If you could live in any fictional world, what world would you live in and why?

If you could live in any fictional world, what world would you live in and why?

First, a clarification.

I interpreted the question as what society you want to live in, which seemed the right way to rule out stories where the main characters have an awesome time because they're special (eg. where it's good to live as a noble, but not as a commoner) or because they narrowly achieve a great victory (but it would be much more likely to be overrun by the dark lord's forced).

But that allows you to choose one society out of a world that may have multiple, eg. if there's a book about planet X, you can choose to live on planet X, even if there's a whole galaxy of other planets the books don't say anything about.

Of course, how good the society is is almost independent of how good the book is. The book naturally focuses on the conflicts to be as interesting as possible, and the society is mostly the background to that.

So what would I look for:

* A society with good technological or magical health care. Unpleasant diseases are relegated to the history books. Eg. Discworld doesn't mention this, but given that medicine is practically non-existent, and magic is rarely used to cure diseases, people must die at medieval rates. Whereas in Harry Potter, it seems most things can be cured overnight.

* Preferably good options on immortality, so long as I'm choosing

* An emphasis on progress, on society progressing and discovering new, exciting things, and opportunities to achieve something rather than just sitting around eating lotuses. Maybe even kicking ass.

That said, it sounds like one of the technological utopias, such as Iain Banks' Culture or maybe Startrek, would fit best.

I'm also intrigued by the suggestions of Gallifry. We know almost nothing about it, but it's presumably very advanced, you get 13 lifetimes, and you may (not sure) get to play in time.

Or also Narnia, which involves taking a lot on faith, but is presented as very very magical, in the "wonderful to experience" sense.

ETA: You may also want to read a discussion on "is Brave New World a good/bad place to live" at the original post: http://theferrett.livejournal.com/1418312.html?thread=70522184#t70522184

Big Bang Theory

I have finally watched an episode of The Big Bang Theory, a sitcom about approximately four geeks. Quite a lot of people I know have talked about at some point, so here are some sweeping and massively generalised observations:

1. Like many fictional characters, Sheldon acts like a jerk, but we like watching him because he's funny, and confident, even if he's talking about overly geeky things.

2. Like many stories I wanted to shake the characters at some point for overlooking the more obvious thing to do in favour of one that will make more drama, but I always feel like that.

3. It's very interesting to see Will Wheaton in something. Apparently he's quite a good guy, and I feel really bad for him that after playing Ensign Crusher in Startrek he was saddled with Crusher's negative reputation. (I've also seen him in the online series The Guild, and I believe he's done some other geek projects.)

4. I don't particularly find the stereotypes of the characters interesting, because most of my friends are geeks, so I'm used to seeing differentiated, socially ept geeks, rather than people defined socially by their very specific lack of fashion sense. But it was quite funny several times, so I predict that if I watch any more I'll like it.