#fictional islands

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Imaginary Islands and Fictional ones....

Included among the various Imperial Cartological Society Members Who are ‘Permanently Indisposed’ (Like Milton in the Underworld, Coleridge in the ruins of Xanadu, and DeBegerac on a comet or the Moon) is Christopher ‘Kit’ Marlowe. Marlowe happens to be stuck on a Fictional Island, which according to Geoffrey Chaucer (who seems to have some familiarity with the subject. Or was it Poe? That would ma...I digress) is quite different from an Imaginary one. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m quite curious as to the particular difference between a Fictional Island and an Imaginary one. So let’s look at a Fictional Island, since apparently that’s the one he’s stuck on. Not any examples mind you. Not looking to Prospero’s Island, or any notable Island Nations found in the realm of Fantasy (man now I’m reminded of the difficulty in differentiating the Wits of Imagination and Fantasy. But that’s probably neither here nor there). So a Fictional Island. One thing to note is whether or not the term Fictional is capitalized or not. Is it a Fictional Island, or a fictional Island? I ask this since in CotIG there are individuals called Fictions. Including Hank Morgan, Robert Wace, Herman Melville, and Sir Walter Scott. They are individuals who only exist in one Universe. No Alternate universe selves for them. So if Fictional in that sense can apply to a Person, an it apply to an Island? I’m guessing it is fictional with a lower case f rather than the capital F. Mostly because if it was a Fictional Island, meaning one that is only found in one Universe, it shouldn’t be impossible to find Marlowe, meaning he wouldn’t be ‘Permanently Indisposed ‘. With that question of cases settled , we find ourselves taking a look at the word fictional. Looking at it simply, the word means relating to fiction or invented for use in fiction. Now, how the hell to apply that to an Island which exists just enough for a dude to get stuck on. One thought was it may exist in a book....and perhaps through some Ink Heart sort of circumstances, Marlowe has found himself trapped on Fictional Island. Or at Least a Fictional version of a real Island... To be honest...I’m not sure how this fictional Island would work. It must exist in some sense for him to have been marooned.....just a question of how...My guess is it may involve the Swift (and Dafoe, but I’m going to give credit to Swift) method of finding Buried Treasure. We know from Swift that the easiest way to find Buried Treasure is to basically make up an Island. Draw a vauge Islandish Shape. Give a few land marks here and there. Some mountains maybe, a cove here or there, whatever you care to decorate it. Draw a big fat X then start sailing (after being properly supplied of course). My guess is, Marlowe was tasked with going to such an Island for one reason or another. However after some mischance resulting in a Ship wreck, he was marooned on the Island. After some attempts he decided to wait to be rescued only for rescue to never come. After some time, and through some mischance or possibly sabotage by the Cabal and its Agents, the map he used was destroyed. Because of this (and there only being one map) it doesn’t really exist, not to mention no one is looking for it...and I doubt it was even properly Named (I imagine Marlowe has thoughtbof a name by now, but too late). So because of all this....the Island while existing remains fictional.....Man do I feel sorry for Marlowe now :(. An Imaginary Island though is much simpler. Something that exists in the Imagination. The question that follows is, who’s Imagination? Marlowe’s (if he was marooned on one)? Or someone else’s? Is it an act of Imagining that keeps it existing, or is it the reality invading Dreams of some other creature? When they wake will it disappear? Like in day Through the Looking Glass when Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum point out the Sleeping Red King, suggesting if he wakes up, the World will cease to exist. Or a better example being Link’s Awakening, where the Island Link is on is just a Dream of the Sleeping Windfish. The Island disappearing when said Windfish wakes up. One thing I wondered about was if a person not native to said Imaginary Island and becomes a part of the Imagination which makes it exist, would that non native aspect also disappear the moment no further thought is given to said Imagination? When I discussed this with my friend Mister C, he replied No they would not disappear because they weren’t originally thought up by whoever. On a somewhat related note, I remember there being a story about an Island of Witches that became shaped and influenced the the stories thought up by some Storyteller. I forget the name, but it was a rather nice story. No disappearing Islands though. Well, there’s my overthought analysis of single offhanded line, about a notable Playwright being Marooned on a Fictional Island. Make of this what you will. Al, the Chronographing Cottager.

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Featured Image: Colin Knowles, Flickr Creative Commons

Fictional island settings are attractive to both readers and writers. An island can be a perfect seaside paradise, but it can also be a place of isolation, where characters are often left to their own devices, far from civilization, other human beings and safety.

