Take a break somewhere fantastic
The best way to escape the British summer is to head off into the unreal realities between hard covers. What are your favourite fantasy getaways?
May 30, 2008 11:15 AM
Wish you were here ... Mount Ngauruhoe, used by Peter Jackson as Mount Doom in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod
As the finak days of Hay fly by, and the first grey clouds of British high summer loom on the horizon, the mind turns to distant lands and far away places. But this holiday season forget the tawdry tourist traps and third world tours and take a trip instead into some of the fantasy worlds that lie within the common paperback book.
The secondary worlds of fantastic fiction offer a cornucopia of choice for the discerning imaginative traveller. Of course, as with real world vacationing, its all too easy to find yourself trapped for a fortnight in the literary equivalent of a Club 18-30 tour of Benidorm. Whilst I would happily die defending the merits of JJR Tolkien's Middle Earth, even I have to admit that the imitations spawned over the decades come close to challenging the ranks of thinly veiled auto-biography that pour out of literary fiction for sheer tedium. But beyond the mass media franchises of Trek-Wars, and the mind numbing emptiness of World Warcraft, there are near untouched worlds of wonder waiting to be explored in fantastic fiction.
Those travelers seeking a traditional Medieval European fantasy world, complete with knights, maidens and of course dragons would be wise to consider booking passage to Westeros. Author George RR Martin has the correct middle initials for an epic fantasy novelist, and has been dubbed the American Tolkien, but its a comparison that is only skin deep. Where Tolkien created a world of black and white good and evil, Martin's Westeros is a world of ... evil. The characters in the five volumes ofA Song of Ice and Fire are violent, ruthless and power hungry. When Martin does introduce a goodie, its only to corrupt, torture or kill them. But despite, or perhaps because of, the casual disregard he displays for the well being of his characters, Martin has fashioned a fantasy epic that far outstrips its peers and is so addictive it is commonly referred to as dragon-crack, with hordes of hungry eyed addicts suffering withdrawal until the completion of the next volume, A Dance With Dragons.
With imagined cities two-a-penny in fantastic fiction, its a pleasure to discover one as intriguing and unspoilt as Ambergris. Travellers to the metropolis described by Jeff Vandermeer in City of Saints and Madmen and Shriek: An afterword will find themselves surrounded by outlandish sights that nonetheless seem shockingly familiar. Ambergris is a city of contradictions, apparently pre-industrial but full of combustion engines and hand grenades, a human city built over the protesting fungoid presence of the Greycaps, peopled with bohemian art dealers, corrupt publishers, intense novelists, PR executives and drug dealers. Modelled on street plans laid down by Borges and Kafka, Ambergris has secret quarters and back alleys that either might have imagined.
Anyone with an interest in history and archaeology should seriously consider a package tour to the far future. There is simply no better location to view ancient ruins than the Dying Earth. Jack Vance may not have been the first to chronicle this world of crumbling civilisations and lost technologies, lit by the dim cinder of a sun of the brink of extinction, sixty billion years from today, but his early stories are still classic texts for any serious writer of fantasy. Many writers have followed in his footsteps and the Dying Earth has been a sandbox for some of our darkest and most ambitious storytelling, from Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun to M John Harrison's Viriconium.
But why stop there? Take a step off-planet and visit The Culture of Iain M Banks with its vision of a truly utopian human society. Then come crashing back down to the fractured reality of Philip K Dick and a post-apocalyptic America that seems more prophetic with every passing year. Take an alternative road-trip through that continent with Neil Gaiman in American Gods, or even stay right here in good old Blighty, albeit the altered Kingdom of the Snake imagined by Mark Chadbourn. For the intrepid imagineer there are no shortage of guides to other worlds just waiting to be plucked from the shelves.