the area gazetteer:
Countries
regions, states, provinces, shires...

...in sf scenes

Afghanistan:
After the Patagonian disaster, the Second Dark Age, which lasts for most of the next ten million years as recounted by Olaf Stapledon in Last And First Men (1930), saw the topography of the wounded Earth undergo continuing long-drawn-out violence:
    ...The huge mass of Tibet sank deeply into the disturbed foundations, lunged West, and buckled Afghanistan into a range of peaks nearly forty thousand feet above the sea...  

Alabama, USA:
Thomas Parker, folklorist, in Clifford Simak's The Whistling Well (1980), mentions the Devil to a former preacher, and gets an answer that suggests an evil existed on Earth before Man.
    ...Sitting there, he remembered the old black man he had talked with one afternoon, deep in Alabama, sitting on the ramshackle porch of the neat, ramshackle house, with the shade of a chinaberry tree shielding them from the heat of the late-afternoon sun.  The old man sat easily in his chair, every now and then twirling the cane he held, its point against the porch floor, holding it easily by the shaft, twirling it every now and then, so that the crook of it went round and round.
    "If you're going to write your book the way it should be written," the old black man had said, "you got to look deeper than the Devil..."       

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...

the Cotswolds, England:
In Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud (1957) this is the location of the refuge and research centre where the scientists recruited by Professor Chris Kingsley learn to communicate with the gaseous intruder to the Solar System, and where they wait out the disasters caused by the Cloud's advent. 
The manor house of Nortonstowe is set in open parkland, high in the Cotswolds not far from the steep western scarp.  The land around is fertile.  When it was first proposed to turn the manor into "one of those Government places" there was a considerable measure of opposition both locally and in newspapers throughout Gloucestershire.  But the Government had its way, as it does in such matters.  The "locals" were somewhat mollified when they heard that the new "place" was to be agricultural in orientation and that farmers could look to it for advice...     
In Bob Shaw's The Peace Machine (1971, 1985) mathematician Lucas Hutchman is on the run after having invented a way to explode nuclear weapons remotely: 
The whole broad back of the country lay before him, daunting in its size, complexity, and possibilities of danger.  He had been accustomed to thinking of Britain as a cosy little island, a crowded patch of grass which scarcely afforded a jetliner space to trim for level flight before it was time for it to nestle down again.  Now, suddenly, the land was huge and misty, crawling with menace, magnified in inverse proportion to the number of human beings to whom he could turn for help...
    ...By midday Hutchman was deep in the Tolkien-land of the Cotswolds, swishing through villages of honey-coloured stone which seemed to have grown by some natural process rather than artifice.  Domesticated valleys shone in pale tints beneath veils of white mist.  He surveyed the countryside in detached gloom, his brain seething with regrets and reconsiderations, until the mention of his name on a newscast brought him back to the minute-by-minute business of living...      

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...                

Iowa, USA:
...I stopped in a bar and looked at a newscast.  There was no news from Iowa, but when is there any news from Iowa?   
                                                   Robert A Heinlein, The Puppet Masters (1951)

Labrador, Canada:
[See 2675.]
This is the province inhabited by the post-apocalyptic population described in John Wyndham's 1955 novel The Chrysalids.
   The world... was generally thought to be a pretty big place, and probably round.  The civilized part of it - of which Waknuk was only a small district - was called Labrador.  This was thought to be the Old People's name for it, though that was not very certain.  Round most of Labrador there was a great deal of water called the sea... if you were to go three hundred miles or so east, north, or north-west you would come to it sooner or later.  But south-west or south, you wouldn't; you'd get to the Fringes and then the Badlands, which would kill you...  
The province also features in Isaac Asimov's tale of the rash over-use of probability worlds, Living Space (Science Fiction, May 1956), in which an accountant, Clarence Rimbro, sometime in the fifth millennium, finds (to his indignation) that his very own probability-Earth is shared by the inhabitants of another.
    ...The situation of the dwelling place was in that region which on Earth proper would be called Labrador.  (It was Labrador here, too, really.  It had been calculated that in not more than one out of a quadrillion or so Earths were there significant changes in the geological development.  The continents were everywhere recognizable down to quite small details.)   

