Fictional setting

Fictional locations are places that exist only in fiction and not in reality, such as the Negaverse or Planet X. Writers may create and describe such places to serve as backdrop for their fictional works. Fictional locations are also created for use as settings in role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons. They may also be used for technical reasons in actual reality for use in the development of specifications, such as the fictional country of Bookland, which is used to allow EAN "country" codes 978 and 979 to be used for ISBN numbers assigned to books, and code 977 to be assigned for use for ISSN numbers on magazines and other periodicals.

Fictional locations vary greatly in their size. Very small places like a single room are kept out of the umbrella of fictional locations by convention, as are most single buildings. A fictional location can be the size of a university (H.P. Lovecraft's Miskatonic University), a town (Stephen King's Salem's Lot), a county (Raintree County), a state (Winnemac in various Sinclair Lewis stories), a large section of continent (as in north-western Middle-earth, which supposedly represents Europe), a whole planet (Anne McCaffrey's Pern), a whole galaxy (Isaac Asimov's Foundation books), even a multiverse (His Dark Materials). In a larger scale, occasionally the term alternate reality is used, but only if it is considered a variant of Earth rather than an original world. Austin Tappan Wright's Islandia has an invented continent, Karain, on our world.

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