by William Cameron Menzies), explores the collapse and rebirth over and over of the
Western world from 1936 to 2106, positing the eventual development of a technocratic world
government that will lead humanity to the stars in due time.
Other postapocalyptic dystopias are less hopeful. Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things
(1987) documents the corruption and decay of a New York City-like imaginary world, end-
ing in cannibalism and scenes of urban blight, crime, and decay, as the city collapses under
the weight of an irrational consumer culture and the influences of various death cults and
an authoritarian government. In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), also made into a
popular film (2009, directed by John Hilcoat), a nuclear event has turned the world into a
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wasteland devoid of plant and animal life, inhabited by the violent, cannibalistic, degraded
remnants of humanity. It ends on an ambiguous note when the young boy who has been
traveling the road with his father is taken in by a family—who intend either to raise or
eat him—after his father dies. The less hopeful postapocalyptic narratives generally end in
complete disaster, with violent remnants of humanity battling others to stay alive, or, less
frequently, in last-person stories. An excellent example of the latter is Marlen Haushofer’s
Die Wand (1963), recently republished in English as The Wall (1990) and also turned into a
feature film of the same name (2012, directed by Julian Pölsler). Haushofer’s Cold War-era
narrative recounts three years in the life of an unnamed woman who is apparently the last
survivor of a mysterious event that has left her isolated in the Alps behind an invisible wall,
with the rest of humanity dead and gone, and takes an elegiac tone for what-might-have-
been for the world.
Conclusion
Utopias and dystopias are an expression of a fundamental human tendency toward imagining
alternatives. Levitas writes that “construction of imaginary worlds, free from the difficulties
that beset us in reality, takes place in one form or another in many cultures” (1990, p. 1). The
utopia and the dystopia—the formal written exploration of the positive or negative alterna-
tive to already-existing society—is always a fundamentally imaginary world. While utopian-
ism encompasses the daydream about being elsewhere and doing something else, in terms of
its literary expression it is a fully realized and imagined world that is different from and in
conversation with the author’s own world. More’s Utopia is not so much about an actual island
that an actual traveler visited as it is about his Tudor England; 1984 is not so much about an
actual future predicted by George Orwell as it is about his warning of the consequences of
fascism and totalitarianism in human society. The worlds they imagined are fully developed,
in that details of daily life, political structures, and social relationships form the heart of the
books, creating a verisimilitude of an actually existing world.
The scholarship of utopian studies is dense and far-ranging, crossing into political theory,
sociology, literary criticism, history, and other disciplines. Sargent’s Utopianism: A Very Short
Introduction (2010) and Krishan Kumar’s similar volume, Utopianism (1991b), are excellent
introductions to the concepts and terms, with pointers to reference materials. Readers look-
ing for a more scholarly introduction might consult another of Kumar’s works, Utopia and
Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (1991a), as well as two significant books by the British sociolo-
gist Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (1990) and Utopia as Method (2013). In those two
works, Levitas expounds upon and interprets the German scholar Ernst Bloch’s magisterial
contribution to the study of utopias, The Principle of Hope (1954). Although it is an older
work, few can match the comprehensiveness of Utopian Thought in the Western World (1979)
by Fritzie Manuel and Frank P. Manuel. Its language is more approachable than Bloch’s, and
its coverage of the various forms of utopia and utopianism is so wide that nearly any student
of the genre will find rewards inside. A more recent work exploring the relationship between
utopia and sociology is Levitas’s Utopia as Method (2013). Finally, for influential studies of
utopia and dystopia that introduce the terms “critical utopia” and “critical dystopia,” see
Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible (1986), and Rafaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan, Dark
Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination (2003). A critical utopia is one that has
a significant metatext about the nature of utopia and utopianizing in addition to the main
narrative; a critical dystopia is a dystopia that leaves open the possibility of a return to hope,
a return to utopia.
182
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1–15.
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23
Uchronias, Alternate
Histories, and
Counterfactuals
George Carstocea
Uchronias (also known as alternate histories, alternative histories, or allohistories) are works
of fiction that emerge from the difference between an established narrative timeline and a
“what-if ” scenario: if a given event is assumed to have gone differently, then the change in
that event has repercussions for the flow of time beyond the point of divergence. The term, a
neologism formed through a parallel with the much more common “utopia,” highlights this
narrative trope’s concern with the flow of time: just as a utopia presents itself as “no-place”
while commenting on the possibilities of existing places and spaces, a uchronia reimagines
and comments on causality and the temporal unfolding of events within a particular render-
ing of the world. In the structural view of world-building, counterfactual thinking crystallizes
into what we might call the allohistorical conceit (hereafter AC), a recurring storytelling and
world-building trope with wide-ranging implications for the entirety of the imagined world.
History and historiography, literary and media theory, positivist science, and cultural philos-
ophy have all examined alternate histories according to their respective toolkits. The common
thread that unites these avenues of research is misleadingly simple: alternate histories hinge
upon a point of divergence from an established narrative and world design. Yet, considered
from the perspective of world-building, this simple conceit has wide-ranging implications.
Even mass-market alternate histories vary widely in scope and intent: they may focus primarily
on military, technological, cultural, or even biological paths not taken; they may see their alter-
nate pathway as entirely plausible, unlikely, or even impossible; they may want to engage in an
ideological or scientific polemic, or simply explore the imaginative possibilities offered by the
conceit or merge them with extant generic storytelling patterns. Other criteria bring up their
own sets of questions: historical rigor, narrative form, genre and culture, medium specificity,
and patterns of industrial production and consumption show that the AC can be put to a wide
variety of practical uses. To paraphrase John Muir, when we try to pick up the point of diver-
gence by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the (alternate) Universe. Furthermore,
the AC opens up the same kinds of structural possibilities whether the diverging timeline
emerges in contrast to historical reality or an established fictional timeline; indeed, some alter-
nate histories engage with established historical and fictional formations simultaneously.
In the following pages, I map and exemplify allohistorical practices and the various con-
textual nexuses that inform their production and reception: (1) historical rigor and the
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U c h ro n i a s , A lt e r n at e H i s t o r i e s , a n d C o u n t e r f a c t ua l s
c omplications of contemporary historiography; (2) scientific discourse and the narrativization

of mathematical abstractions in the wider culture; (3) industrial practices, culture, and genre;
and (4) medium specificity and the affordances of new media. This taxonomy is in no way
exhaustive, nor is it meant to be definitive, yet it reveals the overlapping structures that deter-
mine the meanings, styles, and practical applications of the AC.
History/Fact/Counterfact
Some historians abhor the speculation inherent in alternate history, seeing it as an idle dis-
traction at best, and dangerous speculation at worst—too relativizing to carry the burden of
historical truth. Their reticence is rooted in the proliferation of popular works that simplify
historical causality, yet try to maintain a claim to speculative rigor and therefore relevance to
the actual flow of history. This claim to rigor circumscribes the scope of works that form the
basis of the genre for historians, and it narrows down the criteria by which we might judge
a work of allohistorical fiction to the evidentiary standards of historical scholarship. Martin
Bunzl states this quite directly, and perhaps slightly tautologically, in his essay “Counterfactual
History: A User’s Guide”:
counterfactual reasoning comes in two varieties—good and bad. The bad reason-
ing is bad because it has no grounding; it is merely an act of imagination, and
unconstrained imagination at that. The good reasoning is good because it can be
grounded.
(Bunzl, 2004, p. 845)
Bunzl’s criterion, plausibility, is often the self-assigned value criterion in traditional mili-
tary, diplomatic, and political allohistory. Such allohistories are indeed widespread: Livy’s
speculation regarding the possibility that Alexander may have decided to expand Westward
into Roman lands instead of going East shows that counterfactuals have been part and
parcel of historical writing for millennia. Allohistorical premises also formed the basis of
some experimental works by 18th- and 19th-century writers, including Alain-René Lesage,
Louis-Napoléon Geoffroy-Château, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Theodor Herzl (Schmunk,
2016). However, the AC came to widespread prominence in the 20th century, as the market-
place for speculative fiction reached maturity. Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee (1953), a Civil
War Southern victory novel, was preceded by Winston Churchill’s If Lee Had Not Won the
Battle of Gettysburg (1930), a double-alternate in which he recounts actual history from the
perspective of an alternate-history writer in a world in which the South had won the Civil
War; these are but two of hundreds of publications on the topic, each with its own perspec-
tive and causal mechanics. Contemporary works such as those that form Peter G. Tsouras’s
immensely detailed corpus of military allohistory aestheticize the minute details of war-
fare, with hundreds of pages describing the minutia of military maneuvers and diplomatic
finagling. Scholarly historians as well as amateur aficionados and politicians have explored
alternatives to official historical narratives: Niall Ferguson’s collection Virtual History (1999),
for example, defends the practice in a ninety-page introduction that doubles as a history
of counterfactual thinking, followed by nine uchronias authored by academic historians;
Geoffrey Hawthorn’s Plausible Worlds (1991), on the other hand, shows that counterfactual
thinking has always been part and parcel of the historian’s toolkit, as an implied compo-
nent of any causal claim—even those made by historians who would bristle at counterfac-
tual thinking.
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George Carstocea
On the other hand, postmodern historiography distrusts the broad epistemological claims
made by previous generations of historians and reframes history as discourse, always engaged
in a complex intertextual interplay that links official history to notions of hegemony, state-
hood, citizenship, cultural identity, race and gender, and so forth. History is, from a postmod-
ern perspective, the discursive locus of active struggles over the stories we tell about ourselves.
As such, alternate histories always speak to the power struggles of the present and the ways
in which we imagine the future. Gavriel Rosenfeld brings these latent polemical tensions to
the surface in his essay “Why Do We Ask ‘What If?’” (2002), focusing not on the plausibility
of various historical alternatives, but rather their “ability to shed light upon the evolution of
historical memory” (Rosenfeld, p. 93). He focuses on three popular scenarios: Nazi victory in
World War II, Confederate victory in the Civil War, and alternate outcomes of the American
Revolutionary War. Nazi victory allohistories, in his view, also form an overarching meta-
history of 20th-century American cultural trends. Before American involvement in WWII,
such stories were primarily calls for intervention. After the Allied victory and during the early
Cold War, they waned in popularity, as Soviets became the cultural villains du jour. In the late
1950s and early 1960s, as Germany went through a cultural crisis of its own negotiating its
Nazi past, they turned into triumphalistic vindications of American intervention, attempting
to preserve the memory of the Holocaust. By the 1970s, as the Nazi threat lost its immediacy,
they turned into reflexive, self-critical commentaries on the American issues of the day—the
Vietnam war, the Civil Rights movement, the Watergate scandal, and the looming escalation
of the Cold War. Finally, in the 1990s, as the Soviet Union collapsed and American ideol-
ogy was once more presumed victorious, Nazi allohistories turned triumphalist once more
(Rosenfeld, 2002, pp. 96–98).
Science/Fiction/Story
Just as our everyday, pragmatic understanding of history takes shape through patterns of dis-
course, breakthrough scientific discoveries have implications for our conceptualization of
reality, filtering down into the disputed territory of cultural representation. Two such discov-
eries emerged over the course of the 20th century, providing fertile conceptual ground for
allohistorical speculation: (1) the many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics,
which implies that all possible alternative outcomes of quantum-level events actually do occur
in parallel universes, and (2) the idea of sensitive dependence on initial conditions, popular-
ized as “the butterfly effect” in chaos theory (Gleick, 1988, pp. 9–33). Their timing maps well
onto the dispersion of the allohistorical trope in the wider culture. Rosenfeld gathers wide-
ranging evidence that alternate histories grew in popularity as part and parcel of the science
fiction boom of the 1960s, boosted by cultural and structural factors—the emergence and
subsequent market dominance of consumer electronics, the growth of postmodern under-
standings of ideology, and, of course, the aforementioned impact of chaos theory (Rosenfeld,
2002, p. 92).
Although these two ideas are not mutually exclusive, they imply separate avenues for world-
building, which may or may not coexist in the same world. The MWI is often narrativized
into the trope of alternate dimensions, sometimes rendered as a multiverse, a collection of
coexisting bubble universes. Although the current scientific understanding of MWI postulates
that these alternate dimensions do not interact with each other, fiction writers have often
taken it as license to explore the clashes and dynamics between parallel worlds. Drawing on
the philosophical work of Ruth Ronen (1994), Matt Hills distinguishes three possible modal-
ities for MWI storylines: “modal realism,” “moderate realism,” and “anti-realism” (Hills, 2009).
186
The first modality takes the MWI literally, positing that the set of measurable circumstances
in our real world is just one of an infinite number of configurations. Moderate realists, on the
other hand, “view alternative worlds […] as abstract, hypothetical scenarios within our actual
world” (Hills, 2009, p. 433). Put simply, alternate worlds exist only through the exercise of
the imagination rather than as ontological fact, but their speculative impact may well teach
us something about our real world. Finally, “anti-realists” believe not only that the alternate
worlds hypothesis is ontologically baseless, but also that the real world is too complex for
exercises in many-worlds speculation to have any explanatory power.
The discovery of sensitive dependence on initial conditions, on the other hand, suggests
that major consequences can come from a minute divergence. In popular culture, this abstract
discovery of chaos theory has most often been simplified into the “butterfly effect” thought
experiment: weather systems are deterministic, yet unpredictable because extremely small
inputs can greatly alter the subsequent flow of such a system. As such, a butterfly’s wing flap
can produce turbulence that might over time propagate and grow into a hurricane on the
opposite side of the planet. Allohistorical conceits therefore often begin from infinitesimal
changes in the established timeline, seeing the butterfly effect as a speculative carte blanche.
Industry/Culture/Genre
Alternate dimensions and complex structures of causality also had a major impact on the
industrial practices of the comic book, television, and gaming industries, providing a ready
avenue for diversification in major world-building franchises. Crossovers between different
imaginary worlds, alternate timelines for existing fantasies, and time-travel and dimension-
travel mechanics have been borrowed as conceptual affordances that allow for the branding,
intermedia dispersion, and marketplace differentiation of mass-market fantastic and science
fictional worlds. The fictional worlds of both Marvel and DC Comics are split into myriad
alternate timelines and dimensions as part of their respective “multiverses,” allowing the cor-
porate parents to create crossovers (thereby exposing the audience of one subset of their world
to the premises of another, in the hope of encouraging readership), alternate timelines, and
time-travel stories that modify existing continuities. For example, Marvel 1602, a limited series
written by Neil Gaiman, imagines the familiar Marvel characters emerging in the Elizabethan
era rather than the 20th century.
Science fictional universes often delve deeply into the paradoxes and conflicts that emerge
from interdimensional and trans-temporal travel. Star Trek (1966–1969), for example, explores
both the positive and negative valences of the AC throughout its TV incarnations, and its
corpus could easily stand as a catalog of allohistorical possibilities, often commenting on the
cultural context at the time of their production. Perhaps the most heralded episode of the
original series, “The City on the Edge of Forever” (1967) features the ship’s doctor acciden-
tally changing history by saving a woman from a car crash after he is stranded in the 1930s. His
crewmates have to reverse the timeline and let the woman die, even though the captain falls
in love with her: if she doesn’t die, she will lead a pacifist movement, discouraging the U.S.
from WWII intervention and paving the way for Nazi Germany to develop nuclear weapons
before the Allies. Star Trek: Voyager (1995–2001), an odyssey that follows the eponymous ship
stranded across the galaxy as it tries to make its way back to Earth, tackles both the positive
and negative valences of attempting to change history. In the two-parter “Year of Hell” (1997),
the Voyager crew is stranded in a sector of space where an alien leader on a time ship has
already spent centuries trying to restore his home empire to its former glory through tempo-
ral incursions. He is obsessed with reviving his wife, who died in the battle over a small colony,
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George Carstocea
and his desperation repeatedly brings people into and out of existence with every temporal
incursion. In the show’s finale, on the other hand, a grizzled version of Voyager’s captain, who
got her crew home after twenty-odd years, changes the timeline in order to bring the crew
home quicker, against all the rules she’s sworn to protect.
The same narrative dynamics and concerns have formed the primary focus of entire fran-
chises. Quantum Leap (1989–1993), for example, has its protagonist take over the body of
a different historical character in every episode, his mission to “set things right that once
went wrong, always hoping his next leap will be the leap home.” Sliders (1995–2000) fol-
lows a group of scientists who similarly move between alternate dimensions, observing and
influencing alternate paths of development, and trying to make their way home. The long-
running BBC cult favorite Doctor Who (1963–1989, 1996, 2005–present) explores humanistic
and political concerns through the perspective of its protagonist, a humanoid alien from an
extinct species of time travelers (the Time Lords), who pilots a whimsical spacetime-ship, with
only one limitation: he cannot travel across the timeline of his own life. The ACs at the core
of these shows seem to be more of a declaration of creative freedom than a univalent plot
or structural determinant. Their premises even encourage tonal variety: campy and ironic at
times, tragic or melodramatic at others, interested in serious ideological or historical specu-
lation, or simply using the premise as a license for fantastic exploration, they are endlessly
renewable cultural texts, containers for all the ramifications of genre storytelling.
The speculative freedoms of the AC, however, make it difficult to provide a classically sat-
isfying ending without closing the speculative bubble. As such, many alternate timelines are
enclosed in a frame story that subsequently returns the reader to the previously established
continuity. Isaac Asimov, in his novel The End of Eternity (1955), imagines a world in which
humans living in a non-temporal realm called Eternity have managed to shape history so as
to avoid conflict and bloodshed. The protagonist realizes that the absence of struggle caused
humanity to remain complacent and never explore the universe, which will eventually lead
to their demise, and takes it upon himself to destroy Eternity. Stephen King’s novel 11/22/63
(2011), a contemporary uchronia adapted for television by Hulu, envisions time as stubborn
and unwilling to change: King’s protagonist travels into the past to prevent the JFK assas-
sination, and the world seems to conspire against him. Even when he finally saves Kennedy,
he comes back to the present to find it plunged into endless nuclear winter, forcing him to
restore the timeline. Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1980) hinges on the in-world
existence of a text long presumed to have been lost: the second book of Aristotle’s Poetics.
Taking place in the 13th century, the novel pitches medieval dogmaticism against the early
seeds of enlightenment: Eco imagines the Poetics as a defense of laughter and playful imagina-
tion, which is destroyed alongside numerous other treatises by an obsessively dour blind monk
who despises laughter and considers it nigh-blasphemy. Eco’s imaginative conceit allows him
to stage erudite and historically plausible theological conversations between his protagonists,
only to return the world to its original course by the end of the book: this alternate past, like
many others, never gets to have a future.
Technology/Affordances/Structure
By the 1990s, a diversified mediascape, tightly connected to the discourses and practices of
globalization, offered up new affordances that empowered the creators and consumers of allo-
history.The quick growth of the home video marketplace in the 1980s and 1990s emboldened
both creators and fans: the former to add more complex formal and structural patterning to
their works, designing them for repeated viewings over time; the latter to engage in in-depth
188
interpretive work in fanzines and online bulletin boards and, over time, social media and wiki
structures. Such fandoms habitually produce non-canonical allohistories that modify their
source universes and recombine their components to produce new meanings, often at odds
with the intent and desire of the original creators.
Computer gaming offloaded the cognitive overhead of table-top strategy games onto
the machine, allowing game designers to model in-game abstractions of the real world at a
more complex and granular level. Without having to stop at every turn and add up complex
scores, gamers can focus on the flow of the game while learning the background mechanics
through immersion and experimentation. Strategy games foreground the gaming mechan-
ics—mathematical models that approximate structural patterns of geopolitical, technological,
cultural, and economic development. Sid Meier’s Civilization series exemplifies this trend
most emblematically, but similar gameplay mechanics have emerged throughout real-time and
turn-based strategy games, whether they are rooted in a real historical context (as in Rome:
Total War (2004) or Crusader Kings (2004)) or displaced into generic or fictional contexts, in
which case they comment on the real world through allegory and structural parallelism (as in
Master of Orion (1993), Command & Conquer (1995), and StarCraft (1998)).
Civilization (1991) is implicitly rooted in an AC, allowing the player to endlessly replay and
reconfigure alternate historical outcomes. Throughout the six versions of Civilization released
between 1991 and 2016, the player chooses one of tens of preset civilizations (or hundreds,
including user-generated expansions) and shepherds its development across historical eras,
vying for superiority against a customizable number of rival civilizations operated by other
human players, artificial intelligence agents, or a combination of both. The game encourages
variegated paths of development, offering different victory conditions focused on divergent
game mechanics—culture, military domination, science, etc.—and ancillary mechanisms that
shepherd the player along the timeline.
These complex game mechanics model the interconnected dynamics of historical causality,
and in effect teach the player how to view world-building structurally. In Civilization, every-
thing matters: geographical diversity, the characteristics of the chosen civilization, population
and buildings, resources and military layouts, scientific research, trade patterns, social policies
and ideological choices, religious and cultural growth, diplomacy with other nations and city-
states, and the personalities of AI players and the even more complex ones of human players,
spies, and ambassadors. These balanced game mechanics complicate causality and encourage
varied styles of gameplay, offering incentives for specialization as well as disadvantages in
the case of overspecialization. A practically infinite combination of paths can lead the player
to one of the five victory conditions: military domination, diplomatic leadership, cultural
ascendancy, scientific knowledge, and the sum total of gameplay points at a set turn threshold.
In effect, every play-through allows the player to actualize a particular alternate pathway for
history, making Civilization a sandbox for alternate histories.
Mass-market 3-D graphics processing units became widely available in the late 1990s, and the
technology improved rapidly in the 2000s. With the widespread adoption of powerful GPUs
came a corresponding boom in game-design software and application programming inter-
faces that enable game designers to create complex, immersive worlds. First-person immersive
storytelling, which had been a goal of game designers since the 1970s and underpinned the
mechanics of successful games like Wolfenstein 3D (1992), DOOM (1993), or Myst (1993),
stood to benefit from these new software and hardware affordances.The increase in processing
power, coupled with the growth of the industry and its target audience, allowed game design-
ers to create more complex stylized worlds, using higher-resolution surface textures, lighting
schemes, and world geometry to create an impression of near-photorealistic immersion.
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George Carstocea
The Bioshock series, for example, gained a cult following over the course of the aughts, in no
small part due to its allohistorical conceit and its embedding in every aspect of an immersive
world design. BioShock’s point of divergence takes place in the 1940s, when a large number of
scientists and leaders of industry remove themselves from society at large and establish a uto-
pian city named Rapture on the ocean floor, following libertarian and objectivist precepts for
social organization. In the two decades between the point of divergence and the beginning of
the game, the city has degenerated into dystopia, a violent, derelict reminder of its founders’
objectivist hubris. Its once-gleaming undersea towers, gardens, and tunnels have fallen into
disrepair. The player fills in the background narrative through exploration, through observa-
tion, and by listening to abandoned audio journals scattered throughout Rapture.
In narrative terms, BioShock (2007) is a second-order ideological parable, a mirror-image
polemic against Ayn Rand’s novel-cum-objectivist treatise Atlas Shrugged (1957). Whereas
Atlas Shrugged imagines the world collapsing under the heft of regulatory institutions when
business elites decide to “strike” against the government, BioShock reverses the valence of this
conceit: the elites’ safe haven collapses under the heft of their unchecked egotism and hedon-
ism.Without the tempering influence of a governmental safety net and strong business regula-
tion, Rapture becomes stratified along class lines at breakneck speed. Its scientists are indeed
more productive in the absence of strict oversight, but the ethic of the marketplace displaces
any sense of social responsibility.Technology proceeds along an alternate developmental time-
line, focused on genetic engineering. Rapture’s founder, Andrew Ryan, refuses to intervene
when the villainous, power-hungry Frank Fontaine monopolizes the genetic engineering
market with his plasmids, genetic elixirs that endow their users with superhuman abilities. A
genetic advantage arms race ensues, and a large part of the population mutates into Splicers,
violently insane plasmid addicts with weaponized bodies. Fontaine—as much of a Randian as
Ryan—wants absolute power, and he manipulates Rapture’s lower classes into starting a civil
war that leads to Rapture’s destruction.
The point of divergence is not only a plot premise, but rather a blueprint that influences
Rapture’s design on every scale. The ideological, social, and technological consequences that
are apparent even in the brief summary above determine the city’s cohesive look and feel.
Imposing structures of art deco chrome, glass, and neon rise high from the ocean floor,
echoing the New York City landmarks that quickly became symbols of capitalist and indus-
trial authority in the years following the Great Depression: the Empire State Building, the
Chrysler Building, and the Rockefeller Center. Rapture’s visual culture combines early-to-
mid-century American commercial styles with the incipient modernism of art deco, pattern-
ing every aspect of the world: advertising from flyers to marquees, functional objects from
transistor radios to major-scale hydraulic mechanisms, and aesthetic embellishments that cover
the gamut from monumental sculptures to intimate interiors. Rapture is enclosed in metal-
reinforced glass domes and tunnels, which results in an industrial-hydraulic restyling of its
historical design inspirations.
The player’s experience of Rapture, however, denies and challenges Ryan’s intended aes-
thetic of authoritarian grandeur. In addition to the physical dereliction of the space and the
ideological failures that allow Splicers to emerge and make civil war inevitable, the lighting
scheme heavily references Hollywood noir stylistics. A soft aquamarine haze filters down
from the surface through Rapture’s glass enclosures, mixing with warmer, dim lighting from
the light fixtures that are still standing and creating a chiaroscuro effect that keeps the player
permanently on edge, constantly expecting the next threat to emerge from the shadows.
This visual style, which filtered into Hollywood from the German Expressionist films of
the Weimar Republic, has historically been associated with subjective, expressive storytelling;
190
extreme mental states; suspense filmmaking; and the totalizing impact of industrialized,
urban modernity on the multitudes who are left behind in a competitive, capital-driven,
and machine-driven environment. BioShock’s dystopia draws heavily from this lineage; for
example, its all-powerful machines that subject human bodies to their own whims, as well as
the manipulation of the lower classes by powerful, mystical leaders, have direct homologues
in Fritz Lang’s German Expressionist ur-text Metropolis (1927). The soundtrack, composed
primarily of upbeat, idealistic blues and jazz standards from the first half of the 20th century,
underlines the contrast between this world’s aspirations and its descent into madness.
Rapture is therefore not just a world, it’s an argument, drawing inspiration from a long tradi-
tion of progressive ideological parables and allegories, and pointed directly at Ayn Rand’s own
objectivist fables. This once-gleaming metropolis, a capitalist pharaoh’s pyramid, attempted to
elide the responsibilities of building a cohesive social structure that tempers the more violent
trends of unchecked development; as such, it paid the ultimate price. It’s no surprise that,
after a sequel set in Rapture, the third game, BioShock Infinite (2013), tackled the ideological
implications of a version of American exceptionalism rooted in pseudo-Christian Evangelical
morality and a white supremacist, militarist power structure that took hold in a fictional flying
steampunk city named Columbia. BioShock’s worlds are salvos in a cultural and ideological
war between the libertarian dogma of self-sufficiency and unencumbered freedom of associa-
tion, and a worldview that prizes social cohesion and the protection of the individuals that are
left behind in a world that always seems on the brink of decaying into Hobbesian nightmare:
the war of all against all.
Alternate histories are multivalent, and the trope bears iteration through various versions
of official and unofficial history, as well as the histories of fictional worlds (which themselves
often have an argument to make, through metaphor and allegory, about the real world). Across
this continuum, between reality and fiction, they offer imaginative possibilities that can flexi-
bly assign agency and causality to dynamic relationships, and polemically mirror the structural
elements of the real world: history and memory, ideology and economics, science and culture.
References
Asimov, Isaac, (1955), The End of Eternity, Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Hawthorn, Geoffrey, (1991), Plausible Worlds, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Hills, Matt, (2009), “Time, Possible Worlds, and Counterfactuals,” in Mark Bould (editor), The Routledge
Companion to Science Fiction, London, England: Routledge, pp. 433–441.
Bunzl, Martin, (2004), “Counterfactual History: A User’s Guide,” American History Review, 109(3),
pp. 845–858.
Eco, Umberto, (1980), The Name of the Rose, San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Ferguson, Niall, (1999), Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, New York: Basic Books.
Gleick, James, (1988), Chaos: Making a New Science, New York:Viking Penguin.
King, Stephen, (2011), 11/22/63, New York: Scribner.
Ronen, Ruth, (1994), Possible Worlds in Literary Theory, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Rosenfeld, Gavriel, (2002), “Why Do We Ask ‘What If?’ Reflections on the Function of Alternate
History,” History and Theory, 41(4), pp. 90–103.
Schmunk, Robert B. (2016), Oldest Alternate Histories, bibliography compiled as part of the allohistory
resource site Uchronia.net. Retrieved from http://www.uchronia.net/bib.cgi/oldest.html.
Singles, K., (2013), Alternate History: Playing with Contingency and Necessity, Germany: De Gruyter.
Warf, B., (2002), “The Way it Wasn’t: Alternative Histories, Contingent Geographies,” in R. Kitchin and
J. Kneale, (editors), Lost in Space: Geographies of Science Fiction, London and New York: Continuum.
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24
Virtual Worlds
Mark J. P. W
olf
The term “virtual” is used in optics to describe the image that is formed when light rays
appear to diverge from a single point, but do not actually emanate from that point; hence,
the image differs from a “real image,” which can be projected onto a screen (whereas a
virtual image cannot). Influenced by Henri Bergson, philosopher Gilles Deleuze suggested
that “virtual” is not the opposite of “real,” but is opposed to “actual;” the virtual has an
existence, but it is not that of a material existence (Deleuze, 2002: 112–116). A reflection
in a mirror is virtual but not actual, since it has all the appearance of something material,
without being so.
Extending this idea in 1938, avant-garde theater director and essayist Antonin Artaud
described the nature of the theater as “la réalité virtuelle,” and in English, the term “virtual
reality” appeared in The Judas Mandala (1982), a novel by Damien Broderick. The term was
popularized during the 1980s when used by Jaron Lanier, whose company, VPL Research,
produced head-mounted displays and data gloves, the first virtual reality (VR) equipment to
be commercially available. Since then, the notion of “virtual worlds,” experienced through
such technology, has grown in popular culture in science fiction novels and films. Thus,
virtual worlds differ from other imaginary worlds because one can see them, but not enter
into them.
The Ontological Status of Virtual Worlds

Virtual objects and worlds occupy a curious ontological status that is somewhere located
between the actual and the imaginary. Unlike things that are purely in one’s imagination,
a virtual object is something that is visible that appears to be material, but is illusory, either
because it is not material, or because the material objects used to portray the world do so only
under a pretense of being something they are actually not. The materials used to convey the
presence of virtual worlds bring about the world visually, giving it a presence (and in the case
of video games like MMORPGs, a persistent presence) without giving it a physical presence
in which objects are the very things they appear to represent. Since virtual worlds can be seen,
they need not be visualized by an audience, though they will still require imagination since
there will remain many gaps in the world data to be filled in by the viewer. Thus, a virtual
world is always reliant on materials outside of itself for its presentation without being actually
made of those materials; for example, one could own and hold the prop lightsaber used by
Luke Skywalker in the films, but one still would not have an actual, functioning lightsaber
from the diegetic world of Star Wars.
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V i rt ua l Wo r l d s
Early Virtual Worlds

The earliest example of travel to a virtual world is the dreaming that occurs during sleep;
and it is still the most vivid form of virtual world experience, sometimes leaving the dreamer
a very strong impression that what was experienced was real, at least during the dream.
Mirror images also presented a virtual space (which Alice enters in Through the Looking-Glass,
and What Alice Found There (1871)), and the theater stage, a space set aside by mutual con-
sent of the audience and performers, represented other places and entire worlds, like that of
Nephelokokkygia (Cloudcuckooland) from Aristophanes’s The Birds (414 B.C.) or Prospero’s
Island from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611). Painted images saw the refinement of tech-
niques that created illusory spaces in quattrocentro perspective-based painting, particularly
trompe-l’oeil techniques used to extend actual three-dimensional spaces. And during the latter
half of the 1800s, photography and stereoscope viewers further improved the illusion of a
three-dimensional space, while museum dioramas created theatrical vignettes with painted
backdrops that extended real spaces into the curved walls that surrounded them.
Like the theatrical stage, other spaces and material objects could be used as miniature stand-
ins to represent much larger worlds; dollhouses, model train sets, and playsets, for example,
all represented miniature versions of imaginary places, in the imaginations of both children
who played with them as well as the adult collectors and hobbyists who built them. Similarly,
movie sets could also be grouped along with theater sets, differing in the fact that the former
were further virtualized by being filmed and mediated for audiences.
Unlike the stage, the virtual worlds represented by dollhouses, model train sets, toy soldiers
and their landscapes, board games, and playsets all allowed users to interact within the world,
through the use of a surrogate character, usually represented by a doll or a miniature figurine
representing a person, or perhaps an animal or a vehicle. This additional feature also required
an additional pretense, since living beings in these worlds were represented by objects, rather
than by other living beings, as was the case on the theatrical stage. But the tradeoff is consid-
ered worthwhile due to the participatory nature that is present in such worlds, and audience
participation would be a great part of the impetus behind the development of video games
and other digital virtual worlds.
Digital Virtual Worlds

While virtual images and mirror images depend on the divergence of light rays, computer
imaging allows users to generate images of virtual objects and scenes that have no material
referents.The first computer to use a graphical display was the Whirlwind I, designed and built
from 1947 to 1951 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for the U. S. Navy. It
ran projectile trajectory simulations, with simple graphics made of lines and points, but it was
enough to imply events taking place in real time in a virtual space seen onscreen. Computer
graphics developed throughout the 1950s, and, in 1962, MIT computer science students com-
pleted Spacewar!, one of the first graphical mainframe computer games.
Video games became one of the main uses for interactive, onscreen imaginary worlds.
Players controlled spaceships or other types of avatars to interact within the world. These
worlds would grow in size and complexity, with the first graphically three-dimensional game
worlds appearing in 1974, in Steve Colley’s Maze War and Jim Bowery’s Spasim (short for
Space Simulator), the latter of which could support up to 32 online players at once. Online
worlds would become used for both gaming and communication, especially after the devel-
opment in 1978 of multi-user dimensions (or dungeons), known as MUDs, in which players
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could communicate with each other via text. Finally, in 1986, Lucasfilm’s Habitat program
was MUD with a graphical user interface, and became one of the first large-scale online
communities.
Throughout the 1980s and especially the 1990s, the largest virtual worlds of video games
would be continent-sized and host hundreds of thousands of avatars, each controlled by a
human subscriber. These games, known as massively multiplayer online role-playing games
(MMORPGs), would also be persistent online worlds, which meant that they continued
to exist and run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, some continuing for decades. Such continu-
ing existence gave these worlds an even greater sense of being like a real place, and other
non-game worlds like Second Life (2003) also would appear as places for virtual communities
to form.
Other technologies also allowed users to interact in virtual worlds, and control their
experiences there. Lanier’s VPL sold a “data glove” that controlled a computer-generated
hand within the virtual space. Since then, a number of other hand-controlled devices have
appeared, and other forms of input, such as those used in motion-capture, silhouette-tracking,
and gesture-recognition technology, have allowed the control and manipulation of characters
in virtual worlds. Motion-capture technology is used particularly by the makers of film and
video games who wish to give computer-animated figures life-like movement without hav-
ing to animate everything by hand. Other technologies, like touch-screens and voice recog-
nition software, allow other forms of interaction with objects and characters seen onscreen.
Developments in software are changing virtual worlds as well, especially agents (or “bots,”
short for “robots”) run by artificial intelligence (AI). Some of these include mobs, groups of
which roam about killing player-characters whom they come across, until they run into ones
who can kill them; merchants programmed for trade with player-characters; bots that can fix
things for players, teleport them, or train them; and other AI-controlled functions determin-
ing attitudes of bots and managing character relationships (Castronova, 2005: 93–94). In large,
online worlds, however, most interaction is between player-characters controlled by human
beings, resulting in social and economic behaviors.
Social and Economic Aspects of Virtual Worlds

Since the rise of MUDs, virtual worlds have become social worlds, where users can gather vir-
tually regardless of their actual geographical locations. The persistent nature of MMORPGs
has led some players to remain online for several hours every day, and, for some, online virtual
worlds have become a main source of social interaction. For example, in World of Warcraft
(2004), players join guilds, raid groups, and other groups, and go on quests together, while in
the space trading game EVE Online (2003) players control characters who join corporations
(which can have hundreds of members, all hierarchically arranged under a CEO), and corpo-
rations work together in alliances competing against other alliances. According to “Eve Who,”
an online directory for EVE Online, as of late 2016 there were 9,126,204 Characters, 359,520
Corporations, and 3,052 Alliances (https://evewho.com/corp/).
Not all online virtual worlds are games; Second Life (2003) is an online virtual world in
which participants are not given goals or objectives. Players can use a built-in three-dimen-
sional modeling tool and build their own virtual objects and buildings, and can develop their
own plots of virtual land, as well as visit the constructions made by others. The world is more
than simply a social setting or one just for play: there are conferences held in Second Life, some
global in scope; business meetings are held there; and it has also been used to bring students
together in a kind of virtual classroom, and Linden Labs, the makers of Second Life, has offered
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free software for classroom use. One author, Megan Conklin, has even found over one hun-
dred uses for Second Life in the college classroom (Conklin, 2007).
Virtual worlds offer users a safe place for communication, allowing them to craft an online
identity freely regardless of who they are. Users often can choose the race, gender, and over-
all design of their avatars, sometimes down to the hairstyles, clothing, and facial appearance
of their online alter egos. While this can lead to the deception of others, it also allows users
to experience a different identity that may lead to a greater understanding of others. Many
users, however, have virtual-world identities that are not far removed from their real-world
ones. Thus, it happens that many people who become friends in virtual worlds build real
friendships and may even get to know one another in person, face-to-face. In Second Life,
and in other virtual worlds, avatars can date, get engaged, and get married, and some of these
relationships also carry over to actual marriages in real life.Weddings have become a big busi-
ness in Second Life; for example, a bridal show held there attracted 40 vendors and over 800
attendees (“Virtual world, real emotions,” 2008).
In Second Life, and elsewhere, users can build virtual objects, and these are regularly bought
and sold, both in virtual stores within the virtual worlds, or on websites like eBay. The buying
and selling of virtual items has led to the appearance of entire virtual economies, which one
can find in Second Life and MMORPGs, including Runescape (2001), Entropia Universe (2003),
World of Warcraft, and EVE Online, some in the millions of dollars. In many cases, in-world
currencies can be exchanged for real-world currencies, making virtual items a very profitable
venture for some. Jon Jacobs, a player in Entropia Universe, for example, bought a virtual resort,
Club Neverdie, for USD $100,000, and after owning it for a few years, sold off sections of the
location for a total sale of USD $635,000, making a profit of over half a million dollars in the
process (Gibson, 2014).
The economic opportunities found in virtual worlds have even led to the practice known
as “gold farming,” which is now illegal in some virtual worlds. Especially in the 1990s and
2000s, gold farming provided full-time employment for workers in developing countries,
who would spend hours leveling up characters and then selling them to wealthy players who
paid real-world currency for the virtual characters rather than spending their own time to
advance them to a high level. Many MMORPGs have now banned gold farming, and do not
allow characters to be bought and sold. The construction, sale, and purchase of virtual items,
however, remains a lucrative market.
Even outside of online virtual worlds, one can find people making money from the con-
struction of virtual items and virtual world locations. For example, Daz Productions, Inc. (also
known as DAZ 3D) is a software company that specializes in the sale of three-dimensional
computer-generated models, offering a free program, DAZ Studio, and selling others, such
as Bryce and Carrara, for 3D graphics and modeling. The Daz website features a shop where
designers can sell their virtual items and models, including some that are entire locations and
digital scenes that can be used in computer animation. Other websites, like DigitalxModels
.com, also sell virtual models online for artists and animators.
Virtual Worlds in Fiction

While technologically based virtual worlds, like those described above, only reproduce the
sights and sounds of a world, the notion of a virtual world has a long history in fiction,
where it is more technologically advanced, to the point of creating worlds indistinguishable
from lived reality. This history extends back at least as far as E. M. Forster’s short story “The
Machine Stops” (1909), in which humanity lives underground, with each person hooked up to
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a machine that provides all bodily needs and connects all users together electronically, so that
they can continually share and discuss ideas. As the title implies, the system is doomed to fail-
ure. Another early short story imaging VR equipment is Stanley G. Weinbaum’s “Pygmalion’s
Spectacles” (1935), in which an electrical set of goggles takes the main character, Dan, to the
world of Paracosma, which he can see, hear, smell, and touch.
Virtual reality devices (some of which send signals directly into the user’s cortex) and their
counterpart (false, implanted memories, which retroactively create a virtual world in the
recipient’s experiences) were often employed in the works of author Philip K. Dick, as in his
short story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” (1966) and his novel A Maze of Death
(1970), both of which end with the twist that what the main character (and the reader) was
perceiving as real turns out to be the product of a simulation.The confusion between the real
world and a virtual world would be used often enough to become a trope in science fiction.
In Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–1994), and other Star Trek series that followed, the
Holodeck would become the perfect virtual reality device, which used holographic imag-
ing devices and intricately shaped force fields to generate what appears to be another reality
around one or more users, which can be directly perceived without the need for a head-
mounted display. Inevitably, something almost always goes wrong with the Holodeck, trap-
ping users inside of it with the safety settings turned off or not working, making threats to
their lives very real. Other episodes, like “Ship in a Bottle” (1993), play with the confusion
caused by indistinct boundaries between the real and the artificial.
Movies and television have also employed the tropes of virtual worlds becoming con-
fused with the actual world. David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999) features “game pods” that
are attached directly to players’ spinal cords, providing an experience that simulates all their
senses, while at the same time complicating what is reality and what is not. The Wachowski
Brothers’ movie The Matrix (1999) likewise featured a spinal-based virtual world connection
that provides all the user’s sensations, this time for a more sinister purpose outside of gaming;
machines have taken over the world and have imprisoned most of humanity unknowingly in
a simulation of the world in the late 20th century.Television programs occasionally use similar
plot devices; the episode of Person of Interest (2011–2016) titled “6,741” (2016) turns out to all
be an electrochemical simulation that takes place completely in the character’s mind, though
viewers are led to believe that it is real, until the very ending. The episode’s title is revealed
to indicate the number of simulations that have occurred, with the one we see being just
the most recent one—a technological version of the “it was all a dream” trope found earlier
in fiction.
In the early 20th century and before, it was still common to try to provide a realistic expla-
nation of how a story’s main character went to a fantasy world and returned, and dreaming
was a common justification used. Alice’s trips to Wonderland and through the looking-glass
were both attributed to dreams, as was Little Nemo’s trips to Slumberland. The Dreamlands
of H. P. Lovecraft’s Dream Cycle set of stories is an alternate dimension entered by dreaming,
and multiple people can appear in the same dream story.
Apart from actually dreaming, the virtual worlds of dreams are also entered by characters
and shared by them either through supernatural means (as in Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on
Elm Street (1984)), through technological means (as in Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010)),
or even just as a magical realist convention (as in Akira Kurasawa’s Dreams (1990)). This has
the advantage of not having to explain how the virtual world was created—it is someone’s
dream—while, at the same time, the dreams are often controlled and shared by multiple par-
ticipants other than the dreamer, similar to technological virtual worlds. Likewise, since the
events of the virtual world are not actual, the dramatic stakes of events occurring there are
196
raised by the rule that if you die in your dream, you die in reality. Thus, dangers faced in a
dream are as dangerous as real-world dangers, only the dreamstate allows them to be far more
fantastic and operate by additional ontological rules that complicate situations. Inception even
introduces multiple levels of dreamstates, nested within one another, requiring characters
to be woken up multiple times to emerge safely from the dream world. Likewise, injuries
sustained in the dreamworld remain when the person wakes up. Neo is bleeding when he is
disconnected from the Matrix; Tina and Nancy emerge from their nightmares with Freddy
Krueger with slashes and burn marks, respectively; and in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time
universe, characters injured in a shared dreamworld known as Tel’aran’rhiod emerge back into
the real world with their injuries, and do not wake up at all if they die there.
The virtual worlds of fiction, regardless of their justification for existence, provide an imag-
inative release from the seemingly ironclad ontological rules and limitations of the real world,
while also providing new and creative dangers and nemeses. In some ways, the virtual worlds
of fiction (some of which could be termed “virtual virtual worlds”) help to drive the devel-
opment of virtual worlds in the real world, bringing them slowly ever-closer to what authors
have imagined. And virtual worlds in general explore the possibilities inherent in visualized
imaginary worlds, and, in so doing, help us to visualize and work toward the futures possible
in the real world.
References
Artaud, Antonin (1938), The Theatre and Its Double, translated by Mary Caroline Richards, New York,
New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1958.
Carroll, Lewis (1871), Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, London, England: Macmillan
Publishers.
Castronova, Edward (2005), Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games, Chicago, Illinois,
and London,England: The University of Chicago Press.
Conklin, Megan S. (2007),“101 Uses for Second Life in the College Classroom,” available at http://uksl.
pbworks.com/f/101Uses4SecondLife.pdf.
Deleuze, Gilles (2002), “The Actual and the Virtual” in Dialogues II, revised edition, translated by Eliot
Ross Albert, New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, pp. 112–116.
Dick, Philip K. (1966, April), “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” in The Magazine of Fantasy &
Science Fiction, pp. 407–427.
Dick, Philip K. (1970), A Maze of Death, New York, New York: Doubleday Publishing.
Forster, E. M. (1909, November), “The Machine Stops” in The Oxford and Cambridge Review.
Gibson, Nathan (2014), “10 of the Most Expensive Virtual Items in Video Games,”
TheRichest.com, November 15, 2014, available at http://www.therichest.com/rich-list/
most-popular/10-of-the-most-expensive-virtual-items-in-video-games/.
Jordan, Robert (1990), The Eye of the World, New York, New York: Tor Books.
“Virtual World, Real Emotions: Relationships in Second Life,” CNN, 11:54 a.m. EST, Mon December
15, 2008, available at http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/12/12/second.life.relationship.irpt/
index.html?_s=PM:LIVING.
Weinbaum, Stanley G. (1935) “Pygmalion’s Spectacles,” available at http://www.gutenberg.org/
files/22893/22893-h/22893-h.htm.
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25
Interactive and
Participatory Worlds
Matthew Freeman
Interactive and participatory worlds are in many defining ways products of a wider culture and
technological landscape that, as Henry Jenkins puts it, “absorbs and responds to the explosion
of new media technologies that make it possible for average consumers to archive, annotate,
appropriate, and recirculate media content in powerful new ways” (1992: 55). This chapter
explores some of the pertinent issues surrounding interactive and participatory worlds, both
in and outside of the wider context of media convergence and participatory culture. I detail
the defining characteristics of a range of participatory worlds, exploring their cultural, crea-
tive, and interactive components. To do so, the chapter outlines the social and historical con-
texts by which audiences began to interact with imaginary worlds during the 19th and early
20th centuries, before moving on to examine the dynamics of participatory worlds in the age
of digital convergence. Finally, the chapter offers some new perspectives on participatory and
interactive worlds by considering the complex underlying rationales that can underpin why
audiences choose to participate in imaginary worlds across media.
Contextualizing Interactive and Participatory Worlds

The practice of producing and engaging with imaginary worlds that are interactive or partici-
patory in nature can be understood in a number of ways. It can also be traced and conceptual-
ized according to a range of contexts and perspectives. Mark J. P.Wolf acknowledges an innate
correlation between imaginary worlds and the participatory behaviors of audiences, noting
that “the experiencing of imaginary worlds has always required the active participation of the
audience, whose imaginations are called upon to fill gaps and complete the world gestalten
needed to bring the world to life” (2012: 138). Famously, Henry Jenkins defined participatory
culture as “culture in which fans and other consumers are invited to actively participate in
the creation and circulation of new content” (2006: 331). According to Jenkins, participatory
culture is characterized by particular ideals such as a “strong support for creating and sharing
one’s creations with others,” where “members believe that their contributions matter” and
where “members feel some degree of social connection with one another (at the least they
care what other people think about what they have created)” (2012).
Jenkins, moreover, theorized the relationships between participatory culture and media con-
vergence as to some extent intertwined developments of the contemporary landscape. Media
convergence, itself “the coming together of things that were previously separate” (Meikle and
Young, 2012: 2), has come to dominate contemporary understandings of the models through
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I n t e r a c t i v e a n d Pa rt i c ipat o ry Wo r l d s
which culture is produced and consumed across platforms. Entire media industries, along with
their technologies and practices, have become increasingly aligned, branded, participatory, and
networked. As Henry Jenkins writes, “media convergence makes the flow of content across
multiple media inevitable” (2003). Convergence has accelerated the ways in which imaginary
worlds are developed as media-traversing participatory spaces.
It is in this way that concepts of media convergence, participatory culture, and transmedi-
ality have become key to exploring the interactivity and participation of imaginary worlds.
Mark J. P. Wolf shows that “imaginary worlds are not only transmedial and transnarrative, but
transauthorial as well” (2012: 269). That is to say that imaginary worlds often traverse mul-
tiple media platforms as well as authors in the process of building a rich canvas of fictional
characters, spaces, places, religions, myths, politics, etc. World-making, then, itself the art of
transmedia storytelling, argues Jenkins, is “the process of designing a fictional universe that
will sustain … development, one that is sufficiently detailed to enable many different stories
to emerge but coherent enough so that each story feels like it fits with the others” (2006:
335). In other words, transmediality has become a means of understanding the flow of content
and imaginary worlds across multiple media, with this “circulation of media content—across
different media systems, competing media economies, and national borders—depend[ing]
heavily on consumers’ active participation” (Jenkins, 2006: 3).
Though convergence, as Stein notes, “recognizes the expanse of audience authorship,”
this participation of audiences is most notably—though not always—an affordance of digi-
tal media specifically rather than a general characteristic of transmediality itself (2013: 405).
Interactivity is a property of technology, while participation is a property of culture. Jenkins
(2009) insists that the performance of audiences is often a key outcome of transmedia storytell-
ing, describing “the ability of transmedia extensions to lead to fan produced performances
that can become part of the transmedia narrative itself.” Scolari, Bertetti, and Freeman (2014:
3) suggest that there are different levels of participation and performance ranging from the
consumer of a single media form to the “prosumer” who expands the imaginary world by
producing new content, typically via interactive digital media forms such as websites and
online platforms including YouTube. Jenkins emphasizes that transmediality, new technolo-
gies, and convergence have indeed all worked to make this kind of performance possible,
empowering audiences by giving them the “right to participate” (2006: 23).
The Past
That users have the right to participate may be true, but participatory and interactive worlds
are by no means specific to the digital age. Steve Coulson, creative director of Campfire—a
Toronto-based company specializing in participatory storytelling—argues that media-based
participation can be stripped to a few basic characteristics, most of which predate contempo-
rary convergences:
At a very simple level, you can say participation is playing a game, or doing something
interactive on a screen. But at its most simplistic level, participation may be in what
order to consume media, or when to consume them, and how fast to consume them.
(Hassler-Forest, 2016: 685b)
And of course participatory practices of playing games predate media.Wolf argues that “inter-
active worlds can be traced back to children’s play and games of pretend,” looking particu-
larly at the table-top imaginary worlds of the 19th century (2012: 138). For Wolf, interactive
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M at t h e w F r e e m a n
imaginary worlds such as dollhouses, model train sets, board games, and playsets all afforded
participation and interactivity “either in role-playing situations or through the use of toys, like
dolls and toy soldiers used as avatars through which children can vicariously enter the table-
top worlds they created” (2012: 138).
Such table-top forms of interactive worlds were quickly followed by the technologically
based imaginary worlds of the early 20th century, driven in part by wider transformations in
industry. For as Wolf also observes, “with the mass production of dollhouses in the nineteenth
century and rise of model railroading in the early twentieth century, children’s play gained
more world-building tools” (2012: 138). By the turn of the 20th century, for example, The
Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) was extending its world across multiple media and inviting
consumers to interact with its narrative adventures. That tale’s magical Land of Oz was cross-
ing novels, posters, theater, newspaper comic strips, and cinema by around 1910, inviting
audiences to interact with the world. With regard to the Land of Oz, competitions became a
strategy for building the world as an interactive space—competitions that were woven into
the stories of a comic strip series called Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz, published
in 1904. Its author, L. Frank Baum, used competitions as a means of exploiting his fictional
characters and inviting participation—working to point audiences toward Oz merchandise,
which in doing so led to new fictional settings being added to the world. Consider “What
Did the Woggle-Bug Say?”—a popular competition used in the Queer Visitors comic strips
and which built a weekly contest around the Woggle-Bug character in the first seventeen edi-
tions. Throughout the course of each comic, the Woggle-Bug was posed a question from his
fellow Oz comrades, though his answer was not revealed to readers. At the end of each story,
readers were then asked “What did the Woggle-Bug say?” and were invited to submit their
guesses to the newspaper in the hope of winning items of Oz merchandise and cash prizes.
But these responses did more than promote merchandise; they also dictated the storytelling
direction of upcoming comic strips, as the often highly creative and imaginative ideas of read-
ers came to influence and inspire Baum to explore further untapped terrains of the already
expanding Land of Oz world.
Such a case of competitions and storytelling aligning shows how early 20th-century
newspaper comic strips came to exemplify features of participatory and interactive world-
building, while the competitions published inside those newspapers also provide us with
an historical example of how “fan produced performances … invited by the creator …
become part of the transmedia narrative itself ” at this time (Jenkins, 2009). Moreover, the
miniature table-top imaginary worlds of the 19th century—from dollhouses to toy sol-
diers—alongside the literary case of Oz in the early 20th century demonstrate that audi-
ence explorations of imaginary worlds pre-date the contemporary era of convergence and
participatory culture.
Similarly, both Will Brooker (2002) and Jonathan Gray (2010) have shown how toys can
expand or reshape a participatory transmedia world, and in the 1930s cases such as Tarzan can
be seen to have adopted strategies of merchandising to enable the stories and world to extend
and expand through participation. By the mid-1930s, Tarzan’s creator Edgar Rice Burroughs
had issued a total of twenty-six companies with a license to manufacture Tarzan merchan-
dise (Porges, 1975: 489–492). Items made in the likeness of Tarzan or branded items that the
character used in the context of the world included Tarzan bread, Tarzan knives, Tarzan belts,
Tarzan household kitchen utensils, and Tarzan ornamental bows and arrows, to name just a
few (Vernon, 2008: 34–35). This merchandise, carefully inserted into the fictional milieu of
the stories—which themselves were expansions of the world published elsewhere—was an
intertextual cornerstone of the fictional world that impacted on how the narrative actually
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unfolded across media. (Entire plots in the Tarzan comic strip, for example, were dictated by
Burroughs’s merchandising deals (Freeman, 2016).) And in so doing, it was the merchandise—
functioning as artifacts within the world itself and as a physical, extractable item from that
world—that contributed as much to the process of building the Tarzan world as any of the
media forms in which its stories unfolded. This focus on games and merchandise has sug-
gested the ways in which media products were developed so as to connect imaginary worlds
together, as processes of promotion and commodification.
The Present
In the past, in fact, interactive and participatory worlds were largely underpinned by wide-
scale industrial and technological developments, notably in mass communication, new print-
ing technologies, and merchandising, all of which afforded audiences to more easily engage
with the media creations that they loved. Understanding how participatory worlds existed
under a different logic besides the digital participatory model of contemporary media conver-
gences also means acknowledging factors of promotion, with participation offered as a kind of
marketing strategy (Freeman, 2016). It is this same notion of participation-as-promotion that
has come to characterize any number of interactive and participatory worlds in the digital era,
too. In the age of convergence culture, the job of continuing to expand the Land of Oz across
media, for example, rests most emphatically in the hands of marketing teams and digital agen-
cies. One website called findyourwaytooz.com, created by Disney and UNIT9 and devised
as an official promotional website for Oz the Great and Powerful (2013), allowed audiences to
walk around the fictional spaces seen throughout the narrative of that film.The website made
use of digital convergence by blending 3D animation, video, audio, and gameplay to take
audiences on an “interactive journey through a Kansas circus, which leads you to the Land of
Oz after you are swept up by a massive storm” (UNIT9, 2013).
Transmedia websites such as findyourwaytooz.com are typically prized for their abil-
ity to blend the affordances of multiple media forms to create, in that instance, at least, “a
fun, immersive experience that users can form a strong connection with” (UNIT9, 2013).
Steve Coulson, despite his earlier characterization of participatory worlds based on traits of
play, order, and speed of consumption, similarly notes that the on-demand nature of digital
media is key to understanding the allure of many contemporary interactive and participa-
tory worlds (Hassler-Forest, 2016b). For Coulson, on-demand affords audiences to “choose
when, where, and what comes to [them] and in which format, and certainly digitization is
therefore a big part of the on-demand revolution” (Hassler-Forest, 2016: 685b). In the digi-
tal industry, too—at least in the U.S. and the U.K.—participatory transmedia worlds based
on the modern on-demand nature of digital convergences have themselves come to be
perceived as a new form of storytelling or narrative engagement. Conducttr, for example, a
London-based transmedia content producer, works to generate the building of participatory
worlds via forms such as alternate reality games (ARG) or location-based games (Pratten,
2012). Conducttr works on the assumption that a story allowing audiences to roam the
world and discover the story for themselves by questioning, unlocking, solving, visiting, and
generally exploring all the platforms made available by the creators is a richer, more dynamic
and engaging story.
Yet a model of participatory transmedia worlds based on this logic of convergence culture
faces notable challenges. One challenge concerns the question mark over how to produce (or
rather co-produce) such participatory transmedia worlds outside of ARG or promotion-based
strategies. Jonathan Gray, for instance, explores the benches that were erected in anticipation
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of the film District 9 (2009), and the ways they contributed to narrative exposition and shaped
emotional reactions to the film as key sites of participatory world-building:
All that can happen before you even know there is a movie. Now when you are told
that there is a movie, and that these benches are part of it, they have given you an
experience of that world.You have set foot in it and had an experience in it.
(Gray, 2010b)
Like many of today’s participatory worlds based in film and television, at least, much of this
interactive and participatory content occupies the status of promotion or publicity. Brian
Clark notes that most of the transmedia projects based in the U.S. and U.K. today are funded
through promotional and marketing funds (2011). Clark goes on to note that the creatives
involved in such so-called marketing materials continue to make a forceful argument that
their work should be understood as “content” and not simply as “promotion,” with economic
and labor relations issues at stake in the dispute between the two terms.
A second challenge concerning a contemporary model of participatory transmedial worlds
concerns a question mark over why, or when, audiences choose to participate in worlds.
Indeed, what exactly is the relationship between what Michael Saler calls “geographies of
the imagination” (2012: 4) and the audiences who actually engage with them? Christy Dena
introduces an emerging form of participatory culture, “one that is not a modification or
elaboration of a primary producer’s content,” but instead one that is based on a theory of
“tiering” audiences in ARGs, “targeting different players with different content” (2008: 2).
Just as Dena explores aspects of player-created tiers to assess shifts in participatory ARGs,
Charlotte Taylor-Ashfield shows how authorship standards across film, television, and comics
industries can impact on how audiences engage with interactive and participatory worlds,
and what they do with those worlds (2016). Importantly, Taylor-Ashfield points to the ways
in which fans of Captain Marvel attached themselves closely to the work of author Kelly Sue
DeConnick, which resulted in containing transmedial migration and participation rather than
cultivating its spread, thus effectively regulating the participation of audiences (2016).
The Future?
Moreover, amidst the influx of content, brands, narratives, and indeed worlds across multiple
platforms that have flourished with the rise of media convergence, it is not enough to assume
that the creation of a single and coherent imaginary world is necessarily enough to explain
the specificities of and reasons for why audiences choose (or in some cases, choose not) to
cross multiple media and to participate in the world. Hassler-Forest (2016a: 3) argues that
there is a fundamental contradiction between industrial understandings of a fictional transme-
dial world—which emphasize the “straightforward assembly” of “creative production”—and
“fan culture perspectives” that highlight expansiveness and the creative deferment of narrative
closure. Further to this, do all audiences really engage in participatory transmedia activities?
Are worlds, in and of themselves, powerful enough to encourage fans to follow fictions across
an array of texts? And is the creation of an interconnected world capable of igniting sustained
participation from all corners of a given fan base? If not, then which fans do opt to engage in
participatory practices, under what circumstances, and for what reasons?
Given the multifaceted and seemingly endless combination of ways that mark the actions
of today’s media audiences, perhaps it is time to move beyond characterizing the behaviors
of participatory audiences simply according to more industrially defined concepts of sto-
202
rytelling, world-building, brand, or character. Rather, it is crucial to analyze the behaviors

and motivations of a participatory media-crossing audience according to a much more fluid,
paratextual, and value-laden participatory ethos. At a moment when the media industries are
producing so much content, across so many platforms, each with so many varying extensions,
it is now time to re-think critical assumptions that it is simply a narrative, a world, or even a
character that is being engaged with across platforms, and instead to analyze the more specific
and messy rationales for why audiences participate in worlds across media.
Moving toward a fan studies perspectives and, in particular, building on Matt Hills’ work
into how transmedia fandoms operate as unique “communities of practice” (2015), consider
how fans of the aforementioned Captain Marvel engaged in participatory and interactive
practices only when the participatory behaviors in question encapsulated a layered ethos
based on an anti-commercial gift economy—that is, participatory fan productions that are
circulated freely with no financial gain for contributors, all the while held up by an underly-
ing sense of reciprocity between fans (Hellekson, 2009). Media industries have frequently
interpreted the ideal form of fan participation as “continuous consumption” and financial
support of a franchise (Scott, 2012: 43), which for a corporation such as Disney—who owns
Marvel Comics—would be enacted by fans through collecting trivia, merchandise, and indeed
comic books themselves. Even prior to the first issue of the Captain Marvel comic book
being published, writer DeConnick was also using “fannish” platforms including Tumblr and
Pinterest to circulate less commercial forms such as fan-art, crafts, and cosplay of the char-
acter. This meant that prior to any official texts being published, DeConnick—positioned
by many fans as the “auteur” of this fandom (Taylor-Ashfield, 2016)—was acknowledging
transformative works as not only a valid way to participate within the fan community, but
also legitimizing this interactive, freely circulated material as valuable participatory exten-
sions of the Captain Marvel imaginary world. DeConnick even participated in this fan world
herself, selling T-shirts through WeLoveFine and donating her profit to The Girls Leadership
Institute—a charity whose goal to “help foster and give voice to the heroines of tomorrow”
aligns closely with the gift economy values of the Captain Marvel fan community (Taylor-
Ashfield, 2016).
In the case of the participatory motivations of the Captain Marvel fan community, at least,
reciprocity, community, anti-commercialism—not to mention an open dialogue between cre-
ator and consumer—all directly informed which stories fans chose to engage with and how
they chose to participate in the world of those stories. In some sense, then, the fan practices
of participating in the imaginary worlds of 21st-century popular culture are, in part, based
broadly on the sharing of personal values within, across, and between media—philosophising,
not just interacting with, imaginary worlds across multiple platforms.
Importantly, this form of world participation based on fan-made crafts, fan-fiction, and
fan-art exemplifies the kind of participatory culture first envisaged by Jenkins in Textual
Poachers (1992), and then realized more recently in a more socio-political sense in By Any
Media Necessary (2016). In the latter book, Jenkins, Shresthova, Gamber-Thompson, Klinger-
Vilenchik, and Zimmerman explore the complexities and the challenges faced by the current
youth generation seeking to acquire “the skills necessary for political participation at an age
where there is less than complete access to the rights of citizenship” (2016: 7). So far, the
academic study of imaginary worlds has not done enough to conceptualize the specificities
and peculiarities of how and why audiences choose—or choose not—to interact with, and
to participate in, imaginary worlds. As researchers of imaginary worlds, we should pay more
attention to such specificities and peculiarities, for the politics of individual participation raise
important questions about how and why imaginary worlds continue to be built.
203
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Brooker, W. (2002), Using the Force: Creativity, Community and Star Wars Fans. London: Bloomsbury.
Clark, B. (2011), “Brian Clark on Transmedia Business Models (Part Two).” Retrieved August 30, 2014.
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Dena, C. (2008), “Emerging Participatory Culture Practices: Player-Created Tiers in Alternate
Reality Games,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 14(1),
41–57.
Freeman, M. (2016), Historicising Transmedia Storytelling: Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds.
London and New York: Routledge.
Gray, J. (2010a), Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts. New York: New York
University Press.
Gray, J. (2010b), “On Anti-Fans and Paratexts: An Interview with Jonathan Gray (Part Two).” Retrieved
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participatory-stories.
Saler, M. (2012), As If: Modern Enchantments and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality. Oxford: Oxford
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Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines. Basingstoke: Palgrave Pivot.
Scott, S. (2012), “Who’s Steering the Mothership?: The Role of the Fanboy Auteur in Transmedia
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Part 4
Authorship and
Reception
26
Subcreation
Lars Konzack
On March 8, 1939, J. R. R. Tolkien officially coined the term “subcreation” at his Andrew
Lang Lecture, and it was published eight years later in his now-famous essay, “On Fairy-
Stories.” By “subcreation” (literally, “creating under”), he means the ability to create a world
within God’s Creation. Tolkien was a Catholic and that’s why this concept made sense to him.
For this reason, students have asked me if an analyst has to be Catholic or at least Theist in
order to use and apply his theory. It probably helps, but it can be exercised whether the analyst
believes the world was created by God, by Intelligent Design, or simply by a Big Bang; as long
as the analyst accepts the idea of a Primary World and a secondary world. (Georges Henri
Joseph Édouard Lemaître, a Belgian priest, astronomer, and professor of physics at the Catholic
University of Leuven, proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of
the universe, which he called his “hypothesis of the primeval atom” or the “Cosmic Egg.” Pope
Pius XII declared, at the November 22, 1951, opening meeting of the Pontifical Academy of
Sciences, that the Big Bang theory does not conflict with the Catholic concept of creation.)
If we take this stand, then it makes sense to perceive a fictional world as a subcreation and
the designer of this world as a subcreator. The world of Creation is the Primary World, while
the subcreated world (also known as a subcreation) is known as a secondary world (Tolkien,
1975). The secondary world is an imaginary world.
A surprising aspect of J. R. R. Tolkien’s theory is that he does not regard fairy tales as
specially made for children. In fact, the concept of fairy tales may be harder to grasp and
understand for a child than for an adult. This does not mean you cannot make a fairy tale
for children, but it will not be possible to use all the skills and knowledge of the subcreator.
I imagine that was how J. R. R. Tolkien must have felt when writing the children’s book The
Hobbit (1937) compared to his later adult works The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955) and the
writings that would become The Silmarillion (1977). To better understand J. R. R. Tolkien’s
notion of subcreation, we may see how the concept was first introduced:
We may put a deadly green upon a man’s face and produce a horror; we may make
the rare and terrible blue moon to shine; or we may cause woods to spring with
silver leaves and rams to wear fleeces of gold, and put hot fire into the belly of the
cold worm. But in such “fantasy,” as it is called, new form is made; Faerie begins;
Man becomes a sub-creator.
(Tolkien, 1975, p. 28)
And later this idea is generalized: “To many, Fantasy, this sub-creative art which plays strange
tricks with the world and all that is in it, combining nouns and redistributing adjectives, has
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seemed suspect, if not illegitimate. To some it has seemed at least a childish folly, a thing only
for peoples or for persons in their youth” (Tolkien, 1975, p. 55).
Based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s description of what he means by subcreation, I shall define
subcreation as a creation of an imaginary world that in literature can be accomplished by
combining nouns and redistributing adjectives; the imaginary world is a secondary world in
relation to the Primary World, also known as the real world we live in; and the imaginary
world has the inner consistency of reality. Subcreation can be done not only in literature
but in various media forms; and consequently the imaginary world may be expressed across
media as transmedia storytelling. Following this definition, a subcreator is a person creating an
imaginary world, and subcreative art means the art of creating imaginary worlds.
J. R. R. Tolkien came up with a strikingly new take on fairy-stories. Rather than focusing
on the temporal development of a narrative, and comparing different narrative structures, he
outlined a world perspective from which several different narratives can take place and poten-
tially be created. This means the subcreation becomes a storyworld superstructure, generating
novel storylines for subcreators. When Tolkien writes, “Faerie is a perilous land, and in it are
pitfalls for the unwary and dungeons for the overbold,” he is talking about the land of make-
believe as a metaphor for fairy tales, but his own fantasy literature has actual maps, timelines,
genealogies, nature descriptions, cultures, languages, mythologies, and philosophies to express
the imaginary world. The fantasy genre is closer to the ideals of subcreation than fairy tales
ever were.
Tolkien’s concept of subcreation holds that fairy tales stem from the world of Faerie, and
this might actually be the weak spot of Tolkien’s theory. Because while it is obvious that the
fantasy and science fiction genres are about creating fictional worlds, it is far from obvious
that a fairy tale is based on a coherent world of Faerie. Even though it might be useful as a
metaphor to comprehend fairy tales this way, the subcreation of a fairy tale is not nearly as
developed and does not have the inner consistency of reality, as in fantasy and science fic-
tion novels.
According to Tolkien, an imaginary world or subcreation should not be based on the
willing suspension of disbelief, but on “secondary belief ” in the world’s inner consistency
of reality. This is because the very moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken. Tolkien rejects
the idea of willing suspension of disbelief because a convincing fantasy is built on belief—
not in the sense that the reader actually believes in the fantasy as deception, but as a way to
understand that any subcreation should be able to explain the motives, actions, and events in
the story based on reason and logical causation. Willing suspension of disbelief leads to lazy
storytelling: Why was there a dragon? Just accept it.Why was the dragon able to turn into a frog? Just
accept it. And why was the frog able to shoot a machine gun? Just accept it. An experienced subcrea-
tor has to have a coherent answer to all that is happening within the imaginary world, and, as
a consequence, willing suspension of disbelief is regarded as a kind of dumbing-down of the
imaginary world. Contrary to such random contingencies, a Tolkienesque fantasy has to be
internally intelligible.
From this standpoint follows Tolkien’s insistence on rationality when pursuing subcreative
art. Tolkien puts it this way:
Fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult
Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of,
scientific verity. On the contrary. The keener and the clearer is the reason, the better
fantasy will it make. If men were ever in a state in which they did not want to know
or could not perceive truth (facts or evidence), then Fantasy would languish until
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they were cured. If they ever get into that state (it would not seem at all impossible),
Fantasy will perish, and become Morbid Delusion.
(Tolkien, 1975, p. 56)
If Tolkien is correct, then it fully makes sense why children should not be considered the tar-
get audience of subcreation because it takes an adult to really appreciate the inner consistency
of reality and to realize the deeper meanings and mythological and philosophical reflections
of the subcreation. That is not to say that children are not allowed to experience the fantastic,
but they will not be able to fully value the work of art.
Literary Criticism
In “On Fairy-Stories,” J. R. R. Tokien criticizes a variety of views. He was critical toward
Victorian Romanticism, Reductionism, and Formalism, Modernism, and Skepticism. Not all
of of these critical points are explicitly targeted, and the casual reader might easily overlook
the addressee.
Apparently, Tolkien and his works are by some regarded as just another Victorian
Romanticism (Garth, 2003; Reilly, 2006), and I do think his authorship began from this
angle. But as his writings developed, Victorian Romanticism turned into a prison. He could
no longer comprehend his work as irrational and just emotional expressions of childhood
dreams. By insisting on reason as the entrance to fantasy, and that fairy-stories aren’t made
for children, Tolkien discarded Victorian Romanticism and its denial of rationality. Tolkien
accepted the idea that subcreation and fantasy give a way to escape from day-to-day reality.
But he perceived the Romantic as an escapist deserter of reality while the reader who enjoys
and understands subcreations is a prisoner escaping his imprisonment, and like the escapist
from Plato’s cave wants to return to free the other prisoners. With his newfound power in
fantasy comes a great responsibility.
Tolkien was also against Reductionism and Formalism as a way to grasp fairy tales. Rather
than conforming to popular beliefs, he discovered how much information was lost and how
this lack of knowledge turned into false statements through generalizations. He did not think
reducing heroes or gods to weather phenomena or archetypes helped to give a better under-
standing of what they were all about. Instead, he wanted rich descriptions that opened up for
greater applicability (the capacity of reading texts in a variety of contexts). Also, his criticism
of Formalism comes as a soup-metaphor. The Formalist separates the different aspects from
the story in order to create some sort of recipe of the fairy tale, separating the bone from
the soup. Even if the Formalist succeeds, it does not tell us much about the fairy tale as such.
Tolkien writes: “By ‘the soup’ I mean the story as it is served up by its author or teller, and
by ‘the bones’ its sources or material—even when (by rare luck) those can be with certainty
discovered. But I do not, of course, forbid criticism of the soup as soup” (Tolkien, 1975, p. 26).
Before Structuralism had become a popular way to analyze literature, Tolkien had already
discovered the foundational problem of Reductionism: that it simply did not allow for syn-
thesis, treating the works unfairly. Of course, knowing the foundational structures of a story
may be interesting in itself, but it neither tells about the quality of the work nor the moral of
the story. It’s like searching for psychological mentality by taking x-rays of the skeleton, which
was close to what phrenologists tried to do, and they failed miserably.
Being anti-Reductionist, it is no wonder that Tolkien was anti-Modernist too. This was
a provocation in the middle of the 20th century, and seen as reactionary. However, most of
what he says has been accepted today. The Modernists have later been criticized for being
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reductionist (Fried, 1982). So when Tolkien was criticizing Modernism, he was, in fact, not a
reactionary but ahead of his time, or one could say he had his own agenda and from his point
of view it was obvious that even though literary Modernists acted very aggressively their
methods simply did not work.
One might then argue that J. R. R. Tolkien was in fact a Postmodernist; but this is not the
case. First of all, Tolkien never said he was, and, second, he was critical toward Skepticism as
well. In The Lord of the Rings, Skepticism is represented by Saruman of Many Colours, and, as
you might well know, he is presented as a mere sophist. Tolkien calls for reason and belief and
that is an antidote to Postmodernist rhetoric.
To sum up, J. R. R. Tolkien was anti-Romantic, anti-Reductionist, anti-Formalist, anti-
Modernist, and anti-Skeptic/anti-Postmodernist. This meant that he did not make many
friends in the highly politicized academic milieu of the mid-20th century. He was consigned
to link up with a few other non-conventional minds in a literary discussion group called
The Inklings (Duriez, 2015). Here, Tolkien had the advantage of intellectual exchange in this
group of people who were outside mainstream and where different views and beliefs were
truly permissible, developing his own Subcreativist agenda of literary criticism, focusing on
the concept of subcreation and insisting on reason in order to appreciate and comprehend
fantasy fiction and the inner consistency of reality.
J. R. R. Tolkien’s Precursors
To better grasp Tolkien’s project, it is important to stress that many of his ideas came from
early medieval Anglo-Saxon literature. A great inspiration was the poem Beowulf (circa 8th to
11th century) in which the writer, an unknown monk, tries to empathize with Pre-Christian
Anglo-Saxon culture (Tolkien, 1997). The idea was that you could express a sentiment and
cultural point of view from another perspective than your own. This was not about creating a
utopia, but about using another time and place as a platform to put your own life in perspec-
tive, just as you might empathize with another person and his or her point of view.
The concept of creating imaginary worlds wasn’t new. What Tolkien offered was a unique
poetics with which to value and understand imaginary worlds.There had been descriptions of
imaginary worlds as far back as Homer’s Odyssey, written in the 9th century B.C. (Wolf, 2012).
The ancient Roman poet Virgil’s approach to imaginary worlds is the epic poem Aeneid (circa
29–19 B.C.), a conscious art mythology created as a sequel to the Odyssey, creating a Roman
artificial national mythology (Putnam, 1995). Following in his footsteps, we find the High
Medieval Welsh cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth who fabricated the chronicle Historia Regum
Britanniae (circa 1136) in which Brutus, a descendant of the Trojan hero Aeneas from the
Aeneid, founded the first settlements of Britain (Lacy & Wilhelm, 2013). In here, we also find
one of the earliest stories about King Arthur.The Danish Medieval scholar Saxo Grammaticus
also created a chronicle of the Danish Kings, though unlike Geoffrey of Monmouth, he did
not feign its origin. In the tradition of Virgil, he created a Danish national mythology in his
work Gesta Danorum (circa 1208). Similarly, Tolkien wanted to create an artificial national
mythology for the Anglo-Saxons based on his profound knowledge on the subject of Anglo-
Saxon literature and language (Shippey, 2001). This, however, could have been done without
creating an imaginary world.
The subcreation of the imaginary world Arda (including Middle-earth) was at least partly
inspired by the Danish minister, poet, and philologist N. F. S. Grundtvig; the Scottish minister
and poet George MacDonald; the English philosopher and journalist G. K. Chesterton; and
the Irish author and game designer Lord Dunsany. N. F. S. Grundtvig translated Beowulf and
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Gesta Danorum by Saxo Grammaticus into Danish. According to Tom Shippey, Grundtvig
created a legendarium for Denmark and insisted on the concept of det levende ord (the living
word); it was not enough for the philologist to learn the words and grammar, he had to use
them as well (Shippey, 2001). George MacDonald gave the living word a direction by insisting
on imagination in fairy tales (MacDonald, 2004). But imagination was only one part of the
human mind as Francis Bacon once wrote:“The parts of human learning have reference to the
three parts of man’s understanding, which is the seat of learning: history to his memory, poesy
to his imagination, and philosophy to his reason” (Bacon, 1893, p. I (1)). It must be added
though, Tolkien did not only want imagination, he wanted memory and philosophy as well.
What G. K. Chesterton gave Tolkien was criticism of Romanticism as well as criticism of
Modernism. He showed that it was a false dichotomy. One did not have to choose between
Romantic irrationality and Modernist absurdity.They could both be wrong. It was possible to
adopt independent options outside this deceitful dualism (Chesterton, 2014; Milbank, 2009).
But most importantly, Lord Dunsany went even further and presented a fantasy world with a
pantheon of his own. In it, Tolkien found his inspiration for creating an imaginary world, to
develop his subcreation (Carpenter, 2014).
Unknown to Tolkien, scientist and Duchess Margaret Cavendish had similar thoughts on
the creation of an imaginary world centuries earlier. In the introduction to her work The
Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World (1666), she explained her considerations
about the matter of creating an imaginary world, writing:
The end of Reason, is Truth; the end of Fancy, is Fiction: But mistake me not, when
I distinguish Fancy from Reason; I mean not as if Fancy were not made by the
Rational parts of Matter; but by Reason I understand a rational search and enquiry
into the causes of natural effects; and by Fancy a voluntary creation or production
of the Mind, both being effects, or rather actions of the rational part of Matter; of
which, as that is a more profitable and useful study than this, so it is also more labori-
ous and difficult, and requires sometimes the help of Fancy, to recreate the Mind, and
withdraw it from its more serious Contemplations.
(Cavendish, 2016, p. 59)
As one can see, she, like Tolkien, insists that even though her imaginary world is created as
fiction, it has to come from reason. In her work, she has many science fiction elements from
17th-century natural philosophy. She is also very conscious about her subcreation, writing:
But lest my Fancy should stray too much, I chose such a Fiction as would be agree-
able to the subject I treated of in the former parts; it is a Description of a New
World, not such as Lucian’s, or the French man’s World in the Moon; but a World
of my own Creating, which I call the Blazing-World: The first part whereof is
Romancical, the second Philosophical, and the third is meerly Fancy, or (as I may
call it) Fantastical; which if it add any satisfaction to you, I shall account myself a
Happy Creatoress […] I have made a World of my own: for which no body, I hope,
will blame me, since it is in every ones power to do the like.
(Cavendish, 2016, p. 60)
Margaret Cavendish had some of the same thoughts as Tolkien came up with, although admit-
tedly Tolkien gave his vision much deeper thought. Inspired by Medieval literature and the
ideas of scholars and writers, Tolkien developed his own poetics for imaginary worlds.
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J. R. R. Tolkien’s Successors
Many fantasy writers would, in the years to come, copy the style and stories of Tolkien’s
fantasy works; this was not necessarily complimentary to Tolkien. The idea of subcreation
is not necessarily about hobbits, orcs, and elves. It is about being creative, as Olaf Stapledon
would put it (Stapledon, 1939). When Tolkien subcreated The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings,
and the writings of The Silmarillion, he was being creative, conceiving modern epic fantasy.
Copying his work is a form of laziness. Subcreation, and the idea of an imaginary world with
an inner consistency of reality, is a method that could be used to create any kind of imaginary
world. In this sense, Frank Herbert’s Dune series and Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast series are
closer to the ideals of subcreation than something like Terry Brooks’s Sword of Shannara (1977).
Apart from science fiction and fantasy fiction, a new literary genre emerged called role-
playing games. In 1974, Ernest Gary Gygax and David Arneson published the rules for
Dungeons & Dragons based on subcreation of fantasy fiction. The overall idea of delving into
ancient dungeons was closer to the genre of sword-and-sorcery than epic fantasy, but there
is no doubt that the role-playing game worked as a tool for subcreation. Role-playing games
thrived in the late 20th century, and they all worked with subcreation in different genres and
settings. It seemed as if the ludic nature of role-playing games was the perfect match with
the ingenuity of subcreation, supporting the inner consistency of reality through game rules.
While The Lord of the Rings movies visualized J. R. R. Tolkien’s epic fantasy trilogy, the
visualization of the idea of subcreation was done most convincingly in massively multiplayer
online role-playing games (MMORPGs). Again, the programmed game rules sustained the
inner consistency of reality. But more than that, these games opened up three-dimensional
imaginary worlds that the player could discover with his or her player character. These
MMORPGs weren’t just showing the surroundings but provided the opportunity to explore
whole imaginary worlds (Nitsche, 2008; Taylor, 2009; Tresca, 2011).
In his 1940 short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Jorge Luis Borges tells about a lexicon
that has been infiltrated by fiction. At the time this was presented as out of this world—an
outrage. Today, we are used to presenting imaginary worlds in online lexica. Keeping track of
the imaginary worlds of The Lord of the Rings, Dungeons & Dragons, and various MMORPGs
becomes a task in itself. No wonder a lexicon was needed for Middle-earth to get an over-
view. With the invention of the Internet, lexica have been easier to access than ever before.
Now it has become commonplace to have wikis for all major imaginary worlds. It helps with
the following of a television series like Game of Thrones (2011–present) or to keep up with the
many characters in superhero movies. This way, the very structure of the Internet enhances,
facilitates, and supports subcreation literacy; the ability to understand and work with sub-
creations. This also means that lack of ability to understand and work with subcreations is
subcreation blindness.
Subcreation literacy is needed when working with transmedial worlds (see the chapter
“Transmediality” in this volume), and consequently subcreation works as a poetics for trans-
medial storytelling. Episodic narratives based on a subcreation open up to several, if not
endless, storylines within the imaginary world. That is why episodic narratives, the black
sheep of the narrative family, have now become a far more accepted technique in storytell-
ing. Likewise, in an MMORPG, there is an open architecture for numerous quests to follow.
Further development of the concept of subcreation is presented by Mark J. P.Wolf. Inspired
by fantasy and science fiction literature, he presents an infrastructure for imaginary worlds
with maps, timelines, genealogies, nature, culture, language, mythology, and philosophy (Wolf,
2012). Another development is focusing on different levels of subcreation (Konzack, 2006).
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At the philosophical level, the subcreator strategically constructs mythologies, religions, and
philosophies of the world. At the epic level, the subcreator tactically has to construct a sec-
ondary world with geography and items based on the cultures, mythologies, religions, and
philosophies, shaping the world historically. This world mapping should inspire storytelling
of epic proportions, giving rise to legends and heroic acts. And finally, at the naïve level, the
subcreator operationally builds within his subcreation what seem to be straightforward plots
that are effortless to grasp for the explorers of the imaginary world.
References
Bacon, F. (1893). The Advancement of Learning, Book II. London: Cassel & Company, Ltd.
Carpenter, H. (2014). The Letters of J.R.R.Tolkien. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Cavendish, M. (2016). The Description of a World called The Blazing-World. Ontario: Peterborough,
Broadview Press.
Chesterton, G. K. (2014). The G. K. Chesterton Collection. London: The Catholic Way Publ.
Duriez, C. (2015). The Oxford Inklings: Lewis,Tolkien and Their Circle. Oxford: Lion Books.
Fine, G. A. (2002). Shared Fantasy: Role-Playing Games as Social Worlds. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press.
Foster, R. (2001). The Complete Guide to Middle-earth: From the Hobbit Through The Lord of the Rings and
Beyond. New York, NY: Ballantine Books.
Fried, M. (1982, Sept.). “How Modernism Works: A Response to T. J. Clark,” Critical Inquiry,Vol. 9, No. 1,
The Politics of Interpretation, pp. 217–34.
Garth, J. (2003). Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin
Comp.
Gygax, G. (1987). Role-Playing Mastery. London: Grafton Books.
Konzack, L. (2006). “Subcreation of Secondary Game Worlds” in J. Dionísio, A. R. Fernandes, & P.
Gomes, Games 2006: iDiG—International Digital Games Conference: Proceedings (pp. 115–22).
Portalegre: APROJE.
Lacy, N. J., & Wilhelm, J. J. (2013). The Romance of Arthur: An Anthology of Medieval Texts in Translation, third
edition. London: Routledge.
MacDonald, G. (2004). “The Fantastic Imagination” in D. Sandner, Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader
(pp. 64–9). Westport. CT: Praeger Publ.
Milbank, A. (2009). Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians. London: T&T Clark.
Nitsche, M. (2008). Video Game Spaces: Image, Play, and Structure in 3D Worlds. Cambridge, MA:The MIT
Press.
Peterson, J. (2012). Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People, and Fantastic Adventure from
Chess to Role-Playing Games. San Diego, CA: Unreason Press.
Putnam, M. C. (1995). Virgil’s Aeneid: Interpretation and Influence. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North
Carolina Press.
Reilly, R. J. (2006). Romantic Religion. Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Books.
Shippey, T. (2001). J. R. R.Tolkien: Author of the Century. London: HarperCollins Publ.
Stapledon, O. (1939, Dec.). Escapism in Literature. Scrutiny, pp. 298–308.
Taylor,T. L. (2009). Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture. Cambridge, MA:The MIT Press.
Tolkien, J. R. R. (1975). “On Fairy-Stories” in J. R. R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf (pp. 11–79). London:
Unwin Books.
Tolkien, J. R. R. (1997). “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” in C. Tolkien, editor, The Monsters and
the Critics and Other Essays (pp. 5–48). London: HarperCollins Publ.
Tresca, M. J. (2011). The Evolution of Role-Playing Games. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Comp.
Wolf, M. J. P. (2012). Building Imaginary Worlds:The Theory and History of Subcreation. London: Routledge.
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27
Authorship
Jessica Aldred
The concept of the author figure seems to provide a kind of organizing principle to the study
of imaginary worlds. However, in recent years in particular the question of authorship—and
whose voice or voices are privileged in the construction of increasingly dispersed, transmedial
imaginary worlds—has become ever more contested. As Mark J.P. Wolf points out:
Despite attacks on them and proclamations of their death, the notions of author-
ship and the author have endured and show no signs of falling out of use. What has
changed, however, is the idea of the author as a lone figure producing a work in iso-
lation, for whom influences and potential consequences play no role in the shaping
of a work. The notion of authorship has expanded out to include a variety of roles
and acknowledged contributions that make a work what it is, while still maintaining
the need for attribution … Imaginary worlds are not only transmedial and transnarrative,
but transauthorial as well.
(Wolf, 2012: 268–269, emphasis mine)
As imaginary worlds expand across a growing range of media platforms, each with its own
technical, aesthetic, and narrative demands, so too does the potential number of authors
involved in their creation increase, giving way to the “transauthorial” nature of imaginary
worlds Wolf describes. For example, while novelist J.K. Rowling holds the privileged posi-
tion of primary creator of the world of Harry Potter, retaining ironclad script approval on
cinematic adaptations of her novels and meticulously curating an encyclopedia of characters,
places, items, and wizarding lore via her Potter-focused website, Pottermore, Rowling also
necessarily welcomes the interventions of the directors, cinematographers, video game pro-
grammers, toymakers, and theme park designers who make the cross-platform expansion of
the Potter universe possible.
With Rowling’s example, which I’ll return to later, in mind, the notion of a distinctive,
unified, authorial vision guiding every aspect of an imaginary world becomes even more
problematic than it was in the multi-faceted industrial process of cinema, where “auteur”
theory originated in the late 1940s—and has since been extensively debated and contested—
in relation to the figure of the director.
Led by prominent French film critics Andre Bazin and Alexandre Astruc, auteur theory
touted the discernible authorial vision of the director (“camera-stylo”), wielding his camera
as a gifted writer might wield his pen (see Astruc, 1948). Auteur theory served as a means of
both legitimating cinema as an art form at the same time as it legitimated the nascent schol-
arship that had begun to surround it. However, as Paul McDonald (2013) contends, early
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studies of film authorship and their focus on the director-as-individual agent of p roduction
ultimately obstructed the realities of cinema’s broader industrial, institutional, and market con-
texts. Furthermore, the objections to “unified” theories of authorship that followed amongst
prominent poststructuralist critics, led by Roland Barthes’s famous declaration of the “Death
of the Author” and Michel Foucault’s insistence that we investigate the author as a discursive
construction or “author function,” were not necessarily any more attentive to questions of
industrial and commercial production. As McDonald asserts, “the critical dismissal of author-
ship in favor of attention to the meanings and politics of texts or discourses blocked attention
to the circumstances in which those very texts or discourses were produced and circulated”
(McDonald, 2013:147).
As Jonathan Gray and Derek Johnson (2013) suggest in “The Problem of Media Authorship,”
the aptly titled introduction to their edited volume on the subject, in the age of media con-
vergence in particular, we must remember that authorship is as much about power and the
active management of people and meaning as it is about creativity:
The author is a node through which discourses of beauty, truth, meaning, and value
must travel, while also being a node through which money, power, labor, and control
of culture must travel, and while frequently serving as the mediating figure stand-
ing between large organizations (such as Lucasfilm or Fox) and the audience. No
wonder academics and citizens alike are all endlessly fascinated by authors. And no
wonder we all discuss authors so frequently, since arguments about creation, beauty,
the audience, production, the industrialization of culture, labor, and flows of mean-
ing and cash will often be couched in terms of authorship.
(Gray and Johnson, 2013: 3)
With this understanding of media authorship as a typically transauthorial phenomenon that

balances these dual imperatives of creativity and control, we can move toward a productive
understanding of its ongoing significance to the study of imaginary worlds. In so doing, we
must pose and begin to answer a series of key questions, including: Whose interests does
the author or “author function” (to borrow Foucault’s crucial phrase) serve? How does the
authorship of an imaginary world differ from the authorship of a story? Does the narrative
focus of most theories of authorship affect how we conceptualize the authorship of imaginary
worlds? What types of spoken and unspoken hierarchies exist between authors of different
media forms within a given imaginary world? Or between so-called “above-the-line” and
“below-the-line” talent working to create these worlds? Whose authorial voices are privileged
within this new, ostensibly “transauthorial” model, and whose are marginalized? What role do
audiences play in the negotiation of creativity and meaning within imaginary worlds? As we
work to answer these questions, we must also interrogate some of the more problematic resur-
rections of the unified author figure since Barthes famously proclaimed its death in the 1960s.
Circles of Authorship?
Despite—or perhaps because of—the potentially large number of prospective creators
involved in the “transauthorial” model of imaginary world-building,Wolf suggests that certain
facets of the unifying concept of the author persist and remain useful. For Wolf, authorship
can be conceptualized as a series of concentric circles extending out from the

world’s originator (or originators), with each circle of delegated authority being
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Jessica Aldred
further removed from the world’s origination and involving diminishing authorial
contributions, from the originator and main author to estates, heirs, and torchbearers;
employees and freelancers; the makers of approved, derivative, and ancillary products
that are based on a world; and finally to the non-canonical additions of elaborationists
and fan productions.
(Wolf, 2012: 269)
The “circles of authorship” Wolf proposes are strongly linked to the perceived canonicity of
the works in question, with those texts “that typically possess the highest degree of canonic-
ity … (coming) from the innermost circles of authorship, which surround the originator and
main author of a world” (Wolf, 2012: 271).While authorship alone doesn’t guarantee a work’s
place within the canon, Wolf posits a strong correlation between the highest level of canon in
an imaginary world and the output of the so-called “main author,” who is viewed as invent-
ing the world, setting its boundaries, and building its infrastructures: “When the world makes
its first public appearance, the author’s name becomes associated with it as the source of the
world and the authority behind it” (p. 273).
Wolf points to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Arda and L. Frank Baum’s Oz as crucial examples of the
way “circles of authorship” can structure imaginary worlds. In both cases, clearly defined
author-originators create and define exhaustive fictional universes in which their stories are
set; biological heirs (Christopher Tolkien) and estate-appointed torchbearers (Ruth Plumy
Thompson) become approved to continue or tend these literary narratives within their
created worlds; a selection of employees and freelancers are tasked with re-creating and
expanding these worlds in the context of other media (most notably in both examples, that
of cinema), while the makers of the “approved” ancillary merchandise (dolls, toys, costumes)
bring tangible facets of the imaginary world into the lived world of the audience. And finally,
in Wolf ’s outermost circle, devoted fans re-work and elaborate on their favorite aspects of
these worlds, producing non-canonical extensions and revisions in a range of different media
forms. Thus, the long-hypothesized queer relationship between Sam and Frodo in The Lord
of the Rings can be explored via slash fiction and animated gifs in “SamFro,” a Tumblr based
on the “much-needed shipname for the pairing of Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee,”
while online galleries of Wizard of Oz fan art showcase character designs and narrative
re-imaginings that merge Baum’s world with the aesthetics and tropes of Japanese anime
and manga.
Certainly J.K. Rowling, as the aforementioned “main author and originator” of the world
of Harry Potter, seems to exist at the center of Wolf ’s “circles of authorship.” Rowling’s book
series provides the core world-building text to which all other extensions, expansions, and
adaptations must adhere, the affordances and limitations of the elaborate world it creates rein-
forced by her encyclopedic updates regarding various characters, spells, settings, and history
via the Pottermore website, as well as supplementary world-building books like Quidditch
Through the Ages (2012) and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2001). While her children
have yet to achieve the “heir” status of Tolkien’s or the estate-managing status of Baum’s,
Rowling hand-picked authorized torchbearers in Jack Thorne and John Tiffany, with whom
she collaborated on the play Harry Potter and The Cursed Child (2016), extending the Harry
Potter storyline into Potter’s adulthood and the troubled youth of his son, Albus. Rowling’s
increasingly hands-on involvement in the development of each subsequent Harry Potter film
adaptation didn’t just police the “proper” boundaries of how to represent the world she’d
already created; by securing script approval and eventually producer credits on the last two
films (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 (2010) and Part 2 (2011)), Rowling also
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ensured that they didn’t contradict or “spoil” any future developments in the book series.
At the same time, Rowling extended the perception of her authorial control to include the
films, granting them privileged access to one of the innermost circles of franchise canon in
the process. The multiplicity of acclaimed but ultimately transient directors associated with
the film franchise—including Chris Columbus, Alphonso Cuaron, David Yates, and Mike
Newell—helped further solidify Rowling’s unifying presence as author.
Rowling also provided input and approval to the development of several of the Harry
Potter video game extensions—for example, one developer gleefully re-counted Rowling
“giving” them a creature named a “Gytrash” that had yet to appear in any of the Potter
books, to use in The Chamber of Secrets game. And yet, perhaps due to the long, thorny history
of adapting video games from popular novels and films, Rowling’s approval and involve-
ment seem to function at a greater remove in the context of the Potter games, delineating a
clear line between her role as “primary” author and the secondary role of the developers as
employee-freelancers. While Rowling provided written guidelines outlining the world’s basic
operating principles and secrets that couldn’t be given away, as well as feedback on which
characters might be best suited for specific game missions, she ultimately demurred on certain
major decisions, leaving them in the hands of game developers. As Stephen Totilo recounts in
the pre-release lead up to the Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix game:
[S]he’s J. K. Rowling. She invented Harry. And yet when the EA team working on
the game in London wanted to give players the ability to play wizard games like
Gobstones and Exploding Snap, she did more than just say, “OK”. Rowling’s books
mentioned the games but didn’t spell out exactly how Harry and friends play them.
Roberts and team dreamed something up. “We wrote the rules up for all these
games, sent them off to J. K. Rowling, and she went, ‘Yeah, OK, those are the rules’,”
he told MTV News during a visit to EA UK’s Guildford, England, studio just out-
side of London. “It’s kind of cool. We got to make all the rules.”
(Totilo, 2007)
In this case, instead of strictly enforcing the fictional rules of her imaginary world as she had
with the Harry Potter films, Rowling relinquishes the authorship of these rules to game devel-
opers, perhaps a savvy rhetorical move and technical strategy given the difficulty of imple-
menting highly detailed rule systems at the level of code. However, since there’s no evidence
that the rules Rowling “allows” developers to establish feed back into the broader narrative
ecology and world-building of the Potter universe in other media, this gesture ultimately
places the games further away from its canonical “center.” Rowling’s insistence on narrative
continuity and maintenance also curtails the opportunity to make the games—or the films,
for that matter— participate meaningfully in the process of transmedia storytelling, in which,
as Henry Jenkins (2007) suggests, “integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systemati-
cally across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated
entertainment experience … (and) each medium makes its own unique contribution to the
unfolding of the story.” In this instance, Rowling’s “author function” is carefully managed in
order to protect the integrity of her imaginary world-as-personal-brand, allowing the game
developers as employees-freelancers to bear the brunt of any mediocre reviews and tepid fan
reception that followed. (For example, GameSpot bemoaned that “(t)he video game version
of Order of the Phoenix captures none of the magic in the Harry Potter books or films”;
another reviewer for VideoGamer complained that “(w)hile the core mechanics of Order of
the Phoenix are verging on excellent, the game that’s been built around them is basically a
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Jessica Aldred
series of chores in disguise.”) As Casey O’Donnell (2011) points out, while game development
studios bolstered by a larger corporate structure like Electronic Arts can typically weather the
disappointing results of any given game, smaller studios can and have been brought down by
a single poorly selling movie-licensed game, as have the professional reputations of the indi-
vidual developers involved in its creation.
Rowling’s unifying author function has also become, at times, highly problematic in the
context of Harry Potter fans’ efforts at expanding or even simply documenting her well-
defined world. For example, in 2007, Rowling filed a lawsuit challenging the publication of
an encyclopedia-style book called the Harry Potter Lexicon, based on an immensely popular
and exhaustive fan website of the same name, since Rowling herself had plans to publish
a similar reference book. Although the defense team faulted Rowling for attempting “to
claim a monopoly on the right to publish literary reference guides, and other non-academic
research, relating to her own fiction … a right no court has ever recognized,” the court ulti-
mately ruled in her favor, forcing the fan in question to publish an abbreviated and highly
amended version. Rowling has also vociferously corrected many of the fan theories that
have gained enough traction to reach her notice (including the notion that Ginny must have
used a love potion to win Harry’s affections, since Hermoine is Harry’s true soulmate (see
Panganiban, 2015), while advancing her own, seemingly fanfic-inspired character backsto-
ries (“outing” Professor Dumbledore, for example) in subsequent discussions of the books.
Furthermore, many fans were devastated by the 2015 relaunch of Rowling’s Pottermore site,
since it removed most of the interactive and role-playing affordances that allowed them to
play in and with the magical world of Hogwarts, and replaced this interactivity with more,
mostly etymological writing from Rowling herself as well as Buzzfeed-style listicles and
“news” about the world of Harry Potter (Ross, 2015); just like that, claimed the Change
.org petition submitted to Rowling on behalf of thousands of disappointed fans, “the ‘Little
Hogwarts’ they could always escape to, had vanished. And with it all our personal stories, our
progress in the magical world have gone” (Pottermore Fans, 2015). (And with it, it should
be noted, also disappeared much of the extensive labor and craftsmanship of the unheralded
“below-the-line” programmers and artists who created the site.) As Henry Jenkins (2011)
contends, Rowling
has shown many signs that she wants to continue to shape and control how fans
respond to her work well after she finished writing it.We can see this in the epilogue
to the last novel, which seems to pointlessly map out futures for all of her charac-
ters, including shaping the “ships” (relationships) between them, in what amounts
to spraying her territory. Many fans would have preferred a text which was more
open-ended on that level and allows them more freedom to speculate beyond the
ending … So, it is abundantly clear that she likes some of her fans more than others
and that any effort to facilitate fan interactions also represents an attempt to bring
fandom more under her control.
( Jenkins, 2011)
“World-Building” versus “World-Sharing”

