TTT 59 – Books That Have Worlds Based On Our Own

Sometimes there are days where I am completely stuck as to what to choose for a specific fill in prompt as they are provided to us by The Broke and the Bookish. This time it was a setting we had to fill in ourselves. I kept staring at my books but I could not find a spark of creativity for this Tuesday.

In the end I choose to go with books that have worlds based on our own. With this I mean that there are some books out there that have worlds that are so close to ours but there have been changes made to the history or other things so that it isn’t quite our world anymore. It is an interesting addition to (urban) fantasy. And yet I could still think of so few. Le sigh.

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• Bartimaeus trilogy by Jonathan Stroud
  The world of Bartimaeus is set in our world, in England for the most part. However Stroud has changed various things about our history. For instance magic is common knowledge. And through magic being known some events in our history have changed. For instance the British Empire is in war with the American colonies.
• Lockwood and Co. by Jonathan Stroud
  Stroud sure likes to play with our world. Because of the problem (the ghosts) in this book the reality of our world has changed. It seems to be set in modern day London, but because of the problem you can’t quite say if it is. Children are being taught very differently now based on their talent. So while it seems like our world, things are very different.
• The Others by Anne Bishop
  The Others is set in our world but the history has been radically changed by the add of the Others who are more dominant over the world than we humans are. A lot of different changes have been made like different names for weekdays and places around the world. Yet humans still continued to evolve to have cars and electricity.
• Discworld by Terry Pratchett
  While Discworld is a fantasy world in its own and there is the different universe called Roundworld which is basically our world, Discworld is clearly a satire of our world. I think that is the biggest appeal of this series. So for that I felt it deserved a place on this list even though technically doesn’t fit with my setting theme but you can forgive me for that, right?