Softer spaces
Today I read China Miéville's The City and The City, and it was really interesting, but now I am wondering about something.
It's a pretty common trope to drop a fictional country into a world which is *otherwise* meant to be identical to our own, and I can think offhand of fictional Eastern European or African countries, or Asian or Central American ones... but no North American ones, and *maybe* a couple meant to be Western European (Princess Bride, I think?). Yeah, there's Gilead and Oceania and such, but the point of them is that they *don't* exist in a world identical to ours.
It might be that there are actually many examples of fictional WE/NA countries, I am just not well read enough (very possible). Or I tend to consume Western media, which may have a hard time imagining changes to familiar geography/understand the local countries well enough it does not *need* to invent imaginary countries, which are easy permission to get things wrong. Perhaps Chinese literature has many such countries, far away fantasy islands filled with people drawn from some rough hybrid of English and Spanish stereotypes, whereas the borders of Burma and Thailand are understood to be far too definite to make room for imaginary nations.
I hope so. Otherwise it implies something... unsurprising... about the pieces we consider "essential" for a world to be recognizably "this" one.
Of course, when it comes to North America (Northern America? I'm not including Central America, which seems to have different rules), we have very few countries to sneak new ones between. It would be difficult to be vague about location, as is often the case with fictional countries. (And the history must change, but that is true with any imaginary map, the trope requires us to gloss over this fact.) Still... if anyone knows of any examples, I'd be very curious to see a recognizably North American country which is not the USA and not Canada and not Mexico either.
It's a pretty common trope to drop a fictional country into a world which is *otherwise* meant to be identical to our own, and I can think offhand of fictional Eastern European or African countries, or Asian or Central American ones... but no North American ones, and *maybe* a couple meant to be Western European (Princess Bride, I think?). Yeah, there's Gilead and Oceania and such, but the point of them is that they *don't* exist in a world identical to ours.
It might be that there are actually many examples of fictional WE/NA countries, I am just not well read enough (very possible). Or I tend to consume Western media, which may have a hard time imagining changes to familiar geography/understand the local countries well enough it does not *need* to invent imaginary countries, which are easy permission to get things wrong. Perhaps Chinese literature has many such countries, far away fantasy islands filled with people drawn from some rough hybrid of English and Spanish stereotypes, whereas the borders of Burma and Thailand are understood to be far too definite to make room for imaginary nations.
I hope so. Otherwise it implies something... unsurprising... about the pieces we consider "essential" for a world to be recognizably "this" one.
Of course, when it comes to North America (Northern America? I'm not including Central America, which seems to have different rules), we have very few countries to sneak new ones between. It would be difficult to be vague about location, as is often the case with fictional countries. (And the history must change, but that is true with any imaginary map, the trope requires us to gloss over this fact.) Still... if anyone knows of any examples, I'd be very curious to see a recognizably North American country which is not the USA and not Canada and not Mexico either.