This is what happens when my brain wanders...

[barbarienne]

Was JRR Tolkien the first person to write a book in a wholly-created world?

There's plenty of fantasy and SF before 1939 (when The Hobbit was published), but when I think of any, it all takes place on Earth (or our moon, or possibly other planets in our solar system

Comments

[mkhobson]

How about Wonderland, Alice In? Maybe that doesn't count because it starts off in our world.

[barbarienne]

Yeah, it's not quite the same thing. In context, our world is the "real" world, and Wonderland is some sort of dream-world (as discovered at the end, anyway). Wonderland (and the mirror universe in Through the Looking Glass) doesn't exist in any coherent rules-based way--practically the opposite!

Hmmm. This may be the reverse of the "satire exception" for humor in SFF. Because Carroll's created worlds exist to be lessons in mathematics/logic/satire, they aren't what I would call "fully realized."

Contrast with, say, Zelazny's Amber. Sure, our world exists, but Amber is fully created as its own place, with logic and systems and so on. The Amber universe is chaotic and ever-changing, sure, but it's not arbitrary like Carroll's worlds.

[maradydd]

Damn, beat me to it.

[jaylake]

Off the top of my head, without actually checking dates:

ER Eddison, The Worm Ourobouros

William Morris, The Well at the World's End

Also, lots of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard

Hell, John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress. Thomas More's Utopia.

[barbarienne]

Well, it came up in the context of contemporary* fantasy set in created worlds that are derivative of Tolkien. We do tend to, well, not blame him precisely, but point to LOTR as the work that spawned a generation of copycat books featuring a band of adventurers of mixed species going after plot coupons to destroy some Big Evil.

The Sword of Shanarra was mentioned. :-)

The question also came up regarding the causal factor of D&D.

I'm trying to pin down an ur-text, and I think there's a definite funnel at Tolkien; which is to say teenagers don't discover the older works until after they've been seduced by LOTR.

I wonder if Harry Potter will have that effect on the next generation. Will there be teenagers thirty or fifty years from now testing their wings as new writers by following patterns inspired by JK Rowling?

*i.e. since 1970 or so

[sartorias]

A lot of the travel books kicked off after Swift's Gulliver were less satirical and more about the weird, etc, as I recall.

[sartorias]

I was going to add that Tolkien's Middle-Earth reminds me more of the epics' weird lands of dragons and mages, and the Arthurian tales with their shadow worlds of magic overlying ours.