“Islands occupy a significant space in literature. They are more than scenic locations; they are literary devices whose natural boundaries help shape and contain narratives,” says writer Ben Myers. “Fictional islands exist as either lost paradises where poetry and contemplation happen, or places where law breaks down and conventional morality gets tested.”

Within the limited space of an island, situations that can easily be dealt with on the mainland can be magnified; a simple nuisance anywhere else can become a matter of life and death on an island. Because of their physical isolation, islands are also usually home to tight-knit communities. This can be a source of strength for its members, as well as a pressure-cooker where resentments fester and lies eat away at the community for years and even generations.

Because there is less room to maneuver and hide—both physically and figuratively—situations occurring on an island will more readily force a character or group of characters to look within or reveal their true selves to others. An island presents a limited space, where the option between “fight or flight” often becomes “fight or perish.”

Fictional islands are often even more effective devices, because a writer can tailor a fictional island to suit his/her purposes and set the mood for a book. In many of the following books, the fictional islands are important elements of the story, often becoming as memorable to the reader as many of the characters.

1. Shutter Island, Massachusetts

Shutter Island, Dennis Lehane, 2003

[/media-credit] Paramount Pictures

  “Out past them all, the one they called Shutter lay like something tossed from a Spanish galleon. Back then, in the spring of ’28, it had been left to itself in a riot of its own vegetation, and the fort that had stretched along its highest point was strangled in vines and topped with great clouds of moss.”

Shutter Island is the setting for Dennis Lehane’s novel by the same name, first published in 2003 and adapted by Paramount Pictures in 2010. The fictional island is located off the coast of Massachusetts on the outer edges of Boston Harbor. In the novel, the island is home to the Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where U.S. Marshall Teddy Daniels is sent to investigate the mysterious disappearance of one of the patients.

On Shutter Island, nature is bold and powerful, with rocky beaches, dense woods, hidden caves and steep cliffs. The island’s inhospitable nature is magnified by a colossal storm that hits soon after Teddy arrives, making it impossible to leave or even communicate with the mainland, heightening the feeling of isolation.

The manmade structures on the island are almost as inhospitable as nature is beyond the high walls of the compound. Once left to rot, Ashcliffe has reclaimed the old army fort once operational on the island. The fort has been turned into a hospital for the most dangerous of criminals. There is a constant feeling in air that Teddy is not being told about everything that goes on at Ashecliffe and that everything is not as it seems.

In an interview, Lehane said he was inspired by a mental hospital located in Boston Harbor’s Long Island, which he visited as a child. Long Island is still home to several institutional programs including several drug addiction treatment centers and homeless shelters. The brick buildings and ruins of Fort Andrews on nearby Peddocks Island were used as film locations for the 2010 adaptation.

  2. Waytansea Island, USA

Diary, Chuck Palahniuk, 2003

  [/media-credit] Arbiter News

  “Picture the way a little kid would draw a fish bone—the skeleton of a fish, with the skull at one end and the tail at the other.   The long spine in between, it’s crossed with ribbed bones. It’s the kind of fish skeleton you’d see in the mouth of a cartoon cat.

“Picture that fish as an island covered with houses.”

Waytansea Island is the fictional setting of Chuck Palahniuk’s 2003 novel, Diary. “Waytansea” could be a play on words, “wait and see,” which certainly seems to fit with the novel’s plot.

The island is a quaint summer resort, but it is overrun with tourists and losing its splendor, as the island’s formerly-wealthy residents have turned into an army of maids, waitresses and bellhops that cater to the tourists. They have all lost their houses and live in the top floor of the island’s only hotel, which has become a kind of barracks, housing the island’s eccentric permanent residents.

Waytansea is picturesque, the home of two famous painters (now deceased) and appears to be the perfect tourist paradise. But like everything Chuck Palahniuk writes, Waytansea has a very dark side. What appears quirky at first—like the fact that all the young men from the island wear women’s costume jewelry, or there is a forgotten statue garden on Waytansea point—soon turns macabre, in a very Palahniuk-like way.

3. Isla Nublar, Costa Rica

Michael Chrichton, Jurassic Park, 1990

[/media-credit] Christian Haugen, Flickr Creative Commons

  “There is a problem with that island. It is an accident waiting to happen.”

Isla Nublar is home to Jurassic Park and the setting of Michael Chrichton’s novel by the same name. According to the book, it is 120 miles off the Coast of Costa Rica in the Pacific Ocean. The name translates to “cloud island.”

Originally, the island itself is not unlike any other tropical Pacific island, with lush tropical forests and beautiful cliffs and sandy beaches—until Jack Hammond establishes Jurassic Park.

