Countries
and regions, states, provinces, shires...

...in sf scenes

[ + link to the main Gazetteer ]

The main Gazetteer page has become so enormous, that I welcome any excuse to start another so as to accommodate some "overspill".
One such idea has led to this page. It occurred to me with regard to the brilliant start of Keith Laumer's A Plague of Demons - the opening scene in Tamboula, Algeria. I set about doing a Gazetteer entry for Tamboula, but I encountered a problem: the town doesn't exist. Laumer must have invented it.
Formerly, that would have stopped me from using Laumer's scene at all, since my aim has been to reserve the Gazetteer for scenes with fairly specific real locations: entries for particular towns and cities, all of which actually exist.
Now, however, while I shall continue with the main Gazetteer for locatable specifics, this new page will be for scenes which refer to reality in a more general sense. Here, then, you'll find imaginary towns, or just unspecified states or provinces or countryside, that nevertheless definitely belong to the real countries which provide the headword entries to this supplementary Gazetteer.

Algeria:
Secret agent John Bravais' arrival to investigate a missing-persons mystery opens the near-future narrative of Keith Laumer's A Plague of Demons (1965):
It was ten minutes past high noon when I paid off my helicab, ducked under the air blast from the caged high-speed rotors as they whined back to speed, and looked around at the sun-scalded, dust-white, mob-noisy bazaar of the trucial camp-city of Tamboula, Republic of Free Algeria. Merchants' stalls were a clash of garish fabrics, the pastels of heaped fruit, the glitter of oriental gold thread and beadwork, the glint of polished Japanese lenses and finely-machined Swedish chromalloy, the subtle gleam of hand-rubbed wood, the brittle complexity of Hong Kong plastic - islands in the tide of humanity that elbowed, sauntered, bargained with shrill voices and waving hands or stood idly in patches of black shadow under rigged awnings all across the wide square. I made my way through the press, shouted at by hucksters, solicited by whining beggars and tattooed drabs, jostled by UN Security Police escorting officials of a dozen nations...

Guyana:
Donald A Wollheim's strange and memorable story The Rules of the Game (New Writings in SF-22, ed. Kenneth Bulmer, 1973) is set in Guyana: at a launch site for a mysterious craft which seems to lack an engine. The theme of the tale is that the laws of Nature are not fixed but on the contrary have changed in historical times and are about to change again - in particular the law of gravity...
"This is not a spaceship or maybe it is," Dr. Desai said now, leaning back. "I regret that you must perforce remain with us, but the change is coming now - suddenly and violently, and it is raining petroleum from the skies, and the grounds are rising up now to take new conformations to fit the new rules of science..."
...The great globe rocked from side to side and then the oil drops slid away from the bull's eye windows and the globe rolled slightly over and I saw the whole of Guyana below us, aboiling and aseething with seas of gleaming sludge, and tossing with flotsam that were jungles...

Montana, USA:
My impression of this state came originally from reading Patrick Tilley's Fade-Out (1975), a novel of extraterrestrial visitation. I read it in the late 1970s and ever since then a mention of Montana has conjured in my mind the image of an alien epiphany. Somehow the locale is so appropriate:
North of Miles City, the land is known as 'The Big Open'. Bare, rolling, high plains country with as few trees as there are people. For mile after mile on either side of the two-lane hog-backed highway, there is nothing but endless stretches of buffalo grass and sage. Cattle country, scarred here and there by poisonous salt pans, and the intertwined, weathered clusters of gumbo and sandstone buttes that make up the eastern Montana badlands...
Montana is also the setting for Bob Shaw's The Two-Timers.