Tag Archives: setting

November 15, 2015 · 3:48 pm

Imaginary Worlds

I generally fall into the science fiction & fantasy category as a writer. I like to connect my stories to the home town I grew up in. It is a place called Rowan, a tiny farm town in North Central Iowa. In my fiction I call it Norwall, an anagram for Rowan with two “L’s” added, one for “Love” and one for “Laughter”. But the stories I tell about the town, or in some way connect to the town, are all about alien invasions, lycanthropy which is the disease that causes werewolves, fairies in the Kingdom of Tellosia which is located in the farms and fields north of town, and Iowegians who were real when I knew them in real life, but have been transformed by my imagination. So, I have to believe that Norwall, like Narnia, Pellucidar, and Middle Earth, is an imaginary world.

Imaginary worlds have a definite and important function. In his new book, The Book of Legendary Lands, Umberto Eco puts forth the theory that imaginary worlds are basically a utopian sort of dream… the perfect place to live out the life you imagine you should be living. (Here is a link.) This rings fundamentally true with me. I spent the Summer of 1976 in Middle Earth, eluding the Nazgul and helping Frodo and Sam sneak the one ring into Mordor. Heroic tales set in an imaginary world help you to transform from the psychotically depressed youth you were with a secret so terrible (being the victim of a childhood sexual assault) that it was destroying you from the inside out, into the selfless and altruistic adult you needed to be to cope with life in a dark and frightful world. We never truly live in the real world around us. We live in the imaginary construct of that world that our mind creates and interprets. I lived in other imaginary lands as well as a youth. I visited other towns like Norwall in Winesburg, Ohio and Green Town, Illinois,

set in Green Town, Illinois

I roamed the stars with Ben Bova, Ursala LeGuin, and Andre Norton. I lived on Mars with Ray Bradbury. I found in those places the golden ideals that would become my treasure trove after a life of vicarious adventuring. It would give my own story-telling the background and the sort of grounding in reality that only excellent examples could provide.

So here, now, is the most important thing I have to say about imaginary worlds; We live in them constantly, and probably could not live without them. I offer this invitation now as this world grows darker two days after the Paris attacks…”Come live in my imaginary world for a time, and open up the gateways to yours so that I may also visit them.”

pellucidar.org

erbzine.com

comicvine.com

Galtorr Prime

Here is the world where Stardusters and Lizardmen is set. It is the environmental nightmare known as the planet Galtorr Prime. It is the world where Sizzahl was born and where young George Jetson, the Telleron cadet from Xiar’s exploration command has to find a new place to colonize. I should explain that of the characters from this novel excerpt, George Jetson, Davalon, Brekka, Menolly, and Tanith are Telleron tadpoles, or children. Alden and Gracie Morrell are a middle-aged farm couple from Iowas that were turned back into children in a previous adventure. Let me share with you a Canto from this work in progress….

Canto Ten – Aboard Golden Wing Sixteen Near an Abandoned Space Station

Looking for interesting places to explore, the tadpole crew of Wing Sixteen spotted the abandoned orbital station before sensors could detect it. The sensors were set to find life-forms, lizard men in particular, and the instruments all said that none existed on the space platform. In fact, it was apparently devoid of all life but a few plants.

“Can you dock with that thing?” Tanith asked George Jetson.

“Of course I can. I am programmed to be the best wing pilot you have ever seen.”

“And you are programmed to be the most modest Telleron we have ever seen too,” said Brekka.

“Or maybe the one with the biggest gonopodium and the smallest brain,” said Menolly.

George just laughed as he focused his instruments on the docking bay.

“What’s a gonopodium?” Alden asked Davalon.

“Father, you would call it a penis,” said Davalon.

“Oh.” Alden’s forty-year-old sense of propriety turned his twelve-year-old face a bright crimson red.

“Why do you suppose there are no personnel on that station,” Tanith asked everyone in general.

“Maybe there is something wrong with it,” suggested Gracie Morrell. “Maybe they had to abandon ship.”

“Maybe,” said Davalon, looking carefully at the sensor monitor. “But I don’t see anything wrong with the on-board systems. They are all operating like they work perfectly. That station has air we can breathe, water we can drink, and no alarms are going off anywhere. It’s as if they abandoned a perfectly good station.”

“Well,” said George Jetson, “we can find the answer by going in and taking a look around.” He said that just as he pulled a control lever that thrust the wing forward to meet the docking ring and impacted the station so hard that everyone on board was knocked senseless.

“George! What did you just do?” Davalon asked from his new position prostrate on the floor of the control pit.

“Um, I meant to dock with the docking port, but it appears I may have embedded the wing in the side of the space station.”

“Oh, this can’t be good,” moaned Tanith, rubbing the greenish-brown knobby bruise that now blossomed on her pretty forehead.

Farm and Home

My younger son and I are visiting the family farm for a week. It was once Grandpa and Grandma Aldrich’s farmhouse. Now, my retired parents live there. It is a place that figures prominently in my fiction because most of what I know about rural farm life comes from there. Hollyhocks and tiger lilies grow there, Corn and soybeans grow there too. The sky is laughing blue in sunshine.