How Long 'Til GooglePern?

That's PERN. Not the other thing you think you might've read.

Encyclopedia Week II continues with me heralding my love of books about fictional places. I know, I know... It's a big, beautiful world out there, but genre fiction makes such a big point of world-building, you can't help but be charmed by the detailed worlds created by writers and the enthusiasts who were allowed to fill in the blanks. Not everybody's a Tolkien, after all. Not every writer has the time to create their world's alphabets, folk songs and fashions through the ages.

When I was a pup, at the height of my science fiction and fantasy reading, I was lucky enough to be in the Science Fiction Book Club with my poor old mum paying the bills. The Club offered some great fake atlases and encyclopedias and I tried to get them when the price was right. One of these is the Atlas of Pern, and this despite the fact that I have yet to read any of Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders stories! Back then, I was a sucker for any map in any book, and this had a whole planet of locations to picture!Another precious piece of my collection is the Dune Encyclopedia, authorized by Frank Herbert (yay!) and totally contradicted by his son, Brian Herbert (boo!), filled with essays by Dr. Willis E. McNelly and others, in an alphabetical, encyclopedic manner. Though completely readable from cover to cover as a sort of chronicle, there is some insane detail in this book. How the Great Houses voted on important issues, just what religions influenced the Orange Catholic Bible, poetry and song à la Tolkien, linguistics (Fremen looks Arabic of course), and more. You've got biographies for characters that were never developped, illustations, and more fake footnotes than a Borges short story. It's what the book of Tlon would have been like, and as Herbert himself says, both amusing and fascinating.

In this age of wikis, the fan encyclopedia has gone the way of the internet, I suppose. Nothing like a real book in your hands to make a place seem real. After all, who creates history books and atlases about fake places? Wikis still stick very much to the "canon" though, and never really reach the level of the Dune Encyclopedia. And what about atlases? We have GoogleEarth technology! Why isn't it put to use mapping other planets? Where's our GooglePern, GoogleWorldofGreyhawk, GoogleRiverworld?

Seed sown. I'll be waiting.