[/media-credit] Fobos92, Wikimedia Commons

Isla Nublar was inspired by Isla del Coco or Cocos Island, 300 miles off Costa Rica in the Pacific Ocean. Isla del Coco is a National Park, as well as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The 1993 film adaptation was actually shot in Hawaii on the island of Kaua’i.

  4. Hedeby Island, Sweden

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larson 2005

[/media-credit] Columbia Pictures

http://appnotes.weebly.com/patterson-84.html

  “I assume that something happened to Harriet here on the island […] and the list of finite suspects consists of the finite number of people trapped here. A sort of locked room mystery on an island format?”

Hedeby Island is the fictional island home to the Vanger family and where a lot of the action in Stieg Larson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo takes place. The book says it is about an hour’s drive north of Gävle, which would put it somewhere in the Gulf of Bothnia. Hedeby is close to land, connected to the town of Hedestad (also fictional), by a two-lane bridge. Other than by boat, the bridge is the only way on and off the island.

Most of the Vanger family either lives on the island or keeps a house there. At first, Hedeby appears to be just a wealthy compound, where each member’s house reflects his or her personality and is an expression of the Vanger family’s wealth. However, as the story continues, the reader learns of a number of horrible occurrences and terrible secrets kept in Hedeby and its seemingly inoffensive houses.

The island’s geography—the fact that the bridge is the only way on or off the island—helps deepen the mystery of Harriet Vagner’s disappearance and plays an important role in setting the mood for the book and moving the action towards the surprising ending.

[/media-credit] Bchwood at millenniumtrilogy wikia

5. ########## (Classified) Island

Beauty Queens, Libba Bray, 2011

  “To the right, the vast turquoise ocean bit at the shoreline, gobbling small mouthfuls of sand.  The sand itself, white as desert-bleached animal bones, stretched for miles, in one direction yielding to the jungle growth and, farther on, green mountains and lava-formed cliffs, which created an almost turtle-like wall running the length of the island.  Just behind the cliffs a volcano rose, vanishing into heavy cloud cover.  Its ruble could be heard on the beach, like a giant groaning in its sleep.”

The name of the island in Libba Bray’s Beauty Queens is classified and its location is unknown. When a plane full of teen beauty pageant contestants crashes in the middle of the jungle, the surviving girls believe they are on a deserted tropical island. They encounter a giant, diseased snake and a group of scary-looking totem poles, but they are too preoccupied with surviving to notice that the island is really a pivotal strategic location in The Corporation’s plan for world domination.

The island is a tropical paradise that hides The Corporation’s dark secrets. Once the home of an unnamed group of natives, the island has been secretly taken over by The Corporation in order to exploit its natural resources and its residents have been “relocated” elsewhere. The volcano that makes up the island’s main feature is really a James Bond-like secret Corporation lair, complete with a skull-shaped docking area and underground control room.

Beauty Queens has an answer for those who have wondered what would happen if the characters in Lord of the Flies were girls instead of boys. As the girls learn to survive on the island, they are forced to question who they are in a book that isn’t quite as shallow as it appears on the surface.

  6. Unnamed Island, Pacific Ocean

The Island of Dr. Moreau, HG Wells 1896

  “It was some time before I could summon resolution to go down through the trees and bushes upon the flank of the headland to the beach. At last I did it at a run; and as I emerged from the thicket upon the sand, I heard some other body come crashing after me. At that I completely lost my head with fear, and began running along the sand. Forthwith there came the swift patter of soft feet in pursuit. I gave a wild cry, and redoubled my pace. Some dim, black things about three or four times the size of rabbits went running or hopping up from the beach towards the bushes as I passed.”

The fictional island in H.G. Wells’ novel does not have a name, but the reader learns that it is a volcanic island on the Pacific Ocean covered with lush jungle. The only humans on the island appear to be Dr. Moreau; his assistant, Montgomery; and Edward Prendick, a shipwrecked Englishman.

Dr. Moreau has been on the island for 11 years and lives in an enclosed compound where he conducts gruesome experiments. Prendick is lodged in an outer room of the compound, but he can hear the anguished cries of the animals as Moreau is experimenting on them.

The atmosphere on the island beyond the compound is just as unsettling as the laboratory inside. While lush and beautiful, the island’s landscape is also dangerous and menacing, especially when Prendick makes contact with its unusual inhabitants.

  7. Island off the coast of Rabaul, Pacific Ocean

The Invention of Morel, Adolfo Bioy Casares, 1940

    “The island has four grassy ravines; there are large boulders in the ravine on the western side.  The museum, the chapel, and the swimming pool are up on the hill.  The buildings are modern, angular, unadorned, built of polished stone, which is somewhat incongruous with the architectural style.”

