This Most Unfrabjous Day
The word fictionaut fascinates me.
Most recognisably similar to astronaut. From 'nautes', greek for sailor, dictionary.com tells me. Someone who sails space, travels through space. Fictionaut, someone who sails through fiction, who enters fiction, and journeys there.
In some small sense it's what we do every time we read a book, a short story or a micro-fiction. I can't help but imagine more of the world. Sometimes I will put the book down a moment and the story carries on in my head, I am so lost in a world that the words distract me. I honestly yearn for the ability to truly travel in such a fashion, to create a world and enter it. Or to enter someone else's world and explore it.
There is a lot of fiction that explores this concept. In Warren Ellis' excellent Planetary series their is an expedition into a fictional world, similarly in Grant Morrison's Filth, characters fly straight out of the page of a comic into the 'real world', into the comic you are reading (to the characters in the comic they fly out of, they simply seem to have disappeared). Mike Carey's Unwritten is all about blurring the lines between fiction and the real world. Three excellent series, from three of my favourite authors.
If you prefer less pictures... Then you could try Jasper Fforde's Eyre Affair. I'm sure there are more I haven't read, or have forgotten, too.
I think it would be interesting to review books as if you had actually travelled into them, an eyewitness to the events of the book. A good tell of how immersed in the world the author can get you.
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Talking about This Most Unfrabjous day in particular now... I could probably have removed the few lines after the stars. However, unlike the lines I removed from the previous story, I think these lines create more without denotatively telling you how it is, a further mystery to lodge itself in your mind. The final lines are not just so much exposition as the ones I removed from This Alien Land were.
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