As Rowling’s example demonstrates, by strongly linking the main author and originator of
a world to the most canonical (and thus, the most critically and commercially valued) works
within it, the problematically “unifying” and legitimating power of the primary author figure
can be reincarnated with a vengeance. Derek Johnson (2013) provides a useful corrective to
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this tendency by reminding us that we must also situate contemporary imaginary worlds in
the industrial context that typically produces them, that of media franchising. Thus, rather
than examining and conceptualizing transmedial imaginary worlds through the somewhat
utopian lens of “world-building”—which more often than not elevates a central creator or
author figure as a kind of ‘master builder’ of the world in question—Johnson contends we
must consider the more industrially grounded notion of “world-sharing,” wherein the ten-
sions between various creators and production communities with media franchises must
be reconciled:
Such an understanding would … recognize that media franchising does not end
with the building of a world; instead, worlds are continually used and dynamically
altered by creative laborers who may or may not have played any role in their genesis.
What distinguishes world-building in media franchising from that in “traditional”
media works is the degree to which worlds, once built, become shared among crea-
tive stakeholders working in and across multiple production sites. Franchising occurs
where creative resources are exchanged across contexts of production, where sequels,
spin-offs, and tie-ins ask multiple production communities to work in successive or
parallel relation to one another.This makes franchising better conceived in the terms
of world-sharing than world-building. The world in play in franchised production
offers a shared creative context in which many different individuals and communi-
ties can draw resources and contribute in kind.
( Johnson, 2013: 109)
For Johnson, franchising’s reliance on shared creativity and collaboration puts it at odds with
traditional, individual-centric models of authorship. “World-sharing asks us to consider claims
and discourses of franchise authorship in terms of social relations,” Johnson asserts (2013:
109), allowing for a more dynamic relationship between the different stakeholders involved
in creating a given imaginary world; this is authorship conceived as a constantly evolving
and shifting network of creative workers rather than a series of concentric circles delineating
greater or lesser creative authority depending on how far from the center you travel. While
those working in less ostensibly valued or “prestigious” contexts—which vary according to
the franchise in question, though licensed toys and games come to mind—may need to prac-
tice a certain amount of deference to more privileged or primary sites of production, there
are multiple ways in which these creators can assert their authorial identities in meaningful,
if often heavily negotiated, ways. Thus, for example, the outcry over Pottermore’s re-launch
doesn’t just trouble the “unity” of Rowling’s authority, which always exists both in coopera-
tion and tension with the various corporate interests she pairs with (in this case, that of the
Sony Corporation, which ended its involvement in Pottermore prior to the site’s re-launch).
The Pottermore controversy also functioned to shed light on the distinctive creative accom-
plishments of the previously unrecognized team of the programmers, artists, and authors
responsible for the games and role-playing elements of the original site, at the same time as
it galvanized fans—whose creative contributions are often deemed the most peripheral and
“diminished” mode of franchise productivity—to claim pride and ownership over the magi-
cal identities and accomplishments they’d accumulated in Pottermore. As Johnson (2013: 109)
suggests, we must always ask: What creative strategies have been developed so as to construct
worlds to be shared? How has shared creative use been managed? How have media work-
ers made their own creative identities and production labor meaningful in relation to these
shared structures?
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Fanboy Auteurs, Transmedia Authorship, and Future Challenges

Despite the necessary scholarly attention being paid to the complex social and industrial
relations that forge the polyglot authorship of most contemporary imaginary worlds, the
growing prominence of transmedia storytelling has, in many ways, ensured the ongoing pri-
macy of the unified author function in their commercial and critical reception. According to
Henry Jenkins’s influential definition, transmedia storytelling is a process wherein “integral
elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the pur-
pose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience” (Jenkins, 2006: 95–96).
However, as Jenkins acknowledges and Suzanne Scott has rightfully critiqued, this “dispersed”
model of storytelling often relies on the unifying presence of a clearly defined creator figure.
As Scott asserts:
the media industry’s effort to create unified and coordinated entertainment experi-
ences frequently requires the construction of a unified author figure to serve as a
creative and textual coordinator. There are practical and promotional factors moti-
vating this consolidation, but concerns arise when a unified author figure results in
an attempt to unify and regulate the audience’s interpretations of the text.
(Scott, 2013: 44)
Scott contends that this regulatory function can be particularly problematic when it is prac-
ticed by a relatively recent instantiation of the author figure—that of the fanboy auteur. At
first blush, the fanboy auteur may appear to level the hierarchies between authors and fans,
and between canonical and marginal texts—after all, as Jenkins (2013) puts it, he is typically
“the dungeon master made good, the guy who used to play with Star Wars action figures and
now gets to manipulate big budget special effects” (p. 54). He may not even be the original
“creator” of the imaginary world in question, as was the case with J.J. Abrams and the Star
Wars universe, for example, or Joss Whedon and the Marvel universe. And yet with their
obsessive, encyclopedic knowledge of the imaginary world, their ability to emulate and court
fan interest, and the seemingly paradoxical ability to control and channel that interest, the
fanboy auteur has come to the fore as a kind of “creative and textual coordinator,” steering
the franchise mothership and its fans through an ever-expanding media universe, legitimating
certain transmedia extensions as worthy expansions of the mothership, and denigrating others
as cheap, ancillary tie-ins.
In addition to this boundary policing of which extensions and additional authorial voices
merit the notice of franchise fans, the fanboy auteur’s every tweet, blog post, and interview
utterance are mined and analyzed for how they may further unlock the hidden meaning and
context of the transmedia storyworld. As Scott (2013) asserts, “though these authorial exten-
sions … are not fictional contributions to the storyworld being built, they perform similar
narrative work, and they reinforce the fanboy auteur as a ‘human bible’, and the transmedia
story’s sole navigator and interpreter” (p. 45). This deification of the fanboy auteur as “human
bible” and “sole navigator and interpreter” of a transmedia story doesn’t just occlude the very
real creativity of those lesser-known author figures laboring at different levels of that world
and story; it also effectively forecloses the active interventions of those fans who once felt
comfortable enough in that imaginary world to act on and through it. As we contemplate
how to best theorize and challenge the concept of authorship moving forward, these elisions
and foreclosures are crucial reminders that we cannot simply retreat to that ever-comfortable,
ever-contradictory fallback position: The author is dead, long live the author.
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Au t h o r s h i p
References
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française 30 March 1948 as “Du Stylo à la caméra et de la caméra au stylo,” reprinted via New Wave
Film, available at http://www.newwavefilm.com/about/camera-stylo-astruc.shtml.
Barthes, R. (1967), “The Death of the Author,” originally published in Aspen, No. 5–6, available at
http://www.tbook.constantvzw.org/wp-content/death_authorbarthes.pdf.
Foucault, M. (1977), “What is an Author?,” translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Donald
F. Bouchard (ed.) Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press,
pp. 124–127.
Gray, J. & Johnson, D. (2013), A Companion to Media Authorship, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Jenkins, H. (2006), Convergence Culture:Where Old and New Media Collide, New York: NYU Press.
Jenkins, H. (2007), “Trans,media Storytelling 101,” Confessions of an AcaFan: The Official Weblog of Henry
Jenkins, 22 March 2007, available at http://henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.
html.
Jenkins, H. (2011), “Three Reasons Why Pottermore Matters,” Confessions of an AcaFan: The Official
Weblog of Henry Jenkins, 24 June 2011, available at http://henryjenkins.org/2011/06/three_reasons_
why_pottermore_m.html.
Jenkins, H. (2013) “The Guiding Spirit and The Powers That Be: A Response to Suzanne Scott,” in A.
Delwiche and J. Jacobs Henderson (eds.) The Participatory Cultures Handbook, New York, Routledge,
pp. 53–58.
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NYU Press.
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Number 3, Spring 2013, pp. 145–149 | 10.1353/cj.2013.0025
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Convergence,” Convergence 17(3), pp. 271–286.
Panganiban, R. (2015), “12 Intriguing (and Occasionally Bizarre) Harry Potter Fan Theories,” available
at http://mentalfloss.com/article/67401/12-intriguing-and-occasionally-bizarre-harry-potter-fan-
theories.
Pottermore Fans (2015), “Bring Back the Old Pottermore,” Change.org, available at https://www.
change.org/p/j-k-rowling-bring-back-the-old-pottermore.
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com, 22 September 2015, available at http://time.com/4044232/harry-potter-pottermore-new-site/.
Scott, S. (2013), “Who’s Steering the Mothership? The Role of the Fanboy Auteur in Transmedia
Storytelling” in A. Delwiche and J. Jacobs Henderson (eds.) The Participatory Cultures Handbook, New
York, Routledge, pp. 43–52.
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Approval,” MTV.com (20 June 2007), available at http://www.mtv.com/news/1562930/
harry-potter-video-game-creators-get-jk-rowlings-stamp-of-approval/.
Wolf, M.J.P. (2012), Building Imaginary Worlds:The Theory and History of Subcreation, New York: Routledge.
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28
Reboots and
Retroactive
Continuity
William Proctor
In February 2016, DC Comics posted a cryptic image on Twitter. Consisting of a pair of blue
theater curtains with the word ‘Rebirth’ at the center, the image sparked a series of debates
across the Internet as fans recoiled at the possibility that DC would reboot their universe
only five years after “The New 52” ostensibly wiped the slate clean in order to begin again.
To assuage fan anxieties, DC executives Geoff Johns and Jim Lee posted a second image on
social media that explained: “It’s not a reboot and it never was.” (See Figures 28.1 and 28.2.)
Before its publication in June, Geoff Johns appeared on The Late Show with Seth Meyers to
talk about Rebirth. Meyers asked Johns to “explain real quick what you’re doing with the DC
Comics Universe [DCU] because it does seem like these days there’s often a sense of starting
over. Is that what this is?” Johns responds:
No. Thank God. DC Comics, like in the DNA, is all about hope and inspiration, so
we needed to get back to that. So, the comic books, they’re not rebooting … which
is a dirty word, it’s a swear word in the comic book world because that means eve-
rything that you ever read and bought doesn’t exist anymore. But the re-launch is
just approaching it with a new light and bringing every character that hasn’t been
around back.
Here, as with the second Twitter image, Johns is keen to reassure a vocal (and often hostile)
readership that Rebirth is definitely not a reboot. At the same time, however, there is certainly
an element of revision involved in “bringing back every character that hasn’t been around
back,” even if this doesn’t lead to a wholesale razing of the DCU (where “everything you ever
read and bought doesn’t exist anymore”). Instead, what DC Rebirth evokes is the technique
of retroactive continuity (usually shortened to “retcon”), that is to say, “when an author alters
established facts in earlier works in order to make them consistent with later ones” (Wolf,
2012: 380). In other words, a retcon retroactively changes continuity.
To be sure, there are similarities between rebooting and retconing: historically, both origi-
nate from the medium of superhero comics; both are “makeover modalities” (Hills, 2014); and
both revise pre-established “facts” about an imaginary world, but do so in different ways, to
different degrees, and for different reasons. Given that there has been a broad and inexact use
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R e b o o t s a n d R e t ro a c t i v e C o n t i n u i t y
Figure 28.1 Geoff Johns promotes Rebirth on Twitter Image.
Figure 28.2 Jim Lee explains that Rebirth is not a reboot.
of these terms in popular and academic circles, it is necessary to historicize their origins and
then move on from there, for, as Roberta Pearson rightly states, “those who cannot remember
the past are condemned to misunderstand the present” (2014: xii). I shall take each of the
concepts in turn, beginning with the most misunderstood of these “strategies of regeneration”
(Proctor, forthcoming), that of the reboot.
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W i l l i a m P ro c t o r
Crisis, Etymology, and History

Etymologically, a reboot is a computer term that refers to the process of shutting down a
computer system and then restarting it, often to “recover a system from failure” (Tucker, 2006:
644). As a metaphor for resetting and restarting narrative universes, however, the term was
first used on the DC UseNet message board to describe the new adventures of The Legion
of Superheroes (McKean, 1994). Effectively, this means that the pre-established continuity no
longer exists and is deleted from the storyworld’s data banks (at least in theory and figuratively
speaking) and that new narrative information reprograms the imaginary world’s memory and
is disconnected from the earlier iteration (“everything you ever read and bought doesn’t exist
anymore”). A reboot aims to purge the system and begin again with a tabula rasa (a “blank
slate”), onto which a brave new world can be etched.
As a metaphor, rebooting is rather apposite in the context of new media and the practices
of contemporary, networked culture. As Stenport and Traylor argue, this “encompasses the
significance of computerized conceptualisations” (2015: 77) and is arguably the principal rea-
son for the term’s “remediation” (Bolter and Gruisin, 2000) in recent years across a range of
platforms, such as film, television, and so on. As with a computer reboot, then, the process is
often used following a malfunction of some sort that “suggests not only a restarting, but also
that something was no longer viable or had gone wrong enough to require such an extreme
measure” (Wolf, 2012: 380).
Consider DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths (1985–1986), a 12-issue maxi-series that (ostensibly)
concluded with a system-wide reboot of the entire DCU. As an imaginary world that, at the
time, had a complex continuity spanning almost half a century, a number of system errors had
amassed. To begin with, such a convoluted and labyrinthine narrative history was becoming
increasingly difficult to maintain and the system was riven with “continuity snarls,” incon-
sistencies in the imaginary world’s memory banks. Given the size of the DC storyworld that,
alongside bête noire Marvel, are “the largest narrative constructions in human history (exceed-
ing, for example, the vast body of myth, legend and story that underlies Greek and Latin
literature)” (Lowe, quoted in Kaveney, 2008: 25), it is hardly surprising that the continuity
system started to buckle beneath the weight of hundreds and thousands of texts created over
a lengthy time span by an inordinate number of creative programmers (writers, artists, editors,
etc.).The early DC Comics were “not conceived with an eye to internal coherence” and edi-
tors were “comparatively mild about relating one issue to another or one series to another”
(Duncan and Smith, 2009: 191)—comics were thought to be “kids’ stuff ” with a limited life-
span during the period—yet, over time, writers started to make explicit links between issues
to build a shared universe populated by a pantheon of characters, many of whom will be rec-
ognizable to the contemporary audience (such as the DC Trinity of Batman, Superman, and
Wonder Woman). After a decade or so of popularity and prominence, the end of World War II
coincided with a widespread industrial slump, and many titles were cancelled.
In 1956, DC editor Julius Schwartz kicked off a superhero renaissance with a project that
many believe saved the faltering industry (Carter, 2010). Beginning with The Flash, which
“had died [in 1948] with the demise of other superhero titles” (Schwartz, 2000: 87), the edi-
tor devised a way to resurrect the character, not as a continuation, but by beginning again
“from the ground up, keeping only the name and the superspeed powers” (Morrison, 2011:
82). In many ways, the new Flash was a “proto-reboot” but, eventually, the original incarna-
tion was brought back into the imaginary world with the seminal storyline, “Flash of Two
Worlds” (The Flash #123, 1961), which introduced the concept of parallel worlds into the
DCU. From this point on, the DCU was transformed into a multiverse “in which an infinite
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number of alternate Earths … each with its own history and superheroes” (Morrison, 2011:
111) existed side-by-side with one another. Henceforth, the original Flash came from Earth-2
while the new iteration of “the scarlet speedster” belonged to Earth-1. Soon after, the DCU
was replete with adventures featuring parallel versions of staple characters crossing over into
multiple titles. For example, Earth-3 was conceived as a “mirror universe” where the roles
and characteristics of popular characters were reversed—heroes as villains and vice versa—
and which preceded the classic Star Trek episode, “Mirror, Mirror” (1967) by three years; or
Earth-X, a universe where World War II was won by Nazi Germany. The DCU continued to
expand exponentially as more alterative worlds were added to the continuity, and, as a result,
the “hyperdiegesis” (Hills, 2002) became “rickety at best” (Britton, 2011: 22).
By the 1980s, DC was struggling economically: sales were down across the board, the
readership was rapidly declining, and Marvel Comics ruled the roost. By the same token, the
sheer size and scope of the imaginary world became off-putting for new readers. As Sacks
explains, the DCU had grown into “an alphabet soup of letters and concepts that required
readers to keep an encyclopaedic amount of information in their head” (2013: 129). Indeed,
as Wolk puts it, comic book fans are often “‘super-readers”; that is, “readers familiar enough
with enormous numbers of old comics that they’ll understand what’s really been discussed in
the story” (2007: 26). One such super-reader wrote to Marv Wolfman, writer of Crisis, “asking
about a mixup in DC continuity” (Wolfman and Perez, 2000: 1). Wolfman responded:
In my reply I said, “One day we (meaning the DC editorial we) will probably
straighten out what is in the DC Universe …and what is outside.” At this point
in its history DC Comics had Earth-One, Earth-Two, Earth-Three, Earth-B, etc.
There were superheroes on each Earth and though old-time readers had no problem
understanding DC continuity, it proved off-putting to new readers who suddenly
discovered there was not one but three Supermans, Wonder Womans, Batmans, etc.
(2000: 1)
On the one hand, fans “expect adherence to established tenets, characterisations and narra-
tive ‘back stories’.” (Hills, 2002: 28), but given that the DCU is “of an order of complexity
beyond anything the television audience has become accustomed to” (Reynolds, 1992: 38),
then rebooting is one of the ways that an imaginary world’s continuity can be reprogrammed
to deal with a growing number of glitches in narrative memory.
On the other hand, such reprogramming also signals to potential new readers that a func-
tional entry-point has been opened, a direct invitation to those who might have been put off
by the improbability of catching up with fifty years of continuity. This illustrates the double-
logic of rebooting, one that aims to address the maelstrom of contradictions to appease the fan-
nish demand for cohesion and consistency, while also operating as a way to entice new readers
with the promise of a blank slate. From this position, then, the DC comic book reboot is both a
narrative technique and an economic/industrial strategy designed to stimulate the cash nexus.
What is fascinating about Crisis on Infinite Earths is that the DCU is deleted from the con-
tinuity program as a part of the story itself, a technique that has since been used repeatedly to
revise and recalibrate superhero comic universes, for example, DC’s Zero Hour: Crisis in Time
(1994), Infinite Crisis (2006), and Flashpoint/“The New 52” (2011), and also in the J. J. Abrams’s
Star Trek reboot (the latter of which operates as both a reboot and a continuation). As Colin
B. Harvey explains, narrative devices, such as time travel and parallel worlds, afford creators
the opportunity to “correct solecisms in the storyworld” (2015: 71). The primary rationale
for demolishing the imaginary world as part of the narrative is to provide sufficient canonical
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reasoning for the core fan base. Indeed, as Johns points out above, reboots are a “dirty, swear
word in the comic book world” because of the investment that fans make in terms of read-
ing and buying large amounts of comics. To be told that the stories many have been reading
for years no longer count as imaginary world “fact,” but are thrown into the dustbin of history
as irrelevant and apocryphal, signals disrespect from producers to fans. This demonstrates that
continuity and canon are often sacrosanct principles for super-readers “which production
teams revise at their peril, disrupting the trust which is placed on the continuity of a detailed
narrative world” (Hills, 2002).
For the uninitiated, reading Crisis might well be an insurmountable task but, in a nutshell,
the story revolves around the series’ big bad, the Anti-Monitor, who orchestrates the destruc-
tion of DC’s nexus of parallel worlds while an army of superheroes from across the multiverse
battle to stop him. By the end of the series, the Anti-Monitor is defeated; Supergirl and The
Flash are dead; while the multiverse is purged from continuity and contracts into a single
world. By the final pages, fifty years of narrative continuity is washed away and replaced with
a blank slate. The imaginary world isn’t simply destroyed: put simply, it “never existed in the
first place” (Klock, 2002: 21). From this point on, the DCU (theoretically) splintered into
pre- and post-Crisis universes.
Here, the reboot process begins with the collapse of the imaginary system, followed by a
program of recreation, of rebuilding. In superhero comics, the reboot process begins with a
system purge, à la Crisis, but the “actual” rebooting process is that which is sketched onto the
blank slate, texts such as John Byrne’s Man of Steel (1986) and George Perez’s Wonder Woman
(1987) that respectively rebooted Superman and the Amazonian Princess from degree zero,
from the beginning (again) with the characters in a state of becoming. It is necessary to under-
stand, however, that the DC comic book reboot is a process and that both the demolition and
rebuilding of an imaginary world are part and parcel of this process, something that film and
TV franchises are unable to do due to the direct address to fan consumers. As I argue else-
where, minority fan cultures are unable to prop up a tent-pole movie (Proctor, forthcoming).
Vast narrative event-series, such as Crisis, are undoubtedly for super-readers while the reboots
themselves are invitations to new readers.
Of course, the notion of wiping away decades of canonical history, of an imaginary world’s
biographical memory, is nigh on impossible: the slate is always-already populated by the
ghosts and phantasms of history. A reboot might well aim to delete previously established
programming, but this can never be achieved cleanly or without complication and contra-
diction. Here, Harvey’s model of storyworld memory is a valuable way of understanding the
ways in which narrative continuity functions and the paradoxes set in motion by intertextual
“remembering.” By viewing the parameters of the imaginary world across the two axes of
“horizontal” and “vertical” memory, we are faced with the aporia of multiplicity and, con-
sequently, anomaly. First, episodes, installments, chapters, sequels, prequels, and so forth are
metaphorical bridges that establish sequential connections along the horizontal axis and form
the storyworld. In short, each “micro-narrative” (Ryan, 1992: 373) should ideally “remember”
other entries in the system. Second, and contradictorily, the vertical axis “remembers” every
text in the DCU regardless of the intentions of creators and producers, but it also “remembers”
the infinite spiral of intertextuality. From this perspective, then, a reboot’s principal objective
is to “forget,” or “non-remember,” the contents of vertical memory but—and here’s the con-
tradiction—it can never truly forget the horizontal. As Brooker acknowledges, “a text cannot
fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads” (2012: 47).
What complicates this matter even further is that imaginary worlds are often comprised of
multiple versions and variations, continuities and canons, so much so that the concept of an
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imaginary world might be better reconfigured as an imaginary system. Within such a system,
we can view an individual co-system as a story-program.To illustrate, the DC character Batman
belongs to an imaginary system consisting of innumerable story-programs that are “hermeti-
cally sealed” (Ford and Jenkins, 2009: 307) from one another so that there is no such thing
as a singular Batman, or for that matter a united Batman storyworld, but a plurality of Batmen
co-existing in parallel with each iteration and incarnation as part of an imaginary system, not
world. Such programming means that Comic Book Batman (and within this, Bob Kane’s
Batman, Frank Miller’s Batman, DC Rebirth Batman, etc.),Tim Burton’s Batman, Christopher
Nolan’s Batman, Animated Batman, Video Game Batman, and 1960s TV series Batman all
belong to different story-programs.To this end, each variation on the Batman theme is in pos-
session of individual mnemonic circuits, of memory and continuity. This is of vital importance
when analyzing reboots, as one must ask: what is being rebooted? Christopher Nolan’s Batman
Begins (2005), for instance, reboots the Batman film series, the cinematic program, and not
the contents of the comic book system. In the contemporary “age of multiplicity,” as Jenkins
(2009) describes the current historical moment, “readers may consume multiple versions of
the same franchise” (Ford & Jenkins, 2009: 20) but, at the same time, “are expected to know which
interpretative frame should be applied to any given title” (2009: 303, my italics).
In recent years, the reboot concept has been transposed from comics and adapted across
media. This has led to the term becoming a fashionable buzzword in popular and academic
circles and a tendency to misinterpret the concept or treat it as axiomatic. The next section
addresses and unpacks this conceptual hodgepodge.
Reboots, Remakes, and Re-launches: Film and Television

Following the commercial and critical failure of Joel Schumacher’s Batman and Robin (1997)—
“by most viewers’ account an atrociously bad film, too bad to even be camp” (Gray, 2010:
131)—Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins “successfully resurrected the Batman brand from
the cinematic graveyard” (Proctor, 2012). In essence, the reboot responds to Batman and Robin
as a “program error,” and supplants the series by resetting the horizontal memory to degree
zero and beginning again. Batman Begins was the first film to be described as a reboot, most
notably by co-writer, David S. Goyer:
After Batman and Robin it was necessary to do what we call in comic book terms
“a reboot”… Say you’ve had 187 issues of The Incredible Hulk and you decide you’re
going to introduce a new Issue 1.You pretend like those first 187 issues never happened,
and you start the story from the beginning and the slate is wiped clean, and no one
blinks … So we did the cinematic equivalent of a reboot, and by doing that, setting it
at the beginning, you’re instantly distancing yourself from anything that’s come before.
(Goyer, quoted in Greenberg, 2005: 13–14)
The triumph of Batman Begins has since led toward the reboot term becoming used fre-
quently as part of the popular and academic lexicon. Other films, such as the Bond reboot
Casino Royale (2006), J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek (2009), and Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man
(2012) have been accurately defined as reboots, but other texts have been described as such
in contradictory ways.
One of the most common ways that the concept has been evoked incorrectly is by viewing
reboots as “the current operative moniker for American or Hollywood-to-Hollywood
remakes” (Stenport and Traylor, 2015: 77).To be sure, there are conceptual commonalities and
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considerable overlap between rebooting and remaking, but the principal differential is that a
reboot is a serial paradigm as opposed to the archetypal remake that can be understood as a
single narrative unit. As Steven Gil rightly states, “[w]hat may be said to immediately identify
a reboot is the fact that it initiates a series of texts,” a plurality as opposed to the singular (2014:
25–26, my italics). Essentially, one cannot reboot a self-contained film.
Another way that rebooting has been misused is in relation to revivals, those series that have
spent some time hibernating in the cultural wilderness but are reawakened in the present.
Texts such as The X-Files (2016), Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), and Doctor Who (2005–
present), for example, have been described as reboots in mainstream media, but this is prob-
lematic. All of these examples—and there are many more besides—“remember” the contents
of horizontal memory and, as a result, can be understood as revivals or re-launches. Here is
Shawn Shimpach describing the 2005 revival of Doctor Who as:
not a reboot or a remake of the earlier series, nor another set of stories simply set
in the same fictional universe, but instead an updated continuation of the previ-
ous program featuring the familiar box-shaped TARDIS, familiar antagonists (ani-
mated mannequin Autons—last seen in 1971, later Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans,
the Master, etc.), and young, female companions from early twenty-first century
Earth ... especially London. This program was the same program—same histories,
same memories—but with a new form and new traits. Doctor Who had regenerated.
(2010: 155)
Likewise, Star Wars: The Force Awakens is not a reboot, as fan Amanda Ward points out (with
indignation, I might add):
Star Wars journalism is kicking into high gear right now, and so is my extreme
annoyance with loose semantics. Star Wars has never been rebooted … it seems obvi-
ous to me none of these films are reboots, reimaginings or remakes of any other Star
Wars film, but apparently it is not that clear for others. Star Wars is now one big nine
part saga, at least when talking about The Skywalker Saga.
(Ward, 2013)
Again, Star Wars:The Force Awakens and, by extension, other “new” episodes in the continuity
(Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars: Rebels (2014–present)) “remember” earlier
serial utterances, such as The Original and Prequel trilogies or The Clone Wars TV series (see
Proctor and Freeman, 2016). Such remembering, of course, might eventually be corrupted
by faulty programming, such as with Doctor Who’s canonical conflicts. But the point remains:
reboots delete established memory in order to begin again with a new horizontal memory,
whereas revivals/re-launches provide a “substantive bridge” (Hills, 2002) between past and
present as continuations. Briefly, reboots forget and disconnect; revivals/re-launches, and we
could include other sequential concepts such as prequels and sequels, etc., remember, attach,
and continue (for further analysis see Proctor, forthcoming).
Retroactive Continuity
In many ways, reboots and retcons are part of the same family: whereas the former deletes
the entire contents of a horizontal story-program, the latter revises partially. In other words, a
reboot can be understood as an “extreme” retcon, and a retcon as a “partial” reboot.
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Like the reboot, retconning originates from superhero comic books and the first printed
appearance of the term appeared in the letter pages of All-Star Squadron #18 (Thomas et al.,
1983) wherein writer Roy Thomas wrote: “we like to think that an enthusiastic ALL-STAR
booster at one of Adam Malin’s Creation Conventions in San Diego came up with the best
name for it a few months back: ‘Retroactive Continuity.’ Has a kind of ring to it, don’t you
think?” The corollary to this is that the term might well have emerged at this point in history,
but the technique has been utilized avant la lettre, such as the revisions Tolkien made to The
Hobbit (1937) to bring it into alignment with The Lord of The Rings (1954–1955) or Conan
Doyle resurrecting Sherlock Holmes following his ostensible demise at the Reichenbach Falls
(“The Final Problem” (1893)).
Retconning is more frequently used than rebooting, and such reprogramming of horizontal
memory, that which is canonical and “factual” in the story-program (see also the “Canonicity”
chapter in this volume), illustrates that canon “is not absolute gospel but a database that allows
for constant tweaks, reboots and revisions. Metaphorically, its ideal medium is not stone tab-
lets, but Wikipedia” (Brooker, 2012: 158). Indeed, one of the reasons why superhero comics
have managed such longevity is through the means of periodic regeneration and revision. As
Klock (2002) points out, survival is a key feature of the medium’s DNA.
Consider the archetypal character, Superman, who first made his appearance in the pages of
Action Comics #1 (1938). One can view Action Comics #1 as the first reading head of the DCU
and the beginning of the imaginary world’s horizontal memory, of continuity (although as
noted above, the DC titles were not created with coherence in mind from the start and so it
was with the Man of Steel). In the early issues of Action Comics, and extended with the first
Superman solo title a year later, the character could not yet fly, his most recognizable trait to
contemporary audiences, but only “leap 1/8th of a mile” (Siegel & Schuster, 2006: 4). It was,
in fact, not the comic book that bestowed the powers of flight on Superman, but the suc-
cessful radio adaptation that started airing in 1940 and lasted until 1951. It wasn’t until Action
Comics #55 (“The Million Dollar Marathon,” 1943), however, that the Last Son of Krypton
took to the skies. As a result of this transmedia exchange, Superman’s abilities were retconned
in the comic book to align with other media, including the classic Fleischer animated series
(1941–1943).
What this example shows is that Superman, the comic book character, was in “dialogue
and oscillation with other texts” (Berger, 2008: 88), with other Supermen, transmedial expres-
sions that influenced the “source” material via vertical memory. In this way, adaptation can
often reconceptualize canonical elements that are then “rewired” (Berger, 2008) back into
the comic book’s horizontal memory. Rather than a one-way process of translation as with
“archetypal adaptations” (Harvey, 2015), what we have here is a “feedback loop” comprised
of “a multiplicity of criss-crossing, appropriations and re-appropriations, borrowing and bor-
rowing-back” (Brooker, 2005: 181). Such a “strategy of regeneration” is commonplace in
superhero comics.
Like reboots, retconning runs the risk of annoying dedicated readers. One of the most con-
troversial retcons in recent years occurred in the pages of Marvel’s Amazing Spider-Man sto-
ryline, “One More Day” (Straczynski et al., 2007). In the four-part mini-series, Aunt May has
been shot and, in order to save her life, Peter Parker makes “a deal with the devil,” Mephisto,
who requires him to sacrifice his marriage to Mary Jane. As Peter and Mary Jane tied the knot
in the 1987 storyline, “The Wedding,” such a significant shift in the status quo was difficult for
some fans to swallow. Not only that, but “One More Day” also wiped the memories of the
entire Marvel character pantheon to rectify Peter’s unmasking as Spider-Man in Mark Millar’s
Civil War (2006–2007) mini-series. By the close of “One More Day,” Aunt May is saved, Peter
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and Mary Jane are no longer married—indeed, they were never married in the first place—
and Peter’s secret identity is reset.
Marvel’s Editor-in-Chief, Joe Quesada, tried to rationalize the creative decision: “we have
to do this to keep the character fresh for this generation and generations to come … this is
really the right thing to do for the long-term health of the character” (quoted in Colton,
2008). For the fans, however, the retcon was an outrage: “People are very upset. They erased
a lot of stuff that had been set in stone … it disrespects the readers by saying everything they
read is wrong” (Newmand and Shutt quoted in Colton, 2008). As with reboots, the concept
of horizontal memory is a valuable framework for understanding revision and regeneration,
or as the case of Spider-Man demonstrates, degeneration, should audiences react negatively to
such a shift in the status quo.
The UK TV series, Doctor Who, has utilized the retcon technique multiple times over the
years to try and repair the continuity snarls in horizontal memory. “Because the series is
over half a century old,” explains Harvey, “many contradictions exist within the programme’s
continuity” (2015: 94). As with comics reboots, the conceits of time travel and alternative
universes provide the grounds for revisionism as a method of repairing inconsistencies in the
story-program. Despite Paul Cornell’s claim that “[t]here is, with some caveats, no such thing
as a Doctor Who canon” (2009), fans often work toward cataloging the contents of the story-
program in order to make sense of it all by rationalizing inconsistencies, as with the online fan
database,The Whoniverse (http://www.whoniverse.net/articles/canon). Hence, the “mainte-
nance, ordering and enhancement of the Doctor Who hyperdiegesis has almost entirely been
the work of fans” (Britton, 2011: 21).
For instance, the controversial Doctor Who television movie contradicted established mem-
ory by informing audiences that the character was “half-human,” as opposed to “wholly alien,”
which “led to many rejecting the television movie and rendering it ‘non-canon’” (Harvey,
2015: 95). Again, for fans, this was a retcon too far. To try and impose a course correction for
those fans who deemed the text to be contradictory, tie-in media, such as the Big Finnish
audio drama Zagreus (2003), which explained away the discrepancy by positing “multiple ver-
sions of this particular incarnation of the Doctor” (ibid), can function as a kind of “software
patch” to reprogram what we think we know and understand. Whether or not tie-in media
is accepted as authentic, as opposed to apocryphal, is another thing altogether (for further, see
Jenkins, 2006; and Hills, 2012).
As with reboots, retconning is a serial paradigm and has been evoked in other media and
genres. Soap operas, such as Coronation Street (1960–present) or Dallas (1978–1991, 2012–
2014), are also imaginary systems consisting of thousands of texts, episodes, and tie-in media.
Viewers of such programs share remarkable commonalities with science fiction and fantasy
audiences in that they:
do remember a serial’s past very clearly and expect any references to it to be accurate,
down to the last detail.This accumulation of knowledge by the committed audience
is recognised by those working on the programmes, who boast about the detailed
attention to minutiae which their audience give the serial.
(Geraghty, 1981: 16)
Yet both Coronation Street and Dallas have retconned elements of established lore and horizon-
tal memory. The latter is a particular egregious case. The famous, and indeed infamous, death
of fan-favorite character, Bobby Ewing, was retconned in a way that actively defied belief. In
the show’s sixth season finale, Bobby was killed in a car accident and the following season dealt
232
with the trauma of his passing. However, in the seventh season finale, Pam Ewing, Bobby’s
distraught spouse, discovered Bobby alive and well in the shower. Season Eight rationalized
the resurrection of Bobby by explaining that the previous season in its entirety had all been
a dream and, therefore, none of the episodes actually occurred! Moreover, the Dallas spin-off,
Knot’s Landing (1979–1983), ignored Bobby’s miraculous revival so that, effectively, the imagi-
nary system was beset by breaches in horizontal memory.
Not all retcons—or reboots for that matter—are treated with disdain by audiences. For
the vast comic book empires of “the Big Two,” Marvel and DC, periodic updates are a fun-
damental way to ensure the story-program remains vibrant and contemporary “as part of its
survival code” (Klock, 2002). This can be achieved by revising the established biographies of
staple characters, such as Marvel’s Iron Man, who was initially an arms-dealer in the Vietnam
War but has since been retconned multiple times to account for shifts in the socio-political
landscape. Marvel often rationalize such shifts through their concept of “sliding time,” which
means that the characters, and, by extension, the story-program, remain perpetually youthful
through the compression of narrative temporality. Even though the Marvel Universe is dec-
ades old, the concept of sliding time—or Marvel Time—dictates that the temporality of the
imaginary world is but a fraction of “real time.”
Conclusion
To sum up: both reboots and retcons are “strategies of regeneration” that revise previously
established facts about an imaginary world, its canon, continuity, and memory. As “product
differentiation is key to profitability” (Johnson, 2013: 42), revisionism becomes a fundamental
characteristic of long-running story-programs and imaginary systems. Here, the double bind
is that industrial grounds are often confronted by fan cultures that may decry periodic par-
oxysms that shift the framework of memory, hyperdiegesis, and established continuity. That
being said, worlds have a tendency to apocalypse and are frequently beset by stress fractures
in the imaginary canvas: worlds often fall apart (Hassler-Forest, 2016), especially as more and
more expansive materials are frequently uploaded to the memory banks of the story-program,
and strategies of regeneration are employed to stabilize and/or update the imaginary world
and purge the system of inconsistency, contradiction, and paradox. A careful balance between
innovation and standardization becomes difficult to manage for vast imaginary networks.
Both reboots and retcons function as “makeover modalities,” of repair, reprogramming, and
regeneration; the former uses a method of beginning again with the establishment of new hor-
izontal memory while the latter endorses the revision of an already existing narrative sequence
without deleting the entire story-program. Rebooting, then, “means to restart an entertain-
ment universe that has already been previously established, and begin with a new storyline
and/or timeline that disregards the original writer’s previously established history, thus making
it obsolete and void” (Willits, 2009). On the other hand, retroactive continuity refers to:
[t]he process of revising a fictional serial narrative, altering details that have previ-
ously been established in the narrative so that it can be continued in a new direction
or so that potential contradictions in previous versions can be reconciled.
(Booker, 2010: 510)
Such “strategies of regeneration” are thus employed to ensure that falls do not fall apart
beyond repair. As Schwartz acknowledges, “every ten years the universe needs an enema”
(quoted in Kaveney, 2008).
233
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29
Canonicity
William Proctor
In May 2013, IDW announced that the cult TV series, The X-Files (1993–2002, 2016–present),
would continue as a comic book series that “picks up sometime after the last movie,” I Want
to Believe (2008). Written by Joe Harris with art by Michael Walsh, the creative team on the
comic book, subtitled Season Ten in deference to TV series continuity, also consists of X-Files
creator and showrunner, Chris Carter, serving as executive producer in order to provide
“feedback to the creative team regarding scripts and outlines to keep the new stories in line
with existing and ongoing canon” (Brown, 2013).
The involvement of Carter and the news that the series would be an official extension of
the TV series was met with waves of enthusiasm from dedicated fans—known as “X-Philes”
in fan vernacular—and that these new stories would “count” as an authentic continuation of
the imaginary world, as opposed to counter-factual apocrypha, was for many a dream come
true. Promoting the Season Ten comic as intimately bound to the canonicity of the TV series
directly addresses the X-Philes community and the fannish desire for authenticity. In so doing,
such a promotional strategy reassures fans that these new stories will constitute imaginary
world “fact.”
The canonical status of the comic book series would, however, be later threatened by the
return of The X-Files on TV in a six-part “special event” series in 2016. The new televisual
Season Ten would effectively disavow and supplant the comic book Season Ten as canonical,
the latter being reconceptualized as fabrication (Figure 29.1). Put simply, the comic series’
status was effectively rendered “non-canon,” that is, it no longer “counts” as the genuine
article. As Brooker explains, “[t]his is the rulebook of continuity canon; the strict sense
of what counts and what happened, what is ‘true’, and what isn’t” (2012: 154). What this
demonstrates quite clearly is that canonicity, or canon, is “not gospel, but a database that
allows for constant tweaks, reboots and revisions […] its ideal medium is not stone tablets
but Wikipedia” (ibid). As Wolf emphasizes, the
idea of canon, that certain things are “true” for an imaginary world (that characters,
locations, and objects exist, and that events have happened within that world), dem-
onstrates the desire for authenticity from the point of view of the audience, who are
often concerned with demarcating what is “official” for a world or franchise.
(2012: 270–271)
From the outside, the issue of canonicity might well seem strange; after all, an imaginary
world is just that: imaginary. But for dedicated audiences, canonicity is a fundamental part of
the fan experience and “one of the great pleasures of serial art” (Kaveney, 2008: 26).
236
Canonicity
Figure 29.1
This short example illustrates several things simultaneously. To begin with, the importance
of canonicity has become a promotional instrument with which to potentially entice X-Philes
to partake in the new (and now genuine) adventures of Mulder and Scully. In doing so, canon
becomes a way to brand texts as official extensions and thus “makes sense from an economic
point-of-view” within the industrial logic of late capitalism (Hayward, 2009: 2). Second, the
involvement of Chris Carter signifies and activates his “author-function” (Foucault, 1969),
which operates as a savvy branding mechanism to authenticate the comic series and signal
its canonicity. Third, canon is subject to revision and fluency, not stasis and permanency. And
fourth, canonical declarations emanate from the production/creative context as a top-down
process. Although “for a work to be canonical requires that it be declared as such by someone
with the authority to do so” (Wolf, 2012: 271), such official dictates have often led to quarrel,
confusion, and contestation between fans.
When did canon become such a significant characteristic of imaginary world organization?
This chapter provides an account of canonicity from a number of perspectives. The first sec-
tion explains the broad range of meanings of canonicity that then leads into the emergence
of imaginary world canon, most notably in reference to Ronald Knox’s satirical essay, “Studies
in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes” (1911), a work that set out to deliberate on questions
of canonicity regarding the famous detective’s adventures from the bottom-up.This leads into
an examination of the way in which authorship and canonicity are intrinsically connected
as a method of branding imaginary world fiction as legitimate and accurate through the lens
of Star Trek. The final section discusses the importance of canon as both a fan concern and
the industrial logic of “commodity braiding” (Freeman, 2014) as a way to provide genuine
interconnections between imaginary world narratives.
237
Defining Canonicity
The term “canon” is usually defined as “law,” “rule,” or “norm” (Schnabel, 1995: 17). The
Greek word from which it is derived has a broad range of meanings, and so it is with canonic-
ity. For example, one might refer to “the Leavisian notion of a great tradition” (Parkin, 2007:
246), namely, the English literary canon, a body of work that includes “classic” authors such as
William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and so forth. Traditionally, this is often set
in opposition to popular culture, which is debased and “symptomatic of a profound political
disorder” (ibid), of “anarchy,” and that the reinforcement of canonical distinctions thus con-
structs a binary relationship, or “moral dualism” (Hills, 2002), between “good” high art and
“bad” popular culture.
If one thinks of the (high) cultural outrage in regard to the popular author Stephen King
being awarded the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters—what elite
critic Harold Bloom described as “another low in the process of dumbing down our cultural
life” (quoted in Rolls, 2008: x)—or folk singer-songwriter Bob Dylan receiving the Nobel
Prize for Literature, with many cultural commentators decrying the award as a slip in cultural
standards, then it is clear that the organization of canonical works relies upon distinctions
largely based in classed “taste cultures,” as theorized by Pierre Bourdieu (1984). In many ways,
then, the literary canon is a sacred and evangelized body of work.
This is not to say, however, that the great canon of English literature is the one and only
“law” or “rule,” nor that the body of work contained therein represents a “closed” system. As
the philosopher John R. Searle remarks:
In my experience there never was, in fact, a fixed ‘canon’; there was rather a certain
set of tentative judgments about what had importance and quality. Such judgments
are always subject to revision, and in fact they were constantly being revised.
(1990)
Popular culture also canonizes aesthetic material and constructs distinctions between texts, so
one might refer to the Film Canon, the TV Canon, or the Comic Book Canon as a yardstick
for measuring the “quality” of popular texts and their authors (again, with the proviso that
this is a fluid corpus of texts rather than one that is fixed and permanent). Directors, artists,
and authors can equally be canonized within fan communities, but the literary canon is still
upheld as the “true” canon by elite figures and institutions as “the best that has been thought
and said in the world” (Arnold, quoted in Storey, 2012: 21).Who has the power to make these
decisions is another question entirely and beyond the scope of this chapter.
A second understanding of canonicity, and one that is more in line with our purposes here,
is that of the biblical canon. Although “the genesis of both the OT [Old Testament] and NT
[New Testament] are extremely complex” (Schnabel, 1995: 16), one can view the biblical
canon as a body of work “which was applied to the list of books regarded as authoritative for
the churches” (ibid). Despite the lack of consensus concerning the literary history of canonical
processes, what is valuable here by way of analogy is that Catholic canonicity is a closed system.
Those texts within the Catholic canon are deemed as authoritative and genuine by church
governance whereas the gospels and texts that have been excluded are best understood as
Apocrypha. By contrast, the canonicity of imaginary worlds such as, say, Doctor Who, Star Wars,
or Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a matter of debate, rationalization, and exegesis—although debates
about what texts are deemed as authoritative imaginary world “scripture” by the churches
of popular culture are hardly conclusive, yet often pivot on questions of authenticity—of
238
Canonicity
authorship—that is analogous with canonicity principles in religious doctrine. As Parkin

explains, secondary world creators, such as George Lucas (Star Wars) or Gene Roddenberry
(Star Trek), are “authorities and can act like popes of their magisteria and make definitive,
official rulings on matters of canon” (2007: 252). What should be clear at this point is that
canonicity is synchronic—it develops over time—and diachronic—“the state of affairs at a
given moment” (Reynolds, 1992: 41). I will now move on to look at a sampling of imaginary
world canonicity, beginning first with the famous Baker Street detective, Sherlock Holmes.
Canonicity and Fandom: The Many Lives of Sherlock Holmes

Like many imaginary worlds, the Sherlock Holmes universe is brimming with texts, the
vast majority of which were not written by original creator and author, Arthur Conan
Doyle. Recent examples abound across the transmedia expanse, including Guy Ritchie’s
Sherlock Holmes films (2009 and 2011); the BBC TV series Sherlock, including manga spin-off,
“A Study in Pink” (2016); the US TV series Elementary (2012–present); Neil Gaiman’s short
story, “A Study in Emerald” (2003); Caleb Carr’s The Italian Secretary (2005); numerous comic
book series, such as Daniel Indro’s Sherlock Holmes:Year One (2011); and Anthony Horowitz’s
novels, The House of Silk (2011) and sequel, Moriarty (2014). From this select list, then, we can
see that there is no such thing as a singular Sherlock Holmes but a plurality of Sherlocks exist-
ing within a matrix of multiple versions and variations (for more on cultural matrices, see
Brooker [2012]). None of these examples, however, are a part of the official Sherlock Holmes
canon. The implication here is that the “truth-conditions” (Doležel, 1998) of the Sherlock
matrix only apply to a small corpus of texts; to wit, 56 short stories and four novels all written
by Arthur Conan Doyle. The rest of the hundreds and thousands of texts are counter-factual
stories and, effectively, apocryphal; that is, they never really happened.
The problem with any notion of a Holmes canon, even one anchored to Conan Doyle’s
authorship, is that the body of work is “replete with all the contradictions, lacunae, and inter-
esting mistakes of inspiration working under deadline” (Chabon, 2010: 41). As early as 1902
(Saler, 2012: 116), passionate Sherlockians began writing mock scholarly articles that aimed
to “settle the questions raised by the gaps that Conan Doyle left lying around the canon”
(Chabon, 2010: 41) and to “provide explanations for inconsistencies in … Watson’s writings
of the master-detective” (Eckert, 2010: 11). Such a playful and participatory spirit became
known amongst Sherlockians as “The Game” in which players:
write critical essays that resolve the chronology of the Sherlock Holmes canon and
otherwise provide explanations for inconsistencies in Watson’s work. Sometimes
the inconsistencies are explained as resulting from Watson’s carelessness, whereas in
other instances we are told that Watson deliberately changed certain details, times,
and names to protect innocent parties and prevent delicate information from being
uncovered through his writings.
(ibid)
Ronald A. Knox’s essay, “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes” (1911), is such an
example of painstaking scholarly exegesis and treats the canon with the same level of detail
and rigor as what one might expect for an analysis of “high” cultural texts. Written as part-
satire and part-sincerity, Knox offers “outlines of a possible mode of treatment” as a way to
resolve “grave inconsistencies in the Holmes cycle” (1911). Here, Knox believes “that all
the stories were written by Watson, but whereas the genuine cycle actually happened, the
239
spurious adventures are the lucubrations of his [Watson’s] own unaided invention.” Knox
marshals “internal evidence, implicit or explicit” as a way to rationalize inconsistencies and
contradictions within the Conan Doyle canon as a form of play and participation. Despite the
mock seriousness of the essay, and the inclusion of invented sources, such as M. Papier Mache
or M. Piff Pouffe, the Sherlockian Game “anticipated and helped to invent, the contempo-
rary fandom that has become indistinguishable from contemporary popular art” (Chabon,
2010: 44).
What this convincingly demonstrates is that an emergent Sherlockian fan culture shares
many remarkable commonalities with contemporary fan practices, such as:
the degree to which [some fans] want to see inconsistencies resolved; although they
would seem to threaten the believability of a world more than the lack of complete-
ness or invention, inconsistencies are treated by those fans as though they are merely
gaps in the data, unexplained phenomena that further research and speculation will
clear up.
(Wolf, 2012: 45)
What is also important here is that Conan Doyle is most certainly viewed as the sole author-
God of the Holmes canon and the texts created with his pen are the genuine article while all
else is mere fabrication. However, and this is important, it is not Conan Doyle who is making
such claims about The Gospel According to Watson, but, rather, the Sherlockian fan culture. To
this end, the author is deified as sole creator of the imaginary world despite a multitude of
contradictions and inconsistencies within. To prevent the world from falling apart, then, fans
often play around with the text to ensure the pieces fit cohesively in lieu of any guidance
from authorial governance.
One of the ways in which we might be able to include every incarnation of the Holmes
archetype within such a paradoxical imaginary system is through the concept of “possible
worlds.” Each incarnation could then be viewed as an alternate fictional world, what Doležel
describes as a “heterocosm” (1998). While this would seem to feasibly work, at least from a
theoretical perspective, one should recognize that the activities and behaviors of fan cultures
often pivot on questions around genuine articles versus imposter versions. The Conan Doyle
canon is thus the “real truth” about the “inhuman and undifferentiated sleuth-hound” (Knox,
1911) whereas the wealth of Sherlock texts that continue to be produced in many variations
and forms are interloper texts.
Canon and Authorship: The Imaginary World of Star Trek

One of the ways in which imaginary world canonicity has developed as part of the industrial
logic of late capitalism is through the concept of authorship. We have seen how canonical
aporia can be of vital importance for the Sherlockian fan culture and that the deification of
Conan Doyle’s authorship as the central source of the “truth-conditions” of the imaginary
world is initiated from bottom-up participation as opposed to top-down industrial govern-
ance. The contradiction here is that canonicity is usually determined by an official authority,
by an author or, if such a figure has passed away, through the invocation of an “author-func-
tion.”This section provides a brief case study of Star Trek, with “its storyworld more internally
complex than that of any other American television show” (Pearson and Davies, 2014: 15),
and of a size and scope that means it is incredibly unlikely that any one person has read,
watched, and played all the works of the imaginary world.
240
Canonicity
The Star Trek Universe comprises thousands of texts, including seven live-action TV series,
and one animated series, consisting of over seven hundred individual episodes and over 500
hours of television; thirteen feature films, including three set in “The Kelvin Timeline,” which
is a parallel universe; hundreds of novels; and “several decades worth of video games, comic
books, and other books including technical manuals, chronologies, and encyclopedias. And
since it is an open-ended and still-growing universe, more Star Trek material appears every
year” (Wolf, 2012: 2).
What constitutes the Star Trek canon, however, has often led to skirmishes between pro-
ducers and fans (Geraghty, 2007). The general rule of thumb is that the official canon consists
of the seven TV series, excluding The Animated Series (TAS), and thirteen films. These texts
are the immovable objects of the Star Trek Universe. All else—those hundreds of novels, com-
ics books, and video games, etc.—are officially non-canon and non-genuine. This, however,
is not as straightforward as it may seem. There are two versions of The Original Series (TOS),
both of which are available at the time of writing on Netflix and on DVD/Blu-ray, the former
being the “original” as it was broadcast and the latter including new digital/CGI scenes to
revise and update dated special effects. Of course, this raises the question of which of the two
available versions are canonical.
Furthermore, it was not the TV series that first highlighted that James T. Kirk’s middle
initial stands for “Tiberius,” but the TAS episode “Bem” (1974), which then became part of
established canonicity. By the same token, there have been multiple episodes in the official
canon that directly refer to TAS, such as the Enterprise episode “The Forge” (2004). For some,
this promotes TAS from apocrypha to official canon and effectively revises the series as the
genuine article. On the other hand, however, such a transposition can also be viewed as a
“moment” of remediation rather than the complete elevation of an entire series to genuine
canonical status. As writer Ronald D. Moore explains, “we don’t consider it [TAS] canon
but it’s fun to drop in the odd reference here and there” (http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/
inconsistencies /canon.htm).
Gene Roddenberry is often viewed as the author of all that is Star Trek. Despite many more
canonical Star Trek materials, episodes, and films being produced after the creator’s death, and
the fact that the imaginary world of Star Trek is a transnarrative and transauthorial mega-text,
Roddenberry’s authorial vision continues to be evoked as a method of authentication, both
by fans and by producers. But in actual fact, Roddenberry was quite lackadaisical when it
came to questions of canonicity. David Gerrold, writer on TAS and TOS, including the classic
episode, “The Trouble with Tribbles” (1967), said that:
Arguments about “canon” are silly. I always felt that Star Trek Animated was part of
Star Trek because Gene Roddenberry accepted the paycheck for it and put his name
on the credits. And DC Fontana—and all the other writers involved—busted their
butts to make it the best Star Trek they could. But this whole business of “canon”
really originated with Gene’s errand boy. Gene liked giving people titles instead of
raises, so the errand boy got named “archivist” and apparently it went to his head.
Gene handed him the responsibility of answering all fan questions, silly or otherwise,
and he apparently let that go to his head.
(http://www.startrekanimated.com/tas_david_gerrold.html)
Here, we see that Roddenberry’s authorship is handed down to a nameless “errand boy”
rather than the sole province of an author-God, but, equally, that TAS should be consid-
ered canonical “because Gene Roddenberry accepted the paycheck” and that other authors,
241
such as fan favorite D. C. Fontana, were involved. To complicate matters even further,
Roddenberry himself did not believe that all the Star Trek films were necessarily canonical.
He despised Star Trek II:The Wrath of Khan (1982) because “he thought there were moments
that betrayed the original show—he felt, for example, that it was out of character for Kirk
to shoot the nasty worm that crawls out of Chekhov’s ear, rather than make every effort to
study it” (Jones and Parkin, 2003: 7). He also denounced the disastrous fifth film, The Final
Frontier (1989), as a violation of his liberal-humanist ethos but found that his protests went
largely ignored. To this, “some commentators have argued that their [the films] frequent
disregard for Roddenberry’s ethics excludes them from the true Star Trek ‘canon’” (Gregory,
2000: 41).
There is certainly a powerful “aura” that envelops Roddenberry’s authorship and that has
figuratively constructed a mythological halo around the creator. For instance, Roddenberry
did not write any episodes for TAS and frequently farmed out TOS episodes to other writers
and “over the years, a lot of the very best Star Trek has been the work of people other than
Roddenberry” (Jones and Parkin, 2003: 7). In recent years, there has been some reconsidera-
tion of Roddenberry’s authorial signature, including William Shatner’s documentary, Chaos on
the Bridge (2014), a film that details a struggle for power between the creator and Paramount
Studios in relation to the second live-action series, Star Trek:The Next Generation (1987–1994).
So, then, what is the current state of the constitution of Star Trek canon? With Roddenberry
no longer able to provide authorial stewardship, it has since become the domain of Paramount
Studios to issue canonical guidelines.The most current state of canonicity at the time of writ-
ing is advertised on the official website, StarTrek.com, which states that:
the events that take place within the live-action episodes and movies are canon, or
official Star Trek facts. Story lines, characters, events, stardates, etc. that take place
within the fictional novels, video games, the Animated Series, and the various comic
lines have traditionally not been considered part of the canon. But canon is not
something set in stone; even events in some of the movies have been called into
question as to whether they should be considered canon! Ultimately, the fans, the
writers and the producers may all differ on what is considered canon and the very
idea of what is canon has become more fluid, especially as there isn’t a single voice
or arbiter to decide. Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry was accustomed to making
statements about canon, but even he was known to change his mind.
(https://web.archive.org/web/20100628174255/http://www.startrek.com/
startrek/view/help/faqs/faq/676.html)
From this perspective, then, canonicity shifts from authorial governance toward an all-
inclusive sphere of interpretation. Like the Sherlockians, then, what constitutes the Star Trek
canon comes down to interpretation, at least for those texts that exist outside the immove-
able objects of television and cinema. By relinquishing the power to issue canonical dictates,
Paramount has essentially awarded such power to the fan community: the power to interpret
for themselves, a fact that runs counter to the way in which canonicity ostensibly functions
as the product of an authoritative body or voice. Thus, Parkin’s concept of Roddenberry or
Lucas as “popes of their magisteria” requires revision, especially given that the former has
since passed away and had already lost his authorial grip on the series and that the latter is no
longer involved with Star Wars, having handed the keys to the multi-billion dollar franchise to
Disney in 2012 (for more on Star Wars canonicity, see: Brooker, 2002; Proctor and Freeman,
2016). Despite such a loose method of canonical management as proposed by Paramount
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Canonicity
Studios—arguably a way to ward off potential fan skirmishes and hostile arguments—the
ghost of Gene Roddenberry’s authorship continues to haunt Star Trek to this day.
Conclusion: Canon in the Twenty-First Century

Canonicity has since gained a valuable cultural currency in the new millennium as multi-
media conglomerates increasingly move toward integration in a variety of ways. The impor-
tance of canon is increasingly recognized as a fundamental part of the fan experience and, as
a result, used as an economic method of commodity logic in contemporary capitalism (“it
makes economic sense”).The enormous success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) as
an expansive imaginary world consisting of multiple transmedia expressions, such as film, TV,
streaming, a series of short films (one-shots), and tie-in comic books, has proven to be a valu-
able template for the entertainment media industrial complex. As a result, Wolf ’s principle of
“narrative braiding” (2012) needs to be considered as entwined with Freeman’s “commodity
braiding” (2014) to fully understand the dialectic of production and consumption.
Historically, tie-in materials and spin-offs, such as expanded universe novels and comics,
were either defined as non-canonical—as with Star Trek—or quasi-canonical—as in the Star
Wars canon. Prior to the Disney takeover, the films created by George Lucas occupied the
highest tier of canonicity, with the Expanded Universe (EU) materials, novels, comics, and
so forth belonging to a lower stratum and thus perilously unstable in that new narrative
information could supersede and write over a previously established canonicity (Proctor and
Freeman, 2016; Wolf, 2012: 270–273; see also Jenkins, 2006: 105; Hills, 2012). So it is that
quasi-canonical material, such as Karen Traviss’s novel, Republic Command: 501st (2009), a text
that depicted the history and culture of the Mandalorian Race, was overwritten and rendered
apocryphal by The Clone Wars TV series. Indeed, the novel was to be the first in a series but
this was canceled due to the canonical conflicts instigated by The Clone Wars (2008–2015)
and, as a result, Traviss ended her tenure as writer of Star Wars tie-in novels. Traviss explained:
When I was finishing 501st in January this year, I was told about a significant con-
tinuity change coming up in the Clone Wars cartoon […] That’s fairly common
procedure for any franchise—but unfortunately it wasn’t that simple in practice.The
two Commando series—and quite a few older books and comics, come to that—
were based entirely on that original history, and basic logic meant that the funda-
mental plot of the series could never have existed if this had been a pacifist society.
Neither could any of the characters or their motives have existed, because they were
wholly based on a global warrior culture living on a non-nuked Mandalore.
(http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/96176/mandalore-
planet-karen-traviss-versus-clone-wars)
Star Wars fan culture has often been embroiled in hostile dissension and debates as exam-
ined by Brooker (2002: 101–115). One of the ways that Disney has managed this since the
Lucasfilm buyout in 2012 was via the controversial decision to do away with the hierarchical
canon system and cast all EU material into the dustbin of history. Lucas’s non-involvement
means that the new Pope, to continue Park’s analogy, is a collaboration of creative minds
dubbed The Lucasfilm Story Group who steward canonicity through close alliance with tie-
in writers and so forth.
Since 2014, all new Star Wars material, be it novels, comics, or what have you, are deemed
officially canonical and thus genuine imaginary world “fact,” with the old EU being r elegated
243
to counter-factual apocrypha, “what if?” stories that henceforth bear the hallmark of
“Legends.” It is not too much of a stretch to understand this maneuver as a form of editorial
management and also as a way to latch into the coattails of the MCU’s transmedia success via
the construction of a vast canonical imaginary empire.
As with The X-Files comic book series that introduced this article, other comic spin-offs
and tie-ins have followed a similar trajectory, such as the continuation of cult TV series Buffy
the Vampire Slayer, which was promoted as “the definitive version of what happens after the
TV series ends” (Ford and Jenkins, 2009: 305) and, as with The X-Files, carries the series num-
bering across media windows (beginning with Season Eight). Again, the author—in this case
Buffy creator and showrunner, Joss Whedon—is activated as a “brand function” to authenti-
cate the comic book extension.
Of course, comics that spin off from television series are not a new phenomenon, but we
have seen a significant shift in principles of canonicity. Star Trek and Star Wars comics were
published in the 1970s and 1980s, for instance, but “nobody would consider those titles to be
canonical” (Ford and Jenkins, 2009: 305), whereas the Buffy comics “are absolutely canonical
in the views of many fans” (ibid). To this, we could add comic book series tie-ins, such as the
canonical Battlestar Galactica comics (Scott, 2008) or mini-series such as 24: Undercover (2014),
which functions as a prequel to the TV series revival, 24: Live Another Day (2014), and, simul-
taneously, as sequel to Season Eight.
The comic book extension of cinematic universes is also continuing apace with prequels,
interquels, and sequels (Wolf, 2012) exploiting narrative gaps in ways that directly address the
fannish desire for authenticity. Rather than casting tie-in materials as non-genuine stories, as
has been traditionally the case, there is an industrial movement at work that is shifting more
toward an industrial logic of canon formation.
That being said, fans might not accept such rulings as canonical and therein lies the rub. As
this chapter has shown, canonicity may well operate as official policy, although not always as
the case of Sherlock illustrates, and that conflicts between producers and audiences can never
truly be managed and steered into interpretative cul-de-sacs. Canonicity may be interpreted
as “rule” or “law” but this certainly doesn’t account for the bottom-up process of dissent and
revolt instigated by fan cultures.
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30
Escapism
Lars Konzack
The term escapism, to seek distraction from reality or from routine, first appeared in the 1933
Encyclopedia of Social Sciences (Ayto, 1999). This, of course, implies that it may have seen ear-
lier use. “Escapism” should not be confused with “escapology,” which is the performance of
escaping from restraints, traps, or confinements. Hence, an “escapist” could be either a person
who escapes from captivity or, as in this case, a person who indulges in a mental process of
emotional diversion by means of entertainment or other kinds of leisure activities to avoid or
retreat from what is considered an unpleasant or unacceptable reality.
Cultural and Literary Criticism

In 1921,T. S. Eliot wrote: “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emo-
tion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only
those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these
things” (Eliot, 1982, p. 42). Eliot did not directly use the term escapism, but seen in retrospect,
this points toward a discussion of the role of literature (and other media creations) as a way to
escape from the world. It is implied that only people with a personality and emotions, maybe
even rich personality and rich emotions, will truly understand poetry as a way of escape. In
this sense, it was meant to be a positive aspect of poetry. This positive usage of escape would
soon vanish. Nevertheless, it reveals that whether or not “escape” should be considered a posi-
tive or negative literary quality is a matter open to interpretation.
The first use of the term “escapist,” to describe a person who seeks diversion from reality,
has been ascribed to John Crowe Ransom, founder of the Southern New Criticism School
of literary criticism in 1930 (Ayto, 1999; Flora, MacKethan, & Taylor, 2002). Ransom, as an
avowed reactionary, decried his contemporaries as an escapist people blinded by progressivism
and industrial power (to quote the British edition): “It is much too likely that they betoken
a defeated and escapist people—a people which is afraid of the fullness of the inner life and
prefers to rush into violent action—a people that takes its work as an anesthetic—an impo-
tent people building up a legend of power” (Ransom, 1931, p. 184). Ransom attributed three
properties to this escapist people: First, he perceives them as having a general illusion of per-
sonal and collective power; second, as taking on work as an anesthetic or anodyne; and, third,
as exhibiting infantilism in the pathological sense of the word (Ransom, 1931). Following this
logic, Ransom portrays escapism as a combination of illusionism, anesthetic, and pathological
infantilism—the latter probably referring to Freudian psychoanalysis, though only implicitly
so. Nonetheless, pathological infantilism would undoubtedly be understood in the context of
Freudian psychoanalysis by his contemporaries. In prolongation of these views on escapism,
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Escapism
John Crowe Ransom was apprehensive toward entertainment and communication devices
such as radio and movies (Ransom, 1931). His disciple, Robert B. Heilman, would, decades
later, categorize the counterculture of the hippies, with their sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, as
escapism (Heilman, 1975).
Another cultural criticism came from C. S. Lewis, who wrote, in The Pilgrim’s Regress
(1933), an updated version of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1757), about an allegori-
cal, and autobiographical, character named John questing for an ideal, desirable island. In a
conversation with Angular, a man who represents the Anglo-Catholic movement, John asks:
“Have you ever seen my island?” gaining the response: “God forbid.” John then asks: “And
have you never heard of Mr. Halfways (the personification of decadent Romanticism) either?”
Angular answers back: “Never. And I never will. Do you take me for an escapist?” John replies:
“Then there is at least one object in the world of which I know more than you. I have tasted
what you call romantic trash; you have only talked about it” (Lewis, 2014, p. 99).
Lewis’s lines suggest that this criticism was targeted toward Romanticism. Cleanth Brooks,
a prominent literary critic of New Criticism and student of John Crowe Ransom, similarly
exhibits this development a year later, writing that the three characteristics of Romanticism
were sentimentality, vulnerability to irony, and escapism (Brooks, 1934); and in his famous
essay “Criticism Inc.,” John Crowe Ransom likewise calls the author of romantic literature
escapist along with flabby, intemperate, unphilosophical, and simply adolescent (Ransom,
1937). In the late 1930s, Montague Summers called literature based on subjectivity, in the
form of personal experiences of inner and outer realities and accentuating make-believe and
fantasy, “romantic escapism” (Rustowski, 1976). And American journalist, and, later editor,
James Wechsler argued, in his Revolt in the Campus, that some people could retreat into the
fantasies of escapism even though it is neither satisfactory nor permanent (Wechsler, 1935).
Escapism as initiated by John Crowe Ransom started out as a criticism of modernism, but
rapidly turned into a criticism of Romanticism (Breines, 1977). This criticism of “romantic
escapism” then developed into a general cultural criticism of the fantastic and capitalism in the
20th century, as Freudian and Marxist views on escapism rose to dominance.
Freudian and Marxist Use of the Term Escapism

Although Sigmund Freud never used the term escapism, it has nevertheless been widely used
by Freudian literary critics. Sigmund Freud was not himself opposed to reading and applying
allegorical or mythical accounts, such as Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (429 B.C.), Shakespeare’s
Hamlet (1603), and E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman (1816), to make his point. Freudian crit-
ics’ adoption of the term may, however, have been facilitated by John Crowe Ransom’s related
usage of words such as “pathological infantilism.” Sigmund Freud does use the term “fantasy”
as denoting an infantile state; suffered by someone who indulges in his own dreams of power
and control rather than understanding the realities of adulthood (Freud, The Psychology of Love,
2007). As explained by Murray Krieger:
Now, one can simply dwell upon the once-upon-a-time element in fiction and
justify it as an escape from the world around us. Fiction’s made-up, make-believe
character is the very feature which the escapist celebrates. Indeed, it can be argued
that Freud justified literature precisely on such escapist grounds, as a necessary sub-
limation for the frustrated poet who, as a daydreamer, provided daydreams for the
rest of us.
(Krieger, 1974, p. 335)
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L a r s Ko n z ac k
As a consequence of this notion of Freudian escapism, Dominick Lacapra asks rhetorically,

“who more than Freud taught us to suspect the escapism of a private, compensatory response
to a public problem?” (Lacapra, 1984, p. 305). In this notion of escapism, it is not only a criti-
cism of romantic literature, or a condemnation of a specific field of cultural misendeavor, but
an overall criticism of any literature and fiction that contains fantastic elements. Consequently,
it becomes a general criticism of any form of fantastic expression or cultural product—not
merely escapist romantic literature. Had Freud, in fact, used the term escapism, he would have
said that all artistic expression was the result of neurosis, hence any kind of artistic expression
was, accordingly, escapist (Freud, 1930; Stapledon, 1939).
One attempt by Freudian literary critics to break free from this reductionist and totalizing
world view was the distinction between conscious fantasy and unconscious dreams. Sigmund
Freud does not distinguish between dreaming, daydreaming, and conscious poetic elabora-
tion. However, Neo-Freudian tradition has made some attempt at a more discriminating
perspective. Melanie Klein decided, based on the usage of the German word “Phantasie” by
Freud, that phantasy was unconscious, whilst fantasy was conscious (Hinshelwood & Robinson,
2014). The usage of the term was limited by the fact that, when spoken aloud, it is indistin-
guishable from fantasy; besides, the distinction had already been made in the 19th century
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge argues that fancy is based on the law of association,
whereas imagination is an act of the conscious mind (Coleridge, 2004). Also, it doesn’t seem
as if Melanie Klein’s distinction had any real impact on Freudian psychoanalysis in practice;
Freudian literary critics, at any rate, persisted in treating conscious fantastic works of art as if
they were unconscious dreams (Ellmann, 1994).
Karl Marx did not use the term “escapism” either; nonetheless, it was adopted into Marxist
vocabulary as well. The Marxists perceived art as “Bourgeois escapism” or escapist “Neo-
Romantic anti-capitalism” (Aronson, 1975/1976; Breines, 1977). In the early 20th century,
Marxists regarded Freudianism as equally escapist. According to Silvio Gaggi, “Earlier in the
[twentieth] century Marxists generally rejected Freudian notions, regarding them as mysti-
cal, escapist, and socially irresponsible, while the Surrealists were desperately attempting to
achieve a reconciliation” (Gaggi, 1978, p. 462). At this time, Marxist criticism did not operate
from a Freudian Left cultural vantage point. Marxist criticism did not only reject Freudian
analysis, but any kind of literature that did not live up to their “uncompromising realism.” It
seemed as if Marxist cultural critics became obsessed with the terms “escape” and “escapism”
(Hyman, 1947; Schwartz, 2000). The counterculture, with its sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, was
perceived as escapism (Jha, 1978). Likewise, Marxist cultural criticism was applied against non-
figurative art. Gerardo Mosquera, David Craven, and Colleen Kattau explain:
Aside from the fact that they were influenced by Soviet dogmatism and its claims
to scientific omniscience, many Marxists, who wished to transform reality, had little
general faith in art that seemed to them vacuous. Although some of them assumed
more flexible postures towards modernism, or even participated in modernist
movements, they usually accused non-figurative art of being escapist, formalist, or
inexpressive.
(Mosquera, Craven, & Kattau, 1994, p. 76)
During the Cold War, Western Marxist and Freudian criticism merged into a totalizing
Freudo-Marxist critical superstructure, invariably rejecting fantastic artistic and make-believe
productions as mere escapism (Gaggi, 1978; Roberts, 2000). David Sandner echoes this belief:
“Fantastic literature’s declared position as purely imaginary or unrealistic clearly underwrites
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Escapism
the persistent charges against it as ‘escapist’. Because the fantastic apparently refuses or is
unable to connect with reality, it is commonly viewed as lacking serious intention or rel-
evance” (Sandner, 2004, p. 320)
This totalizing tendency was challenged as the Cold War came to an end.The Marxist critic
Darko Suvin identified science fiction as that which had the potential for either conducting
new directions for imagining the social order of society or to motivate oppressed people to
repel hegemonic power. Conversely, fantasy, myth, space opera, and science fantasy did not
have this potential and therefore had to be considered escapism (Suvin, 1979; Renault, 1980).
This notion was soon disputed by Rosemary Jackson, who, in trying to grasp the fantasy
genre from a Freudo-Marxist perspective, unfolded the idea that fantasy may not always be
regarded as escapism but a way to disturb rules and transform the world (Jackson, 1981).
Furthermore, Steph Lawler, in her writings about the theatrical representation of working-
class women, felt it necessary to distinguish between escape and escapism. Following her line
of thought, trying to actively escape working-class conditions was a heroic act, whereas escap-
ism, passive daydreaming, could only be seen as a failure (Lawler, 2000). Suddenly, the term
“escapism” had become a nuanced cacophony.
In the 21st century, Marxist and fantasy author, China Miéville, went even further: “Let
me empathetically stress that this is not to make the ridiculous suggestion that fantastic fiction
gives a clear view of political possibilities or acts as a guide to political action. I am claiming
that the fantastic, particularly because ‘reality’ is a grotesque ‘fantastic form’, is good to think
with. Marx, whose theory is a haunted house of spectres and vampires, knew this” (Miéville,
2004, p. 339).
I do respect China Miéville’s sincere attempt at trying to revitalize Marxist literary criti-
cism, although it was simply too little and too late. By then, the Soviet Union had fallen
due to economic failure, whilst the Western democratic welfare states flourished, and it still
remains a mystery why economic theory should be particularly applicable to literary criti-
cism in the first place. Not only has Marxist economic theory widely come to be considered
unviable (Prychitko, 2002), but, by now, many academics and intellectuals also question and
denounce Freudian psychotherapy as being pseudo-science, even antitherapeutic (Eysenck,
1986; Torrey, 1992; Webster, 1996).
It is important to stress that escapism was never a technical term founded on actual research.
It does have a technical ring to it, reminiscent of psychotherapeutic pathology, but people
declared escapists were as a rule not committed to an asylum. One possible reason the term
“escapism” was so naturally adopted by Freudian and Marxist literary and cultural critics
seems to have been that it was once fashionable, and due to its appearance of being scientific
terminology, even though it was merely a para-technical expression, a simulacrum.
Reactions to the Charge of Escapism

Long before Freudian and Marxist literary criticism imploded in the 1980s, the usage of
escapism, as introduced by Southern New Criticism, was itself criticized. As early as 1935,
Kenneth Burke condemns this tendency among cultural critics:
Properly used, the idea of escape should present no difficulties. If a situation is unsat-
isfactory, it is quite normal and natural that people should want to avoid it and
should try any means at their disposal to do so. But the term escape has had a more
restricted usage. Whereas it properly applies to all men, there was an attempt to
restrict its application to some men. […] In the end, the term came to be applied
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L a r s Ko n z ac k
loosely, in literary criticism especially, to designate any writer or reader whose inter-
ests or aims did not closely coincide with those of the critic.While apparently defin-
ing a trait of the person referred to, the term hardly did more than convey the
attitude of the person making the reference. It looked objective, as though the critic
were saying ‘X is doing so-and-so’; but too often it became merely a strategic way of
saying, ‘I personally don’t like what X is doing.’”
(Burke, 1984, p. 8)
Unfortunately, Kenneth Burke’s disapproval of this tendency did not have much influence on
how the term would later be used by Freudians and Marxists in order to condemn any literary
development that did not fit their close-minded modernist beliefs. But he was not the only
one who recognized how “escapism” was being used as a fallacy.
The influential British science fiction writer, Olaf Stapledon, wrote an essay titled “Escapism
in Literature,” published in F. R. Leavis’s quarterly periodical Scrutiny. Written in 1939, it is
obvious that the discussion of escapism had become common during this decade. It begins by
simply stating: “We often hear it said disparagingly that some writer or other is a mere ‘escap-
ist,’ or that a particular piece of writing is sheer ‘escapism.’ It is implied that the true function
of literature is, not to offer escape from unpleasant facts, but to help the reader to face up to
reality, and cope with it successfully” (Stapledon, 1939, p. 298). Hence, Stapledon takes a stand
on this issue from a critical literary point of view; critical in the sense that he is sorting out
different kinds of literary practices and adjudicating their literary qualities.
Stapledon divides literature into four categories: creative, propaganda, release, and escape.
Stapledon is hostile toward escapism, but it is in his view only escapism if there is no creativ-
ity involved, or the creativity applied is so unimportant as to not really matter. In his view,
science fiction is not escapism when it is creative or gives some kind of psychological release
or catharsis (Stapledon, 1939; Crossley, 1986). Stapledon states: “In ‘creative literature’ the
dominant motive and the main import are creative” (Stapledon, 1939, p. 301). This means
that literature that constructs a universe of fiction, such as an imaginary world, or brings a
fresh new aspect of the world or self to literature should not be regarded as escapist. On the
contrary, this is what literature is all about as long as it induces new appreciations and expands
innovative and improved dimensions for accomplishment (Stapledon, 1939). J. R. R. Tolkien’s
Middle-earth, or Frank Herbert’s Dune series, to take two later examples, would not, in this
theory, be escapist because they have been created through a groundbreaking ingenious and
pioneering creative process. This means that, from a creative literary perspective, new discov-
eries in the sciences or other fields of human curiosity may be the very material from which
to create fresh and exciting literature.
Propaganda literature is without such artistic ambitions. It is about evoking the right
thoughts and feelings to change people’s behavior. Propaganda may be justified, according to
Stapledon, as long as its social effect is positive to society and humanity. Clichés and slogans are
used to produce an anticipated effect on the opinions of the public (Stapledon, 1939). In this
perspective, works mostly concerned with changing people’s views in one particular direction
should not be considered as significant literature because it is a mere matter of propaganda. Of
course, the propaganda may, eventually, be justified, but that does not suddenly transform the
work into a rewarding literary experience.
In “release” literature, the motivation is catharsis or “the assuagement of starved needs.” It
is the release of pent-up forces that leads to change in emotion, resulting in replenishment
and renewal. The aim is not to be overly creative, but release literature does have a legiti-
mate function; authored with such expressive imagination of sensitivity that it generates an
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Escapism
inner recuperating outcome. While the creative kind of literature destabilizes or alters the
conformist structure of established beliefs and accepted wisdom, release literature generally
admits to these ideas, implicitly and unconsciously. Release literature could be anything from
crime fiction and thrillers to poems and romances (Stapledon, 1939).
“Escape” literature, to the contrary, is illegitimate. Seemingly, it is much like release litera-
ture, and it may prove difficult to decide whether a work of art is either escape or release.
There is, nonetheless, a difference. While release literature creates catharsis so that the reader
can meet the world renewed and refreshed, escape literature constructs a dream world that
protects the mind of the reader from an unpleasant reality. The underlying raison d’être is
escape, by making the imaginary world more alluring and seeming-real. Stapledon acknowl-
edges that escapism is not only a problem for literature critics alone, and insists that psy-
chologists and sociologists ought to have a say as well, pointing to Freudian psychotherapy
(Stapledon, 1939). Any genre of literature can be made into escapism: the more realistic it
seems, the more convincing the dream world.
Release and creative literature are about personal achievement, while escape and prop-
aganda focus on social effect. Creative and propaganda literature are conscious, whereas
release and escape literature are unconscious (Stapledon, 1939). To illustrate this in a diagram,
see Figure 30.1.
Figure 30.1 Olaf Stapledon’s four types of literature.
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L a r s Ko n z ac k
Remarkably, Olaf Stapledon criticizes the usage of “escapism” among both Right-wing
and Left-wing politics, saying:
Whereas for the reactionary escapist true salvation lies in facing the fact that the
existing social order and his own part in it are unhealthy and immoral, for the
Left escapist it lies in recognizing that his motive for condemning the social order
is not as disinterested as he believes. […] Left escapism is but a special case of the
escapism which characterized so much of modern “scientific” culture. Accepting
the temper of our age, we tend to withdraw attention from the inner life, and
to seek escape from individual moral responsibility by constructing a fictitious
world in which individuals are wholly the product of external forces, physical
or social.
(Stapledon, 1939, p. 308)
While being positive toward Freudian psychotherapy and criticizing Right-wing political
use of escapism, Olaf Stapledon’s thoughts were not used by Marxist literary critics because
he was equally critical toward Left-wing political use of escapism. Furthermore, he was a sci-
ence fiction writer and this kind of literature was increasingly perceived as being inherently
escapist popular culture. J. R. R. Tolkien pointed out that stories of science fiction were the
most escapist of all literary forms (Tolkien, 1975). Nevertheless, Stapledon’s essay was pub-
lished by F. R. Leavis, who was associated with cultural elitism, high culture, yearning for
traditional pre-industrial society, moralism, and a corresponding resentment toward Marxism,
commercialism, and mass culture. The term “Leavisite” has, even, itself become a pejorative
synonym for a conformist and traditionalist approach to literature and culture (Bilan, 1979;
Farred, 1996).
When Realism Becomes Escapist

Olaf Stapledon’s literary criticism of escapism is the only attempt at giving a proper theoreti-
cal foundation for the term, and it was very unfortunate that his work did not gain more
followers and have greater impact at the time. That said, there were other literary criticisms
of escapism that deserve mention. J. R. R. Tolkien addressed the issue in “On Fairy-Stories”
(1939), his, it is important to stress, decidedly anti-romantic essay. He insists that fairy tales are
best understood through reason by adults. As regard escapism, he does not deny that a part of
the appreciation of Faerie is escape. But he distinguishes between two kinds of escape.There is
the illegitimate escape of the deserter who flees from his responsibility, and then there is the
legitimate escape by which a prisoner flees from his prison. The deserter is like the romantic,
while the fleeing prisoner is the one who is more curious about life than to just sit locked
up in his cell. He wants to go on adventure and learn more about the world and return with
his experiences and insights. In this sense, this kind of escapism is a heroic act (Tolkien, 1975).
C. S. Lewis commented:
That perhaps is why people are so ready with the charge of “escape.” I never fully
understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question,
“What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and most hostile
to, the idea of escape?” and gave the obvious answer: jailers.The charge of Fascism is,
to be sure, mere mud-flinging. Fascists, as well as Communists, are jailers; both would
assure us that the proper study of prisoners is prison. But there is perhaps this truth
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Escapism
behind it: that those who brood much on the remote past or future, or stare long at
the night sky, are less likely than others to be ardent or orthodox partisans.”
(Lewis, 1975, p. 67)
C. S. Lewis, like Olaf Stapledon, was not focused on blaming Right-wing or Left-wing poli-
tics. The charge of escapism has been abused by both sides of the political spectrum. Like
Tolkien, he does not see escape in literature as a problem in itself. It can be either responsi-
ble or irresponsible, depending on the quality of the content and how it is read. One of the
irresponsible escapist readings is daydreaming and castle-building. Here, the reader wants to
escape from reality, and, in order to do so, the imagery should, in fact, be as convincing as
possible. That’s why the fantastic and marvelous are, actually, rejected by such irresponsible
readers. The dream can only be approachable if it seems as if it could be real or happen in
one’s immediate existence, with as little intellectual effort as possible. In this respect, fantastic
elements actually obstruct the irresponsible escapist reading (Lewis, 1969).
Ursula K. Le Guin points to the same realist escapist reader: “That all these genres are
sterile, hopelessly sterile, is a reassurance to him, rather than a defect. If they were genuinely
realistic, which is to say genuinely imagined and imaginative, he would be afraid of them. Fake
realism is the escapist literature of our time. And probably the ultimate escapist reading is that
masterpiece of total unreality, the daily stock market report” (Le Guin, 1979, p. 42) Here, Le
Guin casts the term back at the realists, saying that believing in realist fiction is actually the
true form of escapist delusion, because the escapist believes this kind of fiction to be true.
Conclusion
The term “escapism” has been around since 1930 with a multiplicity of meanings. Before
the term existed, T. S. Eliot perceived escape as a positive element of poetry. This changed
with John Crowe Ransom’s Southern New Criticism. He defined escapists as those blinded
by industrialism and progressivism.Thereupon, literary critics used it as a mere insult toward
Romanticism, or simply any work the critic did not happen to like. The term moved into
Freudian and Marxist vocabulary and was used for decades as a pejorative for any kind of
work that was not considered realism according to Freudians and Marxists. However, by the
end of the Cold War, the term was being used more and more inconsistently. Science fic-
tion author Olaf Stapledon made, as early as 1939, a systematic attempt to situate the word
in a literary perspective, and, later on, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Ursula K. Le Guin
strove toward a more nuanced view of escapism. Seeing creative fantasy as escapism, in the
sense of the reader only using it as a diversion from reality, is becoming an increasingly
anachronistic approach. Rather, fantastic literature creates a free space from which one can
gain new perspective. J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis used fantastic worlds to reconsider
the real one.
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31
Genre
Lily Alexander
For imaginary worlds, storytelling is the means of actualization: this is how “worlds” reveal
themselves and flourish. Fictional worlds can be classified in many ways: by their authorship,
media, design, aesthetic style, or genre. Worlds can be grouped by spatial relationships, such as
island worlds, underground worlds, virtual worlds, or planetary worlds, which define them by
their location and the boundaries that surround them (Wolf, 2012). Yet the fictional worlds’
time-space continua, or chronotopes (Bakhtin, 1938/1981), inevitably trigger a consequential
story. For example, seeing people laboring in underground catacombs, we expect a dysto-
pia, as in Metropolis (1927); or prison bars connote a jail tale and lead to escape story, as in
The Shawshank Redemption (1994). Worlds can be also grouped stylistically, when influenced
by the aesthetics of the Baroque, Romanticism, Expressionism, or Magic Realism. Some
worlds combine many artistic layers, like the multifaceted storytelling of J. R. R. Tolkien or
J. K. Rowling.
This chapter examines and highlights genres as the means of both: the categorization and
the configuration of fictional worlds. Genre structure is vitally important to fictional world-
building, representing not merely classification but the core modality of the organization of
narrative systems. Worlds can be narratively homogeneous (one genre) or heterogeneous (a
combination of genres), especially when they employ more than one story. Developing stories
branch off along the powerlines of genres, revealing the imaginary worlds’ creative unfolding.
Similarly to how Nature arrays the “golden-mean” patterns through sprouting flowers and
branches, genres offer fictional worlds pathways to grow. Genre is a symbolic narrative sys-
tem that purports influence and resonates with the audience. Just “naming” a genre triggers
intense emotional responses, so do iconic visual images. Picturing the cowboys riding through
a canyon or a female silhouette in the night’s fog transports us at once to a distinctive world
of the Western or Film Noir. Genres have an enormous power over our symbolic experiences;
they also profoundly influence box office success.
Evolving as a set of narratives, an imaginary world most successfully advances through
genre-based storytelling (such as fantasy, action-adventure, journey story, mystery, or coming
of age). Hence, “genre awareness” becomes a necessary attribute of fictional world-building,
in both theory and practice. This chapter outlines recent debates on genre in narratology
and media studies, highlighting the latest in genre theories—the anthropological, which
focuses on the genres’ ritual roots and socio-cultural functions in the development of humanity
throughout time. All genres work in concert as a cultural and meta-narrative framework, based
on the historical and transnational continuity of dynamic symbolic codes (Alexander, 2013a/b,
2017). Unlike previous genre theories, which emphasize genres’ function as the categorization
of texts, the anthropological theory of genres underlines their importance for structuring socie-
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Genre
ties. Current discussions of genres as a cultural system are especially topical because the rapid
expansion of digital storytelling raises the question of how important genres are to interactive
new media and fictional world-building in the context of globalization.
Imaginary worlds are rooted in the collective imagination of early religions and folklore.
They also unfold through individual visions in literature and modern art.What we call “imag-
inary worlds” includes a spectrum of interrelated cultural phenomena encompassing mythic,
artistic, narrative, and fictional worlds (see the “Mythology” chapter in this volume). We must
acknowledge the whole range of imaginary designs because fictional world-building, particu-
larly when influenced by genre systems, includes all the types outlined below:
1. The mythic worlds of folk traditions.

