Anderson And Larsson II

A writer of contemporary fiction must fit his fictional characters and settings into the real world somehow. London still exists even if Sherlock Holmes, James Bond etc never really lived there. How an author does this depends on what kind of story he has to tell. We know that Manse Everard of the Time Patrol has an apartment in New York in the second half of the twentieth century but we do not (need to) know his address whereas we do know that Mikael Blomkvist lives at Bellmansgatan 1, Stockholm. No doubt Stieg Larsson freaks, who would include me if I were there, enjoy guided tours of all the real locations mentioned in Larsson's Millennium Trilogy. We cannot do this with Poul Anderson's Archopolis.

I find the following passage particularly evocative. Blomkvist travels north by train:

"After Uppsala came the string of small industrial towns along the Norrland coast. Hedestad was one of the smaller ones, a little more than an hour north of Gavle."

-Stieg Larsson, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (London, 2008), p. 68.

Uppsala, Norrland and Gavle are real. Hedestad is not. We could travel just over an hour beyond Gavle and know that we were in the place where Hedestad is supposed to be. 

How might we generate the experience of arriving in Hedestad?

Virtual reality;

"emulation," i.e., conscious AI simulation, as in Poul Anderson's Genesis;

parallel universes where what is fictional on one Earth is real in another, like the Shakespearean timeline in Anderson's Midsummer Tempest.

But maybe all such speculations are what we call "going too far"? In the normal way of things, we simply enjoy reading about and imagining Hedestad. We know what Blomkvist experiences when he is there.