WORLDS NUMBERLESS AND STRANGE (The Strange)

RESOURCES AND
INSPIRATION

The following list attempts to identify the major works of fiction that seeded the named recursions, though of course sometimes it’simpossible to fully know where one’s ideas spring from. The synthesis of what has gone before is the soul of creativity, and we want to not only credit those sources but also share them so they can inspire you as well.

Atlantis:
Critias, Plato;
Arion, Lord of Atlantis (1982 comic book series)

Avalon:
The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley;
Camelot (1967 movie)

Borderlands of Sol:
Dark as Day,
The Ganymede Club,
Cold as Ice, Charles Sheffield;
Known Space novels, Larry Niven

Camelot Le Morte:
Camelot (1967 movie);
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975 movie);
The Once and Future King, T.H. White;
The Crystal Cave, Mary Stewart

Cyberscape:
Halting State, Charles Stross;
Neuromancer, William Gibson

Cygnus Station:
The Black Hole (1979 movie);
Interstellar (2014 movie)

Entopia:
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989 movie)

Eschatos:
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams;
Raft, Ring, and other Xeelee Sequence novels, Stephen Baxter

Flatland:
Flatland, Edwin Abbott

Gingerbread House:
Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Brothers Grimm

Gothic Playground:
Dracula, Bram Stoker;
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

Kiplingverse:
The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling

Magician’s Sanctum:
Supernatural (2005 TV series);
Doctor Strange comics, Steve Ditko

Manifest Silicon:
The Golden Age, John Wright;
Diaspora, Greg Egan

Mesozoica:
The Lost World (1960 movie);
Land of the Lost (1974 TV series)

Microcosmica:
Inner Space (1987 movie);
Fantastic Voyage (1966 movie)

New Centropolis:
All the superhero comics and all the novels about superheroes, with special callout to
Soon I Will Be Invincible, Austin Grossman

Panopticon:
1984, George Orwell;
Logan’s Run (1976 movie);
Paranoia (1984 RPG)

Pellucidar:
Pellucidar, Edgar Rice Burroughs

Posthuman Apocalypse:
Babylon 5 (1994 TV series);
Ilium, Dan Simmons

Rebel Galaxy:
Star Wars (1977 movie);
Firefly (2002 television series)

Ring:
Halo (Xbox game),
Ringworld
and The Ringworld Engineers, Larry Niven

Riverside:
The Lost City of Z, David Grann

R’lyeh:
“The Call of Cthulhu,” H. P. Lovecraft

Samurai Sky:
Cowboy Bebop (1998 TV series);
Samurai Champloo (2004 TV series)

Seishin Shore:
Spirited Away,
My Neighbor Totoro,
Grave of the Fireflies,
and most every other Hayao Miyazaki production.

Starship Heinlein:
“For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky” (Star Trek TV series);
Dust, Elizabeth Bear;
Pandorum (2009 movie)

Strawberry Fayre:
Watership Down, Richard Adams

Sunspot Meadows:
Up the Walls of the World, James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Bradley Sheldon)

Sword Realms:
All my D&D yesterdays

Sycorax Island:
The Tempest, Shakespeare

Telluria:
Radix, A. A. Attanasio;
Children of Hastur, Marion Zimmer Bradley

Urban Wizardry:
Rivers of London novels, Ben Aaronovitch;
Alex Verus novels, Benedict Jacka;
Harry Dresden novels, Jim Butcher;
Greywalker novels, Kat Richardson

War of the Worlds:
The War of the Worlds, H. G. Wells

Wrecked Starship:
Lost in Space (1965 TV series; 1998 movie);
Event Horizon (1997 movie);
Startide Rising, David Brin

Wuxia City:
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000 movie);
Big Trouble in Little China (1986 movie)

Zed America: All the zombie movies, novels, and short stories, with special callout to the Newsflesh novels by Mira Grant