On Friday I looked at the first Science Fiction “worlds” in this series of “Encountering Fantastic Worlds” posts, which began on October 27 with Kids/YA lit and also traversed fantasy for adult readers on November 3 and November 4 respectively. All the worlds selected have been personal favourites, rather than any more objective measure—although I have also tried for a reasonable range, just to keep things interesting. In the first SciFi instalment this meant looking at Dune, the near-future earth of Neuromancer, and CJ Cherryh’s Serpent’s Reach.

To begin the final three in my list of fantasic worlds, the proper place to start may be last Thursday’s post where I paid a personal tribute to Anne McCaffrey (1926-2011), whose storytelling both entralled and inspired me as a teen reader. So looking back to that time, I think the first world on today’s list has to be:

P is for Pern in Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonflight (and its many sequels.)

Pern is unquestionably a SF world: a planet settled by space-travelling humans where the “adversary” is “thread”, a lifeform that descends through space whenever Pern and a neighbouring planet’s orbitary paths come close enough together—to huge destructive effect. So the human colonists genetically engineer fire-breathing dragons to destroy the thread before it reaches Pern’s surface … But the world of Pern and dragons is one of the first I encountered where, despite this SciFi premise, the world read essentially as fantasy, since the long-isolated human society has regressed to a low tech, medieval-feudal culture with hold lords and trade guilds, and where the dragons and dragon riders form both a distinct cultural group and a social elite.

Dragons are definitely the star of the Pern show, and the idea of riders with a symbiotic, telepathic bond to their dragons a new and exciting one when Dragonflight (based on the precursor novellas, Weyr Search and Dragonrider) was first published. The symbiotic relationship with dragons also drove a more permissive sexual culture within the weyrs, although this did not translate into much greater socio-political autonomy than in the rest of the feudally-conceived world. The threat of Thread-fall also had consequences for the way the Pernese lived, i.e. in dwellings constructed within rock, since stone was the only substance that thread could not burrow into and destroy. Throw in dragonflight and the ability of dragons to teleport across space and through time, and Pern becomes an exciting as well as a fun SciFi destination.

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T is for Thailand in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl

So far all the fantastic worlds visited have been longstanding favourites, but also drawn from books published as early as the 1960s (Dune, 1965; Dragonflight, 1968) and no later than the 1980s (Serpent’s Reach, 1980; Neuromancer, 1984.) So what about newer tales and worlds? They are undoubtedly out there, but little contemporary SciFi has made much of an impression on me, world building-wise. Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl is the exception.

The “world” of this story is a medium-future, post peak oil, kingdom of Thailand characterized by gene hacking and genetic engineering, together with associated bio-plagues, where food strains are a tightly controlled commodity. Travel is by dirigible and enhanced clipper ships, and the society is a conflict of cultural, religious and social stratification. Not surprisingly in a society where so much is at stake, it’s also a violent world, where refugees and the rest of the poor struggle to find a secure place amidst the conflicts of foreign corporations, both agricultural and technological, a special police force dedicated to eradicating plague sources and rogue gene variants, and the political and military interests struggling for power over genetic manipulation and access to new food strains.

From the opening sequence where the character Anderson Lake identifies a new and illegal (given the genetic patent controlled enforced by the multinational corporates) type of fruit/vegetable (probably of the nightshade family) in a Bangkok market, The Windup Girl presents a vivid, brutal, colourful and above all real world, one you can smell and taste and hear, as well as ‘see.’ Definitely one of the standouts in my pantheon of science fiction worlds.

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T is also for Tiamat in Joan Vinge’s “The Snow Queen”

The Snow Queen is another longstanding favourite and the world of Tiamat one of the more fascinating worlds of science fiction: a water planet with two red suns orbiting a ‘stargate’—a revolving black hole that also serves as a portal for faster-than-light travel from the worlds of the technocratic Kharemough Hegemony. The portal gives the Kharemough access to the “water of life”, a life extending substance harvested from Tiamat’s native mers—but only for a century or so, during the extended winter season, until the orbital proximity of the Summer Star renders the gate unstable.

But the interest of Tiamat doesn’t just end there, it’s also a world of three cultures: the native Summer clans and the Winters, both tied to the prolonged winter/summer seasons brought about by the planet’s orbit—and with a whole array of cultural and religious belief built around the changeover. The most fundamental of these is that the Winters are cosmopolitan and technologically adept, while the Summers cling to a primitive hunter-gatherer existence.  On top of this again, the world of Tiamat also has a strong colonial legacy, with the Kharemough Hegemony imposing their own legal and commercial institutions on the native Tiamat society whenever the stargate opens, in order to control the “water of life” trade. And woven through everything is the role of mers in the planetary ecology and the philosophical function of the sibyls …

Planetology and ecoystem, technology, culture and society, as well as philosophy—taken together I think it’s easy to see why Arthur C Clarke called The Snow Queen “a future classic.”

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So there you have it: the final three of my six fabulous worlds of science fiction. Of course, there could have been so many more: Iain M Banks’ fabulous Culture ‘verse (although how do you begin to describe it?), David Brin’s Kithrup in Startide Rising, Winter in Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, and CJ Cherryh’s Downbelow; the Istanbul of Ian McDonald’s The Dervish House, and the post-apocalyptic Labrador of John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids—and even this is only a very few of scifi’s fantastic worlds. At least as many and varied as the amazing worlds of fantasy. Isn’t it great?

But what about you? Do you have a favourite SFF world that hasn’t been mentioned yet?

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To read the first instalment of “Encountering Fantastic Worlds: SciFi”, click here.