There’s nothing like reading to discover new places, but
there’s something special about visiting places you already know through a
book. I remember reading Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast while spending a summer
abroad in Paris, and seeing the city through his eyes while I was discovering
it through my own was an experience I’ll always value. It’s a rare joy to look
through the lens of a gifted writer into a place you love, and see it in a
whole new way.
I was born and raised in Louisiana, but for over a decade
now, I’ve lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. I feel lucky that both places serve
as settings for more than their fair share of stories, especially stories of
the supernatural variety. Reading fantasy or science fiction set in San
Francisco or New Orleans is like going through a rabbit hole to an alternate
dimension.
One of my favorite ways to look at San Francisco is through
the literary lens of William Gibson. He might be most famous for writing Tokyo
and London, but his “Bridge Trilogy” (Virtual
Light, Idoru, and All Tomorrow’s Parties) takes place partially in San
Francisco, and he does fascinating things with the Oakland Bay Bridge. It
becomes a community all it’s own, filled in like a sideways skyscraper and
populated with squatters and some near-future equivalent of food trucks. I
never drive across it without remembering his gritty vision of its fate.
There are plenty of other takes on San Francisco and its
surrounding towns. Christopher Moore delivers the whole Bay Area in intimate (and
hilarious) detail. He even sets part of Bloodsucking Fiends and its sequels in
the Safeway where I used to buy my groceries. Seanan McGuire (and her alter ego, Mira Grant)
is another author who knows and writes the Bay Area beautifully. There’s a
scene in her urban fantasy Rosemary and Rue that takes place in the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden
Gate Park, and everything from the ticket kiosk to the landscaping was exactly as I remembered it. (Except for the faeries.)
I'm glad I haven't run into any vampires in the produce aisle or mischievous Fae in the botanical gardens, but imagining them there sure is fun. What are some of your favorite stories set in places you’ve
called home?
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A.J. Larrieu is the author of Anchored and the upcoming Twisted
Miracles, the first book in her urban fantasy series, The Shadowminds. She's a Southerner, a chocolate addict, and an incurable nerd. Find
out more at www.ajlarrieu.com.
I live in Edmonton, Alberta, which hasn't been featured very often, but I do vividly remember Sean Stewart's Night Watch and a hair-raising scene on Edmonton's High Level Bridge--magic has come back into the world and at a certain age children are taken to the bridge. Those with magic cross and don't come back.
ReplyDeleteOoo, creepy! I haven't read this yet, but I hear it's excellent.
DeleteDorothy L. Sayers' Gaudy Night is wonderful in its Oxford-ness.
ReplyDeleteOh, good one. I'm a sucker for British mysteries. My mother loved them, so it was the first genre (sub-genre?) I read.
DeleteDiana Gabaldon's Outlander series is a big favorite of mine; I especially love the Scottish highland settings, and Edinburgh. We later get to experience Paris, N. Carolina, Philadelphia... but I'll take Scotland.
ReplyDeleteOh, I'll take Scotland, too, especially with Jamie Fraser in it :)
DeleteThere are a BUNCH of books set in Seattle, including, well, _mine_--but of the ones that aren't written by me, I'm quite fond of Kat Richardson's Greywalker series as well as Cherie Priest's Boneshaker.
ReplyDeleteI particularly liked how Boneshaker got the thing we have on downtown street corners right, where you can see the names of the streets set into the sidewalk.
I haven't read Priest's Boneshaker, but I adored Bloodshot, and I think that was set in Seattle? So cool that yours are, too!
DeleteMy Seattle book will probably always be Megan Lindholm's _Wizard of the Pigeons_, much as I enjoy Angela's Warder universe. I've not read much fiction set in my other city of Napoli, but Mary Gentle's _The Black Opera_ is pretty dang cool.
ReplyDeleteI hadn't heard of either of these, but I just checked out Wizard of the Pigeons, and the blurb reminds me a little of Kate Griffin's A Madness of Angels, which I loved. It looks excellent! (And I think living in Napoli sounds better than reading about it any day... :)
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