2. The quasi-historical restoration of the worlds of “legendary past” through
mythology, such as those practiced by the classical Greek dramatists (as in
Oedipus Rex, Phaedra, Iphigenia, and Hecuba). Such activities were repeated in
the revival of Greek myth during the Renaissance and in the 17th-century
French theater, as well as in recent television series like Xena: Warrior Princess
(1995–2001); Hercules: Legendary Journeys (1995–1999), which is also a video
game; and The Young Hercules (1998–1999); add to this the “medieval worlds” of
Gargoyles (1994–1996) and Game of Thrones (2011–present).
3. The unique world designs with the elements of the fantastic and philosophical
wit (like those authored by Apuleius, François Rabelais, Jonathan Swift, and
Lewis Carroll).
4. Worlds of Fantastic or Magical Realism of modernity, in which the ordi-
nary worlds border/overlap with the fantastic, sometimes featuring just one
“magic deviation” from the familiar reality, such as the nose in Nikolai Gogol’s
The Nose wandering off from the face of his owner (1836), the Devil visit-
ing the brother with a guilty conscience in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers
Karamazov (1880), or one lonely man morphing into an insect in Franz Kafka’s
Metamorphosis (1915).
5. The worlds in one’s imagination, subjective remembrance, illusion, or dream, as
created by Joyce and Proust, following the poetics of Modernism (also encom-
passing nightmarish visions of Expressionism).
6. The realistic yet hypothetical futuristic realms of science fiction, with its utopian
and dystopian worlds (including those of Yevgeny Zamyatin, George Orwell,
Aldous Huxley, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, and Stanisław Lem).
7. Any fictional storyworld, regardless of fantastic elements, that is logical and
artistically vibrant.
In the present, the so-called show reunions on television are undertaken with a purpose
of enabling fatigued series. Beyond commercial reasons, they represent nostalgic attempts
to revive the long-gone storyworlds, like those of The X-Files (1993–2002) and Full House
(1987–1995). Usually, such profit-driven attempts are futile or a mixed success. The artist’s
devotion to world-building, which resonates with the audience’s cultural needs, better ensures
a storyworld’s longevity. A flourishing imaginary world is one that a “visitor”—a reader, the
audience—does not want to leave, despite its dangers, its tragic events, or even if the story is
over. Such audience craving—to revisit—facilitates the transformation of a story into a sto-
ryworld, and further into a serialized fictional world. Some worlds that did not bloom into a
series are simply reread or watched all over again, perhaps generating fan movements and fan
257
fiction. Expanding worlds are manifest, for example, in the dystopian “cult” novel-film-video
game, like the Strugatsky Brothers’ Hard to Be a God (1964) and Dmitry Glukhovsky’s Metro
2033 (2002). As stories of personal courage, they reveal their wisdom as enlightening para-
bles of survival. A transformation of a story into a world is often empowered by its visitors,
unwilling to accept the inspiring world’s end and eager to extend its vitality by “permanently
populating” it.
Genre can be defined as a symbolic script, a meta-story, and a game, the rules of which are
familiar to both authors and audience. These “conventions” are known even to characters
in the metafiction or parody, traditional or postmodern. Such genre-focused stories often
play with the ingrained rules, or tease us with their self-knowledge, while folding one’s plot
as a circle in jest (Pulp Fiction, 1994). Such worlds are also known to overlap and interact.
For example, there is The Postman Always Rings Twice in all its three versions (1946, 1981,
and Ossessione, 1943), as well as in its “doubles,” Double Indemnity (1944) and its meta-ref-
erence The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001); all these films, developing a similar crime story,
merge into a metaplot, becoming a distinctive, genre-defined “storyworld” and a vivid ritual-
symbolic endeavor. The British-Japanese fantasyland Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), a collabo-
ration between Diana Wynne Jones and Hayao Miyazaki, becomes a multimedia endeavor of
a book, animation, and a video game. Conversely, the same director/producer can envision a
variety of mythic worlds, like Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves (1990), Waterworld (1995),
and The Postman (1997). Multiple magical worlds sprang out of just one Akira Kurosawa
film, Dreams (1990), admittedly influenced by the artistic visions of Van Gogh and Martin
Scorsese; not to mention Kurosawa’s other magnificent storyworlds, from Rashomon (1950)
to Ran (1985), inspired by such prominent world-builders as Akutagawa and Shakespeare,
respectively.
How did the understanding of genre develop? The history of conflicting ideas on genre
begins with Aristotle. His classical treatise Poetics (335 B.C.) didn’t offer a theory of genre,
but highlighted the key genres—tragedy, comedy, and drama—as the established narrative
practices and conventions. The 17th-century neoclassical tragedy was shaped by the principle
of following the “classical” conventions of the ancient Greek theater, and theorized in terms
of genre imitation and “purity.”Yet, late Antiquity, following the rise of Greek civilization and
the fall of the Roman Empire, had already shown a booming diversity of popular genres and
a metanarrative outlook at crumbling classical conventions. This playful, self-reflective treat-
ment of genres was manifest in the Menippean satire (Bakhtin, 1965/1968), a predecessor of
defiant and innovative forms of comedy.
In the 1920s, Mikhail Bakhtin and his contemporaries, the Formalists, an influential group
of scholars in narrative theory, had already laid a foundation for exploring genres from new
perspectives. Bakhtin assessed genres from a standpoint of dialogue and interactivity. Yuri
Tynyanov (1977) viewed them as part of narrative systems, concluding that genre represents
an interplay of three referential orders: (1) all elements of form refer to the text as a whole;
(2) each text refers to literature as a whole and its evolution; and (3) literature as a whole is
intentionally related to the whole human environment in its historical and social develop-
ment. Boris Tomashevsky (1978) was intrigued by the displacement of genres in culture (par-
ticularly the high genres by the low) via historical change. The Formalists’ era, the aftermath
of the Bolshevik revolution, perceived poetics as the victory of new cultural forms over
the obsolete and “defeated” ones. International modernist and avant-garde art also eagerly
awaited the collapse of traditions. Hence, the question of genre’s expected cultural death may
have been overrated and politically influenced. The core genres represent the cultural con-
stant—anthropologically, they are secured by their connection to the human condition—and
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Genre
e volutionarily they remain linked to the same foundational rituals. What is subject to change
is the variable—assorted subgenres and their combinations.
The European tradition has demonstrated narrative diversity and the preference for certain
genres, which rose to prominence while reflecting social-political changes of their eras. For
example, the Middle Ages attempted to expand the canonical text of the Bible to the universal
and all-encompassing narrative form. The Renaissance promoted the purity of high tragedy
and comedy, with William Shakespeare also fostering chronicles, which took the cultural place
of historical narratives, the descendants of epic genre and the myths of origin. Classicism
favored and conceptualized the high art of tragedy, insisting that only kings can be the stage
protagonists. The Classicists revisited the Aristotelian poetics, reinforcing the principles of
order, yet also rigidity to stage art. The Baroque, while glumly reflecting on the decline of
the Renaissance and the dusk of aristocracy, (re)invented urban mystery, and such suspense-
driven forms as thriller and crime drama. Sentimentalism offered a proto-melodrama, while
Romanticism reintroduced folklore, myth, mystery, and the symbolic journey to high culture
and literature.
Nineteenth-century Realism both rejected genres and integrated them in the novel, with
its multifaceted form. A complex style rather than a genre, realist literature branched into
several modes, such as Critical, Psychological, and Fantastic Realism. Each offered new
narrative blueprints and propelled grand-scale fictional world-building. Symbolism high-
lighted the parable and fairytale, while Modernism discarded genre (as an artistic approach)
altogether. This position lasted long into the 1960s, the dawn of Postmodernism, and is
exemplified by the 1959 statement “Genres disappeared!” by the French theorist Maurice
Blanchot (2015).
Genre’s hidden power and strategy is, however, in its system of algorithms, which facilitate
pattern thinking. It took almost a century of scholarship to prove the influential and beneficial
presence of genre formulas. The delay in understanding the symbolic nature of genres stemmed
in part from the 19th-century rise of Realism, itself shaped by the upsurge of the mid-
dle class and city culture, with their concrete and pragmatic thinking. Meanwhile, the era’s
performative art—its thriving bourgeois theater—put forward genres that matched the new
class’s idea of truth and entertainment. In France, vaudeville emerged, essentially a new take
on the everlasting genre of farce, with the elements of physical and screwball comedy, and
erotic undertones.
The trendiest vaudeville plot, spreading across Europe like wildfire, presented the same
storyworld with recurrent events, featuring the stupidity of cuckolded husbands. These char-
acters always suffered a moral defeat after acquiring a trophy wife and treating her as a pos-
session. The lucky tricksters, young women and their lovers, typically avoided getting caught
and enjoyed the sympathy of the audience (ironically, often comprised of the bourgeois with
their young wives, laughing at the show in sync). While parading adultery and seemingly
lowbrow and tasteless, this jovial popular entertainment manifested the widespread tragic
phenomenon of marriage disintegrating into a business contract. This bourgeois era’s social
trend was even commented on by Karl Marx and prominently reflected in the “serious” liter-
ary genres of Gustave Flaubert’s Madam Bovary (1856), Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877),
and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Meek One (1876); all three female heroines commit suicide.
Hence, the upsurge of a popular comedic form of vaudeville resonated with significant socio-
economic changes. This genre aptly commented (albeit with sarcasm) on serious problems:
deception, greed, dominance, and cruelty destroying the humans’ procreative force and family.
Interestingly, the so-called high and low genres worked in tandem to express the same con-
cern for the collapse of marriage; anthropologically, for the survival of the species.
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Among the key criticisms of genre is its predictability. In fact, the pragmatic, hands-on
d iscussions of genre and its limitations came from early Modernism (1910s), which focused on
the artist’s unbound creativity. Genre in this context was seen and conceptualized with a rep-
rimand as a set of “rules,” meant to deprive the artist of freedom. It was the spirit of the avant-
garde movement that instilled the condescending attitude toward genre as a tool of mass art
and an arm of vulgar entertainment. Genre was cast off as kitsch, a crude and trite cultural form
shaped by bourgeois tastes and commercialism. Scholarly debates on genre were unleashed at
the dawn of the 20th century by the rebellious Modernists, who openly scorned this cultural
form as binding and curbing the artist’s imagination and innovative prowess. Genre was con-
demned as a darling of the philistines and mass market. Conversely, emerging experimental art
was expected to reconfigure the familiar building blocks of culture into the freeform streams of
creative consciousness, exemplified by the work of Picasso, Kandinsky, Dali, Joyce, and Proust.
In the Modernist conception of art, a pure genre exists only as something to be defied or sub-
verted; at very least, integrated into the larger-scale canvasses of experimental art.
Therefore, the true cultural significance of genres still remained a mystery.Yet their power
is in promoting pattern thinking: genres can be defined as part of what Turner emphasized as
culture’s dynamic symbolic codes (Turner, 1975). The appreciation of genres as part of influential
active symbolic systems was not possible before the rise of awareness of culture’s innate sym-
bolic codes and meta-processes. The rise of metanarratives was facilitated by the ascent of
Symbolism and Modernism in art at the dusk of the 19th century, reflecting the general turn
in pattern recognition and paradigmatic thinking in knowledge and science. Theoretical delibera-
tions regarding genre became even more urgent at the end of the 20th century. The contro-
versial issues of genre politics, commercial use, limitations imposed on artistic freedom, the
rise of interactive storytelling, as well as the persuasive and sarcastic attack on cultural clichés
from the era’s aesthetic leader, Postmodernism, facilitated the need for a new genre theory.
Since art per se was no longer viewed as the refuge of genre, it was considered as part of
mass culture, literary tradition, and language, and, therefore, studied within these contexts.
The field of genre studies had been influenced by the three theories, which all have demon-
strated undeniable strengths, yet also limitations and fallacies.This chapter highlights the latest
among genre theories, the anthropological, which explores the ritual roots of the media, and
illuminates genres’ innate interactive potential for fictional world-building. The very origin of imagi-
nary worlds can be fully understood only with the added contexts of symbolic anthropology
and the anthropology of consciousness (Levy-Bruhl, 1935; Levi-Strauss 1974, 1995; Turner,
1975; Turner and Bruner, 1986; Meletinsky 1976/2000; Freidenberg, 1997). The previously
dominating schools of thought, termed here “economic,” “literary,” and “semiotic,” trace the
origins of genres to business, literary, and linguistic-communication practices, respectively.
Economic theory suggests that film industry executives, the creators of Hollywood, along
with the mass market book publishers, invented genres to encourage sales. The role of genres
as fast and efficient deliverers of products to consumers cannot be overestimated. Stimulating
further appetite for similar products, genres as marketing tools increase profits.Yet this theory
disregards the cultural function of genres and their importance beyond efficacy as a business
strategy. It also ignores the existence of genres prior to mass society and mass culture.
The second school of thought fittingly links the rise of the 20th-century media genres
to prior literary traditions, yet neglects explaining the existence of genres before literature
developed. A vivid example of the literature-centered conception is Tzvetan Todorov’s “The
Origin of Genres.” While identifying them as “metadiscursive notions,” he views genres as
merely serving as the “horizons of expectations” for audiences and “models of writing” for
authors (1976: 161–164). Todorov inquires: “From where do genres come?,” answering:
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Why, quite simply, from other genres. A new genre is always the transformation of
one or several old genres: by inversion, by displacement, by combination … The
question of origins cannot be disassociated, historically, from the field of the genres
themselves. Chronologically, there is no “before genres.” (161)
Conversely, anthropology states “there is”: what existed before a spectrum of genres was a
system of ritual performances and storytelling.The fallacy of “rootless genres” ignores the link
between genres’ ritual origin and the ritual-symbolic codes of contemporary narrative/media
(Turner, 1975; see also a table of rituals with correlated genres: Alexander, 2013a: 54).Todorov
speaks for the narratologists who insist that genres represent a universe of their own, and
should be defined strictly on their own terms as “classes of texts,” residing on the intersection
of poetics and literary history (1976: 163–164). This approach denies the presence of genres
outside of speech acts and literature, ignoring their anthropological roots and significance
across cultures and time. The powerful genre prototypes in ritual/oral traditions are not clari-
fied within the literary conception of genre.
Despite lingering questions on the cultural roles of genre, a few scholars, following the
literary and semiotic traditions, produced rich and informative analyses of genres across media
borders in literature and film (Schrader, 1972, and Desser, 2003, on film noir; Sobchack,
1997, on science fiction. For comprehensive neoformalist and semiotic approaches toward
film genre, see Altman, 1999; Bordwell, 1st ed., 1979/11th ed., 2016; Duff, 2000; Neale, 2000;
Grant, 2003, 2012; Friedman, 2013).This list excludes Bakhtin’s original contribution to genre
theory embodied in his seminal studies of the novel (1928/1984) and comedy (1965/1968)
because he looks deeply into the matter of cultural continuity and evolution, defining his
innovative methodology as “anthropological.” Bakhtin’s ideas influenced the examination of
genres of comedy and the “worlds of laughter” on-screen (Stam, 1992; Horton, 2000; and
Alexander, 2013a).
The strictly semiotic approach treats genres as a linguistic system, a form of language with
its own “vocabulary” and “grammar” (the terms used both metaphorically and literally, with
mixed success). The semiotic and neoformalist approaches have been, so far, the most repu-
table among the scholars of genre, particularly in film. They should be credited for offering
exhaustive descriptions of genre types, groups, and subgroups, along with the meticulous
detailing of themes, iconic imagery, styles, and narrative/visual patterns. Yet even this highly
regarded approach has its flaws. The semiotic conception of genres has shown rigor for clas-
sifications. But when (film) genres are considered as language, which operates by means of
“grand syntagmas” (Metz, 1964/1990), they are often treated as a frozen language, while
their historical roots and evolution are ignored. Although highlighting the power of narra-
tive patterns, traditional film/narrative semiotics disregards the development of genres as an
evolving mechanism of culture. In addition, the excessive focus on typical traits replaced the
examination of genres’ social-cultural functions. After WWII, semiotics experienced first pro-
gress, then decline. Methodological flaws limited the value of the semiotic approach toward
genre.While its frontrunner, Structuralism, had a profound impact, its constraints became also
obvious: its methodology was criticized by its successor, Poststructuralism, for focusing on the
phenomena (nouns) rather than the processes (verbs). The core notions of signs and symbols,
as well as the signifier and the signified, were thus replaced by the concepts associated with
the signification (as) activity. “Sign” was becoming a verb, answering the question “what is it
doing?” rather than “what is it?”
Likewise, Functionalism, a method developed by anthropologists ranging from Emile
Durkheim to Victor Turner, facilitated the question “how does it work?”The field of semiotics
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was unable to answer such inquiries into the social realm. Finally, the (micro) semiotic study
of texts had been replaced with the (macro) agenda of the Semiotics of Culture (Levi-Strauss,
1974; Lotman, 2001; Ivanov, 1977). Genre studies had to undergo the same transformations as
semiotics as a whole: refocusing on the (re)signification and symbolization processes, as well
as on social functions and meaning-making, particularly, on the scale of culture rather than a
single text.
Functionalism, Poststructuralism, and the Semiotics of Culture advanced new scholarly
methods that implicitly or directly impelled the rethinking of genres. This complex paradigm
shift facilitated the anthropological conception of genre, which focuses on genre as an heir
of ritual and its roles in culture. Socio-cultural functionality and discourse represent what
is lacking in the earlier semiotic approaches toward text, and consequently, to genre. Some
theorists made steps toward expanding the idea of genre as merely a category. Altman (1999)
was the first to use the term ritual, albeit metaphorically, while Frow (2005) emphasized
genre as a dynamic process, which expands our knowledge about the world; yet falling short
of examining this process in social contexts. Meanwhile, rather than film or literary studies,
it was the traditions of anthropology and studies of myth that informed the critical turn in
genre studies. The breakthrough explorations of the ritual-symbolic codes of culture can be
found in the seminal writings of James George Frazer, Arnold Van Gennep, Emile Durkheim,
Lucien Levy-Bruhl, Claude Levi-Strauss, and especially Victor Turner, whose work inspired
Lily Alexander’s studies in the anthropology of genre. The symbolic-interactive foundation
of mythic and folk narrative has also been highlighted in the foundational scholarship of
Vladimir Propp and Joseph Campbell (see “The Hero’s Journey” chapter in this volume).
Most theorists used to define the notion of (film) genres as a means of categorization of
stories—enabling a viewer to immediately recognize certain types of storytelling, such as
the Musical or the Western. While these theorists look at narrative and visual codes, the new
anthropological theory of genre, proposed and outlined in the author’s book series Fictional
Worlds, firmly links genres to rituals on the one hand and to the fictional world-building on
the other hand (Alexander, 2013a/b; Jenkins and Alexander, 2014). Influenced by the advanc-
ing fields of symbolic and semiotic anthropology, the new approach points instead at the social
codes and models of/for social behavior, which operate within narrative and media culture. This
theory emphasizes genre’s function as a biosemantic protocol of ritual nature, and a tool for organ-
izing and optimizing social behaviors, community-building, and the maintenance of society. Alexander
examines how genres work within the formation of fictional worlds by means of dynamic
symbolic processes, genre structures, and core narrative forms: the symbolic journey, drama,
tragedy, mystery, and comedy. She also analyzes the interplay of subgenres, for example, crime
drama, thriller, and film noir under the umbrella genre of Mystery; or screwball comedy, com-
edy of the absurd, and tragic farce within the realm of Comedy. The Symbolic Journey (as in
The Wizard of Oz (1900), Alice in Wonderland (1865), The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955), Spirited
Away (2001), and the Harry Potter series) represents another macro-genre, highly potent for
designing imaginary worlds and world-building, and associated with a spectrum of related
genres: coming of age, fantasy, fairytale, road movie, and science fiction (see the “Mythology”
and “The Hero’s Journey” chapters in this volume).
A perspective of anthropology informs the study of genre as an investigative experiential
framework. Inspired by a range of social thinkers, an anthropological theory of genre discusses
them not as merely narrative formulas or sets of storytelling conventions, but as different ways
of structuring societies. “Genre” is understood as a behavioral modifier, to mean ways of organ-
izing social practices and fine-tuning increasingly complex societies. Narrative and media
genres are defined and differentiated by their social and cultural functions, rather than by
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Genre
their semantics alone. Each genre evolves to address a specific cultural need, and thus is meant
to fulfill a corresponding cultural function. All genres comprise a cultural system, working in
concert to facilitate a harmonious synchronization of the diverse social whole.
Genres provide storytellers with the framework within which they create templates for
challenging experiences that inevitably guide participants toward new wisdom. These episodes
are hypothetical, symbolic, occurring in imagination, as well as partially real: the audience lives
through these events, while identifying with the protagonist, and absorbing emotions lead-
ing toward reflection on “what happened” and “why” in the story. The audience seeks out
these answers, because through the narrative experience, it has happened “to us.” By means of the
genre framework, storytellers shape their messages of social responsibility and collaborative behav-
ior, helping with necessary communal adjustment of individuals and groups. The negative
behaviors (social don’ts) are examined using the emotions of fear, pity, and laughter, through
the genres of tragedy, drama, crime drama, mystery, and comedy. Many realms of experience
and the rites of passage toward maturity may be addressed within one fictional world through
a series of narratives.
What “necessary” communal adjustment means varies from country to country, and is
subject to debate within and across societies. In some cultures, the “fitting” young men and
“proper” young women are those who silently comply and do not ask any questions. This
“conception” of adjustment benefits groups in power (father knows best) but not the entire
society, particularly when seen from the point of view of collective wisdom and the future.
If media narratives do not support a healthy adjustment, they “don’t do their job,” that is,
fulfill their cultural function. Offered by flawed “ill-adjusted” practitioners, or by those pursu-
ing profit or ideological advantage, such stories promote the status quo while pretending to
inspire individuals and transform community. Some theorists (Wright, 2003), following the
Modernist mistrust of genres, insist that genres per se are the tools of oppressive politics.
The anthropological approach also addresses the politics of genre, by employing a spectrum
of ideas such as a “ceremony” as a pretend transformative ritual (Turner, 1975; Geertz, 1993)
to explain how ineffective it is to blame genres. Instead, we should investigate how ideologies
exploit the immense power of genre system, and how the groups in power effectively have
done so around the world. Is there “bad” storytelling, ineffective in its adjustment role, even
harmful? Some theorists of ritual insisted that modern media can and should be evaluated
regarding its ritual efficacy, as a “transformative performance” (Turner, 1976, 1986; Grimes,
1990). If there are effective “right steps” toward social progress, precious to its outcome, there
must be “wrong steps” to be avoided. “The harm is done” when stories demonize minori-
ties; fallen victims or accidentally shot bystanders are not given second thought; dramatic
conflict resolution is replaced by explosions/violence; and especially when the cause-effect is
not traced throughout the dramatic arc, thus robbing audiences of enlightening Recognition
in the realm of consequential logic. Specific cases of harmful or helpful narratives and their
politics can be debated (as in Survivor (2000–present), Lost (2004–2010), Breaking Bad (2008–
2013), and Games of Thrones (2011–present)), but the question “how good is this story, televi-
sion show, or movie to our species” is a vital one. Some storyworlds convey timely humanistic
sentiments, propelling the influence of underrepresented groups. For instance, a simpleton
and a schoolgirl singlehandedly fight evil, becoming the folk heroes for their time, the 1990s
(in The Adventures of Tintin (1991–1992) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003)). Being
part of more than one genre framework, a fictional world may offer adjustment mecha-
nisms on several levels. Most of us would agree that action-adventure, love story, and social
drama Casablanca (1942) teaches lessons that benefit us all, as does the sci-fi mystery Solaris
(book, 1961; film, 1972), the sci-fi and coming of age E.T.: The Extraterrestrial (1982), and
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Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek: Next Generation (1987–1994) with its multifaceted storyworld,
encompassing multiple extraterrestrial worlds, and many humans, as well as aliens, at once on
their rites of passage, journeys of self-discovery and transformation. Conversely, the dark yet
seductive worlds of vampires and sexual predators warn of rising neo-aristocratic elites, for
whom the rest of us are just a subject of consumption (as in the Twilight saga (2005, 2008); and
Fifty Shades of Grey (2011, 2015); books and adaptations).
Growing out of the millennia-long framework of ritual, genre has become a new investiga-
tive experiential framework in its own right. Intact with the anthropology of experience, a field
initiated in the 1980s by Turner (1986), the experimental exploratory activity we call “genres”
can be viewed as a segmentation of reality with a purpose of finding optimal solutions within each
type of circumstances. Genres ensure that the Western takes place on the frontier; film noir in the
city-jungle; a crime will be solved in the police procedural, while in comedy “everything will
turn out alright.” This framework reveals a wise approach toward solving problems “one at a
time.” Genres shift our attention to the investigative process by liberating us from the uncer-
tainty of: “What kind of fictional world is that?” “What happens there?” or even “How does
this multinarrative, fictional world connect actions and consequences, even across separate
stories?” (as in Aeschylus’ Oresteia and its heir, a serial television drama). Genres are shaped by
the cultural need to address specific realms of reality, just like mythic stories were narrated
at the dawn of culture within the correlated ritual experience. By employing pattern think-
ing, genres carry compressed and coded knowledge that is essential yet stipulated. Before the
“show begins” and “the curtain rises,” we already know a lot about the typical storyworld
behind a genre. Why is that important? These embedded assurances free our attention and
energies for tracing something else occupying the spotlight: the hero’s steps and decision-making
process. Genres gently refocus us on the problem-solving process rather than a story outcome
(occasional clever twists notwithstanding).
Essentially, genres represent a ritual-symbolic code of culture, for which their easily trace-
able and identifiable visual-narrative codes are just “the dressing.” Iconic images are identified
as the “genre” markers for quick indication of which realm of experience is explored. Genre’s
visual-narrative cursors must be promptly recognizable: their purpose is in delivering con-
densed information—even prior to the start of the audience’s experience. Importantly, pattern
recognition is a condition and stimulus for the development of pattern thinking. Symbolic
consciousness of the higher order, or deliberating by means of codes, results in superior levels
of problem detecting and solving, essential to our collective survival. Not only do patterns
help audiences to recognize genres promptly, they facilitate the diagnostic process of embed-
ded behavioral codes. Their deep meaning is in investigating human actions associated with
specific realms of experience and analyzing behavioral patterns in the social circumstances
requiring problem-solution thinking. Genre is all about what characters choose to do, while
attempting to navigate social mazes, and by doing so, ascending “from level to level” (to use
a video game metaphor); in drama, such levels are charted by complications and peripeteias.
Social pathfinding and pathmaking is at the heart of the cultural function of genres. “Action!”
is known as a code-word signifying film art. Dramatic action is also central to genre and
fictional world-building (Alexander, 2013a/b, 2014, 2017). In this context, genre may be
defined as a systematic “step-by-step” examination of human conduct within the stipulated
circumstances and set of rules defined by individual genres. “Action” is both the physical and
symbolic micro-unit of behavior, essentially manifest in the storyworlds as characters’ steps.
They encompass the footsteps, treading, stops, turns, and paths, as well as completing tasks,
fighting back, escaping, or hiding. Imaginary worlds, including those of video games, with
vibrant narrative unfolding, are propelled by exciting dynamics. In fictional world-building,
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the designing of maps, roads, intersections, and the entire sphere of the journey, plays a vital
dramatic role. The chronotopes of imaginary worlds ensure the mapping of arenas and battle-
fields, on which the reality-testing action takes place. The authors-heroes’ activity of pathfind-
ing and pathmaking represents their collaborative input into solving cognitive and social riddles,
which accompany the evolution of communal life. The audience and readers are actively
involved in such path-tracing, assessing the value of each step taken, and deliberating on one’s
own choices, if given a chance (ensured by interactive storytelling).
The essence of genre-defined stories is that they focus our attention on what the heroes do
while choosing the optimal behavior in critical situations. Unsurprisingly, the moves of chess
figures symbolize the same. Each step/move underscores a choice, the decision-making upon
analysis, however swift, of the (social) situation under examination. Hence, all the action, from
hiking in deep woods to carpet-flying and riding Pegasus or a dragon, from the cowboys on
stallions to car chases in the crowded cities, manifests the dynamic metaphors of choosing
the right turn in the story’s cognitive maze. Rooted in ritual (an interactive activity), genre
has proven to be a form of role-playing. A genre system is a super-contest on multiple chess-
boards.The rules of the game—known to all—allow one to focus on the moves of the players
and their ability to thrill us with bold and original solutions. These “smart moves” represent
the cognitive breakthroughs and intellectual discoveries (Aristotelian anagnorisis) of genre-as-
game.Yet, the focus is on the chosen steps in the symbolic process of pathfinding.
Creating fictional worlds involves a balanced combination of pattern thinking and innova-
tion. While designing new storyworlds for the genre-based media, an author must combine
rules/tradition and artistic freedom. The preset elements may be mixed-and-matched in new
imaginative combinations, a sort of artist’s dreamlike marathon, with near-infinite configura-
tion options.While conventions require mastering the blueprints of historical narrative codes,
experimentation may be manifest in (1) the unique setup of mandatory situations, details,
clues, and other information bits, but more importantly, in (2) the advanced problem-solution
thinking by the heroes. This interactivity, between symbolic presets and artistic liberty, reveals
genre’s major appeal and its game-like propensity. This is the way a genre framework stimu-
lates new thinking about forging ahead in familiar life circumstances for all of us, a society.The
main anthropological value of genre is in its “pattern thinking” and the interplay between an
invariant (core structures and formulas) and variations (changing details), while the audiences
with their avatars are carefully choosing steps at the moral crossroads.
Moving from a symbolic fictional world to community-building requires developed social
pattern thinking. Just as traditional mythic worlds included spirits and magic beings, the mod-
ern-day cast of characters may enlist aliens (as in Star Wars, Star Trek, The X-Files, Solaris, and
Hard to Be a God). Yet even so, genre’s sophisticated cognitive process impels deliberation
regarding our own behavioral patterns, those of the human “typical characters under typical
circumstances” (to use the famous definition of realism in Friedrich Engels’ letter of 1888).
Codes and patterns became a subject of profound scholarly interest with the development
of cybernetics and the new knowledge of meta-semantics, which reveal advanced levels of
consciousness and the mental apparatus in charge of socio-cultural activities. In these con-
texts, genre can be defined as a meta-script or a (ritual) symbolic scenario. We already know what
happens in the fictional worlds of romance, sci-fi, film noir, or crime drama. The romantic
couple must overcome mounting obstacles. In the road movie or the journey in space/time,
a hero runs into a gamut of strangers and dangerous situations. A decent and brave Private
Eye navigates the treacherous waters of organized crime and corrupted officials. The police
procedural (note the pattern-implying term!) is a “whodunit” within the crime investigation
process established by society.
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Far from being shy about bluntly relying on blueprints, genres “think” patterns and “play”
with formulaic plots. By doing so, genres as dynamic symbolic codes, center their inquiry
on finding advanced new solutions to typically thorny social situations. Social patterns, to
be explored by genres, have drastically changed since the dawn of culture when the ancestral
ritual-symbolic codes were created. New stories, and the worlds in which they take place,
are still based on these codes and relevant genres, while addressing the complexity levels
embedded in contemporary multifaceted societies.Yet, many new stories, inquiring into social
dilemmas, align precisely with the “magnetic” powerlines of the genre system, foundational to
both rituals and modern-day media.
One of the keys to understanding pattern thinking (so definitive to genres and facilitat-
ing higher consciousness, including experimenting with codes) is progressive segmentation and
focalization. Genres focus on story elements relevant to possible human behaviors and choices
within the limitations of known “social presets.” Such “programmed” types of situations tend
to reoccur across time, making classical stories forever relevant to generations of audiences.
Genres are jam-packed with fixed features, cataloging all types of dramatic obstacles, compli-
cations, plotting of villains or tricksters, counteractions by heroes, help from allies, and back-
stabbing by traitors. Finally, stories ardently list the protagonists’ pathfinding tactics, because
they are our ultimate role models for improving the social life. That is why stories highlight
the hero’s best possible reactions, turns, choices, decisions, methods, and, hence, step-by-step
walk toward triumphant outcomes. Such optimal pathmaking encompasses all problem-solv-
ing types: the cognitive/intellectual, the moral/interpersonal, and the macrosocial/humanistic,
influencing the consequences for society at large.
Authors are encouraged to creatively add unique options or recombine them as advanced
ethical patterns, as has occurred in the imaginary worlds of Apuleius, François Rabelais,
Jonathan Swift, Jules Verne, Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, the Strugatsky Brothers, and oth-
ers. Worlds like Wright’s Islandia or Levine’s airborne city of Columbia also present new
worldviews and ways of life in detail, inviting audiences to reflect on and compare how their
own cultures resolve conflicts and prioritize values. In imaginary worlds, a hero (our avatar),
and certainly us, must make the best decisions, choosing between the known options, hope-
fully discovering an original path or pioneering problem-solving logic. The interplay of the
new—uncovered by the hero and his civilization—and the familiar preset is the crux of the
genre-based story, as a ritual-symbolic activity. Hence, it appears to be more efficient and logi-
cal to find new solutions to old problems with a genre’s precision focus on a selected segment
of reality. The genre system’s social problem-solving activity carefully investigates each realm
of experience at a time, employing the romantic comedy yesterday, film noir today, and tragic
farce tomorrow.
Pathfinding and pathmaking are keywords that define the intrinsic link between ritual,
genre, and game. Progressive segmentation and focalization are achieved by a structure and
system of limitations, embedded in rules. This applies to the laws of dramatic arc (so disliked
by some writers as an “obstacle” to artistic freedom) and the “rules of the game” in interac-
tive media. By means of presets, the loosely chartered scripts in each genre, a precision-focus
investigation is applied to a spectrum of possible stories and social situations. Within a given
storyworld, a protagonist is likewise limited to a range of choices and actions, be he a roman-
tic lover, action movie savior, space explorer, or private detective. The protagonist-avatar—a
shared, projected alter ego of the audience—makes complex decisions and initiates steps, con-
sidering variable options for the paths taken, limited by each genre’s conventions. As expected,
the audience, familiar with the genre and aware of possible steps, is eager to follow the hero’s
moves, in “his shoes,” calculating at once how to act wisely in this predicament.
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A genre’s precision focus is achieved by a complex process, which includes a sequence of

steps: (1) the initial segmentation of reality (a defined realm or world to be explored), (2) a nar-
rowing down to a specific situation within limited circumstances, in which specifically (3) the
story’s piling obstacles further confine characters to a restricted range of choices. In addition,
all stories have a rhythm and are structured as the grid-framework of levels in video game,
and scenes/acts in drama (also, the series and seasons on television); each segment focuses on
selected problems. This progressive segmentation and “narrowing down” in tracing turns and
counting steps allows one to analyze human choices (that is, the decision-making process)
with exceptional accuracy and detail. Each genre’s familiar “playing field” allows one to closely
focus on each micro-move (just like the known rules of the game of tennis, soccer, and so
forth free fans to enjoy the athletes’ choice of actions and the acumen of their execution).
This micro-breakdown is resonant with gamers’ keyboard taps. All action-adventure tales and
crime dramas require measured moves around the minefields of conflicts. Detectives carefully
follow the cold-hearted, calculating villains. Romantic lovers make tiny tender steps toward
each other, then run away together from wars or hostile clans, as in Romeo and Juliet (1597) and
West Side Story (1957). The musical, based on a group’s calculated dancing steps, underscores
the interpersonal and social synchronization, within the storyworld, and with the audience.
The Recognition (anagnorisis) of wrong-versus-right moves at each turn is where the
teaching moments are most valuable. Our genre-story hero (and us) must quickly process
a spectrum of choices, at every shift of the dramatic landscape. Audience members must
think through their avatar-protagonist. (Don’t we all love figuring out problems and solutions
before the characters do?) They experience disappointment or joy, depending on what the
hero chooses. While the presets of a genre offer a comfortable cushion of familiar informa-
tion, we are afforded the luxury of “attention to detail” (proven to be especially important
in genre stories). Yet the crucial details are not merely visual signs, but motivational “clues”
and behavioral elements. We learn leisurely and efficiently by means of genres because we
can focus entirely on each storyworld’s action-reaction dynamics and trial-and-error pathfinding.
Genres as informational channels encompass problem assessment, the pulsating beats of vital
new knowledge, and the problem solution ideas, with the possible answers leading to survival
and progress. It is not by chance that the search for clues is the intellectual staircase in many
genre stories. Whether in a jail tale, escape story, or crime drama, each micro-move is of great
significance, there are no second chances, attempts cannot be repeated, and counting steps
toward victory requires precision. In sum, a genre’s investigative and calculative capacity stimulates
the relevant types of storyworlds.
Multiple paths, prearranged for heroes in genre-based stories, ensure that the avatars (and
us) experience both constraints (of the game) and freedom (of experimentation). The system
of possible paths, across all genre narratives and the media, represents an intricate, giant chess
game. More precisely, genres are a Jumanji-type realm of diverse chess-like games, each with
its own predetermined rules. This is how the traditional ritual activity of “rites of passage”
is organized as well: the initiand has options, but may pass or fail, depending on personal
choices, imagination, survival and problem-solving skills, and his or her ability for social
adjustment. Each story is a successor of preceding stories in the same genre (there is natural
genre-based intertextuality, as in the interlinked worlds of traditional myths), entailing the
consistency of operations.
The resulting pattern thinking facilitates a comparative analysis of different types of pro-
tagonists and their courses of actions. From the anthropological theory of genres, there is just a
step toward understanding genre as an immersive and interactive “structured process” of ritual
nature. Therefore, the continuity from ritual to folklore, to literature, to cinema, television,
267
video games, and all future successive interactive storytelling modes underscores the logical
legacy and transition of narrative forms. As a cultural system, genres perfectly suit the future
developments of storytelling and world-building, particularly in the directions of collaborative
enlightenment through challenging intellectual quests. A ritual is an interactive performance of
symbolic-mythic nature, while the genre, an heir of ritual, examines the realms of human social
activities emerging throughout time.Within each genre and stemming storyworld we find a set
of typical situations and conflicts that must be resolved for our collective survival, one at a time.
While a semiotic approach emphasizes each genre’s emblematic images, characters, and
events, the anthropological socio-behavioral theory looks deeper into protagonist reactions to con-
flicts and choices at the situational crossroads, typical for specific genres. The labyrinthine logic of
the Symbolic Journey (Propp, 1928/1968; Campbell, 1968; Turner, 1969; Vogler, 2007; and
Alexander 2007, 2013) resonates with a game, which amasses paths, turns, thresholds, cross-
roads, levels, entailing the actions of falling, climbing up, discovering dark corners and caves,
crossing (doors and gates; open, closed, or locked), advancing, or being pushed back. All physi-
cal challenges cause a hero’s actions, resulting in right or wrong moves. What also stops our
heroes in their tracks, forcing them to carefully address new riddles and think on new levels,
is the encounters with the “Unknown” that manifests cognitive challenges and thresholds.
This type of “narrative shock” is termed astonishment (Aristotle), the uncanny (Freud), mak-
ing strange (the Formalists), symbolic inversions (Bakhtin, Turner), and suspense (Hitchcock),
proving to be key factors for genre-focused storytelling and games. These disruptions break
the flow of information and action with the different kind of segmentation: the units of the
familiar (comprehensible, processed) and those yet to be grasped (perplexing or threatening);
in tandem, they stimulate new experiences and innovative thinking.
Any segmentation or grid-making is a property of, and stimulus for, a comprehensive
analysis. We find the patterns of fragmented actions and movement in all interactive stories:
each dynamic unit requires problem-solving. The ultimate victory is a sum of all the compo-
nents contributing to a definitive resolution. To sum up the meaning-making mechanisms of
focalization and pathmaking embedded in genre, we should mention the following phases:
1. segmentation to the units of specific realms of experience;

2. creation of ritual-symbolic scripts or narrative formulas, for each segment/
genre;
3. through trial and error, the implementation of a spectrum of stories (variations)
for each segment/genre;
4. organization of storytelling, compositionally and rhythmically, as a set of action-
able units: gestures-steps, scenes, and acts;
5. close tracing, with a precision focus, of the choices/steps of characters in man-
datory situations;
6. ensuring that the pathfinding takes heroes through both familiar terrain and the
Unknown;
7. promoting, reinforcing, and celebrating the optimal steps/decisions by means of
charismatic and influential genre heroes (often embodied by stars, like the film
noir leads Jean Gabin and Humphrey Bogart), who vividly and persuasively
show the way toward victory through social pathfinding and pathmaking in
storytelling, and other forms of cultural texts.
A timely question is: how can genre awareness further empower the growing movement of
fictional world-building? Imaginary worlds as modeling systems or models of/for the future
268
Genre
have proven to influence reality on many levels (Turner, 1969, 1975, 1986; Geertz, 1993;
Lotman, 2001; Jenkins, 2006a/b; Wolf, 2012; Jenkins and Alexander, 2014). Fictional world-
building encompasses storytelling as a narrative tradition and industry, culture, society, con-
sciousness, politics, and globalization. Despite the sophisticated mechanism of behavioral
modification embedded in a genre system, few practitioners are aware of this influential cul-
tural apparatus. Aspiring artists routinely cast off genres, and the market’s addiction to them,
as an obstacle to creative freedom and desired legacy of the auteurs. Ironically, it is by means
of genre that the media-makers most often launch prominent careers. This contradiction—
between genre and the artist’s creativity or cultural prominence—is a faulty binary opposition,
proposed by Modernism, and based on the premise that true art emerges only on the ruins of
traditional forms. Such rejection of rules is vividly manifested in the world-as-abyss of Kazimir
Malevich’s painting Black Square (1915); or the strange nightmare-world with the notorious
melting watch of The Persistence of Memory (1931) by Salvador Dalí, and his surrealist assault on
the act of seeing in the film Un Chien Andalou (1929), coauthored with Luis Buñuel.
Since genre is a predetermined and “preset” narrative structure, authors always struggle in
crafting fictional worlds that are designed “by the rules” yet powerfully original. A balance is
often achieved by “playing” with conventions and boundaries.The potency of genre promises
its enlightened role in fictional world-building, encompassing tradition and innovation: har-
vesting the power of individual genres and combining it with fearless experimentation. Both
goals require a profound knowledge of genre, with all possible combinations.
The current global narrative climate is conducive to genre fusions: the vast populace of
fictional worlds follow multiple social paths, experience dissimilar segments of reality, and
require distinct rites of passage. Hence, multifaceted storyworlds need different genres for their
stories.The transcultural expansion of transmedia storytelling and audience also propels genre
hybridization. For example, Tolkien’s and Rodenberry’s epics effectively combine fantasy,
action, coming of age, romance, and crime dramas, addressing the manifold conflicts of com-
plex worlds. Thoughtful experimentation, providing numerous trajectories (Borges’s “forking
paths”) for the pathfinding aspirations of multiple heroes, is a future of imaginary worlds.
Multifaceted narratives require a combination of genres to organize branching storyworlds
with diverse populations that are busy, exploring the wealth of social paths. The larger our
fictional universes become, spanning cultures and media, the more their creators should learn
about genres to effectively use them in their world’s tales and fuse them in experimental
ventures. Which story types should be defined as genres also remains a subject of ongoing
debates. Some offhand groupings may be mistakenly named “genres”: the so-called mad sci-
ence, monster movies, disaster movies, and gangster movies. Along with the genres that grow
in scale or together with other genres, there are fractured forms, representing a broken genre
structure, or a disintegrated part of preexisting genre, like “horror,” which is not a genre from
a socio-anthropological perspective because it doesn’t have a related cultural need or cultural
function (Alexander, 2013a, 2013b; Jenkins and Alexander, 2014). Experimenting with genre-
charted worlds continues not only for the sake of artistic freedom but because, as a society, we
must carry on the search for optimal pathfinding and pathmaking, recognizing an ideal course
in each type of circumstances.
The solutions for bridging rules (of genres) and creative freedom (of imaginary world-
building) auspiciously go with the growing complexity of fictional models and multifaceted story-
telling. Outgrowing textual boundaries, stories continually expand into the fictional worlds
of global media. Even created by a distinctive mind (like Lewis, Tolkien, or Rowling), imagi-
nary worlds tend to develop as a transcultural and transgenerational endeavor. Bourgeoning
fictional worlds (not unlike ancient mythologies) expand into macro-narrative forms, encom-
269
passing prequels and sequels, versions, series, adaptations, games, franchises, intertextualities,
fan fiction, movements, and traditions (slipping in commercial merchandize, like cult-movie
T-shirts and Disney character tie-ins at McDonald’s). Considering the wide range of stories
that can be told about, and within, a single fictional world, it appears that the notion of genre
works best in organizing multifaceted macro-narratives.Thus, fictional worlds tend to contain
heterogeneous and multifaceted genre structures rather than rely on one genre.
The collaborative nature of contemporary media production, manifest in film, video,
television, and video games, entails collective authorship, adding a creative team’s multiple
perspectives. Unsurprisingly, genres’ familiar depictive patterns, with their established logic,
serve as an anchor, grounding complex narratives and guarding them from entropy and col-
lapse. In addition, from the viewpoint of anthropology, manifold narrative forms cannot avoid
combining genres because fictional worlds must examine many segments of social reality.
A world aligns more organically with genre fusions when its initial storyworld is based on
core genres that are “integral” or inclusive of other subgenres, such as Drama, Comedy, and
Mystery. Let’s call them the “umbrella genres.” The comic genre encompasses physical com-
edy, screwball and eccentric comedy, the comedy of the absurd, farce, tragi-farce, tragicomedy,
romantic comedy, and new hybrids such as sci-fi comedy (like the Men in Black film series).
The world of The Sopranos (1999–2007) emerged at the fusion of the (antihero) crime drama
and dark comedy or tragic farce, rooted in the ancient Greek satyr play. Drama includes a wide
spectrum of the romantic, crime, court, and political forms. Science fiction branches into uto-
pia and dystopia; the latter overlaps with tragedy, thriller, film noir, and the symbolic journey.
Genres interlink and intersect: mystery may correspond with tragedy, thriller, crime drama, fan-
tasy, and film noir. Genre experimentation naturally includes any number of possible combina-
tions, suitable to specific content and message (on genre hybrids in Hollywood, see Jaffe, 2007).
Trialing may invoke a few types of genre hybridity: the umbrella genres, with overlapping gen-
res (often tied in natural fusions), and clashing genres (manifest as paradoxical unities or inten-
tional contradictions, such as a tragic farce or tragic comedy). Genre fusions contain “moral
lessons” and wisdom of sorts, hinting that story characters and events can be simultaneously
viewed and “judged” from different viewpoints. The world of The X-Files (1993–2002) starts
as sci-fi, gradually encompassing related genres: thriller, mystery, film noir, and crime drama,
even screwball comedy and self-parody. The clownish worlds of Roseanne (1988–1997), The
Simpsons (1989–present), and Home Improvement (1991–1999), while rooted in the comedy of
the absurd, manifest working-class family dramas and tales of survival. In these familial farces,
burdened-by-life simpletons with limited social opportunities keep going against all odds,
with wisdom and dignity, while laughing at themselves and at everything they are supposed
to fear, bouncing back after each fall.
While some theory purists, who see genre clarity and consistency as its main traits or even
“virtues,” are concerned about such “confusing” issues as genre transformations and inver-
sions, there are no conceptual problems of this kind within the anthropological theory of
genres. Fusing genres while experimenting with storyworlds is as legitimate and productive
as following traditional genre models. If the multifaceted (multi-genre) narratives rooted in
distinctive fictional worlds (such as Star Trek: Next Generation, The X-Files, or the Harry Potter
series) have effectively fulfilled multiple cultural functions, they have served their purpose.
Segmentation of reality is not an end but a means of achieving a “precision focus.” Hence,
genres can be combined within one storyworld, while employing a multifocal observation in
studying social behaviors.
To examine how genres align within multifaceted multimedia storytelling, we should iden-
tify (at least) four macro-narrative forms with diverse genre relations and fusions: (1) the novel;
270
Genre
(2) the fictional world with continuing and branching story lines, including adaptations;
(3) the serial television drama; (4) story-into-game, in which a storyworld that begins as a
(comic) book or a movie becomes a pop culture phenomenon inspiring video games. These
modalities overlap when a fictional world generates screen adaptations, a series, or interactive
multimedia.
The novel, erroneously called a genre, is better defined as a narrative form or format (with
its distinctive styles and techniques). Similarly, a short story is not a genre, and neither is poetry;
they are narrative categories or domains. Genres per se represent specific ritual-symbolic codes
associated with investigation and modification of human behaviors. The novel is a complex,
multimodal form, able to integrate storylines adhering to different genres: coming of age,
drama, tragedy, farce, self-parody, crime drama, crime investigation, and court drama, such as
in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. His Notes from Underground (1864) contains
scenes of dark comedy intertwining with tragedy, while The Meek One fuses crime, mystery,
and farce. Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869) is an unlikely fusion of an epic genre with a
novel, yet strikingly successful.
Defining macro-narrative forms (like the novel) as “an end of genre” ( Jameson, 1981: 151)
takes us back to the genre-opportunistic era of Modernist theory and the misconception of
rapidly developing fictional world-building as genre-less. Genres do not “end”: their inter-
relations signal the end of the dominance of the belief in strict genre purity and hierarchy.
Conversely, Bakhtin’s views on genre fusions as a part of the “translinguistic” dialogue occur-
ring on many semantic levels of culture are highlighted in his theory of carnival and theory of
polyphony. This interchange is a step toward understanding the interactivity of genres (rein-
forced by the genre’s roots in ritual). Diverse genre elements convey multiple points of view
involved in constant discussions about society within the realm of culture at large (Bakhtin,
1928/1984). A serial television drama—an heir to the novel—as a fictional world with multi-
ple plots and parts typically encompasses several genres and subgenres, pointing at a range of
cultural functions to be addressed.
World-building implies the construction of a multifaceted fictional reality and multidi-
rectional narrative paths. Such complexity entails the profound understanding of the func-
tion of genres as part of the ritual-symbolic mechanism of culture. World-building revels in
genre diversity, hybridity, fusions, and increased functionality, to cover all experiential areas
of the new fictional realm. Just as within the novel or serial TV drama, a range of genres
coexist within, or co-govern, an evolving imaginary world, including what is now termed a
world-building “franchise.” Genre combinations and hybridity do not represent a problem for
the anthropological theory of genres, as long as the embedded cultural functions are effec-
tively fulfilled.
The current upsurge in interactive storytelling raises new questions on the relations
between fictional world-building, genre, and video games. The game-like foundation of gen-
res originates from ritual, which gave birth to interactivity as riddle-saturated challenges,
inseparable from ritual structure. Genres exist as part of a genre system, an integral whole that
is employed by world-builders, providing their audiences with the pleasure of interactivity,
exciting challenges, all-out immersion, and “total experience.” Experimentations with fic-
tional worlds in the ironic mode of self-parody (as in Pulp Fiction, The Simpsons, and Futurama
(1999–2013)) reveal the playful nature of genres and their self-reflective capacity.The interac-
tive and investigational qualities of genre essentially link it to games and the unfolding mul-
tifaceted imaginary worlds.
A (symbolic) framework and a network (of social communication and innovation), the
genre system is a laboratory of narrative and social algorithms, investigating the dynamics,
271
and input/output of ideas, from authors to audience. Through employing and experimenting
with genres, society benefits from the discoveries of advanced behavioral patterns. Genre is
a part of our species’ socio-cognitive problem-solving process (based on the continuity of its
symbolic codes). Not only do genres gather their keen discursive communities but they also
facilitate what anthropology terms “a symbolic construction of community,” which is cur-
rently in progress on a global scale.
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32
Fandom
Matt Hills
Imaginary worlds can be engaged with in many different ways, and the communities and
practices of fandom illustrate these varied reception strategies more visibly than perhaps any
other group of readers/consumers/producers. Fandom has been defined as the regular, emo-
tionally committed consumption of specific media narratives (Sandvoss, 2005), but many
scholars have viewed fandom, more crucially, as both communal and productive (see Jenkins,
1992; Hills, 2002), whether this involves creating fan fiction, fan art, videos, or commentaries.
In short, fans display a tendency to create their own paratextual realms (Gray, 2010) around
the canonical texts making up imaginary worlds (that is, the officially produced and endorsed
versions of a media franchise) as well as frequently acting as “paratextual completists” (Hills,
2015: 65) in relation to the cataloging/collecting of any given imaginary world’s transmedia
extensions and branded merchandise.
Historically and culturally, it is possible to analytically distinguish between literary fandoms
that sprang up around novels and their characters in the pre-20th century—Sherlock Holmes
and Sherlockian/Holmesian Societies, for example—and media fandoms that later emerged
in relation to television series of the 1960s, such as Star Trek (1966–1969). Literary fandoms
can be positioned as a precursor of these incarnations based in audiovisual media, yet each
type of fandom shares ways of engaging with imaginary worlds, treating them playfully and
imaginatively “as if ” they are real (Saler, 2012: 13). This is evident in the Sherlockian “game”
of assuming that Sherlock Holmes and John Watson were real figures (Saler, 2012: 124–125).
But it is also apparent in ethnographic studies of “How To Watch Star Trek” (Amesley, 1989),
where fans discuss how “Kirk wouldn’t behave like that,” treating characters simultaneously
as media constructs and yet as if they are real personalities that some episode writers capture
well and others do not. Likewise, both literary and media fandoms have shown a keen inter-
est in mapping and collating information about their favorite imaginary worlds, compiling
concordances, guides, and encyclopedia-like sources. Contemporary Web 2.0 iterations of
such fan mappings typically occur online via fan wikis (Booth, 2010); Star Wars has the aptly
named “Wookiepedia,” whilst Star Trek and Doctor Who have thriving fan wikis of their own,
given that these:
have both remained actively expanding worlds for … [many] decades … [with Who
entering its sixth decade in 2013 and Trek in 2016 – MH].These [expansive, ongoing
imaginary] worlds, then, are not only quantitatively different from earlier ones, but
qualitatively different, in that the audience has an experience of a world which, like
the Primary World, not only achieves saturation of mind, but virtually exceeds the
audience’s ability to encounter it all in its entirety.
(Wolf, 2012: 135)
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Fa n d o m
This suggests that media fans, at least of very long-running franchises, are engaging with
different kinds of imaginary worlds compared to those of literary fandom—ones that cannot
be mastered or fully known. And whilst some fans will select out what they count as “real”
Star Trek or Doctor Who to make these more quantitatively manageable (not reading original
novels or following series of audio adventures), such fan communities nonetheless place an
emphasis on organizing and refining knowledge about their favored imaginary worlds. In fan
parlance, the “-verse” has become a way of referring to a distinctive imaginary world (e.g., the
“Whoniverse”) that can, in fact, feature different parallel universes in science fictional terms,
as well as different entries in the franchise or reboots/reimaginings.
But we should refrain from demarcating literary and audiovisual media fandoms as overly
separate today: often, literary fandoms also have vast amounts of material that can be learnt
about, and sifted for canonical knowledge or non-canonical variants. Sherlockians, arguably
forming one lineage of proto-fandom, may have been restricted to debating a fixed canon of
56 short stories and 4 novels written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but they can also discuss all
manner of Sherlock Holmes pastiches, as well as adaptations and reimaginings. In a sense, then,
the full panoply of Sherlock Holmes’s variants and versions may be just as vast and ongoing as
the imaginary worlds of Star Trek and Doctor Who—except whereas these brands will arguably
have a film/TV-based canon, the character of Sherlock Holmes has increasingly also dispersed
into an array of adaptations and reworkings that are no longer restricted by intellectual prop-
erty rights. Conan Doyle’s authorship can be used as a way of discursively containing the liter-
ary Holmes canon, to be sure, but over time Sherlock Holmes has become as much a media
creation as a figure of literature, blending literary/audiovisual media fandoms. Also gradually
deconstructing a strong historical binary of literary/media fandoms, J. R. R.Tolkien fans have
latterly discussed, contested, and sometimes embraced Peter Jackson’s films of The Lord of The
Rings (2001, 2002, 2003) and The Hobbit (2012, 2013, 2014).
Without the support, the passion, and the creative imaginations of fan followings, many
imaginary worlds such as those of Tolkien, Conan Doyle, Star Trek, and Doctor Who would
not have attained such longevity and cultural potency. Indeed, at the time of writing, Harry
Potter and the Cursed Child (2016) has just enjoyed its international release as a playscript,
with fans queuing across the UK at special midnight openings in bookstores—events cov-
ered live by UK broadsheet The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/books/live/2016/
jul/30/harry-potter-and-the-cursed-child-follow-the-midnight-launch-live). The previous,
and supposedly “final,” Harry Potter novel was published in 2007, with the film version
of this following in 2011. Although Harry Potter’s out-of-active-production phase has thus
been relatively short (with the official website Pottermore filling in some of this time from
2011 onward), fans have nonetheless continued to keep the Potterverse active via their fan
fiction and creativity. Fans often remain focused on imaginary worlds when they have been
officially “completed,” and when there are no new books or films in the offing. Rather than
these being thought of as “post-object fandoms,” as Rebecca Williams (2015) has described
them—meaning fan objects that have passed out of official production—they might occa-
sionally be better considered as fan-conserved imaginary worlds. Doctor Who fans kept the show
culturally active even when it was off the air between 1989 and 2005 (with the exception of
a one-off TV movie in 1996); similarly, Star Trek fans maintained the Trek flame between 1969
and 1979, the period between the cancellation of The Original Series (TOS) and its return as
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (which had been bridged in audiovisual media forms only by a
1973–1974 animated series).
To view imaginary worlds as entities created officially or canonically by media producers
before then being “consumed” (or received) by fans and fan communities thus misses the
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M at t H i l l s
extent to which fans can be viewed as co-creators—or perhaps more accurately, sustainers—
of these worlds over time. Owain Gwynne (2014) has even described the anticipatory period
between the official announcement of a new film or TV series and its broadcast/release as
“fan-made time,” since fan paratexts (and para-paratexts) such as rumors, speculation, and
spoilers predominantly occupy fans during this phase, allowing projected or imagined/desired
versions of the specific films and TV shows to be shaped within fan discourse. That is to say,
imaginary worlds are not simply fictional worlds: they are imagined by creators, yes, but they
are also (pre-) and (re-) imagined by invested fans via processes of brand co-creation. This
gives them an inter-imaginary quality, as multiple layers of imaginative activity cluster around
successful pop-cultural artifacts. Indeed, a number of scholars have begun to theorize this col-
laborative creativity: Ian Condry refers to the “dark energy” of fan activities that, occurring
outside realms of commodification, helps to make franchises successful (2013: 164), whilst
Ramon Lobato and Julian Thomas (2015) relatedly distinguish between “formal” and “infor-
mal” media economies. The former belong to official, corporate practices, whereas the latter
exist in “grey markets” and in unofficial, unregulated domains such as markets for “second-
hand fandom” (Geraghty, 2014: 148) as well as the spaces of fan creativity and entrepre-
neurialism. Lobato and Thomas highlight how difficult it is to separate formal and informal
economies in actuality: what we think of as culture industries and formal, official, economies
are frequently inseparable from, and tightly interwoven with, informal economies such as
those belonging to fan productivity.
Perhaps the most developed analysis of how contemporary imaginary worlds are collabora-
tively created via media franchises occurs in Derek Johnson’s Media Franchising: Creative License
and Collaboration in the Culture Industries (2013). Johnson makes the key point that we need
to go beyond theories of “world-building to conceptualize the franchise in terms of world-
sharing among creative workers and communities” (2013: 109). This can mean world-sharing
between different production communities at broadly the same time (film/TV-makers and
transmedia tie-in producers). It can also refer to world-sharing between producers across time,
as when a production team takes over a new franchise entry and has to place its work in the
lineage/tradition of earlier franchise producers or pioneers, as well as marking out its own
creativity and authorship (something that is currently the case for Star Trek: Discovery (2017)).
And, of course, fans have a role to play here—both in terms of specific individuals moving
generationally from fandom into official production, and more generally in terms of how fan
cultures play with, poach from, and engage in “immaterial labor” in relation to their favored
imaginary worlds (Hassler-Forest, 2016: 57). It has also been suggested that as digital media
such as Netflix or Amazon Prime move toward “bingeing” or “media marathoning” models
of consumption, then imaginary worlds can hold greater power and “solidity” for viewers in
this context (Perks, 2015: 8). Such developments demonstrate how much fan interpretation
can center on the coherence and integrity of imaginary worlds (Perks, 2015: 10), with fans
reading for, or even communally working toward, these attributes (explaining away possible
continuity errors, for example, or fixing them via analysis).
Fans’ collaborative creativity has typically been positioned as “transformative;” this is evident
in the naming of the Organization for Transformative Works (http://www.transformativeworks.
org/) and its journal, Transformative Works and Cultures (http://journal.transformativeworks.
org/index.php/twc). Discussing fanworks as “transformative” emphasizes their legal status as
non-copyright infringing, and as creatively changing imaginary worlds rather than merely
copying them.There is a progressive cultural politics to championing fanworks as “transforma-
tive,” since this stresses the legitimacy, legality, and artistic value of fan creations, shielding them
from delegitimating notions of derivative, trivial, or “amateur” cultural production.
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Viewing fanworks as transformative has also focused much scholarly attention on the s exual
politics of fannish and canonical productions: fandom has typically shaped more inclusive
visions of imaginary worlds through “slash fiction” in comparison to the historically heter-
onormative canons of media franchises (slash focuses on same-sex character couplings that are
not present in canon (e.g., Kirk/Spock) or that are subtextually implied at best). But fandom’s
transformative energies have not only focused on character relationships or “ships;” fans have
also explored “crossover” fiction. This aims to bring together different imaginary worlds, uni-
fying their diegetic universes. As such, crossover fanfic strikes at the heart of current branding
discourse that works to discursively position the uniqueness of the “over-design” distinguish-
ing a franchise (Johnson, 2013: 119)—this is the branded universe that should be immediately
recognizable through its production design as much as its characters (c.f. Star Wars’ lightsabers,
X-wings, and the Death Star; Star Trek’s spaceship designs and redshirts; or Doctor Who’s Daleks
and Police Box TARDIS). Different brands can be officially combined, but only when appro-
priate licensing deals are struck, and usually only at the level of transmedia tie-ins/paratexts
whose canonical status is murky, or more a case of “What If?” parallel universe transmedia
rather than “What Is” canonical transmedia (Mittell, 2015: 314–315).
By contrast, fan crossovers create counterfactual hybrids such as SuperWhoLock, completely
disregarding the branded “uniqueness” of BBC TV’s Sherlock and Doctor Who while fusing
these with the U.S. TV show Supernatural, and thereby willfully transgressing their status as
legally separate intellectual properties. Paul Booth has recently investigated such “crossing
fandoms” (2016), and these practices of transfandom. He argues that SuperWhoLock GIF fic-
tions or “fics” liminally combine “semantic reproduction of textual elements and syntactic
appropriation of ideological moments from a media text … [and] both mirror and subvert the
original narrative” (2015: 26). Simultaneously transformative and affirmational, SuperWhoLock
GIF fics sample very brief extracts from the three source texts, yet overwrite and combine
them into reworked material. For Booth, this also means that SuperWhoLock GIF fics “rep-
resent a liminal state between fandom and the media industry” (2015: 27). Yet this arguably
overstates the importance of the individual textual excerpts that are stitched together and
renarrated to create GIF fics. By virtue of patching together Supernatural, Doctor Who, and
Sherlock into a single diegetic frame, this kind of transfandom productivity, I would instead
suggest, very much resists and opposes a key industrial logic of brand identity. In effect,
SuperWhoLock becomes an entirely fan-created “transworld” that integrates otherwise highly
distinct imaginary worlds that usually follow their own different diegetic rules.
Natalia Samutina has also explored the significance of crossover fanfic in a Russian context,
arguing (as I do here) that such fan activity “undermines the traditional preconceptions of
how imaginary worlds can be built, inhabited and developed” (2016: 1). Such fan practices
are transformative, to be sure, but in a way that potentially outruns the transformational pos-
sibilities of imagining (same-sex) characters as being in relationships, as slash fiction has done.
Instead, here “contemporary fan fiction writers build imaginary worlds themselves … in a
course of transformative reception of unprecedented proportions” (Samutina, 2016: 2). This
can involve imagining non-magical Harry Potter alternate universes, for instance, demonstrat-
ing how the fanfic crossover works as a literary game that plays with fans’ detailed knowledge
of source texts and their characters, at the same time as seeking to create coherent, original,
and convincing imaginary worlds. Such transfandom and transworld productivity does not
merely elaborate upon a canonical imaginary world, then, as Samutina makes clear:
It is quite hard to decide exactly where—and by what means—one can draw the line
between the construction of a new imaginary world by a ‘creator’ or a ‘sub-creator’
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and the ‘elaboration’ of an existing one by a fascinated user (the term ‘elaboration’
is used by Wolf and many others for the designation of a creative operation, second-
ary to the initial world-building) … While generating and populating multiple and
sometimes quite unexpected versions of imaginary worlds, fan fiction encourages
researchers … to think of this borderline as less essential and more porous.
(2016: 4–5)
But if crossover fanfic blurs the line between creating/supplementing imaginary worlds then
it surely does something other than liminally bridging fandom and industry. Such transforma-
tive fandom takes on a brand-transgressing function by virtue of its failure to recognize the
separate “-verse” or “over-designed world” that each franchise is presumed to offer, by way of
legally enforceable intellectual property.
Not all fan engagements with imaginary worlds are transgressive of brand identities and
logics, however. In some cases, such as series of Trek fan films including Star Trek Continues
and Star Trek: Phase II (formerly New Voyages), great care and attention has been put into creat-
ing material that is as close to the original TV show’s over-designed world as possible. James
Cawley, who plays Captain Kirk in Phase II as well as producing the series, has overseen the
creation of highly authentic replica costumes and sets, meaning that Phase II looks strikingly
similar to the canonical mise-en-scene of Star Trek: The Original Series. Likewise, fan film pro-
ductions such as Star Trek Continues, starring Vic Mignogna as Kirk, also feature actors from
the original series (Star Trek Continues even includes James Doohan’s son, Chris Doohan, as
Scotty) as well as precisely using designs and music characteristic of the original series.
Star Trek fan films have also been crowdfunded, e.g., Prelude to Axanar (2014) and the as-
yet unreleased Star Trek: Axanar, which received $638,471 on Kickstarter (https://www.kick-
starter.com/projects/194429923/star-trek-axanar). With Trek fan films involving professional
actors (including Star Trek alumni such as George Takei and others), using professional pro-
duction crew, and raising substantial budgets, Star Trek’s rights owners eventually felt that it was
necessary to act to protect their intellectual property:
Once a franchise is established … the challenge shifts to problems with managing

the brand, which includes elements of the imaginary world … In managing the
brand, the owners of a franchise must walk a tightrope between actively engaging
consumers and fans, on the one hand, and retaining the authenticity of the universe
and preventing the dilution of its distinctive qualities, on the other. As the power
of the franchise is based upon the recognizably distinctive features of the imaginary
world, control of this world becomes a key site of struggle between content owners
and audiences.
(Lindsay, 2014: 57)
Some Star Trek fan films had, in a sense, become too adept at brand-occupying: in such
instances they certainly were blurring the lines between fans and industry, between formal
and informal economies, in a way that could be taken to threaten CBS/Paramount’s control
of the Trek “world.” And they were working directly in Star Trek’s original medium of TV
(now digital video), rather than supplementing its imaginary world with written fan fiction
or drawn fan art.
By comparison, although fanfic crossovers may transgress brand logics, their mode of trans-
formative reception does not leave them appearing to be in direct competition with audi-
ences for official Sherlock, Harry Potter, or Star Trek. Ironically, by strongly reinforcing the
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brand identity, authenticity, and imaginary world of Star Trek, fan film series such as Star Trek
Continues and Phase II have fallen foul of highly restrictive and “prohibitionist” (Jenkins, 2006:
134) guidelines issued in 2016 by CBS/Paramount Pictures (http://www.startrek.com/fan-
films).These guidelines strike back at the mixed formal-informal economies that have sprung
up around fans’ digital productivity, insisting that fan films should only be 15 minutes long (or
2 x 15 minutes at most), that they should be standalone rather than continuations or sequels,
and that they should involve no industry professionals. Whether such a stance is legally viable,
it is clear that CBS/Paramount have attempted to assert their ownership of Star Trek against
fans’ interest in expanding and adding to this franchise’s imaginary world. This is less a case
of “world-sharing” or co-creation, and more a case of world-shrinking, as Trek’s rights owners
seem set on reducing the array of high-quality Star Trek fan films that have flourished to date.
Meanwhile, replica USS Enterprise sets for Star Trek: Phase II have been officially licensed
and repurposed as part of a 50th anniversary Star Trek Original Series Set Tour (http://www.
startrek.com/article/the-original-series-set-tour-to-open). Rather than adding narratively to
Trek’s imaginary world, the infrastructure underpinning James Cawley’s fan films has effec-
tively been poached from and appropriated by CBS/Paramount via a kind of “convergent
incorporation” (Booth, 2015: 103). Fans’ world-building—threatening to dilute the dis-
tinctiveness of official Trek—has thus been displaced by an alternative mode of imaginative
world-experiencing, whereby fans can be interpellated as consumers seeking an “experiential,”
embodied, connection with the Star Trek brand. Visitors cannot alter the pre-structured and
“authentic” spaces of the Tour, meaning that fans are disciplined and repositioned not as
competitors over Trek’s imaginary world, but as safe sources of consumer revenue whose
affection for the show can be securely monetized without unlicensed (fan film) producers
benefitting.This situation demonstrates that we shouldn’t simplistically celebrate fan-industry
“co-creation;” at any given moment, if official producers feel that their intellectual property
is under threat of dilution, collaborationist logics between fans and industry insiders can be
replaced by prohibitionist strategies. Far from co-creation, this amounts to a stark re-creation
of reactionary power relationships between official producers and policed, intimidated fans. It
seeks to restrict fan films to a zone of audiovisual non-seriality where they cannot even create
unofficial sequels to Star Trek canon, and equally cannot craft rival series of adventures, whilst
official producers retain control of the imaginary world’s “extended seriality” (Pearson and
Messenger Davies, 2014: 128), able to thread together entries in the franchise, and patrol Star
Trek’s overall continuity.
Fandom’s relationships to pop-cultural imaginary worlds may be many and varied, but as
I’ve sought to show here, these relationships are both patterned across historical modes of
fandom (literary/audiovisual media) and typically transformative—whether this means trans-
forming character relationships and their heteronormative sexualities or transforming entire
imaginary worlds (and brand logics) themselves by splicing imaginary worlds together. Fans
may trangress the explicit or implicit rules of official imaginary worlds, yet it is by seeking to
“authentically” occupy a brand’s semiotic and media space—blurring the line between indus-
try and fans from an initial position of fandom—that fans perhaps become most threatening
to producers’ intellectual property. Of course, blurring this line from an industrial position,
in the form of the “fanboy auteur” (Scott, 2013), is entirely industrially acceptable, and in
fact is viewed as part and parcel of reassuring and addressing long-term fans when franchises
and their imaginary worlds are updated and revitalized. Fan-producers such as those working
on Star Trek: Axanar are supposedly a threat to Trek’s intellectual property, but producer-fans
such as Bryan Singer, J. J. Abrams, or Steven Moffat are an accepted aspect of industrially fan-
targeted recognition and communication. What’s clear is that not all hybrids of informal and
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formal economies—fandom and industry—have an equal status when it comes to managing

fandom’s multiple engagements with imaginary worlds.
References
Amesley, Cassandra (1989) “How to Watch Star Trek” in Cultural Studies 3 (3): pp. 323–39.
Booth, Paul (2010) Digital Fandom: New Media Studies, Peter Lang, New York.
Booth, Paul (2015) Playing Fans: Negotiating Fandom and Media in the Digital Age, University of Iowa
Press, Iowa City.
Booth, Paul (2016) Crossing Fandoms: SuperWhoLock and the Contemporary Fan Audience, Palgrave
Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York.
Condry, Ian (2013) The Soul of Anime: Collaborative Creativity and Japan’s Media Success Story, Duke
University Press, Durham and London.
Geraghty, Lincoln (2014) Cult Collectors: Nostalgia, Fandom and Collecting Popular Culture, Routledge,
London and New York.
Gray, Jonathan (2010) Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts, New York
University Press, New York and London.
Gwynne, Owain (2014) “Fan-Made Time: The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit” in Kristin M. Barton
and Jonathan Malcolm Lampley (eds), fan CULTure: Essays on Participatory Fandom in the 21st Century,
McFarland, Jefferson: pp. 76–91.
Hassler-Forest, Dan (2016) Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Politics:Transmedia World-Building Beyond Capitalism,
Rowman & Littlefield, New York.
Hills, Matt (2002) Fan Cultures, Routledge, London and New York.
Hills, Matt (2015) Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event—Marketing, Merchandising and Mediatizing a Brand
Anniversary, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York.
Jenkins, Henry (1992) Textual Poachers, Routledge, New York and London.
Jenkins, Henry (2006) Convergence Culture:Where Old and New Media Collide, New York University Press,
New York and London.
Johnson, Derek (2013) Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries, New
York University Press, New York and London.
Lindsay, David (2014) “Franchises, imaginary worlds, authorship and fandom” in Kathy Bowrey
and Michael Hander (eds), Law and Creativity in the Age of the Entertainment Franchise, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge: pp. 52–74.
Lobato, Ramon and Thomas, Julian (2015) The Informal Media Economy, Polity Press, Cambridge and
Malden.
Mittell, Jason (2015) Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling, New York University
Press, New York and London.
Pearson, Roberta and Messenger Davies, Maire (2014) Star Trek and American Television, University of
California Press, Berkeley and London.
Perks, Lisa Glebatis (2015) Media Marathoning: Immersions in Morality, Lexington Books, Lanham.
Saler, Michael (2012) As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality, Oxford
University Press, Oxford.
Samutina, Natalia (2016) “Fan fiction as world-building: transformative reception in crossover writing”
in Continuum, published online 11 Feb 2016, available at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1
080/10304312.2016.1141863.
Sandvoss, Cornel (2005) Fans:The Mirror of Consumption, Polity Press, Cambridge and Malden.
Scott, Suzanne (2013) “Who’s Steering the Mothership? The Role of the Fanboy Auteur in Transmedia
Storytelling” in Aaron Delwiche and Jennifer Jacobs Henderson (eds), The Participatory Cultures
Handbook, Routledge, New York and London: pp. 43–52.
Williams, Rebecca (2015) Post-Object Fandom: Television, Identity and Self-Narrative, Bloomsbury
Academic, London and New York.
Wolf, Mark J. P. (2012) Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation, Routledge, New
York and London.
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33
Worlds as Satire
George Carstocea
The breadth of the satirical imagination in the contemporary mediascape defies static
definitions and taxonomies. Although satire has been categorized as a genre over the course
of centuries of literary theory, most contemporary accounts of satire argue that it functions
across genres, inflecting many different forms of discourse and artistic practice. In his complex
“re-introduction” of satire, Dustin Griffin therefore calls it a “mode” or “procedure” (Griffin,
1994: 4), exploring its affinities with the functions and modalities of polemical rhetoric.
Charles Knight similarly writes not just of satire, but of a “satiric frame of mind,” combining
two elements: “ironic perspective on [a] historical subject and parodic borrowing of a literary
form” (Knight, 2004: 8 et passim).
The satirical worldview therefore emerges primarily from a critical attitude toward the
content to be represented, combined with rhetorical strategies and formal devices that elicit a
comedic response. In the terminology of world-building, there are two aspects that mark any
particular world as satirical: first, the presence of structural characteristics that make a polemi-
cal, politically charged implied or explicit argument about the workings of the homologous
structures in the real world; and second, the use of humorous medium- or genre-specific
devices (jokes, gags, puns, caricature, hyperbole, absurdist contrast, word play) that explore the
divergence between the constructed world and reality. The world-building view re-frames
Knight’s insights in a more general formulation, highlighting the fact that contemporary
satires borrow not only literary forms, but rather world-building forms and devices that
take up medium-specific characteristics across the breadth of the contemporary, fragmented
mediascape.
Much of the contemporary understanding of satire relies on parallels to its historical cor-
relatives: Greek satyr plays and Roman saturae, Horatian and Juvenalian verse, and Menippean
prose, or the satirical polemics in the poems of Alexander Pope and the poems and prose of
Jonathan Swift. Drawing inspiration from these historical traditions, Dustin Griffin insists that
satire has historically functioned in the context of a larger cultural dialogue, either through
univocal interventions that are supposed to participate in a contextual debate, or embed-
ding within a single work multiple, distinct, satirical voices engaged in a polemical dialogue
(Griffin, 1994: 32, 39, 41, et passim).
Satires that derive their polemic power from complex world-building consequently rely on
a polyphony of voices, allowing the audience to come to their own conclusions regarding the
inconsistencies of particular voices within the represented world.They foreground a complex
interplay between univocal riffs on a single topic, back-and-forth battles of wit, and multiple,
partial views on the topics at hand within the constraints of a single work. In Griffin’s terms,
they enjoin the audience to seek out the satiric “truth” rather than locating it in the voice of
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a single, reliable narrator (Griffin, 1994: 41). As such, satirical worlds prompt their audiences
to reconsider received notions of goodness, truth, prosocial behavior, and the ways in which
such notions might be complicated by social negotiations.
Beyond their explicit targets, most satires also focus on processes of mediation as their
implicit object. A foundational world-building pattern of satire focuses implicitly on the con-
centric processes of abstraction required to articulate the connection between the individual
body and the body politic: from the individual to the family, to formal institutions (work-
place and/or public space), to tribe, ethnicity, race, gender, and sexual orientation. The satiri-
cal view foregrounds the tensions and paradoxes that emerge across these different levels of
identity formation, highlighting the inconsistencies between a worldview defined in strict
ideological terms and the more complex reality of daily human interaction. Political abstrac-
tions such as citizenship, legal frameworks, and institutions are, for the satirist world-builder,
structural patterns of social power that elide the complexities of human behavior, motivation,
and cooperation.
Origins of Satirical World-Building

The comedies of the ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes (circa 446–386 B.C.) form the
earliest surviving corpus of satirical work in the Western world. Aristophanes came of age
during the latter part of Athens’s Golden Age under the rule of Pericles (circa 461–429 B.C.).
By the time of Aristophanes’s plays, Athens had become embroiled in the Peloponnesian war
(431–404 B.C.), a protracted conflict between the city-states under Athenian hegemonic
rule and the Peloponnesian League led by Sparta. Aristophanes opposed the war, satiriz-
ing the perceived moral and intellectual decay of the Athenian populace under the rule of
Pericles’s successor Cleon, a bellicose populist. Most of the action in his plays takes place in a
satirically heightened version of the real world, interspersed with fantastic and mythological
elements that allow Aristophanes to critique Athenian politics and mores through fictional
world-building.
Some of these departures from reality are quite cursory, contained in the words or actions
of a single character.The protagonist of The Wasps (422 B.C.), for example, is so obsessed with
his power as a juror that he compares himself hubristically with Zeus (Konstan, 1995: 16).
In other instances, Aristophanes resorts to allegorical personifications of abstract concepts,
which enable him to explore large-scale political issues within the limitations of live theatre.
His last play, Wealth (388 B.C.), critiques the role of money in Athenian society through a
personification of wealth itself (Plutus) as well as poverty (Penia). Plutus is blind, and there-
fore unable to distribute his bounty to the virtuous. Chremylus, the protagonist of the play,
helps Plutus regain his sight, banishes Penia (who argues that without poverty, there would
be no slaves left and therefore no labor to maintain the polis), and redistributes wealth to
the virtuous. The traditional Olympian gods send their messenger Hermes to register their
displeasure at this new state of affairs, in which humans have turned their attention from
Zeus to Plutus. The play’s utopian vision comes to fruition when the citizens force Hermes
to work for them and install Plutus in the Acropolis, replacing Zeus at the geographical
and conceptual center of Athenian political life (Konstan, 1995: 75–90). The same kind of
allegorical world-building undergirds Peace (421 B.C.), in which the worship of War and his
servant Havoc has displaced the traditional deities. The protagonist inspires the community
to take back their city, defeating War and liberating Peace, Harvest, and Festival, the deities
that War has maliciously imprisoned with the aid of power-hungry demagogues. Similarly,
the eponymous deities of The Clouds (423 B.C.), who preside over metaphysical sophistry,
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allow Aristophanes to launch an attack against Socratic philosophy, which the play portrays
as impractical and self-involved.
Aristophanes creates significantly more expansive satirical worlds in two of his plays: The
Birds (414 B.C.) and The Frogs (405 B.C.). In The Birds, two Athenians displeased with the state
of their city set off to found a new, better polis. They search for the Thracian king, Thereus,
who has been transformed into a hoopoe and therefore can guide them with the wisdom of
both earthbound and celestial beings. Upon finding him, they decide to found a city among
the birds themselves, for amusingly hegemonic reasons: by controlling the interstitial realm,
they can impose their will on both the earthlings below them and the gods above, the lat-
ter of whom would starve if deprived of the sacrificial aromas wafting up from the ground
(Konstan, 1995: 29–30). David Konstan notes the foundational irony of this utopian endeavor:
in their search for a space unbound by the legal and political strictures of Athenian life, the
protagonists replicate in the skies the hegemonic struggles that they were initially attempt-
ing to escape. The only major difference between their project and contemporary, real-world
Athenian naval expansionism seems to be their direction of travel (Konstan, 1995: 30–44).
The Frogs is Aristophanes’s least typical play, and the one that has attracted the most schol-
arly attention because of its complex meta-commentary on the conventions of the Greek dra-
matic arts. As Leo Strauss notes in Socrates and Aristophanes (1966), the play signals its departure
from established tropes from the beginning: the protagonist is Dionysos, God of revelry and
theater itself, rather than a simple human; the play opens with a dialogue between a master
(Dionysos) and his slave Xanthias, rather than a complaint; they discuss how best to make an
audience laugh, differentiating between the simple pleasures of physical comedy and more
refined forms of humor (Strauss, 1966: 236). Xanthias, the everyman, is inclined to make
physical jokes, which Dionysos has come to abhor as boring clichés. Although this opening
scene is relatively short, it abounds in subtextual irony: in discussing physical humor, the char-
acters are simultaneously problematizing easy jokes and performing them for the audience.
The same pattern of ironic juxtaposition and knowledgeable meta-commentary struc-
tures the entirety of the play, simultaneously engaging in the established conventions of the
Ancient Greek dramatic arts and subverting them.The overall plot is a parody of the katabasis,
a mythological trope present in many traditional cultures, in which the hero descends into the
underworld in order to return a character to life; the story of Orpheus and Eurydice is the
most prominent Greek example. As the patron god of the theater, Dionysos knows this, and
his first stop on the journey is at his half-brother Herakles’s abode, to ask for advice. In the
conversation with Herakles, who had retrieved the three-headed hound Cerberus from the
underworld in his own katabasis, Dionysos reveals that he intends to resurrect the tragedian
Euripides, who had passed away the year before The Frogs premiered, because there are “no
good poets” left in Athens. Herakles, as knowledgeable as Dionysos, suggests that he might as
well bring back Sophocles, who had also died in the months leading up to the play’s premiere
at the Lenaia festival (Dover, 1993: 6–9). Almost every line of their conversation is a laugh
line, peppered with bawdy physical and sexual commentary. Herakles mocks Dionysos for
disguising himself with a pelt and club, Herakles’s own attributes, but wearing that outfit over
Dionysos’s traditional androgynous garb. He lampoons the lines that Dionysos cites as proof to
Euripides’s superiority over still-living writers, whose work they also discuss. When Dionysos
asks for an easy way into the underworld, Herakles suggests three different ways that he could
commit suicide, before telling him to go to Lake Acheron, the boundary to the netherworld,
and pay the mythical ferryman Charon to carry him across in his boat. Throughout the
conversation, they ignore Xanthias, who keeps complaining about being ignored and aching
under the burden of their luggage.
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Throughout its action, the play comments on and subverts the established tropes of its
established mythological world. Dionysos, albeit a god, is debased in every way imaginable,
from verbal mockery and abuse to physical punishment; even Xanthias the slave outmaneu-
vers him at every step. As Dionysos crosses into Hades, even the frogs turn against him, driving
him to paroxystic rage with their cackling refrain, “brekekekèx-koàx-koáx.” Charon refuses
to carry Xanthias alongside Dionysos in his boat because he is a slave, and reveals that he can
just walk around Acheron—a stunning parodic rendering of the established myth, in which
the border to the netherworld is nearly impenetrable. When, after a protracted series of mis-
adventures, Dionysos finally makes his way to the depths of Hades, he learns that Euripides
has challenged Aeschylus, the grandfather of Greek tragedy during the Golden Age of Athens,
to a ritualistic battle of wits in an attempt to unseat him as the leading poet of the under-
world. Dionysos presides over their exchange of antagonistic barbs, which parody the stylistics,
character types, and poetic devices employed in their plays. Aristophanes’s version of Hades,
devoid of the gravitas that it used to hold in oral mythology and classic tragedy, becomes a
staging ground for a battle between Aeschylus’s old-fashioned language of soaring metaphors
and larger-than-life characters and Euripides’s more realistic, pragmatic, and colloquial style
(Segal, 2001: 105). Dionysos ultimately decides in favor of Aeschylus, as his high morality
seems more appealing than Euripides’s ambivalent equivocations.
The sheer intertextual density of The Frogs is astonishing considering that ancient Greek
plays were traditionally only performed once, during the theater festival for which they
were written. The Frogs, as Erich Segal points out in The Death of Comedy (2001), is not
only responding to the deaths of Euripides and Sophocles and Athens’s impending defeat in
the Peloponnesian War; it is also a reflection of the momentous cultural shift between the
transient oral culture of the past and the growing impact of written culture (Segal, 2001:
103). Although it is packed to the brim with the kind of easily understandable physical
jokes that Dionysos decries at the very beginning, it is clearly written with a knowledge-
able and sophisticated audience in mind—in other words, an audience that can read. The
ideal viewer would have been able to appreciate the stylistic differences between the work
of Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus, the mythological and ritual references peppered
throughout, as well as the underlying political message about the decay of Athenian culture
as a result of the protracted Peloponnesian war. The satirical rendering of Hades in The
Frogs creates an interplay between the real political world of post-Periclean Athens, the
imaginary worlds created by two generations of Greek playwrights, and the established
world of Olympian mythology transmitted through centuries of Greek oral culture and
religious practice. Although bewilderingly complex, The Frogs was an instant success, and
remains the only recorded instance of a play receiving an encore performance at Lenaia
(Segal, 1995: 106).
From Antiquity to Modernity