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 scene of Bob Shaw's The Two-Timers (1968), set in the year 1981 except for flashbacks.  (The city in the text is not named.)  Jack Breton has managed to go back nine years to save his wife from a killer, but in doing so has created a parallel time-track.
   ...As he reached the outskirts of the city Breton distracted himself by looking for visible differences between the Time B world and his memory of the same area in Time A.  But things appeared no different - there was the same penumbra of lumber yards, used-car lots, lonely little banks stranded far away from their parent organizations, knots of bravely-lit stores, diners, and occasional incongruous groups of houses...
    When the car had shaken off the city and was arrowing through the Montana prairie, Breton increased speed, and insects began to splatter the windshield.  A coppery sun was setting to his left, withdrawing its light from a peacock-green sky.  Far off to the east something flickered above the horizon...   
Three chapters later the meteor showers (connected, though Breton does not know this yet, with changes in the gravitational constant due to his tampering with time) have increased to a disturbing extent.
    ...He reached the crest of the ridge and far away to his left saw topaz fragments of flame stirring on the sloping grasslands.
    Within a matter of minutes the whole area would be overrun with curious sightseers.  Breton knew the mentality of the average Montana city-dweller - even a simple brushfire was enough to bring them pouring out of their dessicated houses, ridiculously grateful at having somewhere to go in their brand-new cars, which - big and fast though they were - were unable to perform their function as magic carpets in the face of the prairie vastness...   

New Hampshire, USA:
Whiteford, N.H., in Bob Shaw's Fire Pattern (1984), appears to be non-existent, so this entry is for the State rather than the town.  The novel's first four chapters are set in the State and give a generally pleasant impression of it, though it is the scene of stunning events for science-journalist Ray Jerome, who is researching cases of spontaneous human combustion.  He seeks a Doctor Pitman in the Albany district of Whiteford:
    ...Albany was an exclusive enclave where, as a kind of reaction to the strict grid pattern of the rest of the town, the roads had been laid out in meandering curves and given English county names instead of numbers...  
    - and has no peace from then on.

the Ozarks, mostly Missouri and Arkansas, USA:
In this rural setting a researcher encounters the telekinetic "witch"-girl Abbie, in the novella by James E Gunn, Wherever You May Be (Galaxy, May 1953).
   A tinkling of little silver bells.  Laughter?  Matt looked up quickly, angrily.  The woods were thin along the top of this Ozark ridge.  Descending to the lake, sparkling cool and blue far below, they grew thicker, but the only one near was the young girl shuffling through the dust several hundred yards beyond the crippled car.  And her head was bent down to watch her way.
Much further futureward is the scene depicted by Stanley G Weinbaum in his posthumously published Dawn of Flame (Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1939):
   He passed the place where the great steel road of the Ancients had been, now only two rusty streaks and a row of decayed logs.  Beside it was the mossy heap of stones that had been an ancient structure in the days before the Dark Centuries, three hundred years ago, when Ozarky had been a part of the old state of M'souri.
   They had been mighty sorcerers, those ancients; their steel roads went everywhere, and everywhere were the ruins of their towns, built it was said, by a magic that lifted weights...    

Patagonia:
Olaf Stapledon's Last And First Men (1930) describes - in the chapter "The Fall of the First Men" - how, early in the ten-million-year Dark Age that stretches between the First and Second Men, a brief rebirth of civilization occurs about a hundred thousand years after the disastrous demise of the first World State.  
    ...Complex climatic changes had rendered the southern part of South America a fit nursery for civilization.  Further, an immense warping off the earth's crust to the east and south of Patagonia had turned what was once a relatively shallow region of the ocean into a vast new land connecting America with Antarctica by way of the former Falkland Islands and South Georgia, and stretching thence east and north-east into the heart of the Atlantic.
    It also happened that in South America the racial conditions were more favourable than elsewhere.  After the fall of the First World State the European element in this region had dwindled, and the ancient "Indian" and Peruvian stock had come into dominance.  Many thousands of years earlier, this race had achieved a primitive civilization of its own...  Superficially Americanized, it remained fundamentally "Indian"...  had lain dormant like a seed in winter...  From the interaction of this ancient primitive culture and the many other racial elements left over in the continent from the old cosmopolitan civilization, civil life was to begin once more.  Thus in a manner the Incas were at last to triumph over their conquerors.
    Various causes, then, combined in South America, and especially in the new and virgin plains of Patagonia, to bring the First Dark Age to an end.  The great theme of mind began to repeat itself...     
(The civilization of Patagonia ends, however, with a disaster which almost wipes out all life on Earth.)

