Westeros v Middle Earth v The Five Kingdoms

The best fantasy worlds need to feel real while still providing readers with their fill of the fantastical. They need to be unique and not at all derivative. And they need to be fully fleshed out so it feels like the characters are moving between real world locations across open areas which seem vast and give a good sense of distance while cities should feel cramped and populated and not at all like their country-set counterparts.

The amount of detail given about a world is also important. It should feel incredibly real, even when we are reading about dragons and shadow assassins. Characters in Westeros in The Game of Thrones talk about where they need to go or who controls what lands so naturally and vividly it’s as if they are talking about real places. A Song of Ice and Fire is a perfect example of how a writer can create a fantasy world without it being cliche or derivative.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, however, is the fantasy world by which all other fantasy worlds are judged. Almost everything Tolkien ever wrote took place, in one way or another, in Middle-earth. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings series give a good idea of just how detailed a fantasy world can be. Everyone has a family tree in Middle-earth and every place has a detailed history.

The Five Kingdoms, the other dimension to where the time travelers are taken in The Reluctant Time Travelers Guide to Other Worlds and Other Dimensions, has a similar detailed history as one of the characters in the story explains to another character.

Best described, as an alternative Wales, the first character says, with the borderlands around it being like the Welsh Marches. Very like twenty- first century earth, in some ways, and yet very unlike them in others, because in The Five Kingdoms elves and sprites and fairies still live alongside mortals, like they used to on earth in days gone by. And there are Sorcerers too!

One area of The Five Kingdoms in particular, a land of extremes where the burning desert of Myrrhia meets the icy wastes of Cyonil and the overwhelming heat of day is matched only by the icy cold of the nights, is ruled by a queen called Setura, who appeared there suddenly, and without warning, in the dim and distant past, and just took it away from the people who had been living there before she came. No one really knew where she had come from, or even when it was she first began to gather her army about her, because once she was there, no one dared venture into that land again. And those who had been there when she first came were never free enough afterwards to leave and tell the rest of the world about it.

This was the forbidding land into which Aurora Bradley had blundered because she refused to believe it could exist, and from where she spent the rest of the story trying to escape.