After the advent of writing, satirical literature diverged into two main categories. Verse sat-
ires, whether Horatian or Juvenalian, were mainly univocal writings attacking a particular
individual or behavior, and did not engage in significant world-building. On the other hand,
the tradition of Menippean prose satire, which Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) identifies as one of
the main historical precursors to the novel, combined sustained plot development with the
exploration of well-developed real and fictional worlds.The structural patterns of Menippean
satire draw inspiration from the two genres concerned with the exploration of faraway worlds:
mythology and travel literature.
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Although they are mentioned by several ancient sources, Menippus’s own writings from
the 3rd century B.C. are entirely lost. A version of Menippus, however, appears as the fictional
narrator in “Menippus” and “Icaromennipus,” two works by Lucian of Samosata, a Syriac-
Greek writer from the 2nd century A.D. In these short stories, Menippus travels to Hades and
the heavens, respectively, in a failed attempt to come to terms with the implications of mythol-
ogy and philosophy (Branham, 1989: 14–27). Lucian’s most popular work, titled True History,
is also an extended example of Menippean satire. It begins with a short polemic against “the
old poets, historiographers, and philosophers” who present mythical and fantastic lies as truth.
In contrast, Lucian warns the reader that his “true stories” are lies, before setting off to recount
a journey that includes various fantastic earthly realms, an episode in the belly of a whale, and
the first surviving instances of extraterrestrial travel in literature. His version of celestial realms
includes a satire of the human inclination for warfare: the armies of the sun and the moon
are warring over control of the morning star. Back on Earth, Lucian’s travels take him to the
land of the blessed, where his mentions of historical figures reveal his true satirical target: the
high-minded denial of pleasure. Plato, for example, is absent from the banquet halls of the
afterlife, and instead lives on his own, in accordance to the legal and governmental tenets of
his writing. The Stoics are also absent, because, even after death, they spend their time trying
to climb “the height of virtue’s hill.” Free love reigns, both heterosexual and homosexual; the
only widespread condemnation is aimed at Socrates, because he denies that his attraction to
young men is sexual in nature.Throughout these imaginary tales, Lucian elevates the pleasures
of the imagination and the importance of honesty over pretense.
In the The Anatomy of Satire (1962), Gilbert Highet dismisses Lucian’s worlds as derivative
and insufficiently well-developed, but provides wonderful in-depth accounts of the writers
who would take up the project of satirical world-building throughout the Renaissance and
Enlightenment. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) is, of course, the genre’s landmark, and
Highet identifies the satirical target of every world in Swift’s opus. When Gulliver travels to
the shrunken land of Lilliput, and Brobdingnag, the giants’ abode, Swift is using these spaces to
comment on France during the reign of Louis XIV and Russia under Tsar Peter.The imprac-
tical yet highly learned flying island of Laputa, which dominates its earthly subjects from the
skies, is inspired by the British Royal Society. Balnibarbi, ruled over by Laputa, as well as the
debased humanoid Yahoos ruled over by the Houyhnhnms, recall the plight of the Irish under
British rule. The Houyhnhnms, described as horse-like creatures, are ideally rational, a cipher
for the virtues of the Enlightenment (Highet, 1962: 159). The flying island of Laputa, inci-
dentally, highlights Aristophanes’s foundational influence on the genre. Swift’s account of the
island’s impractical research is highly reminiscent of the anti-Socratic raillery in The Clouds,
whereas Laputa’s celestial dominance over its subjects recalls the airborne city of The Birds.
Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) also begins as a travel narrative, yet soon settles into an
in-depth description of the titular country. Many names in Erewhon are British names ren-
dered backwards; Erewhon itself is “Nohwere” backwards, a near-reversal of the literal English
translation of “Utopia.” Erewhonian customs, too, are usually mirror versions of the customs
in Butler’s native Victorian England, allowing him to indirectly comment on the unspoken
assumptions of his contemporary culture. Illness in Erewhon is tried in courts of law and
punished by imprisonment; crime, however, is treated as an illness would be in England.
Erewhon has outlawed mechanical technology, and its colleges teach “unreason” instead of
reason. These mirrored concepts make for fascinating thought experiments, but they at times
lapse into inconsistency. For example, Butler’s inquiry into the idea of treating crime as if it
were illness falls apart when we learn that “straighteners”—the moral doctors of Erewhon—
habitually prescribe enforced fasts and lashings; the medical solution to crime turns out to be
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also rather punitive. Erewhon’s satirical approach has much in common with Thomas More’s
Utopia (1516), its evident forebear and mirror image. Both books explore the social organi-
zation and mores of stable imaginary societies in considerable detail, providing the authors
with an opportunity to reflect on the implications of real-world social systems without fear
of retribution. More’s rational Utopia, as Highet points out, was a polar opposite of his own
dogmatic society (Highet, 1962: 162). Butler’s unscientific yet stable Erewhon, conversely, was
at odds with the technologically enabled colonialism and ruthless foreign trade practices of
Victorian England; indeed, the novel ends with England’s decision to expand its reach to the
newfound land.
Yet satire is not always high-minded; it just as often juxtaposes the lure of the ideal with
bodily humor, vulgar realism, and the aesthetic of the grotesque. François Rabelais con-
structs a world of absolute bodily excess in the five volumes of his Gargantua and Pantagruel
cycle, published between the 1530s and the 1560s. In the first two books, the titular giants
move between their homeland and places in medieval France, and Rabelais draws much
humor from the contrast between their physical excess and the scale of the real world. In
the latter books, they travel across a variety of fictional lands in search of the “Oracle of the
Holy Bottle,” in a bawdy disjointed parody that references elements of the Odyssey and the
Arthurian search for the Holy Grail (Highet, 1962: 115, 162). A similar deconstruction of the
worlds of chivalric adventure underpins the two books of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s
Don Quixote cycle, published in 1605 and 1615. Their eponymous protagonist lives in a real-
istic, at times vulgar, version of medieval Spain; however, he has read so many adventure tales
that he believes himself to be a knight-errant questing for adventure. Cervantes’s satire hinges
on contrast between Quixote’s delusional, subjective experience of the world and the reality
of his surroundings (Highet, 1962: 116–119).
Swift and Rabelais highlight beastly characteristics in humans, but stop short of rendering
entire human worlds in animal terms. Highet identifies one medieval satirical cycle that takes
place entirely in the animal kingdom, the fables of Reynard the Fox. These tales reproduce
the hierarchy of the medieval court, with animals standing in for every role: Noble the Lion
is king, and he is surrounded by Bruin the Bear, Isengrim the Wolf, Tybert the Cat, and
Chanticleer the Cock. Reynard the trickster, outside the official hierarchy, manipulates them
all with cleverness and wit (Highet, 1962: 178–179). In the much more domesticated 20th
century, an echo of Reynard surfaces in the figure of the cat in George Orwell’s Animal Farm
(1945). Orwell’s satire of Stalinism reimagines the Russian Revolution as a revolt of farm
animals against human owners, followed by the pigs’ betrayal of the other animals and their
progressive consolidation of power. The cat, who continuously equivocates between political
positions, retains its freedom of thought and movement. It escapes oppression by refusing to
accept the arbitrary boundaries imposed on the other animals by the pigs. Just like Reynard
the Fox, it transcends the social order that surrounds it, by acting as an unbound, radically free
trickster. The fox and the cat are therefore textual instantiations of the satirical drive, avatars
of the satirist that place the voice of satirical dissent at the apex of the in-world hierarchy of
satirical worlds.
American Satirical Worlds in the 20th and 21st Century

Satirical world-building underpins a rich tradition of critique and ambivalent political dissent
in American culture, cutting across ideological lines. As Amber Day explains in the introduc-
tion to Satire and Dissent (2011), the satirical impulse can have both conservative and pro-
gressive valences. The conservative interpretation focuses on satirists’ tendency to “ridicule
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non-normative behavior, thereby reinforcing existing attitudes” (Day, 2011: 11). Conversely,
Day argues that the work of liberal and progressive satirists has become a nexus for the for-
mation of critical counterpublics in the American public sphere (Day, 2011: 13–23 et pas-
sim). Day focuses primarily on explicitly activist humor, but Stephen Kercher (2006) comes
to similar conclusions in his wider-ranging discussion of post-war American liberal satire, in
which he shows that, although they are often avowedly liberal, American satirists do not shy
away from critiquing the political failures of liberal politicians.
This political ambivalence is apparent in one of the most popular satirical worlds of
American folk culture, the hobo utopia that came to be known as Big Rock Candy Mountain,
after Harry McClintock’s 1928 recording of the eponymous song. As Hal Rammel shows in
his book Nowhere in America: The Big Rock Candy Mountain and Other Comic Utopias (1990),
McClintock’s humorous depiction of this land of plenty is just one of many renderings of a
utopian vision present across a variety of folk cultures ranging from Ancient Greece, through
medieval Europe (where it was often named Cockaigne), and into modernity. Rammel chron-
icles the tension between the utopian visions of plenty that drew immigrants to the American
continent, American settler-colonialism, and the harsh realities of life on the American fron-
tier, thereby positioning Big Rock Candy Mountain at the center of the American imaginary
(Rammel, 1990: 19 et passim).
Political satire often highlights the dangers of such utopian visions of purity, revealing
the ways in which utopian visions of perfection mask a latent dystopian potential. Stanley
Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) famously
grounds its satire of Cold War politics and the threat of nuclear mutually assured destruction
in a character’s obsession with physical purity. Strangelove is situated in a satirically heightened
version of the Primary World, but the same pattern equating the drive to purity with fascistic
warmongering lies at the core of Starship Troopers (1997), Paul Verhoeven’s hostile adaptation
of Robert Heinlein’s 1959 novel. Heinlein’s novel glorifies authority and upholds a vision
of citizenship rooted in military service. Verhoeven satirizes the utopian militarism of the
original through exaggerated world-building and directorial choices, rather than direct com-
mentary.The film’s version of Buenos Aires is populated by fair-skinned, Aryan-looking actors
surrounded by a militaristic culture that asserts itself through grandiose propaganda videos
steeped in fascistic imagery. The film’s overwrought melodrama, its glorification of warfare,
and its portrayal of the alien enemies as a mindless, abject, insectile other slowly gives way to
the gruesome realities of the battlefield and the realization that the enemy is in fact sentient.
Behind the glossy façade of this world’s utopian self-image lies its dystopian reality: endless,
self-perpetuating warfare. An obsession with cleanliness also occasions the dystopian world
of David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest (1996), in which a pathologically germophobic
president in a near-future version of the United States has forced Canada to accept a part of
New England, irretrievably damaged by nuclear power plants, into its own territory. President
Gentle’s “experialism” gives rise to a spate of Canadian terrorist attacks, and the novel strongly
suggests the likely inevitability of a conflict of eschatological proportions.
Many satirical worlds, however, steer clear of utopian and dystopian extremes. Perhaps
the most consistent satirical space in American television culture is the one opened up by
animation, whose deconstructive, experimental ethos has been a focus for critical theorists
since Walter Benjamin and Sergei Eisenstein (Leslie, 2002). Since the beginning of the 1990s,
spurred by the success of The Simpsons (1989–present), a wide variety of animated satirical
shows have relied on the contrast between their imaginary constructed worlds and the real
one to engage in satirical polemics on current affairs. Of the three broadcast networks, Fox
has been most committed to animated satire; shows such as The Simpsons, Futurama (Fox,
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1999–2003, and Comedy Central, 2010–2013), Family Guy (1999–2002 and 2005–present),
American Dad (2005–2014 and TBS, 2014–present), Bob’s Burgers (2011–present), and King of
The Hill (1999–2010) have expanded the representational vocabulary of the live-action family
and workplace sitcom, reflecting the changing societal mores and conception of the American
family on broadcast television. Cable shows, bound by fewer content restrictions than their
broadcast counterparts, were able to stretch the boundaries of satire even further. South Park
(Comedy Central, 1996–present), for example, deals with contemporary social and cultural
debates through the lens of its established location and cast of characters by producing a
new episode, from draft to final cut, every week over the course of its seasons. Its accelerated
production schedule, unique in the world of mainstream animation, allows it to respond to
current events as they occur. Other shows, such as BoJack Horseman (Netflix, 2014–present),
The Venture Bros. (Adult Swim, 2003–present), and Archer (FX, 2009–present), engage in satire
through genre parody, deconstructing American ideology and its conceptions of masculinity
and authenticity as reflected in the male prestige melodrama, adventure genre, and spy thriller
genre, respectively.
Netflix’s BoJack Horseman parodies the self-indulgent pathos of the male melodramas that
have come to dominate discussions of quality television in the first two decades of the 21st
century, such as The Sopranos (1999–2007), Mad Men (2007–2015), or Breaking Bad (2008–
2013). Its egotistic protagonist, a self-destructive, drunk, aging sitcom actor, happens to also be
an anthropomorphic horse. He lives in a Los Angeles populated by animal-human hybrids like
himself, courtesy of art director Lisa Hanawalt’s cute-yet-twisted aesthetic. Most of the show
focuses on BoJack’s destructive self-pitying pathos, and the pathologies of fame and fortune
in American entertainment, conveying a dark satirical image of contemporary Hollywood.
The show’s deconstruction of Hollywood self-important vapidity pervades every aspect of
its inventive world-building, down to cut-away scene endings and establishing shots. In the
background, we might see yoga aficionados shopping for sportswear at Lululemming, rather
than Lululemon, and note that the show has taken a jab at the group-think tendencies of
trendy Angelenos. At a coffee shop, a woodpecker sips on his coffee, then furiously pecks at
the table rather than work on his laptop, like many an anxious aspiring screenwriter might
in the real city.
Produced quasi-independently for Adult Swim by writer-producers Doc Hammer and
Jackson Publick, The Venture Bros. is a parody of space-age adventure cartoons, primarily
Hanna-Barbera’s short-lived Jonny Quest (1964–1965). The Venture Bros., inspired by the out-
sized hopes, dreams, and aesthetics of the Space Age, turns adventure tropes on their head and
traces the hidden impact of industrialist macho idealism through the generations. Currently
middle-aged, the protagonist (Thaddeus T. “Rusty” Venture, former boy adventurer) is rais-
ing his own children surrounded by the decaying detritus left behind by his father’s “super-
science”—a high-modernist compound littered with data tapes and death rays, supersonic
jets, and automated laser sentries. He spills the frustrations of his childhood, spent under the
Oedipal shadow of his larger-than-life father, on his own spawn. His boys (fraternal twins
Hank and Dean), homeschooled and stuck in arrested development, keep getting murdered
in various arch-rival attacks, and their father resurrects them by downloading an outdated
backup of their consciousness into clone bodies. The show further engages in a mise-en-abyme
of the same themes through repeating narrative variations on the concepts of kinship and
failure, transgenerational flashbacks to the Space Age itself, as well as the ideological excite-
ments of an even earlier generation of adventurers—the explorers, leaders, and artists of the
Industrial Revolution, from robber baron caricatures to such high art mainstays as Oscar
Wilde and James McNeill Whistler.
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A similar ideological critique lies at the core of Archer on FX. Archer reimagines the spy
thriller as a workplace sitcom, satirizing the ideological baggage and political inconsistencies
of Reaganism, and deconstructing the bombastic inclinations of American macho individual-
ism. Archer relies heavily on its audience’s understanding of previously codified genre tropes.
The title character’s hypermasculinity is both an exaggerated version of James Bond’s own
and a critique of discourses of masculinity in American culture as a whole. Archer’s employer,
also his mother, is a cantankerous alcoholic who sees the world through the purely self-
interested frame of Reaganite neoliberalism and engages in casual racism at the drop of a hat.
Archer’s partner Lana Kane, an extremely capable black female secret agent, is simultaneously
a reimagining of Blaxploitation foxy action hero tropes and a powerful voice in favor of the
dissolution of those very tropes. Archer reveals reality as a set of power relations, mediated
through cultural tropes; by deconstructing the latter, it implicitly critiques the former. The
world of Archer does not represent reality directly; it rather constructs its satirical view from
the overdetermined iconography of the spy thriller genre, which was one of the mainstream
vehicles for ideological grand narratives in the Cold War era. By caricaturing James Bond and
his ilk, Archer implicitly critiques the discourses of masculinity and the simplistic Manicheism
at the core of the late Cold War worldview.
As the selective, limited timeline set forth in this chapter suggests, satire has been inter-
twined with world-building practices since its emergence as a creative modality in the
Western canon. In contrast with the univocal inclinations of Horatian and Juvenalian satire,
the Menippean mode of satire often approaches the object of its critique through exten-
sive parodic world-building. Satirical world-builders repurpose existing genre structures,
established mythological and religious worlds, and the earnest literary visions of their time,
twisting their components to construct polemical worlds that question the hypocritical
orthodoxies of their cultural milieu. As such, satirical worlds are often the conduit for
transgressive critiques of the social taboos and imaginative limitations of their histori-
cal context.
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London, UK: Harvard University Press.
Butler, S. (n.d.). Erewhon, or, Over the Range. Champaign, IL: Project Gutenberg.
Cervantes Saavedra, M., Jervas, C., and Riley, E. (transl.) (2008). Don Quixote de la Mancha. Oxford, UK:
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34
Worlds as Paracosms
Jeremiah Piña
To put it mildly, our culture has developed an appreciation for imaginary worlds. Stories set
in elaborate magical lands have transformed into multimedia properties worth truly mind-
boggling sums of money, including J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth (Abramowitz, 2008) and
C. S. Lewis’s Narnia (Chittenden, 2005). And as our appreciation grows, so too does our
appetite for engagement and immersion. Attendance at sci-fi and fantasy conventions—where
one can be part of a Middle-earth masquerade or learn to dress like a Vulcan (Dragon Con,
2015)—has experienced a meteoric rise in recent years. Dragon Con in Atlanta, Georgia,
for example, has ballooned from a convention of just 2,400 attendees in the early 1990s to a
population of nearly 60,000 attendees in 2014 (McCain, Gentile, and Campbell, 2015).
And always there are those, like myself, who are insatiably curious about the origins of such
worlds. We seek to understand what event or experience in the life of world creators, like J.
R. R.Tolkien, Frank Herbert, Ed Greenwood, and many others, might have inspired the crea-
tive devotion that is the lifeblood of these sophisticated narratives. Over time, and through a
variety of efforts, we have learned the surprising fact that the creation of imaginary worlds
often starts when an author is very young. By way of illustration, take the case of C. S. Lewis.
As a schoolboy, aged 6 or so, he invented the imaginary country of “Animal-Land” (Silvey
and MacKeith, 1988) and shared with his older brother a fantastical world of “India” (Root-
Bernstein, 2014). As a preteen, he would merge the two into the state of “Boxen,” which
served as a source of inspiration for a number of characters, stories, and histories (Root-
Bernstein, 2014).
These spontaneous, youthful imaginary worlds, sometimes referred to as paracosms (Cohen
and MacKeith, 1991), appear to be a special type of pretend play activity that apparently differs
from ordinary pretense in a few important ways.There is, for instance, an uncommon durabil-
ity and consistency in the creation of such worlds (Silvey and MacKeith, 1988). Additionally,
the age at which paracosms are most likely to develop, a peak occurring between ages 7 and
12 (Cohen and MacKeith, 1991), is long after the traditionally recognized period of extinc-
tion for regular fantasy play activity, which generally occurs no later than age 7 (Smith and
Lillard, 2012). Furthermore, unlike many forms of fantasy play, it seems as if paracosms drive
their creators to make artifacts documenting various aspects of the imaginary world, including
fantastic languages, maps, and poetry (Root-Bernstein, 2013).
For these reasons, it sometimes seems as if, having identified the paracosm in the lives of
creators of imaginary worlds, we are left with more questions than answers. Are paracosms
precursors to the creation of imaginary worlds in adulthood? Do they contribute meaning-
fully to creative ability? And, if so, how?
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Jeremy Piña
Current academic study into the topic is, as usual, inconclusive. One line of research has
argued the position that paracosms are little more than the unusual imaginings of relatively
normal individuals (Cohen and MacKeith, 1991) while another has advanced the notion that
paracosms are, in themselves, indicators of extraordinary creative ability (Root-Bernstein,
2009). And yet, while the two positions may fundamentally disagree about the utility of the
paracosm, both have gleaned important insights about the phenomenon.
What follows is a brief comparison of these perspectives on the role of the paracosm with
respect to the development of adult imaginary worlds. Each of the next two sections will
provide some background for the empirical studies and theoretical writings that make up the
line of research with emphasis given to the conclusions drawn and the limitations of the work.
Finally, a new perspective will be put forth based not on the qualities of the paracosm itself,
but on the characteristics of paracosmists.
The Province of Ordinary People

The first line of research to be discussed is that which follows the writings of MacKeith
(1983), Silvey and MacKeith (1988), and Cohen and MacKeith (1991). These are among the
earliest efforts to bring to light the existence of the paracosm, and it was a participant of these
early studies who coined the term (Silvey and MacKeith, 1988) and thereby provided an
organizing definition for the field.
From the beginning, this research was motivated by Robert Silvey’s personal efforts to seek
out others who, like him, had created imaginary worlds as a child (Cohen and MacKeith,
1991; Root-Bernstein, 2014). However, even though he went to great lengths to gather
instances of these imaginary worlds, Silvey died before the first study was ever completed
(MacKeith, 1983). As a result, there is an omnipresent sense of reverence, empathy, and nos-
talgia woven throughout these texts, both for Silvey and the imaginary worlds he worked so
hard to document. One cannot help but feel compassion for a man who, in his final years,
devoted himself to such a degree to his well-loved childhood imaginings.
On the whole, it was Silvey and MacKeith’s (1988) study that would prove to be the
most useful empirical work in this line of research. In an effort to provide a robust descrip-
tion of the paracosm and the paracosmist, the authors drew from three interrelated sources
of evidence: (1) a survey issued to 53 self-selected participants, (2) a content analysis of 64
paracosms, and (3) an assembly of 15 biographical paracosms taken from literary works (Silvey
and MacKeith, 1988). The other works, by comparison, played a secondary, theoretical role
and did not report new evidence. Cohen and MacKeith (1991), for instance, focused on elu-
cidating the contents of the 64 paracosms collected earlier in great detail. It also contributed
to the whole of the research by providing a framework for considering paracosms in relation
to other types of fantasy play, as well as postulating a general orientation toward creativity
research (Cohen and MacKeith, 1991).
Drawing from survey results, Silvey and MacKeith (1988) were able to build a rough
image of the personality of the paracosmists and their motivations for creating the imagi-
nary world. The authors reported that most paracosmists, perhaps unsurprisingly, thought
of themselves as being “imaginative” people (1988). Furthermore, the authors characterized
paracosmists as being a “dreamier and more tender-minded individual who is less inclined
than most to vigorous outdoor sports, and who is not mechanically-minded” (1988). When
asked what function the paracosm served, the answers were diffuse: Some highlighted how
the private world offered a place of personal expression, others recalled the joy of creation,
while yet another group indicated that the paracosm was a good escape from a variety of
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situations, and still others thought of the paracosm in ludic terms, calling the experience
plainly “fun” (1988).
With regard to the content analysis, Silvey and MacKeith were able to categorize their
descriptive findings of paracosms into five content groups and four dimensions of paracosm
typology (1988).The content groups ranged from concrete topics, such as toys and animals, to
abstract topics, such as shifting, idyllic worlds (1988). Later analysis suggested these categories
changed from concrete to abstract matters as the child matured (Cohen and MacKeith, 1991).
Thus, a child who began with a wholly fantastic paracosm might have it evolve into an ide-
alistic, highly social paracosm while retaining its content.
In general, the literary sources assembled by Silvey and MacKeith (1988) provided a first-
hand account of a paracosm and the role it played in the life of an individual as detailed in a
biography or an autobiography. When possible, the authors included the individual’s ration-
ale for creating the paracosm, the age at which it was created, the people with whom they
purported to share their invented world, and any artifacts the paracosm may have inspired
(1988). Among the notable of the paracosms were those of Robert Louis Stevenson, Friedrich
Nietzsche, W. H. Auden, and Christopher Isherwood (1988).
Literary accounts notwithstanding, a great deal of care was taken throughout the entirety
of this line of research to stress the degree to which paracosms were, by and large, signs of
“ordinary” contributors, best thought of as “those who don’t go on to make glittering creative
careers” (Cohen and MacKeith, 1991). In other words, all lines of evidence led to the conclu-
sion that, in spite of the fact that paracosms could sometimes be found in the biographies of
famously creative individuals, they did not indicate anything exceptional about the creative
abilities of paracosmists. Silvey and MacKeith (1988) put it succinctly:“High degrees of corre-
lation with the general intelligence and ‘creativity’ of the individual child have been plausibly
suggested, but we have not demonstrated these” (p. 195).
As a corollary to these conclusions, there was a tendency to negatively represent the
concept of creativity as it was understood at the time. Throughout the introduction that
framed Cohen and MacKeith (1991), there was, in fact, a quietly dismissive attitude
toward the notion of paracosms as a creative endeavor and toward creativity research as a
whole. The authors took pains to characterize the “creative school” as being motivated by
American business interests, and, paraphrasing Piaget, they denounced Americans as being
people who “studied psychology only in order to see what they could get children to do
younger and better” (1991, p. 6). Moreover, the authors derided the methods developed
by creativity researchers as having “doctored” creativity “to suit the conventions of psy-
chological testing” (1991). As such, instruments like the remote associates test (the RAT)
were condemned as being not “quite what we mean by being normally imaginative”
(1991, p. 6).
Although this line of research was a groundbreaking first step in the discovery of paracosms,
it was not without its limitations. As the authors themselves admitted, their research was
“explorative,” “descriptive,” and “only cautiously interpretive” (Silvey and MacKeith, 1988).
This was partially for the reason that paracosmists were not sampled from the population as
a whole, and were instead gathered by word-of-mouth through a loose network of associates
(Silvey and MacKeith, 1988). This argument of poor sampling also extends to the manner in
which paracosms were related to the researchers, namely as retrospective accounts from adults
who had, for the most part, long since put away their childhood imaginings.The use of retro-
spective accounts, especially from such diverse periods in a person’s life, has been considered
controversial in many research communities (Miller, Cardinal, and Glick, 1997; Hardt and
Rutter, 2004).
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Jeremy Piña
Portents of Nascent Creativity

The second line of research is that which follows the writings of Root-Bernstein and
Root-Bernstein (2006), Root-Bernstein (2009), Root-Bernstein (2013), and Root-Bernstein
(2014). These are much more recent efforts to articulate the importance of the paracosm, and
they are based mostly in the fields of giftedness and creativity research. It is worth pointing out
that the authors of this line of research have chosen to advance the term worldplay to define
the act of creating an imaginary world in childhood (Root-Bernstein and Root-Bernstein,
2006). To avoid confusion, uses of this term will remain limited in the following discussion.
In my effort to review this material, it quickly became apparent that the work that com-
prised the second, modern investigation of the paracosm remarkably paralleled—and, at times,
interestingly subverted—the research that predated it. For example, as Robert Silvey was the
driving force behind the landmark investigation of the paracosm, the second wave of research
was almost single-handedly the result of Michele Root-Bernstein’s curiosity and devotion.
Whereas Silvey’s perspective was reflective and nostalgic, Root-Bernstein’s outlook could
be easily summarized as prospective and optimistic. This difference in approach is likely the
result of the manner in which Root-Bernstein became involved with the topic: She took
up inquiry of the paracosm, not on her own behalf, but to better understand the imaginary
worlds created by her daughter (Root-Bernstein, 2014).
However, throughout the whole of this line of research, it was evident that Root-Bernstein
sought not only to study the paracosm for the sake of satisfying her own curiosity, but also
to refute Cohen and MacKeith’s (1991) conclusion that paracosms did not influence crea-
tivity. To wit, the purposes given for investigating the paracosm in the initial study were:
(1) to determine if more highly creative individuals would be more likely to have paracosms,
(2) whether or not that creativity would express itself in a narrow range of professions, and
(3) whether or not adult paracosmists would consider their childhood paracosm as being
useful and informative to their adult career (Root-Bernstein and Root-Bernstein, 2006). Or,
as she later clarified, she had “hypothesized that the childhood invention of imaginary worlds may
in fact be a predictor for adult creativity across the arts, humanities, social sciences and sciences” (Root-
Bernstein, 2009, p. 605; emphasis in the original).
In order to investigate these hypotheses, Root-Bernstein and Root-Bernstein (2006) made
comparisons between a group of 106 relatively normal Michigan State University (MSU)
students and 262 highly creative MacArthur Fellows. A short survey was issued to both par-
ticipant groups that identified childhood avocations, imaginary worlds in childhood, and
whether the paracosm remained important to the participants in their adult careers (2006).
Interestingly, the Root-Bernsteins found the process of capturing the paracosm, most espe-
cially differentiating it from other forms of fantasy play, to be somewhat troublesome. They
were forced to create multiple criteria by which to judge the paracosm and eliminate “false
positives” (2006). This led to variability in their empirical results, bounded on the lower
end by paracosms defined according to the most stringent definition proposed by Silvey
and MacKeith (1988) and on the upper end by their “relaxed” criteria (Root-Bernstein and
Root-Bernstein, 2006).
Root-Bernstein and Root-Bernstein’s (2006) findings largely supported the position that
paracosms did, in fact, influence creativity. Not only were paracosms about twice as common
in the eminent MacArthur Fellows sample—between 5% and 25.5% of MacArthur recipients
were judged to have a paracosm, whereas between 3% and 12% of MSU students demon-
strated a paracosm (2006)—but it was also demonstrated that adults who were paracosmists
during childhood were not more likely to pursue careers in traditionally “creative” fields
294
alone. Rather, they were most likely to have chosen vocations among the arts, sciences, and
social sciences (2006). Furthermore, the Root-Bernsteins found that more than half of the
individuals who had engaged in paracosms as children reported that they found the experi-
ence of maintaining a paracosm to be beneficial to their later adult careers (2006).
These results would later be woven into discussions that represented the utility of the para-
cosm in different ways. Root-Bernstein’s (2009) article, for instance, emphasized the notion
that bearing a paracosm as a child may, in itself, be a sign of a child’s creative potential
and could serve as a complement to extant means of identifying creatively gifted students.
Alongside the results of her previous empirical work, Root-Bernstein provided evidence
from her case study of M. and her imaginary world of Kar, as well as a detailed review of
other case studies in gifted education that highlighted evidence of paracosms in the lives of
highly intelligent students (2009). Likewise, Root-Bernstein (2013) extended the notion of
the paracosm as a “learning laboratory” and discussed a multitude of paracosmic artifacts that
hinted at growing creative ability.
This line of research has culminated in Root-Bernstein’s book Inventing Imaginary Worlds
(2014), which greatly expanded the three previous works. Large sections were allocated
for drawing conclusions from literary sources, new paracosms were investigated, and many
opportunities for developing the paracosm in children were detailed. However, the most
important addition, at least in terms of future research, was in Root-Bernstein’s newly postu-
lated “Worldplay-Creativity Network Revisited” model by which the factors inherent to the
paracosm may be thought to inspire adult public creativity (2014).This idealized the influence
of the paracosm as an indirect pressure on adult creative ability through the intermediaries of
training in a craft and continuing play, which led ultimately to harnessing play to work (2014).
The greatest limitation of Root-Bernstein’s research, aside from relying on retrospective
accounts like her predecessors, was inherent in her approach to the topic: Fostering creativity
is a lofty goal, and by evoking the possibility that paracosms may lead to creative eminence,
Root-Bernstein has set a very high bar. But while she has devoted a great deal of time to elu-
cidating the cognitive benefits of the paracosm, she has given comparatively little attention to
the role of decision-making, intentionality, and plain hard work on the part of high-achieving
paracosmists in realizing their goals. To paraphrase Albert (1992), creative behavior does not
become greatness just because one has potential; real creative genius is the result of a complex,
difficult process of personal growth. After all, no one is born a successful author, thinker, world
creator, or MacArthur Fellow. It stands to reason that even if the paracosm is a stepping-stone
on the path to greatness, it may be only the first of many.
Paracosmists as Geeks
Before embarking on this final section, a brief, honest aside: Throughout the research pre-
sented, the paracosmist has been primarily described through the medium of evidence
collected by researchers. Their personalities have been quantified, their imaginary worlds
recorded.These are opaque views of actual people. For this reason, as a paracosmist, it has been
difficult to maintain a neutral tone. So much of this work concerns the ideals and experiences
of people who, like me, created imaginary worlds as children and cared for them deeply. But
current research doesn’t help me to understand very much about these people, the world they
lived in, or the challenges they faced, except to the extent that they involved the paracosm.
Simply put, the research has largely ignored the paracosmist in favor of the paracosm.
As I know them, paracosmists are neither highly creative, intellectual supermen nor mun-
dane schlubs. They are, for better or worse, geeks. They are nerds. They are boffins and otaku.
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Jeremy Piña
These terms are not meant as pejoratives; to the contrary, they are meant to be reverential and
inclusive in the spirit of Kahler (2015) and Gabriel (2015). Moreover, they are intended as
thoughtful reflections from an emic research perspective. And while admittedly anecdotal, this
insight does provide a starting place to consider the social context and psychosocial develop-
ment of paracosmists. Take, for instance, the similarities between the interests and motivations
of paracosmists and geeks: Like paracosmists, geeks are defined by their intense passion for a
topic (Bray, 2014; Schmettow and Drees, 2014); they enjoy exploring fantasy worlds (Konzack,
2006) and engaging with fantasy in general (McCain, Gentile, and Campbell, 2015).
As a corollary, it may be the case that many paracosmists, as geeks, have likely been forced
to make difficult decisions, such as whether to continue to commit oneself to their topic
of interest (a fantasy world, in this case) or to focus on social advancement in high school
(Kinney, 1993) or as an adult (Kaichiro and Washburn, 2013). Moreover, it may mean that
paracosmists have faced ostracism (Turkle, 1984) and bullying (Berlatsky, 2013) as a result of
their eccentric approach to life. As of right now, nothing in the study of the paracosmist has
directly approached the issue that the experience of being a paracosmist may carry long-term
social costs, but this is a well-studied phenomenon in geek culture. As such, recognition of
these similarities may provide a useful vantage by which to consider such circumstances.
Furthermore, it may be that, though differing to a large extent from juvenile fantasy play,
the act of creating a paracosm differs only superficially from other geeky adult fantasy play
activities, such as pen-and-paper role-playing (Lankoski and Järvelä, 2012), live-action role-
playing (Rognli, 2008), and fan fiction writing (Barnes, 2015). Situating the paracosm among
these pastimes would support the notion that, rather than being an unusual form of childhood
fantasy play as both Silvey and MacKeith (1988) and Root-Bernstein (2014) have supposed,
the paracosm may instead be considered an expression of life-span fantasy play (Göncü and
Perrrone, 2005; Smith and Lillard, 2012). This would further imply that there might be no
meaningful difference between the privately held paracosm and other, publicly shared imagi-
nary worlds as expressed in activities like role-playing and larping. Thus, paracosms may be
far more variant than we have otherwise credited in their modern expression, perhaps even
matching the fluid transmediality (Wolf, 2012) apparent in other sorts of imaginary worlds.
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35
Worlds as
Experiments
Edward Castronova
There are perhaps two ways to think about “worlds as experiments.” Making a world is an
experiment in itself, an attempt to build anew a place for people to be. In this sense, to experi-
ment is to try something new, to fiddle around with the tools at hand and see what happens.
The other sense of experiment is more mundane: Experimenting is a scientific protocol, a
recipe for knowledge discovery. To conduct an experiment, you hold certain factors fixed
and then vary a specific thing in a specific way, and observe changes in something else, some
outcome of interest.
Many imaginary worlds, maybe the majority, have been experiments in the first sense. This
chapter concerns itself with experiments in the second sense. What about using synthetic
worlds to conduct experiments along the lines of the scientific protocol? There are very good
reasons to think hard about this, as outlined in the following sections. The possibilities and
problems of doing synthetic world experiments occupy the rest of the chapter.
It is exciting to imagine using vast worlds with millions of people to discover solutions to
important social problems. Making the discoveries would be quite hard. Games are hard to
make; massively populated games harder still; massively populated games in which behavior
is relevant to broader questions are perhaps beyond our current capacity. On the other hand,
the sheer cost of making interactive systems is falling. It may soon be as common for people
to make new worlds as it is for them to make short videos today. If so, we might face a bright
dawn of new knowledge about how we all live together.
Problems in Social Science Methods

The world’s problems today, and for quite a long time, have been primarily social in nature.
Natural science has discovered what needs to be known about global climate, ballistics, nutri-
tion, and disease. Social science has not discovered how to get people to reduce their climate
impact, lay down their weapons, feed the hungry, or keep everyone basically healthy. Human
nature sets a limit on what can be accomplished, but the structure of social institutions and
culture must be important too. We may even know in some cases what needs to be done, but
we have been unable to actually do it. Something gets in the way, and removing that some-
thing is at least potentially discoverable by social scientists.
Social science is beset by severe methodological problems. Roughly, there are three ways
of going about knowledge discovery about society. One is pure theory: Speculate and see
whether the argument makes sense. Maybe the starting assumptions are so good and the logic
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Wo r l d s a s E x p e r i m e n t s
so flawless, the conclusions must be true, no matter what the physical evidence may suggest.
A second is experiment: Develop a conjecture and then conduct a targeted experiment in
the real world that might refute or support the conjecture. A third would be historical data
analysis: Again develop a conjecture, then see if the world seems to develop in the ways sug-
gested by the conjecture.
Natural scientists move among these modes. Someone develops a theoretical notion, say that
the crust of the Earth is broken into plates that slide around on the surface.Then others go out
and test various aspects of the Earth’s crust to see if such a concept is warranted. They look at
coastlines and imagine a historical pattern where once Africa and South America were joined.
It makes sense.This leads to further conjectures about the plates and the crust and the bubbling
goo below, which are verified or not in further observations of the real world. Thus, natural
science advances and has given us such amazing knowledge. Many of our lives and their many
comforts have been made possible in the first place by the discovery methods of natural science.
How sad, then, when we turn to social science. In some fields of social science, thinkers
rely on pure theory alone. This is certainly the case in economics as well as some branches of
political science and even anthropology. Economics has become a subfield of applied math-
ematics. Very little research in economics is relevant to the world at large. It is almost never
tested. As a result, theories in economics and other rational choice fields have a bad track
record in terms of explaining (much less predicting) actual social behavior.
When social scientists do try to engage empirical data, things are not much better. Social
theory generally lives at the level of society; that’s why it is social theory, and not psychologi-
cal. How can a researcher engage in a meaningful way with an actual society? Experimental
approaches are almost impossible. No one can command cities and countries to replicate
themselves, and inject some novel element so as to observe the effects. Instead we have seen
far too many experiments in the first sense: Moments in time when dictators, following the
bizarre theories of some defunct philosopher, have totally reordered their countries and killed
millions of people in the process. All we learned from Hitler, Stalin, and Mao was “Don’t do
what Hitler, Stalin, and Mao did, even if they were honestly trying to implement the theories
of Rousseau, Darwin, and Marx.”
Other experimental methods rely on small sizes and harmless effects. The past fifty years
have seen an explosion of studies of college students, who may be the single-most poked
and prodded collection of human beings ever. What is learned from observing young white
Americans in a windowless room for a few hours on a Tuesday afternoon? This method seems
unlikely to reveal much about human social behavior in general.
Moving away from experiments, a researcher can observe historical data and see if it accords
with a theory. In social science, though, the systems are too complex. Do violent media cause
social violence? Or does social violence cause violent media? Yes. As a result, historical trends
in media violence and social violence cannot be disentangled. Not only that, but everything
else is affecting the system as well: income, family structure, education, and culture. In social
systems, all affects all, and all affects how we think and what we do. Determining cause in
social data is well-nigh impossible.
It is no wonder that many social scientists satisfy themselves with pure theory, since making
sense of the empirical world of human social behavior seems almost impossible.
Experiments in Commercial Synthetic Worlds

How interesting, then, that in recent years a new possibility for social discovery has emerged
in the form of synthetic worlds. Through the Internet and its social media, communities have
299
formed in arenas that are similar to, but not exactly like, the communities we have had in the
offline world. Many of the social institutions look quite similar: markets, reputations, urbanity,
power, and so on.
Because of the similarities, some events in synthetic worlds have had the character of natu-
ral experiments. I wrote a paper about market locations in EverQuest (1999), and epidemiolo-
gists analyzed a disease in World of Warcraft (2004) (Castronova, 2006; Lofgren and Fefferman,
2007). In both cases, the design decisions of world builders caused a sequence of events that
accidentally revealed interesting information about social processes. In the EverQuest case, an
oddly regular pattern in the location of trading revealed certain key features of the player soci-
ety’s approach to buying and selling. Namely, of all the hundreds of places where one could
trade, just three emerged on any given server, and of those, one was dominant on most of the
servers. It was a place accessible to the entire player population, quite near to the designed
“official” market that, inadvertently or not, could not be accessed by the evil faction. Though
evil was a minority, its purchasing power was significant enough to cause the market location
to move to a place more congenial to ogres and trolls. It all made perfect economic sense,
and that was the point: Market location inside this Tinkertoy world made perfect economic
sense.This raises the immediate follow-on: What else might make perfect sense, economically,
sociologically, or anthropologically?
In the decade since these early papers, commercial virtuality has continued to explode and,
indeed, experimentation has become a formal design practice, going under the name “A-B
testing.” Designers are increasingly working with populations of hundreds of thousands of
people, sometimes tens of millions, and they have the luxury of assigning a new design to a
“small” subset of, say, 10,000 users. They can observe how the experimental population reacts
to the design decision and, if it looks good, apply it to all players. How powerful this is as
an experimental protocol. The professors are sitting in their little labs with 27 sullen, bored
undergraduates for 2 hours, while the game owners are running live studies of thousands and
thousands of happy, emotionally committed subjects—from all over the world, all ages, sexes,
races, cultures—studies that can go on for days and days, months and months. Commercial
game owners are learning about society at lightning speed. Even if researchers never run
another social science study, we will still make rapid advances just by watching the evolution
of social media design.
Possibilities for Research in Synthetic Worlds

The natural experiments in commercial synthetic worlds led early observers such as Caroline
Bradley and Michael Froomkin and, later, myself to call for bespoke research worlds (Bradley
and Froomkin, 2004; Castronova, 2006). The idea was to build a world with the explicit pur-
pose of replicating significant social structures. The world would then be divided into shards.
Each shard would replicate the same world in all respects and would receive a random popula-
tion. Then a specific research question might be posed, and different interventions crafted for
the different shards. Several shards would be left alone to serve as controls. Outcomes would
be measured, and a clear causality could be established. In ensuing years, some early papers
attempted to see how realistic virtual worlds could be. One paper tested microeconomic the-
ories, and found that simple laws of supply and demand seem to hold quite firmly in a virtual
environment (Castronova et al., 2009a). Another found that virtual macroeconomic behavior
also replicated offline macroeconomic patterns (Castronova et al., 2009b). Meanwhile, experi-
ments in a Stanford media behavior lab found that the transfer of impressions and behaviors
across the virtual boundary was strong enough at a cognitive psychological level to warrant
300
a name, the “Proteus Effect” (Yee, Bailenson, and Ducheneaut, 2009). This early research into
online and offline behavior has suggested that social scientists could fruitfully use virtual
worlds of their own design for their own experiments.
Consider for example a very difficult problem in social policy:What is the response of soci-
ety to social norms? Suppose for example that we blanketed several of our shards with (false)
information that “In this world, people are nice to one another.” In others, we blanketed the
environment with (also false) information that people on this shard take care of themselves
first and foremost. In a third set, we do nothing. In all these cases, we are not actually reporting
behavior; we are telling players that behavior is this or that, and then observing what sort of
social norms actually emerge.This sort of thing is not impossible to do on a small scale, with a
few college students, over the course of an afternoon. But with a full-scale virtual world, one
could balance the norm effect against time and incentives, showing exactly how persistent
and robust social norms are as a causal factor. The ability to express, or not, a norm that may
or may not exist among a population becomes a design tool for policy.
This strategy might solve the most severe problems faced by social scientists and take them
much closer to the protocols of natural scientists that have proved so successful and valuable.
Here would be an opportunity to conduct direct experimental tests of grand theories of social
organization. If workers own the means of production, are all people better off in a concrete
way? Do tax cuts trickle down? Are property rights essential to growth? Is the broken window
theory of community control accurate? There are many grand ideas about social progress, and
many of them warrant a skeptical drive around the block before buying. Synthetic worlds
provide that kind of test drive.
Counterarguments
While commercial experimentation proceeds apace, research virtual worlds have not emerged.
This is for good reasons:
Practicality: Researchers are researchers, not world builders. It is no small task to conceive
and construct a synthetic world.
Game design is hard: Making a synthetic environment that works, at some level, for a single
person is exceedingly difficult. One maxim among game professionals is that 90% of game
projects are destined to fail. This maxim is applied not to novices, but to the work of suc-
cessful, experienced designers and builders. This is for single-player games. Add multiplayer
and the complexity of managing groups of players, and the chances of success decline by two
additional orders of magnitude.
Imagine architecture, if it were understood that the 90% of buildings, even those made by
senior firms, would collapse about halfway into construction. Moreover, among buildings
with several floors the collapse rate rose to 99.9%. Then imagine that a professor expressed
the goal of building a big special building just for doing research.The hopelessness that attends
this thought replicates in a small way the hopelessness that most experienced game design
professionals express when asked about the prospects for a research synthetic world.
Then there is the funding issue. Contemporary game development budgets rise into the
hundreds of millions of dollars—nine zeroes—especially for deep synthetic worlds where
the richest social behavior is observed. While it is not uncommon for hard science funding
to reach this level, social science funding does not. In social science funding, the number of
zeroes in grant money is six, maybe seven, but no more. Building a research world will require
changing the funding paradigm in social science and adding two orders of magnitude to the
typical funding level.
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Experiments are not fun: It is hard for accomplished designers to make successful synthetic
worlds when they are trying to make them fun. How much harder for a researcher whose goal
is to make them fun but also somewhat realistic? Evidence from the “games with a purpose”
(GWAP) field suggests that requiring anything beyond fun can impose an impossible burden
on the design process. “It must be fun AND deliver Message X” is a much harder design goal
than simply “It must be fun.”
Generality: There has also been a rethinking of the earlier enthusiasm about the general
applicability of behavior in synthetic worlds. The spread of disease in World of Warcraft is per-
haps not very interesting at all. People don’t die in World of Warcraft, not really, but people do
die of Ebola. While behavior in synthetic worlds seems similar to offline behavior in some
very basic ways, it may not give us the precision needed for serious social research, especially
about things that matter. We can use rat mazes to learn much about how rats think, but that
does not help us understand why people pay too little attention to facts about risk.
It has proven more difficult than first imagined to conceive a synthetic world for experi-
mentation, build it, and conduct successful, meaningful research within it.
Effects of Decreases in the Cost of Design Technology

Despite the lack of progress in the first decades of the 21st century, the subject of synthetic
worlds for experimentation cannot be closed.The costs of computing continue to fall. As they
do, two new possibilities appear in the design space relevant to synthetic world experiments.
Middleware for game construction is developing in two directions. On the one hand, the
sheer power of tools such as Unity and Unreal has been expanding. These engines allow
a designer to make games with stunning visual effects, vast worlds, multiplayer access, and
sophisticated AI. A decade ago, these sorts of things were restricted to companies that could
hire enough coders to implement them. Now, the designer can switch buttons and set param-
eters to make these things happen. It is still not easy—features must be designed, after all,
which is no simple task—but the raw scale of operations necessary to design and implement
has been falling. Large-scale designs are available to any group that can design well and master
the engines.
At the same time, the engines themselves are becoming more usable. The major game
engines compete to capture the student audience, working to make entry into their products
cheaper and easier. Small-scale game engines like Game Salad and Construct enable smaller
games. A person does not need to know how to code to make a game in Construct. Clear
thinking is required, certainly, since game logic can be unforgiving. (If you told the engine
that structural damage equals the number of termites squared, well … that’s going to become
quite a bit of damage when you have hundreds of bugs.) It is becoming easier for small teams
with fewer technical assets to deploy interactive systems for others.
Something else is happening within commercial game companies: procedural generation.
This involves writing an algorithm that produces game assets and actions using random start-
ing conditions (“seeds”). It is not too hard to imagine how terrain can be generated randomly;
have the algorithm spit out jungle for a while and then shift to desert when the environment
has less water. For quite some time, the commercial program SpeedTree has enabled design-
ers to quickly populate their biomes with different kinds of plants. Press a button and a forest
appears.Too much pine? Move the “conifer” slider down and press again.What works for trees
can work for almost anything in a synthetic environment. Joint work by game designers and
computer scientists shows that even stories can be generated procedurally (Mateas and Stern,
2005). Stories, environments, villages, quests: The computer can do a great amount of design
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work. While the necessary artificiality of the resulting world, its utter randomness, might be a
problem for a game designer hoping to get a certain fantasy world just right, it is less critical
for a researcher. The researcher just needs some kind of world to attract people and get them
busy performing the social behavior of interest. It does not matter if the story is about dragons
or dragoons, boggarts or bodices. The researcher is interested in the macro-level institutions
that the world produces. An economist, for example, only needs there to be markets and
money. Perhaps it does not matter what’s being traded, only that there is trade. On the other
hand, perhaps the artificiality of the world does have an effect on the objects of interest. In
fact, that might be one of the first research questions to resolve: Does a procedurally gener-
ated world feel as natural as a hand-crafted one, and does it elicit behavior that replicates what
we see in the offline world? These and many other questions would fall under the heading
of “calibration.” First we have to learn how to make worlds that elicit the behaviors that we
want. Procedural generation is one method, and while it is cheap, it may not be good enough.
The future will eventually see Ph.D. students crafting and deploying their own interactive
systems for their research. It will feel like second nature to them, just as making a video is sec-
ond nature to any student today.We can imagine a political science student saying, “To test my
hypothesis about judicial fiat, I need a virtual space of 100,000 acres, 5,000 non-player charac-
ters, 27 different animal types, 18 plants, and 16 major storylines that involve justice somehow.
I’ll have the players serve as judges of small criminal cases and see how precedents evolve if I
use Method X to allow them to overrule statutes.” He presses a button and the environment
appears. He posts the world to some social media site and in fairly short order some fraction
of the 10 billion people who will be inhabiting our globe will poke in and see what the world
is all about. Some of those people will stick around. Basic macro-level research with only a
few hundred people would be interesting and better in many ways from what we have now.
Conclusion
When social scientists first encountered synthetic worlds, the parallels to the offline social
world were striking enough to generate the simple idea of doing research with synthetic
world data. The more ambitious idea was to build new worlds and conduct experiments on
them. That idea seems to have been far too ambitious for the time. Technology was not far
advanced, and each world was crafted by hand. Most such worlds failed to thrive. The idea
that a university professor and his team could build a synthetic world for experiments was
far-fetched.
As a result, no one at a university has been able to see what one could actually do with
this type of experimental protocol. No one at a university controls a synthetic world of any
significant depth or size. Therefore, questions remain about whether anything could actually
be discovered. Is it even possible to build a fantasy world that would not only attract people
but also embed them in a society realistic enough on certain lines to provide generalizable
findings? We cannot know because we have not tried. Observation of the commercial space
continues to provide accidental evidence that societies in synthetic environments are rough
parallels to offline environments. The evidence remains anecdotal, however.
The situation is likely to change over the next two decades. Before very long, just about
anyone will be able to deploy a synthetic environment with considerable verisimilitude and
emotional punch. Already in the game Minecraft, people who are not professors are conduct-
ing social science research. For example, a collective of teachers based in the Brooklyn Public
Library has made a Minecraft environment called HungerCraft, in which “students explore
issues of social inequity as citizens of either the impoverished District 12 or the wealthy
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Capitol in this map based on The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins” (TeacherGaming,
2015).The goal of the project is to allow students to experience the social inequality depicted
in the novel. Rich and poor students will have to decide how to live together. It is a worthy
experiment that speaks to questions that have concerned social scientists for centuries. Social
experiments in virtual worlds are happening already; soon it will be time for academics in
these fields to make them a normal part of professional practice.
As this development takes place, it will perhaps only be the latest confirmation of the close
relationship between fantasy and science. All thinking begins with hypotheses, conjectures,
and imagination. We build worlds in our minds, and in those worlds we suspend certain
aspects of what must be and replace them with possible things that may be. We do this in an
ordered and conscious way; we keep many things in place and alter a few. Plato wrote about a
Republic that did not exist; Thomas More wrote about a fantasy island; Einstein surely spent
many hours thinking about possible physics that we don’t have before deducing the altogether
strange physics that we actually do have. Synthetic worlds in computers merely make the fan-
tasy more concrete and tangible, ironically enough.They are fantasy worlds we not only think
about, but inhabit, if only in a mediated way. Nonetheless, we are “in there,” and the structure
of being in those places can tell us a great deal about who we really are.
References
Castronova, Edward, (2006), “On the Research Value of Large Games: Natural Experiments in Norrath
and Camelot,” Games and Culture 1(2), pages 163–186.
Castronova, Edward, Mark W. Bell, Robert Cornell, James J. Cummings, Will Emigh, Matthew Falk,
Michael Fatten, Paul LaFourest, and Nathan Mishler, (2009a), “A Test of the Law of Demand in a
Virtual World: Exploring the Petri Dish Approach to Social Science,” International Journal of Gaming
and Computer-Mediated Simulations 1(2), pages 1–16.
Castronova, Edward, Dmitri Williams, Cuihua Shen, Rabindra Ratan, Li Xiong,Yun Huang, and Brian
Keegan, (2009b), “As Real as Real? Macroeconomic Behavior in a Large-Scale Virtual World,” New
Media and Society 11(5), pages 685–707.
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36
Worlds and Politics
Dan Hassler-Forest
World-building is inextricable from questions of politics. As tempted as we may be to lose

ourselves in the immersive landscapes of Oz, Middle-earth, Westeros, or the Star Wars uni-
verse, we must at the same time remember that these secondary worlds are always projections
of tensions, desires, anxieties, and contradictions that define our own material world and its
social and economic organization. The political nature of world-building is perhaps most
obvious in some of the tradition’s earliest examples: Plato’s Republic (380 b.c.) provides a
paradigmatic example of world-building that insistently foregrounds its own political implica-
tions. Similarly, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
are both vivid precursors to the modern era’s cultural traditions of fantastic world-building,
including the elaborate maps that have become prerequisites for literary high fantasy (see the
chapter “Worlds as Satire” in this volume).
It is difficult indeed to ignore the political in works like Republic and Utopia, as they con-
stitute attempts to describe elaborate alternatives to existing sets of social relations, and do so
without the distractions of narrative arcs, elaborate portal-quests, or fantastical trappings: the
absence of dragons, Dementors, and giant sandworms helps maintain a rigorously rational
form of engagement with the text’s secondary world, without the emotional investment and
affective immersion so valued by authors and readers of fantastic fiction. Similarly, explicitly
dystopian worlds, as established most famously in novels like We (1924), Brave New World
(1932), Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and Fahrenheit 451 (1953) (see this volume’s chapter
“Utopias and Dystopias”), tend to emphasize the science fiction genre’s dialectic of cognition
and estrangement (Suvin, 1979), and thereby lend themselves all too easily for an interpretive
position that is critically and politically engaged (Freedman, 2000).
But beyond those storyworlds that are all too easily identified as “political,” I would argue
that any attempt at world-building is always fundamentally and irreducibly political. In this
sense, just as the feminist movement in the 1970s emphasized how the personal is the political
(Hanisch, 1970), we might also recognize how the fantastical is the political. Therefore, in the
same way that the Marxist tradition of literary and cultural theory has focused on the critique
of any given text’s “political unconscious” (Jameson, 1981), we can identify in complex and
expansive fantastic storyworlds the creative choices that together express an identifiable form
of politics.While a storyworld like Tolkien’s Arda may not be perceived as political in the same
way that More’s Utopia is, his elaborate attempt at subcreation nevertheless expresses a politics
at multiple levels simultaneously, from the storyworld’s Eurocentric geographical organization
to its Catholic symbolism and teleological historiography.
At the same time, the industrial spheres of media production and distribution in which
world-building circulates also impose a political economy defined by the cultural and
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economic logic of global capitalism. Fantastic world-building may have long existed as a
cultural practice in the margins of mass culture, but in the context of a media landscape domi-
nated by transnational media corporations, the cultural logic of branding and franchising has
its own far-reaching political implications. For businesses like Disney, Fox, Time Warner, and
Netflix, fantastic world-building has increasingly become a corporate strategy for develop-
ing and monetizing valuable IP (“intellectual property”) across a wide variety of audiences
and media platforms. From this perspective, the most basic way in which media industries
approach world-building is by way of the franchise (Johnson, 2013), fully embracing the logic
of brand culture (Banet-Weiser, 2012) as a way of claiming ownership and legitimacy in the
context of participatory culture and media convergence.
I will illustrate both these aspects of fantastic world-building and politics in this chapter by
foregrounding these two interlocking but identifiable levels: first, that of storyworld construc-
tion and tensions within the text that reproduce the contradictions of late capitalism; and
second, that of the political economy that informs media-industrial practices of production
and distribution, and the reception of these storyworlds by active and participatory audiences.
I will do so by drawing on Game of Thrones (2011–present) as a central case study. As a fantastic
world-building franchise that has proliferated across virtually all popular media since its popu-
lar adaptation as a television series, Game of Thrones offers a vivid illustration of the politics
of world-building, both in terms of storyworld construction and in what it reveals about the
political economy of world-building as a media-industrial practice.
Politics and Ideology: Constructing Complex Storyworlds

Most of the existing scholarship on the imaginary worlds of cross-media storytelling fran-
chises has described them primarily in formalist and/or sociological terms: the exhaustive
detail, the elaborate histories, the complex relationships between fans and producers, and the
variety of media that make up convergence culture have encouraged many scholars work-
ing on such franchises to focus on their forms and the cultural practices that surround them
rather than theorize their political implications. In Building Imaginary Worlds, the editor of this
volume discusses world-building primarily in such terms. Wolf takes as his point of departure
J. R. R. Tolkien’s concept of “subcreation” (Tolkien, 1997: 138–141), which he views as an
inseparable combination of process and product resulting in the development of a fictitious
“secondary world” (Wolf, 2012: 24). The “secondariness” of this imaginary environment is
more a question of degree than absolute separation, depending on the ways in which familiar
defaults are transformed into imaginary alternatives:
Fictional worlds can be placed along a spectrum based on the amount of subcreation
present, and what we might call the “secondariness” of a story’s world then becomes
a matter of degree, varying with the strength of the connection to the Primary World.
(ibid. 27)
Wolf ’s definition of world-building thus relies on a common-sense distinction between what

constitutes a “realistic” representation of a diegetic world, and a fictional environment that
defamiliarizes conventional defaults by altering a number of these coordinates.
While fantastic world-building thus clearly shifts our focus from the linear and teleologi-
cal structure of narrative to the environment that surrounds and sustains it, this changes
nothing about the ways in which we might interrogate and historicize the resulting mul-
titexts as expressions of tensions and contradictions that are ultimately social, material, and
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Wo r l d s a n d P o l i t i c s
p olitical. Following Jameson, a useful starting point would therefore be “by asking of what
real contradiction a given text is an imaginary or symbolic resolution” (Dowling, 1984:
121). A text is hereby not approached as a self-contained system of signs that carries its own
meanings inside it, but as a reflection of a specific organization of historically grounded
social relations. Any attempt to better understand the politics of any given storyworld must
therefore begin, in Jameson’s famous words, with “the recognition that there is nothing
that is not social and historical—indeed, that everything is ‘in the last instance’ political”
(1981: 5).
When applied to world-building, this form of ideological analysis faces a challenge in the
absence of a single structuring narrative, as the storyworld provides a fictional environment
that we might describe as infinitely expansive, resulting in what Matt Hills has described as a
“hyperdiegesis” (2000: 137). The Frankfurt School tradition of media criticism is notorious
for emphasizing the monolithic repetitiveness of the industrially produced episodic narratives
that take place within this hyperdiegesis, running counter to Cultural Studies’ interest in the
way fans find value and meaning in what may appear to outsiders as insignificant details. At
the same time, storyworlds are continuously undergoing expansions in numerous directions:
prequels, sequels, “side-quels” featuring alternate timelines, retcons, and reboots add end-
lessly to the storyworld’s byzantine chronology (see the chapter “Reboots and Retroactive
Continuity” in this volume). The constant mapping and re-mapping that accompanies sto-
ryworlds’ development almost by definition imposes an emphatically modern worldview on
these imaginary empires, which is grounded in an irresolvable contradiction between the
ancient and the modern.
Michael Saler’s excellent study of fantastic world-building focuses precisely on this weird
incongruity between irrational, pre-modern fantasy on the one hand, and modernity’s
“instrumental rationality” on the other (2012: 9). For Saler, fantastic world-building offers
a precarious form of fantasy that is “enchanted in a disenchanted way” (p. 13): it provides a
pre-modern environment of seemingly irrational fancy, but one that is organized on the basis
of “rigorously rational” coordinates, and which is subject to the “thinning” that accompanies
capitalism’s inevitable disenchantment (p. 159). His analysis articulates very clearly one of the
most crucial contradictions in the kind of fantastic world-building pioneered by Tolkien, as
it plays upon a tension between modern and anti-modern forms, aesthetics, and sensibilities.
The benefit of this approach is first that it helps historicize Tolkien’s work and legacy precisely
by emphasizing the contradictory elements in the political organization of his storyworld (for
instance, the tension between his resistance to capitalist industrialization alongside his obvious
aversion to collectivization) and second that it emphasizes how what is so often experienced
as a “timeless” fantastic storyworld is in fact fully enmeshed in tensions that are historical and
material.
These tensions in 20th- and 21st-century world-building are directly related to the internal
contradictions of capitalism, the system of social and economic relations that provides the his-
torical and material context in which fantastic world-building emerged in its current form. If
one wishes to develop an understanding of the politics of world-building, the most appropri-
ate starting point would be to follow Jameson’s most famous slogan—“Always historicize!”
(1981: ix)—and to begin by relating the construction of any storyworld back to the historical
and material conditions from which it emerged.The contradictory social and economic con-
ditions of capitalism find expression in these works in complex forms that are best described
with Raymond Williams’s helpful phrase “structure of feeling”: a non-reductive way of articu-
lating “concepts of ‘world-view’ or ‘ideology’” in a way that foregrounds “meanings and values
as they are actively lived and felt” (1977: 132).The term is especially useful when approaching
307
complex storyworlds, as Williams takes as his point of departure the idea that any historical
period is a combination of residual and emergent ideas, and will therefore always find cultural
expression in irreducibly complex, contradictory, and therefore profoundly dialectical forms.
Thus, while we may be tempted to characterize any given popular storyworld as “progressive”
or “conservative” in its politics, even a seemingly liberal franchise like Star Trek brings together
thoroughly contradictory ideological positions (see Booker, 2008).
This relationship between capitalism and world-building becomes even more obvious
when one considers its two most popular genres of fantasy and science fiction. While both
genres have long and fascinating histories that predate the modern era of mass media, each also
yielded specific world-building paradigms that helped define the cultural, social, and industrial
practices associated with fantastic storyworlds in the age of late capitalism: Tolkien provided
the basic narrative and aesthetic coordinates for fantasy, while Star Trek popularized science
fiction’s techno-futurism. Significantly, these two paradigms also express—respectively—pre-
and post-capitalist storyworlds, with Tolkienian “high” fantasy associated by many with cul-
tural nostalgia and political conservatism, while Star Trek’s liberal utopianism is often linked to
progressive ideals. This distinction has led Marxist critics for many years to dismiss fantasy as
a politically reactionary genre (Jameson, 2005: 57–71), whereas science fiction has long been
perceived as an inherently progressive cultural form (Freedman, 2000: 16–17).
While I would argue that no absolute distinction, political or otherwise, can be made
between fantasy and science fiction, my point in this chapter concerns the ways in which
fantastic storyworlds provide pleasurable ways of negotiating tensions that are social, eco-
nomic, and cultural—and therefore political. In this regard, both Tolkien’s pre-capitalist semi-
feudalism and Star Trek’s post-capitalist galactic imperialism offer similar ways of negotiating
the contradictions of modern capitalism. Both these paradigmatic storyworlds express a
worldview in which the modernizing influence of technology, industrialization, and reason
is represented as unstoppable and inevitable. And while Tolkien’s elegiac nostalgia for a pre-
modern world is obviously different in tone from Star Trek’s technological utopia, they express
a similarly ambivalent political perspective on industrial capitalism: while he clearly disap-
proves of modernization and industrialization, he also expresses a patronizing attitude toward
the hobbits’ quaint parochialism.
Just as we can recognize in these paradigmatic fantastic storyworlds their historical contin-
gence with capitalism in its 20th-century industrial phase, we can identify the cultural logic
of global capitalism in 21st-century world-building. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have
famously adopted the term “Empire” to describe the new ways in which capital’s power is
organized in the post-industrial age. Central to their thinking is the notion that our age of
global, post-industrial, financial, or cognitive capitalism brings with it new forms of power
that are specific to the richest nations’ dominant mode of immaterial production. The result
is something they describe as a “properly capitalist order” in which alternatives to capitalism
no longer seem to exist (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 9). Game of Thrones is the perfect exam-
ple of a fantastic storyworld whose structure of feeling expresses the contradictions of truly
global capitalism.
Game of Thrones as Fantastical Capitalism

The stultifying lack of social, political, and economic options that emerges under a fully global
capitalist order can be summed up by the phrase “capitalist realism:” a pervasive social and cul-
tural climate that expresses what Mark Fisher has described as a “business ontology, in which
it is simply obvious that everything in society … should be run as a business” (Fisher, 2009: 17).
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It imposes severe limitations on our social, political, and cultural order, which all come to
express a basic form of “realist” thinking; not in the sense that storyworlds become less fan-
tastic, but in the sense that their social and political organization fully embraces capitalism’s
“naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation” (Marx and Engels, 2012: 38).
“Fantastical capitalism” seems an appropriate term to describe fantastical storyworlds that
give narrative and aesthetic expression to Empire’s spirit of capitalist realism: “fantastical”
because—superficially at least—they present us with storyworlds totally unlike our own,
and “capitalism” because they insistently reproduce the cultural logic of global capitalism.
Fantastical capitalism doesn’t operate on the basis of the 20th century’s media-industrial logic,
developing stable entertainment franchises in which a familiar narrative formula is reassur-
ingly repeated week after week with minor variations. Fantastical capitalism instead expresses
a worldview in which there is no outside, no future, no alternative. Its storyworlds aren’t uto-
pian, because they lack the ability to imagine a future that is fundamentally different, let alone
better. But they also aren’t traditionally dystopian, because their dark worlds aren’t warnings
of what is yet to come.
Fantastical capitalism instead offers storyworlds that are turned in upon themselves, embrac-
ing neoliberalism’s cynical business ethic: characters look out for themselves, and those who
don’t will inevitably be left behind as a “loser” in the game of capitalism. One of Game of
Thrones’s most-repeated lines perfectly encapsulates neoliberalism’s merciless form of com-
petitive individualism: “in the game of thrones, you either win or you die.” Global capitalism’s
cynical structure of feeling pervades the Game of Thrones storyworld, as it does so many other
21st-century world-building franchises, from Battlestar Galactica (SyFy Network, 2004–2009)
to The Walking Dead (AMC, 2010–present).
For the uninitiated: the Game of Thrones franchise is based on a series of fantasy novels and
stories by author George R. R. Martin and known collectively as A Song of Ice and Fire. The
storyworld is set in the imaginary continents of Westeros and Essos, both of which are part
of a storyworld grounded in high fantasy’s familiar pseudo-medievalism. The series charts the
ongoing power struggles between competing dynasties, each of which has some claim to the
Iron Throne that controls the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. In many ways, it follows fantasy
fiction’s “topofocal” tradition, carefully mapping out the many characters’ increasingly byzan-
tine trajectories across its imaginary landscape (Ekman, 2013). The geographical organization
of this storyworld is also familiar from Tolkien’s paradigmatic Eurocentrism, with the central
continent of Westeros transparently standing in for medieval Europe, and the sprawling east-
ern regions of Essos harboring a variety of less “civilized” societies, most of which feature
familiar Orientalist stereotypes (Hassler-Forest, 2016).
Already a book saga with a sizable following among readers of fantasy fiction, Martin’s
storyworld became one of the most popular and iconic world-building franchises follow-
ing the success of HBO’s high-profile television adaptation. Re-titled Game of Thrones, the
series premiered in 2011 as the boutique cable network’s first foray into the fantasy genre,
quickly becoming one of the most widely acclaimed programs in HBO’s roster of original
drama series. The show’s premiere was accompanied by an ambitious publicity campaign
that included games, apps, collectables, and live events, and, since that time, the franchise has
expanded to include numerous videogames, spin-off novels, comic books, role-playing games,
board games, cookbooks, and reams of fan fiction. I will return in more detail to the televi-
sion adaptation later in this chapter, but will now first unpack the storyworld’s political and
ideological basis as established in Martin’s novels.
As a fantastic storyworld, the Game of Thrones universe distances itself emphatically from
the reassuring Tolkienian mold of high fantasy. Middle-earth’s organization represented the
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kind of “thinning” one encounters so often in the genre, as magical and mythical elements
start making way for a purely rational modernity (Sedlmayr, 2014: 167–8). But Martin’s
storyworld moves in the opposite direction: much of the franchise’s primary narrative
revolves around the resurgence of monsters, magical forces, and mythical creatures assumed
to belong to this storyworld’s forgotten past, and an important part of the narrative slowly
sets up the reappearance of dragons and other fantastical beings as forces to be reckoned
with. Instead of Tolkien’s elegiac nostalgia for an older, more innocent world, Martin’s
fantastic fiction cannily reverses this dynamic to show an emergent modernity in which
“all the old numinous powers come roaring to life” (Kriss, 2015). In Game of Thrones, the
truly apocalyptic threat thus comes—with considerable irony—from monsters that no one
believes in.
Unlike the clearly hierarchical organization of human power in The Lord of the Rings,
with the vast narrative building up to the fated return of the one true king, power in this
storyworld has been virtualized, and dissociated from the pre-modern sovereign’s traditional
authority. The execution of Ned Stark toward the end of the first volume has tremendous
significance for the political and ideological organization of this storyworld: as the franchise’s
most obvious embodiment of patriarchal power, moral and ethical stability, and narrative
continuity, his irreversible demise signals a storyworld in which the genre’s clearly defined
distinctions between right and wrong no longer hold sway—a world of radical instability
and precariousness.
Stark’s execution is but the first of many slayings of kings, lords, and other major figures
of authority, with no fewer than five major contenders in the eponymous game of thrones
meeting an untimely end before the fourth book in the series is even over. Where Tolkienian
high fantasy associates power explicitly with the Arthurian tradition of a transcendent, god-
like monarch, this storyworld marks it instead as purely immanent. This is illustrated quite
literally by an exchange that takes place in the second book, A Clash of Kings (1998), between
duplicitous councilor Varys and the highborn but powerless Tyrion Lannister, as they discuss
the question of power in relation to Stark’s public execution:
“Some say knowledge is power. Some tell us that all power comes from the gods.
Others say it derives from the law. Yet that day on the steps of Baelor’s Sept, our
godly High Septon and the lawful Queen Regent and your ever-so-knowledgeable
servant were as powerless as any cobbler or cooper in the crowd. Who truly killed
Eddard Stark do you think? Joffrey, who gave the command? Ser Ilyn Payne, who
swung the sword? Or … another?”
Tyrion cocked his head sideways. “Did you mean to answer your damned riddle,
or only to make my head ache worse?”
Varys smiled. “Here, then. Power resides where men believe it to reside. No more
and no less.”
“So power is a mummer’s trick?”
“A shadow on the wall.” Varys murmured, “yet shadows can kill. And ofttimes a
very small man can cast a very large shadow.”
(Martin, 1998: 101)
If one would expect to encounter yet another return to pre-modern assumptions about
autonomous sovereign power in Martin’s pseudo-medieval storyworld, we find here instead
a pithy summary of Foucault’s argument that political power in the modern age is not held,
but merely exercised (Foucault, 1995: 305). If Tolkien’s Middle-earth was already built upon
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the tension between pre-modern enchantment and thoroughly modern maps and narrative
forms, Game of Thrones clearly embraces global capitalism’s precarious and unstable “world
without an outside” to the fullest.
Branded Storyworlds and the Cultural Logic of Gentrification

The elements of the Game of Thrones storyworld that set it apart from most preconceptions
about popular fantasy are the very ones that connect it to the media-industrial framework of
“Quality TV.” Like HBO’s other drama series, the television adaptation of Martin’s storyworld
is one of narrative complexity, moral ambiguity, high production values, cinematic aesthetics,
and an explicitly “adult” sensibility (Mittell, 2015: 17). As an HBO production, the Game of
Thrones TV series predictably sets itself apart from previous fantasy shows on television. It does
so by foregrounding and even exaggerating those aspects of the books that fit the network’s
established style and audience. Dean J. DeFino has defined this “HBO effect” as a style that has
re-defined the general understanding of quality television “by shaking up the conventions of
genre, expanding the boundaries of content and form, and injecting an unprecedented sense
of fatalism into American television” (2014: 129–30).
I have argued in the previous pages that the Game of Thrones storyworld expresses the
contradictory politics of global capitalism, expressing ideological values, character motiva-
tions, and narrative trajectories that resonate in this particular historical era. But at the same
time, its storyworld circulates globally not just as a successful transmedia franchise, but as an
entertainment brand that is a vital part of global capitalism’s powerful media industries. As
interesting as the storyworld’s political implications might be, we might at the same time
argue that both HBO and Game of Thrones are encapsulated by what Sarah Banet-Weiser
has described as a global “brand culture,” in which cultural meanings are overdetermined by
economic exchange (2012: 7).The recurring paradox in the cultural logic of global capitalism
then becomes that brands must find ways of presenting themselves as “authentic” in order to
generate exchange value. In this contradictory context, “the authentic and commodity self
are intertwined within brand culture,” even to the extent that any former distinction between
authenticity and branded commodities has come to evaporate (p. 14).
In the case of Game of Thrones, the construction of this crucial authenticity relied heavily on
a paradoxical form of “realism”: the franchise’s “grittiness” and discursive authenticity offer a
provocative example of the cultural logic of gentrification, which I have described elsewhere
as “the hegemonic appropriation and adaptation of subcultures and genres in ways that are
experienced as ‘gritty’ and ‘authentic’” (Hassler-Forest, 2015: 192). In the case of Game of
Thrones, this resides partly in the orchestration of fans’ collaboration, as their participation
proves (among other things) that the show is indeed perceived as “real” by fans with the
authority to provide this kind of legitimization. It is also and perhaps even more visible in its
uncompromising dedication to HBO’s familiar kind of “most objectionable programming”
involving sex and violence. While distancing itself from popular perceptions of the fantasy
genre, Game of Thrones offers value to those very “hipsters and gentrifiers” who continuously
seek out novel but crucially “authentic” experiences (Zukin, 2010: 7).
The show’s tendency to court controversy therefore makes more sense once we perceive it
from this perspective of gentrification and discursive authenticity. As the TV series has devel-
oped, it has in fact adapted some of the most violent and controversial moments from the
novels by making them even more intense than the already somewhat notorious source texts.
For instance, in the third-season episode “The Rains of Castermere” that adapts the “Red
Wedding” sequence from the novel A Storm of Swords (2000), the mass murder that takes place
311
on-screen involves not only the grisly deaths of popular main characters Robb and Catelyn
Stark, but also that of Robb’s fiancée, whose pregnant belly is graphically stabbed several times
before her throat is slit. Show-runners and screenwriters David Benioff and D. B. Weiss thus
made the scene not only as graphically violent as possible, but adapted it for television in a
way that made an already grisly sequence a great deal more graphic and controversial, result-
ing in a tremendous amount of desirable media attention that once again emphasized the
show’s “gritty” and “uncompromising” authenticity.
The episode of late-night talk show Conan in the week following this episode’s broad-
cast provides a vivid example of the organic way in which media conglomerates effortlessly
incorporate fandom’s affective and immaterial labor. Author George R. R. Martin was a guest
on the show, and after a few minutes of general chitchat with host Conan O’Brien, he was
shown a compilation of YouTube videos showing viewers reacting to the instantly notorious
sequence. Fans who had already read the books secretly recorded video footage of “newbies”
responding to the scene, resulting in a wide range of hugely entertaining responses. Many
such compilations had been making the rounds via social media, but the moment where the
author was invited to respond on national television, spurred on by one of America’s best-
known talk show hosts, indicates both the extent and the range of this productive interaction
between the media industry and participatory fan culture.
Through such processes, the Game of Thrones storyworld is marked as part of a brand cul-
ture that results from the strategic collaboration between producers and fans eager to par-
ticipate in ways that also increase the franchise’s brand value. While the storyworld includes
political and ideological contradictions that resonate with capitalist realism, they are at the
same time all too easily overshadowed by two separate processes that nevertheless reinforce
each other: first, by the sustained foregrounding of neoliberalism’s fantastical capitalism,
with its precarious structure, its post-ideological politics, and its narrative emphasis on
individuals engaged in unrelenting competition; and second, by the political economy that
has inscribed the franchise with HBO’s “authentic” brand and the cultural logic of gentri-
fication.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have approached world-building from the perspective of political theory,
arguing that fantastic storyworlds are inextricably intertwined with questions of politics and
ideology. Looking back upon two of the most influential paradigms of modern world-build-
ing, I argued that the storyworlds of Tolkien and Star Trek provided profoundly ambivalent
negotiations of late capitalism, combining the relatively stable social and economic organiza-
tion of industrial capitalism with fantastic frameworks that offered a pleasurable release from
the modern age. Apart from their own unmistakable ideological coordinates, each storyworld
thus articulates a complex and contradictory structure of feeling that reflects the social and
economic context from which it emerges.
As a case study, the Game of Thrones franchise illustrates both crucial aspects of the politics of
world-building: first, some of the specific ways in which the storyworld’s organization uncan-
nily reflects the cultural logic of global capitalism; and second, how the franchise exists within
a political economy dominated by brand culture, gentrification, and discursive authenticity.
A media-industrial framework where entertainment franchises circulate as hugely profit-
able brands managed by transnational media conglomerates perfectly complements Game of
Thrones’s thematic emphasis on competitive individualism. In both ways, this storyworld is a
vivid illustration of fantastical capitalism and the politics of world-building.
312
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Martin, G. R. R. (2005) A Feast for Crows, New York: Bantam Books.
Martin, G. R. R. (2011) A Dance of Dragons, New York: Bantam Books.
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Saler, M. T. (2012) As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality, Oxford: Oxford
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Suvin, D. (1979) Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre, New Haven:
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Part 5
Worlds and
World-Builders
37
More’s Utopia
David Glimp
The central assumption informing the following account of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516)
is this: No equipment, no imaginary worlds. This statement appropriates Bruno Latour’s lapi-
dary formula, offered in Reassembling the Social: “No equipment, no rationality” (Latour, 2005:
210n282). Latour’s point is that thinking about the world depends upon all of the available
concepts, tools for measuring, devices for recording, modes of archiving and accessing infor-
mation, disciplines of knowledge, professional competencies, and institutions structuring and
authorizing all the ways knowledge is put into action. This approach to equipment is similar
to Paul Rabinow’s emphasis on the array of techniques, competencies, knowledges, modes of
expertise, and capacities for action through which humans come to be equipped to do things
(Rabinow, 2003: 6–12). Equipment represents all of the machinery—the cognitive capacities;
the conceptual resources; the modes of argumentation; the forms of knowledge production;
the means of gathering, storing, and accessing information; the pedagogical practices through
which subjects are trained to understand and act in the world; the institutional authorities;
the technologies and forms of communication; and so forth—that makes it possible to know
something, to orient oneself in the world, and to act.
More’s depiction of the island of Utopia occupies an important place in the imaginary
worlds tradition that is this volume’s central focus. More creates a world from a vast array of
received materials reworked and combined in a virtuoso performance that inaugurates a new
imaginary place and a new genre of writing, both of which have had remarkable ongoing
afterlives. My focus in this chapter is on how More’s act of literary making depends upon
humanist equipment. In this case, imagined fictional worlds are made possible by the avail-
able resources for governing the world. More is fascinated with how people use and misuse
this equipment, and with the possibilities for adapting humanist equipment for purposes not
fully defined by the institution of humanism. Utopia depicts humanism in action, drawing
on, addressing, analyzing, and playing with the equipment the professional class of humanist
councilors, commissioners, office holders, justices, secretaries, chancellors, and other govern-
mental officials bring to their projects of governmental world-making. The work features
people employing the pragmatic resources, the conceptual, analytical, historical, rhetorical,
and compositional tools afforded by a humanist education for the project of governing. Utopia
also reworks humanist affordances, competencies, assumptions, and professional imaginaries in
order to facilitate humanist sociality. More’s efforts give formal shape to what I shall refer to
as the paraconciliar space of humanist association, a space designed to facilitate and to derive
pleasure from imaginary world-making.
Implicit in Utopia’s policy setting is an understanding of humanism as a pedagogical project
organized around equipping its aspirants for practical activity.There are a host of things students
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learned in moving through a humanist curriculum, a wide array of literacies, competencies