the Peak District, (mostly in) Derbyshire, England:
This area is the site of Glyn Weston's time-travel experiments, in Seeker of Tomorrow (Astounding Stories, July 1937) by Eric Frank Russell and Leslie J Johnson.
...I had set up my laboratory in the wilds of the Peak District of Derbyshire, in England, where work could be carried on with the minumum of interference.  From this laboratory I had dispatched into the unknown, presumably the future, a multitude of objects...  In no case could I bring back anything I had made to vanish.  Once gone, the subject was gone forever.  There was no way of discovering exactly where it had gone.  There was nothing but to take a risk and go myself...    

Scotland:
In chapter 2 of David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus (1920) we first hear mention of Starkness Observatory, the point of departure for the amazing adventure on Tormance, the Arcturian planet.  The protagonist, Maskull, asks where Starkness is and is simply told, "On the northeast coast of Scotland.  Curious discoveries are made there from time to time." 
Chapter 3 begins, 
    A couple of days later, at two o'clock in the afternoon, Maskull and Nightspore arrived at Starkness Observatory, having covered the seven miles from Haillar Station on foot.  The road, very wild and lonely, ran for the greater part of the way near the edge of rather lofty cliffs, within sight of the North Sea.  The sun shone, but a brisk east wind was blowing and the air was salt and cold.  The dark green waves were flecked with white.  Throughout the walk, they were accompanied by the plaitive, beautiful crying of the gulls.
    The observatory presented itself to their eyes as a self-contained little community, without neighbours, and perched on the extreme edge of the land...   
The following fifteen pages of increasingly spine-tingling narrative are a fitting prelude to the hallucinatory wonder of Tormance itself.   

Tibet:
See Afghanistan.

Wisconsin, USA:
The southwestern corner of the State is Simak country.  In The Whistling Well (1980) we're introduced to the narrator's ancestral land before we meet the stunning mystery that has lain in wait since the pre-human past.
    ...The ridge itself was bare of trees, except for a few that still clustered around the sites of homesteads, the homesteads now gone, burned down or weathered away or fallen with the passage of the years.  In time long past, there might have been trees, but more than a hundred years ago, if there had been any, they had fallen to the ax to clear the land for fields.  The fields were still here, but no longer fields: they had known no plow for decades...
    ...Here his ancestors had walked the land, the last of many who had walked it.  For millions of years unknown, perhaps unsuspected, creatures had walked along this ridge.  The land was unchanging, geologically ancient, a sentinel of land standing as a milepost amidst other lands that had been forever changing.  No great mountain-building surges had distorted it, no glacial action had ground it down, no intercontinental seas had crept over it.  For hundreds of millions of years, it had been a freestanding land.  It had stayed as it was through all that time, with only the slow and subtle changes brought by weathering...   
For more on Simak country see America's own haunting.

the Yang-tze, China:
In roughly ten million years' time humanity will achieve a resurgence in the form of the cultures of the Second Men, in Olaf Stapledon's vast future history, Last And First Men (1930).  On their way up, these improved humans suffered many twists of fortune.
    ...For some thousands of years the race remained in a most precarious condition, now almost dying out, now rapidly attaining an extravagant kind of culture in some region where physical nature happened to be peculiarly favourable.  One of these precarious flashes of spirit occurred in the Yang-tze valley as a sudden and brief effulgence of city states peopled by neurotics, geniuses and imbeciles.  The lasting upshot of this civilization was a brilliant literature of despair, dominated by a sense of the difference between the actual and the potential in man and the universe.  Later, when the race had attained its noontide glory, it was wont to brood upon this tragic voice from the past in order to remind itself of the underlying horror of existence...