Geofic:About

From Geofic

Current revision as of 05:43, 19 April 2007

Geofiction is a hobby where people design imaginary cities, countries or entire worlds, including placenames, culture, social and political structures and even constructed languages (conlangs), primarily for personal enjoyment.

It may be contrasted with the creation of constructed worlds, which are typically used to enhance the realisation of a fictional universe for a story or collection of stories, whereas geofiction is "world creation" for its own sake, sometimes but not always for creating a story setting, but always for fun.

Geofiction may range from diagrams of imaginary streets drawn by a young child to elaborate, internally self-consistent worlds created as a hobby or life-long project by adults. Alternately, geofiction is fiction where the (created) setting is the focus.

A good example of the art of geofiction is manifested in The Lord of the Rings, where J. R. R. Tolkien devised the fictional world of Middle-earth populated by various species and races (man, elf, hobbit, etc), along with imaginary languages and alphabets for his creations, all initially for his own amusement.

Neverland is another good example. It is a fairytale island world created by J.M. Barrie which is the setting of Peter Pan's adventures. It is a land much like earth but in Neverland time stands still. It is occupied by children (the Lost Boys) and their rivals the pirates, who are constantly battling throughout the fairytale. Neverland was created by Barrie also for his own amusement, just as Tolkien did with Middle-earth.

Micronations are sometimes considered an elaborate form of geofiction.

Geofiction flourishes over the Internet via nation and empire simulations and collaborative conworlding sites.

Eshraval: A Nation of Your Own is a new and more developed game of geofiction, incorporating a nation and business simulation to allow players the opportunity to run their own nation and businesses on a realistic and consistent game world.

ImagiNations, a network of geofictional planets and the brainchild of author Edward Mooney, Jr., is a prime example of highly developed geofiction as a hobby. Vexillium is the oldest and primary geofictional planet of the ImagiNations network. Two of the active ImagiNations games are undergoing a reset and both are welcoming new players. They are Scandia, set in an Earth present-time equivalent period, and The World of Aurora, originally developed by Mike Phyle. Aurora's technology level is roughly like that of 1945-1955 Earth.

[edit] See also

• Imaginary world
• Conlang
• SimEarth

[edit] Project links

• World-building guide
• Introduction

[edit] External links

• The Dutch Geofiction Association, a collection of geofiction enthusiasts who meet each other, exchange ideas, and talk about the hobby
• Wikivex, the Vexillium wiki
• The ImagiNations world of Scandia
• The World of Aurora, an ImagiNations planet

Some of this page is derived from Wikipedia. The original article was at Geofiction. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with Wikipedia, the text of Geofic is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.