for thought, analysis, argument, deliberation, decision-making, and capacities for translation,
written composition, and spoken performance (see Dolven, 2007: 1–64). Humanism sought
to install in its students something like a basic operating system, a collection of shared texts,
literacies, habits of thought, forms of reasoning, analysis and deliberation, argument and speak-
ing, cognitive equipment upon which those so educated could draw in whatever vocation
they found themselves. For present purposes, a key competence would have been in utramque
partem argument, a deliberative and compositional exercise in the schools in which young
language learners would be asked to speak on both sides of an issue (Altman, 1978; Halpern,
1991: 19–60). The exercise would have the effect of cultivating a capacity for hypothetical or
counterfactual “what if ” thinking, and a disposition toward considering a given set of circum-
stances from multiple perspectives, or, alternatively, for imagining alternative dispensations or
states of reality. Whether students eventually took up careers in the church, or in civic, legal,
administrative, aristocratic, or royal service, humanist equipment provided a basic platform
for active engagement in the world. Though these career paths might differ radically in terms
of day-to-day activity and scope of influence, the humanist pedagogical and ethopoetical
program afforded those who went through it a repertoire of assumptions, shared material
for reflection, forms of analysis and argument, ideas about what would constitute a valid
argument—in short, equipment for imagining possible worlds and a professional disposition
toward application of that equipment.
Scholars have long noted how centrally concerned More’s work is with the question of
governmental service, for instance, in the so-called debate on counsel that occupies most of
Book One. From the outset, Utopia frames its discussion in clear relation to the project of
putting to work humanist training, applying the intellectual and practical equipment of a
humanist education to the concrete task of governing. Stated in slightly different terms, Utopia
is a wonkish text, written by a policy wonk, for other policy wonks in a way that reflects upon
what it means to be a policy wonk. The wonkishness is evident not only thematically, in the
content of the discussion, but also in the shared background and active governmental service
of most of the participants, other historical figures mentioned in the text—Cuthbert Tunstall,
Georges de Themsecke, John Cardinal Morton, all prominent governmental officials (More,
1964: 10 and 20)—and in the impressive array of humanist scholars and governmental officials
who contribute to Utopia’s paratexts (discussed below). The motivating context of professing
humanism, the concern to put humanist equipment to work, is evident as well in the enabling
assumption of More’s work, the understanding of collective life as a made thing. As Julian Yates
asserts, “Utopia generates itself . . . as a lesson in world construction or poeisis” (Yates, 2004: 8).
Staying within the diegetic parameters of Utopia, More’s work elaborates on this assumption
in two ways. First, the text constitutes a wide-ranging account of the available equipment for
world-making. Second, Utopia explores the meta-level process of reflecting upon the activities
of rulers and the professional class of councilors who apply this equipment.
Raphael Hythlodaeus, the primary interlocutor in More’s work, offers a good place to see
these emphases in action, despite, if not because of, his withering account of counsel, espe-
cially that of the French king—an elaborate portrait of duplicity, cunning, avarice, corruption,
and treachery of the first order, a vision of a world wholly made to serve the greed and self-
interest of its rulers (pp. 40–43). His basic assumptions about governance come through in his
report of a dinner party in England, hosted by Cardinal Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury
and Lord Chancellor of England, occurring several years prior to meeting More in Antwerp.
After dinner, a lawyer in Morton’s retinue celebrates the strict justice meted out to thieves in
England, who were summarily executed for their crimes, sometimes “as many as twenty at a
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time being hanged on one gallows” (p. 20). The claim and observation comes with a question
though, a kind of head-scratching on the lawyer’s behalf. Even as he celebrates the brutal effi-
ciency of justice in England as a point of pride, the lawyer puzzles over the fact that so much
crime continues to persist: “he wondered all the more, though so few escaped execution, by
what bad luck the whole country was still infested with them” (p. 20). Hythlodaeus—in a first
introduction to the concerns motivating his account of Utopian existence in Book Two—
argues that theft should not be viewed primarily as a matter of individual moral failing, but as
part of a much broader structural problem involving how wars leave some people wounded
and unable to work; the way the aristocratic practice of maintaining large retinues of servants
and hangers on leaves such people ill prepared to work should their masters be forced to let
them go; the “wanton luxury” (p. 27) of aristocrats, lifestyles of the rich and famous imitated
by people at all levels; and most crucially the way the practice of enclosure of common land
for the purpose of establishing large-scale sheep farming operations displaces large numbers
of subsistence farmers and their families, cast out from their way of making a living, left with
no other way to survive but by begging or stealing (pp. 21–27) (Halpern, 1991: 61–75 and
136–175). Unless England implements a set of policy recommendations and radical reforms,
Hythlodaeus suggests (p. 27), they will be doing nothing more than working to “create thieves
and then become the very agents of their punishment” (p. 28, emphasis added). Government
is making, a creative act, that can be carried out either skillfully or incompetently. The lawyer
assumes that the policy issue is simply a subtractive matter of eliminating moral failing by
executing the incorrigible. By contrast, Hythlodaeus shows how English governance makes
the world it confronts.
Hythlodaeus’s strongly constructivist understanding of how governmental equipment
works is further evident in his radical critique of private property, which is at its base a cri-
tique of the incompetent application of governmental equipment. In addition to his claim
that private property is a basic mechanism for the few to dispossess the many, Hythlodaeus
shows how the very laws designed to protect private property fail to stabilize the world.
Hythlodaeus’s basic assumption about governance is that it should create a relatively stable
world in which the benefits of human activity are distributed as widely and fairly as possible.
By Hytholdaeus’s account, the laws of private property fail to create a stable object at all, in
fact effectively perform a kind of world-unmaking. The unanticipated consequence of prop-
erty law and its enforcement is simply to provide a venue that actually destabilizes property
claims. By way of drawing attention to the practical difficulty people encounter in trying to
keep what they own, Raphael describes those nations:
where all these laws daily framed are not enough for a man to secure or to defend or
even to distinguish from someone else’s the goods which each in turn calls his own,
a predicament readily attested by the numberless and ever new and interminable
lawsuits.
(p. 53)
Under the current dispensation, possessing things is not a stable state secured by a single act of
purchase, transfer, or manufacture. Instead, ownership is a kind of narrative act—a person can
only “call” something “his own”—requiring the ongoing effort of warding off the claims of
others, not only those of land-hungry enclosers or thieves but also possibly the sincere claims
of neighbors or associates not motivated by guile but perhaps by honest misunderstanding.
Part of the difficulty no doubt is that “all these laws daily framed” serve only to enable the
cunningly acquisitive. But the parenthetical phrase at the end of the p assage quoted suggests
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also that the law thwarts such machinations by becoming an end in itself. Drawing attention
to the actual practices through which private property is supposedly secured, Hythlodaeus
shows how the law as currently structured fails to achieve the closure that justice would seem
to demand, in fact creates instability and insecurity.
Rather than bringing into being a stable and secure world, the law as governmental equip-
ment facilitates failed acts of world-making.This is the case especially with the policy of treat-
ing petty theft and murder as juridically equivalent crimes. Far from providing safety for those
with private property, this severity has the effect of heightening personal insecurity:
Since the robber sees that he is in as great danger if merely condemned for theft as if
he were convicted of murder as well, this single consideration impels him to murder
the man whom otherwise he would only have robbed. In addition to the fact that
he is in no greater danger if caught, there is greater safety in putting the man out of
the way and greater hope of covering up the crime if he leaves no one left to tell the
tale. Thus, while we endeavor to terrify thieves with excessive cruelty, we urge them
on to the destruction of honest citizens.
(p. 30)
The hyperbolic efforts to terrify people into respecting property have the impact not of
rendering possession of goods more secure but of rendering the lives of “honest citizens”
and the commonwealth as a whole less secure. Through its very rigor and the categories of
action and consequence it institutes, the law encourages petty thieves to become murderers.
The desire to impact the internal deliberations of the potential criminal (if I steal I will die)
actually produces a different train of thought (if I do not kill I will die); this mental calculus
has the unanticipated effect of redistributing “safety” and “danger” in ways that exacerbate
the impact of deprivation. This is a version of governmental world-making that is in reality
a kind of unmaking, a self-defeating failure of intelligence in the application of governmen-
tal equipment.
It is here that we see how the governmental aspects of world-making provide equipment
for—as well as an occasion for—imaginary world-making. More situates the fictional worlds
he invents in the context of debate about how to govern actual worlds, and no doubt it is
precisely this juxtaposition that accounts for the critical power of utopia as a literary practice.
Hythlodaeus’s answer to the world-unmaking he confronts is to introduce examples of what
we might call hyper-equipped worlds. This is the case with his discussion of the Polylerites
(pp. 31–34), who by Hythlodaeus’s account have solved the problem of criminality and capi-
tal punishment; his mention of the Macarians (pp. 47–48), who enact a restrictive royal fiscal
policy to keep in check the possible greed of their ruler; and, of course, his elaborate descrip-
tion of the Utopian polity that takes up the bulk of Book Two. The lengthy description of
the Utopian polity addresses the complexities and unanticipated consequences deriving from
the dense interconnectedness of moral, legal, economic, social, and political realities. To pre-
pare against the possibility of deprivation requires that you attend to geography, architecture,
kinship structures, living arrangements, education, work, the production and distribution of
food, banking and wealth management, justice, systems of punishment, provisions for warfare,
diplomacy, religion, clothing, disposition of leisure, travel, and collective governance, and so
on. A central concern of the literature on More’s work is the question of Utopia’s actual
radicality, whether the polity offers a liberating vision of freedom or a horrifyingly vivid
portrait of a completely disciplined world, a blueprint for emancipation or for repression. In
the context of the present argument, that is, viewing More’s work as an imaginary world, as
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an adaptive use of world-making equipment, the text offers less of a blueprint and more of
a thought experiment, a performance of a culture of hypothesis and counterfactual inquiry.
Of course, all of the analysis, diagnosis, critique, and imagined alternatives, only sketched
here, arise in the context of Hythlodaeus’s effort to demonstrate why he refuses to enter
counsel. It bears remarking, by way of gauging the effects of Hythlodaeus’s stance, that his
jaundiced view of rulers and their councilors does not fully match up with the reality of
how his ideas are received, at least in England in the household of Cardinal Morton. When
Hythlodaeus describes an alternative to the death penalty for Morton and his guests—detailing
the example of how the Polylerites respond to crime—the lawyer at the table predictably dis-
misses the counterexample as totally ridiculous and unworkable in England. But not the Lord
Chancellor. Morton asserts that “[i]t is not easy to guess whether it would turn out well or ill
inasmuch as absolutely no experiment has been made. If . . . the king . . . were to try this system
[of the Polylerites], then, if success proved its usefulness, it would be right to make the system
law” (p. 34). Give it a try and see what happens. If it works in a limited context, then expand
its general applicability through the available legislative process. Morton attempts to function-
alize Hythlodaeus’s speech, which is to say that he takes it seriously as counsel. In planning an
experiment, Morton strives to operationalize the radical counterexamples Hythlodaeus pro-
vides by incorporating elements of the Polylerites’s governmental practice into a clinical trial.
As I have noted above, Hythlodaeus seizes on the French example of how counsel works as a
paradigm of the corruptness of all counsel as such. But Morton’s openness to Hythlodaeus’s
argument and examples instantiates a kind of practical approach not only opposed to French
conciliar activity, but also actually consistent with the governmental practice of Utopians, who
happily utilize any good idea they encounter if it makes collective life better. Hythlodaeus
can only imagine counsel in terms of absolute corruption, as making an absolutely damaged
world. By contrast, Morton’s example is of an administrator who attempts to reincorporate
the give-and-take of the after-dinner symposium into the practice of making a better world.
The point is not to catch Hythlodaeus in an inconsistency or to challenge the character’s
views as not being perceptive enough. Rather, the point is to shift the effort from adjudicating
between the revolutionary and reformist impulses of the text—from deciding whether or not
Hythlodaeus or Morus wins the debate on counsel—to an effort to understand how More is
using humanist equipment—what we might call the “Hythlodaeus effect” that More strives
to achieve through his character.Though, as noted above, Hythlodaeus rejects counsel out of a
sense of deep disgust for and pessimism about contemporary rulers and the ability of existing
conciliar structures to remake the world in any efficacious way, he is actually really good at
counsel and has completely internalized all of the relevant equipment for humanist world-
making. He thinks and speaks just like a councilor, offers deeply perceptive analysis and advice,
and encourages his listeners to enact new laws, to modify existing governmental structures
and practices, and to govern in a way adequate to the complex realities facing contemporary
rulers. His speech is characterized by its rhetorical sophistication, by a capacity for hypotheti-
cal or counterfactual thinking, critical analysis of relations of cause and effect, and a gift for
the forensic give-and-take of policy debate among those with administrative responsibility.
However, such skill notwithstanding, Hythlodaeus’s rejection of conciliar service effectively
creates a paraconciliar space for interacting with other humanists. Hythlodaeus engages in
conciliar discussion, interacts with others in the vicinity of policymaking and administrative
service, but nonetheless does so outside official conciliar venues. Paraconciliar exchange uses
all of the equipment of humanism, but does so in a way that momentarily puts into abeyance
the immediate question of what to do. Paraconciliar exchange brackets for a period of time
the effort to functionalize the use of humanist equipment beyond the immediate project of
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intensifying humanist sociality, proliferating and augmenting the pleasures of governmental

expertise. Hythlodaeus’s refusal of counsel makes it possible to experience the pleasures of
hypothetical thinking, in utramque partem argument, and other humanist competencies; to
play utopia, to derive the pleasures of imaginary world-making from the adapted equipment
of governance and counsel in ways that cannot fully be accommodated to the governmental
aims of humanism (Holquist, 1968; Glimp, 2008).
The very persistence and vitality of utopia as a genre should be evidence enough of the
pleasures embedded in paraconciliar reflection and exchange, pleasures that survive and fre-
quently intensify across media and temporal and spatial settings. Like contemporary televi-
sion or film franchises—for instance, those of Star Trek and Star Wars—that spawn sequels,
prequels, next generations, spinoffs, reboots, cartoons, video games, novels, fan fictions, and
the like (Wolf, 2012), the pleasures and affordances of utopian equipment for imaginary
world-making sponsored myriad imitations, parodies, revisions, refinements, or elaborations.
More’s Utopia, in fact, already embeds this process of elaboration and ludic remediation in its
earliest editions, which quickly accrue a significant amount of paratextual material: a map
of Utopia, an alphabet and a brief poem in an invented Utopian language, and letters and
laudatory poems from prominent humanists active in intellectual and administrative circles
across Europe. (The paratexts up to the 1519 edition, the last in which More was thought to
have been involved directly, are printed in More [1965: 4:2–45 and 4:248–53] and discussed
insightfully by Boesky [1996: 47–52].) Here is a partial inventory of the letters and poems:
the prominent French scholar and ambassador Guillaume Budé’s letter to the English scholar
Thomas Lupset; the humanist and civic official Peter Giles’s missive to the scholar, coun-
cilor, and diplomat Jerome Busleyden; the letter of John Desmaris, Orator of the University
of Louvain, to Giles about the exemplarity of “the New Island of Utopia” along with a
dedicatory poem; similar dedicatory verses from the Dutch councilor and scholar Gerhard
Geldenhauer and humanist (and soon to be Secretary for the city of Antwerp) Cornelius
de Schrijver; Busleyden’s letter to More; More’s own letter to Peter Giles both immediately
before and immediately after the text; and a letter about the reception of Utopia from the
German humanist scholar Beatus Rhenanus to Willibald Pirckheimer, a senator and councilor
to Emperor Maximilian.
On the one hand, such letters are absolutely conventional, expected puffery of the author
and the work at hand. More apparently worked very hard to get these endorsements from
prominent humanists across the continent (More, 1965: clxxxiii), no doubt by way of elevat-
ing his stature within this pan-European community of humanists and deriving as much
prestige as possible from his work—to make Utopia a media event. At the same time, even as
the paratexts boost More’s cultural capital, praising his intellectual accomplishment, they do so
in a way that reiterates—that is, continue to play with—the premise of the fiction. The map,
invented language, and brief poem in that language playfully run with the premise of Utopia,
developing the fictional world More creates in ways and in media that extend that world
beyond More’s original creation.Those contributing letters write about Utopia as a real place,
refer to Hythlodaeus as a real person, and speculate about where the island is located, or about
its superiority to other polities, ancient and modern. As indicated, the letters frequently talk
about how the book is a spur to governmental reform, but they do so in a paraconciliar way,
with a ludic sense of joining the symposium.The paratexts are both serious and not, admiring
More’s intellectual accomplishment and his playful appropriation of the intellectual equip-
ment of humanism, participating in the game, riffing with the tools of humanist expertise,
even as they reinscribe what Thomas Nashe would come to refer to as the “discontented”
spirit of More’s work (Nashe, 1985: 291).That is, the paratexts dilate the space of paraconciliar
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More’s Utopia
exchange, perform or get in on the game of creatively adapting humanist equipment and
extending the franchise.
This account of humanists gamifying their equipment might seem to emphasize a rela-
tively narrow and rarefied sphere of influence and impact for utopian practice. Certainly, the
utopian conversation and the paratexts involve a highly select group of scholars and govern-
mental officials. But More’s and his collaborators’ decision to print Utopia with the paratexts
speaks to a crucial aspect of utopian practice, an impulse toward enlarging the symposium,
toward recruiting others to play utopia and contribute to the paraconciliar exercise of human-
ist expertise. Utopia embeds within it a disposition toward sharing (Yates, 2004: 41), toward
distributing the fascination and pleasures of making imaginary worlds.To be sure, More’s text,
published in Latin, sought to circumscribe those pleasures by restricting their circulation to
those possessing the requisite literacies. Nevertheless, his work itself imagines a radical exten-
sion of education and the conditions that would allow all Utopians access to the equipment
afforded by humanism (Kendrick, 2004: 28–73, esp. 72–73). More imagines a world in which
all members of the polity have access to education and the free time to employ their learning
as they see fit. Precisely because of the elaborate regulations and demands structuring Utopian
existence, all are able to have access to the time and resources requisite for intellectual pursuits
(Bartolovich, 2013). Such an extension is both consistent with and functionally related to
Utopia’s emphasis on pleasure as the foundation of its moral philosophy and as the objective
of More’s elaborate efforts to create an imaginary world.
I have argued that More’s Utopia both reflects upon and performs the use of humanist
equipment to construct a paraconciliar space for imaginary world-making. The last few para-
graphs also suggest how Utopia itself becomes equipment. My emphasis specifically has been
on Utopia as equipment for gathering. It is so in the sense that More’s literary work assembles
multiple precursors, cultural forms, governmental competencies, modes of thought, and kinds
of knowledge. Utopia is also equipment for gathering in the sense of bringing people together,
even if only momentarily, on an afternoon in Antwerp, or via the medium of letters, or
through the practice of reading. Such a gathering is metasocial, to the extent that the exchange
is organized around reflexive thought about the nature of collective gathering, hypothetical
speculation about the systemic interconnections that create or block “the best state of a com-
monwealth” (p. 2). Certainly, James Holstun is right to underscore how utopia, construed
(as it was by many) as a program, is a way of doing frequently awful things to other people
(Holstun, 1987: 7). But such uses of utopia do not exhaust its impact or explain entirely the
genre’s ongoing appeal. Embedded in More’s literary equipment for world-making, both his
text and his genre, is the basic capacity for suspending the world as it exists, for disrupting or
bracketing the status quo, imagining alternative, differently configured worlds. As I have noted,
utopia has an abiding appeal as a literary genre, an appeal that manifests in the extraordinary
variety of ways More’s equipment has been adapted, retooled, and applied. No doubt, the spe-
cific equipment changes, but the basic dynamic—adapting available resources and repertoires
for comprehending and acting in and on the world—is the same, as is the pleasure attached
to the intellectual accomplishment and sense of possibility associated with imagining worlds.
References
Altman, J. (1978) The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bartolovich, C. (2013) Utopia and Its New Enemies: Intellectuals, Elitism, and the Commonwealth of
Learning. Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 13.3, pp. 33–65.
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Dav i d G l i m p
Boesky, A. (1996) Founding Fictions: Utopias in Early Modern England. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Dolven, J. (2007) Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Glimp, D. (2008) Utopia and Global Risk Management. ELH 75.2, pp. 263–290.
Halpern, R. (1991) The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of
Capital. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Holquist, M. (1968) How to Play Utopia: Some Brief Notes on the Distinctiveness of Utopian Fiction.
Yale French Studies 41, pp.106–123.
Holstun, J. (1987) A Rational Millennium: Puritan Utopias of Seventeenth-Century England and America.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kendrick, C. (2004) Utopia, Carnival, and Commonwealth in Renaissance England. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press.
Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
More, T. (1964) Utopia. Edited by Edward Surtz. New Haven: Yale University Press. Unless otherwise
indicated, references to Utopia are to this edition.
More, T. (1965) The Complete Works of St.Thomas More. Edited by Edward Surtz and J. H. Hexter, 15 vol.
New Haven:Yale University Press.
Nashe, T. (1985) “The Unfortunate Traveller,” in The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works. London:
Penguin, p. 291.
Rabinow, P. (2003) Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Wolf, M. (2012) Building Imaginary Worlds:The Theory and History of Subcreation. New York: Routledge.
Yates, J. (2004) Counting Sheep: Dolly does Utopia (again). Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging
Knowledge [online]. Available at http://www.rhizomes.net/issue8/yates2.htm#1 [Accessed August
16, 2016].
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38
Cavendish’s
Blazing-World
Anne M.Thell
Deep-ocean portals that link parallel worlds. Rainbow-colored, anthropomorphic animal-men

who practice experimental science. Intergalactic mind-travel that offers panoptic views of
entire planets. Few Restoration authors rival Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle,
when it comes to feats of the imagination. In The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-
World (1666), Cavendish presents a world so radically new and strange that it has taken several
centuries for readers to appreciate her inventiveness, her bravado, and her critical acumen.
Even in this outlandishly fantastical travel narrative, however, the real world is never far from
sight: Like many authors featured in this collection, Cavendish understands that imaginative
realms create the perspectival leverage to ‘look back’ upon the real world with enhanced
clarity and precision. Blazing-World showcases the power and range of the imagination, but
it also participates in real-world philosophical and political debates and expresses the author’s
unique metaphysics.
Cavendish published Blazing-World in both 1666 and 1668 as the companion piece to
Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, her most thorough statement of her later natu-
ral philosophy, and therefore meant the two texts to be read as a linked network of ideas.
While Observations pits Cavendish’s hylozoistic vision of the universe against the experimental
and mechanical philosophies of the Royal Society of London (targeting especially Robert
Hooke’s recently published Micrographia [1665]), Blazing-World forwards these same ideas
while also catapulting her nominally fictional characters—the Lady-turned-Empress of the
Blazing-World and the Duchess of Newcastle, who are both avatars of Cavendish herself—
into dazzling, interstellar motion. Taken together, the two texts launch a powerful critique
of the dominant philosophical currents of her era, while they also investigate the nature of
political power, the contingency of human knowledge, and the value of imaginative thought.
Even more specifically, both texts dismantle the subject/object and human/nature binaries on
which Baconian experimental science is based (as I will soon discuss).
Cavendish composed Blazing-World after spending the bulk of nearly 16 years in exile as
a result of the English civil wars. As a maid of honor in the court of Queen Henrietta Maria
(the wife of King Charles I), she followed the monarch into exile in Paris in 1644; in 1645,
she met and married William Cavendish, Marquess (and eventual Duke) of Newcastle. With
the wars raging on in England and the subsequent Interregnum (1649–1660)—the only
period in British history when the country was declared a republic and there was no reign-
ing monarch—the couple remained on the continent until the Restoration of King Charles
II in 1660. Like many royalists, however, their return home was not without disappointment.
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Anne M. Thell
They had suffered heavy losses over preceding decades and felt that they were never entirely
recompensed for their loyalty.
Although Cavendish had no formal education, she read widely and deeply and was intro-
duced to contemporary philosophy by her husband and his brother, Charles Cavendish.While
abroad, she was also exposed to the “Newcastle Circle,” a group of exiled English philoso-
phers that included Thomas Hobbes, Kenelm Digby, and Walter Charleton, and came into
contact with such continental philosophers as René Descartes and Pierre Gassendi (Sarasohn,
2010: 3). Cavendish’s social position therefore allowed her time for private study, access to
some of the most renowned thinkers of the period, and the financial means to publish her
books (which she delivered to university libraries for posterity). But it did not save her from
ridicule: Many savagely attacked Cavendish for “extravagancy” in her writing and social per-
sona (she enjoyed dressing up in fabulous costumes for public outings); implicitly, they also
attacked her audacity in participating in the masculinist intellectual debates of the era (Evelyn,
2000: 91). None of this stopped Cavendish from producing work. She recognized that she
would not gain favor in her own lifetime, yet continued to write prolifically across a wide
range of genres—poetry, fiction, drama, epistles, autobiography, biography, philosophy—so as
to secure a more sympathetic audience in “after-Ages” (Cavendish, 1656: 63).
Often considered one of the earliest pieces of science fiction in English, Cavendish’s
Blazing-World is willfully provocative on every page. It challenges some of the most renowned
philosophers of the period, while it also dramatizes Cavendish’s own philosophical ideas and
strives both to perplex and delight readers. The narrative begins much like a typical romance
by following the adventures of a “Lady” who is kidnapped and then miraculously survives a
tempest at sea; she then passes through the freezing pole of the planet into another, fantas-
tic realm (the Blazing-World), where the Emperor swiftly marries her and then grants her
absolute sovereignty. As Empress, she immediately consolidates power by taking control of
church and state—ensuring that there is one religion, one language, and one ruler (clearly
reflecting Cavendish’s royalist views on what went wrong during the English civil wars)—
and establishing scientific societies, which in their inept attempts to explain nature and their
zeal for scientific instruments overtly satirize the Royal Society of London. After a series of
lengthy interviews with her animal-men scientists and physicians—including the Bear-men,
who adore optical instruments; the Fish- and Worm-men, who collect knowledge about the
sea and earth; and the Ape-men, who are talented “Chymists” (Cavendish, 1666a: 185)—the
Empress desires to create her own cabala and calls in the ‘soul’ of the Duchess of Newcastle to
serve as an assistant and scribe. From this point on, the narrative becomes more intensely laby-
rinthine and difficult to follow, as the Duchess and Empress begin to travel into each other’s
minds—creating and dissolving worlds for the other to view—and then mind-travel into
their former worlds (which are like but not the same as the ‘real’ world in which Cavendish
writes). Eventually, the Duchess helps the Empress subdue a revolution in her former world,
which they execute by orchestrating a fantastic spectacle that involves the Empress dazzlingly
suspended high above the ships of her opponents, and they then part ways. Cavendish ends
Blazing-World with a now famous epilogue that elides the voices of the Empress and author
and impishly informs readers that we can either remain her dutiful subjects or imagine
“Worlds of [our] own” (1666a: 251).
Because Blazing-World so determinedly resists categorization on the level of both content
and form—shapeshifting as it does from romance to scientific treatise to autobiography—
any attempt to ‘define’ this imaginary world seems innately reductive. In much of her work,
Cavendish enjoys demolishing categorical stability; in Blazing-World, she takes this effort to
new levels as she experiments with vertiginously shifting points of view, mercurial characters
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C av e n d i s h ’ s B l a z i n g - Wo r l d
and settings, and fluctuating formal patterns. While the piece has become undoubtedly
canonical, scholars still struggle to understand its formal and rhetorical complexity and its
sometimes playful, sometimes bellicose commentary on seventeenth-century science, politics,
and society. Indeed, even some of the most ‘obvious’ aspects of Blazing-World—its endorse-
ment of royalist politics, for instance, or its engagement with utopic traditions—are not easy
for scholars to maintain definitively (Walters, 2014). We can agree, however, that Cavendish’s
ability to undermine static or dogmatic points of view is one of her greatest strengths as an
author, while her interest in transformation and variety is a defining feature of her work.
Whether exposing the political function of religion or insisting that “self-love” leads scientists
to believe that they are above nature, Cavendish enjoys the role of demagogue and consist-
ently finds way to poke holes in some of the most important philosophical positions of the
period (Cavendish, 1664a: 34).
There are some aspects of Blazing-World that we can confidently discuss, however. Most
obviously, perhaps, is Blazing-World’s critical engagement with English experimental science
of the 1660s. Cavendish has two major bones to pick with the Royal Society’s philosophical
program. First, as a dyed-in-the-wool rationalist, she distrusts their reliance on sense percep-
tion and, more specifically, on optical instruments, preferring instead the superior powers of
the human mind. Moreover, Cavendish emphasizes that we are part of nature—which she
defines as sentient, self-knowing, and alive—and therefore lack the perspective to isolate it as
an object of study. In suggesting that nature is infinite and that it exists in a continual state of
flux (and, similarly, that our own bodies exist only as they move and change), she undermines
the stability of the subject-object relationships that are necessary to uphold experimental
practice (Keller, 1997). Her second major qualm with the Royal Society has to do with their
mechanist account of nature, which mandates that nature functions according to a set of
fundamental laws—like a ‘machine’—and that all natural change or motion occurs due to
the collision between parts. By contrast, Cavendish’s pan-psychic model of nature replaces
collision—or brute force—with a cooperative model of cognition and volition: Sentient
and self-aware, nature recognizes its environments and moves itself “freely,” or “by its own
motion” (Cavendish, 1666b: 27). This vastly different understanding of the universe, then,
offers a potentially gendered critique of experimental science and Hobbesian political systems
(Rogers, 1996). In sum, Cavendish privileges rationalism over experimentalism and forwards
a vitalist natural philosophy that radically challenges empirical understandings of the world.
In Blazing-World, Cavendish voices these objections both explicitly and implicitly, while she
also elucidates and tests her own philosophical ideas. The Empress’s conversations with the
animal-men in Blazing-World—which make up more than a quarter of the text—serve as
an obvious platform for Cavendish to disparage the Royal Society and to showcase the supe-
riority of her own views. Here, the Empress badgers the animal-men with a series of com-
plex questions about nature (queries about regeneration, for instance, or the precise motion
of celestial bodies). Unsurprisingly, the Empress finds that their optical instruments delude
rather than augment their senses—and, more dangerously from a political standpoint, cause
endless disputes rather than conformity—and therefore demands that the Bear-men break
their instruments (though she ultimately allows them to keep their devices so long as “their
disputes and quarrels should remain within their Schools, and cause no factions or distur-
bances in State” [Cavendish, 1666a: 171]). Later, she initiates a similar question-and-answer
session with the Blazing-World’s immaterial spirits, whom she calls on to answer questions
that the ‘natural’ anthropomorphic men cannot answer. Interestingly, in philosophical con-
texts, Cavendish is thoroughly materialist—meaning that she admits no spirits or immaterial
substances in nature—and investigates extensively the immaterial world only in her fiction.
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Anne M. Thell
In this way, Blazing-World treats more experimentally her own philosophical ideas and there-
fore demonstrates Cavendish’s awareness of the differing capacities of various genres and the
speculative function of the imagination.
Indeed, like later science fiction, Blazing-World tests the speculative limits of Cavendish’s
scientific ideas; for instance, when she describes the mind-travel of the Empress and Duchess,
she is actually probing the limits of the materialism and volitional motion that she outlines
in her natural philosophy. Also in the vein of contemporary science fiction—a genre that
Blazing-World helps to inaugurate—Cavendish showcases a series of new inventions that are
fantastical but technically possible. Here, we might think of the spectacular optics of Blazing-
World’s imperial palace, which is intricately encrusted with precious gems, or the nation’s
impressive boats, which can be configured like “a Honey-comb” so as to elude wind and
enemy assault (Cavendish, 1666a: 160). Moreover, Cavendish takes great pleasure in pulling
back the curtains, so to speak, to show readers the machinery behind her contrivances and
spectacles. For instance, she tells us that she harvests stone from the sun and stars to create the
chapels that inspire awe in worshippers, and describes to us explicitly how the Fish-men keep
her suspended over the ocean when she conquers the enemy armies of her former world.
Thus, readers enjoy a level of confidence with the narrator that characters within the text lack.
Many of these inventions are playful—and some wildly fictitious—but some are also genuine
possibilities that in themselves showcase the value of the imagination. Like contemporary sci-
ence fiction, Blazing-World takes advantage of its fictional status to investigate the operability
of ideas and inventions that Cavendish finds intriguing but ontologically uncertain.
In the category of science fiction—and space travel, more specifically—Cavendish has
some clear precedents. Just forty years earlier, Francis Bacon provides a formal antecedent
by attaching a piece of utopic fiction, New Atlantis, to his treatise on natural history, Sylva
Sylvarum (published posthumously in 1627). In 1608, Johannes Kepler composed his Somnium
(published 1634), which mingles scientific observations about the cosmos with a fictional
story about how the earth looks when viewed from the moon, while in 1610 Galileo pub-
lished The Starry Messenger, which includes detailed lunar and planetary observations but also
strives to entertain and transport readers to other worlds (Spiller, 2000). In terms of fictional
space voyages, we might also turn to the earliest known account of travels through outer
space, Lucian’s parodic True History (c. 150–180), or, in the seventeenth century, to Cyrano
de Bergerac’s Voyage to the Moon (published posthumously in 1657) and Francis Godwin’s
The Man in the Moone (published posthumously in 1638). Interestingly, Cavendish herself
acknowledges several of these potential sources when discussing the connection between
Observations and Blazing-World in the preface to the latter text: Here, she explains that she
“chose such a Fiction as would be agreeable to the subject treated in former parts,” but then
explicitly distinguishes her fictional voyage from “Lucian’s, or the French man’s World in the
Moon” on the grounds that she describes a “World of my own Creating” (Cavendish, 1666a:
153). Whether or not her project is as radically novel as she claims (and whether or not she
was influenced by Lucian, Cyrano, or Godwin), Cavendish sees Blazing-World as something
entirely new and entirely her own. However, like the authors above, Cavendish treats imagina-
tive fiction as a more formally open means of investigating the nature of the universe.
In addition to its engagement with early modern science, Blazing-World is deeply political,
as we see from the moment that the Emperor grants the Lady “absolute power to rule and
govern all that World as she pleased” (Cavendish, 1666a: 162).The Empress has an astute sense
of how political power is constructed and maintained—religion, science, language, along with
prodigious pomp and spectacle—and immediately sets out to ensure that each of these areas
is firmly under her control. For the most part, the Empress’s governing system can be defined
328
as a kind of monarchical absolutism—although her innate magnificence always ensures that

her subjects and her husband desire to adore and obey her—and her various social programs
always operate with the end-goal of sustaining her unconditional rule. Even religion is largely
utilitarian in Blazing-World, as the Empress wishes to convert all citizens to her own faith
(and resorts to synthetic devices so as to ensure this uniformity). The Empress is particularly
sensitive to the formation of factions—and potential dissent—which she believes can only
lead to chaos and war. To this end, she works to unify all aspects of daily life so that there is
no room for conflict. Interestingly, however, it seems that even this vigilant political system
is not uniform enough to sustain peace: Near the end of the first part of Blazing-World, the
Empress is concerned because her scientific societies have led to factions and disagreement,
and the Duchess therefore advises her to dissolve these societies and restore Blazing-World
to its original condition (which saw no dissent and thus apparently did not need fixing).
Throughout, Cavendish seems to recognize that political systems are at least in part imag-
ined (in that they must convince citizens to believe wholeheartedly in the divine power of
monarchs) (Stevenson, 2003); nonetheless, Blazing-World describes a type of absolutism that
Cavendish seems to view as necessary for maintaining order.This political outlook might also
relate to gender, as Catherine Gallagher has suggested, as seventeenth-century women writers
often attach themselves to royalist politics—despite their innately patriarchal structure—so
as to imagine for themselves an empowered individuality at the top of that system (rather
than a position that is equal with others) (Gallagher, 1988). Of course, the Empress’s worry
about political discord also has clear parallels with Cavendish’s experience of the English civil
wars. Blazing-World is the product of a tense political climate, with the Restoration heralding
a renewed sense of order but also a society profoundly scarred by the internal conflicts of
preceding decades.
Finally, because of Cavendish’s unique position as a female author in the 1660s, and because
Blazing-World demonstrates the supreme power of the Empress (not the Emperor), many
have understood the text as a critique of the dominant gender roles of the period. However,
Cavendish’s views on gender are deeply complicated. While her boldness in educating herself
and disseminating her own work and her sensitivity to the gendered construction of early
modern science might make us suspect—or even hope—that she is a proto-feminist writer
who was never appreciated in her own era, this is not necessarily the case. In Blazing-World—
and across her oeuvre—there is no consistent sense that Cavendish is interested in improving
the unfair treatment of women or that she believes that men and women are equal on intel-
lectual or political grounds. For instance, she points out that women lack education, oppor-
tunities, and exposure—expostulating famously that women “Live like Bats or Owls, Labour
like Beasts, and Dye like Worms”—but she also complains about female dispositions and
considers herself superior to most other women (Cavendish, 1662: 143). In Blazing-World, the
Empress notices immediately that the women have no place to worship, but goes on to build
separate chapels for them and to stupefy them into belief (as she does with the men). Similarly,
in Blazing-World, Cavendish offers a sustained vision of intellectually stimulating and mutually
beneficial female friendship—in the relationship between the Duchess and the Empress—but,
given that these characters clearly embody aspects of Cavendish herself, it is uncertain whether
she is drawn to female solidarity or, by contrast, solipsism. Cavendish’s hierarchical views on
rank are also difficult to square with potentially egalitarian views on gender. At the very least,
however, Cavendish recognizes that women remain hidden from sight and lack authority and
opportunity, while she also points out that men enjoy freedom, status, and epistemological
authority because of their gender. Thus, while Cavendish’s views on gender remain some-
what ambiguous—with scholars disagreeing on the extent to which she can be c onsidered
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Anne M. Thell
a proto-feminist writer (or even an author interested in gender per se [Boyle, 2004])—she
is certainly unique in publicly writing against the views of powerful men and in imagining
spaces where females can think and write as they please. Moreover, while Cavendish’s status as
a female author relegates her to the margins of the period’s intellectual debates, it also para-
doxically enables a privileged or distanced position from which to view those developments;
in fact, perhaps what connects Cavendish most concretely to modern feminist thinking is her
attention to the situatedness of intellectual and political endeavor (which in the 1660s involves
specific circles of learned gentlemen) (Keller, 1997: 450; Haraway, 1988).
More than anything else, however, Blazing-World is a treatise on the power of “Fancy”: a
testament to the endless fecundity, variety, and scope of the imagination, which Cavendish sees
as the engine that drives the human pursuit of knowledge. For Cavendish, the imagination
allows us to conceive and assess the viability of novel ideas, while it also allows us to engage
with the outside world and to entertain other points of view (a fact beautifully demon-
strated by the Empress’s travel into other minds and worlds in Blazing-World). Indeed, she sees
the imagination—or looking inwards—as our only means of escaping our limited, monadic
perspectives. In this way, the imagination has real pragmatic applications and is not simply
phantasmagorical (Starr, 2006: 299). Furthermore, as Cavendish outlines in Observations, the
imagination is not only a powerful generative force but also an embodied mental process
that gives rise to new thoughts that are also material. This philosophical explanation of the
‘real’ existence of imagined matter underpins Cavendish’s claim in her Epilogue that she is
“Authoress of a whole World” (Cavendish, 1666a: 250). According to her own philosophy,
everything that she has imagined into being in Blazing-World has gained material existence—
both in our thoughts and on the page—and will continue to exist in various formats in the
future (Thell, 2015: 30–31). Blazing-World is a textual embodiment of the imagination; or, as
Cavendish explains, her writings are “Paper Bodies” of imaginative endeavor that, like nature,
migrate and change but never die (Cavendish, 1664b: 81).
Pioneering scholarship on Blazing-World over the past several decades has opened this
important author to study and made her unique voice accessible to students and scholars
of the period. However, given the complex nature of her thinking and writing—and given
the fact that Cavendish has only recently attracted the attention of historians of science and
philosophy, who now often view Cavendish as a legitimate voice of the period—one gets a
sense that Cavendish studies have only just begun. In her complicated rhetorical and formal
strategies and her ever-evolving ideas about nature and the self, Cavendish has ensured that
her audiences must read and reread her work to understand and critically engage her ideas.
Indeed, because Cavendish treats genre as a means of reformatting and reassessing her ideas,
some of her less-studied work—her lesser-known philosophy, for instance, or several frag-
ments of unfinished plays she printed in 1668—will no doubt contribute to the future study
of Blazing-World. To date, Blazing-World has spurred a rich and unresolved dialogue about its
aims, scope, and methods (something Cavendish would certainly appreciate). Finally, then,
“Margaret the First” (Cavendish, 1666a: 153) has risen to “Fames Tower” (1656: 62) and her
ideas “Live in Many Brains” (1664b: 71).
References
Boyle, D. (2004) “Margaret Cavendish’s Nonfeminist Natural Philosophy,” Configurations 12(2),
pp. 195–227.
Cavendish, M. (1656) “A true Relation of my Birth, Breeding, and Life,” in Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara
Mendelson (eds.), Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader, New York: Broadview, 2000: 41–63.
330
Cavendish, M. (1662) “Female Orations,” in Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson (eds.), Paper Bodies:
A Margaret Cavendish Reader, New York: Broadview, 2000, pp. 143–47.
Cavendish, M. (1664a) Philosophical Letters, London.
Cavendish, M. (1664b) “CCIX Sociable Letters,” in Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson (eds.), Paper
Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader, New York: Broadview, 2000, pp. 64–85.
Cavendish, M. (1666a) “Blazing World,” in Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson (eds.), Paper Bodies: A
Margaret Cavendish Reader, New York: Broadview, 2000, pp. 151–251.
Cavendish, M. (1666b) Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, ed. Eileen O’Neill, Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001.
Evelyn, M. (c. 1667) “Letter of Mary Evelyn to Ralph Bohun,” in Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson
(eds.), Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader, New York: Broadview, 2000, pp. 91–93.
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39
Swift’s World of
Gulliver’s Travels
David Alff
In March 1726, Jonathan Swift rode into London carrying a manuscript that would become
one of Western literature’s most enduring and incendiary fictions. The first volume of
Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a
Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships hit bookstalls that October, and the work has
never since gone out of print. Best known by the short title Gulliver’s Travels, Swift’s land-
mark satire has remained popular both for its scalding ridicule of the powerful and pre-
sumptuous, and for the settings it devised to stage these attacks. The plot follows the career
of Lemuel Gulliver, a Nottinghamshire native and Cambridge/Leiden-educated surgeon
who sails the globe in search of fortune but falls victim to storms, pirates, and mutiny. These
misfortunes send Gulliver foundering toward strange and fantastical lands: Lilliput, whose
residents are one-twelfth the size of humans; Brobdingnag, whose denizens are twelve times
larger; Laputa, whose inhabitants are so engrossed in mathematics, music, and astrology
that they lose common sense; and Houyhnhnm Land, where sophisticated horses enslave
Humanoid Yahoos.
These places (and premises) have proven so individually captivating that readers tend to
isolate them from one another, partitioning Gulliver’s four-part exploration into a string of
episodic jaunts. This chapter, by contrast, foregrounds what these different locations share.
It suggests that despite their dissimilarities, Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, and Houyhnhnm
Land belong to a single fictional world with a traceable literary heritage and cohesive politi-
cal agenda. Swift situates this imaginary realm within the world he knew, its different regions
working in concert to defamiliarize taken-for-granted aspects of Georgian-era society, and
inspiring subsequent authors to dispatch Gulliver on itineraries of their own design.
Arriving at Fiction
Swift’s world-making finds generic context in his volume’s oft-ignored full title: Travels into
Several Remote Nations of the World. The first word, “travels,” places Gulliver’s star-crossed jour-
neys within an established Anglophone tradition of travel writing (Sherbo, 1979, p. 125).
Eighteenth-century book markets abounded with prose accounts of various lands, cultures,
and crossings, from Charles Patin’s Travels thro’ Germany, Bohemia, Swisserland, and Holland
(1701) to Johannes Nieuhof ’s Voyages and Travels into Brasil and the East Indies (1703) to James
Brome’s Travels Over England, Scotland, and Wales (1707). Joseph Addison remarked in 1710
that “[t]here are no Books which I more delight in than in Travels,” adding “especially those
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S w i f t ’ s Wo r l d o f G u l l i v e r ’ s T r av e l s
that . . . give the writer an opportunity of showing his parts without incurring any danger of
being examined or contradicted” (p. 408).
Addison insinuates that travel writers composed spectacular stories by dispensing with the
truth: they favored sparkling rhetoric and thrilling plots over rigorous reportage. Likewise,
Gulliver’s Travels would critique travel writing’s tendency to embellish its source materials by
placing its hero in patently unreal places while claiming to be an accurate record of actual
events (Rivero, 2002, p. 5n5). “Travels” signifies an attempt at satirizing the truth-making
stratagems of a literary genre while also evoking the travails of Gulliver, his labors of survival,
ceaseless hardships, and vocational ascent from ship doctor to captain. “Travels” encompasses
maritime toil and the storytelling that conveyed its experience to readers.
Swift begins fashioning Gulliver as a travel author through an epistolary preface. Gulliver’s
Travels begins not on a wayward ship or unchartered island, but rather in a letter from “The
Publisher to the Reader.” This letter, composed by one “Richard Sympson” (and not the
actual publisher, Benjamin Motte), credits Gulliver’s veracity: “The Style is very plain and
simple; and the only Fault I find is, that the Author, after the Manner of Travellers, is a little too
Circumstantial” (p. 5). Gulliver errs only in being “circumstantial” or details-obsessed, which
is actually a back-handed compliment meant to bolster his credibility. Readers access Swift’s
made-up realms through letters that characterize their central correspondent, Gulliver, not as
a fanciful creator of worlds, but the opposite, a diligent compiler of facts.
The title indicates that Gulliver’s “Travels”—his trips and writing—survey “Several
Remote Nations,” domains that lie beyond the limits of British military conquest and mer-
cantile empire, and yet still belong to a single, contiguous world. Mark J. P. Wolf observes that
secondary worlds are “usually connected to the primary World in some way, but, at the same
time, set apart from it enough to be a ‘world’ unto itself, making access difficult” (2012, p. 25).
Swift places his imaginary lands in proximity to real places through map plates that appear at
the beginning of each volume. One map sticks Lilliput southwest of Sumatra. Brobdingnag
occupies a peninsula jutting out of central California. Laputa hovers over the Pacific Ocean
east of Japan. The Country of Houyhnhnms lies southwest of Australia. These lands appear to
occupy real space in the world, and yet reaching them is harder than their cartography would
suggest. Gulliver only arrives at “remote nations” through catastrophic events that isolate and
disorient him, making return trips to these regions uncertain, perhaps impossible.
Take, for example, Gulliver’s arrival at Lilliput. Early in the first voyage, Gulliver keeps
meticulous track of his ship’s location, pinpointing it to “the Latitude of 30 Degree 2 Minutes
South,” northwest of Tasmania (p. 16). But all spatial precision is lost when that ship crashes
into a rock. Gulliver boards a lifeboat with six crewmen and rows “by my Computation
about three Leagues” from the wreck (p. 17). A “flurry” causes the vessel to capsize, separating
Gulliver from his companions, and leaving him to swim “as Fortune Directed me . . . push’d
forward by Wind and Tide” (p. 17). Once the storm passes, Gulliver finds himself “within my
depth,” and proceeds to walk “near a Mile” to shore at what “I conjectured was about eight
o’Clock in the evening” (p. 17). Gulliver qualifies his testimony through a string of prepo-
sitional phrases: “by my Computation,” “near a Mile,” “about eight o’Clock.” These provisos
convey Gulliver’s increasing bewilderment, as human guesswork assumes the place of navi-
gational instruments. By the time he falls asleep and is bound to the grass by a tribe of tiny
warriors, it is not possible to know where Gulliver is. Spatial and temporal distortion mark his
passage from a reckonable world of eighteenth-century shipping to an island swarming with
six-inch subjects.
Gulliver reaches Lilliput in the desultory aftermath of shipwreck. He also returns to Swift’s
imaginary world through catastrophe. On his voyage to Brobdingnag, a storm blows the ship
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so far off course “that the oldest Sailor on Board could not tell in what part of the World we
were” (p. 70). Pirates seize the vessel of Gulliver’s third voyage, setting him adrift “about three
Hours” of sailing from an unoccupied island chain (p. 131). Gulliver’s crew mutinies on his
fourth voyage, confining him to a cabin where “I knew not what Course they took,” before
setting him ashore in a longboat (p. 188). When Gulliver asks where he is, “[t]hey all swore,
they knew no more than myself ” (p. 188). Readers enter Swift’s storyworld through confusing
incidents that place Gulliver outside the known coordinates of human geography.
Gulliver’s homebound passages likewise offer few clues as to his location. Most disorient-
ingly, he departs Brobdingnag with the assistance of a gigantic eagle that picks up his sleeping-
box and plunks it down in the ocean, where a passing ship saves him (p. 117–8). Despite the
unnavigable distance that buffers real and fictive worlds in the Travels, Swift maintains that
Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib, and Houyhnhnm Land
share the same globe as Britain, and are composed of the same earthly matter. Gulliver passes
through no magic portal to reach Lilliput, for instance, nor does Swift reduce his tour of
Balnibarbi to the status of dream vision. To the contrary, Gulliver demonstrates the material
reality of these realms by returning home from them with artifacts that confirm his tales. He
leaves Brobdingnag with the carcasses of three enormous wasps, and donates them to the
Royal Society (p. 92). Gulliver departs Luggnagg with a red diamond that he sells in England
for eleven-hundred pounds (p. 182). He leaves Lilliput and Blefuscu with a flock of miniature
cattle, “six Cows and two Bulls alive, with as many Ewes and Rams, intending to carry them
into my own Country, and propagate the Breed” (p. 64). With the exception of one sheep
that was devoured by rats en route, the animals survive the passage, enabling Gulliver to make:
a considerable Profit by Showing my Cattle to many Persons of Quality, and

others … Since my last return, I find the Breed is considerably increased, espe-
cially the Sheep which I hope will prove much to the Advantage of the Woolen
Manufacture, by the Fineness of the Fleeces.
(p. 66)
These souvenirs transform Swift’s fictional realms into a public spectacle. British subjects may
never lay eyes upon Lilliput or Blefuscu, but livestock from those kingdoms captures their
interest and even spurs projects of industrial improvement. Swift renders his imagined lands
geographically inscrutable at the same time he allows Gulliver to profit from their remnants.
Less felicitously, Gulliver returns from his final voyage with Houyhnhnm mannerisms and a
contempt of mankind: “I fell to imitate their Gate and Gesture, which is now grown into an
Habit, and my Friends often tell me in a blunt way, that I trot like a horse which, however, I take
for a great compliment” (p. 235). Gulliver’s descent into misanthropy suggests that ontologies
and sentiment, as well as people and objects, can cross the permeable boundary between the
ordinary world and that of literary fantasy.
Gulliver’s Description
Gulliver’s Travels surveys wondrous lands that transform Gulliver himself into a source of
wonder. One cannot grasp the miniscule character of the Lilliputians, for instance, without
marveling at Gulliver’s newfound immensity, or appreciate the dispassionate governance of
the Houyhnhnms without interrogating the mix of patriotism, xenophobia, and charisma
built into the narrator’s European worldview. Swift’s aim is “not make us see things, but to
make us see things oddly,” according to Cynthia Wall, who shows how the Travels surfaces
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the unnoticed strangeness of eighteenth-century life as personified in its affable ambassador,

Gulliver (2006, p. 81).
Gulliver sees and becomes visible through what Nelson Goodman calls a “system of
description,” a set of rhetorical procedures for constructing a certain vantage upon the world
(1978, p. 2). “Description,” the setting down in words of an entity’s qualities and features, was
also a keyword for Swift, who uses some variant of the root verb “describe” sixty-five times
in Gulliver’s Travels. Gulliver “describes” storms, sovereigns, and temples, as well as the humors
and dispositions of Laputians,” and, most awkwardly, horse-riding to Houyhnhnms (p. 133).
Swiftian description visualizes “remote nations” in order to draw attention to the limits of
human perception. For example, in Brobdingnag, Gulliver delivers a “sort of Description of
the Country” that records the realm’s sublime dimensions (p. 92). We learn that the prince’s
dominions stretch six-thousand miles in length and three- to five-thousand in breadth (p. 92).
His palace occupies a seven-mile circumference (p. 92). A mountain range forming the bor-
der of his realms reaches thirty miles high (p. 92). These figures tabulate—but scarcely make
comprehensible—Brobdingnag’s epic scope, compelling readers to share with Gulliver the
cognitive burden of adjusting to an outsized land.
Brobdingnag’s immense scale also has the effect of giving Gulliver microscopic insight into
the bodies of its residents. This bracing view sensitizes readers to the nauseating aspects of
their own anatomies:
There was a Woman with a Cancer in her Breast, swelled to a monstrous size full
of Holes, in two or three of which I could have easily crept, and covered my whole
Body. There was a Fellow with a Wen in his Neck, larger than five Woolpacks, and
another with a couple of wooden Legs, each about twenty foot high. But, the most
hateful Sight of all was the Lice crawling on their Clothes.
(p. 93)
Visceral disgust is the result of examining any body up close, Swift suggests. Gulliver’s account
of behemoths and their dermatological blemishes reminds readers that they are themselves
porous, protruding, and fed upon.The second part of the Travels pivots between surveying vast
topographies and exfoliating the minute grossness of being alive.
Gulliver also describes British society throughout his journeys, with each rendition mark-
ing his growing alienation from his native culture. These passages present Europe through
dishabituated eyes, offering what Dennis Todd calls a “satiric anatomy of specifically English
attitudes and values” (1992, p. 239). Robert Demaria likewise takes Gulliver’s discourses as
evidence that the “broad context of Gulliver’s Travels is the history of England” (2003, p. xv).
When compared to one another, these speeches reveal how Gulliver’s time abroad has made
him aware of the hypocrisy, greed, and violence naturalized within his home world. Near
the beginning of the book, Gulliver celebrates the ingenuity of British civilization, includ-
ing its “illustrious Body called the House of Peers” and the “extraordinary Care always
taken of their Education in Arts and Arms” of legislators and judges who undertake the
“Defense of their Prince and Country by their Valour, Conduct and Fidelity” (p. 106). But
by his fourth voyage, Gulliver’s nationalism has dampened considerably. When his master
Houyhnhnm asks why human nations wage war on one another, Gulliver answers with
deadpan cynicism:
Sometimes the Ambition of Princes, who never think they have Land or People
enough to govern: Sometimes the corruption of Ministers, who engage their Master
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Dav i d A l f f
in a War in order to stifle or divert the Clamour of the Subjects against their Evil
Administration.
(p. 207)
Gulliver’s disillusionment derives from his years of residence in foreign lands, an experience
that forces him to establish an objective idea of England.The captain’s withdrawal from family
and parish after the fourth voyage is also the result of the challenge posed by description to
square new and old forms of experience with one another. Brobdingnag and Houyhnhnm
Land form more than an inert backdrop to Gulliver’s acquisition of self-knowledge. As objects
and occasions of description, they foreclose on the possibility of Gulliver returning to a home
that is familiar.
Travel after Travels

Lubomír Doležel asks how fictional worlds “move through literary history” independently
of the works that first conceived them (2000, p. x). Given subcreation’s tendency to inspire
succeeding acts of storytelling, this chapter closes by tracing the literary afterlife of Swift’s
imagined realms. By 1727, the “remote nations” of the Travels had become a popular site of
readerly tourism thanks to a host of hackwork adaptations that presumed to revisit Swift’s
realms. Gulliver seemed to anticipate this outpouring of follow-ups, guides, and parodies in
the first volume, where he advertises his own forthcoming history of Lilliputian civilization:
But I shall not anticipate the Reader with farther Descriptions of this kind, because I
reserve them for a greater Work, which is now almost ready for the Press, containing
a general Description of this Empire, from its first Erection, through a long Series
of Princes, with a particular Account of their Wars and Politics, Laws, Learning and
Religion; their Plants and Animals, their peculiar Manners and Customs, with other
Matters very curious useful . . .
(p. 39)
Gulliver brackets Lilliputian politics, customs, and botany as subjects for future writing.
“Lemuel Gulliver” would, in a certain sense, fulfill this promise. His name appears as an
authorial pseudonym on the title page of several works that purport to supplement the Travels,
though none of these works was by Swift. Just as Gulliver enjoyed a prolific (if counterfeit)
career post-Travels, the lands he discovered would also stimulate future authors. Some of these
writers added backstories to Gulliver’s adventures. Memoirs of the Court of Lilliput (1727), for
instance, reports on a string of sex scandals that rocked the Lilliputian ruling class. These
“Accounts of the Intrigues . . . omitted in the two volumes of Travels” contain one episode in
which the emperor’s admiral, Skyresh Bolgolam, tries to rape a maid. Gulliver intercedes to
save the woman, giving Bolgolam a motive to seek revenge in the later action of the Travels.
Another narrative appendix, John Arbuthnot’s An Account of the State of Learning in the Empire
of Lilliput (1728), claims to be “faithfully transcribed out of Captain Lemuel Gulliver’s General
Description of the Empire of Lilliput, mention’d in the 69th Page of the First volume of his
Travels.” Arbuthnot’s Gulliver details Lilliputian librarianship while browsing books “with a
Miscroscrope, the biggest being a folio about half an inch long” (p. 20).
Other adaptations replaced Gulliver as narrator. The “editor” of A Cursory View of the
History of Lilliput (1727) claims to have extracted the work “from the Papers of a deceased
Friend of mine” (p. A2v). Pitting this friend’s account against Gulliver’s, the editor claims that
336
“in those Places where my Friend and Mr. Gulliver differ, I am of the opinion the latter was
mistaken” (p. A3v). A more imaginative work of adaptation, Alexander Pope’s Poems Occasion’d
by Reading the Travels of Captain Lemuel Gulliver (1727), endows characters recounted in Swift’s
Travels with their own voices. These figures include “Titty Titt, Esq; Poet-Laureate to his
Majesty of Lilliput,” who composes an ode to “The Man-Mountain” in fittingly diminutive
lines extending only three syllables each (pp. 3–5). By contrast, “The Grateful Address of the
Unhappy Houyhnhnms” consists of heroic couplets, befitting the solemn dignity of a noble
equine race who, according to the poem, are now reduced to slavery in England (pp. 10–11).
“The Lamentation of Glumdalclitch for the Loss of Grildrig: A Pastoral,” meanwhile, lends
Gulliver’s Brobdingnagian nurse a degree of interiority and self-reflection only hinted at in
the Travels:
Trembling, I’ve seen thee dare the Kitten’s Paw;

Nay, mix with Children, as they play’d at Taw,
Nor fear the Marbles, as they bounding flew:
Marbles to them, but rolling Rocks to you.
(p. 7)
By perceiving how pets, toys, and children terrorize small-scaled life, Glumdalclitch shows that
she can see the world through Gulliver’s eyes. Pope’s “lamentation” retrospectively endows her
with powers of sympathy that recast Gulliver’s misadventures in Brobdingnag with a new
affective dimension, while prompting readers to contemplate the emotional aftermath of the
captain’s sudden escape.
Many Gulliverian appropriators tried to thicken Swift’s storyworld by lending it new nar-
rative strands and perspectives. Others sought to do precisely the opposite by publishing
“keys” to decode the Travels’ allegorical content. In a letter to Swift, the poet and playwright
John Gay mentions “people of greater perspicuity, who are in search for particular applications
in every leaf ” (in Rivero, 2002, p. 266). Matter-of-fact and frequently erroneous, these ciphers
flatten Swift’s fantastical world into a simple mirror of British political life. In 1726, the pub-
lisher Edmund Curll issued A Key, Being Observations and Explanatory Notes, upon the Travels of
Lemuel Gulliver under the imposing moniker, “Corolini di Marco.” Key asserts that “under the
allegory of a Voyager, Mr. Gulliver gives us an admirable System of modern Politicks,” before
assigning real-world referents to virtually every facet of Swift’s text (p. 5). Of the Laptuain
metropolis, Mildendo, “di Marco” writes “a German Critick assures me by a Jumble of Letters,
is not other than Londino, anglie London, and indeed the Description given of it, as well as
the Emperor’s Palace, corresponds very much with the Royal Court at St. James’s” (p. 18). An
unwavering belief that Swift’s imagined world was “no other” than England leads the Key’s
author to interpret Laputa as a “very good Rehearsal of Bishop Wilkins’s’ World in the Moon,
or the Castles in the Air built upon a noted Lady of Quality” (p. 5).
Like John Gay, Lubomir Doležel questions the value of such literal-minded analysis, call-
ing it “one of the most reductive operations of which the human mind is capable: the vast,
open, and inviting fictional universe is shrunk to the model of one single world, actual human
experience” (2000, p. x). Granting fictional worlds the power to do things other than reflect
reality does not mean ignoring historical context. That Swift wrote in the fractious partisan
climate of the Hanoverian Age certainly influenced the kind of world he chose to describe.
Today, criticism of the Travels appears to negotiate conflicting impulses: to fathom the radi-
cal creativity that fashioned places like Balnibarbi and Luggnagg, while also making political
history explain this dreaming. J. A. Downie stakes out a sensible middle ground between
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Dav i d A l f f
these approaches when he suggests that readers take Swift’s allusions “in general”—that is,
by recognizing their allegorical possibilities without becoming bound by them (1989, p. 19).
Impersonated, refuted, and decrypted, Gulliver would continue traveling through the
twentieth century. In Vladimir Savchenko’s Gulliver’s Fifth Travel (1988), the captain explores
the land of Tikitaks, whose inhabitants drink fruit juice to make their skin transparent. Edgar
Brau’s Captain Lemuel Gulliver’s Last Voyage (1988) sends Swift’s hero to the basin of the River
Plate in South America, where he makes various observations on the depravity of post-
modern culture. The 1965 Japanese film Gulliver’s Travels Beyond the Moon sends Gulliver into
space, where he fights the legions of the Queen of Purple Planet alongside a boy whose
dream encapsulates the action. Martin Rowson’s Gulliver’s Travels Adapted and Updated (2012)
retargets Swift’s satire at contemporary political figures, including British Prime Minister
Tony Blair. The Travels continues to provoke and inspire not simply because of its topical
parodies and games of scale, but its creation of a world able to accommodate four centuries of
satirical projects. Swift’s imagination of lands that could stage and shape action made Lemuel
Gulliver both an eighteenth-century sensation and a durable vector of literary invention.
References
Anon. (1726) A key, being observations and explanatory notes, upon the travels of Lemuel Gulliver. London:
Edmund Curll.
Anon. (1727) Memoirs of the court of Lilliput. London: Lucas Bennet.
Anon. (1727) A cursory view of the history of Lilliput. London: A. Moore.
Addison, J (1835) The tatler. Philadelphia: M. Wallis Woodward and Company. (Original work published
1710)
Arbuthnot, J. (1728) An account of the state of learning in the empire of Lilliput. London: J. Roberts.
Demaria, R. (2003) Introduction. Gulliver’s travels. New York: Penguin. (Original work published 1726)
Doležel, L. (2000) Heterocosmica: fiction and possible worlds. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Downie, J.A. (1989) The political significance of Gulliver’s Travels. In J. Fischer, H. Real, J. Wooley (Eds.),
Swift and his contexts (pp. 1–19). New York: AMS Press.
Goodman, N. (1978) Ways of worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.
Pope, A. (1727) Poems occasion’d by reading the travels of captain Lemuel Gulliver. Dublin: J. Hyde.
Sherbo, A. (1979) Swift in travel literature. Modern Language Studies 9, 114–127. Retrieved May 16, 2015,
from Jstor.
Swift, J. (2002) Gulliver’s travels (A. Rivero, Ed.). Norton Critical Editions. New York: Norton. (Original
work published 1726)
Tood, D. (1992) The hairy maid at the harpsichord: some speculations on the meaning of Gulliver’s
Travels. Texas Studies in Literature and Language 34, 239–283. Retrieved June 13, 2015, from Jstor.
Wall, C. (2006) The prose of things: transformations of description in the eighteenth century. Chicago: Chicago
University Press.
Wolf, M. J. P. (2012) Building imaginary worlds: the theory and history of subcreation. New York: Routledge.
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40
Holberg’s Nazar and
the Firmament
Peter Fitting
Ludvig Holberg was probably the most European of Scandinavian writers before Ibsen and
certainly the best known; he is often referred to as the “father” of both Danish and Norwegian
literature. Although he is usually remembered today as the “Molière of the North” for his
satirical plays, like so many other 18th-century figures, his writing encompassed a wide range
of fields: he was the author of historical and political works, as well as philosophical and legal
essays, a series of “Moral Reflections,” and some autobiographical “Epistles,” and he was the
author of an important subterranean utopia: The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground,
with a new theory of the Earth and the History of the previously unknown Fifth Kingdom. First
published in Latin in 1741, Niels Klim was quickly translated into a number of European lan-
guages: the first French edition appeared that same year, the first English edition a year later.
Holberg’s utopia recounts the adventures of Niels Klim after his fall through the Earth’s
crust into the center of the Earth where a solitary planet moves about a subterranean sun.
The first utopian part of his adventures is set in the land of Potu (= utop), which is inhabited
by a race of intelligent and mobile trees. Although he is eventually recognized as “a rational
animal” (for there are unintelligent apes in Potu and the Potuans’s initial reaction is analogous
to the Houyhnhnms’s assumption that Gulliver is a Yahoo), Klim is never able to attain full
Potuan status. In a land in which important statements are repeated three times, his quickness
is seen as a flaw, and he is nicknamed “Overhasty.” In utopian fashion, he is assigned a task in
keeping with his character: because he moves so much faster than the trees he is made the
king’s chief messenger.
After several years as a messenger, he is commissioned to make a tour of the entire planet
of Nazar and to report back to the king. The planet is only about 900 miles in circumference,
and his trip takes him two months instead of the two years it would take a tree. In this sec-
tion of the book the author turns from utopia to satire, as Klim visits the different provinces
of Nazar. The descriptions of these countries—all inhabited by different species of intelligent
trees who speak the same language as the Potuans—are very brief, and most present satirical
sketches of alternative societies. For instance, in the province of Quamso, everyone is happy,
healthy, and bored; in Lalac, where there is no need to work, everyone is unhappy and sickly;
in Kimal, the citizens are wealthy, and spend all their time worrying about thieves; and, in the
“land of Liberty,” everyone is at war.
When Klim returns to Potu, his account of the trip around the planet immediately becomes
a best-selling book, and he is frustrated when he is told that he must nonetheless continue
as the king’s messenger. In an attempt to improve his status, Klim tries to find a brilliant
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Peter Fitting
innovation “that should demonstrate the excellence of my genius and wipe away my present
infamy” (Holberg, 79). But changes come very slowly to Potuan society; its laws and institu-
tions have evolved over centuries, and proposed changes are examined and judged at length;
and there are severe penalties for rash or injurious proposals. Foolishly, then, Klim settles on
a proposal to “exclude women from the administration of public affairs” (p. 123). Instead of a
promotion, Klim is banished to the “firmament,” the underside of the Earth’s crust, to which
he is carried by a giant bird.
His adventures on the Earth’s inner crust begin in the kingdom of Martinia, a country of
intelligent apes who, because of their preoccupation with fashion and their changeableness,
may be seen as a caricature of the French (“a light babbling race of creatures, and vast admir-
ers of novelty,” p. 130).Too late, Klim realizes that he had been “translated from a land of sages
to a country of fools” (p. 135). Now he is thought too slow, but because of his strength he is
made one of the Syndic’s “body chairmen . . . [with] the honor of carrying only [the Syndic]
or his lady” (p. 135). In Martinia, however, Klim is able to enhance his status through his wits,
and he soon makes a fortune by introducing wigs to the Martinians. His success is short-
lived, however, for after he rebuffs the advances of the Syndic’s wife, he is accused of trying to
seduce her. In exchange for a guilty plea he is sentenced to the galleys.
From social satire the book now becomes almost entirely fantasy. As a galley slave, Klim is
taken on a trading voyage to the Mezandorian islands, which lie across a vast sea. These lands
are inhabited by various fabulous creatures, beginning with a country of jack-daws at war
with their neighbours, the thrushes, and including a malodorous land of creatures who speak
“a posteriori,” as well as a country of string basses who communicate by music. “Their necks
were pretty long with little heads upon them; their bodies were slender and covered with a
smooth kind of bark or rind in such a manner as that a pretty large vacuity was left between
the rind and the body itself. A little above the navel Nature had placed a sort of bridge with
four strings . . . One of these hands was employed in holding the bow, as the other was in
stopping the strings” (pp. 156–157).
After a shipwreck he finds himself in a remote country inhabited not by intelligent animals or
trees, but by primitive humans, who, of all the creatures of the subterranean world, “alone were
barbarous and uncivilized.” Klim sets out to redress the situation, intending “that this reproach
would soon be removed and that [they] would recover that dominion which Nature has given
to man over all other animals” (p. 181). One of the bitterest ironies for Klim lay in the fact that
every subterranean race he had encountered—plant and animal—with the single exception
of the human Quamites, were civilized. Unlike Gulliver’s loathing of the Yahoos, Klim takes it
upon himself to civilize the Quamites; but this civilizing mission is perhaps the most Swiftian
part of the book. Using his knowledge he is able to manufacture gunpowder and to conquer,
one by one, all of the countries of the firmament. Klim’s many conquests lead him to see him-
self as the “Alexander of the Subterranean world,” and he becomes a tyrant. When his subjects
rebel, he is forced into flight; looking for shelter, he falls into the same hole through which he
had previously fallen, thus returning to Norway.There he meets an old friend to whom he tells
his story, but the friend convinces him that in this time of religious persecution, he would do
well to conceal his adventures. Although he was once an emperor, Klim accepts an appointment
as a curate, marries, and has children. After his death, his friend publishes the manuscript.
Holberg’s Interior World

Although Holberg’s text is almost certainly the first portrayal of a hollow Earth, there is no
explanation of where this idea comes from. As he is falling, Klim does make a reference to
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Holberg’s Nazar and the Firmament
accounts of an interior realm, but without any details: “I fell to imagining that I was sunk
into the subterranean world, and that the conjectures of those men are right who hold the
Earth to be hollow, and that within the shell or outward crust there is another lesser globe,
and another firmament adorned with lesser sun, stars, and planets” (p. 13). But who are “those
men?” There is no actual depiction of a hollow Earth in the works of earlier writers who
are sometimes identified as Holberg’s sources, only hollows and chasms, caves and subter-
ranean channels running beneath the surface of the Earth in the theories of earlier writers
like Athanasius Kircher’s Mundus Subterraneus (1665) or in the anonymous Relation D’Un
Voyage Du Pole Arctique Au Pole Antarctique Par Le Centre Du Monde, Avec la Description de ce
périlleux passage, & des choses merveilleuses & étonnantes qu’on a découvertes sous le Pole Antarctique
(1721) (See the “Underground Worlds” chapter of this book). In the most complete study of
Holberg’s sources, J. Paludan (writing in Danish in 1878) reviews extensively the traditions
of the imaginary voyage and Holberg’s borrowing from Classical authors like Lucian. His
chapters include “Geographical Fictional Voyages” and “Astronomical Fictional Voyages,” but
as these titles suggest, none of the works mentioned, from the Odyssey or Plato’s discussion of
Atlantis in the Timaeus, to Francis Godwin and Cyrano’s trips to the moon (1638 and 1657,
respectively), depicts a subterranean world.
In a recent article, Patricia Fara tries to establish the links between the “concentric spheres”
theory of the English astronomer Edmond Halley (1692) and Holberg’s novel. After explain-
ing Halley’s “multi-shelled model” of the interior of the Earth—a “set of habitable globes
one within the other”—Fara goes on to describe the dissemination of those ideas and why
it is likely that Holberg was aware of them. While this is a fascinating discussion of Halley’s
hypothesis, it is not very convincing in terms of making what she herself admits is a “tenu-
ous link” between the two, particularly since Holberg’s inner world is not a set of globes but
a single planet circling an inner sun as well an inhabited inner crust—significant features of
subsequent subterranean fictions, but not part of Halley’s scheme.
Inner Astronomy
While the origins of the idea remain unclear, the absence of a direct link is not important. Fara
shows how much discussions of both the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere (particularly
following Bernard de Fontanelle’s Entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes [1686]) as well as theo-
ries of hollows within the Earth were part of intellectual discussion in the 18th century.While
Klim mentions “those men . . . who hold the Earth to be hollow,” there is no indication of who
“those men” might be, and little discussion of the properties of the inner world.There is, as we
have seen, a vast inner cavity with an inhabited inner crust as well as a planet circling a “subter-
ranean sun” in the void. This planet has a circumference of “200 German miles” (p. 48), that
is to say roughly 900 miles, which would make the diameter of Nazar almost 300 miles. (For
comparison, the diameter of the Earth is almost 8,000 miles and that of the moon a little over
2,000 miles.) Holberg has not calculated these distances very carefully since the Earth’s radius
was known to 18th-century scientists (in his Mesure de la terre [1671], Jean Picard estimated that
it was about 4,000 miles). But for purposes of his story, Holberg shrinks substantially the inner
globe: Klim estimates that he fell in darkness for about a quarter of an hour before emerging
into the light of the inner world. Even if he fell through the Earth’s crust at 100 miles per hour,
that would only carry him 25 miles or so, a far cry from the 4,000 miles of the Earth’s radius,
which we can assume would be the distance from the surface to the center of the Earth.Then,
when Klim is exiled to the Firmament later in the book, he notes that it is only “100 [German]
miles away” (roughly 450 miles); to which he is carried by a giant bird in about 24 hours.
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Peter Fitting
Geography
Both Nazar and the Firmament are complex worlds. Klim visits 27 of the countries on Nazar,
which contain a “great variety of inhabitants”—all different species of intelligent trees speak-
ing a common language, but with many different customs and societies. These countries are
furthermore often separated by “seas and straits,” but there is no geographical description of
the planet Nazar beyond this. The Firmament, with a far greater area, is also composed of
many different countries and types of intelligent and often fanciful beings. After he is sen-
tenced to the galleys, he leaves Martinia for the Mezandorian islands, which lie across a vast
sea, constituting, as Klim puts it, “a kind of Indies for the Martinians” (p. 149). But, again, there
is no discussion of the actual characteristics or features of these different lands.
The Mechanical Realm

The relative indifference to the physical details of the imaginary world is characteristic of
many early utopias and satirical works. Klim was written at a time when the popular travel
narratives of the 16th and 17th centuries had evolved into the imaginary voyages of the 18th
century, a way of allowing writers to visualize political and social alternatives to their own
societies while skirting the interdiction of such political speculation by passing it off as an
authentic narrative.
Thus, the invention of a hollow Earth with both a habitable planet floating in the center
and an equally habitable inner crust offered the author a vast canvas for his imagination. As for
the many different inhabitants of Nazar and of the Firmament, they are also vehicles for satire
and fantasy, although Holberg does make a minimum gesture toward verisimilitude when
Klim notes, for instance, that the trees did in fact have “hands:” in his first contact with the
Potuans, he observes that the trees have “at the extremity [of some of their branches] six large
buds in the manner of fingers” (p. 17). But there is no further explanation of how they move
or speak or what they eat or how Klim’s best-selling book was printed or distributed. Similarly,
on the Firmament, Klim encounters a land of intelligent speaking animals: “though [they]
resemble brutes as to their shapes, yet they have hands and fingers which grow out of their
forefeet . . .” (p. 166); but, again, this is the only nod toward plausibility, and a weak one at that.
With the exception of the brutish humans of Quamso, the inhabitants of the underworld
have a developed civilization, with absolutely no indication of how anything was produced.
Klim describes the capital of Potu as “remarkable for its stately edifices and for the elegant
order and proportion of the streets and highways” (p. 18). But who built these highways or
how they were constructed is not mentioned. This is basically an 18th-century European
world with differing social structures and moeurs, allowing the author not only to imagine
a better alternative (Potu), but to satirize some other utopian schemes. But Holberg is not
interested in exploring the practical side of his imaginary world—it is simply a canvas for his
political and social imagination.
There are two exceptions to this absence of any consideration of mechanical matters. At
one point in Potu, he sees a ship “whose oars seem to be moved by a kind of magical impulse,
for they are not worked by the labor of the arm, but by machines like our clockwork. The
nature of this device I cannot explain, as being not well versed in mechanics” (p. 48). The
clockwork suggests the 18th-century fascination with automatons and mechanical devices,
rather than some truly magical or psychic energy.This machine is an anticipation of machines
to come, which followed the invention of the stationary steam engine later in the century.
Unfortunately, this is the only such reference to a machine in the novel.
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Holberg’s Nazar and the Firmament
Then, when he lives among the “barbarian” but human Quamites, he decides to “reform
[their] savage manners” by expanding their empire. Military training is followed by the dis-
covery of saltpeter and the manufacture of the hitherto unknown gunpowder, to replace the
pikes and short swords on which they had relied until then. Although Klim is able to cast
“barrels for guns and other kinds of weapons,” there is no mention of how the metal of mus-
kets was forged or the guns assembled.
Conclusion
Wherever he may have found the idea, Holberg was the first to present a developed vision of
the hollow Earth.Yet, like so many other utopias and satirical works, this imagined world was
only the setting, a vast canvas on which he could render his ideas.This contrast is most explicit
in science fiction, which from the beginning included philosophically oriented works, where
the scientific plausibility of the creations was secondary to the ideas, as opposed to works
that attempted to uphold a basic scientific verisimilitude. Jules Verne and H. G. Wells—the
so-called “fathers” of science fiction (with Mary Shelley the mother)—are often cited as rep-
resenting those two poles.They both wrote novels about a voyage to the moon (the first, De la
terre à la lune, 1865; the second, The First Men in the Moon, 1901).Verne considered that he had
been scientifically sound in his description of a rocket to the moon, and he was quite dismiss-
ive of Wells’s use of an anti-gravity device to get there. Like Holberg’s use of the hollow Earth,
Wells was interested in the lunar setting only insofar as it provided him with the setting to
present and critique an alternative society. In the tradition of 18th-century utopias, the imag-
ined place provides an opportunity for philosophical and political speculation; on the other
hand, in what would come to be called “hard” science fiction, the imaginary place provides
an opportunity to explore and develop mechanical and scientific possibilities and alternatives.
Holberg’s Niels Klim is clearly an example of the former, albeit one that has been remembered
not for its utopian and satirical dimension, but for the evocation of the hollow Earth.
References
Fara, Patricia, “Hidden depths: Halley, hell and other people.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
Part A, 38, 3 (2007): 570–583.
Fitting, Peter. “Buried treasures: Reconsidering Holberg’s Niels Klim in the World Underground.” Utopian
Studies 7, 2 (1996): 93–112.
Holberg, Ludwig. The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground. Introduced and edited by James I.
Mc Nelis, Jr. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press (1960).
Paludan, Julius. Om Holbergs Niels Klim, med saerligt Hensyn til tidligere Satirer i Form af opdigtede og vidun-
derlige Reiser (1878).
Peters, Sigrid. Ludvig Holbergs Menippeische Satire: Das ‘Iter subterraneum’ und seine Beziehungen zur antiken
Literatur. New York: Peter Lang (1987).
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41
Paltock’s Sass
Doorpt Swangeanti
Edward O’Hare
It might surprise some readers to know that one of the most elaborate and beguiling examples
of pure world-building was written back in the middle of the 18th century. Derided as a
bloated and meandering flight of fancy by its contemporary critics, The Life and Adventures
of Peter Wilkins (1750) remains an obscure and unfairly neglected work even today. The only
recorded work of fiction from the pen of an otherwise undistinguished lawyer of Cornish
heritage, Robert Paltock (1697–1767), who lived and worked in various parts of London his
entire life, this decidedly eccentric novel is a remarkable testament to the creative imagina-
tion’s power to manifest itself with exceptional vividness in the most unlikely of circumstances.
In the course of its considerable length, Peter Wilkins shifts from being a picaresque romance
to an impressively lifelike narrative of travel in exotic climes, a thrilling shipwreck story, and
finally a densely detailed account of a wondrous civilization located in a distant corner of the
Earth’s surface, complete with descriptions of its marvelous inhabitants, customs, and history.
For its original reviewers, the weakness of Paltock’s obviously ambitious novel lay in what
they regarded as its shapelessness and its perverse refusal to conform to a single literary mode.
Inevitably, they were drawn into making comparisons with the two most celebrated fabulist
fictions of the age, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
(1726). The brief notice in the Monthly Review (the only journal in which it received sub-
stantial critical attention) described Paltock’s novel as “the illegitimate off-spring of no very
natural conjunction” (Arthur, 2010: 57) between these works, but deemed it very much their
inferior “both as to entertainment or utility” (p. 57). As far as it was concerned, Peter Wilkins
contained “all that is impossible in the one or is improbable in the other, without the wit and
spirit of the first, or the just strokes of nature and the useful lessons of morality in the second”
(p. 57). In this way, it argued that Paltock’s imaginary voyage story amounted to nothing more
than a show of “dullness and unmeaning extravagance” (p. 58) that served no purpose.
For the critic of the Monthly Review, the exact verisimilitude that characterized Defoe’s
revolutionary work had no place in one that described a land of fabulous beings much as
Swift’s allegorical masterpiece had already done. Clearly, if an author was going to create
an imaginary world it must either be with the intention of educating the reader or simply
enchanting them, and Paltock’s lengthy account of his underground realm of Sass Doorpt
Swangeanti did neither. However, in the eyes of a later generation of readers, it was Paltock’s
very determination to produce a novel that could not be reduced to one or other of these
basic categories that made Peter Wilkins so important. After being largely forgotten for decades
it was rediscovered by many of the great figures of the Romantic period, who lavished praise
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Pa lt o c k ’ s S a s s D o o r p t S wa n g e a n t i
upon it: Coleridge defended it as “a work of uncommon beauty” (Paltock, 1990: viii), Leigh
Hunt discussed its merits in his critical essays, Charles Lamb identified it as an influence, and
Walter Scott acknowledged its dazzling originality, while the Shelleys read it together with
mutual delight. The quality they all recognized in the work, the sheer ebullience of an author
intoxicated by the endless inventive possibilities of fiction itself, is what continues to make
Paltock’s novel and the imaginary world of Sass Doorpt Swangeanti so enthralling.
Sprawling and unruly though it is, the central plot of Peter Wilkins can be outlined with
reasonable simplicity. After a series of reversals of fortune threatens to destroy his personal and
professional reputation, resourceful Cornishman Wilkins decides to begin his life anew by
joining the crew of a merchant ship. Unfortunately, the machinations of fate are nowhere near
done with him. Sickness and an encounter with a French warship see him clapped in irons
and set adrift. Eventually reaching the African coast, Wilkins survives several further perilous
episodes in the jungle, his simple conception of reality enlarging all the time. Sailing onward
to the very ends of the Earth, he crosses into the unknown waters of the Antarctic Ocean.
Here, beyond the established limits of earthly geography, the hapless mariner falls under the
unshakeable magnetic influence of the South Pole. Wilkins’s vessel is destroyed, and the small
boat he escapes in is dragged through a mysterious portal and into a dark subterranean tunnel.
This inland sea sweeps him deep into the interior of the globe, and when daylight returns
after several months the castaway emerges into a world beyond anything his already extensive
travels could ever have prepared him for.
This eventful record of Wilkins’s tribulations and his discovery of this uncharted realm
only take up less than a third of the first volume of Paltock’s novel, and the entirety of what
follows chronicles his gradual assimilation into the fantastic society he eventually discovers.
On arriving in this world (also known, he later learns, as Normnbdsgrsutt), Wilkins is very
much a Crusoe-esque figure, alone and deprived of almost everything that connected him to
his native land, apart from the few items he managed to salvage and his memories of home.
Finding himself in the vicinity of “a prodigious Lake of Water, bordered by a grassy Down,
about half a Mile wide, of the finest Verdure I had ever seen” (p. 74), he resolves to convert a
nearby grotto into a dwelling. Like Crusoe, it is not long before Wilkins discovers the extent
of his skills and abilities, and through the act of constructing his simple “Habitation” he
comes to see himself as “the absolute and sole Lord of the Country” (p. 84). Into this unspoilt
and apparently uninhabited arcadia, Wilkins brings an impulse toward cultural colonization
that, to varying extents, shapes all of his interactions with Normnbdsgrsutt (or Sass Doorpt
Swangeanti, as he later renames it), and this subject shall be returned to later in this chapter.
Once he has built and fortified his home,Wilkins continues to establish himself by growing
the fruits, plants, and grains he needs to stay alive. In order to do this, he builds a wet-dock
for his boat, constructs a machine for supplying fresh water, and chooses a fertile piece of
woodland for cultivating his essential provisions. Before long, he learns how to make bread,
a form of cheese, and carefully sets aside an ample store of supplies to sustain him in times
of bad weather. He experiments with growing different varieties of herbs, nuts, and berries.
He also comes to a better understanding of the strangeness of his new environment when he
samples the fruits of the crullmot tree and the padsi bush, which taste like the flesh of fowl
and fish, and catches a monstrous “Beast Fish” (which has a snout and is covered with shaggy
hair) in a net. As much as it now resembles home, Wilkins’s existence in this lush and tranquil
domain remains a deeply unhappy one. In tandem with his development of his miniature
kingdom, he has grown wretched and miserable from loneliness. At night he is woken by
what he fancies are voices murmuring outside his grotto, and this only makes the anguish
of his isolation more acute. Through his own ingenuity and sustained effort the castaway
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E dwa r d O ’ H a r e
now has all that a human being could ever want, except the one most important thing: the
company of another person.
Just as Wilkins faces the dismal prospect of spending the rest of his life in complete solitude,
Paltock’s novel performs another of its sudden shifts. Having survived a summer and a winter
by himself in this self-made pastoral seclusion,Wilkins ventures out of his dwelling after hear-
ing the mysterious voices yet again, and this time he discovers that they were not the product
of his imagination after all. Another soul has, quite literally, fallen from the heavens and landed
on what might well be described as his “doorstep.” Moreover, the injured creature Wilkins
now takes into his care is the living embodiment of the landscape of Normnbdsgrsutt, and
is wildly alluring, delicate, and surprising. In the same manner that he embraced this sublime
world the moment he saw it, Wilkins states that this “human Shape lying at my Feet” (p. 105)
was “the most beautiful Creature I ever beheld” (p. 104), and he falls in love with her almost
before she has regained consciousness.
The object of Wilkins’s affections, a companion worlds apart from Crusoe’s Man Friday, is
the enchanting Youwarkee. She is a gawrey, one of the flying people for which Paltock’s novel
is best remembered. If Wilkins has hitherto perceived the radical Otherness of Sass Doorpt
Swangeanti in its curious flora and fauna, the unearthly vision of a female humanoid whose
nubile body has an enclosed set of membranous wings is the final confirmation that he is
a visitor in a place totally unlike any other on the planet. However, it is the very Otherness
of Youwarkee’s body, its rich exoticism and exceptional elegance, that draws Wilkins to her.
Writing about the character, Leigh Hunt observed that “a sweeter creature is not to be found
in books” (p. ix), but Youwarkee is far more than just some representation of idealized femi-
ninity. Neither is Wilkins’s wooing of her a crude metaphorical figuration for the act of colo-
nization. Despite the powerful eroticism that surrounds Paltock’s description of their romance,
Wilkins manages to overcome his carnal desire for Youwarkee. Instead the two live together in
his grotto for the winter, caring for each other and participating in a gentle exchange of ideas.
Even after Wilkins marries her, Paltock makes a point of showing that Youwarkee’s fantastic
physiognomy (the very wings that he finds so magical) prevents them, at least for the time-
being, from engaging in sexual congress.
Inasmuch as Wilkins saves her life, Youwarkee is also his salvation. It is her willingness to
trust him and be his friend that grants him access to her society, which in time becomes a
more than acceptable substitute for the one he left behind back in England. Rather than being
repelled by her radical alterity, it is Wilkins’s enlightened affection for Youwarkee and his
respectful curiosity about her racial difference that lead him to forsake the safety of his grotto
and return with her to Sass Doorpt Swangeanti so that he can meet more of her kind. This
is a reciprocal process, since she must also come to accept the “unnaturalness” of his wingless
condition and his physical inferiority compared to the glumms, her virile male counterparts.
When Youwarkee fully recovers, her relationship with Wilkins (her husband, or “barkatt”)
is tested when she makes plans to leave him but promises that she will return. However, it
transpires that she is no ordinary gawrey but the daughter of the governor of the town of
Arndrumstake, and when she is discovered to be alive and well Wilkins is enthusiastically
welcomed into her community.
At first glimpse, this kingdom of Sass Doorpt Swangeanti seems shockingly primitive.
Despite being prepared for this by his conversations with Youwarkee, Wilkins’s imaginary
voyage beyond the South Polar Sea seems to have brought him somewhere that has remained
in the same state that the human world was at the dawn of its history, and shows no signs of
ever advancing. A monarchy ruled over by a supreme king, this land of flying people has only
the most basic of political structures, and no extensive legal system, scientists, doctors, t eachers,
346
or any of the other refinements of 18th-century Europe. Even religion has not moved much
beyond a simplistic monotheism. What makes Paltock’s imaginative skill all the more impres-
sive is that he created Sass Doorpt Swangeanti almost twenty years before the first of Captain
Cook’s celebrated voyages to the antipodes, and well before readers would have had the
opportunity to become familiar with the details of the cultures that existed in untouched
serenity on the series of Hawaiian islands he visited.
As mentioned previously, Paltock’s novel is marked by a verisimilitude comparable to that
of Robinson Crusoe, and no matter how bizarre Wilkins’s adventures become (and these can
often be quite bizarre indeed) this quality means that it succeeds in carefully and deliberately
maintaining the pretense of being an authentic exploration narrative. Like many later imagi-
nary voyage tales, Paltock creates the impression that the work is a genuine account and that
the land of Sass Doorpt Swangeanti is real by surrounding his central story with a framing
narrative. In this, a benevolent passenger (who possesses the initials “R. P.”) bound on a return
voyage from Cape Horn to England explains how he took pity on Wilkins after he was pulled
aboard the vessel having been found floating in the ocean. Paying for Wilkins’s passage home,
the passenger then transcribes what proves to be the old man’s death-bed confession before
he slips away just as the ship reaches Plymouth. The precision with which Wilkins recalls his
early exploits in England and Africa is carried over into his account of his time living amidst
the gawreys and glumms, and he looks at this world with the sagacious eyes of an amateur
anthropologist. This aspect of Paltock’s book is further enhanced by its series of engraved
plates representing the flying creatures, whose style closely resembles the illustrations of native
peoples that accompanied genuine works of exploration at this time.
For all of the intricacy of Paltock’s framing narrative and the verisimilar nature of his
descriptions, there is another factor that does even more to invest the underground realms
of Peter Wilkins with a semblance of authenticity. The chief component of Paltock’s approach
to world-building, and the one that provides the clearest demonstration of his remarkable
ingenuity in this field of fiction, is the novel’s language. Taking his cue from Swift, Paltock
develops marvelously exuberant and outlandish words for the contents of his imaginary world
and the novel stands as a virtuoso display of linguistic invention. While Swift mostly reserved
such fantasy names for characters and places, Paltock far outdoes his predecessor. As his nar-
rative progresses and Wilkins becomes ever more familiar with the culture of the gawreys
and glumms, he learns the strange terms they use for even the most mundane of its features.
In this way, like so many imaginary realms invented by later authors, Paltock’s Sass Doorpt
Swangeanti is primarily a world of words.
Paltock’s obvious delight in devising words of this kind and his perceptive recognition of the
importance of the role of language in the creation of convincing secondary worlds finds its fullest
expression in the glossary of 103 terms he includes as an appendix to the novel, one of the very
first times such a glossary had been added to a work of fiction. Predating Dr. Samuel Johnson’s
dictionary by five years, the definitions listed in Paltock’s “EXPLANATION of Names and
Things Mentioned in This Work” eventually become indispensable as the reader follows Wilkins
to Brandleguarp, the main city of Sass Doorpt Swangeanti, where he communicates with its
inhabitants. Using this glossary, the reader can, for example, confirm that a “Mouch” means
a church and a “Hoximo” a graveyard, that a bag for provisions is called a “Colapet” and that
something sweet is described as “Parky,” or that to be “Praave” means to be modest, and to say
“Ors clam gee” is to say to another person “Here I am.” Whether Paltock’s marvelous vocabu-
lary had any wider etymology or whether his words are simply complete inventions, its richness
adds immeasurably to the subcreation of Peter Wilkins, and from it can be traced the origin of
the constructed languages of writers as varied as Tolkien, Orwell, and Edgar Rice Burroughs.
347
One question dominates the very small body of critical writing on Peter Wilkins:
e stablishing whether or not Paltock’s novel should be considered a utopian text. On one
level, there seems to be much to support this contention. The land Wilkins discovers after
being sucked through the polar portal is a gloriously fertile agrarian realm, one that offers
all the necessities of life in abundance. It remains absolutely unravaged by the unstoppable
encroachment of industrialization, which came to deface the natural world by the end of
the 18th century, something that may explain why the novel was so popular with the later
generation of Romantic writers. Having been the victim of many varieties of human deceit
and treachery in Europe and then in Africa, the forms of relationship Wilkins establishes in
Sass Doorpt Swangeanti are for the most part based on trust, equity, and the desire for greater
understanding. Also, in his marriage to Youwarkee, he attains a degree of sexual fulfilment
he had never enjoyed with his late wife Patty back in England. The loving union of the
Cornishman and his flying woman produces seven happy children, who embody the best
virtues of their parents.
While all of these factors seem to reinforce the image of Sass Doorpt Swangeanti as a form
of harmonious utopian paradise in which Wilkins and Youwarkee play out the roles of Adam
and Eve, this impression of blissful simplicity is misleading. After living for some time amongst
the gawreys and glumms, Wilkins comes to see that things here are not nearly as perfect as
they first appeared to him. At the margins of this land are disgruntled, power-hungry fac-
tions waiting to launch a revolution, and the dangerous threat they pose is a constant source
of unrest. Wilkins also learns that for all their physical beauty the flying people are in many
respects no better than his own degraded race, and are equally susceptible to jealousy, pettiness,
and even blind hatred. Some of their laws are also founded upon ignorance and intolerance,
and those who transgress them can be subjected to cruel and stigmatizing punishments. The
worst of these involves the clipping of offenders’ wings, leaving them both mutilated and
forever estranged from the rest of their kind.
As mentioned earlier, from the outset Wilkins sees his presence in Sass Doorpt Swangeanti
as that of a colonizer. However, the way he sets about influencing this alien society is quite
subtle. First of all, he tries to learn as much as he can about the land in which he has found
himself, and even when he travels to Brandleguarp he bides his time, closely observing things
there and waiting for an opportunity to change them. Once he has won the trust of its king,
Georigetti, he strives to show him the advantages to be gained by adopting the ways of his
society. Wilkins’s tendency to interfere does not arise from any imperialistic zeal. In a world
in which such fundamental features of civilized society as clothing, metallurgy, money, and
systems of organized trade, and even the written word are unheard of, Wilkins genuinely
believes he is showing the gawreys and glumms the way out of the stagnant natural state in
which they appear hopelessly trapped.
For their part, the flying people prove extremely receptive to Wilkins’s suggestions for
improving their civilization. Before long they have embraced the notion of refashioning their
society into a capitalist economy. Slavery and work camps are abolished. They have wor-
shipped a god named Collwarr uninterruptedly for centuries, but at Wilkins’s instigation they
quickly abandon this religion and convert to Christianity. This process is accelerated when
Wilkins retrieves a Bible from his boat. In his determination to destroy the rebellious factions
whom he believes endanger his nation, Georigetti asks Wilkins to reveal the secret of his guns.
He obliges, and shows them how to make more firearms of their own.With frightening rapid-
ity the conflict between the two sides, which until then was conducted with simple weapons,
is now fought using rifles and canons. In this way, almost unthinkingly,Wilkins is instrumental
in ushering in a new age of savage mechanized warfare.
348
At the same time, even if Peter Wilkins is not a utopian text, it would be inaccurate to inter-
pret Paltock’s act of subcreation as constituting a critique of colonial ideologies. By the end
of the novel, Normnbdsgrsutt has been entirely transformed by Wilkins’s influence. Hailed
as a savior-figure whose appearance was prophesied long ago, the society of Normnbdsgrsutt
is more than prepared to accept Wilkins’s suggestions and is even given the new name Sass
Doorpt Swangeanti by him. Paltock portrays this not as an inherently constructive or destruc-
tive process but as something that has mixed consequences for the kingdom. By assisting its
ruler, Wilkins has given this civilization a forward push that was perhaps necessary to stop it
collapsing into all-out civil war. Indeed, the gawreys’ and glumms’ enthusiastic appropriation
of the stranger’s values suggests that they really do see them as a genuine improvement on
their own. Nevertheless, it is hard to get past the sense that by bringing about this change
Wilkins has taken from this world a form of primal innocence and autonomy that can never
be restored. It is ironic to remember that it was the corrupt state of the outer world that left
Wilkins with little choice but to flee England in the first place, but he sees no contradiction
in then freely passing on its value-system to the people of Sass Doorpt Swangeanti.
What makes Wilkins’s status as an advocate of colonialism more ambivalent is that he does
not, in one sense, even regard himself as an Englishman. Paltock deliberately complicates
things by emphasizing time and again that his hero is a Cornishman. As such, he sees himself
as having already lived as something of an outsider within his own society, and has considered
its values with an attitude of detachment. Wilkins’s calamitous misadventures in his homeland
and especially his time evading vicious slave-traders in Africa reveal to him the true ugliness
and callousness of capitalist metaphysics. However, it is only many years after he has intention-
ally exposed the citizens of Sass Doorpt Swangeanti to this ideology that he begins to ques-
tion the wisdom of what he has done. Not long before he resolves to leave the new society
he has helped to build and return to England to die, Wilkins ponders whether it would have
been better for its people if he had never come among them.
In other words, by creating his imaginary world, Paltock ultimately sets up a sophisticated
debate about what exactly “civilization” consists of. Can there be, his text asks, a set of values
that allows all the citizens of a society to flourish? Must economic progress always necessitate
the desecration of the natural environment? Is the very concept of civilization irreconcil-
able with our notions of perfect freedom and happiness, or is there a situation in which it is
possible to have both? As James Grantham Turner has written in his critical introduction to
Peter Wilkins, the novel has clear links to the upheavals in the intellectual culture that marked
Paltock’s age. He observes that the book “synthesizes both the left-wing and the right-wing
Enlightenment” (p. viii) and evinces its author’s familiarity with the writings of both Jean-
Jacques Rousseau and Edmund Burke. However, it is a testament to the maturity of Paltock’s
vision that he refuses to provide final answers to any of these questions. He leaves it to the
reader to conclude if Wilkins has heroically delivered Sass Doorpt Swangeanti out of the dark-
ness of barbarism or whether he has done irreparable harm by contaminating its simple purity.
While these philosophical considerations were clearly integral to Paltock’s design, the nov-
el’s exploration of these intriguing ideas should not overshadow the astonishing beauty of his
creative vision. The meticulousness of his conception of Sass Doorpt Swangeanti, his facility
for ensuring that even the smallest details of his secondary world are sufficiently different from
our own, is truly extraordinary. In what other novel of this time could be found something as
sublimely and unforgettably strange as a race of beings capable of enclosing themselves inside
their own wings and using these as a boat? To date critics have tended to evaluate Paltock’s
novel in terms of the fantastic literary realms that preceded it, such as Swift’s and those of even
earlier writers like Margaret Cavendish, Milton, and Plato. However, future criticism may
349
prove even more insightful if it is directed toward examining the parallels between Paltock’s
subcreation and the works of more recent writers like Ray Bradbury, Frank Herbert, or China
Miéville.Very few texts composed before the 19th century are more entitled to their reputa-
tion as a fascinating and innovative work of proto-science fiction.
References
Arthur, P.L. (2011) Virtual Voyages:Travel Writing and the Antipodes, 1605-1837, London: Anthem Press.
Leigh Hunt, J.H. (1834) ‘Of Peter Wilkins and Flying Women’ in Leigh Hunt’s London Journal, London:
Charles Knight.
Lockhart, J.G. (1896) The Life of Sir Walter Scott, London: A&C Black.
Medwin, T. (1847) The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, London: Thomas Cautley Newby.
Moore, J.P. (1933) ‘Coleridge’s Indebtedness to Paltock’s Peter Wilkins,’ Modern Philology 31, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Nelson, H. ed. (1835) ‘Peter Wilkins and Stothard’ in Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, London: John Murray.
Paltock, R. (1990) The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, edited by Christopher Bentley and with a
New Introduction by James Grantham Turner, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Talfourd, T.N. ed. (1838) The Works of Charles Lamb, London: Bell and Daldy, 1852.
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42
Defontenay’s
Starian System
Irène Langlet
Star, or Psi Cassiopeia: The Marvelous History of One of the Worlds of Outer Space, subtitled
“Fantasia” by its author Charlemagne Ischir Defontenay, occupies a significant place in the
literary history of early science fiction (SF). Published in 1854 in Paris, this 325-page novel
combines poetry and theater and is divided into five “Books,” each one preceded by an intro-
duction and followed by an “Epilogy” [sic]. Star tells of the discovery of a meteorite containing
strange manuscripts and a series of documents depicting an entire alien world. The narrator
in the documents explains that his information comes from the found manuscripts, and he
then takes the reader on a mind-journey to the Psi Cassiopeia system, describing the mother-
planet, inhabited satellites, nature, races, peoples, and customs. Three times, his description
is replaced by a text “translated from the Starian.” Those quoted extracts give the novel the
appearance of a documentary, which played an important role in establishing the reputation
of Star. Known as “a precursor of Jules Verne” or “the first space opera” of the science fiction
genre, the novel marks an interesting step in the evolution that led the “other world” or
“imaginary voyage” story to take on a referential autonomy that is typical of modern science
fiction. In Star, the fictional “autonomization” of the text creates a sort of completeness; illu-
sionary, as usual in fiction, but strengthened by the narratological choices of the author, not
only through the inclusion of alien poetry and the documentary record, but also by a story-
within-a-story structure that multiplies the text’s specular effects.
Charlemagne Ischir Defontenay was born in 1819 into a family of Norman, anticlerical,
and libertarian farmers (who were eccentric enough to choose this unusual surname for
him). He obtained his Ph.D. in medicine in 1845 and married soon after. It seems that, at least
temporarily, he was in the public eye of the literary world: Théophile Gautier, George Sand,
Charles Monselet, and Camille Flammarion had heard of him. In addition to some plays, he
published in 1846 (under the pseudonym of “Docteur Cid”) an Essay on Facioplasty, which
predated the advent of plastic surgery and met with some success (it was reprinted in 1850).
However, in 1854, the very year of Star’s publication, his wife died after giving birth to twins;
and, two years after, in 1856, he died in his turn. His far-too-short life is no doubt the reason
why history subsequently consigned Defontenay to an almost complete oblivion.
Raymond Queneau (1949) and especially Pierre Versins (1966) saw in Star one of those
forgotten SF masterpieces that gave scholars the opportunity to find European and even
French ancestors to American science fiction, massively exported to France during the post-
war period. Queneau discovered Star during his researches attempting to exhume from the
Bibliothèque Nationale de France some forgotten “crazy authors”—later, he described them
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Irène Langlet
rather as “heterogeneous.” In 1949, he dedicated an article about it in Cahiers du Sud but

