For this one I’d say pretty much any world from a sci-fi or post-apocalyptic novel. Even some fantasy worlds, like the various landscapes in The Lord of the Rings, are not ones I’d want to spend time in, fraught as they are with unexpected danger. I sometimes even have trouble reading about them because the threatening landscapes feel threatening in my mind as I read. The same goes for a lot of historical times and places. It’s tempting to romanticize at least some of the bygone eras – Austen’s England, the London of so many great classics. Particularly when I was young I used to love poring over books of clothing from different periods, fascinated by the sweeping gowns and jewels. But now I also know that these times were full of horrible things. Those long, elegant dresses often dragged through all kinds of mess in the street. They also came with restrictive corsets that caused damage to women’s bodies. And that’s the upper class – class divides were huge back then, and a vast majority of people were scraping by on very little, often living in horrible conditions. Malnutrition was common, along with infections from animal and insect bites and poor hygiene. There were all kinds of horrible beliefs in medical care as well – some of the “treatments” were worse than the ills they tried to treat, and I can’t even imagine having surgery before the importance of cleaning instruments and hands was known, and without anesthetic. And that’s not even bringing in the issues women had to deal with – no legal rights to speak of, being literal property, depending on male relatives or husbands for everything and having no control over pregnancies or birth – which often didn’t go well for the mother or infant. No, I definitely wouldn’t want to go back to pretty much any point in history, since things now aren’t great but are much better even in just the past hundred years for women, in particular. So basically I don’t want to go to any other made up worlds, and I don’t want to go to ours in any other period. I don’t think I’d last long in either.
What about you guys? Are there any worlds you particularly wouldn’t want to visit?
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