GeofictionGeofiction is a word to describe the making up of cities, countries, worlds and their societies, in other words: the geography of fictitious places.
When I was around ten years old, in my atlas there was a country without a name at the border between Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Later I learned that this was a strip of neutral area between the two countries, but I was intrigued and devised a country there. I think in making up facts about that country I was inspired by a story in the Dutch weekly magazine Donald Duck. It must have been around 1979, and the country's name was Kierewiet (which means 'crazy' in Dutch).
Later I made up a country on an island called Terdia (written as Terdië or Terdye in Dutch). I believe that somewhere in a cupboard I still have some lessons in the language Terdian.
Duckburg is a form of geofiction (this card is from the website of the Dutch weekly magazine Donald Duck).
When I was twelve I had my first lessons in Latin in school myself, and I immediately started to make up a new language of my own, called Vixatisch (in English that would be 'Vixatian'). Quite soon it became apparent that this language should be spoken by people who called themselves Vixatians and who lived in a country called Vixati, and thus the stories about this country and its inhabitants grew very rapidly. Especially after my mother had died I spent many hours working on Vixati, which became my first big fictitious country.
But I grew faster than Vixati did, and it became apparent that the description of the country was full of illogical facts. In short it was a country with a western-like culture, but with inhabitants who did respect eachother and their surroundings and which was richer even than a typical country in the western world. And there was no reverse to that medal. Vixati had no army. It was on the continent Augisti, which was too big to really fit on Earth. It was unknown however where it did lie, if that was not on Earth. I had always assumed that it would be possible to get on a plane in Europe and fly to Vixati. These problems remained unsolved.
After Vixati had run ashore in 1988, when I moved to Utrecht, the new fictitious country Estave came into being. It was bigger than Vixati had been and it was at least just as rich, but it did have a large conservative political party and an army. Obviously, one who gathers riches need to invest in armaments as well. But Estave never really came to life, and washed ashore after just one year.
In June 1990 I started work on a new fictitious country, which I called Ubilan and which rapidly became my second big fictitious country. Ubilan was on the continent Gmune, on the planet Nmonige. The culture of Ubilan had just recently passed into the iron age. I wrote a Book of the gods, full of magical stories from the creation of the world by the thirty-six gods of the Ivodian religion until the present time. And I compiled extensive lists with the name of the monarchs of the countries in Gmune, with their years of birth, death and government, and their most important doings.
But eventually Ubilan encoutered similar problems as Vixati had done, however thorough I had thought it all through from the start. Yet from a very early stage errors had slipped into the description of Ubilan, one of which were the illogical names. The language in Ubilan, the Irbiox, had by now grown large enough to see that many of the names in Gmune couldn't be Irbiox-names. I tried to sweep all names that looked alike together and make another language for it, but it was way too much work, and right in the middle of it all I despondently gave up.
After that I was even more attentive in building a new fictitious country, in the hope I might avoid all catches. But at the same time I had grown more aware of the fact that illogical facts cannot be avoided. Some will always be there and need to be accepted. After having made up the worlds called Foros and Ojmola, trying to build the language and history of the country at the same pace, out of these worlds Caltura came into being. Caltura, a municipal society on the continent Iliria on the planet Mimia (this website is named after that planet), was my third big fictitious country. Just like Ubilan also Caltura had only since a small number of centuries passed into the iron age. But Caltura never really came to live, and nowadays it is inactive.
Pages about my fictitious countries:
 | Vixati |
 | Ubilan |
 | Caltura |
Pages concerning geofiction-related subjects:
 | a list of inspiring literature on the subject of geofiction |
 | an (incomplete) summary of my fictitious countries |
 | a story I compiled from many different sources about the origin of Earth (only in Dutch) |
 | the transcript of an interview Bas van Eerd did with me in November 2004, entitled De vrijheid van het verzinnen (only in Dutch) |