he never actually finished his Heterogeneous project, and the article about Defontenay was
included in the “Tributes” part of his collection Bâtons, chiffres et lettres (1950). Queneau’s
article was noticed by Jean José Marchand who worked for Cahiers du Sud and who was
fascinated by this illustrious unknown author to the point of publishing the results of his
research in La Quinzaine littéraire in 1970. This led him from the Bibliothèque Nationale
to the University of Medicine’s archives (which allowed him to understand that Dr. Cid,
whom medicine historians knew, was actually Defontenay himself), and then to the boxes of
an attic in which the grand-daughter of the author kept some old papers. This philological
adventure could only reinforce the aura of this little novel of which one of the rare avail-
able copies was owned by the scholar and collector Pierre Versins and rediscovered by him
when he was writing his impressive and revolutionary (at that time) Encyclopédie de l’utopie,
des voyages extraordinaires, et de la science-fiction, published for the first time in 1972. This ency-
clopedia gives Defontenay an enthusiastic write-up and mentions his novel in 10 entries at
least (including “Antigravity” or “Extraterrestrials”), as well as labeling it the “first space opera.”
Also in 1972, nearly 120 years after its first publication, Star was reprinted in one of the most
influential collections of French science fiction, Denoël’s “Présence du Futur,” with a preface
by Marchand.The latter named it “a masterpiece […] of ‘science fiction’ […] well before Jules
Verne” (Marchand, 1972a: 12).
All this enthusiastic momentum allows us to understand the rapidity of the American
translation by Sokolowski in 1975, published by Daw Books with an introduction by Versins
and some illustrations by George Barr. These illustrations are typical of pulp culture, with their
overt sexism in complete opposition to the content of the book itself, which shows women
combining greatness, reserve, and decency with their faces always covered when they go out.
In his introduction, Versins chastises American readers for their ignorance about science fic-
tion that is not American, but he grants them the fact that in the case of Star, no one knew.
Again, like Marchand, he tells the epic story of the rediscovery of the book before calling it
(this time) “nothing less than the second science fiction ‘Space Opera’—the first, of course,
having been True History, written by Lucian of Samosata in the second century” (Versins,
1975: 8). This cultural topos can be summarized as follows: the genre of SF, which builds
extraordinary worlds, was not born with Verne, Wells, or Stapledon, the fathers usually named
by SF fandom culture; we have to rediscover the “true” fathers of science fiction. Defontenay
gained his important place in the history of science fiction through this quest for literary
legitimacy, which has sometimes reflected some nationalistic accents when it takes the form
of an intercultural challenge. Perhaps to modify this first image of the book and place it more
accurately in literary history, the book was reprinted in 1976 by Gregg Press’s Science Fiction
Series, with a new preface by Marc Angenot. He criticizes Versins’s quest for ancestors and
offers an exhaustive account of the book’s context before asserting that Star has the essential
characteristic of science fiction, thanks to its “maximal gap” between its referential universe
and the reality of the reader. Thus, he makes reference to the semiotic theories of science fic-
tion that, at the end of the 1970s, had replaced little by little the philology of Marchand or
Versins. In this context, Star becomes a significant novel, not for its importance as an example
of lost “science fiction origins,” but for the process by which an imaginary world story has
autonomized itself not only through its thematic invention but also (and mostly) through its
narrative creativity (even if Angenot is rather vague about their actual syntax and does not
produce any textual analysis). The last very similar reprints of Star (2007 in the United States
and 2008 in France) give evidence of the stability of this now-dominant reading: an imaginary
world where the reader is not so much fascinated by the invention of certain objects, beings,
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D e f o n t e n ay ’ s S ta r i a n S y s t e m
or extraordinary machines, but by the effect of completeness and the acumen of the world
builder.Versins himself had had this intuition that, in Star, “nothing’s missing” (Versins, 1972:
229). In the French 2008 preface, Star is described as:
one of the first texts to describe so meticulously a different and extraterrestrial uni-
verse […] More than a novel, Star, with its excessiveness, its abundance of texts in
the text, is a total book.
(Jaccaud, 2008: 5)
The illustrations of the French and American covers now show some strange landscapes with
green mists and weird urban rocks—which, incidentally, do not correspond any better to the
novel’s atmosphere than the naked women but which better underscore the emphasis now
put on the “other world.”
So it is the double aura of precursor and world-builder that makes Star an important book
in its portrayal of an imaginary world. The first dimension needs a discussion, for beyond the
enthusiasm of Marchand and Versins, the semiotic protocol of Defontenay deserves an analysis.
Defontenay’s position in the continuum of science fiction history is a key to understanding
the second dimension, the one concerning world-building, and to freeing ourselves from a
sort of mythification proposed by Versins.
Marchand is the first to try to define the genre of Star: according to him, Defontenay is
“one of the creators of this genre; the novel of anticipation that needs to be carefully distin-
guished from utopia and imaginary voyage” (Marchand, 1972b: 11); he “invents, beyond the
fantastic, the novel of anticipation, ‘science fiction’ and interplanetary journeys” (Marchand,
1972a: 12). Thus, two sets are drawn: on the one hand, utopia, imaginary voyage, fantastic; on
the other hand, novel of anticipation, interplanetary journeys, science fiction. The reasons
for this division are not explicit, but clear enough: the first set involves the resources of pure
imagination, there is no search for a connection with scientific or rational reasoning; the
last set, on the contrary, bases its plausibility on this connection, through a kind of specula-
tion that includes widened time (future), widened space (planets), and widened science. The
assertion of Marchand can be surprising: Star is not presented as a vision of the future, as may
be the case with some of its contemporaries such as Félix Bodin (Le Roman de l’avenir: The
Novel of the Future, 1834), or Emile Souvestre (Le Monde tel qu’il sera: The World as It Shall Be,
1846). However, it does imagine flying vehicles in the space of Psi Cassiopeia, propelled by
a mysterious anti-gravity technology (of which nothing is told, of course). As for science, it
is regularly mentioned but in such a vague way that it could designate any situation, here or
elsewhere, provided that we praise it.
In fact, we can find almost everywhere in the story a laudatory rhetoric that would rather
make Star a utopia, in opposition with Marchand’s assertions. The fourth Book, in particular,
fittingly entitled “Exodus and Deuteronomy,” puts forward in a Biblical way the fundamental
principles and the practical morality that are the basis of the Tasbar society (the capital city
of this planet). The fifth Book is introduced as history and constitution of a perfect society
in agreement with the maxim inspired by Charles Fourier printed on the book’s cover right
under the name of the author:“Delectari maxime, semper et illico.” But according to Angenot,
Charles Fourier and the utopian socialism associated with his name allow us to understand
why Star is not a utopia like the ones written during the Enlightenment, for example The
Year 2440 (Louis-Sébastien Mercier, 1770). With Defontenay, as with Fourier, the description
of a perfect society aims to be progressive, and so it is inscribed in history and caught by the
novel inside an “Einsteinian” dynamic, that is to say in constant expansion. This prevents the
353
Irène Langlet
chronotope from becoming “utopian” and from freezing on a future that can be mistaken for
perfection—and a sort of end of history. In fact, Star fizzles out, the text largely left open on a
date: “Avia, on the 33rd day of the Ertaër month, year 1863 of Marulcar’s reign” (Defontenay,
1854: 275). The story does not come back on this data specific to the other world; it does
not explain it. It is, however, readable and shows that each alterity of this other world refers
to its own internal network, and not necessarily to the world of the reader through a logic of
evolution, explanation, or technical, social, and historical confrontation. That is why the end
may be described as open: after this date and the new “translated from Tasbarian” extract that
follows it, a section entitled “Epilogy” comes back to the main narrator’s reveries, without any
conclusion about Star’s world that now is turning on itself in perfect independence.
According to Angenot, Star appeared at an essential moment in the ideological and cul-
tural history of the modern Western world. Around 1850, one can witness the decline of
the old forms of philosophical speculation such as Cyrano de Bergerac’s or Fontenelle’s, the
fast evolution of utopia’s models, and the emergence of new forms born from ideas bound
up with industrial capitalism and its societal disruptions, as well as some recent disciplines
(paleontology, anthropology, ethnography, the history of civilizations, and new astronomy).
Around Defontenay, Bodin, Souvestre, but also Restif de la Bretonne (Les Posthumes, The
Posthumous Ones, 1802) or Cousin de Grainville (Le dernier homme, The Last Man, posth. 1805)
fall also within this moment when “the concept of the future [was] divorced from the ideas
of perfection” (Angenot, 1976: viii); in other words, when the imaginary worlds are no longer
necessarily based upon the intentional purpose of philosophical speculation. From then on,
anticipation can be released from its programmatic task and become an independent narra-
tive resource; it is the same for the extraordinary voyages. But this discursive projection into
the future or into an elsewhere requires a semiotic disposition of referential projection into
alterity, and can cause great problems for the coherence of the imaginary world (see Saint-
Gelais, 1999). Angenot reminds us that Fourier himself promoted the conjectural practice of
the “maximal gap” to take the opposite view, not of an isolated point of the current world,
but of its totality: not only to criticize the injustice of the world as it is, but also to imagine a
whole different, future, and better society in all its coherent aspects. On those interpretative
bases, Star, even if it is not the absolute precursor of science fiction, is a great example of the
expansion of the neo-utopian imagination, of the problems caused by the coherence of these
stories, and of the textual strategies that can resolve them.
The original title chosen by Defontenay is quite a long one: “Star, or Ψ Cassiopeia. The
marvelous history of one of the worlds in space. Its singular nature, customs, voyages, Starian literature,
poems and comedies, translated from the Starian language.” It is followed by the generic mention
“Fantasia,” without a precedent in a literary work, and that has been reused in none of the
successive reprints since 1972. It can be easily understood: a “fantasia” does not connote the
desired science fiction genre. Neither does the pompous style of the original title; the reprints
have systematically reduced it to Star or Psi Cassiopeia, with the Ψ letter typed in the Latin
alphabet, except for the French 2008 reissue.The stylistic baroquisms pervade nevertheless the
whole novel, breaking away from the modern SF tone—and even from the older one. (The
American translation is therefore attempting the impossible, and is referred to as an “adapta-
tion” since 2007.) The mix of prose and poetry is especially notable in Star. For example, in
the introduction, verse dominates prose, in very various meters—and, interestingly, even blank
hexameters that have fascinated 20th-century people who have rediscovered the text, and that
must be reproduced in the original layout (see Figure 42.1) to be savored.
Book I and Book II are all in prose, but Book II is interrupted by a “salvecian poem”
(titled by the name of a Starian people) written in prose but with refrains; Book III alternates
354
Figure 42.1 (Defontenay, 1854: 11) Sokolowski’s translation (without any typographical
effect): “DISCOVERY—Despite my cold disgust for that hideous spectacle, curiosity still
impelled me to examine the celestial mass which had weighed, perhaps, in the hand of
Brahma or at least had long wandered in the sky, in the superior tides of the sea of stars.”
(Defontenay, 1975: 17)
sequences of prose and verse, without making clear if the verses are for a “translation of the
Starian” or if it is the narrator’s style (the introduction clearly demonstrated that he loved
doing this); in the epilogy, there is only poetry. The translations of theatrical texts (a comedy,
a drama, and a historical poem) are sometimes in prose, sometimes in verse—in the latter case,
there is a clarification: “translated in verse imitated from the Starian.” Finally, in the pages
containing the most pathos, text is sometimes replaced by ellipses composed of whole lines of
dots, for maximal expressivity, or to make it look like missing phrases, or both of these effects.
The whole thing certainly produces a “fearsome riot of stylistic effects [...] overelaborated,
troubled, hallucinated” ( Jaccaud, 2008: 7); but for Jaccaud, it is also the base for a specific fic-
tion, and he compares Star to a “page torn from the encyclopedia,” meaning that he sees here
a lacunary strategy that triggers cognitive activity for completion.The beneficial effects of the
fragment, as encouraged by German Romanticism, are seen everywhere here. Through a raw
fragment, the totality is expressed far more efficiently, because the reader actively takes part in
its construction. Saint-Gelais (1999) has linked the specific lessons of this effect to the genre of
science fiction: this kind of literature is known for “building entire worlds,” but not because it
says everything about them (of course); it is rather because it manipulates cleverly the gaps and
lacunae, so that the reader is the builder of the narrative’s semiotic and fictional coherence.
The insertion of fictional texts presented as raw pieces works especially well toward that goal,
as we know well since the Encyclopedia Galactica extracts used as chapter epigraphs in Asimov’s
Foundation (1951), or the epigraphs appearing in Herbert’s Dune (1965), extracted from vari-
ous fictive sources (see Langlet, 2007).
One of the rare contemporary mentions of Defontenay provides a convincing proof-by-
example. In an article from August 1854, Théophile Gautier is apparently seriously reviewing
what is going on in the “Theatre of the Psi Cassiopeia.” It offers him the occasion to clarify
where it is located, summing up by this way the Books I to III of the novel—but without
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Irène Langlet
making any mention of it. Then he proceeds to do a review of the two inserted dramas: he
writes it in an absolute fictional illusion. This philological game suggests the autonomiza-
tion of the fictive world at its height, even, and maybe especially, in the few lines with which
Gautier concludes his real-false article, and in which he insists on the story, not the narrative:
And now, if you wonder how we are so conversant on the matters of Psi Cassiopeia,
we will answer that we found all those details in a book by Mr. Defontenay, trans-
lated from the Starian, based upon a manuscript fallen from the sky in a meteorite
on the highest mount of the Hymalayas.
(Gautier, 1856: 295 [1854])
That being the case, it is obvious that the real importance of Defontenay’s novel is not revealed
in the circumspect statement of Monselet in 1857 (“weird, nebulous imagination”), or the
more severe one of Camille Flammarion, who estimates, in Les Mondes imaginaires et les mondes
réels [Imaginary and Real Worlds] in 1864, that “one does not recognize the hand of an astrono-
mer” in Star).The building of its Starian system is not so much a matter of invention or astro-
nomical plausibility than of textual strategy; a case of elocutio and dispositio rather than inventio.
Two other strategies are complementing this basic device and completing the complexity of
the novel: a diabolically tortuous use of utterance in Book I, and specular elements composing
a kind of Russian doll-like story-within-a-story in the later Books.
Thanks to the discovery of the deep-space documents, Defontenay’s discursive protocol is
able to avoid miraculous or irrational elements. Unlike Bodin, whose narrator describes the
future with the help of a British visionary scribbling his hallucinations on messy notebooks;
unlike Souvestre, whose divine being makes two young people fall asleep until the year 3000,
Defontenay’s narrator just picks up a chest ejected from a meteorite, deciphers the documents
in it (it takes him two years), and gives some order to its content before revealing it to the
reader. But the introduction does not lead straight to the third-person report. The entirety of
Book I resembles an extraordinary voyage in space. First, an address to the reader in Sequence
I: “Fix your gaze on the starred vault [...] transport your imagination to distances greater than
several million times the distance from Sirius to the Sun” in order to “be able to reach [Star]
in thought;” sequence IV: “It is done! In one leap you have penetrated into this new universe
with me.” But what was at that time a mere intellectual game now becomes a discovery nar-
rative, thanks to the use of intense scenarios, like:
Seq. XIII: “Notre arrivée imprévue sur le bord d’une rivière y cause un tumulte
étrange. Une multitude d’arbrisseaux aux feuilles vertes et luisantes s’élancent
comme des oiseaux, fuient dans les airs agitant branches et feuilles en guise d’ailes, et
vont s’abattre sur les rives à quelque distance.”
Translation: “Our unforeseen arrival at the edge of a stream causes a strange tumult
there. A multitude of shrubby trees with green, glossy leaves, surging up like birds,
escape into the air moving their branches and leaves in the manner of wings and go
to set themselves down on the banks some distance away.”
Or the use of past tenses to create the structure of a narrative (unfortunately translated into
the present tense by Sokolowski):
356
Seq. XXI: “À mesure que la lumière dessinait plus distinctement les objets, de vagues
frissons d’espérance et de crainte nous agitaient. Enfin nous n’en pûmes douter:
c’était bien l’aspect lointain d’une grande ville que nous découvrions tout au bout
du cercle visual.”
Translation [tenses rectified by me]: “As the light delineat[ed] objects more distinctly,
we experienc[ed] vague thrills of hope and fear. Finally, we [could] not doubt it:
it [was] indeed the distant prospect of a great city that we [could] see at the very
extremity of the visible horizon.”
This oscillation between the described and the narrated takes advantage of the very efficient
diegetic structure of the extraordinary voyage without the necessity of making it materi-
ally plausible.
One last trick is completing the narrative: a specular mirror effect is created from Book
II onward between Defontenay, his narrator, and the fictive authors (often anonymous) of
the texts he pretends to translate from the Starian. The real object, this book published by
Ledoyen in Paris in 1854, thus playfully points to the different identities taken by his author
in his polytextual strategy for the building of an imaginary world. First, a footnote inserts a bit
of reality into the fiction: it is about the “Treliorians,” a Starian people who have generalized
plastic surgery: “See Essay on Calliplasty by Dr C. I. D.; one vol. grand in-18. – Paris, 1846”
(Defontenay, 1854: 79). Of course, this masking game did not deceive anyone in 1854; this
essay had been quite successful, as mentioned. But, a century later, this brief mention had
put the researcher Marchand onto the track of a forgotten Defontenay: a striking example of
reality-fiction cooperation. Later in the book, Defontenay suggests his presence once again,
creating a discursive spiral quite comparable to what Saint-Gelais calls an “artefactualization,”
meaning a device by which the narrative seems to produce the book we are actually read-
ing—and that is the support and ontological condition of the narrative. Book V of Star is one
of the pieces entirely “translated” by narrator 1: Voyage of a Tassulian to Tasbar (in which Tassul
is one of the worlds orbiting around Star). This Tassulian man (narrator 2) is also inserting
texts into his narrative, translating them from the Starian for his Tassulian fellows. The narra-
tives and translations thus interlock, creating the shape of the Rosetta Stone used by narrator
1. But there is something more: the text chosen by the Tassulian is a “historical poem” signed
by a certain “Isrich of Tasbar,” which Marchand proposes to read as an anagram of Ischir, this
so-unusual name of Defontenay himself. Defontenay is there staging himself in his book,
building imaginary worlds, and internally signing works among their literatures. The “reality
effect” composed with, and by, the fragments is dissolved with subtlety: Defontenay’s masks
are playfully showing themselves, but at the same time they are creating one final effect: that
of a plurality of worlds, a pre-Dickian one, where realities and fictions interlock like fractals.
Editions of Star
Defontenay, C. I. (1854) Star ou Ψ de Cassiopée, histoire merveilleuse de l’un des mondes de l’espace. Nature sin-
gulière, coutumes, voyages, littérature starienne, poèmes et comédies traduits du Starien. Fantasia, Paris: Ledoyen;
online on Gallica, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, available at http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/
bpt6k1045500j (First French edition.)
Defontenay, C. I. (1972) Star ou Psi de Cassiopée: histoire merveilleuse de l’un des mondes de l’espace, Paris:
Denoël, “Présence du futur,” pp. 9–13. (Second French edition.)
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Irène Langlet
Defontenay, C. I. (1975) Star (Psi Cassiopeia), translated by P. J. Sokolowski, DAW Books. (First English
edition of the book.)
Defontenay, C. I. (1976) Star (Psi Cassiopeia), translated by P. J. Sokolowski, reprint by Gregg Press.
(Second English edition.)
Defontenay, C. I. (2007) Star (Psi Cassiopeia), adapted [sic] by P. J. Sokolowski, Encino, CA: Black Coat
Press. (Third English edition.)
Defontenay, C. I. (2008) Star ou Ψ de Cassiopée, Rennes: Terre de Brume. (Third French edition.)
References
Angenot, M. (1976) “Introduction,” in Defontenay C. I., Star (Psi Cassiopeia), translated by P. J. Sokolowski,
reprint by Gregg Press, pp. v–xiv.
Gautier,T. (1856) “Théâtre du Psi de Cassiopée” [1854], in L’art moderne, pp. 289–295 ; online on Gallica,
Bibliothèque Nationale de France, available at http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k109148c.
Jaccaud, F. (2008) “C.-I. Defontenay l’esthète visionnaire” (introduction), in C. I. Defontenay, Star ou Ψ
de Cassiopée, Rennes: Terre de Brume, pp. 5–9. (Third French edition of the book.)
Langlet, I. (2007) “Transfictionnalité en régime non-narratif,” in R. Saint-Gelais, R. Audet, La fiction.
Suites et variations, Presses Universitaires de Rennes / éditions Nota Bene (Québec), pp. 51–70.
Marchand, J. J. (1970) “Sur les traces de Defontenay,” in La Quinzaine littéraire, no. 100, 1970, pp. 20–22.
Marchand, J. J. (1972a) “Un précurseur, Defontenay” (preface), in C. I. Defontenay, Star ou Psi de
Cassiopée: histoire merveilleuse de l’un des mondes de l’espace, Paris: Denoël, “Présence du futur,” pp. 9–13.
(Second French edition of the book.)
Marchand, J. J. (1972b) “L’insolite Defontenay,” in La Quinzaine littéraire, no. 138, 1972, pp. 11–12.
Queneau, R. (1965) “Defontenay” [1949], in Bâtons, chiffres et lettres, Gallimard, pp. 239–248.
Saint-Gelais, R. (1999), L’Empire du pseudo. Modernités de la science-fiction, Québec: Nota Bene.
Versins, P. (1966) “Le Second Space Opera: Charles [sic] Defontenay,” in Ailleurs, no. 5–6, pp. 60–75.
Versins, P. (1972) Encyclopédie de l’utopie, des voyages extraordinaires et de la science-fiction, L’Age d’homme.
Versins, P. (1975) “Introduction,” in C. I. Defontenay, Star (Psi Cassiopeia), translated by P. J. Sokolowski,
DAW Books, pp. 7–10.
358
43
Baum’s Oz
Michael O. Riley
The Land of Oz has been a media phenomenon since it was first introduced in 1900 in
L. Frank Baum’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The imaginary world was the setting for
the adventures of Dorothy, the little girl from Kansas, but Baum presented it with such rich-
ness and detail that it seemed to his readers that it had existed long before Dorothy arrived.
That sense of reality only intensified when Oz transcended its original story and became the
setting for a whole series of books—but even more when it transcended its original print
medium to all other media that spread its influence worldwide.
Oz appeared on the stage as early as 1902 in a mega-hit musical extravaganza that ran for
years. Then in 1908 Baum devised a multi-media entertainment that employed film, slides,
live actors, orchestra, live music, and a narrator to dramatize his stories. Film versions began as
early as 1910, with major productions in 1914 (two films), 1925, 1939, 1985, and 2013. Stories
based in Oz have been adapted to both radio and television, to animated cartoons, comic
books, stage plays, and new musicals both in the United States and abroad. And along with all
of these are the uncountable commercial tie-ins: comic strips, coloring books, puzzles, dolls,
music boxes, games, and other toys. There have been Oz theme parks, Oz Conventions, Oz
Conferences, Oz Festivals, Oz Clubs, and Oz museums. Oz has also been the subject of aca-
demic study, college courses, the foundation of adult novels, and the source of unending fan
fiction. It has inspired music, been the subject of popular songs, and is a source of inspiration
for every visual art form. When new media are developed, Oz will be represented there, too.
Clearly the Land of Oz transcended the original story in which it first appeared. Baum
himself appears to have focused on Oz as Place when he was writing it. The Emerald City was
the title of the manuscript, but by the time the book was ready for the printer, it had changed
to The Land of Oz. Only at the last minute, after the illustrator W.W. Denslow had lettered the
illustrated title page, was the final title chosen and the title page altered.The emphasis on Place
reveals one of Baum’s main creative methods: he often developed a secondary world first and
let the story grow out of it. A New Wonderland (1896/1900), Dot and Tot of Merryland (1901),
and The Enchanted Island of Yew (1903) are some of his other books where this seems to have
been the case. But none of his other imaginary worlds has caught the imagination of genera-
tions of readers like Oz has. What is it about The Wonderful Wizard of Oz that is different?
Most would answer that Baum’s story and characters are the secret of the book’s appeal—
the iconic adventure of the little girl from Kansas, Dorothy, and her companions the Scarecrow,
the Tin Woodman, and the Lion who journey to the Emerald City to ask the great Wizard
to fulfill their dearest wishes. It is Baum’s best story and one of the great fantasy plots. And
even though stories of quests are as old as civilization, this one is a uniquely American version
of the story, reflecting the ideal of the “American Dream” where success can be achieved if
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M i c h a e l O. R i l e y
only one tries hard enough—despite the fact that sometimes what one is striving for is clearly
impossible. The story also works on a deeper level as an exposé of the darker side of that
dream when all the characters, except the clear-eyed child Dorothy, demand to be fooled by
the “medicine man” and to believe the illusion over the reality.
Readers everywhere loved this story, but even so, something unexpected happened that
surprised even Baum. Readers loved the Land of Oz as much or even more than the story.
Dorothy wanted to leave Oz, but his readers wanted to go there.The Land of Oz moved from
the background to the foreground, and the fascination with Oz began to grow. It continues
to this day.
Fantasy very often gives glimpses of possibilities and new perspectives beyond what we
have imagined; it can embody the very real experience of growing up and experiencing the
world. While readers understand Dorothy’s desire to return to her loved ones, the lure of
adventures beyond the ordinary involves the readers more. That may be a universal prefer-
ence of youth. What young person has not felt the desire to discover what is out there over
the horizon? The original illustrator, W. W. Denslow, captured this idea perfectly in his first
illustration of Dorothy at the head of Chapter One in early editions of the book (Figure 43.1).
Dorothy stands facing away from the viewer looking out at the western horizon and the
endless prairie. She is on the edge of the civilized world and on the brink of her great adven-
ture. As she contemplates the setting sun, the reader senses that she wishes for more than the
gray world around her. In another great fantasy—the original Star Wars (1977) film—George
Lucas replicates this scene almost exactly suggesting the same lure of adventure when Luke
Skywalker, on his home planet Tatooine, stands looking at the horizon and the two setting
suns, feeling trapped on his desert planet and longing to find out what unimaginable experi-
ences and adventures are out there.
The Land of Oz is that place just over the horizon—that undiscovered world where one
finds all the heart’s desires. While Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland is a dream world and J. M.
Barrie’s Neverland exists as the children imagine it, Oz is presented as a real place that is wait-
ing for anyone willing to take the risk of going there.
Oz was only the second imaginary world that Baum created, and it is different in almost
all respects from his first, the outrageous Valley of Phunnyland in A New Wonderland that is
literally made of good things to eat. Rather than being a bizarre place with an alien makeup,
Oz has immediate appeal because of its similarity to our world—it seems like a place that
Figure 43.1 Baum’s 1914 map of Oz and the countries surrounding it.
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B au m ’ s O z
could exist in America, and even the geography reflects the East and Midwest sections of
America with a great new city, like Chicago, in the center. Oz both reassures and entices
because it is exciting and strange and familiar all at the same time.
Where Oz differs from our world is that magic can exist there. However, many of the
effects that seem like magic to Dorothy are really created by contrasts rather than by magic.
When Dorothy’s house lands in Oz, her first view of the country seems otherworldly to her
just because of the extreme contrast between Kansas and this beautiful, colorful, and lush,
new landscape.
This transition from a gray, dry world to one of beauty and color coupled with the amazing
way the cyclone carried Dorothy to Oz are enough to set the mood for the really marvelous
events that follow. With the adaptability of a child, Dorothy accepts that anything can happen
in this strange and wonderful place. Thus Dorothy feels no fear when she meets the Good
Witch of the North and the Munchkins, only wonder at the unusual things they have to tell
her about this Land of Oz where her house has landed.
Baum’s description of the imaginary world right at the beginning of the story provides the
plot with context and veracity. In the conversation Dorothy has with the Good Witch, she
learns that she has arrived in a world with a long history and with a unique geography. Oz
is divided into four countries with the Emerald City in the center. The countries match the
compass points, and three of them are named and play major parts in the story: the Munchkin
Country in the east, where the favorite color is blue; the Winkie Country in the west, where
the favorite color is yellow; and the Quadling Country to the south, where red is favored.
The northern country is not named or visited, although it has significance as the home of the
Good Witch of the North and as the homeland of the Winged Monkeys. And the whole of
Oz is surrounded by desert that effectively cuts it off from the rest of the world. The natural
laws are the same as those in our world. The country’s economy is similar to ours, and, unfor-
tunately, also just like our world, there are rich and poor. While Dorothy’s companions, the
Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman, are magical beings who will exist for an infinite period of
time, the other inhabitants of Oz are people like us who are born, live, and die, generation
following generation.
But magic, witches, wizards, and other marvelous things exist there because Oz is not civi-
lized. Those wonders cannot exist in Kansas because civilization has eliminated them, and it
is difficult not to read this as a criticism of our world. Good Witches rule the northern and
southern areas of Oz and Wicked Witches the east and west, while a great Wizard, thought
to be more powerful than all the Witches, rules the Emerald City, which he had caused to be
built. In the course of the story, it becomes evident that this tense balance of power between
good and wicked is the result of past battles among these magical beings, and the uneasy peace
is insured by the most powerful of all living right in the center.
This equal division of good and evil kept Oz in a state approaching suspended animation—
the land was literally bewitched. That, however, was the situation before Dorothy’s house
landed in the Munchkin Country. By falling on the Wicked Witch of the East and killing her,
Dorothy and her house have freed the Munchkin people from bondage. Initially, no one in
the story notices that the event has also altered the balance of power.
Dorothy’s immediate concern, however, is to return to her aunt and uncle; the Good
Witch’s magic slate advises, “Let Dorothy go to the City of Emeralds,” and the assumption is
that Dorothy should go to the Wizard because he is powerful enough to send her home. Like
the responses of most oracles, however, the advice the slate gives is vague. The slate’s message
does not mention the Wizard or anything about Dorothy getting home. All it suggests is that
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Dorothy go to the City. The Wizard does not fulfill Dorothy’s wish, but her adventures in Oz
ultimately bring a new order to the land.
Still, with all of the talk of witches and wizards and magic, as Dorothy begins her journey
to the Emerald City on the “road paved with yellow brick” (Baum does not call it the Yellow
Brick Road), the only unusual elements she notices about the Munchkin Country itself are
the domed-shaped houses and the inhabitants’ extreme fondness for the color blue—just
about everything that could be made or constructed has been painted blue. The country-
side resembles a rural area in the eastern United States, with large and small farms. Then, as
she travels onward she encounters less cared for areas, and later dense and scary forests. The
road itself bears scars of the past battles. Long stretches of the road are in disrepair and in
other places bridges that once crossed deep ravines have disappeared. Travel to and from the
Emerald City seems to have ceased a long while before, and Dorothy and her companions do
not encounter any other travelers.
Nevertheless, no matter how normal the scenery may appear, as Dorothy meets those who
will travel with her to the Emerald City, she soon realizes that Oz is, indeed, very different
from our world. She is surprised to meet a live scarecrow, less so to meet a man made out
of tin, and, in comparison, a talking lion seems almost normal. The marvelous becomes the
expected to this resourceful child.
The first physical place in Oz that does appear to be magical and totally Other than what
could occur in the outside world is the magnificent City of Emeralds. The book’s characters
expected the home of such a great Wizard to be something marvelous, and the ritual of gain-
ing entrance only enhances that otherworldly feeling. A formidable wall protects the City,
and visitors have to enter through a gate, but only with the permission of the Guardian of
the Gate. Before they can enter the City proper, its otherness is further emphasized by their
being required to put on green glasses to protect them from “the brightness and glory of the
Emerald City.” All the inhabitants must wear them also, and the glasses are locked on. Finally,
here is a physical place that could not exist anywhere else—or so it seems.
Their arrival at the Emerald City occurs right in the center of the novel, and the travelers
feel that they have reached the center of the magic of the Land of Oz. And this impression
is only strengthened after the Wizard sends them out to find the Wicked Witch of the West.
After leaving the Emerald City, they are again in a familiar environment—this one resembling
the great open prairies of the Midwest. They must have left the magic behind because even
Dorothy’s new dress does not retain its green color once out of the city.
Baum, of course, has a surprise in store for the reader.When Dorothy and her friends return
to claim their rewards, they have their ideas about Oz turned upside down. To their great
distress, they discover that the magic of the city and the great power of the Wizard are only
illusions. The center of Oz is empty of magic and the Wizard is only an ordinary man; all he
can offer are circus tricks. There is a definite feeling of anti-climax.
Many adaptations of Baum’s story end it at this point after the Wizard has given his humbug
gifts to the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Lion.The Good Witch then usually appears
and reveals the secret of the Silver Shoes to Dorothy. But stopping the story here weakens the
wonder of Baum’s imaginary world, because it suggests that the marvelous nature of the rest
of Oz is an illusion also.
Baum’s book, though, does not end there. There are still further chapters to explore. The
last fourth of the story has sometimes been criticized as anti-climactic and for containing
elements and adventures seemingly inconsistent with those in the rest of the story. On the
contrary, the final part of the story is necessary, after the disappointments in the Emerald City,
to erase any doubts that Oz is really a magical place and to establish the true nature of this
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secondary world. It is only here that Dorothy experiences the real essence of Oz, for at last the
land itself is revealed to be magical.The journey south redeems and re-invigorates the sense of
the marvelous that is so much a part of Oz. This is the true climax of the story.
In the book, Baum presents the wonders of his imaginary world in stages; gradually, he
takes his reader from the familiar to the extraordinary—just enough at first, though, so that
the Emerald City can appear to be the most magical part of all. Like his showman Wizard,
he fools his readers. But after the destruction of that illusion, he rebuilds the magical nature
of Oz until it finally assumes the character of a true Other World. The journey south to the
Quadling Country to seek the help of Glinda the Good Witch is what confirms the fantastic
nature of this world. And there they meet, at last, a real magic worker who is actually as pow-
erful as the Wizard pretended to be.
With no road to follow to the Quadling Country, their way there is wild and dangerous.
But unlike the natural obstacles of the other two journeys, Dorothy and her friends encounter
places and creatures that could only exist in a magical realm. In rapid succession, they experi-
ence fighting trees; a country made of china (including its inhabitants); a giant spider; and,
finally, a strange race of Hammer-Heads who can extend their necks like jack-in-the-boxes
to prevent the travelers from crossing their land. Only with the help of the Winged Monkeys
are they finally able to reach the Good Witch of the South in safety.
Glinda has the knowledge to show Dorothy how to return home, and she is also able to
provide for the others. As proud as the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Lion are of the
humbug Wizard’s “gifts,” it is Glinda who is able to help all of them reach the true ends of
their journey. She sends the Scarecrow back to the Emerald City to give the citizens a real
magical ruler; the Tin Woodman to the Winkie Country to rule the Winkies with kindness
and love; and the Lion to the Forest where he defeated the giant spider to be king. As Dorothy
goes back to Kansas and each of the others takes his throne, a new order has truly come to
the Land of Oz.
Oz After The Wonderful Wizard

The Land of Oz described thus far is the original version presented in The Wonderful Wizard
of Oz where the story and imaginary world work together seamlessly. But even though the
characters reach the end of their journeys, Oz seemed to continue, and Baum’s readers begged
for more. Baum, however, viewed his story as complete and went on to create other imagi-
nary worlds.
What changed his mind four years later had little to do with his readers’ wishes and eve-
rything to do with the success Oz had had in another medium. Probably the greatest passion
in Baum’s life was the theater, and in 1902 he had transformed The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
into a comic opera with music by Paul Tietjens. His script was faithful to his original story;
however, by the time the producer and director had re-worked his script from a comic opera
into a circus-like musical extravaganza, Baum’s simple story had been altered almost beyond
recognition.The original plot was jettisoned and the emphasis was changed to focus on a new
character, Pastoria the King of Oz, regaining his throne from the Wizard, who had stolen it.
Numerous bizarre new characters were added, and a large troupe of chorus girls was promi-
nently displayed. The comedy team of David C. Montgomery and Fred A. Stone, who played
the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow, were the breakout stars of the show, and they intro-
duced comic routines that further distanced the show from the original book. Despite this
conglomeration, the show was a hit when it opened in Chicago in 1902, and when it moved
to Broadway in 1903, it became one of the mega-hits of the first decade of the 20th century,
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with two companies touring continuously until 1906 and still performing around the country
until 1911.
Baum had initially been dismayed at what had been done to his story, but it was hard to
argue with success. It earned him far more money than he was making from the royalties on
his books, and this success made him envision a series of musical extravaganzas based on his
stories. It was for that reason that four years after The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, he wrote The
Marvelous Land of Oz. And to establish a connection between the book and the successful
stage show, he dedicated the book to Montgomery and Stone, and included a photograph and
a drawing of the two in costume.
The new book was called “A Sequel to The Wizard of Oz,” but in many ways it was more
a sequel to the stage play than to the original book. Baum even changed the history of his
gentle little Wizard from a good man to a bad man to conform to the character as presented
on stage. By 1904, the stage version and the original book were linked in the public’s con-
sciousness so that there were two versions of the story he had to try to reconcile when revis-
iting his imaginary world. But because he intended to turn this book into another musical
extravaganza, the needs of the theater predominated.To that end, Baum worked elements into
the book that would translate easily to the stage. He added more topical humor and numerous
puns that were often at odds with the tone of Oz as he had first created it. A mild satire on
the suffragette movement gave him a built-in excuse for chorus girls. And he ended the book
with a magical transformation that would have been spectacular on stage, but that added a
somewhat unsettling psychological twist to the book.
Unfortunately, the element that got the least attention in this “sequel” was the Land of
Oz itself. Being crafted for adaptation to the stage, the story did not grow organically from
the parameters he had set for Oz when he created it. This is not apparent right at the begin-
ning because he begins the story in the northern Gillikin Country, finally naming that part
of Oz, where the favored color is purple. But he immediately creates confusion about what
is purple—manmade things, or everything?—and this aspect of Oz remains confused for the
rest of the series. Even the famous green glasses appear in only one scene and then, with no
explanation, disappear from the book and the series altogether.
Baum was a good storyteller so despite these changes and the relegation of his wonderful
imaginary world to a stage setting, the book was entertaining and sold well. However, the
show that Baum adapted from it, The Woggle-Bug, closed within a month. It was the worst
failure of any of his stage projects, and he had little incentive to write another Oz book.
However, in 1906 when Baum’s royalties from the stage show began dwindling, he signed a
lucrative contract with his publisher in which he agreed to create their juvenile list. He com-
mitted himself to a massive amount of work with two new teenage series, adult novels, and
stories for younger readers all to be published under pseudonyms as well as a major fantasy
each year under his own name. His fantasy for 1907 was Ozma of Oz, and it began a sequence
of four books that effectively turned Oz into a series.
Internal evidence suggests that Baum planned out these four books to fit together. He
sidestepped the confusion the stage play and The Marvelous Land of Oz had introduced by set-
ting the main adventures in the first three new books outside of Oz. This also allowed Baum
to do what he liked best: to create new imaginary places. To satisfy his readers’ requests, he
re-introduced the whole cast of the first book. In Ozma of Oz, Dorothy and the Cowardly
Lion returned; in Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (1908), the Wizard; and in The Road to Oz
(1909), Toto. And in the fourth and supposedly last Oz book, The Emerald City of Oz (1910),
he brought Oz back to the foreground. However, this time, it is a “new and improved” Oz.To
use the current term, L. Frank Baum “rebooted” his Oz universe.
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B au m ’ s O z
There had already been some revisions to Oz in the first three books. The desert around
Oz changed into a deadly desert where anything touching its sands is destroyed. The Wizard’s
history was again altered turning him back into a good and harmless man, but Baum also
worked Pastoria from the stage play into the history of Oz to provide the line of rulers that
Ozma now represented. And one of the most important changes to Oz was its position rela-
tive to Baum’s other non-Oz fantasy books. In those, he had introduced a number of other
unique imaginary worlds, each the primary setting for the book in which it appeared. Now,
Baum drew almost all of these fantasy worlds into his Oz Universe, making Oz supreme as
was made clear in The Road to Oz when all the rulers of those worlds visited Oz to pay tribute
to Ozma on her birthday.
In The Emerald City, he presents his new version of Oz in detail. He describes it at the very
beginning of Chapter 3, the first that takes place in Oz, and this version of Oz is startlingly
different from that in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The Emerald City is now a real place of
magic, inhabited by real magic workers. Green glasses are not needed because it is decorated
with emeralds. Rather than providing only an illusion of magic, it is really the center of magic
in Oz. But there are even more extreme changes:
No disease of any sort was ever known among the Ozites, and so no one ever died
unless he met with an accident that prevented him from living. This happened very
seldom, indeed. There were no poor people in the Land of Oz, because there was
no such thing as money, and all property of every sort belonged to the Ruler. The
people were her children, and she cared for them. Each person was given freely by
his neighbors whatever he required for his use, which is as much as any one may
reasonably desire. . . .
Every one worked half the time and played half the time, and the people enjoyed
the work as much as they did the play, because it is good to be occupied and to have
something to do. . . .
. . .unpleasant things existed only in a few remote parts of the Land of Oz. . . .
Once there had been wicked witches in the land, too; but now these had all been
destroyed; so, as I said, only peace and happiness reigned in Oz.
(The Emerald City of Oz, Chapter 3)
With little regard to Oz as it was created in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz or even as it was pre-
sented in the musical, Baum has turned his fantasy world into a magical utopia, and given his
Oz series a “happy ever after” ending.To wind up Dorothy’s story, she and her aunt and uncle
are brought to Oz to live. Nevertheless, this happy ending is not reached without conflict,
and the exciting plot Baum devises concerns an attempted invasion of Oz. Even as Dorothy
and her friends are exploring many new magical areas of Oz, an old enemy is planning to
invade and destroy this world. Of course that is avoided in the end, but Baum uses the threat
of invasion—and the threat of discovery by the outside world—to bring his series to an end
by permanently closing his imaginary world off from the outside.To keep Oz safe, Glinda the
Good (a Sorceress now rather than a Witch) renders Oz invisible to the outside world.
In the years after Baum attempted to end the Oz series, there were some major changes
in his life—good and bad. He and his wife moved from Chicago to California, which they
loved. But in 1911, he was forced to declare bankruptcy. He had hoped to strike off in a new
direction with his new fantasy books, but these new books did not match the popularity of his
Oz stories. His readers still begged for more about Oz so in 1913 he was left with little choice
but to return to Oz, and he agreed to continue the Oz series indefinitely.
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Figure 43.2
The first new book in the revived series, The Patchwork Girl of Oz, is a strong story and was
very popular, maybe partly because it echoes the plot of The Wonderful Wizard with a group
of mismatched comrades traveling on another road paved with yellow brick in the Munchkin
Country to the Emerald City to rescue loved ones.
Over the next three years, Baum was heavily involved with a new Oz musical and with a film
studio he and some businessmen from Los Angeles opened to make movies of his stories. He still
published an Oz book a year, Tik-Tok of Oz (1914), The Scarecrow of Oz (1915), and Rinkitink in
Oz (1916), but they all used material from other sources—unpublished stories and an adaptation
of the new musical. As a consequence, all three books were set mostly outside of Oz. Still, a design
element from his 1914 book, Tik-Tok of Oz, had real significance to the development of Oz. For
this book, Baum created two detailed maps that were printed in color and used as the book’s end-
papers: one pictured Oz and the other Oz and the surrounding fantasy countries (see Figure 43.2).
His readers could now see that Oz was the centerpiece of his whole imaginary universe, and they
were able to follow the adventures on the maps and locate many of the places that are mentioned
in the books.This happy idea lent a greater sense of reality to his imaginary world (Figure 43.2).
The closing of the film studio in 1915 ended Baum’s professional theatrical career. From
that time on, he gave his Oz books his primary creative attention and the adventures were
set in Oz, revealing more and more of this magical world. Finally, his Oz stories were grow-
ing out of the parameters of his imaginary world. Over the next four years, he published The
Lost Princess of Oz (1917), The Tin Woodman of Oz (1918), and, posthumously, The Magic of Oz
(1919) and Glinda of Oz (1920).
He did, though, revise his Oz universe one last time—one final reboot. As memories of the
musical of The Wizard faded, he dropped the confusing history of Pastoria that came from the
stage show, and he tried to reconcile the original Oz of The Wonderful Wizard with the utopian
Oz of The Emerald City. In Chapter 12 of The Tin Woodman of Oz (1918), he explained:
Oz was not always a fairyland, I am told. Once it was much like other lands, except it
was shut in by a dreadful desert of sandy wastes that lay all around it, thus preventing
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B au m ’ s O z
its people from all contact with the rest of the world. Seeing this isolation, the fairy
band of Queen Lurline, passing over Oz while on a journey, enchanted the country
and so made it a Fairyland. And Queen Lurline left one of her fairies [Ozma] to rule
this enchanted Land of Oz, and then passed on and forgot all about it. . . .
From that moment on no one in Oz ever died. . . .
Another strange thing about this fairy Land of Oz was that whoever managed to
enter it from the outside world came under the magic spell of the place and did not
change in appearance as long as they lived there. So Dorothy, who now lived with
Ozma, seemed just the same sweet little girl she had been when first she came to
this delightful fairyland.
. . . Also, when Oz first became a fairyland, it harbored several witches and magi-
cians and sorcerers and necromancers, who were scattered in various parts, but most
of these had been deprived of their magic powers, and Ozma had issued a royal edict
forbidding anyone in her dominions to work magic except Glinda the Good and
the Wizard of Oz. Ozma herself, being a real fairy, knew a lot of magic, but she only
used it to benefit her subjects.
This revision brought Oz more in line with the original book, and the plot of The Tin
Woodman also reached back to the first book. It involves the search for the Munchkin girl the
Tin Woodman had loved and had forgotten when he went off to find a heart.
But as Baum reimagined his fantasy world, he also introduced a disconcerting element. In
this version of Oz, the ruler has outlawed magic except for a chosen few. However, one of
the great attractions of the Land of Oz in The Wonderful Wizard is that all kinds of magic can
occur there because it is not civilized—it is the great unknown. Whether Baum intended it
or not, by the end of his series, he had domesticated his original strange and wonderful and
thrillingly dangerous imaginary world—in fact, he had civilized it.
In the beginning, in The Wonderful Wizard, the Land of Oz was similar to our world and
reflected the aspect of the American Dream that hoped paradise might be just over the hori-
zon. As it was adapted to other media and entered the world of popular culture, our world
invaded it. Almost from the beginning, Oz has been pushed and pulled about to modify it
to fit each new incarnation. In Baum’s own revisions of Oz, he turned it from a mirror of
America into a parallel world that demonstrated what America could be—inclusive, help-
ful, kind, generous, and happy—but was not. However, these revisions came at a cost to his
imaginary world. Dorothy’s first arrival in Oz broke what had functioned as an enchant-
ment keeping the Land of Oz in stasis. With her arrival, the exciting adventures began and
Oz started to come to life again. Anything was possible then. At the end of Baum’s series, he
had transformed Oz back into a world in stasis, albeit a protected, happy, and carefree world.
Which is best?
In Baum’s Oz series, he ultimately did intuitively what J. R. R. Tolkien later did pur-
posefully—he created a believable, incredibly detailed, and layered secondary world. Tolkien
commented on the long gestation of The Lord of the Rings: “Then when the ‘end’ had at last
been reached the whole story had to be revised, and indeed largely re-written backwards”
(Tolkien, 1965, page 6).Tolkien achieved consistency by re-working his story and world back-
wards. Baum was forced by circumstances to develop his world as he went along so that all
the stages of its creation, with all their contradictions, are plainly visible. But would we want
it any other way? For many readers Oz is a combination of all its versions—including the
media versions, too. And maybe that is really what is so magical about this greatest American
fairyland: all versions of Oz can exist simultaneously.
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Acknowledgment
Many thanks to Peter Hanff for reading the manuscript.
L. Frank Baum’s Oz Books

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. With Pictures by W. W. Denslow. Chicago and New York: Geo. M. Hill Co.,
1900.
The Marvelous Land of Oz. Pictured by John R. Neill. Chicago: Reilly & Britton, 1904.
Ozma of Oz. Illustrated by John R. Neill. Chicago: Reilly & Britton, 1907.
Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz. Illustrated by John R. Neill. Chicago: Reilly & Britton, 1908.
The Road to Oz. Illustrated by John R. Neill. Chicago: Reilly & Britton, 1909.
The Emerald City of Oz. Illustrated by John R. Neill. Chicago: Reilly & Britton, 1910.
The Little Wizard Series. Illustrated by John R. Neill. Chicago: Reilly & Britton, 1913. Six small indi-
vidual books.
The Patchwork Girl of Oz. Illustrated by John R. Neill. Chicago: Reilly & Britton, 1913.
Tik-Tok of Oz. Illustrated by John R. Neill. Chicago: Reilly & Britton, 1914.
The Scarecrow of Oz. Illustrated by John R. Neill. Chicago: Reilly & Britton, 1915.
Rinkitink in Oz. Illustrated by John R. Neill. Chicago: Reilly & Britton, 1916.
The Lost Princess of Oz. Illustrated by John R. Neill. Chicago: Reilly & Britton, 1917.
The Tin Woodman of Oz. Illustrated by John R. Neill. Chicago: Reilly & Britton, 1918.
The Magic of Oz. Illustrated by John R. Neill. Chicago: Reilly & Lee, 1919.
Glinda of Oz. Illustrated by John R. Neill. Chicago: Reilly & Lee, 1920.
References
Riley, Michael O., (1997), Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum. Lawrence: University
Press of Kansas.
Rogers, Katharine M., (2002), L. Frank Baum Creator of Oz. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Swartz, Mark Evan, (2000), Oz Before the Rainbow: L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz on Stage
and Screen to 1939. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Tolkien, J. R. R., (1965), Foreword to The Fellowship of the Ring: Being the First Part of The Lord of the
Rings, 2nd edition, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
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44
Wright’s Islandia
Michael Saler
While Austin Tappan Wright’s Islandia (1942) is usually praised as a utopian novel, it is also
one of the most intensely imagined imaginary worlds ever created. The novel is distinguished
by the detail and scope of its world-building and by its subtle reflections on the peculiar role
of imaginary worlds within Western modernity. Wright himself mentally inhabited Islandia
for much of his life, conveying in the novel his sense that imaginary worlds were not simply
escapist refuges from contemporary life but a bulwark against modern anomie.
Wright (1883–1931) attended Harvard as an undergraduate and Harvard Law School; the
“Yard” features in his novel. He became a Professor of Law, first at the University of California
and then at the University of Pennsylvania. Following his untimely death in an automobile
accident, his family discovered the vast manuscript of Islandia (approximately 2,300 pages)
together with a 400-page history detailing every facet of the world that Wright had been devel-
oping since childhood. His surviving manuscripts included descriptions of Islandia’s geology
and geography; analyses of the complexities of its seasons, governmental system, ecology, and
language (including a grammar and glossary, and translations from Islandian fables and poems);
and a complex survey of its agrarian way of life.Wright also created numerous maps (many since
lost), tables of population, notes on weather, and even a charmingly annotated bibliography of
imaginary “secondary works” devoted to his invented world. His wife Margaret transcribed the
manuscript, and his daughter Sylvia cut about a third of it so it could be published in 1942.
Wright’s invented milieu is vividly imagined, practically tangible in its minute attention to
topography, history, and culture.Yet Islandia is equally remarkable for its considerations of the
epistemology of worlds real and imagined. Wright came of age during the fin de siècle, when
the imagination was increasingly being defined as reason’s equal and necessary partner rather
than its unruly and dangerous subordinate (Saler, 2012). The “aesthetic turn” characterizing
this period extolled the subjective aspects of human perception: contemporary philosophers,
scientists, writers, and artists argued that the “real” world was to some degree imaginary. At
the same time, the new mass culture of the time enabled an explosion of imaginary worlds in
literature, film, and radio.
Contemporaries “believed” in these imaginary worlds with a double-minded conscious-
ness that allowed them to be immersed in the worlds while also maintaining an ironic aware-
ness of their immersion. They no longer inhabited imaginary worlds through “the willing
suspension of disbelief ” famously proposed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1817, but rather
through the willing activation of pretense acutely described by J. R. R. Tolkien in 1939:
[The willing suspension of disbelief] does not seem to me a good description

of what happens. What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful
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Michael Saler
“sub-creator”. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it,
what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world.You therefore believe
it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken;
the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again,
looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside …. [T]his suspension of
disbelief is a substitute for the genuine thing.
(Tolkien, 2007: 52)
Coleridge’s definition had reflected the religious and utilitarian shackles placed on the imagi-
nation in the early nineteenth century. By the early twentieth century, however, a more toler-
ant and appreciative understanding of the imagination permitted mass audiences to “live” in
imaginary worlds persistently and even communally. Thus, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock
Holmes became the first fictional character whom adults proclaimed was “real” while main-
taining that his author was fictitious. The communal associations and publications devoted
to Holmes and his imaginary world of 221B Baker Street became the model for subsequent
imaginary worlds, which were transformed by reader participation into virtual worlds.
Within Wright’s lifetime, then, fictional imaginary worlds had become genuine domiciles,
while the real world of experience was widely recognized as partly a fictional construct.
Islandia reflects—and overtly addresses—these changing attitudes toward reality, the imagina-
tion, and the nature of imaginary worlds within Western modernity.
Story and Themes

Islandia’s narrative is relatively simple. In 1907, John Lang, a young American recently gradu-
ated from Harvard, is appointed American consul to Islandia, an agrarian nation located on
the southernmost tip of the continent of Karain. For centuries, Islandia has strictly limited
its contact with foreigners to preserve its traditional way of life. The Western nations covet
its resources and have pressured the country to accept global trade and industrialization.
Some among Islandia’s ruling elite believe that if Islandia refuses, the Western powers will
resort to forced colonization; this political faction argues that Islandia can only remain sover-
eign if it cooperates with the West and accepts the inevitability of “progress.” Others strenu-
ously oppose this policy, fearing that the proposed changes to their customary way of life
will destroy precisely those qualities that make Islandia unique. During Lang’s sojourn, the
nation prepares for a national vote to decide the issue. As American consul, he is charged
with promoting the West’s case, but as he travels throughout the country Lang realizes that
incorporating Islandia within the global industrial economy would be a mistake. He learns
to admire, even envy, the Islandians, who are self-sufficient spiritually as well as economically.
Their individualistic way of life is based on the intertwined significance of family and place.
Two key terms in the Islandian language represent these fundamental tenets of the culture:
ania, which means “desire to marry” and alia, which means “love for family and place, as a
continuing unit” (Davenport, 1942: 61). The Islandian people’s confidence, serenity, and indi-
viduality all stem from their sense of participating in an unbroken heritage that will extend
into the future. They exemplify Edmund Burke’s definition of society as a contract among
past, present, and future generations; their agrarian existence similarly integrates the individual
within the wider compass of nature. Islandia exemplifies a rare balance between individualism
and holism.
During his stay, Lang contrasts Islandia unfavorably with the artificial speed, complexity,
and materialism of modern Western culture, which yields anomie, hypocrisy, and mindless
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Wright’s Islandia
conformity. He nurtures his own nascent individuality and sense of purpose through intense
relationships with two strong Islandian women, Dorna and Nattana. He celebrates the
Islandians’ ultimate decision to remain isolationist, despite the fact that it will mean his own
exile. However, as a result of his foiling a foreign plot to invade the country, the Islandian
government rewards him with citizenship. Caught between two worlds—the alien but
enticing Islandian culture and the comfortable but unsatisfying conventions of his Western
upbringing—Lang returns to the United States to see where his interest ultimately lies; a
year spent working in commerce convinces him that he prefers Islandia. He returns with his
fiancé, Gladys Hunter. She too must adjust to the more individualistic and sexually egalitarian
culture of Islandia, which clashes with her socialization as a woman dependent on men. After
an initial period of struggle and self-doubt, she and John successfully acclimate to Islandia by
establishing a farm, family, and commitment to mutual equality.
One of the novel’s most interesting aspects consists in its subtle but repeated meta-reflections
on the nature and purposes of imaginary worlds within modern Western culture. Islandia
highlights how “reality” itself is an imaginary world to some degree, given the inextricability
of emotions and the imagination from all perception. It also vividly portrays how imaginary
and real worlds can be inhabited simultaneously through the exercise of “double conscious-
ness.” Both concepts are illustrated in the following passage, in which Nattana asks Lang to
imagine what it might be like if the two were to visit Lang’s home city of Boston. He starts to
improvise a suitable story, and as he does so the phenomenological world he creates becomes
as real to him as his present material circumstances:
In answering her question it was necessary to describe a city street at home. Almost
yard by yard I led Nattana along, down Beacon Street to the Public Gardens and
across them and the Common and eventually to the Touraine. As I spoke the quiet
living room and the open fire became a dim and unreal background, and the snowy
silent farm lands outside with their encircling forested hills were a dream; I saw only
Nattana’s actual face and her two pretty hands spread along her flushed cheeks, her
short little skirt lying flat upon her rounded body and occasionally a sandaled foot
lifting in the air; and also – quite as vivid as she was – the scenes which I was imagin-
ing and the Americanized Nattana that I pictured as with me.
(Wright, 1942: 532–533)
This interplay between imagination and experience was increasingly studied by philosophers,
scientists, and artists during the late nineteenth century. It was certainly not a new obser-
vation, but its wide public acceptance, and the degree to which it inspired contemporary
intellectuals to rethink epistemological claims to “objectivity,” did distinguish the fin-de-siècle
understanding of the imagination from earlier periods. In turn, this new attention to the
dynamic role of the imagination in everyday life helped legitimate the creation of, and pro-
longed immersion in, imaginary worlds. Reflecting on the late nineteenth century writings of
Friedrich Nietzsche as well as those by neo-Idealist and Pragmatist thinkers, the philosopher
R. G. Collingwood observed, “in the last quarter of the century, there arose … a new school
of philosophy, in revolt against naturalism and materialism and positivism, asserting the free-
dom of mind to create an orderly life of its own and a world in which to dwell” (Collingwood
2005: 106).
The passage also illustrates the new understanding of how one could inhabit real and
imaginary worlds at the same time, through the exercise of “double consciousness.” The early
Victorian middle classes tended to think in terms of binary oppositions, opposing rationality
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Michael Saler
and the imagination. Romantic writers challenged this schematic outlook, and were joined
in the second half of the century by psychologists who posited the existence of double
consciousness, whereby individuals could immerse themselves in imaginary fancies without
losing sight of reality. As early as 1844, one psychologist explained that individuals could
be cognizant that they were hallucinating because humans in effect had “two distinct and
perfect brains: One brain was, as we so often see, watching the other, and even interested
and amused by its vagaries” (Saler, 2012: 40). The realization that complete immersion in
fantasy did not displace reason or reality liberated imaginary worlds as an acceptable terrain
for prolonged and communal habitation. Lang’s description of how the “reality” of Nattana
sitting before him was gradually replaced by his imaginary vision of her in Boston, while at
the same time her actual presence remained equally real to him, nicely illustrates the practice
of double-consciousness.
Islandia also suggests how imaginary worlds might redress the ills of modernity. As a uto-
pian fiction, the book criticizes contemporary Western practices and suggests alternatives in
the ways of life of Islandian society. Such cautionary admonitions and inspiring possibilities
are the standard fare of utopias, but Islandia departs from many other works by focusing on
characters as well as ideas. Perhaps its most fascinating, and certainly most realized, “character”
is the imagined world of Islandia itself, which affects all who come in contact with it—char-
acters and readers alike. The reader experiences Islandia somatically and conceptually, from
its manifold colors, smells, and sounds to its social, economic, cultural, and political organiza-
tions. Wright must convince the reader that Islandia is not merely “real” but actual in order
to convey a central argument: that the United States, when compared to Islandia, is expressly
“unreal.” This in turn has philosophic consequences concerning the vital role that imaginary
worlds can play to redress the ills of the modern Western world.
Lang is subjected to many criticisms of his country by the Islandians. His friend Dorn
explains that inhabitants of the United States cut themselves off from all forms of reality—
personal, social, and spiritual—by separating thoughts from feelings and privileging the for-
mer. In addition to denying their natural urges, they create life-denying deities and disdain
their world as fallen. Their penchant for abstractions destroys spontaneity; their invidious
distinctions between the sexes poison relationships and personal potential; and their artificial
conventions make life unnecessarily complex and frustrating. Dorn explains that, when com-
pared to Islandia, life in the United States is fundamentally unreal:
[In the USA, peoples’] aims are beyond the mark of human possibility …. They aim
for other lives beyond life on this earth and they imagine heavens in the empty skies.
They long for such heavens on earth. They always long for something else beyond
their reach! But we sound the deeps—the deeps of our natures, of dreams, of what
we feel, and of our growth, and of the growth of all that grows about us, men and
women, animals, grass and trees.
(Wright, 1942: 495)
This is primarily because the United States (and the industrial West in general) no longer fos-
ter close connections between family and place (ania and alia). The West’s frenetic pace of life
and increasingly crowded conditions militate against a sense of rootedness and security, which
the Islandians enjoy thanks to their twin allegiances to genealogy and geography.
There are many consequences stemming from these differences, and one in particular is
unexpected in a novel renowned for its world-building:The Islandians spurn fiction and have
no need for imaginary worlds. Their favorite form of writing is the fable, which conveys
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useful precepts couched in the language of an animistic nature. Mimetic works of fiction,
however, are dismissed as emotional crutches unnecessary to a people secure in their roots
within larger social and natural networks. They have no drama, because “it went against the
grain to mimic another person, even an imaginary one” and “it was belittling to pretend you
were someone else” (Wright, 1942: 232). With a pang, Lang realizes that should he reside
permanently in Islandia, “[t]here would be no theaters, no opera, no illustrated magazines,
no developed sophisticated art, none of the highly flavored pleasures of the Western world.”
(Wright, 1942: 855).
For Islandians, a craving for fiction and other forms of escapism indicates that the individual
is “out of tune” with life (Wright, 1942: 408). The Islandians’ remedy for such emotional dis-
equilibrium is to focus on the natural world rather than wallow in introspection. They strive
to combine being inwardly directed with a life of practical activity.“Externality carried too far
eliminates self and its productive desires,” Dorn explains. “It is, like everything else, a question
of balance” (Wright, 1942: 421).
We have, then, a seeming paradox: Wright spent much of his life creating and inhabiting
an imaginary world, only to write a novel based on it that seems to dismiss imaginary worlds
and their immersive pleasures. At the same time, the novel’s alternatives to Western existence
appear impossible to implement within the West. Only in Islandia is it possible for the major-
ity to enjoy the continuity of family and place for multiple generations. In this reckoning,
Islandia highlights the ills of Western modernity, but does not provide a practical solution for
these problems short of radically rejecting the industrial and globalizing trends of moder-
nity itself.
Late in the novel, however,Wright resolves the paradox, not only rescuing imaginary worlds
from the Islandians’ obloquy but also making such fictions part of the solution to problems
of the West. In a brief conversation between Lang and Dorn’s sister Dorna, she tells him that
love of family and preservation of place are not the exclusive preserve of the inhabitants of
Islandia. They are states of mind—and so too is Islandia: “Islandia is nothing real, Johnlang. It
is merely a place. Live true to your alia and to such ania as may come to you” (Wright, 1942:
719). Love and other affiliations are subjective realities that don’t necessarily require mate-
rial correlates for them to be experienced as “real.” Wright’s own life-long habitation of his
imaginary world demonstrates that while Western modernity may have disrupted temporal
and spatial continuities, it compensates for this by encouraging self-reflexive construction of
subjective beliefs, genealogies, and worlds to which one can remain attached, and thus feel
rooted, regardless of external circumstances. Alia and ania are not restricted to the fortunate
Islandians, but to anyone finding homes within their imaginations.
Nor should this modern turn to imaginary worlds be classified as strictly “escapist,” with-
out practical consequences. Islandia shows that concrete attainments are often the product of
a disciplined imagination. In the course of the novel, Lang realizes that he is a “pragmatist”
who seeks “realizable dreams” rather than purely escapist illusions (Wright, 1942: 850, 871).
As a result, he ultimately attains the equipoise exemplified by the Islandians: He is able to bal-
ance his subjective needs with external realities, imaginary worlds with real ones. Retreat to
pure fantasy is not explicitly rejected by the novel, but Islandia stresses the important practical
derivations of imaginary creations.
After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1908, Wright worked briefly for Louis
Brandeis, while also starting to draft his novel. It is likely that Brandeis’ legal pragmatism influ-
enced Wright’s consideration of how imaginary worlds can affect everyday life in constructive
ways. Wright’s tendency to live in his own imagination, while turning his fancies to produc-
tive use, is clearly evident in the letters he wrote around this time.
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Michael Saler
Austin Tappan Wright’s Double Consciousness