In Adolfo Bioy Casares’ 1940 scifi novel, The Invention of Morel, the main character is accused of a crime and sentenced to life in prison. He hears of an island which is said to be home to an incurable, lethal disease, and decides he would rather take his chances there than back home. He paddles to the island from Rabaul, Papua New Guinea.

The island itself is uninhabited, but is home to a strange chapel, museum and pool, apparently abandoned. The island is surrounded by a dreamy, strange atmosphere where the tallest trees are dead and a second sun and moon appear in the sky. The narrator soon finds that he is not alone on the island, but his quest to connect with and understand its strange inhabitants will lead to his ruin.

The dreamlike atmosphere on the island of The Invention of Morel is said to have inspired the 1961 French movie “Last Year at Marienbad.”

  8. Little Tall Island, Maine

Dolores Claiborne, “Home Delivery,” and “Storm of the Century,” Stephen King

  “In the fifties… when they had their summer parties – there were always different colored lanterns on the lawn… and I get the funniest chill. In the end the bright colors always go out of life, have you noticed that? In the end, things always look gray, like a dress that’s been washed too many times.”

Little Tall Island appears in several Stephen King stories. It is the home of Dolores Claiborne in the novel by the same name, and it is also the setting for the short story “Home Delivery,” and the miniseries “The Storm of the Century.”

In Dolores Claiborne, Little Tall Island has the feeling of all resort and seasonal towns, contrasting between the bright, busy summer and the bleak, lonely winter. Summer is when the island shows its best side, when the people who own the expensive summer homes are in residence; winter is when the town’s permanent residents are left to themselves, and the lies and secrets that hide just below the shiny veneer begin to come to the surface.

It is said that King was inspired by Mount Desert Island, Maine.

  9. Cairnholm Island, Wales

Mrs. Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, Ransom Riggs, 2011

[/media-credit] 20th Century Fox

  “It was my grandfather’s island.  Looming and bleak, folded in mist, guarded by a million screeching birds, it looked like some ancient fortress constructed by giants.  As I gazed up at ist sheer cliffs, tops disappearing in a reef of ghostly clouds, the idea that this was a magical place didn’t seem so ridiculous.”

Carinholm is a fictional island located in Wales, and the setting of Ransom Riggs’ debut novel, Mrs. Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. Named after the cairns that are found on it, Cairnholm is as remote as any permanently inhabited island can be, with no cell phone reception and only one telephone in the island’s only pub.

While it appears quaint and beautiful from a distance, Cairnholm is not as picturesque up close. Many of the houses are either abandoned or run down, as the population of the island continues to shrink and young people move to the mainland. Since there is no public electricity, generators run all day long in the small port town, filling the air with their noise and the smell of gasoline.

The island is only partially inhabited, and is rife with all kinds of natural hazards like bogs, and cliffs, as well as some unnatural ones that the reader gradually discovers as the story of Mrs. Peregrine and her peculiar wards unfolds.

[/media-credit] 20th Century Fox

10. Indian Island/ Soldier Island, Devon

And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie, 1939

  “She had pictured it differently, close to shore, crowned with a beautiful white house.  But there was no house visible, only the boldly silhouetted rock with its faint resemblance to a giant head.  There was something sinister about it.  She shivered faintly.”

Both the title of the book—considered Christie’s masterpiece—and the fictional island it is set on have undergone several name changes through the years, as certain words have become offensive. Despite the name changes, however, the island’s creepy character remains unchanged.

Located off the Devon coast, Soldier Island is shaped like a huge head bulging out of the water. The house is not visible from the mainland and is located on the other side of the island, where the cliffs slope into a more hospitable harbor. The house is unusual in that it is not the typical haunted house for an Angatha Christie murder mystery. Instead, the house is bright and modern, but this makes it even more creepy.

There are at least 406 editions of the book in at least 45 languages, as well as countless film, TV and stage adaptations. We love the cover art depicting the island throughout the years:

#Creepy Fictional Islands in #Literature #books Featured Image: Colin Knowles, Flickr Creative Commons Fictional island settings are attractive to both readers and writers.

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VIDEO: Top 10 Fictional Islands in Movies and TV

VIDEO: Top 10 Fictional Islands in Movies and TV

Pack your sunscreen and bathing suit; it’s time to get shipwrecked. Join http://www.WatchMojo.com as we count down our picks for the top 10 fictional islands in movies and TV.

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