Article: Fantasy Settings

Stepping Into the Unknown--LITERALLY!

by Rosemary Porter

A few months back I was watching NATGEO’s A Traveler’s Guide to the Planets. The premise of the show was to reinforce the scientific fact that Earth is, and will always be, the only inhabitable planet in the known universe. Even though it would be great to live on the icy moon of Triton, or dodge asteroids on Io, Earth is the only sure thing we can count on. Despite the bitter-sweetness of the program, the gears in my brain began to turn, and I asked myself, why do we see the same types of settings in fantasy/sci-fi writing?

In Fantasy/Sci Fiction we find ourselves stepping into three familiar territories: first there are the backdrops that remind us of Ireland and even Scandinavia (i.e. The Lord of the Rings, Willow, and The Wheel of Time series). Second, is the desert terrain of Luke Skywalker’s home planet of Tatooine, or even the Cleft in the Myst Reader Anthology[i]. The land is always unforgiving in these worlds. Finally, we have the lush tropical worlds of Avatar and the moon of Endor as seen in Return of the Jedi. While these locales provide the audience and the writer with a familiar setting, the overuse of these elements can take away from the fantasy element of storytelling.

So how can we start stretching our imaginations? Easy, just look out of your window, (especially when there is a laughing moon in sight) and look for a bright point right next to it. That bright point in the sky is Venus, completely unlivable...but in the imagination, anything is possible. If not Venus, how about that band of stars that create a beautiful blue hue stretching across the sky? These are known as the Seven Sisters, or the Pleiades. Imagine what those distant horizons must look like!

Worlds are waiting to be created; worlds that have colors that are not even used in contemporary art that are dying to be discovered and used! Saturn’s moon, Titan, has cryo-volcanoes that spew methane which form platinum colored rivers with a metallic glow, and the sands of the deserts that look like dunes of coffee grounds. Get this, the sand isn’t that dusty yellowish-brown we are used to seeing; the color is a red/mahogany mix. The moon of Triton has geysers that spew liquid nitrogen, and as the sun sets, one can see the rings of Neptune, especially on a clear night.

So even if the universe created only one planet upon which humans can live, it also created countless planets that couldn’t be inhabited so we could be the architects of those worlds. Jupiter, Io, Venus, Mars, Triton, Titan, even Europa are canvases just waiting to be painted on!

A Traveler’s Guide to the Planets opened my eyes to the possibilities writers of fantasy/sci-fi rarely explore, and those are worlds that are nothing like our own. Due to the precarious nature of the times we live in, humans yearn for something familiar in order to cope with exploring the unknown. It’s instinctual, but let’s take the next step and really take our audiences to another world. And why not explore the possibility of living on worlds like Neptune, despite the fact that there is no density? Or how about Venus? Venus is an unfinished Earth hoping someone will come along complete the work.

The possibilities, like the universe, are infinite. So let’s step into the unknown...literally.

[i] The Book of Atrus specifically talks about the conditions of living in the Cleft.