The fin-de-siècle cultural license to inhabit the imagination for prolonged periods of time, and
even communally, offered a solution to modern anomie and flux. This was true for several
prominent creators of imaginary worlds, such as H. P. Lovecraft and J. R. R.Tolkien, and it was
also the case for Austin Tappan Wright (Saler, 2012). He shared this turn to imaginary worlds
with members of his immediate family. His father, John Henry Wright (1852–1908)—Professor
of Greek and Dean of the Graduate School of the Arts and Sciences at Harvard—championed
the contemporary turn to the imagination. In 1895 he delivered an address to the American
Philological Association on “The Function of the Imagination in Classical Philology;” as
a young man he had also mapped his own elaborate imaginary world (Keighren, 2002: 5).
Wright’s mother, Mary (1851–1916), was a celebrated novelist, many of whose works were set
in the imaginary English town of Greater Dulwich. His brother, John K. Wright, created the
detailed imaginary world of “Cravay” as an adolescent, and later became a Geographer. His
1946 Presidential Address to the Association of American Geographers, “Terrae Incognitae:
The Place of the Imagination in Geography,” challenged the reigning positivist current in
the geographical profession that dismissed the subjective aspects of geographical knowledge
(Wright, 1947). John Wright insisted that Geography had a crucial imaginative dimension
that must not only be acknowledged and explored, but celebrated. His talk helped establish
the importance of subjectivity in all apprehensions of geography (Keighren, 2002: 11–12).
Austin Tappan Wright’s own interchanges between worlds real and imaginary are evident
in the correspondence he conducted with his fiancé Margaret (“Margot”) between 1910
and 1911, while she traveled abroad. He encourages her to think of him as an “imaginary
companion” to whom she can confide her thoughts, just as he was doing with her (Wright,
1910a). “I want you all the time; & chat with a Margot who is not there, & discuss law with
her, & point out things in shop windows, & read aloud to her, & ask her advice all the time”
(Wright, 1910b).
Like John Lang finding that both the United States and Islandia could appear illusory to
him, depending on his subjective state, Wright was aware that his emotions colored his sense
of reality. Missing Margot, his own environment could appear unreal: “I feel without you
quite lost, like a phantom thing, and there is an unreality to everything” (Wright, 1910a). To
compensate for the lack of her physical presence, he imagines her with him, which in turn
imbues his concrete surroundings with greater immediacy:
You are in my office (sitting on the telephone book on top of the steam heater)
looking down the harbor. – You come out, and go in, on the electric cars with me. –
Occasionally we travel together. – I may take you out into central Pennsylvania with
me next week, if I go. – I took you on a little trip around Penobscot Bay.You wore a
large loose coarse straw hat with a puffy yellow ribbon around the crown. The brim
flapped a little in the wind.
(Wright, 1910b)
This letter continues to describe his imaginary trip with her in great detail. He suggests that,
when she returns, they visit islands in Maine that he had been to previously. His memories
of these real places have become transformed by his subjective feelings for her: “I suppose
when you love a woman, and have loved certain scenes and places, it is natural that the
two should mingle. Now all the beauty of Castine, my darling, seems significant of you”
(Wright, 1910b).
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Wright’s Islandia
In one remarkable letter of 1911, he reveals to her how he created Islandia as a child and
considers it a haven. He now incorporates her into his world, conjuring it into greater life:
I am sometimes quite a day dreamer, dear Margot. I imagine and visit all sorts of
strange places, – castles, forests, remote seas. Partly by daydreams and partly by night
dreams, there exists a certain country, which I have worked out slowly since I was
seven or eight, and now it is all absolutely vivid and real to the way the window
of the room in which I eat swings out, – to the colour of the flowerboxes on my
roof garden.
I have often imagined you living there with me. The house had to be altered
somewhat, but the alterations had been made. You have a little boudoir finished in
blue. – When you look out the window, you look over the roofs of the houses of the
city. They are nearly all of the same height. Each is flat with a garden. There are little
paths and ways from garden to garden in each block, often. – You would see stretch-
ing away acres and acres of greenery and flowers and grey ivy-grown walls. Beyond
in one place is a sapphire sea; in another a rugged acropolis with a steep-walled castle
of somewhat gothic hues; in another the long slow immense slopes of a white snowy
mountain. Sometime, if you like, I will tell you about it, or write you more.
(Wright, 1911)
Passages like this suggest that Wright withdrew into the interior fastness of his mind to cope
with the anxieties of modernity. He described contemporary existence to Margaret as “a
strange hard world in a way and we are each of us very isolated, & very much alone in spite of
friends and family” (Wright, 1911).Yet their mutual love creates a bulwark against “the great
loneliness of this world;” imagining her with him in his imaginary world when she is physi-
cally unavailable renders existence meaningful and supportable.
But Wright was too pragmatic and perhaps too Victorian (despite his rejection of many
of its conventions) to condone unalloyed escapism. He argues that the pathos of Cervantes’
Don Quixote (1605) derives from the eponymous character’s “glorious unselfish dreams … sad
because so fruitless” (Wright, 1911). And he records that he would rather be a successful
lawyer than writer, because the former tends to have a more “permanent” effect on life than
fiction writers (Wright, 1910b). Like Lang, Wright values dreams that are realizable in wak-
ing life. He relates to Margot a dream he had in which they went camping together. The
dream itself was marvelous, but even more so was the promise that it might be fulfilled in
reality: “Every detail of our day is clear in my mind. And the wonder of it all is not that it
is a very vivid dream, but that it may be true, it may happen, I may actually experience it”
(Wright, 1911).
Writing about Islandia, Naomi Jacobs argues that Wright’s “purpose was not to transform
the world of American industrial capitalism but temporarily to escape from it” ( Jacobs, 1995:
86). She is right, but “escape” is not the right word, or at least it requires severe qualifica-
tion. Wright’s achievement in Islandia is to question the pejorative connotations of “escap-
ism” when it comes to the imagination and imaginary worlds. By defining and encouraging
the outlook of “double consciousness,” Western modernity dissolved the binary opposition
between “reality” and “escape,” revealing the two to be engaged in an inseparable dialogue.
Islandia vividly depicted this process; Wright’s life in all its creative productivity enacted it.
Islandia is not only an exemplary imaginary world, it is a performative one: it forces the reader
to recognize how he or she has come to live in two worlds simultaneously, an epiphany that
John Lang had when Dorna tells him that “Islandia is nothing real.” Rather than opposing
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the “no place” of utopia to reality, Islandia insists that the two are mutually constitutive. It
demonstrates that imaginary worlds are a defining feature of the way we live now.
References
Both the uncut typescript of Islandia and Islandia: History and Description (“by Jean Perrier, First French
Consul to Islandia, and Translated by John Lang, first American Consul”) are available online at the
Harvard University Library website: http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/~hou01122, accessed
May 12, 2016.
Collingwood, R. G. (2005) The Philosophy of Enchantment: Studies in Folktale, Cultural Criticism, and
Anthropology, D. Boucher, W. James, P. Smallwood (eds), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Davenport, B. (1942) An Introduction to Islandia, New York: Farrar & Rinehart.
Jacobs, N. (1995) “Islandia: Plotting Utopian Desire,” Utopian Studies 6:2, pp. 75–89.
Keighren, I. (2002) “The Imaginary Worlds of John Kirtland Wright,” BS Dissertation, University of
Edinburgh, Viewed April 12, 2016, available at http://www.inneskeighren.com/files/Keighren%20
(2002).pdf.
Saler, M. (2012) As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality, New York: Oxford
University Press.
Tolkien, J. R. R. (2007) On Fairy-Stories,V. Flieger and D. A. Anderson (eds), London: HarperCollins.
Wright, A. T. (1910a) Letters to Margaret Wright, MS 81–M126, File 83, February 13–December 10,
1910, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.
Wright, A. T. (1910b) Letters to Margaret Wright, MS 81–M126, File 84, December 14, 1910–January
11, 1911, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.
Wright, A. T. (1911) Letters to Margaret Wright, MS 81–M126, File 88, March 2–April 5, 1911,
Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.
Wright, A. T. (1942) Islandia, New York: Farrar & Rinehart.
Wright, J. K. (1947) “Terrae Incognitae:The Place of Imagination in Geography,” Annals of the Association
of American Geographers 37, pp. 1–15.
376
45
Tolkien’s Arda
Dimitra Fimi
J. R. R.Tolkien’s extended mythology is chiefly known via his much-loved The Hobbit (1937)
and The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955), both set during the Third Age of Middle-earth. Both
of those elements of a “traditional” setting (time and place) imply a much larger conception of
a “secondary world” that unfolds in an immense depth of time and spans a vast geographical
space. This sense of depth is inherent in The Lord of the Rings and is apparent in scenes such as
the Council of Elrond, during which Elrond himself reminisces about events that took place
thousands of years previously. What is more, it is not a literary device: Tolkien spent most of
his lifetime inventing an extended mythology that detailed the history of his imaginary world
over millennia, including a cosmogonic myth and a great number of interrelated legends
and tales. Alongside a complex web of “races” that populate his invented world, Tolkien also
developed a number of other “secondary world infrastructures” (often to impressive detail),
namely mythology, languages, cultures, philosophies, nature, genealogies, timelines, and maps.
Tolkien had started working on his invented mythology in the 1910s, just after he returned
to England from the Great War, and continued elaborating, amending, and enriching it until
his death in 1973. When The Hobbit was composed, the mythology of the First Age and
Second Age of Middle-earth had been evolving for over twenty years; while by the time
The Lord of the Rings was published Tolkien had devoted forty years to his immense project
of world-building. Tolkien never finished his mythology to his satisfaction. The Silmarillion
(1977), the work most cited today as a compendium of Tolkien’s legendarium, was edited and
published posthumously by his son and literary executor, Christopher Tolkien, and (mostly)
represents a selection of Tolkien’s latest thoughts on his created world. However, Christopher
Tolkien has also allowed readers and scholars access to Tolkien’s evolving conception of his
secondary world, via Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth (1980) and the 12-volume
History of Middle-earth (1983–1996), which present drafts, fragments, and alternative versions
of Tolkien’s legendarium and trace its development over sixty years. Given this enormous
scope, it is impossible to express adequately the breadth and richness of Tolkien’s invented
world in a short essay without necessarily condensing its vision. Bearing this limitation in
mind, the remainder of this chapter will attempt to explore some of the most important “sec-
ondary world infrastructures”Tolkien created for Arda. It will also address Tolkien’s theorizing
of his own world-building and will attempt to situate it in its cultural/intellectual context.
Although “Middle-earth” is commonly used to refer to Tolkien’s invented world, in real-
ity this term only refers to a portion of that world. While most readers did not find that out
until the posthumous publication of The Silmarillion (1977), Tolkien had already explained in
earlier letters that Middle-earth is only “the North-west of the world” (Tolkien, 1981: 148)
he had created, and that the name of the entire “world or earth” of his mythology is “Arda,”
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translated as “realm,” itself part of “Eä,” the Universe (Tolkien, 1981: 283, 284). Arda under-
went a number of transformations, both internal (in terms of the fictional history of Tolkien’s
invented world) and external (related to Tolkien’s changing views about his imaginary uni-
verse). In the earliest version of Tolkien’s mythology, The Book of Lost Tales, the land where
most of the Elvish legends and tales are set is a mythical version of England, coinciding with
Tolkien’s early nationalistic project “to restore to the English … a mythology of their own”
(Tolkien, 1981: 230–231; see also below). This relationship of Tolkien’s Arda with Primary
World geography persisted, albeit in a more muted form, until his late writings. The Prologue
of The Lord of the Rings states that hobbits still live in “the North-West of the Old World, east
of the Sea” (Tolkien, 2004: 2), while Tolkien also claimed that Arda is “this earth, the one in
which we now live, but the historical period is imaginary” (Tolkien, 1981: 239). If Arda is a
version of the Primary World in its entirety, then Middle-earth coincides with Europe, thus
justifying Tolkien’s creative re-use of the rich North-Western European mythological tradi-
tion in his legendarium.
Arda also went through some cataclysmic changes in terms of its internal geological his-
tory. Tolkien seems to have begun thinking about it as a flat world, surrounded by an Outer
Ocean, in a similar manner to perceptions of the world in medieval mythological texts (see
Fimi, 2008: 124). However, when Tolkien added to his mythology the Atlantean story of
the Fall of Númenor during the Second Age of Arda, the idea of the World Made Round
changed his secondary world drastically (Noad, 2000). Arda was now conceived as a flat world
at its beginning, until the great flood that sunk Númenor caused the world to become “bent,”
rounded on itself, therefore turning into a globe. Only the Elves can now find the “Straight
Road” to the West, a route denied to Men. These conceptual changes are also reflected in
the maps Tolkien drew for his invented world. One of the earliest maps, adhering to the flat
world model, presents the world in the shape of a Viking Ship (see Tolkien, 1983: 84–85), fore-
grounding the idea of a “mythological” time. On the contrary, the later, widely known map of
Middle-earth, a core paratextual element of The Lord of the Rings, is realistically drawn, with
an eye to scale and distances that (roughly) agree with the narrative of this novel, and signals
that Tolkien’s world has now moved to a “historical” time (see Fimi, 2008: 5–6, 123–125).
Tolkien’s conception of time in Arda includes the Years of the Trees, a primordial period
lasting thousands of years during which the Count of Time has not yet started and the world
is lit by the Two Trees, Telperion and Laurelin; and the Years of the Sun, during which the
Sun and Moon replace the Trees as the main sources of light and with which real “time”
with its inexorability and connotations of decay begins. This latter period comprises the First
Age (until the overthrow of Melkor/Morgoth, the original archvillain of the mythology),
the Second Age (until the first defeat of Sauron by Elendil and Gil-galad, and the taking of
the Ring of Power by Isildur), and the Third Age (which ends with the departure of Elrond,
Galadriel, and Gandalf, the keepers of the three Elven Rings, from Middle-earth). This nar-
rative of the different epochs of Arda, and its gradual disenchantment culminating in the
departure of the Elves, chimes with some of the central theological and philosophical ideas
that Tolkien weaved into his legendarium: the Fall as a major theme, as well as time as a process
of decay. Tolkien noted that one of the main differences between his mythology and most
others is that “the Sun is not a divine symbol, but a second-best thing, and the ‘light of the
Sun’ (the world under the sun) become terms for a fallen world, and a dislocated imperfect
vision” (Tolkien, 1981: 148). Flieger’s landmark study, Splintered Light (2002), building upon
the linguistic theories of Tolkien’s fellow-Inkling, Owen Barfield, has argued for the history
of Tolkien’s Arda as a process of fragmentation, in which the gradual loss of the original light
(from the Two Trees, to the Sun and the Moon, and then to the Silmarils, the jewels that
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T o l k i e n ’ s A r da
captured some of the light of the Trees) serves as a powerful metaphor for the continuing sub-
division and diminishing of the peoples and languages of Middle-earth.
Tolkien’s Arda is inhabited by a number of different beings and “races” who are often
understood to exist in a hierarchical scale that is mainly religious/spiritual in its conception.
Arda itself is created by Eru Ilúvatar, the Godhead of Tolkien’s invented Universe. Ilúvatar
makes the Ainur, angelic powers, who are “the offspring of his thought” (Tolkien, 1977: 15),
and proposes themes of music to them, which the Ainur develop, thus creating a vision
of Arda, though apparently already marred by Melkor who desires power to rival Ilúvatar.
Ilúvatar brings the world to existence with one word (“Eä”), and those of the Ainur who
descend upon the world in order to shape it become known as the Valar. In this task they are
aided by minor spirits, the Maiar. This separation between Eru (as the Godhead who brings
the world into existence) and the Valar (as the divine personas who actually fashion the physi-
cal world) allows Tolkien’s mythology a double spiritual vision: First, a blending of Christian
theology (one God) with the semblance of pagan religions (the Valar as a “pantheon” like
the gods of Olympus or Asgard) (see Burns, 2004); and, second, a Neoplatonic perspective,
in which Eru is the Prime Mover who inspires the vision of the world, while the Valar are
the “demiurgic” powers that craft the actual, physical universe (see Flieger, 1986; Nagy, 2004).
Next come the beings who have a physical body, the “Children of Ilúvatar,” Elves and
Men. Their inner hierarchy is signaled by the order of their appearance in the invented world
that gives them their alternative names: the Firstborn and the Followers. The Elves do not
age or die (though they can be killed) and can return to the world in new bodies. They pos-
sess exceeding beauty and wisdom, and their intrinsic melancholy is associated with their
prolonged lives and getting weary of the world, to which they are bound. Men, on the other
hand, are very much conceived as ordinary human beings, but their (relatively) short lives are
regarded as the “gift” of Ilúvatar, while an afterlife “beyond the circles of the world” (Tolkien,
1981: 287) is implied. The Dwarves are a separate creation of the Vala Aulë, in a naïve effort
to imitate Ilúvatar’s demiurgic power, eventually blessed and accepted by the Godhead and
inheriting their father’s gift of craftsmanship.
Other peoples that populate Tolkien’s Arda are not separate branches of creation, but rather
sub-categories or corrupted versions of Elves and Men. The hobbits, one of Tolkien’s most
successful creations, are only a branch of the human race (see Tolkien, 2004: 2; Tolkien, 1981:
158). They were not integral to Tolkien’s world from the beginning of its inception, but
grew out of stories Tolkien made up for his children (see Anderson, 2002, for their origins),
and gradually became “drawn into” (Tolkien, 1988: 7) the mythology. Shippey (2005) has
discussed the important narrative role of the hobbits, whose anachronistic, Victorian culture
(complete with pocket-handkerchiefs and bourgeois manners) may jar with a world of drag-
ons and warriors, but whose main function is to act as mediators between the modern reader
and the pre-industrial (in its material culture) and medieval (in its heroic code) world of the
Third Age in Middle-earth. On the contrary, the Orcs (called “goblins” in The Hobbit) were
part of Tolkien’s Arda from the earliest versions of the mythology. Tolkien changed his view
a few times about their origin (for an overview, see Fimi, 2008: 154–157), but in most of his
writings they are not created by Melkor/Morgoth (the “fallen” Valar who takes the place of
Lucifer/Satan in Tolkien’s legendarium) but were originally Elves ensnared by Melkor and
“by slow arts of cruelty … corrupted and enslaved” so that the race of Orcs was made “in
envy and mockery of the Elves” (Tolkien, 1977: 50).
The peoples of Middle-earth, therefore, seem to exist in a taxonomy that resembles the
medieval Great Chain of Being, rating as “higher” beings the more spirit and less matter they
have, a classification that is also influenced by their allegiance to the forces of good or evil.
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Dimitra Fimi
Recent scholarly work has been preoccupied with Tolkien’s representations of “race” and
racial prejudice in his invented world, taking into account Tolkien’s medieval sources and
contemporary cultural and intellectual history (see Sinex, 2010; Fimi, 2015).
The “illusion of historicity” (Tolkien, 1981: 143) that Arda maintains is also enhanced by
Tolkien’s language invention. Indeed, Tolkien saw language invention and myth-making as
“coeval and congenital” (Tolkien, 2016: 24) activities. The first drafts of his two most devel-
oped invented languages, Quenya and Sindarin, are contemporary with the earliest versions
of his legendarium and underwent an equally complex series of amendments and conceptual
changes in terms of internal and external history (see Hostetter, 2007; Fimi and Higgins,
2016). Tolkien’s language invention was methodical and informed by his academic training as
a philologist. Every word of his invented languages, therefore, is built upon a system of base-
roots, thus creating discernible relationships between names such as Gondor (“stone-land”),
Argonath (“royal stones”), and Gondolin (“stone of song”), all of which incorporate the
root GOND- (stone). What is more, the various Elvish languages of Arda are interconnected,
since they are envisioned as stemming from a “proto”-Elvish ur-language that developed
into a number of distinct but related languages, modeled upon the Indo-European “Tree
of Tongues” (see Tolkien, 1987: 196–197; see also the “Invented Languages” chapter in this
volume for Tolkien’s theorizing of language invention). Alongside invented languages,Tolkien
also designed writing systems, including the Tengwar (the flowing script seen on the One
Ring) and the Cirth (a Runic alphabet, though quite different to the Old Norse or Anglo-
Saxon runes). Both systems are not, strictly speaking, alphabets, but systems of signs that can
be adapted to express the sounds of different languages (see Smith, 2014). Both invented
languages and scripts have allowed generations of readers to engage with Tolkien’s world by
attempting to use his languages in translations and new compositions, as well as by decipher-
ing the examples where Tolkien uses his writing systems and creating calligraphic examples
of their own.
The languages of Arda do not just add verisimilitude to Tolkien’s world-building, but are
also the vehicle of philosophical and political ideas. The Elves are conceived as the creators
of languages that are artistic, aesthetically pleasing, and capable of sound symbolism (see, for
example, Tolkien, 1987: 223; Tolkien, 1994: 28). On the contrary, upon uttering the Ring
verse in the Black Speech of Mordor, Gandalf ’s voice becomes “menacing, powerful, harsh as
stone” (Tolkien, 2004: 254).Tolkien’s late essay “The Shibboleth of Fëanor” (1996: 331–336) is
a masterful exploration of the ways in which language change can become politicized.Tolkien
gave some guidance on the pronunciation of his invented languages in the Appendices of The
Lord of the Rings, but his more systematic linguistic material (grammars, phonologies, lexica,
etc.) were only published posthumously, mainly in two specialist journals, Parma Eldalamberon
and Vinyar Tengwar, with a great number of his linguistic papers still in the process of being
edited and prepared for publication.
Tolkien’s world-building process was also highly visual. From the earliest drafts of his
mythology, Tolkien combined textual, linguistic, and artistic vision, drawing not only maps,
but also landscapes, architectural features, and—more rarely—characters. A range of drawings
from different periods of Tolkien’s life and writing career have been published in Tolkien: Artist
and Illustrator (Hammond and Scull, 1995; see also Tolkien, 2011 and 2015a), pointing to the
complex, transmedial development of Arda. It is important to note that Tolkien illustrated The
Hobbit himself, thus sharing his visual representation of Middle-earth in the Third Age with
his readers, and therefore “guiding” the way readers imagine Arda depicted.
Tolkien’s invented nature is also original and memorable, from sentient landscapes, such as
the Old Forest and “cruel Caradhras” in The Lord of the Rings, to new flora and fauna, such
380
as the golden mallorn-tree, “the yellow elanor, and the pale niphredil,” the healing athelas, as
well as the elephant-like oliphaunts, and the terrifying Nazgûl. Perhaps the most remarkable
such creations, which also embody an important aspect of Tolkien’s environmental vision, are
the tree-like Ents, who allow Tolkien to enact the fantasy of nature “fighting back” against
industrial exploitation and the machine (for an overview, see Campbell, 2014).Tolkien’s land-
scapes, however, also enhance the idea of thousands of years of Arda’s history, often presented
as palimpsests of layers of history represented by ruins and material remains (e.g., Weathertop,
Amon Hen), or—in the case of the eerie Dead Marshes or the Barrow-downs—the dead of
the past themselves. The Dead Marshes have been discussed extensively by scholars who see
in their description a clear representation of the broken bodies and landscapes Tolkien expe-
rienced in the Battle of the Somme (Garth, 2003; Croft, 2004).
Tolkien’s contribution to world-building is not limited to the construction of Arda in
painstaking detail, but also includes his interest in theorizing the process of creating imaginary
worlds. His essay “On Fairy-Stories” has laid the foundations of the theoretical exploration of
imaginary worlds, as well as much of the critical arsenal of fantasy literature scholarship.Terms
such as “subcreation” (the idea of world-building as a human activity, in imitation of God’s
creation), as well as “Primary World” and “secondary world” (for our world and imaginary/
alternative worlds, respectively) have become standard in scholarship transcending Tolkien’s
own world-building. Tolkien’s insistence on the “inner consistency of reality” (2008: 59),
building on George MacDonald’s earlier argument for the need of coherence in imaginary
worlds, has become the ultimate aspiration of many world-builders. In Tolkien’s own words,
the successful fantasy writer:
proves a successful “subcreator”. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can
enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world.You
therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the
spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary
World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside.
(ibid.: 52)
Tolkien’s own dedication to coherence and consistency can be seen numerous times, espe-
cially in the posthumously published works that chronicle the alterations and amendments he
effected on his legendarium to make it believable. A prime example is his imposition of “ret-
roactive continuity” (Wolf, 2012: 212–216) upon the text of The Hobbit, altering Chapter 5
(“Riddles in the Dark”) to make it fit with the enhanced narrative role of the One Ring and
Gollum in The Lord of the Rings (see Rateliff, 2007: 763–838). Another example was ensuring
that the correct phases of the moon appeared at appropriate times in The Lord of the Rings, for
which he followed an (adjusted) calendar for 1941–1942 (Hammond and Scull, 2005: xlvii–l).
As mentioned briefly above, Tolkien originally conceived his mythology as specifically
associated with England. Spurred by enthusiasm for the Finnish Kalevala, a collection of oral
songs and poems that were shaped into an “epic” cycle of mythological texts and inspired
national pride, he aspired to create “something of the same sort that belonged to the English”
(Tolkien, 2015b: 105). Tolkien’s early nationalistic project has been often discussed as a late
reaction to several examples of Northern European “Romantic Nationalism” and “invented
traditions” (see Shippey, 2000; Flieger, 2005). But in the context of world-building, Tolkien’s
early inspiration is also important in terms of establishing the degree of overlap between the
Primary World and his secondary world of Arda. The first drafts of the mythology, known as
The Book of Lost Tales (see Tolkien, 1983 and 1984), use a framework to link the world of the
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Dimitra Fimi
reader to the imaginary world of the Elves and their stories. The “mediator” is a man from
our world, conceived as a historical character either from early Anglo-Saxon times (Eriol), or
from around the time of the Norman Conquest (Ælfwine), who sails to the island of the Elves
and hears their stories. In that early conception, therefore, Tolkien adapts a popular genre that
often introduced imaginary worlds in literary works of the early modern period, the traveler’s
tale.This link of his legendarium with a “lost” (and perhaps acceptable as “recovered”) English
mythology persisted for a while, until Tolkien experimented with a very different “frame-
work:” that of time-travel and “genetic memory.” Flieger (2004) has shown that the introduc-
tion of the Atlantis-like drowning of Númenor to the mythology in the 1930s led Tolkien to
consider the idea of a series of fathers and sons reliving old European myths and legends via
shared ancestral memory, ultimately leading to Tolkien’s own Númenor. This framework was
never fully developed, but the fact that Tolkien contemplated it shows his continuous inter-
est in linking his secondary world with the Primary one and the potential of transforming
the genre expectations of his entire mythology, from fantasy to something closer to science
or speculative fiction. The Silmarillion was eventually published posthumously without any
framework at all, though Christopher Tolkien later admitted that his father had left clues for
a potential framework in Bilbo’s “Translations from the Elvish” preserved in the “Red Book
of Westmarch” as mentioned in the Prologue and Appendices of The Lord of the Rings (see
Tolkien, 1983: 5–6; Tolkien, 2004: 1, 7, 14, 987). The fact that the mythology (in addition to
the tales of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings) could have been recorded in the Red Book
of Westmarch and presented as the tales Bilbo heard at Rivendell, eventually (supposedly)
discovered by Tolkien and translated for his readers, still preserves a clear link between the sec-
ondary world and the Primary World (via the “found manuscript” topos, an established liter-
ary technique). However, Tolkien had clearly by that point moved from a project to “recover”
a national mythology to a “mythology of an entire world, rather than of a single country or
people” (Donovan, 2014: 92).
Tolkien’s world-building has often been approached by scholarship via the lens of medi-
evalism. Commentators have been long interested in Tolkien’s medieval intertexts (e.g., Old
and Middle English works such as Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) and though
such studies are not tackling world-building per se, they do establish a clear view of Arda as a
world that engages with the heroic code, material culture, philosophical and theological con-
cepts, as well as fantastical beings from the literature of the European Middle-Ages (see, for
example, Shippey, 2005; Chance, 2003 and 2004; Fimi, 2006 and 2007; Fisher, 2011; Flieger,
2012). Other studies examine Tolkien’s work in terms of its engagement with the cultural
moment(s) it was created, spanning six decades of literary and cultural history, showing, for
example, the legacy of Victorian fantasy on Tolkien’s work (Mathews, 2002); or the way con-
temporary intellectual history shaped Arda, its languages and peoples (Fimi, 2008). Individual
elements of Tolkien’s world-building have also been explored by scholars approaching Tolkien
via eco-criticism, myth, religion, and philosophy (see relevant entries in Drout, 2007).
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46
Roddenberry’s
Star Trek Galaxy
Mary McAuley
The year 2016 marks the 50th anniversary of Star Trek’s first appearance on our television
screens. William Shatner’s new memoir, chronicling his decades-long relationship with
Leonard Nimoy, has entered the New York Times’s best-sellers list at number eleven; Sir Wilfrid
Laurier’s face still sports pointy ears and Spock’s eyebrows on some Canadian five-dollar bills;
a thirteenth Star Trek film—the third in the so-called “reboot” series—has been released. The
Star Trek universe is so widely recognized that even people who have never watched a full
episode are familiar with its terminology (“beam me up, Scotty!,” “to boldly go,” “make it so”)
and its particular brand of sci-fi aesthetic; certainly, the stereotype of the show’s dedicated fol-
lowers, “Trekkies” (or “Trekkers,” as preferred by fans themselves), has become a touchstone
for mainstream notions of super-fandom. Star Trek fandom, itself such a vital component of
the franchise—Trekkers took to picketing NBC when the series was taken off the air, and
conducted a letter-writing campaign for its return—continues to exist as an amorphous and
active body, finding new forms of expression and exchange through ever-developing online
media, arranging itself in subcultures within a subculture: worlds within a world. It seems that
to understand the sheer magnitude and endurance of the Star Trek universe, in all its forms,
we must give consideration to a few points: what it is about the world created by Gene
Roddenberry that ensures both mass appeal and individual fanaticism; how this world invites
and cultivates fan engagement and organization, on a scale unknown to any other media
franchise; and to what extent this fan activity can be said to constitute “real world” protest,
resistance, and construction.
The allure of any fictional world lies in it being possible; even worlds as far removed from
our own as those of Middle-earth or Tatooine present, as Wolf rightly notes (Wolf, 2012,
pp. 23–24), combinations of elements already found in our real world, such as to render them
relevant to or instructive for our lived experience. Thus, within fiction is contained “real-
ity,” and within a fictional world, our world. However, there is perhaps a special place in the
psychology of fictional realities reserved for worlds claiming to be not simply alternatives to,
but projections of, our own: i.e., works of science fiction that imagine what might in actuality
become of us. All fantastical realms are the playing grounds of a whole manner of ideologies,
philosophies, and symbologies, but realms situated directly in our human future, posited as
soon-to-become-realities, provide strategies for absorbing new technologies and state systems,
predict moral quandaries arising from these, and build platforms for pre-emptive discourse.
These speculative fictions carry the imaginative power of a portent or oracle—we only need
consider how George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) or Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) not only
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expressed but formalized the concept of a futuristic dystopia, establishing a series of indicators
of certain social, state, or technological advances that could be read, like writing on a wall.
In the same way, science fictions may illuminate positive directions for our world and create
positive signs of the future: in her instructive Science Fiction: A Guide for the Perplexed (2014),
Sherryl Vint offers a definition of the genre (as codified by Hugo Gernsback and his specialist
pulp magazines in the 1920s) as “celebrated for its ability to envision the (presumed won-
drous) world soon to come through the marvels of science and technology” (Vint, 2014, p. 9).
It is Vint’s bracketed qualification that is of most import here: the “presumed wondrousness”
of a world suggested as a viable future incarnation of our own provides an altogether more hope-
ful vision of the future; that imagined world becomes the bearer of a fundamental notion of
progress and the eventual betterment of our world. This may go some way toward explaining
the phenomenal popularity and staying power of the Star Trek franchise.
The notion of science and technology bringing with them “marvels” may seem a little
outdated—even naive—in contemporary discourse; Gene Roddenberry’s world, having seen
the nightmarish mechanisms of the Holocaust and the atom bomb, was far from ignorant to
the global threats posed by technological innovation. However, the conception of Star Trek
also coincided with the development of the space program in the U.S. and Russia, which, as
Vint notes, “transformed our imaginative relationship to our planet through an image of the
world from space” (Vint, 2014, p. 5).The Earth, seen for the first time as a whole and from afar,
inspired vertiginous contemplation of our shared humanity and fate, by turns melancholic
and euphoric; for Roddenberry, it seems, his creativity found root in the latter. Roddenberry’s
projected universe is, at least in The Original Series (TOS) and The Next Generation (TNG) (the
only two series with which he had direct involvement), one in which Earth is part of a United
Federation of planets, whose missions of space exploration are knowledge-seeking and peace-
ful. The U.S.S. Enterprise is on a five-year journey to “seek out new life and civilizations;” its
crew’s most senior members, a captain, a scientist, and a doctor, clearly represent three strands
of the best of human nature: morality, logic, and emotion. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy apply
their often conflicting instincts to every new challenge, and every outcome reflects, or reflects
upon, a possible positive compromise between positive ideologies. Thus, the most utilitarian
implications of Spock’s self-sacrifice in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)—“the needs of
the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one”—are offset by Kirk’s dangerous and
costly rescue of Spock’s soul in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984); in TOS: “The City
on the Edge of Forever” (1967), it is Spock’s rational-humanist prioritization of the lives of
countless unknown human beings in the future that persuades Kirk to prevent McCoy from
saving an individual moral human life in the present. The heroes of the Enterprise together
exist as crusaders carrying a message of universal harmony, while their world—the world of
the Federation—has used technological advancements toward humanist ends; the invention
of the food replicator has eliminated world hunger and created a society that is “post-scarcity.”
Though TOS and TNG often warn against unchecked scientific experimentation—through
the reference in TOS: “Space Seed” (1967) to a devastating “Eugenics War” caused by geneti-
cally engineered super-humans (one of whom would later cause Spock’s death), for exam-
ple, and through the recurring menace of the Borg, a race of cyborgs bent on total world
assimilation and destruction—there remains far more evidence of technology harnessed for
human benefit; a cybernetic ecology reminiscent of Brautigan’s “machines of loving grace”
(Brautigan, 1973, p. 1). Furthermore, both series posit a fundamental understanding between
the ethos embodied by the Enterprise and the deeper workings of the cosmos. A superior
energy being in TOS: “The Squire of Gothos” (1967) is stalled in his lethal games with the
Enterprise landing party by his “parent” beings, who oppose cruelty to vulnerable life-forms;
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in TNG: “Encounter at Farpoint” (1987), the crew pass a supposedly omnipotent entity’s test
of the value of humankind by helping a distressed space creature reunite with its mate. This is
a utopian vision in which humanity’s essential quest is for greater self- and other-knowledge:
a narrative that, in the socio-political context of Star Trek’s first run and re-runs—the U.S.
of the 1960s and 1970s, of the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, and the occupation of
Alcatraz—must have seemed far preferable to that which was on offer.
Looked at through this lens, fans’ protests at NBC studios over the series’ cancellation take
on a political significance: Star Trek followers were arguing their right to imagine a peaceful
universe, their right to learn a utopian script, their right to demand it. TOS began its broadcast
just two years after the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, yet it proclaims
a mixed-race and mixed-species society to come, in which racial prejudice is treated as some-
thing senseless and archaic. The Enterprise’s communications officer was played by Nichelle
Nichols, who was one of the first African-American actors to have a non-menial role on the
American screen, whose kiss with Kirk in TOS: “Plato’s Stepchildren” (1968) is widely (if
incorrectly) considered the first interracial kiss on American television, and who, in a recent
“Ask Me Anything” thread on Reddit confirmed the popular myth of her reason for staying
with the show:
Dr. Martin Luther King, quite some time after I’d first met him, approached me and
said something along the lines of “Nichelle, whether you like it or not, you have
become an [sic] symbol. If you leave, they can replace you with a blonde haired white
girl, and it will be like you were never there. What you’ve accomplished, for all of
us, will only be real if you stay.” That got me thinking about how it would look for
fans of color around the country if they saw me leave. I saw that this was bigger than
just me.
(https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3f6oq1)
Nichols’s sense of her career decision being “bigger than just me” is telling, and casts Star Trek
fans’ unprecedented fan activism as a push for symbolic reform—in other words, as Hauser
posits, the series’ mass following can in part be explained by its providing “a counterpoint
to the reality-view that created Watergate” (Hauser, 1977, p. 147). Interestingly, Andrew J.
Robinson (who played Garak in Deep Space Nine [DS9]) suggested that the moral ambiguity
of DS9 may have been the reason for its relative unpopularity, despite critical acclaim (http://
www/trektoday.com/news/010602_02.shtml).
Of course, an idealistic premise alone does not secure a fictional universe a fanatical audi-
ence. For it to be believed, it must be realistic—that is, it must create a sense of the infinite
complexity of a real world (Wolf, 2012, p. 25). In this regard, Roddenberry was thorough: he
conceived of an aesthetic, political, technological, and sociological framework for his series,
ever-expanded and elaborated upon. Helen A. Hauser has commented on the “curiously lit-
erary” nature of the show, on its “unified opus” (Hauser, 1977, p. 144); Gene Coon, a former
producer of Star Trek, remarked that:
Gene created a totally new universe. He invented a starship, which works, by the way,
and is a logical progression from what we know today. He created customs, morals,
modes of speaking, a complete technology. We have a very rigid technology on the
show. We know how fast we can go. We know what we use for fuel. We know what
our weapons will do. And Gene invented all these things. He did a monumental job
of creation. He created an entire galaxy, and an entire rule book for operating within
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that galaxy, with very specific laws, government, behavior, manners, customs, as well
as science and technology. Now that’s a hell of a job. He didn’t create a show. He
created a universe, and it works, and it works well.
(quoted in Theall, 1980, p. 248)
Star Trek is careful to address any problematic—and unavoidable—changes in style, costume,

and special effects throughout the series’ years on the air, in an effort to preserve the audience’s
full psychic participation and belief in the Star Trek world as separate to our world of television
norms and restrictions (a state called “Secondary Belief ” by J. R. R. Tolkien), and to maintain
a timeline consistent with our real-world expectations of progress and development. TOS is
plotted far enough into the future (the first episode set in the year 2265) that its contemporary
audience would never catch up with the year marked for the Enterprise’s first voyage and find
it falling sorely short of their expectations (as fans of Back to the Future (1985) found to be the
case with hoverboards and flying cars in 2015), TNG, DS9, and Voyager (VOY) are set long
enough after that (a century) to explain drastic changes in spacecraft design and costume, and
Enterprise (ENT), set over a hundred years before the adventures of Kirk and Spock, appears
closer to our present-day limitations, with more familiar clothing and nascent relations with
extra-terrestrial societies. In its final season, ENT begins laying the foundations of the world
of TOS: Ent: “United” (2005) sees an alliance between the four societies who would first
make up the Federation. The Star Trek Encyclopedia (1999), despite its subtitle reading “refer-
ence guide to the future,” presents its information as though it were a glossary of past events:
its introduction states that “we have assumed editorially that both authors and readers are
residents of the future, a number of years after the current Star Trek adventures” (Okuda and
Okuda, 1999).This decision serves both a practical function—allowing the compilers to write
in the less complicated past tense—and a creative one: it encourages the reader to view the
series as history, further bolstering his or her imaginative faith in the “reality” of the narrative.
In the show itself, crossovers between cast members of different series (Spock at the center
of a two-part episode of TNG, Kirk and Picard meeting in an alternate universe in Star Trek:
Generations (1994), countless TNG characters making regular appearances in both DS9 and
VOY) develop a sense of a real and complex universe in which characters exist outside of
televisual conventions and limitations. The avid viewer increasingly inhabits a world that he/
she can believe has been built even beyond that which he/she has seen of it. It is not without
significance to this line of consideration that Star Trek is also about a world-building mission—
the makings of alliances with the Federation, the creation of a united universe, the removal
of threats to this cohesive construct—and that its original episodic formula, of casting off
into the unknown and returning to base to process the unknown, imitates our own internal
processes of imagination.
Imaginary journeys often play a key role in the development of plot or character in Star
Trek, or allow for a broad elaboration of a philosophical theme. In TNG: “The Inner Light”
(1992), it is necessary for Picard to lead a full, if illusory, life in a so-called “ancestor simula-
tion” of a now-extinct world to be able to carry on a memory of its culture; Sisko’s journey
through memory in DS9: “Emissary” (1992), guided by a superior telepathic being, undoes
his decision to leave Starfleet; in TOS: “The Menagerie” (1966), Spock brings his former cap-
tain—paralyzed by a serious accident—to an alien race who can install him forever in a dream
in which he can walk again. Part of Star Trek’s appeal as a fictional universe lies in its own
engagement with the concept of human imagination as a crucial tool for self-betterment,
real-life decision-making, emotional exploration, and choice. The introduction of the holo-
deck in TNG, an onboard virtual reality facility, provides the plot-device for no small number
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of experiments with the Descartian premise cogito ergo sum—the philosophical implications
of which are given physical manifestation in so much science fiction. Fictions designed by
the crew for the purposes of entertainment and/or training, of which they can store their
favorites for future fantasizing, are physically inhabitable, and sometimes extend beyond the
confines of the strictly “imaginary.” Many episodes center on the consequences of a holodeck
malfunction—for example, when The Doctor (himself a hologram) becomes convinced that
he is in fact a living being and that the Starship Voyager is an illusion (VOY: “Projections”
[1995]), or when a character in a simulation becomes sentient and requests he be made into
matter (TNG:“Elementary, Dear Data” [1988]) (this character, incidentally, reappears in TNG:
“Ship in a Bottle” [1993] and explains his apparently material manifestation to Data with the
assertion that “I think, therefore I am”). The effect of this confusion of reality and unreality,
the blurring of the line between what we imagine and what we see, is to foster in the mind
of the viewer a consideration of the fictions of reality and, more importantly for a study of
world-creation, of the realities of fiction.
When Byrd proposes that “the real life of Star Trek […] is in the activities of its fans” (Byrd,
1978, p. 52), she suggests that a fictional world can manifest itself in real-world actions. To
explore this possibility we must return to the series’ famously dedicated fan community.Years
before TNG and Star Trek:The Motion Picture (1979), Star Trek was recognized as having, “with
the exception of the leading rock singers and rock groups [...] probably [...] the most striking
following of any mass media production” (Theall, 1980, p. 245), with re-runs of the canceled
original series gradually gathering around its image a whole subculture of Star Trek enthusiasts
who practiced their fandom in a group setting. Of course, Star Trek famously owes its contin-
ued existence to its active fan-base, whose letter-writing campaign succeeded in bringing it
back for, to date, four more television series and thirteen motion pictures. Collective fan activ-
ity, such as attending conventions, dressing in costume, sharing fan fiction, holding debates,
contributing to online forums, and communicating in in-jokes or fan-slang, may long have
been ridiculed by society at large as serving an essentially regressive function, but increasingly
asserts its status as an autonomous entity, enlarging and morphing its “parent” universe to its
own ends. While fans of fictional universes can be said to inhabit those universes, dutifully
learning their official geography, they frequently become world-builders, inserting extra-tex-
tual narratives and experimenting with various translations of the same primary source. And
just as Star Trek consumers can read in the series a language of the future, so can active Star Trek
fans—Star Trek reproducers—translate this language as they see fit, thus enacting the very ethos
expounded by the show: “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combination.”The practice of writing
alternative or additional storylines to those actually broadcast is one licensed by a series that
makes so much use of parallel or mirror universes and alternate dimensions: the notion that
whatever could happen, does happen, is a recurring plot and philosophical device in Star Trek—
even providing the theme for a special edition DVD set released by Paramount in 2009: Star
Trek: Fan Collective—Alternate Realities. Canonical alternative realms present such subversive
character concepts as an immoral Kirk and a Spock living by a flawed logic (TOS: “Mirror,
Mirror” [1967]), Jean-Luc Picard as happy homemaker (TNG: “The Inner Light”), and a
sadistic and hedonistic Kira Neys (DS9: “Crossover” [1994]). As one fan writes, “part of what
makes the Mirror Universe such fertile imaginative soil is that it’s a limited concept. It’s eve-
rything you know, just reversed” (http://www.startrek.com/article/one-trek-mind-10-most-
awesome-things-about-the-mirror-universe). And so the practice of fan fiction is legitimized
by a canonical universe that experiments with inversions and heterogeneity, and all possible
combinations of the elements of Star Trek may lay claim to being “real.” The introduction to
The Star Trek Encyclopedia pays homage to the multiplicity of the Star Trek universe, stating
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that “the final decision as to the ‘authenticity’ of the animated episodes, as with all elements
of the show, must clearly be the choice of each individual reader” (Okuda and Okuda, 1999).
The support offered by Star Trek canon to the pursuit of alternative or additional storylines is
not merely theoretical: the fan-produced webseries Star Trek: New Voyages—which picks up
where TOS leaves us, in the final year of the Enterprise crew’s five-year mission—saw guest
appearances from TOS actors George Takei (Hikaru Sulu) and Walter Koenig (Pavel Chekov),
and had Eugene “Rod” Roddenberry—Gene Roddenberry’s son—as a consulting producer.
In lending itself so implicitly and explicitly to the individual imaginative process, Star Trek
becomes a set of building blocks for innumerable other worlds.
Fan translations may also serve more overtly transgressive functions. As Henry Jenkins
states in one of his many seminal contributions to the study of fan fiction, “‘Fandom’ is a
vehicle for marginalized subcultural groups (women, the young, gays, etc.) to pry open space
for their cultural concerns within dominant representations” (Jenkins, 1988, p. 87); Anne
Cranny-Francis, in her essay on the fan novels of Jean Lorrah, also refers to this “dreaming
space” (Cranny-Francis, 1997, p. 251) offered to Star Trek followers, who see in the narra-
tive of a future utopia reflections of their realized selves. It is worth noting, as even the most
cursory scroll through any online Star Trek fan fiction database demonstrates, that only a tiny
fraction of these stories deal in the scientific jargon and action-based plots that characterize
the actual show: fan writers’ interest lies primarily in the development of canonical charac-
ters, or the introduction of new ones, usually with a view to suggesting alternative power
exchanges, relationship modes, and sexualities. Penley has argued that the playing out of
“domestic sphere” issues (love, loyalty, betrayal, commitment, marriage, pregnancy) in a sci-
ence fiction setting attempts to reposition female experience within the realm of technology
and military leadership—an essentially feminist exercise, participated in mostly by women
(despite the stereotype of the nerdy male “Trekkie” having gained far more traction): she
identifies fan writing as evidence “of the strength of the popular wish to think through and
debate the issues of women’s relation to the technologies of science, the mind, and the body”
(Penley, 1991, pp. 158–159). In his review of Star Trek Fans and Costume Art (1996) by Heather
R. Joseph-Witham, Jenkins deems fans’ personal testimonies to be the book’s strongest attrib-
ute, citing in particular one woman’s account of her sense of bodily autonomy achieved
through Klingon costume: “‘Klingon women ... have power over themselves. Dressing like
this isn’t dressing for men” (Jenkins, 1997, p. 181). Fans may play or write subversive roles
provided them by Star Trek “canon” (as is the case with the woman dressing as a Klingon)
or, more often, may disrupt or bend these roles (as is the case with “slashed” narratives [in
which heterosexual characters are entered into homosexual relationships] or female charac-
ters assuming positions of greater authority than they hold in the show), a process Jenkins
identifies as “fans correcting deficiencies they see in Star Trek’s egalitarian narrative” ( Jenkins,
1988, p. 93).
Of all of Star Trek’s transgressive fan fiction genres, none has proved so fertile and pre-
vailing as that of “K/S,” which posits a homosexual relationship between Kirk and Spock
(also known as “Spirk”), and is the earliest example of a slash narrative (Diane Merchant’s
“A Fragment Out of Time” was published in the fanzine Grup in 1974). Often read by
academics as an attempt by predominantly female fan-writers to engage in a romantic rela-
tionship free from problematic male/female power dynamics (see, for example, Lamb and
Veith, 1986, and Salmon and Symons, 2001), K/S inspired so much literature that entire
fanzines were dedicated to K/S stories, essays, and poems; it was a hotly contested and
much-debated issue at Star Trek conventions, eventually creating off-shoot conventions
dedicated solely to the slashed concept (the K/S convention KiScon still meets annually).
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K/S-ers even evolved their own shorthand for recurring K/S motifs, such as “Mpreg” (in
which a male character becomes pregnant) or “Fem!Kirk”/“Fem!Spock” (indicating that a
character has been re-imagined as a woman, with obvious potential for feminist translations
of canonical narratives). The J. J. Abrams’ “reboot” movies in 2009, 2013, and 2016 brought
with them a slew of new K/S-ers, who found their slash imaginations had a heritage of
four decades—an incredibly long lifespan for a slash community, surviving both the end of
the Kirk-Spock duo onscreen (with Kirk’s death in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
[1991]) and the transition from printed zines to online forums. K/S fandom is thriving in
its modern medium: one K/S database, KSarchive.com, showcases thousands of works of
fan fiction inspired by the pairing, ranging from song parodies (e.g., “All the Single Vulcans”
by SpirkTrekker42) to novel-length emotional epics (e.g., the much-celebrated “Spice” by
eimeo); KisCon uses such resources as LiveJournal to announce its updates; and fans use
Tumblr to share photos of themselves in costume. This is without question an almost self-
sufficient community, reliant on the official Star Trek narrative only insofar as it presents
it with a fictional world from which to take the raw materials for its self-expression and
resistance to cultural norms. Fandom, then, is rarely an act of mere rehashing but an act of
reconfiguring: fans enact what they perceive as the true ethos of their Star Trek world in their
own real world, thus inhabiting the tension between the two; a kind of inter-zone, in fluid
communication with its neighboring worlds.
Roland Barthes has written that “a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many
cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one
place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader” (Barthes, 1977, p. 148).
The text of Star Trek—existing as it does, as Donald F.Theall notes, “not just as a TV presenta-
tion, but as part of a context of words, images, actions, and ideas” (Theall, 1980, p. 248)—is
not simply focused on its readers but by its readers, who translate and distribute it, or actively
make adjustments to return it to its “true” meaning. The cultural exchange always at work
between a narrative and the consumers of that narrative is perhaps in no modern media phe-
nomenon so traceable as it is in that of the Star Trek franchise, whose entire history—from
Roddenberry’s request for written suggestions to current online petitions for the cancel-
lation of CBS’s planned new Star Trek series—is one of audience engagement, protest, and
participation.
If futuristic science fiction in a general sense does the strange imaginative work of express-
ing a communal premonition of what is to come as a concrete scenario from which we learn
a system of signs—after Saussure, a language—of the future, then the complex cultural net-
work that is Star Trek begins to lay conceptual foundations for “real” world-building, evident
in a broad range of scientific and sociological discourse.To mention a few examples: theoreti-
cal physicist Lawrence Krauss published a book comparing modern discoveries in science
with the science presented in Star Trek (The Physics of Star Trek [1995] had a foreword from
Stephen Hawking and became a national bestseller), while a 2005 entry in American Scientist
considers two recent inventions under the heading “To Boldly Go (Again): Two devices now
under development evoke the fictional technology of Star Trek”: “Phaser-like weapons and
ethereal vacuum windows will surely not be the last Star Trek technologies to come to life”
(Schneider, 2005, p. 313). Constance Penley’s NASA/Trek (1997) chronicles the symbiotic
relationship between NASA’s self-imagining and the cultural iconography of Star Trek, noting
that the former’s use of the latter extended to the renaming of its first space shuttle orbiter
from Constitution to Enterprise, and to the hiring of Nichelle Nichols to recruit women and
minorities to the astronaut corps (Penley, 1997, p. 17); an exhibition of artists’ impressions of
NASA-led space exploration, held in celebration of the institution’s 50th anniversary, includes
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a 1981 print by Clayton Pond that depicts NASA’s Enterprise approaching the U. S. S. Enterprise
in space (Dean and Ulrich, 2008)—a metaphor for the limits of our current reality stretching
to meet our dreamed futures. Similarly, a 2013 contribution to The History Teacher details
an entire university history course taught through the lens of the series, entitled “Star Trek,
Culture, and History” (Putman, 2013). This literature demonstrates, in a very real sense, how
the fictional world of Star Trek becomes manifest, and occupies a space both imaginary and
physical. Furthermore, the fan worlds inspired by the series increasingly appear to have devel-
oped their own ecology, operating as communities with a shared language, loosely defined
tenets, meeting forums and—most interestingly—a hand in the construction of their “parent”
universe: a strange sort of contrary motion between worlds. Given Vint’s assertion that science
fiction “plays a central role in producing the future through the dreams and nightmares it offers
for our contemplations” (Vint, 2014, p. 6, italics mine), we might do well to consider what
the latest additions to the Star Trek universe, in both canon and fan-writing, may offer us in
the way of building blocks for our own eternal world-construction. To quote TNG’s Captain
Jean-Luc Picard, as is only fitting: “legends ... are the spice of the universe, Mr. Data, because
they have a way of sometimes coming true” (TNG: “Haven” [1987]).
References
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Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Barthes, R. (1977), Image, Music,Text. New York: Hill & Wang.
Black, R. W. (2008), Adolescents and Online Fan Fiction. New York: Peter Lang.
Brautigan, R. (1973), The Springhill Mine Disaster. New York: Dell.
Byrd, P. (1978), “Star Trek Lives: Trekker Slang,” American Speech,Vol. 53, No. 1, pp. 52–58.
Caillan (2002), “TrekToday—Robinson On Why He Couldn’t Leave Garak Behind,” Trektoday.com.
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Jean Lorrah’s ‘Star Trek’ Novels,” Science Fiction Studies,Vol. 24, No. 2, pp. 245–255.
Dean, J. and B. Ulrich (2008), NASA/Art: 50 Years of Exploration. New York: Abrams.
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universe. Last accessed January 14, 2016).
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Studies in Mass Communication,Vol. 5, pp. 85–107.
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Schneider, D. (2005), “To Boldly Go (Again): Two devices now under development evoke the fictional
technology of Star Trek,” American Scientist,Vol. 93, No. 4, pp. 312–313.
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47
Lucas’s
Star Wars Galaxy
Chris Hanson
From the iconic opening words of the original 1977 film, George Lucas’s Star Wars makes it
clear that it does not create a mere fictional world, but rather an imaginary entire universe.
Before selling the Star Wars franchise to the Walt Disney Company in 2012, Lucas had directly
overseen six narrative feature films within this invented universe that had grossed approxi-
mately $4.3 billion in box office revenues (Miller, 2015). Yet these films constitute a literal
fraction of what the franchise had generated in merchandise sales—it is estimated that it had
generated in excess of $40 billion by 2013 through the first six films and their accompany-
ing merchandise and transmedia iterations (Taylor, 2014). The Star Wars films reflect only a
small portion of thousands of other officially licensed texts such as novels, video games, comic
books, television programs, and others that comprise the Star Wars universe. The authorship
of Star Wars has extended well beyond Lucas from its beginning and the scale of this fictional
creation is such that licensed encyclopedias and atlases document its inhabitants and galactic
geographies, and a master database termed the “holocron”—a reference to a fictional archive
of knowledge within the Star Wars universe—is kept by the license-holders of Star Wars as
a means of tracking the tens of thousands of entries for narrative continuity and cohesion
(Wallace, & Fry, 2009; Sansweet, 1998). The sale of Star Wars to Disney promises only to grow
this imagined universe even more, as numerous new films, books, comics, video games, and
other media are planned. As much as Star Wars already dominates aspects of popular culture,
its presence is likely to only increase in the coming years.
Most popular accounts of the genesis of Star Wars emphasize the background and upbring-
ing of George Lucas in Modesto, California, suggesting that his interest in auto racing and hot
rod culture informed not just his feature film on the same topic, American Graffiti (1973), but
also the mere fact that he ultimately became interested in filmmaking: a near-fatal car acci-
dent in which he was involved in high school (Longworth, 2012; Hearn, 2005). Following his
recovery, Lucas resolved not to pursue a career in auto racing but became even more deter-
mined not to follow in the footsteps of his father, the owner of a local stationery store. Lucas
enrolled at San Francisco State University and then ultimately ended up studying cinema at
the University of Southern California (USC). Numerous accounts of his life suggest strong
parallels between his upbringing in a small town and the fictional life of Star Wars protagonist
Luke Skywalker, who grows up on the remote desert planet of Tatooine dreaming of larger
aspirations. However, Lucas himself brushes off any notion that his childhood is linked to the
Star Wars universe; when asked by a local newspaper reporter if Modesto influenced Star Wars
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L u c a s ’ s S ta r Wa r s G a l a x y
in any way, Lucas’s response instead suggests the power of subcreation: “No, not really. Most
of these things come out of your imagination” (Taylor, 2014).
While his hometown may have played a small role, his creative output was fueled in part by
his interest in mainstream narrative media and experimental film. As a child, Lucas consumed
popular culture, including comic books, as well as radio, television, and film series (the lat-
ter largely via television). Lucas has remarked that “movies had extremely little effect on me
when I was growing up. Television had a much larger effect,” which perhaps de-emphasizes
the import of cinema to some of the television content that he adored (Biskind, 1998). Much
of pre-recorded content on early television was, in fact, recycled Hollywood film that was
repackaged and distributed to television station operators and included “cliffhanger” adven-
ture and science fiction serial film programming from the 1930s and 1940s (Kompare, 2005).
A number of these film series repurposed for 1950s television, including Universal’s Tailspin
Tommy (1936), Buck Rogers (1939), and Flash Gordon (1936, 1938, 1940), were themselves
adapted from comics, reflecting transmedial industrial strategies that were central to Lucas’s
encounters with Saturday morning television. However, Lucas also cites his formative fascina-
tion with the “fantasy of radio,” noting that he “loved to listen and imagine what the images
would look like” (Hearn, 2005). It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that Lucas has helped to cre-
ate one of the most influential, lucrative, and prodigious imaginary worlds: Star Wars.
Growing up in the more rural Modesto, Lucas began to make trips in his late teens to
nearby San Francisco to attend screenings of experimental films, including those organized
by Bruce Baillie’s Canyon Cinema (Silberman, 2005). George Lucas’s interest in experimen-
tal film informed the creation of his student project Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB
(1967) while at the USC’s film school. Lucas turned the short into a feature-length film with
the shortened title THX 1138 (1971). Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope company
financed the feature, but Warner Bros. feared the film’s limited commercial viability and
reneged on its deal with American Zoetrope, took creative control of the film, and recut it
before releasing it. Lucas similarly struggled with studios on his film American Graffiti, with
six major studios and distributors rejecting his concept pitch before Universal financially
supported its production but then declared the film “unreleasable” despite an enthusias-
tic test screening in late January 1973 (Biskind, 1998). Lucas’s creative struggles with the
major studios spurred him to seek complete control over his subsequent films and helped
to propel his own investments in developing film production, editing, and post-production
technologies to engender greater control. This creative control allowed Lucas to revolu-
tionize his—and the film industry’s—capacity for the design and creation of digital effects,
environments, and characters. Lucas cites the importance of projects such as the television
series Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (ABC, 1992–1993) in helping to streamline the creation
and production of digital techniques that Lucas then implemented in the Star Wars prequel
films (Magid, 1997).
Establishment of the Star Wars Universe

The opening text crawl is as perhaps as recognizable an aspect of the 1977 film as its charac-
ters and plot points, and this style of text crawl can be found in all of the subsequent sequels
and prequels along with a considerable portion of other transmedia texts within the franchise,
such as video games. In the original film, as in these other texts, the viewer is inserted into the
narrative in media res and thus the text crawl serves an essential role in world-building by pro-
viding a fictional context before inserting the viewer into the film’s narrative. Even before the
film’s title, the 1977 film begins with the static opening text: “A long time ago, in a galaxy far,
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Chris Hanson
far away.” Immediately, the film explicitly informs the viewer that what follows takes place not
merely in an imagined world—but instead, an entire galaxy of such imagined worlds.
Following the aforementioned opening text and the film’s title, the text crawl begins: “It is
a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first vic-
tory against the evil Galactic Empire. During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret
plans to the Empire’s ultimate weapon, the DEATH STAR, an armored space station with
enough power to destroy an entire planet. Pursued by the Empire’s sinister agents, Princess
Leia races home aboard her starship, custodian of the stolen plans that can save her people
and restore freedom to the galaxy.” These four sentences perform significant work for the
viewer in establishing the fictive world in which the film takes place without resorting to
using characters to awkwardly insert exposition into dialogue. Before the opening shot of
the film, the viewer is already aware of the broader conflict within the fictional galaxy, with
a particular emphasis placed on the importance of the Death Star through both its descrip-
tion and formally via its capitalization within the text. Similarly, Princess Leia’s objective and
mission are described, helping to establish the first scene, which depicts Leia and her ship
being captured.
But the text crawl also critically alludes to elements that are not represented in the film,
such as the events that have occurred before the film. Here, reference is made to a battle dur-
ing which the plans to the Death Star were stolen by Rebel spies while the Rebel spaceships
won their first significant victory against the Empire. This battle is only obliquely referenced
in the 1977 film and its sequels—one of many events, characters, locations, and other elements
of the larger imagined galaxy of Star Wars that are mentioned without further detail. These
components become source material for novels, video games, and other merchandise officially
licensed by Lucasfilm, which themselves generate more content that can then be used for
further extending the fictional universe. For example, Lucas himself addresses some aspects of
the broader narrative of the design of the Death Star and the secret preparations made for its
construction in his prequel films Star Wars: Episode II Attack of the Clones (2002) and Star Wars:
Episode III Revenge of the Sith (2005), but these events occur before the battle described in
the 1977 film’s opening crawl. While not addressed by the main films, this battle was instead
relegated to secondary materials licensed by Lucasfilm, including the 2007 novel Death Star by
Michael Reaves and Steve Perry and the computer game Star Wars: X-Wing (Totally Games/
LucasArts, 1993). In these and other paratexts, this battle was dubbed “Operation Skyhook”
and included events from the earliest clues gleaned by the Rebel Alliance about the existence
of the Death Star to the battle culminating in its destruction depicted in the 1977 film.
Of course, the films themselves have been subject to change, as Lucas has made tweaks
to graphical effects, adding scenes, characters, and other plot elements. As Mark J. P. Wolf
observes, the “work-in-progress” nature makes it challenging to define a singular and closed
text, such as the multiple re-releases and iterations of that originally released in 1977 (Wolf,
2012). Among the earliest of these changes was to the opening text crawl of the 1977 film.
The box office success of the original film prompted Lucas to release a sequel, The Empire
Strikes Back, in 1980, and the opening text crawl in this sequel begins: “Episode V:The Empire
Strikes Back.” In the 1981 re-release of the original film, Lucas added “Episode IV: A New
Hope” to the original film. This simple textual addition now positioned the film not merely
as a standalone or precursor to the 1980 Empire Strikes Back, but as part four of a larger series
of films. Lucas thus expanded the narrative of the original film considerably as part of a tra-
jectory, with the addition of a handful of words to the start of the film. The 1977 Star Wars
and 1980 Empire Strikes Back films were followed by 1983’s Return of the Jedi (named “Episode
VI”), and these three films (dubbed by fans the “original trilogy”) remained the core texts
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for the fictional universe’s countless other paratexts. Lucas did not make another film as part
of the series until 1999’s The Phantom Menace (“Episode I”), but did re-visit and modify the
original trilogy films as part of their theatrical re-release in 1997 to mark the 20th anni-
versary of the original film. As part of these “Special Edition” versions of the films, existing
effects and shots were altered, and new digital effects and even new shots and scenes were
added. These changes were made under Lucas’s supervision, ostensibly to correct errors and
to add special effects and material that were impossible during the shooting of the original
films due to budgetary or time constraints. Some of these modifications were originally
intended to be in the film, such as a scene between the characters Han Solo and Jabba the
Hutt that was planned but scrapped. Others proved controversial among fans of the films,
such as altering a sequence in which Han Solo is confronted by the bounty hunter Greedo;
in the original, he appears to preemptively shoot Greedo but the re-release instead suggests
that he fires in self-defense. Such changes demonstrate that the core texts themselves proved
to be unstable, meaning that the “canon” of the Star Wars universe was itself prone to tweak-
ing and alteration.
The Expanded Universe

As noted, Star Wars is a truly transmedia brand that extends far beyond the original and
prequel films. Lucas’s vision to closely integrate marketing with the film’s release was actu-
ally directly informed by the profound—and unanticipated—success of the Walt Disney
Company’s $300 million of merchandising that was initiated by the surprising popularity
of U.S. television miniseries Davy Crockett (ABC, 1954–1955). This merchandise included
clothing, lunch boxes, toys, and the titular character’s raccoon-skin cap, and the demand for
such products was so overwhelming that the price for raccoon fur went from 25 cents to $8
per pound; Lucas suggested in a 1976 conversation with Charley Lippincott that “Star Wars
could be a type of Davy Crockett phenomenon” (Taylor, 2014). Even before the 1977 film
was in theaters, Lucas was active in growing the universe into a transmedia phenomenon and
establishing the licensing arm of Lucasfilm.
A key component of this expansive media necessitated sharing authorship for the narra-
tives for texts and other materials affiliated with Star Wars. Lucas is listed as the author of a
novel entitled Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker, which was first published on
November 12, 1976; however, the book was ghostwritten by Alan Dean Foster based on
Lucas’s working scripts for the 1977 Star Wars film. Due to the fact that the script continued
to undergo revisions, certain plot and character discrepancies exist between the film and this
novelization. For example, the novelization opens with the line “Another galaxy, another
time” instead of “In a galaxy far, far away” from the film’s opening scroll, and the book notes
that it was taken from a text entitled Journal of the Whills, a reference also excised from the
1977 film (Foster & Lucas, 1976). Foster’s contract included a second book to function as a
sequel that could be adapted to film with a lower budget than the original film should it prove
not to be profitable, and Foster’s second book, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, was nearly complete
by the time Star Wars was released, and was published in 1978 (Fry, 2000).
Comic books were another venue into which Lucas grew the Star Wars brand while the
original film was still in production. Lucasfilm marketing head Charlie Lippincott approached
Marvel Comics editor Roy Thomas to produce a comic book on the film and insisted that
the series be at least five issues with two to be published before the film arrived in theaters—a
highly unusual request as most Marvel adaptations were only one or two issues (Taylor, 2014).
Thomas strongly supported the idea, stating that he was “determined to make it a six-issue
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color series” despite pushback from Stan Lee and others at Marvel, who finally acquiesced
after learning of Alec Guinness’s involvement in the film (Handley, 2000). After negotiations,
Marvel acquiesced upon significant profits concessions on the part of Lucasfilm and the first
issue was published in July 1977, several months before the film arrived in theaters. Similar to
Foster’s novelization, the Marvel comic books stray somewhat from the plot of the film, per-
haps best epitomized by the abstruse and misleading phrase on the front cover of the premiere
issue: “Enter: Luke Skywalker! Will he save the galaxy—or destroy it?” Other inconsistencies
exist between the comic book adaptations and the released film, including the appearance
of the character Jabba the Hutt, who is a large, brown, slug-like creature in the films, but
appears as a yellow humanoid with walrus-like features in the comic. Such differences can be
attributed to dearth of photographic and art references from the film made available to the
Marvel writers and artists, who were only allowed to see a rough cut of the film, which did
not include special effects (Handley, 2000).
However, Lucas soon sought to retain tight control over the ways in which the Star Wars
brand was licensed and the creative liberties that would be taken with his creations. In part,
this seems to be informed by his negative reaction to the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special, which
was a made-for-television production created to capitalize on the unexpected success of the
1977 film. This program was contracted to producer Dwight Hemion for American broad-
caster CBS by 20th Century Fox and directed by Steve Binder; both Hemion and Binder
had experience with popular televised musical specials, including those for Elvis and Barbra
Streisand, as well as The T.A.M.I. Show (1964).The Holiday Special aired in the U.S. and several
international markets but proved to be somewhat of a critical and creative debacle, however,
and was never officially commercially released following its broadcast.
The Holiday Special features several of the actors and characters from the films, and places
them in a loosely defined narrative of the family of Chewbacca (a character in the original
trilogy) awaiting his return to their home planet of Kashyyyk to mark the annual celebra-
tion of “Life Day.” The Holiday Special employs a variety-show format, with scenes of family
life interspersed with musical numbers and even a cartoon that marks the debut of bounty
hunter Boba Fett, a character who would quickly become a fan favorite after his appearance
in the 1980 film The Empire Strikes Back. The resulting effect of the combination of a number
of disparate aspects is jarring, in no small part due to the extended scenes of Chewbacca’s
family communicating with one another in untranslated grunts and groans. Chewbacca’s
father, Itchy, is tormented by Chewbacca’s son Lumpy, before Grumpy then utilizes a “Mind
Evaporator” that induces a hallucinatory, highly suggestive, and apparently pleasurable song
performance by Diahann Carroll. Other musical performances include those by Jefferson
Starship, Bea Arthur, and even Carrie Fisher singing in the role of Princess Leia. After seeing
the completed special, Lucas and Star Wars producer Gary Kurtz both asked for their names
to be removed from the credits before the show aired (Taylor, 2014).
This infamous foray into television proved to be a mostly forgotten bump in the growth
of the Star Wars universe—although it remained part of the canon in part for its introduc-
tion of Boba Fett. The rapidly growing collection of secondary materials came to be known
as the Star Wars “Expanded Universe” (EU) over time. The EU began almost concurrently
with the film’s release, with Marvel Comics’ Star Wars series beginning in 1977 and the 1978
publication of the novel by Alan Dean Foster, Star Wars: Splinter of the Mind’s Eye. In each case,
characters, locations, and storylines from the films are thrust into new narratives that operate
ostensibly in tandem with those in the main films. Those officially sanctioned by Lucasfilm
were considered canonical by the company and became part of the EU. This included novels,
comic books, video games, toys, and other texts.
398
It should be noted that while the imaginary world of Star Wars began as George Lucas’s
idea, even the first film required the collaboration of hundreds of artists, costume designers,
special effects technicians, and other numerous personnel in order to fully realize the fictional
universe that Lucas had created. The scale of this collaborative authorship grew exponentially
in order to satiate consumer demand for more Star Wars narratives, with a small number of
initial auxiliary texts growing to thousands of titles over time. Timothy Zahn, author of some
of the more popular EU novels, comments: “But whereas Star Wars began as the vision of a
single man, over the past few years it has grown into an impressively intricate group effort.
Large and, on occasion, just a tad bit unwieldy” (Sansweet, 1998).
The scale of the collectively authored Star Wars universe is difficult to definitively map.
It is so large that Leland Chee, an employee of Lucas Licensing (the subsidiary of Lucasfilm
Limited that controls merchandising and the licensing of Star Wars and other Lucasfilm prop-
erties), was given the onerous task of keeping official track of all of the various characters,
planets, and plotlines of the numerous transmedia iterations of hundreds of Star Wars narratives
across the films, novels, video games, comic books, and other official merchandise and prod-
ucts. More commonly known to Star Wars fan communities as the “Keeper of the Holocron,”
Chee’s official job title is “Continuity Database Administrator”—although his Twitter handle
is @HolocronKeeper (Baker, 2008).The Holocron is named for a mystical Jedi archive within
the fictional world of Star Wars, but within the real world was a FileMaker database of over
30,000 entries that tracked plot lines, characters, locations, objects, and other elements of the
fictional universe for the purposes of narrative coherence between the many stories of the
Star Wars texts.
The Expanded Universe persisted until 2014, two years after the franchise’s acquisition by
Disney. Following the transfer of Lucasfilm to Disney, the Expanded Universe was re-branded
as Star Wars Legends as part of a reset of the franchise’s canon. That is, virtually all of deriva-
tive material of the Expanded Universe was no longer considered part of the core Star Wars
narrative, as part of this reset. Other than the seven Star Wars films, two animated films and a
series, and several select novels and comic books, everything else released prior to April 25,
2014, was considered outside of the canon. This calculated move allows Disney to continue
growing the Star Wars universe, both selectively taking elements from the original EU and
introducing new elements.
The canon reset was not without controversy amongst fans, many of whom were the pri-
mary audience for the auxiliary texts of the EU. But such fan controversies were not new to
Star Wars culture, or popular culture in general as fans often experience a considerable sense
of ownership of popular texts once they are commercially released. As the documentary The
People vs. George Lucas (Alexandre O. Philippe, 2010) evidences, numerous fans felt betrayed by
some changes that Lucas made to the Special Edition re-releases of the original films. Others
in the fan community represented in the film express their disenchantment with the prequel
films, such as with the polarizing character of Jar Jar Binks, introduced in the first prequel
film The Phantom Menace (1999). But as these and other fans testify, their dedication to the
franchise is such that they will overlook and forgive perceived slights due to the foundation
of their love for the brand.
Conclusion: Sale to Disney

The Walt Disney Company, one of the world’s largest holders of valuable intellectual proper-
ties (IP), acquired the Star Wars franchise for USD $4.04 billion in 2012. While some finan-
cial analysts initially scoffed at the price as being too high, others disagreed. Indeed, as short
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as three years later, even those who derided the cost of the acquisition acknowledged that
“Disney got a bargain” (Miller, 2015). It should be noted that the acquisition did not include
rights to the original Star Wars (1977) film, which remains the property of 20th Century Fox.
The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983) will belong to 20th Century Fox
until they become Disney’s in 2020. Disney immediately began plans for a number of films
and the development of other Star Wars properties. The seventh numbered film in the series,
Star Wars, Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), grossed over roughly $2 billion globally by
2016. Despite this staggering success, it is sobering to recognize that the box office revenue
films of the Star Wars franchise constitute only a portion of how much the franchise as a whole
has generated. While the box office of the films had totaled $6.25 billion by early 2016, the
franchise itself had earned well in excess of $40 billion. The franchise’s true value lies not
in the films, but within the franchise’s transmedial nature. For example, by the same date,
Star Wars toys has earned $12 billion—almost twice that of the box office (Sunstein, 2016).
Furthermore, analysts predict that the franchise could earn in excess of $25 billion in the years
2015–2020 alone (Miller, 2015).
If there ever was a fan concern that there were once too few films within the Star Wars uni-
verse, Disney will quickly put the matter to rest. This is a company that has sought to capital-
ize on its IPs without hesitation, such as its direct-to-video releases of sequels to its animated
film Cinderella (1950). Cinderella II: Dreams Come True (2002) and Cinderella III: A Twist in Time
(2007) both proved to be extremely lucrative, despite upsetting fans and disappointing critics.
For example, Cinderella II earns a critic rating of 3.2 (9 reviews) and an audience rating of 2.9
(57,408 reviews) on rottentomatoes.com (Rotten Tomatoes, 2016). Disney Chief Executive
and Chairman Robert Iger acknowledges the company’s abilities in this regard, commenting:
“We know how to leverage or mine value from [intellectual property] probably better than
any media company out there … And we have the ecosystem to do it, worldwide” (Miller,
2015). Disney’s 2009 acquisition of Marvel Comics for $4.24 billion and the subsequent
popularity of the Marvel films is indicative of the company’s capacity to successfully build
upon the foundations of established brands and franchises.
The acquisition of Lucasfilm by Disney in 2012 has initiated a renaissance in the
brand with no fewer than six films planned to add to the original six films, along with
innumerable toy, video game, comic book, television, and other tie-ins. It is a remark-
able testament to the creative and business talents of Lucas, and has cemented his role
in late 20th- and 21st-century Hollywood. Lucas himself has acknowledged the strange
reversal in his role in the film industry, which mirrors the tale of Anakin Skywalker and
Darth Vader. He has conceded that his shift from rebellious film student upstart to one of
the most powerful corporate figures in the film and media industries has caused him to
“identity with his arch-villain, Darth Vader.” This is reinforced by Lucas’s comments on
a career retrospective on the 2004 Star Wars DVD set: “I’m not happy that corporations
have taken over the film industry, but now I find myself being the head of a corpora-
tion, so there’s a certain irony there. I have become the very thing that I was trying to
avoid. That is Darth Vader—he becomes the very thing he was trying to protect himself
against.” But despite expressing some reservations about the direction that Disney took
the first of its sequels, Lucas seems relieved to finally relinquish control of the Star Wars
universe that he created. After all, although Lucas’s original creation, Star Wars was from
almost the very beginning a joint enterprise that could only expand to the size that it
has through the power of co-authorship and co-creation. The “big bang” of the 1977
formation of Star Wars generated a galaxy universe that will likely continue to expand for
many, many years to come.
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48
Linden Lab’s
Second Life
Astrid Ensslin
In the past decade, numerous global media commentators and scholarly voices have described
the virtual world of Second Life (“SL”; Linden Lab, 2003) in apocalyptic terms, renouncing it
as “dead” (cf. Nentwich and König, 2012: 101), “desolate hell” (Welt am Sonntag, 2015), or
a “ghost city” (cf. Schmundt, 2014)—with varying degrees of confidence and impassioned
engagement. This post-hype flurry of denunciations followed a peak of media attention to,
and academic research into, Second Life between 2006 and 2008, with numerous conferences
and research publications emerging at the time and its immediate aftermath (e.g., Creating
Second Lives, 2008 and 2011; Boellstorff, 2008; Molka-Danielsen and Deutschmann, 2009;
Ensslin and Muse, 2011). This climax of interest was partly due to the novelty of a three-
dimensional world that allowed users to live parallel lives without the constraints of game
rules or fictional narrativity, and to create alternative bodies, objects, and habitats with unfore-
seen ease and aesthetic pleasure.Yet the hype was no doubt also related to a number of media-
heavy events and developments that human engagement with SL gave rise to at the time, such
as Anshe Chung’s rise to the world’s first Second Life millionaire, or “virtual land baroness”
(Hof, 2006) in 2006; or, two years later, the news that a SL affair had led to a first-life divorce
(Morris, 2008).
Since the late 2000s, scholarly, commercial, and media interest in Second Life has decreased
considerably—despite the facts that the world has maintained a steady user base throughout
(around the one million mark) and that there has been ongoing user engagement, albeit
recently in more limited ways and less diverse areas of human activity than during the hype.
Leaving aside these waves of fashion facing Second Life as a commercial platform and new
media development, it is worth studying it as a both evolving and historical phenomenon as
well as a business venture seeking to develop ever new avenues for attracting users. In particu-
lar, however, SL constitutes an important subject of study in the imaginary world tradition,
as a large-scale response to the human need to immerse oneself into secondary worlds, not
only vicariously, i.e. “through an author’s [fictional] characters” (Wolf, 2012: 143), but indeed
through direct embodiment via a representative figure, or avatar.
Against this backdrop, this chapter seeks to map SL’s ontological status and to theorize it
from an imaginary world angle, looking at key concepts such as virtuality versus actuality, sub-
creation, narrativity, canonicity, and the existential triad of invention, completeness, and con-
sistency (Wolf, 2012). It will further offer an evaluation of SL’s rise to, and fall from, a globally
hyped new media phenomenon vis-à-vis its idiosyncratic design elements and underlying
philosophy. This will include a discussion of why, as a massive multi-user online environment,
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Linden Lab’s Second Life
it has not been as enduring as some other, contemporaneous virtual worlds. The final section
will then focus on SL’s current status and likely future developments.
Ontological Principles
Second Life is a so-called MUVE (multi-user virtual environment), or OVSW (online virtual
social world), that enables its users to enact alternative identities and social practices without
any preconceived rules or narratives, with the exception of the actual building blocks, land-
scapes, and customization options offered in-world. Like other OVSWs such as Active Worlds
(1995), moove online (1997), There (2003), and Kaneva (2004), SL emphasizes exploration,
creativity, and sociality (Boellstorff, 2008) over ludic principles such as targets and objectives,
leveling up, victory and termination conditions, rules, challenges, and feedback. Indeed, San
Francisco-based Linden Lab’s main vision in creating SL was to allow people to have fun
“playing as virtual representations of themselves, [carrying] out day-to-day, often fantastical,
lives in a made-up world. They’ll explore, socialize, have cybersex, make art, perform, create
businesses, build houses, go shopping, pay taxes” (Truong, 2015), whereby the notion of fan-
tasy does not pertain to that of an author who imposes their own fictional construct, but users’
very own, individualized dreams, visions, and exploratory desires. Hence, SL users are pro-
sumers (a blend between “producers” and “consumers”) in a creationist capitalist (Boellstorff,
2008) venture, where “consumers labour for free” (Postill, 2009), and are equally free to gen-
erate profit from their creations. Thus, instead of playing a game according to its formal rules,
SL users play roles in order to achieve “social position” in-world (Meadows, 2007: 34).
Like MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games) such as World of Warcraft
(2004) and Lord of the Rings Online (2007), SL is a persistent virtual online world of vast geo-
graphic dimensions, experienced by subscribers in-world via fully customizable and user-
controlled avatars (Wolf, 2012: 143). The world’s internal clock runs continuously, parallel to
Primary World time, following “SLT” (Second Life Time), which is equivalent to PST (Pacific
Standard Time)—“the new Greenwich Mean Time for many virtual worlds” (Boellstorff,
2008: 105). This entails that “only a fraction [of SL reality] can [ever] be known and experi-
enced during one’s lifetime” (Wolf, 2012: 143), and SL may therefore—in its phenomenologi-
cal infinity, incoherence, and non-closure—be perceived as more realistic, or authentic, than
imaginary worlds with fully preconceived narrative arcs and fictional settings.
SL participants act as co-world-builders, which means their avatars, or virtual embodiments
(Doyle, 2009), interact, either directly or indirectly, in the construction of the virtual world,
using primary building blocks (“prims”) to design, assemble, name, and edit objects and build-
ings in SL regions, also called “sims”.The basic needs of SL avatars are radically different from
those of their human counterparts: due to the absence (or at least vastly reduced degrees) of
Primary World physical constraints such as gravity, energy expenditure, and adverse mete-
orological conditions (e.g., precipitation, extreme temperatures), as well as the complete lack
of exposure to microbiological phenomena that may cause hygienic defects and disease, ava-
tars have no physical, corporeal needs in the Maslowian sense (1943). Instead, their needs
are mostly aesthetic, interpersonal, communicative, material, and emotional, and linked very
strongly to self-image as well as material and psychological ownership and belonging (Ensslin,
2011). SL avatars are thus aesthetically idealized stylizations of their human users, and their in-
world functions, appearances, and behavioral practices reflect the above-mentioned SL basic
needs. A key first step toward SL community acceptance is, for example, investment in and
self-adornment with non-newbie clothes or hairstyles, obtained in one of countless SL shops
for a more or less affordable price.
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Astrid Ensslin
Users navigate the SL archipelago (a geographic formation comprising a mainland and

numerous surrounding islands) macro-spatially, by means of maps and teleportation, or micro-
spatially, by walking or flying across individual sims. They can hear what avatars within thirty
virtual meters of their own avatar are “saying” (audibly or in written form) and talk to other
users using voice-over and written chat. Remote, asynchronic communication is possible
via instant messaging in-world, and nonverbal communication can be enacted by choosing
between different animated gestures, or emotes, such as wave, blowkiss, clap, and frown, from
the Inventory.
Like the MUVE Entropia Universe (2003), SL features an in-game currency, the Linden
Dollar, which forms the link between SL’s virtual economy and Primary World economy.
Linden Dollars, or lindens, can be bought and sold in exchange for actual US Dollars, and
SL members can acquire Premium or Concierge accounts for advanced land ownership, in-
world administrative power, and free access to exclusive virtual goods and advanced commu-
nicative functions (Linden, 2016). SL residency and sociality are strongly linked to in-world
land ownership and the act of building, as user-generated objects “have permanence only on
property” (Boellstorff, 2008: 99). Similarly, lack of property leads to social exclusionary condi-
tions such as virtual homelessness and loss of intellectual property.
Second Life in the Imaginary World Tradition

That Second Life unconditionally deserves a place in an anthology on imaginary worlds relates
to the fact that:
[virtual] worlds, unlike stories, need not rely on narrative structures […]. Worlds
extend beyond the stories that occur in them, inviting speculation and explora-
tion through imaginative [and other] means. They are realms of possibility, a mix of
familiar and unfamiliar, permutations of wish, dread, and dream, and other kinds of
existence that can make us more aware of the circumstances and conditions of the
actual world we inhabit.
(Wolf, 2012: 17)
3-D virtual worlds are thus audiovisually enhanced instantiations of one or more authors’, or
creators’, mental images, dreams, or visions, derived partly from actual world experience and
partly from invention. 3-D worlds inevitably mirror or at least evoke psychological, sociocul-
tural, and geopolitical elements of their makers’ first lives and interweave them with more or
less fantastic design elements.
SL adopts a very specific, curiously life-like role in this tradition. Clearly, SL is not a story-
world in the traditional narratological sense: a (fictional or non-fictional) backdrop created or
adopted by one or more authors in which to set a specific story, such as Gilead in Margaret
Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) or Pandora in James Cameron’s Avatar (2009). Nor can
SL be seen as a game world like World of Warcraft’s Azeroth, which serves as a fictional-narra-
tive backdrop to player-performed quests and skills development, following game rules—with
very limited levels of creative player agency (compared to SL’s creationist agenda). Instead,
SL may be considered a “synthetic world”: “an expansive, world-like, large-group environ-
ment made by humans, for humans, and which is maintained, recorded, and rendered by a
computer” (Castronova, 2005: 11). The emphasis here lies on “world-like,” as SL emulates
the chaotic, incoherent, diverse, random, and erratic patchwork quilt patterns underlying our
Primary World experiences, where free will frequently disrupts whatever narrative cohesion
404
our lives may have. Instead, the very patterns in which the online world presents itself rely
almost exclusively on the whims of its users around the globe, constrained of course by the
affordances of the SL software.
In this sense, it makes sense to refer to SL’s virtual status not in opposition to real, because
the experiences it affords are perceived as equally if not more real, or authentic, than Primary
World experiences. Instead, speaking in Deleuzian terms, “the virtual can be considered that
element of the real that is not actual” and “what is commonly referred to as ‘real’ is [in fact]
a hybrid and fluid mixture of First Life actuality and Second Life virtuality (whereby both
‘Lives’ are pluralistic concepts)” (Ensslin and Muse, 2011: 3–4; Deleuze, 1981). Similarly,
the relationship between users and their avatars is a complex one: they “together perform
actions and make decisions that directly affect the world” (Wolf, 2012: 221), and this dually
embodied, joint embeddedness in the technologically enabled, cybernetic feedback loop can
easily lead to metaleptic transgressions of the ontological boundary between the actual and
the virtual sphere, affecting and challenging the rules, structures, and relationships of both in
equal terms.
A second important concept in imaginary worlds theory is that of subcreation, which is
the term used by J. R. R. Tolkien (1947) to refer to the human construction of secondary
worlds following imago dei, that is, using God’s ab nihilo concepts and re-combining them into
new, imaginary universes that perform more complex functions than those of mere narra-
tive settings. Subcreators are therefore creators “under God” that “replace or reset Primary
World defaults” (Wolf, 2012: 24) in such a way as to generate alternative realms, characters,
and psychological states that resonate with human audiences, partly because their creations
resemble our actual world, and partly because they are “true” or consistent with the laws of
that secondary world. Applied to SL, we may argue that Linden Lab is the subcreator of a
virtual environment that is designed so as to afford or indeed necessitate sub-subcreation: SL
users only come into their own by adopting proper residential status: through monetary and
psychological investment in Linden Lab’s neo-liberal, creationist ideals; and through the very
act of sub-subcreation (designing and building their own objects in an existing, subcreated
sandbox world).
Closely related to subcreation is the concept of canonicity, which relates to a certain set
of elements in an imaginary world (characters, objects, location) that are “true” according
to the author’s original creation (Wolf, 2012: 270). This idea is complicated by the fact that
imaginary worlds are regularly added to by individuals other than the original author, such
as the Bond writers in the post-Fleming era, or fans of the Harry Potter franchise. Whereas the
products of these secondary subcreators may be seen as non-canonical, the question arises
as to what actual canonical content is in open sandbox environments like Second Life, where
a minimum of producer-generated content exists, and the main idea is for users to create
their own, quasi-permanent additions to the world. Here, one could argue with Wolf (2012:
281) “that [in SL] all events are canonical, since they occur diegetically within the world in
question.” This might imply that users are raised to subcreator status and their products—no
matter how short-lived and changeable they may be—form part of the SL canon. This again
would presuppose a fairly dynamic notion of canonicity, which allows for flexibility, subjectiv-
ity, and diversity (cf. Ensslin, 2007). Alternatively, “by a stricter definition, such worlds do not
have canonical events apart from those ‘official’ ones produced by the author of the world”
(Wolf, 2012: 281). In the case of SL, these canonical elements would include, for example,
the existing geographical infrastructure, i.e., the SL archipelago in its raw form combined
with some Linden-created training spaces like the Orientation or Help Islands, as well as the
generic GUI options offered to users affording communication, customization, and object
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Astrid Ensslin
generation. Anything created by SL users, by contrast, would come under non-canonical, or,
for lack of a better term, sub-canonical structures.
Finally, I would like to discuss the existential aesthetic triad of invention, completeness,
and consistency, which are key to imaginary worlds’ credibility and attraction (Wolf, 2012).
Invention relates to the degree to which an imaginary world exhibits changes vis-à-vis the
Primary World. Completeness is a scalar concept and involves the degree to which an imagi-
nary world appears complete in the sense of detail and complexity. Consistency, then, refers to
the degree to which a world comes across as feasible, plausible, and non-contradictory. Second
Life addresses each of these concepts, whereby it seeks to resemble and relate to First Life not
only eponymously but indeed in the sense of offering an experience that is close enough to
users’ actual lives to inspire everyday (rather than fantastic) social and creative experimenta-
tion. Thus, SL’s degree of invention is kept fairly low and mostly involves superhuman quali-
ties such as flying and seemingly endless possibilities of corporeal and material, sexual, and
social experimentation.These seemingly infinite possibilities, which are impossible to grasp or
experience holistically by any single user, mixed with vast geographic expansions and innu-
merable social and cultural practices, evoke a Primary World-like illusion of completeness.
This quasi-completeness is both intangible and dynamic as user-generated content is continu-
ously evolving. Finally, SL is consistent in its inconsistency: it systematically embraces creativ-
ity, diversity, randomness, and subjectivity, which leads to a visual patchwork quilt of arbitrarily
assembled buildings, objects, cultures, and communities.These sites and objects are owned and
managed by their sub-subcreators, and their in-world proprietary practices neo-liberalistically
defy any top-down political or authorial intervention (other than for ethical reasons).
Rise and “Fall”

The rise of Second Life as a non-game 3-D virtual world coincided roughly with the popu-
larization of MMORPGs such as Ultima Online (1997) and World of Warcraft (2004). One of
the main attractions of these novel multi-player environments was the broad appeal they had
and still have for user groups far beyond conventional hard-core gamers. Similarly, SL was
designed to attract users from across the social spectrum, regardless of gender, age, ethnic and
educational background.
Similarly, during the hype, SL developed into a hub for a wide range of social, political,
commercial, creative, educational, and entertainment activities. New and not-so-new areas of
roleplay—sexual or non-sexual, gendered and a-gendered—were explored by communities
of furries (cuddly animals), vampires, pirates, steampunk, and other types of fans. SL was a reg-
ular tool for political campaigning, for example in the 2008 U.S. presidential election, as well
as a popular platform for online commerce, used prolifically by businesses born both in-world
(e.g., Aimee Weber Studio and Electric Sheep Company) and outside (e.g., Mazda, Telus, and
Sky News). Its most enduring and best-documented areas of activity, however, proved to be,
and remain, education, research, and artistic creativity (see the final section).
Surely, the full scope of reasons for SL’s fall out of media and scholarly grace is impossible
to even attempt to capture in a short chapter like this. Instead, I shall now go on to discuss
some of the imaginary world factors inherent in Second Life that may have contributed to its
decrease in popularity over the past decade or so, at least among some types of users.
SL contains relatively low levels of narrativity. It does not serve as a backdrop to one or
more preconceived stories or interactive narrative paths. Nor does it feature a set of canonical
characters for users to recognize and relate to. As Wolf (2012: 29) puts it, “it is usually story
that draws us into a world and holds us there; lack of a compelling story may make it difficult
406
for someone to remain vicariously in a secondary world.”The world as constructed by Linden

Lab manifests itself as a supersize serendipitous sandbox, and it is up to each individual user,
or group of users, to implement and build their specific idea(l)s in-world. Thus, the limits of
creativity are quasi-infinite, and this lack of creative constraint is bound to be perceived by
some as limiting and frustrating rather than stimulating.
Similarly, narrativity usually involves conflict and resolution, and neither is displayed in the
macro-design of SL. Individual elements of existing narratives have surely been transmediated
into SL, such as the storyworlds of H. P. Lovecraft (Ryan and Thon, 2014: 18). Similarly, narra-
tives have been created using SL as a dramatic and cinematographic backdrop, most pertinently
SL machinima (animated films shot in-world). Moreover, naturally, every SL avatar creates and
experiences their own personalized stories in SL.Yet the world as such does not offer a coher-
ent and ‘true’ narrative experience, which again may be off-putting to some potential users.
An element closely related to conflict in particular is the representation of life-like diver-
sity, including the negative sides of character and/or setting. While diversity in appearances of
various kinds is encouraged and celebrated in SL, the more natural sides of human life, such
as dirt, stench, excrement, and illness are semiotically erased or aestheticized. The vast major-
ity of sims offer visually pleasing vistas and experiences, with tropical tourist islands like Bora
Bora being extreme cases in point.Yet even deliberately provocative sites such as the polluted
Caleta harbor cannot have any potentially shocking or disgusting effect on users as they ironi-
cally exhibit an anti-aesthetic that reconfirms the overall hegemonic beauty ideals promoted
by SL (Clark, 2011). This lack of roundedness, mixed with an emphasis on outward appear-
ances, may strike some users as monotonous, inauthentic, and superficial.
Finally, in virtual environments, lack of narrative depth and plot may well be compensated
for with ludic structures, such as puzzles, enemies, and navigational challenges (think of The
Secret of Monkey Island (1990), Myst (1993), and the Mushroom Kingdom). A highly successful
example of such a combination of ludicity, or gameness, and multi-user sandbox creationism
is Mojang’s Minecraft (2011), which has developed into a massive transmedia franchise and
fan culture, with over 70 million copies sold (Sarkar, 2015). Second Life has been referred to
as a game by many scholars. However, due to its lack of macrostructural ludicity, it cannot be
called thus. After all, it does not offer actual gameplay elements such as quests, rules, victory
conditions, and a level-based architecture. Clearly, some users have built so-called mini-games
into their own SL spaces for others to enjoy (e.g.,The Well and The Second Farm).The world
as such, however, does not challenge users in the same way as MMORPGs challenge their
players into actual ludic behavior as sine qua non of their in-world identity and existence. On
the contrary, the fact that SL users never know exactly what particular roles other avatars are
playing at any given time may come across as uncanny and alienating.
SL Today and in the Future

Instead of a conclusion, I’d like to end this chapter with a summary of SL’s present status
and some deliberations on its pending future developments. Recently, SL has predominantly
been used in three, partly overlapping, areas: education, sociological research, and creative
arts. Prime examples of these are studies on new literacies (Gillen, 2010), medical education
(Irwin and Coutts, 2015), teacher training (Hartley et al., 2015), language learning pedagogy
(Aydin, 2013), heritage education (Ferreira, 2012), virtual anthropology (Boellstorff, 2008),
business studies (Jensen, 2011), machinima (Johnson and Pettit, 2012), and artistic practice
more generally (Doyle, 2015). Hence, its uses have become more focused, narrow, systematic,
and functional, compared with the heyday of SL’s business and media craze.
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Arguably, however, SL’s contemporary uses have also become less financially viable for
Linden Lab, and it is not surprising that the company is now seeking ways of tapping into
new—and old—audiences. Its latest venture bears the codename Project Sansar. It aims to
“democratize virtual reality as a creative medium” (Linden Lab, 2015), allowing its users
to fully immerse themselves into 3-D space using state-of-the-art VR technologies such as
the Oculus Rift and experience real/virtual world scenarios in holodeck style. Aiming to
develop their highly cross-compatible platform into the “WordPress for VR” (Charara, 2016),
Linden Lab was scheduled to launch Project Sansar to the public in early 2017 (Roettgers,
2016). Surely, whether or not it will fulfill its democratizing potential will largely depend on
accessibility issues and hardware affordability, which are among the features for which SL has
often been criticized. That said, Project Sansar will constitute a new-generation approach to
visualizing and experiencing virtual imaginary worlds—worlds designed and built collabo-
ratively by sub- and sub-subcreators, calling into question hegemonic thought surrounding
authorship and canonicity while simultaneously perpetuating corporately imposed needs and
value systems.
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49
Persson’s Minecraft
Lori Landay
“Create New World:” this is one of the things you can do every time you launch Minecraft
(see Figure 49.1). When one of the more than 100 million people across the world who have
purchased Minecraft does that, a brightly colored three-dimensional landscape comprised of
one-meter cubes is procedurally generated. There are no instructions, only composer C418’s
music encouraging you to venture forth into a world of possibility. Like other sandbox games,
Minecraft is about world-building; players interact with the game environment rather than
pursuing a game-defined goal. Unlike other sandbox games, Minecraft’s procedurally generated
worlds are endless, resolving before your eyes into areas that beckon to be explored, mined,
built upon, goofed around in. The famously “blocky” look, reminsicent of LEGO bricks, hits
a sweet spot between realism and abstraction, with enough detail to differentiate materials and
plenty of room for the player or viewer to involve their imagination. The world is alive, with
animals, other creatures, and plants that grow.
More than a Game

The Minecraft phenomenon, which emerged from the game Markus Persson created in 2009,
encompasses a community of players, modifications (mods) of the game, servers on which to
play it, instructions and tutorials, a platform for creative works about (and set in) the Minecraft
world, and an educational tool, to name a few. In Persson’s description:
MINECRAFT is a sandbox fantasy adventure game set in a world made up

entirely of one-meter blocks of different materials. The player can pick up those
blocks and move them around, and use them to craft items and tools. Monsters
can spawn in dark areas and during the night, which plays nicely into a general
fear of the dark.
(Persson, 2011a: 24)
What began as a Java applet Persson posted on the indie game developer forum TIGSource
has grown into the first virtual world to be adopted in the mainstream, and will shape the par-
ticipatory media expectations of a generation. As of 2016, Minecraft runs on Mac, Linux, and
Windows computers; Xbox 360 and Xbox One; Playstation 3 and 4, Playstation Vita; WiiU;
and Gear VR.There is a Minecraft: Pocket Edition (2012) for iOS and Android mobile devices. It
is developed in Java, which can be reverse-engineered by programmer-players to make mods,
special versions of the game with new objects, graphics, and gameplay. And although Persson
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Figure 49.1 Screenshots from Minecraft.
Figure 49.2 Screenshots from Minecraft.
did not set out to be a public figure, he became what Rolling Stone called “gaming’s biggest
rock star” (MacCallum-Stewart, 2014).
Minecraft is more than a game. “Minecraft is basically this generation’s Lego or even this
generation’s microcomputer,” says video game designer and scholar Ian Bogost (quoted in
Mac, 2015).What is it about Minecraft that made it so popular and influential? In no particular
order, (1) Minecraft is fun to play, see, and hear; (2) the core mechanics are easy; (3) players
learn by doing; (4) players can advance and still be challenged because there are many ways
to play in an infinite game; (5) it can be social; (6) it fosters creativity and exploration because
there is no central goal; and (7) it is a platform. Many commentators have waxed poetic about
Minecraft, but perhaps Peter Molyneux summarizes it best:
The gift was giving people a world to play with. Minecraft trusts in people’s ability
to find their own entertainment in a digital experience, to choose whether they’re
going to build or destroy. It is a glimpse into a new world of digital entertainment.
(Cheshire, 2012)
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Developing a World
The origin story of Minecraft is well known, due to media coverage and the open development
process that Markus Persson used from 2009 onward that integrated community input. At
MineCon 2011, when the first nondevelopment version of Minecraft PC 1.0.0 was officially
released, Mojang showed a video that began with a voice-of-God narrator comically boom-
ing over a black screen, “A man by the name of Notch had an idea: a cave game, a sandbox
seemingly endless, an adventure that had everyone saying, ‘Just one more block.’This man, that
game, those blocks have brought all of you here to celebrate what has become Minecraft” (Hat
Films, 2016). The video then shows key moments in the development: single player, multi-
player, survival, leading up to the introduction of the iconic creepers (Classic), dynamic light-
ing, new sound engine, crafting (Indev version), infinite terrain, minecarts, tracks, dungeons,
(Infdev), redstone, biomes, slimes, boats, survival in multiplayer (Alpha), the Nether, dispensers,
beds, tamable wolves, weather, pistons, improved combat (Beta), and teasing The End.
Indeed, a man called Notch, a programmer working in the booming Swedish video game
industry and also making his own games, did have an idea for a game, one that was inspired
by elements of other games that Persson played and liked, such as Dungeon Keeper (1997),
RollerCoaster Tycoon (1999), Dwarf Fortress (2006), and Infiniminer (2009) (Goldberg and
Larsson, 2013). From May 2009 when Persson posted a Java applet for other players and game
developers in the indie online community TIGSource onward, Persson’s development hap-
pened in a public sandbox, with his peers providing feedback in the iterations that followed.
Persson asked questions about possible features, responded to comments, and took polls. The
name Minecraft was even suggested by a player on TIGSource. Persson didn’t bother with
instructions because he released the game on TIGSource, where people immediately posted
examples of what they did in the game. The only place people could get the game was from
Persson, and he kept the game open for modders to develop their own special versions of
Minecraft, as long as they didn’t sell them.
During the alpha stage, Minecraft was playable for free online and also in survival mode in its
/indev/ form. Players purchased the game for half-price ($13) and got free updates afterward.
Still working a day job at Jalbum, Persson speculated about his development process:
As for being a viable model, I don’t know. What is? I definitely think you can get a
long way by being fair to your customers and having a close relationship with them,
and selling “pre-releases” while developing the game is a great way to both fund
development and to gauge how well the things you’ve added so far works (both
technically and commercially).
(Handy, 2010)
Persson made these comments weeks after he had to stop replying to every email he received
because of the volume and about six months before he cofounded Mojang AB with Jakob
Porsér and Carl Manneh in Stockholm, Sweden. It had been Persson’s dream to support
himself making the kind of games he wanted to make, and Minecraft offered that opportunity.
Minecraft, first as developed solely by Persson and then by Mojang (which means gadget,
or thingamabob, in Swedish), was always part of the indie scene and community. Not only
did people discuss Minecraft online, and share information on YouTube and in forums, but
they created millions of works in Minecraft housed all over the Internet. Despite growing
extensively beyond one developer discussing his game on a forum with players, the com-
pany Mojang continued to include the player/modder community through the forums and
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Figure 49.3 A tweet from Notch.
other social media like Persson’s tumblr blog, The Word of Notch, and especially Twitter. The
company Mojang developed Minecraft, to be sure, but in collaboration with its player com-
munity. Development in a sandbox of a sandbox game led to a new paradigm of authorship.
Scholar Adam L. Brackin argues:
Authentic gameplay gives functional agency to the player resulting in emergent

gameplay decisions, and if pushed far enough with non-linear and ergodic models
of gameplay, effectively gives authorship to the audience. This shift in authority in
Minecraft has driven Mojang’s content development process itself.
(Brackin, 2014)
The inclusion of the players goes beyond inviting feedback during the extended development
phase and an End User License Agreement that encourages modding and content creation to
require community resources to learn how to play the game. For example, Greg Lastowka calls
“a consequence of Persson’s lack of interest in writing” an instruction manual as “an ingenious
design decision” because players find help in the multitudes of wikis, blogs, forums, and videos
about Minecraft, all of which are easily accessible online, but are outside Mojang (Lastowka,
2012). Official Mojang Books (Minecraft: Essential Handbook (2013), Minecraft: Redstone Handbook
(2013), Minecraft: Construction Handbook (2014), and Minecraft: Combat Handbook (2014)) are
“packed with tips from Minecraft experts FyreUK, YouTube sensation Paul Soares, Jr., and
redstone expert CNB Minecraft,” superstars of the player community (Milton et al., 2014: 6).
One YouTube superstar known as Minecraft Chick ended up employed by Mojang as the
“Director of Fun.” An extrovert in a company full of introverts, Lydia Winters was happy to be
in the spotlight, and terrific at conveying her enthusiasm. She explained her position:
My task it not so much to run the community as to supply it with material and just
support everyone out there. The community really runs itself, it was there before I
came aboard and it has a life of its own. To try to control it or govern it in any way
wouldn’t work. It would only be weird to even try.
(Arnoth, 2013: Kindle Locations, 491–494)
As scholar Esther MacCallum-Stewart concludes, “by fostering a close relationship with fans
and players, Persson and Mojang created an environment in which their respect and debt to
the community are apparently reciprocated through design” (MacCallum-Stewart, 2014: 139).
The mods and features the community provided enhanced Minecraft, and only increased the
players’ social investment in the community.
The close and direct relationship with players is one of the elements of the “indie spirit” that
Minecraft embodies. Minecraft is widely acknowledged as a breakout indie success. One person
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developed a game outside of a video game industry organization, distributed it himself, hired
like-minded people for a company he founded with friend/colleagues, and it has become one
of the best-selling, most played video games of all time. By any measure of success—whether
economic, popularity, recognition via awards, influence on its own field, ubiquity in the cul-
ture, inspiration of other works, or community participation—Minecraft is an indie game that
made good.
It is hard to imagine a scenario in which Minecraft could have been developed inside the
video game industry in which Persson had been employed. As Goldberg and Larsson write:
At Midasplayer, Markus’s ideas were too odd, and the game he wanted to make had
nothing to do with those that had already proven successful. At Avalanche, a pro-
grammer couldn’t just drop into the director’s office and suggest a new project. In
fact, when we ask his old bosses, they admit without hesitation that Minecraft would
never have become a reality inside the walls of their companies. The idea was too
strange, too difficult to fit into their existing product catalog. Most of all, it was
untried. They would never have dared.
(Goldberg and Larsson, 2013: 237)
Modes of Minecraft
Indie development shaped the content of Minecraft. Persson explained:
Discussing with the players and listening to suggestions, I learned a lot about how
the game could be played and what directions were most interesting to others.
Usually, people played it in completely different ways than I did. For example, when
I added more complex game rules to the basic game engine, it turned out a lot of
people really liked the free building from the engine test, so I kept it around and
called it ‘creative mode.’
(Persson, 2011a: 26)
Persson’s access to feedback and willingness to develop based on it had major ramifications.
The inclusion of both creative and survival modes (and the addition of adventure and hard-
core modes, to a lesser extent) is one of the fundamental reasons Minecraft is open enough to
encompass all that it has spawned. As scholar Sean Duncan concludes:
Minecraft’s tensions between construction and survival have led it to be seen increas-
ingly more as a gaming platform, one which is overtly afforded by the game’s design
and which has led to exciting experiments in games for learning, game play as an
instructional space, and games as playgrounds for the exploration of artistic goals.
(Duncan, 2011, 10)
With “cheats” enabled in the World Options, players can switch between construction
and survival.
Gameplay stems from the core mechanic of Minecraft, placing and destroying blocks. Beyond
that, in Survival Mode, secondary mechanics include crafting, mining, building shelter, and
finding food. With the addition of the Ender Dragon and The End, there is a goal (although
achieving it doesn’t end the game, but leads back to the spawn point in the Overworld).
Flexibility is a key characteristic of Minecraft. There are both single-player and multiplayer
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ways of playing, which means Minecraft is adaptable enough to support different kinds of
players and different kinds of play. Moreover, a player can open his or her single-player world
to others on a LAN (local area network) or on a server (hosted independently or through the
monthly paid subscription service, Minecraft Realms).
Repeatedly in interviews, Persson has said he prefers to dig caves and explore in Minecraft;
he does not build huge elaborate structures. That he still enabled those who prefer a different
kind of gameplay than he does prevented him from making Minecraft just one thing and kept
it a platform.There couldn’t be a better example of how important it is for game designers to
playtest and incorporate feedback into their iterative design process, especially when it is dif-
ferent from their personal preferences. Persson personified what game designer and educator
Tracy Fullerton calls a “playcentric” approach to game design, which foregrounds the player
experience through iteration based on feedback (Fullerton, 2014).
Vanilla and Modded Minecraft

