Discussion question- if you could live in a fictional world, which one would it be? Lets say you can bring anything with you that you can carry, but can’t automatically take advantage of the fictional world’s perks, and have to follow it’s rules. (including unspoken and cliche rules) i.e., you can’t be a jedi just cause you’ve moved to the star wars universe, or do kung-fu in a kung fu movie unless you train. However, if you move into a porn movie, everyone will want to have sex with you, speak in a stilted and unrealistic way, and everthing will look like a cardboard set.
Books, movies, TV, ect. are all acceptable sources.
Inspiration for thread: The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde. Read it!
In some ways, I’d very much like to live in John Varley’s Eight Worlds universe, if only for the medical treatments. I like the general society too. I think that I could do without living through the Big Glitch, though. I don’t know if I could live with that level of illiteracy. Apparently there are SOME readers (Hildy in Steel Beach loves literature).
Yes, I think that Steel Beach is part of the Eight Worlds continuum, even though Varley says it’s not really. I think he should have recruited a grad student to do the research of his old works for him.
I’d love to be at Elrond’s last homely house, in the golden years.
And I’d love to be in Africa in the movie HATARI! although I suspect I’d be the comic relief. And I wouldn’t want to be there more than a season.
It would also be fun to be in some musical – like SINGIN IN THE RAIN – where people burst into song and dance for no reason, and at random. But again, since I can’t sing, I’d be there just to watch the others and enjoy myself for a while, it’d be a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.
Of course, I’m already in THE PHILADELPHIA STORY, and that’s pretty much perfect, so…
I’ll be the first to post the obvious, and say that I would like to inhabit the world of Harry Potter, but only if I can do magic, and go to Hogwarts. Hogwarts is actually a very romanticised version of the typical English boarding school, of the type that I attended. It manages to capture everything that was good about that experience and adds delicious food, warm rooms with comfy furniture (a four poster bed with drapes, each!) and of course, magic! Pictures that move, apparating everywhere, flying on brooms, owls instead of postmen, how great it would all be.
One fantasy world I definately wouldn’t want to inhabit is the world of “freed” people in the Matrix. I have terrible claustrophobia, so the idea of living in a city miles and miles underground near the core of the earth, with no access to the outside world would be unbearable for me. Any bits of the films that featured Zion heavily actually started a little mild panic in me when I even thought about it. Eeek! the blue pill for me please!
I’d go for the Federation, or any other Fictional Universe with Earth-like colony worlds, assuming that I could head for one of those sparsely inhabited colony worlds and live as I pleased.
I can be packed in an hour. Maybe two if I can stop by the garden store ahead of time and pick up some seeds.
I want to live in a dystopia, darn it! Some place with 400-story buildings and automated everything. I think I’d like Brave New World, if it weren’t for all the sex.
The Eight worlds is a great idea, though it has been hinted that the characters we see are exceptions, and the majority of citizens have ordinary, boring lives and make-work jobs. It can be argued that this is a good thing.
The federation is a good idea, too, except that if you aren’t a name character, death is all too possible. Also, I think that an immigrant to that universe might suffer from cliche-related amnesia, and be unable to remember the amazing technology discovered while solving a problem a few weeks ago and perfectly applicable to the next crisis, but somehow never used…
In a non-science fiction vein, I always thought that the semi-idealized Mississippi river of Mark Twain would be a nice place to live, so long as real history never caught up with it. Pleasant, but with enough of an edge to make it interesting.
Hmmmm…Pogo’s fictional Okeefenokee Swamp was a place with no swarming bugs, little work to do, lots o’ fish fries all the time, always a skiff to row or pole in, and Miz Mam’zelle Hepzibah to court.
Iain M. Banks’ Culture, definitely. As long as you weren’t one of the characters in his novels, mind–violent things do tend to happen to them. But if you were just a normal person? No poverty, no war, no death, and all the incredible technological innovations any work of science fiction has ever dreamed up–artificial planets, artificial intelligence, space travel: heck, the ability to change gender whenever you want…
I think I want to go there and stay forever. Adulthood is overrated and I am very, very tired of it just now.
Were I in a more cheerful mood, however, I would definitely want to be a teacher at Hogwarts, preferably History of Magic, because it sounds like it could be such an interesting class if Professor Binns could be persuaded to loose his death grip (heh) on it.
Larry Niven’s Known Space would be interesting - I want my nearly indestructible spaceships.
Any swords and socery world would be fine- I can bring back some engineering texts, as well as some firearms, make myself king of a good-sized nation,(by shooting the evil sorceror who kidnaped the beuatiful, intelligent, princess - then marrying said princes) and then use the engineering text to jumpstart an industrial revolution in my kingdom, allowing it to conquer everyone else in short order, leading to an age of peaces and unity, and my having lots of stuff.
Try the Chinese-ruled world of David Wingrove’s Chung Kuo series. Most people live in one of the seven Cities, each one a 1,000-storey plastic arcology the size of a continent. Sex is not noticeably easier or harder to get than it is here-and-now (but prostitution is legal, everywhere). Society is rigidly stratified – the higher the Level you live on, the higher your status and income. Government usually tries to be benevolent, but it is arbitary, narrow-minded, and at the lower Levels of the City, completely ineffectual. The seven T’angs (emperors) are absolute in their Cities, and some of them are cruel, corrupt, or insane. Dystopian enough?
Hmmm…this is a toughie. I’ll have to also go with being in the Wizarding World of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, provided I have magic powers, of course. I would have loved to have gone to a school like Hogwarts.
If I were to go with a dystopian world, I would say the world of Mad Max. I’ve always had a secret fondness for those weird outfits they wear.
Failing that, either the Forgotten Realms or the DragonLance worlds. Yes, I’d be eaten by orcs or whatever within a few minutes, but the idea of living in a place where you can just Wander Off and Have Adventures is tremendously satisfying.
To add…the ones I wouldn’t want to live in are George R.R. Martin’s and any of David Gemmells, considering the number of times riders come through and kill everyone.