Going off the Map: Lost Lands of Giants and Mystery

Fictional countries are tough to pull off, especially these days, when the entire world is mapped and surveilled from above by government satellites and Google Earth.

In ancient times and until fairly recently, it was simple to imagine sailing a ship just over the horizon, and discovering some heretofore undiscovered land, populated by all manner of strange and exotic creatures, and humans given to strange customs.

Even in the modern era, at the height of the Cold War with the USSR, it was possible to imagine a deserted island three hours distant from Hawaii, where Gilligan and his passengers could be lost forever. When the producers of Lost needed an island they made theirs mystically able to avoid detection and move about at will, because it strained credulity to imagine an island that just sat there would not eventually be found.

Stan Lee introduced the country of Latveria in the Fantastic Four in 1962, also during the cold war. This country, ruled by the evil Dr. Doom, was eventually located somewhere in the Eastern Bloc, countries controlled by the USSR, but Doom’s Latveria was able to repel the Soviet forces through his use of super science and sorcery. This made Latveria one small country, free of Soviet rule, but not free in any real sense, since Doom was a dictator.

What makes a fictional country like Latveria difficult to pull off is that Europe is only so big, and is already well mapped. Placing even a small country somewhere means taking territory away from one or more real countries that actually exist. As it happens, present continuity places Latveria between Hungary, Romania and Serbia, borrowing land from all three places. (To complicate matters further, bordering the south of Latveria is Symkaria, another fictional country.)

L Frank Baum originally located the Land of Oz somewhere in the Western United States, but later expanded this world into an island or continent that existed somewhere between the United States and Australia. More recently Oz is imagined to be in another dimension, a fairy world, which, like the island in Lost, allows it to be both accessible and inaccessible at the same time. 

Jonathan Swift imagined Brobdingnag, his land of giants, to occupy a peninsula connected to the  northwestern part of North America. Swift’s placement of Brobdingnag takes up the territory of Alaska, part of Russia, and the Bering Strait. These days no one takes Swift seriously as to a land of giants, but there is some indication that like Oz and the island in Lost, Brobdignag has also moved of the map, so to speak, and into other dimensions.

The series Land of the Giants features the crew of the spacecraft the Spindrift encountering a cosmic storm of some kind and being transported to a world where the humans are approximately twelve times the size we are here. The crew has not been miniaturized, they are on a giant world. This world is similar to our own, but it is run by a totalitarian government. These giants hunt the people from Earth, because of their advanced technology. 

The idea that the Land of the Giants is in fact Brobdingnag is not far fetched. Gulliver visited the peninsula in 1703, and the Spindrift crashed there in 1983, more than enough time for both Earth and Brobdingnag to change politically and scientifically. In the course of the series we learn of several other visitors to this world, crashed ships with survivors that our little humans meet up with.

What is most worrisome is that the Giants of Brobdingnag are aware of Earth, and covet our advanced technology.  One giant said, “Maybe we can find the home planet of these little people. It may be a very tiny planet, but rich beyond our dreams.”

Sometimes it is for the best that our fictional worlds remain fictional.