Not only did Persson develop Minecraft with feedback from players, but players had more
direct input in the form of mods, texture packs, maps, and other player-created content.
“Audience-led production” like mods, all kinds of narrative, parody songs, tutorials, and more
are the result of an international digital community co-creating Minecraft. As Redmond writes:
Minecraft is a commercial franchise wrapped around a core non-commercial fan

community.While the fan community does not legally own the franchise, this lack of
formal ownership is also irrelevant. The reason is that fans co-produce, co-regulate,
and co-distribute the videogame in close concert with the commercial franchise.
(Redmond, 2014)
There is “Vanilla” Minecraft, the original game released by Persson and then Mojang. In
Minecraft, a player, represented by the avatar Steve, destroys and places blocks in an algorithmi-
cally generated three-dimensional environment made of blocks of different materials (sand,
grass, iron, leaves, wood, and so on). The generated natural world is categorized by biomes
(ecosystems) demarcated by climate, with the geography, animals, plants, weather, and colors
they nurture.“Mobs” of spawned creatures populate the Minecraft world, from animals that can
be tamed, eaten, or killed for resources and villagers with whom players can trade to hostile
monsters to fight or be attacked by, with or without provocation depending on the monster.
The iconic creeper, for example, pursues players quietly to sneak up and explode, causing
damage to structures and players. In contrast, wolves can be tamed, but if a player hits one
wolf, the entire pack will attack. As Minecraft developed from Alpha to Beta to the Release
version, more specific areas of the physical world were introduced, including the Nether and
The End, each with its own battles to be fought against hostile creatures in order to find rare
objects and achieve objectives.
Mods (short for modifications) change the game content from “Vanilla” Minecraft released
by Mojang. Modding precedes Minecraft, but one could argue that within Minecraft, modding
has become mainstream. The history of modding parallels the history of video games as an
industry, first as part of an extension of programming that only experts could do; then as video
games became big business, modding was in conflict with the intellectual property of the
game companies. In the early 1990s, id Software built Doom (1993) in such a way that mod-
ders could create their own files without destroying the original game. As long as modders
made it clear that their mods were not official id products, they were allowed by id to sell their
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mods. id Software’s policy, and its sustained success with shareware and other strategies that
deviated from the rest of the video game industry, provided a model for Mojang, including
their End User License Agreement (EULA). “Both companies were founded by developers
who share many of the same values as the early hackers of the 1950s and 1960s” (Christiansen,
2014: Kindle Locations 505–506).
There are thousands of mods that provide additional content to modify the audiovisual,
kinetic, and interactive aspects of Minecraft. Some are client-side files that players download
to their computer that makes changes to the game’s jar file; others are server-side mods that
make administering privileges on servers. Mods have to be updated as new versions of the
official code are released. A Google search for “Minecraft mods” returns over twelve million
results;YouTube reviews of mods often include the URL of where to download the mod in
the description. Bukkit, a Minecraft server mod for easier server creation and management,
was acquired by Mojang when the company hired its four main developers in early 2012,
signaling Mojang’s commitment to multiplayer and mods (Bergensten, 2012). PC versions
can be modded because the source code is in Java; the mobile version can also be modded,
but because it is written in C++, it requires more steps, including jailbreaking an iOS device
on which to play it. The console games cannot be modded, and mods cannot currently be
installed on Mojang’s server hosting service, Realms.
Invention, Completeness, and Consistency

In order for an imaginary world to be “believable and interesting,” writes Mark J. P. Wolf,
it has to have “a high degree of invention, completeness, and consistency” (Wolf, 2012: 33).
Invention occurs in four areas: the nominal, cultural, natural, and ontological (Wolf, 2012:
35–36). Few existing things in Minecraft are given new names, so there is little nominal inven-
tion, but there is much cultural invention, with the creation of artifacts, objects, customs, tech-
nologies, and ideas. For example, crafting, the technologies of mining, enchantments, potions,
the villagers’ and other mobs’ customs, the gliding wings (elytra), and many more items are
only one aspect of cultural invention in Minecraft. Players are a fountain of cultural invention,
both within Vanilla and in mods.
The realm of natural invention is where Persson’s Minecraft shines. Although the iconic
Creeper was invented accidentally, Persson’s approach to world-building and game develop-
ment was open enough that he embraced it. Persson serendipitously saw the potential in the
coding mistake that generated a long, tall, green object instead of the intended pig. “The way
they moved had a very creepy feel to it, so I named them “Creepers” and painted them green.
Turns out this was a good move, as Creepers have become something of an icon for the game
by now” (Persson, 2011a: 30).The sound they make also was the result of lucky experimenta-
tion, as composer Daniel Rosenfeld recalls, “That was just a complete accident by Markus and
me,” he says. “We just put in a placeholder sound of burning a matchstick. It seemed to work
hilariously well, so we kept it” (Stuart, 2014).
The Overworld is similar to Earth geographically, but Persson also invented two other
dimensions, replete with creatures—the hell dimension known as The Nether (full of mobs
of zombie pigmen, ghasts, magma cubes, Endermen, and blazes) and The End (home of the
Ender Dragon, Endermen, and shulkers).
There is also significant ontological invention, which “determines the parameters of a
world’s existence, that is, the materiality and laws of physics, space, time, and so forth that
constitute the world” (Wolf, 2012: 36). The roughly twenty-minute day-night cycle, with
night shortened if a player “sleeps” in a bed, is one example of an ontological invention that
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shapes gameplay and player experience, setting up a norm that, for example, is absent in
The Nether.
Perhaps the most significant aspect of ontology in Minecraft, though, is redstone, a mate-
rial embodiment of a force; it is an element with the properties of electricity. Players build
mechanical and electrical devices with redstone, from simple constructions such as toggles and
switches to turn on lights or set off TNT to building working clocks, elevators, self-building
constructions, and even graphing calculators. Redstone dust can be laid out like wires in
circuits; redstone circuits can power pistons that push blocks to open doors or create game
mechanics like traps; and clocks and other signal controllers regulate complex contraptions
or devices.
Redstone is one of the ways the high degree of agency in Minecraft reveals itself; as a simu-
lation of the principles of circuitry, it works very well, and it is in the fun, accessible Minecraft
virtual environment in which kids have already become comfortable and empowered. It
demonstrates how players can continue to use Minecraft as their skills and interests grow.
Studies have demonstrated how children achieve social recognition through mastery of skills
like redstone in Minecraft (Dezuanni, O’Mara, and Beavis, 2015). Redstone has aspects of all
four of Wolf ’s categories of invention: nominal (renaming electricity), cultural, natural, and
ontological.
To return to the three necessary qualities of invention, completeness, and consistency,
Minecraft may appear incomplete with its low-res look and simple animations, but its world
gives the “illusion of completeness” (Wolf, 2012: 39). A Minecraft procedurally generated world
from the infdev version forward has “infinite” maps, which as Persson clarified in a blog entry,
are “not infinite, but there’s no hard limit either. It’ll just get buggier and buggier the further
out you are” (Persson, 2011b). One YouTuber, known as Kurt J. Mac, is walking to the “Far
Lands,” the place on the Minecraft map where the glitches happen. He started in June 2011,
filming several times a week, and has traveled the equivalent of 2,266 kilometers as of May
31, 2015, which is “only 18.06% of the way to reaching the Far Lands located at 12,550,820
meters” (Farlandsorbust.com, 2016) (Parkin, 2014). There is something quixotically noble
about his trek that garners attention. In The New Yorker, Simon Parkin speculates:
By one measure, Mac’s endeavor is motivated by the same spirit that propels any
explorer toward the far reaches of the unknown. Today, we live in a world meticu-
lously mapped by satellites and Google cars, making uncharted virtual lands some of
the last places that can satisfy a yearning for the beyond, as well as locations where
you are simply, as Mac puts it, “first.”
(Parkin, 2014)
Lastly, when we consider consistency, we have to wonder, does the world ask to be taken
seriously? Recall the anecdote about how Persson and Rosenberg judged their placeholder
sound for the creeper to work “hilariously well, so we kept it” (Stuart, 2014). Minecraft is a
ludic world that uses inconsistencies as part of its aesthetic, similar to how inconsistencies in
how the town of Springfield in The Simpsons are represented are used as sources for comedy,
“or merely place the desire for variety and humor above the need to be consistent” (Wolf,
2012: 43).
Wolf clarifies, “How imaginary worlds work (when they are successful) depends on how
they are constructed and how they invoke the imagination of the audience experiencing
them” (Wolf, 2012: 17). One of the ways Minecraft invokes the imagination is through its
audiovisual and kinetic aesthetic. It looks “retro,” simplified, blocky, and abstracted. Minecraft
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is distinct from games with realistic graphic styles that edge toward photorealism or hyper-
realism, super intense shaders to create the look of different materials, or mocap and facial
animations for expressive avatars.The one-meter cube (and the other shapes like flowers, rugs,
plates, etc.), the pixelated approach to color, the ability to only place or destroy one block at
a time, and the lack of avatar customization all dial down the intricacies of both other games
and real life. All avatars move the same, whether they are a first day noob or have been in
Minecraft for years. Time in the day and night cycle, physics, and the relationships between
materials, people, and animals are all abstracted, whether in crafting, the tools used for mining,
or using animals for resources for food or wool.
When you select the camera position to be able to look at your avatar, it looks back at you
quizzically. Or that’s how I see it. The facial expressions never change, eyes don’t move, so it
must be what I bring to the moment when my gaze meets my little Minecraft stand-in. Comics
creator and theorist Scott McCloud claims, “when pictures are more abstracted from ‘reality,’
they require greater levels of perception, more like words” (McCloud, 1993: 49). Therefore,
although the abstracted kinetic and audiovisual aesthetic in Minecraft is simplified and relax-
ing because of its distance from reality and connection to cartoons and comics, that makes
room for greater engagement in perceptual and imaginative activity. As McCloud says when
a circle with two dots and a line are shown, they are commonly interpreted as a face; “icons
demand our participation to make them work. There is no life here except that which you
give to it” (1993, 59). We become involved in Minecraft, then, partly because its audiovisual
and kinetic aesthetic—the feel of the game—gives us room to do so. In Marshall McLuhan’s
terms, Minecraft is a cool medium, invoking our participation.
Music
As simplified and blocky as the visual, kinetic, and sound effect components of Minecraft
may be, the music is something else entirely. Daniel Rosenfeld (aka C418) composed a score
that not only doesn’t sonify the blocky look (which would have been chip tune audio from
the eight-bit era), but is counter to how most video games are scored. The result is stun-
ning. Rosenfeld used the software music sequencer and digital audio workstation Ableton
Live, Moog Voyager and Prophet 8 synthesizers, and multiple plugins to compose the music
he describes as “acoustic and orchestral” (Ramley, 2014). The minor keys encourage players
to take their time, explore, venture down, and build. Rosenfeld has described the music as
expressing loneliness, but to me it is more spacious, calm, and lightly enveloping. The layered
textures of sound parallel the environment. Rosenfeld made music that hints at an aesthetic
experience that perhaps is not fully articulated in the game until The End, but is there to be
discovered. Analogous to how the simplification and abstraction of the visuals ramp up the
player’s active perception, Rosenfeld has found that players ascribe meaning to the music
that plays when something significant happens, even though the action has not triggered
the sound.
Rosenfeld became involved with Minecraft because he, too, was part of TIGSource, and got
to know Persson online there. He recalls:
We met on irc [internet relay chat], through TIGSource. He had presented Minecraft as
a tech demo and no one seemed to think much of it. Just as much as he was a show-
off with his tech in the channel, I was a show-off with my music. He got interested
in it and after a short discussion we agreed that I would make music for Minecraft.
(Indiegames.com, 2011)
418
Figure 49.4 Graphic from Mojang, 2016.
Persson’s indie approach to development included choosing someone for the music and sound
because he liked what he did, and then let him have relatively free rein (Indiegames.com, 2011).
Celebrity
I first understood that Markus “Notch” Persson was famous, that it was possible for a game
developer to be famous, when I heard my twins and their friends talking about him. At first
I thought they were talking about a kid they knew, maybe a new Swedish student at school
who was good at Minecraft, a game we all liked. Then I heard words like “coder,” “made
Minecraft in two days,” “Fedora,” and “our Mom will install your mods.” I realized they were
talking about Notch, the creator of Minecraft. It was 2012, and they were seven years old.
Notch, the persona they knew, developed alongside Minecraft. As Notch, first he was the
developer and distributor in 2009, then the personification of Mojang in 2010. As the Minecraft
community flourished, he became well-known as the developer in gaming circles, and also
imagined as a character in fan videos and stories. At the first MineCon, when Mojang released
the official beta version of Minecraft in 2011, Persson pulled a cardboard mockup of a Minecraft
lever in the joyous and adoring company of 5,000 players. Although he handed off the lead
developer role to Jens “Jeb” Bergensten shortly after at the end of 2011, he continued to
grow as a media celebrity whose fame exceeded gamer culture at the same time that Minecraft
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pushed gaming into the mainstream media. When he announced that he was leaving Mojang
and selling his shares to Microsoft, he explained:
I’ve become a symbol. I don’t want to be a symbol, responsible for something huge
that I don’t understand, that I don’t want to work on, that keeps coming back to me.
I’m not an entrepreneur. I’m not a CEO. I’m a nerdy computer programmer who
likes to have opinions on Twitter.
(Persson, 2014)
Nevertheless, Persson’s role as symbol was his most significant contribution beyond creating
the game (surely his most momentous input). As Arnroth writes:
It is not only the game that attracts players, Markus does too. He has become the
gaming industry’s first modern superstar, an idol who makes children dream of
becoming game developers. Markus is someone who proves that developing games
can be its own form of rock and roll, with its own kind of stars, and fans for that mat-
ter. Where the majority of game developers remain anonymous, Notch has become
synonymous with one of the world’s most played games.
(Arnroth, 2013: Kindle Locations 171–175)
In his time as the key public figure of Minecraft, Persson often discussed his celebrity. In 2012,
he revealed:
Because the company kind of started from me just working on my own, I kind of
became the public face, so it’s kind of become that way almost by accident. And I do
like it because I really like talking to people and like meeting people and stuff, but what
I really identify myself as is more of actually, a programmer, not even game designer.
(Persson and Hecker, 2012)
He articulated a keen awareness of the difference between public and private selves in this
quotation in a 2012 Wired article: “Being worshipped, Persson says, ‘is a bit weird. I guess
people feel like they kind of know me. The game developer me, or the Twitter persona, that’s
Notch. It’s a censored version. The real me is Markus.’”
Celebrity in the age of social media is about accessibility. In her study of Twitter use among
electronic dance music (EDM) subculture and celebrities, scholar Anaipakos explains, “fans
form emotional attachments with celebrities and attempt to begin relationships with them and
other fans” (Anaipakos, 2012: 40). In 2012, Notch had 660,000 Twitter followers. By November
2016, he had 3.8 million. Around the time Persson was ready to sell his share of Mojang in
2014, he had experienced not only the adoration of fans, but also criticism, meanness, and hate.
Persson’s final post on “The Word of Notch” blog concludes, “This is what I want to do. I want
to do smaller games that can fail. I want to experiment and develop and think and tinker and
tweak.” (Persson, 2013). Persson has tried to put Minecraft behind him, and shows as much inter-
est in EDM and making controversial comments on Twitter as he does in gaming.
Minecraft after Persson: Jeb and Microsoft

Jens “Jeb” Bergensten has established himself as an excellent lead developer, with a knack for
redstone much appreciated by my sons and their friends, who were delighted to be guided
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through the 2015 Hour of Code by video of him. Fickle lads, they’ve forgotten their earlier
attachment to Notch and moved on. In an interview, Bergensten articulates his understanding
that Minecraft’s strength lies in its flexibility of many modes:
If you compare the core vanilla game to what you can do with mods, it looks like
we are really holding back. That’s actually the case. And the reason for that is when
we add things to Minecraft, we’re trying to partly go slowly so that people can adjust
to the changes, but we’re also trying to remember that we need to grow slowly in
all directions. So some people like Creative mode, some people like exploring, some
people like fighting, and some people like Redstone.
(Peckham, 2016)
Despite Jeb’s leadership and the continued success of Minecraft, there was a lot of fear expressed
in the Minecraft community forums and across social media about Microsoft’s purchase of
Mojang in 2014 for USD $2.5 billion (Hernandez, 2014).To be fair, before the sale, the forums
contained a considerable amount of complaining about the features that were added, that
they ruined the original Minecraft experience, or conversely, that they were not as advanced
or exciting as the mods. People have prematurely predicted Minecraft’s demise for several
years now.
As of this writing, Mojang and Minecraft have been owned by Microsoft for over two years.
So far, so good. There have not been fundamental changes to Vanilla Minecraft, and certainly
not the kind of changes some in the community dreaded. The updates have added new
features to keep all the ways people like to play in Minecraft growing, slowly, as Bergensten
said. The head of Microsoft’s Xbox division Phil Spencer expressed his understanding that
Microsoft purchased much more than a game. He said, “You don’t own Minecraft.You curate
it” (Bishop, 2015).
There have been expansions, however, in the transmedial, educational, social, and tech-
nological areas of Minecraft beyond the game/platform, such as the server hosting service
Minecraft Realms, increased attention to Minecraft.edu, the dramatic demos of Minecraft
augmented reality applications for the HoloLens, the launch of the narrative game, the con-
tinued development of the Minecraft movie by Warner Bros., and expanded licensing agree-
ments for toys, books, and other merchandise. Although Mojang is spearheading new entries
to the transmedial storytelling that continues to flourish across community-created video,
comics, fiction, poetry, maps, servers, songs, and mods, Minecraft Story Mode (Telltale Games,
2015) tells one of the stories in the Minecraft world, and so will the Minecraft movie (Warner
Bros., release date 2019). Mojang Chief Operating Officer Vu Bai explained, “We don’t want
any story that we make, whether it’s a movie or a book, to create some sort of ‘this is the
official Minecraft, this is how you play the game’ thing. That would discourage all the play-
ers who don’t play in that way,” says Bui. “When coming up with a story, we want to make
sure it is just a story within Minecraft, as opposed to the story within Minecraft” (Dredge,
2016). Mojang’s Creative Communications Director Owen Hill sees the importance of
avoiding explanations to keep the mystery of Minecraft so players can keep inventing their
own mythology. “Mojang and Telltale are quick to stress that Story Mode is not the official
story of Minecraft. It cannot be an official canon or mythology, because no such thing exists”
(Moss, 2016b). Minecraft has always been an experience based in interiority and subjectivity;
the imaginary world is one where many players’ stories happen; even as Mojang makes more
exterior, less interactive Minecraft experiences with Story Mode and the movie, it holds onto
its characteristic openness.
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For education, after a successful beta, the promising Minecraft: Education Edition was released
in eleven languages in fifty countries in November 2016, for $5 per user per year, or through
licensing models. It builds on and replaces MinecraftEdu, the version of a Minecraft server that
Mojang asked New York City school teacher Joel Levin to create in 2011; it was developed
by Aleksi Postari and Toni Paavola (Institute of Play, 2012) (Services.minecraftedu.com, n.d.).
Essentially a mod that gives teachers certain administrative privileges over the maps and stu-
dent player accounts, Education Edition is in some ways a new kind of learning management
system. It also fosters sharing pedagogical strategies and learning from other teachers; it has
sets of lesson plans available for three different age groups: 5–9, 10–13, and 14 and up. The
educational use of Minecraft has been well-received among teachers and students worldwide,
and also met with some suspicion that a game can be a learning tool.
One type of transmedial representation that Mojang has not allowed are professionally
built Minecraft maps by companies like BlockWorks hired by Disney, The Guardian, and the
Royal Institute of British Architects to promote a product, place, or movie (Moss, 2016a).
This is a smart move by Mojang, one that will prevent Minecraft from being dotted with the
boring, empty builds purchased by corporations that proliferated in the virtual world Second
Life (2003) at the height of its hype cycle, which many individuals copied in their own builds,
reinforcing a culture of consumerism and consumption that sadly prevailed as the controlling
metaphor (and business model) of that virtual world. “We want to empower our community
to make money from their creativity, but we’re not happy when the selling of an unrelated
product becomes the purpose of a Minecraft mod or server,” explained Owen Jones, Mojang’s
director of creative communications (Hill, 2016).
It will be interesting to see what directions Microsoft takes, or tries to take, with the
Minecraft imaginary world. Mark J. P. Wolf speculated that Minecraft could become part of
the Windows operating system (Wolf, 2015). I foresee an operating system assimilated into a
Minecraft-like interface, perhaps mediated with HoloLens augmented reality, with real-time
webcam-enabled facial and body animation of avatars. The so-called Minecraft Generation
might easily perceive Windows as another mod, another mode.
The “mine” in Minecraft originally refers to the act of mining, a core mechanic in Infiniminer, but
to the kids I’ve observed in person, online, and in videos, they love Minecraft because “it is mine.”
The worlds they build, the adventures they have, stories they create, games they play, friendships
they make, and social interactions they encounter are all theirs.The transformational experiences
in the Minecraft imaginary world(s) each player and all the players together have made are places
where they bridge the gaps between the actual limitations of everyday life in a physical world as
children or other individuals and the empowered agents they can be in their imaginations.Their
participation in the imaginary world is part of the process that makes the actual world “mine.”
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50
HELLO GAME’S
No Man’s Sky
Kevin Schut
Space exploration has held a special fascination for many 20th- and 21st-century dreamers,
but it’s always been a tad expensive and inconvenient. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that
a far more affordable video game that promised an infinite universe to voyage through
would generate significant hype and near-religious devotion before it went public. No Man’s
Sky launched in August 2016 to frenzied anticipation, reaching sales figures that are almost
unheard of for indie releases. Within days, the game was the focus of significant gamer back-
lash, as many players and critics decided the game had not lived up to its advance billing.
The main selling point for No Man’s Sky is the kind of imaginary world it offers to gamers:
a procedurally generated universe. Unlike most video games with sprawling playspaces, like
The Elder Scrolls or Dragon Age or Grand Theft Auto series, a procedurally generated world is not
pre-designed. Instead, the game’s programming builds the imaginary space as the gamer plays,
meaning that the world can effectively be limitless.
Although the success and quality of No Man’s Sky is currently a point of contention in the
gaming community (something that may well change for the better or worse over the com-
ing months or years), it is undoubtedly an excellent case study for considering the possible
strengths and weaknesses of imaginary worlds constructed by algorithms, rather than direct
human intention. As the art of interactive design improves and computer processing power
increases, developers will produce more and more imaginary worlds of this sort. Given the
characteristics of digital media, it is not surprising that the procedurally generated world of
No Man’s Sky has the capacity to be near-infinite and removed from direct authorial design,
but also tends to remove ambiguity and mystery from its objects and is repetitive in nature.
Backstory
Production Background
Hello Games is a small indie company founded by four game developers in 2008 (“History”,
n.d.). Their first series was the relatively simple action/arcade Joe Danger games (2010 and
2012). But in 2012, lead designer Sean Murray started working on a very different project
(Khatchadourian, 2015). The first promo trailer for No Man’s Sky, released late in 2013 and
featuring lush alien planets and exciting space combat, quickly grabbed the attention of the
gaming press and a wide range of gamers.
That first trailer also emphasizes the importance of algorithms: one of the first captions
on the screen proclaims “every atom procedural.” Because the game used algorithms to con-
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struct its imaginary world, the main development team was, from start to finish, much smaller
than for the gigantic blockbusters in the same price range; something like a dozen designers,
coders, and artists were working for Hello Games in comparison with teams of hundreds on
some titles (Khatchadourian, 2015).
By the end of 2014, No Man’s Sky was one of the most hotly anticipated titles in the
gaming world. Murray was busy giving media interviews and doing public demos at shows.
Although he left many of the details vague, gamers filled blogs and Reddit boards with
speculation about the exact nature of the game. The hype was so intense that when Hello
Games announced a several-month delay in the release of the game in the spring of 2016, the
developer received death threats from angry fans as did at least one journalist reporting on the
postponement (Schreier, 2016).
Critical Letdown
It is unsurprising, then, that the game initially failed to live up to many gamers’ expecta-
tions. The reviews of the game were generally (although not universally) somewhat tepid,
noting that gameplay became repetitive and was fairly limited. The response of the gaming
community was far more strident. Many gamers felt that the publicity lead-up to the game
had promised a great deal more than was actually on offer. One Reddit poster, for instance,
catalogued a very long list of features Murray had mentioned or featured in interviews and
demos that either clearly were not present in the finished product or appeared to be absent
(Klepek, 2016).
It remains to be seen how successful the game will be in the long term: the initial release
brought in tens of millions of dollars that should fund further development for a very long
time, and Hello Games has stated all along that it intends to continually patch and update the
game, probably at no extra charge to people who have already purchased the game (Klepek,
2016). But the frenzied expectations, whether fair or not, should be a clue that something
significant is happening with this game. While fans expected many things, the procedurally
generated nature of the imaginary world was always core to No Man’s Sky’s identity; clearly,
this game has something to tell us about what at least some fans hope for interactive fan-
tasy spaces.
Features of the Game

Procedural Generation
The concept of procedurally generated worlds is not new. This phenomenon occurs any time
a game creates levels or spaces based on programmed rules, rather than on intentional design
choices. This split dates back to the early days of computer games. The famous ADVENT
(1976) and Zork (1977) text adventure games, for instance, consisted of rooms fully designed
by the programmers. Rogue (1980), on the other hand, had computer-generated levels that
changed every time someone played it.
Today, an entire Rogue-like genre consists of games like FTL: Faster Than Light (2012) and
Rogue Legacy (2013) that feature procedurally generated spaces. Games from other genres
use the same concept, with the enormously popular Minecraft (2011) being perhaps the most
obvious example. The spaces in this pixelated building and exploration game are not gener-
ated until the player actually goes to an area.
To this point in video game history, however, procedurally generated worlds have been
deployed in somewhat limited capacities. No Man’s Sky uses algorithms to create practically
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HELLO GAME’S No Man’s Sky
every natural feature in its game world. Like FTL, the map of the galaxy’s navigable star
systems is procedurally generated. Like Minecraft, the topography of the world appears as the
player travels through it. And like Spore (2008), the animals and plants of No Man’s Sky are
computer-generated.
During development, Murray explained that the game essentially uses malleable “seeds”—
objects with base properties that can be mutated into many different forms—for each planet,
animal, and plant in the game. As the player moves into a location, the game uses complex
mathematical formulas to determine the variations on those seeds and produces apparently
unique locations and items (Tach, 2014).
Actual Gameplay
The core activity of No Man’s Sky is exploration. The player can discover star systems, planets,
alien-constructed structures, minerals, animals, and plants. These are all physical objects in
the game world that have certain properties such as the capacity for damage, material value,
mobility (or lack thereof), and, of course, physical appearance, among many other things.
Essentially, much of the game simply consists of traveling and looking at things (as well as
interacting with those things in the limited manners described below). It is also possible to
explore alien cultures—more on that below. Combat is possible in the game, whether with
robots, animals, or plants on a planet surface, or between ships in space. However, compared
to polished and detailed first-person shooters or space combat games, the combat mechanics
are fairly primitive.
The game also employs the common game mechanics of resource gathering and craft-
ing. The planets of No Man’s Sky contain a wide range of minerals that fall into a handful of
broad categories: red minerals provide energy; yellow, blue, and green minerals provide build-
ing materials; purple minerals are extremely rare substances. The player can mine these with
the laser-emitting multi-tool and store them in the finite storage spaces in the spaceship and
spacesuit. These resources are then available for repairing damaged items or crafting upgrades
for the ships, suits, or tools. The game’s crafting potential at the time of writing is nowhere
near as extensive as Minecraft, but the list of possibilities also isn’t miniscule.The game does not
have experience points or levels as a standard role-playing game might. Instead, technology
upgrades function as a kind of leveling-up mechanic. As players acquire money, they can use
it to purchase ships, suits, or multi-tools with more expansion slots.
No Man’s Sky also has three sentient races of aliens, each with their own language, attitudes,
and aesthetic styles. The player is able to slowly learn alien languages and improve or degrade
relations with these beings through dialogue interactions and a few other actions in the game.
The other area of galactic interaction is via trade at various terminals scattered across planets
and outer space. As of the time of writing, the economic system is rather rudimentary, but a
key source of money for upgrades.
Finally, the game also features a few very spare narrative elements. Players can progress in
their exploration through to the center of the galaxy, although many players who have done
this have reported that this simply restarts the game. Another quest is to follow the “Path of
the Atlas,” which involves finding mysterious locations and unlocking mysterious locations
for one of ten atlas stones. The events of the Path of the Atlas as well as certain other interac-
tions with locations and objects can trigger short chunks of narration, although these do not
typically string together to form a longer-form story.
In short, while the game allows for crafting, for combat, for diplomacy, and for narra-
tive play, it is, at heart, a game about exploration: about finding new and different locations,
objects, and living creatures, most of which are procedurally generated.
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Kevin Schut
Cultural Significance: Analogic versus Algorithmic Reality

Why the Hype? The Dream of Limitless Imaginary Worlds
So what, exactly, is the attraction? What would exploration of procedurally generated worlds
offer that might excite so many gamers? Imaginary worlds, of course, have always had a
significant cultural pull (Wolf, 2012). But in what ways do digital media change the repre-
sentation of imaginary worlds, and more specifically, how does procedural generation impact
fictional landscapes?
Theory
Media ecology theory has argued for many decades now that the character of a culture’s tools of
communication encourages certain developments and discourages others. Several scholars, for
instance, have argued that the printing press encouraged a heavily cultural emphasis on linear,
rational thought in Western Culture (McLuhan, 1962; Ong, 1982; Postman, 1985). They have
also argued that television promotes associative thinking (McLuhan, 1964; Postman, 1985),
and re-written boundaries between private and public communication (Meyrowitz, 1985).
While there are legitimate questions about media ecology’s tendency toward apolitical
technological determinism (Carey, 1998) and overgeneralization (Gitelman, 2008), many new
media scholars argue that the logic of computerized media likewise impacts communica-
tion. Lev Manovich (2001), for instance, argues that digital files have a “cultural layer”—the
part of the text that is intelligible to humans in a non-technical sense, such as a digital image
looking like a photograph—and a “computer layer”—the numerical code the computer pro-
cesses into meaningful cultural forms. He argues that the two interact and shape each other:
“cultural categories and concepts are substituted, on the level of meaning and/or language,
by new ones that derive from the computer’s ontology, epistemology, and pragmatics” (p. 47).
This isn’t necessarily a case of computers violently reshaping or brainwashing society: in Unit
Operations, Ian Bogost (2006) argues that digital representation not only influences a culture’s
perception of the world, but that it provides opportunities to critically interrogate those per-
ceptions and understandings.
So what, precisely, are the dimensions of the digital shift that are most relevant to proce-
durally created imaginary worlds? Probably the most obvious is that, as Manovich and many
others have noted, everything a computer processes is numerical. This means that although
computers may emulate other media, a song on a vinyl record and an mp3 file on a computer
are at least on one level fundamentally different things.
Pre-digital media’s representations are analog, which means they “create an analogy with
the world observed by establishing a one-to-one correspondence between” the subject of
their representation and the representation itself (Cubitt, 2006: p. 250). Because of its need to
quantify, on the other hand, digital media quantize signals into regular samples that are then
turned into numerical values. To use a common illustrative stereotype: an analog medium
would represent sound volume with a continuous, smoothly bouncing needle, whereas a
digital medium would represent sound volume as a bar graph with a set of discrete levels. As
Manovich points out, however, not all older media were completely continuous (cinema, he
points out, is composed of a set of discrete images).
Janet Murray (2012) identifies four other characteristics of digital media. First, she argues
that computers have the capacity to contain so much data that they are encyclopedic in nature—
users call on information as necessary, meaning that much of it may end up going unused.
Second, digital media are participatory, in the sense that they invite users to interact with
428
and configure representations (rather than simply watch or listen). Third, computers are
particularly good at representing navigable space.
Finally, and most importantly for an analysis of No Man’s Sky, digital media are proce-
dural, meaning they can “represent and execute conditional behaviors” (Murray, 2012: p. 51).
Algorithmic processes, argues Murray, mean that digital texts or cybertexts are flexible and
configurable: “computational artifacts exist not as fixed entities, like books or movies (even
though we may think of them that way), but as a set of easily altered bits governed by condi-
tional rules” (Murray, 2012: p. 53). Murray makes one other key observation about computer
procedures: they require abstraction: “Computer science strives to master complexity by cre-
ating abstract representations that describe elements of systems in the most general terms that
most accurately describe their most salient features” (Murray, 2012: p. 52). In other words, if an
algorithm is going to produce material over and over again, it needs to be able to generalize,
and reduce some of the true variability of the world. A horse, a snail, and an eagle all differ
from each other in countless ways, but if all the program cares about a digital object is whether
it is an animal or not, then all three belong to that category.
The other feature worth mentioning that many new media scholars talk about is emergent
behavior. According to Joris Dormans,“emergence describes the phenomenon of systems that
consist of relative simple, interacting parts, creating rich, unforeseen patterns of behavior after
being set into motion” (Dormans, 2014). Basically, any time gamers or other digital media
users start acting in unexpected ways, they are displaying emergent behavior. Theoretically,
emergent activity or culture can appear anywhere there are systems, so other media (e.g.,
board games) can foster emergence. However, due to its participatory nature, digital media—
and video games in particular—are especially well-suited to encouraging emergence.
Gaming culture is full of stories about gamers finding unexpected bugs or surprising exploi-
tations of intentionally designed rules and systems. Team Fortress 2 (2007) players learned how
to hide under the floor and shoot enemies while effectively being invisible. Destiny (2014)
players discovered a so-called “loot cave” with easily killed enemies that provided items and
experience. A few players in the brutal player-killing world of DayZ (2013) bucked the trend
of ruthless antagonism, and instead wandered around doling out healing and useful items. In
fact, No Man’s Sky has its own version of this: because each space station has above or below
market prices on random commodities, it’s possible to rack up limitless amounts of credits in
a relatively short space of time by hanging out at a space station and continually buying list-
price goods from incoming ships and then selling them on the station terminal for inflated
prices. The list is endless, because gamers can always hijack and repurpose interactive systems.
In short, digital media’s imaginary worlds are numerical, procedural, and, if set up the right
way, are likely to produce emergent behavior.
The Attractions
So what does this mean for the imaginary worlds produced by the procedural generation of
No Man’s Sky? Is it possible to explain the apparent fervor for this game before it came out?
There are many possible answers to these questions, but there are a few points that jump out.
For one thing, procedural generation offers something new in comparison to older media:
functionally limitless imaginary worlds. Literary worlds need a wordsmith, cinematic worlds
need a film production house, and comic books worlds need writers and artists. (It’s also
worth mentioning that most video games still need a host of artists and technicians to digitally
construct the environments of a game.) Absent those authorial figures, the imaginary world
does not exist. And, of course, those authors have limits of time, energy, and creativity.
429
Kevin Schut
But due to procedural generation, software can continue to produce something indefinitely
given the appropriate hardware resources. The physical universe is functionally infinite, and
with the proper setup, so is a procedurally generated universe. No Man’s Sky’s widely repeated
promotional boast of 18 quintillion possible planets (each of them unique) clearly requires a
space so large that even a large body of players will never reach the end of them. Middle-earth
or Westeros may be parts of imaginary worlds that are conceptually as limitless as the physical
universe, but the parts that do not appear in writing or film essentially don’t exist—therefore,
they have effective boundaries. This is not true of No Man’s Sky.
Again, though, not only is the universe infinite, but no human directly authors it. Because
they set the algorithmic parameters, the creators of the game might know better than the
gamer what kind of creature cannot appear on a new planet and what is most likely to appear,
but they do not know for certain what flora and fauna will exist there. Every visit to a new
planet conjures never-seen-before topography and living organisms. It is worth repeating that
this is simply not true of just about any other imaginary world that doesn’t also use proce-
dural generation.
What this all means is that No Man’s Sky’s procedurally generated world has a unique power
to conjure the feeling of a real, tangible world. Tolkien’s creations benefited from his ency-
clopedic appendices and narrative pattern of rather long digressions into description that was
not strictly necessary for forwarding the plot of his stories. As media scholar Henry Jenkins
argues, Tolkien was engaging in “spatial storytelling,” which Jenkins argues video games are
much better suited to do than books (Jenkins, 2004). But in standard video games, a player
can see and sense the handiwork of artists.This may, of course, bring a kind of aesthetic pleas-
ure: readers, gamers, and viewers alike can and do appreciate well-done crafting of imaginary
worlds. But this can definitely contribute to a conscious knowledge that the reality of the
fictional world rests on the conjuring power of the author. Not so with a procedurally gener-
ated world. Once the clockmaker-god programmer of the game sets up the creation, it runs
and seemingly exists without humanly divine intention.
This is not to say that a feeling of realism is necessarily a player’s goal when playing a game.
Rather, that sense of realness may instead function as a precondition for successful enjoyment,
allowing players to truly suspend disbelief and immerse themselves in the imaginary world.
The Pitfalls of Procedural Generation

If the automation of the algorithm allows for an imaginary world that is limitless and appar-
ently independent of direct authorial involvement, however, that same procedurality can strip
the imaginary world of the kind of mystery and organic realism of analog and purposely
designed spaces and places. Specifically, the traceable causality of procedurally generated
imaginary worlds, and the repetitive visible patterns there due to the presence of templates
work against a certain kind of realism that promotes immersive involvement.
All elements in a procedural reality are limited by the parameters of its algorithms. For
instance, if a game has a combat system where combatants’ capacity to take damage is indi-
cated by hit points, then all combatants must have hit points, and the value of that variable will
determine how slowly or quickly a fight participant dies.This is such a well-understood truth
of gaming that it might seem pointless to mention. However, this highly defined nature of
video game objects means that theoretically everything that happens in gameplay is traceable
and explainable. Why do the flying robot sentinels attack a player in No Man’s Sky? Because
the player mined too much or harmed the flora and/or fauna. That behavior is part of the
game’s programming.
430
This effectively removes mystery from the game. The unknown is a fundamental part of
everyday existence, and it is certainly a part of non-digital imaginary worlds. Tolkien never
explains how Gandalf ’s magic works—but a video game would need to know the exact
function of it all (Schut, 2014). It is true that games typically mask their mechanics. The
player never sees the exact instructions of the procedures that create the plants, animals,
and topography in No Man’s Sky. So it is possible to argue that there is functionally some
mystery, even though the program contains all the relevant information about the game’s
world. However, it is quite possible to work out the general parameters of objects in the
game through trial and error. And perhaps more importantly, a community of gamers can
very rapidly collate quite detailed data about a game world at a site like The No Man’s Sky
Wiki (http://nomanssky.gamepedia.com/No_Man’s_Sky_Wiki). In other words, while the
handiwork of an authorial presence may be absent in a procedurally generated imaginary
world, it is quite possible to reverse engineer the handiwork of the clockmaker behind
the game.
A second feature that is common to procedurally generated worlds—and definitely evident
in No Man’s Sky—is their repetitive nature. Minecraft’s world is a good example of this. The
game has something like a half dozen main categories of biomes, with numerous subtypes,
providing a fair amount of variation in landscape, vegetation, and animals as the player travels
through a world that appears on the spot. But inevitably, the trees start to look the same, the
animals look the same, the hills look the same.
No Man’s Sky, for all its promise and undoubted complexity, is the same way. Initially, the
planets seem new, exciting, and unfamiliar territory. But after traveling light years to another
star system, it can be a bit of a surprise how similar the topography is, how predators seem to
share similar body types, and how many bracket fungi across the universe seem to look the
same. To very loosely borrow from Henry Ford’s observation regarding the Model T (the car
can come “in any color … as long as it is black”), space explorers can have any planet they
want, as long as its mountains and valleys fall within predictable parameters. It’s true that some
planets are colder than others, that some have lusher vegetation than others, and that the level
of toxic radiation varies. But on the whole, things start to look remarkably similar after a fairly
short time of exploration.
This is perhaps unsurprising, given an algorithm’s need for abstraction and quantification.
The machine of the program can churn a great deal of material out, but only according to
a limited set of instructions. A digital object needs to be repeatable, or it is unusable for a
computer. Nevertheless, such repetition is even worse for fostering a sense of realism. Planet
Earth contains a shocking variety of terrains, creatures, and plants, not to mention cultures
and languages. The imaginary worlds of books, films, television, and comic books cannot, by
necessity, be as extensive and varied as the physical universe, but at the moment, at least, these
older media have a greater capacity for variability than video games that build their worlds
with algorithms.
There are two factors that may, in the long run, adjust these factors that potentially
damage the immersion in a procedurally generated imaginary world. First, the steadily
increasing power of computers and software may eventually allow developers to create
algorithms of such complexity and variability that gamers won’t really be able to detect pat-
terns. Second, the promise of emergent behavior may also lead apparently predictable game
experiences in unanticipated directions. This would probably be due to interaction with
other players, but it is possible that eventually artificial intelligence will be able to learn
to create and alter algorithms in such a way that procedures start generating completely
unexpected results.
431
Kevin Schut
Conclusion
It is possible that No Man’s Sky will go on to be a major, long-running commercial success,
and it is also possible that it is doomed to the historical junk-pile of games that overpromised
and underdelivered. The procedurally generated imaginary world, however, is unlikely to go
away. So in that sense at least, the key features of the vast imaginary universe of No Man’s
Sky—its nearly limitless size, its apparent independence of direct human authorship, its map-
pable workings, and its repetitive patterns—are worth noting as signs of things to come.
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432
Index
Abbarach 173 The Archers 70

Abbott, E.A. 5–6 Arda: and Middle-Earth 377–8; as the Primary
Abduction (Cook) 168 World 6; see also Middle-Earth
Abrams, J.J. 222, 227, 229, 279, 391 Argonath 380
absolutes 130 Arianus 173
adaptations 50, 135–6, 144, 214, 218, 275, 287, Aristophanes 282–4
309–12, 354, 362–4, 367; see also transmedia Aristotle 258
Addison, Joseph 332–333 Arktos:The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and
Aeneid (Virgil) 212 Nazi Survival (Godwin) 166
afterlife 119, 161 Arrakis 30, 33, 53–4, 68, 169–71
Ainur 379 art-langs 22, 24–7
Alex Rogan 52 The Art of Language Invention (Peterson) 27
Alexander, L. A. 14–15, 262 Artaud, Antonin 192
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll) 57, 360 Arthur Dent 171
allohistorical conceit (AC) 184–5, 187–8 artifacts 30; and maps 103–4
alternate histories 184–6, 189–91 Aslan 51, 53
alternate reality games 201 Astruc, Alexandre 216
alternate worlds 91, 184, 232, 389–90 At the Earth’s Core (Burroughs) 165
Amadu, Jorges 117 Athens 154, 282–4
Amazing Stories (Palmer) 166 Atlantis 5, 141–2, 149, 154–5, 163, 178, 341
America: and Islandia 372; and Oz 359–61, 367 Atlas of Fantasy (Post) 3
American Graffiti 394–5 Atlas Shrugged (Rand) 190
Anakin Skywalker 46, 55 Atwood, Margaret 404
Anarres 169–70 Aulë 379
The Anatomy of Satire (Highet) 285 Auster, Paul 181
Ancient Greece 282–4, 287 authorship 336–8, 405, 431; auteur theory 216–17;
the Ancients 57–8 and canonicity 237, 239–44; Star Trek 240–3;
Angenot, Marc 352 Star Wars 397; theories of 217
Animal Farm (Orwell) 286 auxiliary languages 23–4
Animalic 22 Avatar (2009) 26, 30, 171–2
annals 110 avatars 71, 119, 144, 148, 193–5, 200, 265–7, 325,
Antarctica 161–2, 345–6 403, 407
anthropology 14, 260–4 Axel 163
Aragorn 40, 54, 112, 118, 128 Azeroth 404
Archer 289 Azimov, Isaac 128, 188
433
Index
Babylon 5 32 Brave New World (Huxley) 181

Back to The Future 389 Breaking Bad 263
backstory 37–8, 41, 53, 333 Breda 99
Bacon, Francis 154 Bretonne, Restif de la 354
Bai,Vu 421 Bring the Jubilee (Ward) 185
Baker, Deiredre 100 Brobdingnag 333–5
Bakhtin, Mikhail 12, 258, 271, 284 Broderick, Damien 192
Balfe, Myles 100 Bronies 139
Ballard, Kim 144 Brontë family 21
Banet-Weiser, Sarah 311 Brooker, Wil 200
The Bard’s Tale 55 Brooks, Terry 4, 214
Barfield, Owen 378–9 Buffy the Vampire Slayer 238–9, 244, 263
Barthes, Roland 84–5, 391 Building Imaginary Worlds (Wolf) 3, 100
Batman 39, 54, 70, 117, 120, 226–7, 229 Bulgakov, Mikhail 117
Battlestar Galactica 244, 309 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward 24
Baum, L. Frank 6, 70, 101–2, 200, 359–67 Bunzl, Martin 185
Baxter, Stephen 167 Burgess, Anthony 25
Bazin, Andre 216 Burke, Edmund 349, 370
The Beach 159 Burke, Kenneth 249–50
Bean, Sean 94 Burroughs, Edgar Rice 165, 200–1
Bell, Catharine 12 butterfly effect 187
Beowulf 212
Beren 45 Caesar’s Column (Donnelly) 181
Bergensten, Jens “Jeb” 420–1 Caine 94
Bergerac, Cyrano de 354 Campbell, Joseph 11–13, 15, 262
Beszel 9 Candide (Voltaire) 162
betrayals, and savior figures 53 canonicity 218, 228, 236–9, 405; Minecraft 421; and
Bilbo Baggins 382 Star Trek 240–3; transmedia 240–4; and The
Binder, Steve 398 X-Files 236, 237, 244
Bioshock 71, 190–1 Canticle for Liebowitz, A (Miller) 181
Black Speech 25, 380 capitalism 307–12, 348–9, 354
Blade Runner 5 Captain Marvel 202–3
The Blazing-World (Cavendish) 179, 213, 325–30 Cardin 99
The Blithedale Romance (Hawthorne) 178 Cardinal Morton 318, 321
Blizzard 148 Carroll, Lewis 98
The Blood of Angels (Sinsalo) 180 Cartographies of Time (Rosenberg and Grafton) 109
Bobba Fett 398 cartography 99; see also maps
Bogost, Ian 428 Casanova, Giovanni Giacomo 164
BoJack 288 Casid, Jill 156
Bolf 99 Cavendish, Margaret 325–6, 329–30
Book of Legendary Lands (Eco) 3 caverns 162–3, 167
Book of Lost Tales (Tolkien) 378, 381–2 Cersei Lannister 91
Book of the Long Sun (Wolfe) 128 Chee, Leland 399
Booth, Paul 278 Chelestra 173
Borderland (Windling) 8 Chesterton, G. K. 212–13
borders 7–9 Chewbacca 398
Borg 386 children 21, 141, 291
Borges, Jorge Luis 98, 117 “The Chosen One” 52–3, 55
Boromir 53 chronicles 110–11
Botticelli, Sandro 100 chronologies 112
boundaries, compared with borders 7 chthonic figures 117–18
Bowery, Jim 193 Chung, Anshe 402
“A Boy and His Dog” (Ellison) 167 Churchill, Winston 185
Brackin, Adam L. 413 Cinderella 400
Bradbury, Ray 122 Circe 154
Brampton 99 Cirth 380
Brau, Edgar 338 The City and the City (Miéville) 9
434
Index
City of Saints and Madmen (Vandermeer) 86 cultures 30, 33–5, 68–9, 115; see also
Civilization 189 invented cultures
Clark, Arthur C. 122 Curry, Patrick 143
Clark, Brian 202
Clarke, Thurston 159 Dallas 232–3
A Clockwork Orange (Burgess) 25 Dante 5, 8, 100–1, 155, 161
Club Neverdie 195 Dara 3
Clute, John 8–9, 56, 104, 108, 111 Dark Tower (King) 61–2
codes 265–6 Darth Vader 50, 55, 400
Cold War 25, 248–9, 253, 287 Data 389
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 21, 248, 345, 370 Davy Crockett 397
Colley, Steve 193 Day, Amber 286–7
Collins, Suzanne 9, 303–4 DAZ Studio 195
colonialism 157–8, 286–7, 348–9, 370 DC Comics 49, 70, 224, 225, 226–9, 231, 233
comics 31–2, 70, 200, 226, 397–8; see also DC Dead Island 159
Comics; Marvel Comics Universe Dead Marshes 381
The Coming Rac (Bulwer-Lytton) 24, 163 death 12–13, 16, 118
Commedia (Dante) 5, 155 Death Gate Cycle (Weis and Hickman) 173
completeness 71–2, 82–4, 86, 88, 405–6, 417; Death Star 53, 396
see also incompleteness DeFino, Dean J. 311
complexity 169 Defontenay, Charlemagne Ischir 351–2
computer animation 70 Delvoye, Wim 99
computer games 26–7, 147–8, 158, 189–91, 193–4, Dena, Christy 202
396; see also Minecraft; MMORPGs; video Denslow, Wallace 70, 359–60
games Dewey, John 128
Conducttr 201 Dick, Philip K. 5, 34, 122, 167, 196, 266
Connery, Sean 93–4 dictionaries, for imaginary locations 3
consistency 72, 88, 90, 92–3, 95, 97; see also Dictionary of Imaginary Places (Manguel and
inconsistency Guadalupi) 3
Construct 302 Dictionary of Science Fiction Places (Stableford) 3
continuity 227–8 Dido, Dan 224
Cook, Robin 168 Die Wand (Haushofer) see The Wall (Haushofer)
Coon, Gene 387–8 Discworld 104, 173–4
Cooper, Martin 137 The Disposessed (Le Guin) 43, 169–70
The Coral Island (Ballantyne) 157 District 9 96, 201–2
Corrupted Blood pandemic 105 Doctor Who 188, 230, 232
Cortazar, Julio 117 Doložel, Lubomír 8, 72, 83–6, 240, 337–8
cosplay 26, 139, 203, 390 Don Quixote (Cervantes Saavedra) 286
Costello, Matthew J. 137 Donnelly, Ingnatius 181
Coulson, Steve 199, 201 Doom 415–16
“Counterfactual History: A User’s Guide” Dormans, Joris 429
(Bunzl) 185 Dorothy 360
counterfactual thinking 185–6 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 117
Country of Houyhnhnms 23, Dothraki 24, 27
285, 332–4 double consciousness 371–2
Cranford (Gaskell) 179 Douglas, Mary 12
Cranny-Francis, Anne 390 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan 8, 79, 101, 163, 231,
Craven, David 248 239–40, 274–5
Crawford, Chris 144 Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick) 287
creation 132–3, 251 Dragon Con 291
creative literature 250, 251 dreams 196–7, 251, 257, 360
creativity and paracosms 291–6 Driver, Tom F. 12
creepers 416–17 Dumbledore 88
Crisis on Infinite Earths 226–7 Duncan, Glenn 86
Cronenberg, David 196 Dune (Herbert) 4, 52, 170–1, 214, 250
crossovers 187, 277–8, 389 Dungeons & Dragons (Gygax and Arneson) 88, 214
Cthulhu Mythos 113 Dunsany, Lord 117, 212–13
435
Index
Durkheim, Emile 14 fan theories 87, 94, 220

dystopias 32, 167–8, 177, 180–2, 256, 287, 385–6; fan-works 34, 90, 102–3, 113, 138, 203, 218, 276–9
see also utopias fanboy auteurs 222
fandom 138–9, 202–3, 220–2, 228, 232–3, 244,
E.T.The Extraterrestrial 263 274–5, 291; Game of Thrones 311–12; Minecraft
early satires 281–4 415; Sherlock Holmes 239–40; Star Trek 242–3,
Earthsea 174 275, 278–80, 385, 387, 389–91; Star Wars 230,
Eco, Umberto 3, 92 243, 399
ectopias 180 fanfiction.net 139
Edmund Pevensie 53 Fantastic Realism 80, 117, 257, 259
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Marx) fantastical capitalism 309
41 fantastika 111–12
Ekgurie 99 Fantasy Island 158–9
Ekman, Stefan 7–8 fantasy play, compared to paracosms 291–2, 296
Elastic 102–3 Far Cry III 159
Elder Scrolls 55 Fara, Patricia 341
11/22/63 (King) 188 Farewell, Fantastic Venus (Aldiss and Harrison) 169
11 Rue Simon-Crubellier 47 Farscape:The Peacekeeper Wars 59
Eliot, T. S. 246 fate and mythology 117
Ellison, Harlan 167 feminism 179, 305, 329–30, 390
Elrond 378 Ferguson, Niall 185
Elves 379 Fifty Shades of Grey (James) 139
Emerald City 359–60, 362 films 70, 84, 135, 216–19; Jupiter Ascending 3, 32,
The Emerald City 365 94–5
emergent behavior 429, 431 Final Fantasy (video game) 93
Emerson, Willis George 165 Firefly 4
Emma Swan 52 Fisher, Mark 308
The Enchanted Forest 46 Flammarion, Camille 357
Encyclopédie de l’utopie, des voyages extraordinaires et The Flash 226–7
de la science-fiction (Versins) 3, 352 Flash Gordon 31–2
The End of Eternity (Azimov) 188 Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Abbott)
Endor 169 5–6, 79
England, civil wars 325–6 Flieger,Verlyn 382
The Enlightenment 23 Flusser,Vilém 109–10
Entropia Universe 195, 404 Foigny, G. 23
Ents 381 Ford, Sam 139
epigraphs, use of 355 Formalism 211, 258–9
Erewhon (Butler) 32, 285–6 forwards pragmatism 128–9
escape 251 Foster, Alan Dean 397
escapists 246–50, 251, 253, 373 Foucault, Michel 217
Esperanto 24 Fourier, Charles 353
ethos 137–8 Fourlands 85, 88–9
Euripides 121, 283–4 framing devices 5–6, 188, 196–7, 347
EVE Online 4, 194 Frazer, Sir James 14
EverQuest 300 Freedman, Carl 43
evil 132–3 Freedom (Franzen) 74–5
existentialism 117 Fremen 35
eXistenZ (Cronenberg) 196 Fullerton, Tracy 415
expectations 92–3 Functionalism 261–2
experiments, in virtual worlds 300–4 Futurama 172–4
extensions, of narrative fabric 46, 396
Gaiman, Neil 98
fairy tales 78, 80, 92, 112, 209–11, 213, 252 Galadriel 378
The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays (Baum) 102 Gallagher, Catherine 329
fan fiction 34, 87, 90, 203, 220, 277–8, 296, 309, game designing 301–3, 414–18
322, 359, 389–91 Game of Thrones (HBO) 27, 91, 105, 263, 306, 309
fan films 278–79 GameSpot 219–20
436
Index
Gandalf 88, 378, 380 Guadalupi, Gianni 3

Garcia Marquez, Gabriel 117 guides/narrators 87–8
Garden of Eden 100, 156, 165–6 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift) 5, 23, 31, 99, 157, 285, 305,
Gaskell, Elizabeth 179 332–8, 344
Gautier, Théophile 355–6 Gwynne, Owain 276
gawreys 162, 346–9
geeks 295–6 Halley, Edmund 164, 341
gender, and The Blazing-World 329–30 Han Solo 397
Genette, Gerard 103 The Handmaid’s Tale (Atwood) 404
genre labels 7, 67–8, 75, 81, 353 Hard to Be A God (Strugatsky) 122, 258
genres 257–64, 269–71; pathfinding/patterns Hardt, Michael 308
264–7; and social codes 262–4, 272; theories of Harry Potter 79, 91, 216, 218, 275
256, 260–4; world-building with 265–6 Harry Potter 91
Geoffrey of Monmouth 212 Harry Potter Lexicon 220
German expressionism 120–1, 191 Harvey, Colin B. 138
Gerrold, David 58–9, 241 Harvey, P. D. A. 98
Gethen 169–70 Hassler-Forest, D. 202
Gilead 404 hate, concept of 128–9
Giles, Peter 23, 101 Hauser, Helen 387
Gilligan’s Island 158–9 Hawaii 347
Gillis, John 155 Hawthorn, Geoffrey 185
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 179 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 178–9
The Giver (Lowry) 9 HBO effect 311; see also Game of Thrones (HBO)
Glubbdubdrib 23 Hecuba 121
glumms 162, 346–9 Hegel’s laws 13
Goa’uld 60 Hello Games 425
The Godfather (Puzo) 47 Hemion, Dwight 398
The Godfather (computer game) 49 Here Be Dragons: Exploring Fantasy Maps and
Godwin, Joscelyn 166 Settings (Ekman) 100
Gogol, Nikolai 117 Here (McQuire) 47–8
Gographies imaginaire du quelques inventeur de mondes Herland (Gilman) 179
au XXe sicle: Gracq, Borges, Michaux,Tolkien Heroine’s Journey 13
(Jourde) 100 “The Hero’s Journey” (THJ) 11, 13, 15–17
gold farming 195 Heston, Charlton 172
Goldberg, Daniel 148 Hickman, Tracy 173
The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion High Valyrian 27
(Frazer) 14 Highet, Gilbert 285–6
Gondolin 380 Hill, Owen 421
Gondor 380 Hills, Matt 307
good 132–3 His Dark Materials (Pullman) 128
Gormenghast (Peake) 41, 214 historical data analysis 299
Gould, Roger 12 historical determinism 41–2
government 318–20, 326, 328–9, 346, 361, 363 historical fiction 76, 80
Grafton, Anthony 109–10 Historical Roots of Fairytale (Propp) 14
Grainville, Cousin de 354 history 42–3, 107–11
Grant, John 108 History of Cartography 98
Gravity 84 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Adams) 171, 174
Gray, Jonathan 200–2, 217 The Hobbit (Tolkien) 70, 102, 104, 209, 214, 231,
Great Glass Town 21 275, 377, 379–82
Greater Dulwich 374 hobbits 51, 74, 77, 214, 308, 378–9
Greedo 397 Hodges, Mike 32
Green, Joshua 139 Holbein, Ambrosius 101
Griffin, Dustin 281 Holberg, Ludvig 161, 339, 341–3
Griffith, Mary 178–9 Hollow Earth (Rucker) 168
Grimes, Ronald 12 hollow earth worlds 163–7, 340–3, 345
Grumley, John E. 42 holodecks 196, 388–9, 408
Grundtvig, N. F. S. 212–13 Holstun, James 323
437
Index
horror 56, 61, 86 Jameson, Fredric 42, 307

Hoth 169 Jant 41
Houyhnhnms 23, 285, 332–6, 339 Jar Jar Binks 399
Howell, William Dean 179 Jay, Martin 42
“human culture” 32–3 Jedi census phenomenon 34
humanism and humanist equipment 317–23 Jenkins, Henry 135–6, 139, 198–9, 203, 220, 222,
Hume, David 142 390, 430
Hunger Games (Collins) 9, 303–4 Joe Danger 425
HungerCraft 303–4 John Crichton 59
Hunt, Leigh 345–6 John Lang 33, 370–1
Huxley, Aldous 120, 181 Johns, Geoff 224
Johnson, Derek 217, 220–1, 276
id Software 415–16 Johnson, Mark 35
If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg Jones, Diana Wynne 99
(Churchill) 185 Jourde, Pierre 100
Iger, Robert 400 The Judas Mandala 192
The Iliad (Homer) 39, 119, 121 Jupiter 94
illustrations 70, 101, 103, 347, 360, 380 Jupiter Ascending 3, 32, 94–5
Ilúvatar 379 Jurassic Park 159
imaginary worlds 127–9, 141, 257, 269–70, 291–2, Just Cause II 159
298, 416, 425–7, 429–32; Islandia 371–3 Juvenalian satire 281–2
imagination 370, 374
immediation 127, 130 Kafka, Franz 117
immersive fantasies 40, 87–8 Kafton-Minkel, Walter 165–6
impossible worlds 91 Kalevala 381
In the Country of Last Things (Auster) 181 Kattau, Colleen 248
In the Labyrinth (Robbe-Grillet) 79, 80 Kaveney, Roz 8
Inception 196–7 Keillor, Garrison 70
incompleteness 84; see also completeness Kenny 92
inconsistencies: intentional 91–2; Jupiter Ascending Kinder, Marsha 134
94–5 King Arthur 52
“Incredible Geographies? Orientalism and Genre King, Martin Luther 387
Fantasy” (Balfe) 100 King, Stephen 61
Infinite Jest (Wallace) 287 The Kingkiller Chronicle (Rothfuss) 7
initiation rituals 11, 13, 18 Kira Neys 389
intellectual property 71, 134, 138–9, 275, 277–9, Kircher, Athanasius 161, 163, 341
306, 399–400, 404, 415–16; see also transmedia Kitchin, Rob 100
interactivity 71, 144–5, 198–9, 201–2, 271 Klastrup, Lisbeth 136–8
interquels 46 Klein, Melanie 248
intraqels 46–7 Klingon 26, 33–4
invented cultures 30–4, 43 Klingon Language Institute 33–4
Inventing Imaginary Worlds (Roots-Bernstein) 295 Kneale, James 100
invention 71 Knight, Charles 281
Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient Knox, Ronald A. 239–40
and Modern Science and Theology (Blavatsky) 166 Krauss, Lawrence 391
Islandia (Wright) 33, 369–76 Krieger, Murray 247
islands 153–8 Kurtz, Gary 398
islomania 157–8
Isrich of Tasbar 357 La Vie, les Aventures et le Voyage de Groenland du
Réverend Père Cordelier Pierre de Mésange (Patot)
Jabba the Hutt 397 161–2, 166
“Jaberwocky” (Carroll) 80 Lake Wobegon 70
Jackson, Rosemary 249 Lamb, Charles 345
Jaime Lannister 91 Lamkis ou les voyages extraordinaires (Mouhy) 162
James Bond 93–4 The Lands of Ice and Fire (Martin and Roberts) 103
James T. Kirk 388, 390–1 Lane, Mary 164–5, 179
James, William 128 Language Construction Kit (Rosenfelder) 27
438
Index
Language Creation Society 27 Lucian of Samosata 57, 213, 285, 328, 352
language invention 21–3, 26–7, 347, 370; Tolkien Luggnagg 334
and 21–2, 24–5, 380 Lukács, Georg 42, 111–12
Languages of Pao (Vance) 25–6 Luke Skywalker 40, 55, 398
Lanier, Jaron 192, 194
Laputa 333 Mac, Kurt J. 417
Larsson, Linus 148 MacCallum-Stewart, Esther 413
Last and First Men (Stapledon) 108, 112–13 McCloud, Scott 418
The Last Werewolf (Duncan) 86 MacDonald, George 381
Latour, Bruno 317 McDonald, Paul 216–17
Laurier, Sir Wilfrid 385 McDonald, Rodney 165
Lawler, Steph 249 “The Machine Stops” (Forster) 167, 195–6
Lazenby, George 93–4 McLuhan, Marshall 109–10
Le Guin, Ursula K. 22, 43, 174, 253 Makar 22
Leavis, F. R. 252 Malinowski, Bronislaw 14
Lebiniz, G. 90 Malkin, Benjamin Heath 21
Leckie, Anne 3 Malkin, Thomas William 21
Left Hand of Darkness (Le Guin) 169–70 Man in The High Castle (Dick) 5, 90–1, 105
LEGO 50, 145–8, 410; see also Minecraft Manchen, Arthur 22
Lemaître, Joseph Édouard 209 Manetti, Antonio 100
Lemuel Gulliver 333–8 Manguel, Alberto 3
Leskiw, Adrian 99 Mappa Geographiae Naturalis (Seuter) 3
Levi-Strauss, Claude 12, 116, 262 mappa mundi 98
Levitas, R. 182 “Mapping Imaginary Worlds” (Padrón) 100
Levy-Bruhl, Lucien 12, 116, 262 maps 3, 68, 98–102, 104–5, 144; Gulliver’s Travels
Lewis, C. S. 131–2, 247, 252–3, 291 333; of Oz 361, 366; Tolkien’s 378; see also
lexica 214 cartography
Lidenbrock 163 Marchand, Jean José 352–3
Life: A User’s Manual (Perec) 47 marketing 200–202; see also merchandising
The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (Paltock) 31, Mars 168, 174
52, 162, 166, 344–50 Martin, George R. R. 27, 309, 312
Lilliput 23, 333–4 Marvel Cinematic Universe 4, 243
Lilly Potter 91 Marvel Comics 397–8, 400
Linden Labs 194–5, 402–8 Marvel Comics Universe 49, 70, 187, 226–7,
lines, and history 109–10 231–3
Lippincott, Charlie 397 Marx, Karl 41–3, 247–9, 252, 259
Little Nemo in Slumberland (McCay) 70, 196 Marxism and criticsm 247–9, 308
Little Wolf of the Woods 122 Más a Tierra 156–7
Liu, Ken 3 The Master and Margarita (Bulgakov) 117
logic 79–80 material determinism 41–2
London, Jack 179 Mather, Cotton 164
Looking Backward (Bellamy) 177–8 The Matrix 51–3, 55, 86, 167, 196
Lord of the Flies (Golding) 158 A Maze of Death (Dick) 196
Lord of the Rings Online 27, 102, 149, 403 Maze War (Colley) 193
The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien) 8, 48, 74, 112, 212, Mead, Margaret 12
214, 310, 378 Medea 123–4
Lord Sepulchrave 41 media ecology theory 428–9
Lost 90, 159, 263 Media Studies 141
Lost Horizon (Hilton) 8 Medieval Europe 287
Lost in Space: Geographies of Science Fiction (Kitchin medievalism 104, 379–80
and Kneale) 100 The Memoirs of Planetes, or a Sketch of the Laws and
The Lost World (Doyle) 8 Manners of Makar (Northmore) 22
lost worlds 163 Mendlesohn, Farah 40, 43, 56, 58, 60, 87
Lothlórien 8 Menippus 285
Lovecraft, H. P. 22, 96, 113, 196 merchandising 30, 34, 137, 139, 200–1, 203, 359,
Lowry, Lois 9 397, 421
Lucas, George 16, 239, 394–5, 400 Mercier, Louis-Sébastien 353
439
Index
Metamorphoses (Apuleius) 118 narrative fabrics 45, 47–8

Michael Corleone 47, 49 The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
Microsoft 421–2 (Poe) 162, 178
Middle Ages 22–3, 75 narrative threads, defined 45
Middle-Earth 6, 8, 24–5, 40, 45, 77, 102, 104, 118, narrators/guides 87–8
128, 143–4, 250, 309–10 naturalism, compared with imagination 38
midquels 46, 49 naturalistic fiction 39–40, 85
Miéville, China 9, 249 Nazar 339–43
MINDSTORMS 145; see also LEGO Ned Stark 310
Minecraft 146, 148–9, 303–4, 407, 410, 411, Negri, Antonio 308
412–18, 419, 420–2, 431; see also LEGO neo-mythologies 119, 121
Minority Report 34 Neuville, Alphonse de 103
mirror universes 58, 227 Neverland 158, 360
Miyazaki, Hayao 122, 125 Neverwinter Nights 148
Mizora (Lane) 164–5 New Atlantis (Bacon) 154, 328
MMORPGs 102, 194, 214, 403, 406; see also New York City 4–5
computer games; video games Nichols, Nichelle 387, 391
Modernism 211, 247–8, 250, 260, 271 Nicolai Klimii iter subterraneum (Holberg) 161,
Modesto, California 395 339–43
Moffat, Steve 279 Niels Klim 51, 54, 163–4, 339–43
Mojang AB 412–13, 419 Nimoy, Leonard 385
Molyneux, Peter 411 Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell) 130, 181, 305, 385
Montgomery, David C. 363 No Man’s Sky 3, 84, 425–32
Monthly Review 344 Nolan, Christopher 229
Moore, Alan 5 non-fiction 80; ontological conditions 74–5
Moore, Ronald D. 241 Normnbdsgrsutt 52, 345
Moore, Ward 185 Norstein,Yuri 122
More, Sir Thomas 5, 23, 31, 128, 178, 322–3 North Pole 161–2
Morlocks 166–7 Notch 412, 419–20
Morphology of the Folktale (Propp) 14 novels and genres 271
Morris, William 6 Nowhere in America (Rammel) 287
Mosquera, Gerardo 248 Númenor 378, 382
Mouhy, Charles de Fieux 162
Moving the Mountain (Gilman) 179 Obi-wan Kenobi 40, 46, 88, 103
Muir, John 184 Obruchev,Vladimir 163
Müller, Max 24 O’Donnell, Casey 220
multiverses 226–7 The Odyssey (Homer) 11, 38, 118, 135, 154, 212,
Munchkin Country 361, 366 286
Mundus Subterraneus (Kircher) 161, 163–4, 341 Ogden, C. K. 25
Murray, Janet 428–9 Okrand, Mark 22, 26
Murray, Sean 425–7 “On Fairy-Stories” (Tolkien) 132, 142, 209–12,
MUVEs 403 252, 369–70, 381
My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic 139 Once Upon a Time (TV) 46, 52, 57
Myst 26, 159, 407 ontology 74–9, 80, 192–3, 308–9, 402–3, 416–17
myth-criticism 13–14 orcs 74, 77, 214, 379
mythemes 115–16 Organization for Transformative Works 276
mythologemes 118, 122–4 origin myths 117
mythology 115, 119–25, 212–13, 377–8, 382 origin stories 39
mythopoea 125 Orlando Furioso (Ariosto) 80
mythos 137–8 Orwell, George 25, 130, 182, 257, 286
myths 14, 115, 117–19, 123–5, 156, 257, 262 overlaid worlds 4
OVSWs 403
Nadsat 25 Oz (Baum) 6, 52, 101–2, 135, 137, 200, 218, 359,
Naffarin 24 360, 361–5, 366, 367
The Name of the Rose (Eco) 188
Nancy Drew 49 Padrón, Ricardo 5
Narnia 48, 58–9 Paku 26
440
Index
Palmer, Ray 166 portals 57–8, 389

Paltock, Robert 31, 344 Post, J. B. 3, 99–100
Paludan, J. 341 postapoctalyptic fiction 180–1
paraconciliar exchanges 321–2 a postiori languages 25–6
Paracoma 196 Poststructuralism 261–2
paracosmists 295–6 Pottermore 218, 220–1, 275
paracosms 21–2, 291–5 Potu 342
parallel universes 78, 227–8, 232 power 131
paraquels 46, 47 pragmatism 127–31
paratextual materials 7, 22, 86, 103–4, 276, 322, Pratchett, Terry 173–4
396–7 Primary Worlds 3–6, 8, 33–4, 61, 67–8, 174, 403;
Parian Marbles 110 Tolkien and 378, 381
Parkin, Simon 417 A Princess of Mars (Burroughs) 32
Parma Eldalamberon 380 Principle of Hope (Bloch) 177
Parsons, Terrence 84 a priori languages 23
participation 199–201 procedurally generated worlds 425–7, 429–32;
Passages (Sheehy) 12 see also Minecraft
pastoral romance 80 Project Sansar 408
Pastoria 365–6 propaganda 250, 251
Patot, Tyssot 161, 166 prophecies 52
Patryn 173 Propp,Vladimir 14, 262
patterns 265–6 protagonist-avatars 266–7
Paul Atreides 52, 54 Provencher, Simon 142
Pavel, Thomas 83, 85–6 Pryan 173
Pearson, Roberta 225 Pullman, Philip 128
Pelevin,Victor 117 “Pygmalion’s Spectacles” (Weinbaum) 196
Pellucidar 165
Penley, Constance 391 Quadling Country 361, 363
The Penultimate Truth (Dick) 167 Quamso 341
Person of Interest 196 Quantum Leap 188
Persson, Markus 412, 414–15, 420 quantum mechanics, many worlds theory 186–7
Peter Wilkins 345–9 Queneau, Raymond 351–2
Peterson, David 22, 27 Quenya 24, 27, 380
The Phantom Empire 163
Philmus, Robert M. 39 R.U.R. (Čapek) 181
philology 24, 352 Rabelais, François 69, 286
philosophy: and imaginary worlds 127–33; and Rabinow, Paul 317
languages 21, 23 Radch Empire 3
Picard, Jean 341 radio, and world-building 70
Pierce, Charles Sanders 128 Ransom, John Crow 246–7
Plancy, Jacques Collin de 164 Raphael Hythlodaeus 101, 318–20, 322
Planet of the Apes 172–3 Rapture 190–1
planets 169–74; Anarres 43; Arrakis 30, 33, 53–4, Raymond, Alex 31
68, 169–71; Gethen 169–70; Hoth 169; Nazar readers 5–7, 86, 143–4
339–43; Tatooine 4, 30, 86–7, 169–70; Urras 43 Realism 259
Planiverse 67 realistic fiction 80
Plato 5, 128, 132, 141, 305 reboots 50, 226, 229–30, 233, 399; DCU and 224,
Plausible Worlds (Hawthorn) 185 225, 226–9; and Oz 364, 366–7
The Plot Against America (Roth) 76 The Red Book of Westmarch 83, 382
Plutonia (Obruchev) 163 redstone 417
Poe, Edgar Allen 162 Reductionism 211
polders 8 Relation D’Un Voyage Du Pole Arctique Au Pole
politics 305, 307, 334–5, 380; The Blazing-World Antarctique Par Le Centre Du Monde 161
326, 328–9; Gulliver’s Travels 334–5, 337 release literature 250, 251
Portal 59 religions 116, 128, 132–3, 326, 328–9, 349, 379
portal fiction 40, 46–59, 345; see also Dark Tower The Renaissance 22–3
(King); Stargate Resnick, Mike 56–7
441
Index
Resnick, Mitchel 145 science fiction and fantasy, as a genre 39

retroactive continuity (retcon) 50, 224, 230–3, 381 science fiction and fantasy conventions 24, 26, 389
reverse pragmatism 128–31 “Science fiction or future fact? Exploring
Rey 55 imaginative geographies of the New
Reynard the Fox 286 Millennium” (Kneale and Kitchin) 100
Rhetorics Of Fantasy (Mendlesohn) 87 Scott, Walter 345
Rhuuwydho 99 Seaborn, Adam 164
Rice, Anne 139 Searle, John R. 238
Riddick movies 172 Second Life 194, 402–8, 422
Riddley Walker (Hoban) 181 secondary belief 86, 112, 210; see also Tolkien, John
Riefenstahl, Leni 120 Ronald Reuel
Riou, Édouard 103 secondary worlds 3–4, 381; and backstory 37;
The Rites of Passage (van Gennep) 12 borders in 7–8; changing settings of 5–6;
ritual magic 124–5, 263–7 compared with Primary Worlds 4–5; reader
Riven 26, 159 preparation for 5–7
The Road (McCarthy) 180–2 Secret Avengers #9 137
Robbe-Grillet, Alain 79, 80 Secret of Monkey Island 159, 407
Roberts, Johathan 103 “A Secret Vice” (Tolkien) 21–2, 24
Robinson Crusoe (Defoe) 156–7, 344, 347 segmentation 268
Robinson, Kim Stanley 168, 174, 180 Selkirk, Alexander 156
Roddenberry, Gene 239, 241–3, 386, 391 semiotics 14–15, 260–1, 268, 279, 352
Rogue 426 sequels 46
Roland Deschain 61–2 Serenity Role Playing Game 103
role-playing games 103, 136, 214, 265, 267–8, 296 Sethos (Terrasson) 167
Rollins, James 168 Seuter, Matthäus 3
Romantics 13, 247, 259 Severus Sanpe 91
Rosenberg, Daniel 109–10 Shakespeare, William 13, 33–4, 47, 75, 121, 193,
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (Stoppard) 47 238, 247, 259
Rosenfeld, Daniel 418 Shangri-la 8
Rosenfeld, Gavriel 186 Shape of Things to Come (Wells) 181
Rosenfelder, Mark 143 Shatner, William 242, 385
Roth, Philip 76 Sheehy, Gail 12
Rothfuss, Patrick 7 Sherlock Holmes 79, 239–40, 275, 370
Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory 38 Sherlock Holmes 40
Rowling, J. K. 121, 216, 218–19 Shevek 43
Rowson, Martin 338 “The Shibboleth of Fëanor” (Tolkien) 380
Royal Society of London 326–7 Shimpach, Shawn 230
Rucker, Rudy 168 Shippey, T. A. 22, 212–13, 379
rules 130 Shui Hu Zhuan 104
Ryan, Marie-Laure 67 The Sicilian (Puzo) 47
The Silmarillion (Tolkien) 47, 377
The Sacred Book of the Werewolf (Pelevin) 117 Silverman, Brian 145
Sahlins, Marshall 12 Silvey, Robert 292–3
Saler, Michael 307 Sinclair, James 102
Sanderson, Brandon 113 Singer, Bryan 279
Sapir, Edward 25 Skepticism 212
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis 25, 27 Sliders 188
Sass Doorpt Swangeanti 345 soap operas 232–3
satire 281–4, 287–9, 333, 335, 338, 364 social engineering 8–9
Savchenko,Vladimir 338 social science 298–304
savior figures 51–5; see also “The Hero’s Journey” Solaris (Lem) 32, 68, 122, 263
(THJ) A Song of Ice and Fire (Martin) 27, 102–3
Saxo Grammaticus 212–13 Sophicles 284
The Scar (Mieville) 86 South Pacific 158–9
Schwartz, Julius 226–7 South Park 91, 288
science fiction 40, 185, 250–1, 257, 326, 328, 352, space opera 352
385–6, 391 Spacewar! 147–8, 193
442
Index
Speedtree 302–3 Symzonia (Seaborn) 164, 178

Spencer, Phil 421 synthetic worlds 300–4, 388–9, 402–3; see also
Spider-Man 39, 231–2 virtual worlds
Spielberg, Steven 34
Spirited Away 122 Tabula Rasa 26
Splintered Light (Flieger) 378–9 Tale of Years 112
Spock 385–6, 389–91 Tartu School 16
Square Enix 93 Tassul 357
Stableford, Brian 3, 6–7 Tatooine 4, 30, 86–7, 169–70, 394–5
Stalking the Unicorn (Resnick) 56–7 Tatum, Channing 94
Stapledon, Olaf 250, 251, 252 Taylor-Ashfield, Charlotte 202
Star Maker (Stapledon) 48 technology 34, 127, 137, 193–4, 391
Star (Psi Cassiopeia) (Defontenay) 31, 351–4, 355, Teed, Cyrus 165
356–7 Tel’aran’rhiod 197
Star Trek 4, 57, 59, 122, 137, 139, 171, 227, Temerant 7
240–3, 264, 275, 278–80, 308, 385; Deep Tengwar 380
Space Nine 57, 59; Encyclopedia 389; Enterprise The Cellular Cosmogony, or the Earth in a Concave
389; fan films 278–9, 390; Klingon 26, 69, Sphere (Teed) 165
390; movies 171, 242; Next Generation 57, The Smoky God or A Voyage to the Inner World
196; Star Trek 59, 187, 227, 386; Voyager 57, (Emerson) 165
171, 187–8, 389 Theall, Donald F. 391
Star Wars 4, 16, 30, 33, 52, 55, 121–2, 169, 230, 274, Thomas Northmore 22
360, 394–400; expanded universe 86–7, 95–6, Thomas, Roy 231, 397–8
243–4, 397–9; Holiday Special 398 Thompson, Ruth Plumy 218
StarCraft 148 Thorne, Jack 218
Stargate 56–61, 172 Three Hundred Years Hence (Griffith) 179
Starship Troopers (Heinlein) 287 The Three Musketeers (Dumas) 76
Station Eleven (Mandel) 180 Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found
Stinger 94 There (Carroll) 193
Stoller, Peter 12 Tiffany, John 218
Stone, Fred A. 363 TIGSource 412, 418
The Story of the Glittering Plain (Morris) 6 time 119–20, 233, 378, 403
Storybrooke 46 The Time Machine (Wells) 166–8
Strauss, Leo 283 time travel 7, 11, 56, 59, 77, 119, 166–8, 173,
Structuralism 261 187–8, 227–8, 232, 382
Strugatsky Brothers 120, 122, 258, 266 timelines 48, 107–9, 113
“Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes” Titus Groan (Peake) 41
(Knox) 239 Tlön: A Misty Story 137
subcreation 131–3, 209–15, 306, 381, 405; see also Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (Borge) 91–2, 137, 214
Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel Todd, Dennis 335
subterranean passages 161–2 Tolkien, Christopher 218, 377, 382
Subterranean (Rollins) 168 Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel 55, 86, 102, 121, 252,
Subterranean Worlds: 100,000 years of dragons, dwarfs, 377, 379–80, 388, 430; language invention and
the dead, lost races & UFOs from inside the earth 21–2, 24–5, 380; literary criticism 211–12; “On
(Minkel) 165 Fairy-Stories” 132–3, 142, 209–12, 252, 369–70,
Super Mario Bros. 99 381, 405; world-building of 6, 307–8, 367, 380–1
Super Mario Maker 148 Tom Bombadil 8
superheroes 39, 54–5 Tomashevsky, Boris 258
Superman 231 topso 137–8
Survivor 263 Tosca, Susana 136–8
Susan Pevensie 59 totality 42–3
Suvin, Darko 39–40, 177, 249, 305 totemism 116
Swift, Jonathan 23, 332 Totilo, Stephen 219
Swiss Family Robinson (Wyss) 157 transmedia 26–7, 33–4, 69, 71, 93, 95–6, 102, 134–9,
Sword of Shanarra (Brooks) 214 187–8, 198–9, 202–3, 216–22, 241, 269–70,
symbols 15–16, 120–1, 153–4, 156–8, 258–60 306, 395, 399–400, 421; Oz 6, 102, 200–1, 359,
Symmes, John Cleves 164, 168 362–4; see also adaptations
443
Index
A Traveler from Altruria (Howell) 179 virtual worlds 193–5, 300–4, 388–9, 402–5,
traveller’s tales 22–3, 26, 31, 59, 101, 155, 332–3 407, 422, 427; dreams as 196–7; Minecraft
Travels of Sir John Mandeville 23, 155 410–22; ontology of 192–3, 402–3; procedural
Traviss, Karen 243 generation of 425–7, 429–32
Treasure Island (Stevenson) 101 Voyage au centre de la terre (Verne) 163
Treaty States of Aultica 99 Voyage au centre de la terre (Plancy) 164
Treliorians 357 Voyage to the Center of the Earth (Verne) see Voyage
trickster figures 117, 286 au centre de la terre (Verne)
Trojan War 121 A Voyage to the World in the Center of the Earth 164
Tropico 159 Vril-ya 24
Troy 121
True History (Lucian) 57, 213, 285, 328, 352 Waiting for Godot (Beckett) 80
Túrin 45 The Walking Dead 181, 309
Turner, James Grantham 349 The Wall (Haushofer) 182
Turner,Victor 12–14 Walt Disney 92, 201, 203, 242–3, 306, 394, 397,
“Twelves” 21 399–00, 422
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea Walton, Kendall 142
(Verne) 103 War on Terror 61
Twilight (Meyer) 139 Ward, Jeffrey L. 102
Tynyanov,Yuri 258 Watchmen (Moore) 5
Tyrion Lannister 310 The Water Margin (Suikoden) 104
“We Can Remember It for You Wholesale”
Ualle 99 (Dick) 196
uchronias 184 We (Zamiatin) 181
Ul Qoma 9 Weis, Margaret 173
Ultima Ratio Regum 35 Welcome to Nightvale 4
Uncle Grandpa 52 Wellington Yueh 53
underground worlds 161–7, 340–3, 345 Wells, H. G. 166–7, 181, 343
The Unfinished Tales (Tolkien) 377 Westeros 4, 27, 99, 128, 133, 305, 309–10, 430
United States of America 42 “What we Found on Our Journey through
Utopia (More) 128, 155, 178, 305, 317–23 Fantasy Land” (Baker) 100
utopias 32, 154–5, 164, 177–80, 182, 282–3, 287, Wheel of Time (Jordan) 119, 197
317–23, 328, 339–43, 348–9, 353–4, 365, White, Hayden 110–11
372–3; see also dystopias Whorf, Benjamin 25
Williams, Raymond 307–11
Valar 379 Windling, Terri 8
The Vampire Chronicles (Rice) 139 Winkie Country 361
vampires 49 Winters, Lydia 413
van Gennep, Arnold 12 With Her in Ourland (Gilman) 179
Vance, Jack 25–6 The Wizard of Oz 135
Vandermeer, Jeff 86 Woggle-Bug 200
Vantage Point (2008) 46 Wolf, Mark J. P. 3–4, 37, 58, 88, 108, 136, 141, 146,
Varys 310 169, 198–200, 214, 217–18, 240, 296, 306, 333,
vaudeville 259 396, 404, 416, 422
The Venture Bros 288 Wolfe, Gene 128
Verne, Jules 103, 157–8, 163, 343, 351 Wolfman, Mary 227
Versins, Pierre 3, 351–3 Wonderful Wizard of Oz 200, 359–63
Victorian romanticism 211 Wonderland 57, 196, 360
victories 53 The Wood Beyond the World (Morris) 6
video games 54–5, 71, 84, 93, 99, 219–20, 414, 430; World Builder 147
No Man’s Sky 425–32; see also avatars; computer world-building 6, 22, 31–2, 68–70, 99, 124, 128–9,
games; Minecraft; MMORPGs 132–3, 137, 141–9, 170–3, 184–5, 209, 218–21,
VideoGamer 219–20 265–6, 268–9, 271, 282, 289, 307–12, 320, 332,
Vint, Sherryl 386, 392 355, 357–9, 361–2, 367, 369–76, 380–1, 387–8,
Vinyar Tengwar 380 389, 410–11
virtual economies 195, 300, 404, 427 World of Warcraft 105, 194, 300
Virtual History (Ferguson) 185 world-reduction 170
444
Index
world-sharing 220–2, 276, 279 The X-Files 120–1, 230, 236, 237, 244
world-shrinking 279
World War I 25 The Year 2440 (Mercier) 353
World War II 25, 45, 76, 117, 158, 186, 226–7 The Year of Our War (Swainston) 41, 85, 88–9
worlds 3–4, 68; see also maps Yoda 46
Wright, Austin Tappan 33, 369, 373–6; Young Indiana Jones Chronicles 395
letters to Margot 374–5 Youwarkee 346, 348
Wright, Frank Lloyd 35
Wright, John K. 374 Zahn, Timothy 399
Wright, Mary 374 zombies 81, 181
writing 142 Zork 99, 147, 426
445

The Routledge Companion To Imaginary Worlds

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The Routledge Companion to

Mark J. P. Wolf is a Full Professor in the Communication Department at Concordia

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2018 Taylor & Francis

The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

ISBN: 978-1-138-63891-4 (hbk)

About the Contributors xi

1 Locations and Borders 3

2 The Hero’s Journey 11

13 Geography and Maps 98

14 History and Timelines 107

18 World-Building Tools 141

19 Island Worlds 153

20 Underground Worlds 161

22 Utopias and Dystopias 177

23 Uchronias, Alternate Histories, and Counterfactuals 184

24 Virtual Worlds 192

25 Interactive and Participatory Worlds 198

28 Reboots and Retroactive Continuity 224

33 Worlds as Satire 281

34 Worlds as Paracosms 291

35 Worlds as Experiments 298

36 Worlds and Politics 305

37 More’s Utopia 317

38 Cavendish’s Blazing-World 325

39 Swift’s World of Gulliver’s Travels 332

40 Holberg’s Nazar and the Firmament 339

41 Paltock’s Sass Doorpt Swangeanti 344

42 Defontenay’s Starian System 351

43 Baum’s Oz 359

44 Wright’s Islandia 369

45 Tolkien’s Arda 377

46 Roddenberry’s Star Trek Galaxy 385

47 Lucas’s Star Wars Galaxy 394

48 Linden Labs’s Second Life 402

49 Persson’s Minecraft 410

50 Hello Game’s No Man’s Sky 425

David Alff is an Assistant Professor of English at SUNY-Buffalo. He is the author of

João Araújo is a Ph.D. candidate at the Graduate Program in Contemporary Communication

Communication and Culture and a Bachelor’s degree in Social Communications (with

Astrid Ensslin is a Professor of Media and Digital Communication at the University of

Matthew Freeman is a Senior Lecturer in Media Communications at Bath Spa University,

David Glimp is an Associate Professor in the Department of English, University of Colorado

Chris Hanson is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Syracuse University,

Jennifer Harwood-Smith has a Ph.D. from Trinity College Dublin, and is researching

Dan Hassler-Forest is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Utrecht University. He has

Ian Kinane is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Roehampton, where he

Lars Konzack is an Associate Professor in Information Science and Cultural Communication

Lori Landay is a Professor of Cultural Studies at Berklee College of Music, and an

Irène Langlet is a Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of

William Proctor a Lecturer in Media, Culture, and Communication at Bournemouth

Marie-Laure Ryan is an independent scholar based in Colorado. She is the author of

Michael Saler is a Professor of History at the University of California, Davis, where he

Anne M. Thell is an Assistant Professor of English Literature at National University of

Mark J. P. Wolf is a Professor in the Communication Department at Concordia University,

Content and Story

Borders between Worlds

possibilities of three-dimensional existence and the solipsism of Pointland, “the Abyss of No

A heterocosmic creator cannot organize the informational thread of a text in the

Borders within Worlds

About the Contributors xi

1 Locations and Borders 3

2 The Hero’s Journey 11

13 Geography and Maps 98

14 History and Timelines 107

18 World-Building Tools 141

19 Island Worlds 153

20 Underground Worlds 161

22 Utopias and Dystopias 177

23 Uchronias, Alternate Histories, and Counterfactuals 184

24 Virtual Worlds 192

25 Interactive and Participatory Worlds 198

28 Reboots and Retroactive Continuity 224

33 Worlds as Satire 281

34 Worlds as Paracosms 291

35 Worlds as Experiments 298

36 Worlds and Politics 305

37 More’s Utopia 317

38 Cavendish’s Blazing-World 325

39 Swift’s World of Gulliver’s Travels 332

40 Holberg’s Nazar and the Firmament 339

41 Paltock’s Sass Doorpt Swangeanti 344

42 Defontenay’s Starian System 351

43 Baum’s Oz 359

44 Wright’s Islandia 369

45 Tolkien’s Arda 377

46 Roddenberry’s Star Trek Galaxy 385

47 Lucas’s Star Wars Galaxy 394

48 Linden Labs’s Second Life 402

49 Persson’s Minecraft 410

50 Hello Game’s No Man’s Sky 425

ovelizations, TV series, animations, and games, in a well-coordinated strategy that seems

c omplications of contemporary historiography; (2) scientific discourse and the narrativization