jack

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

I mentioned this in passing a couple of times, but in retrospect it was indeed difficult to get the point out of my successively nested parenthetical asides.

"Sorry" can mean two different things, sympathy or apology. But my way of viewing it was as a continuum, something like

1. Pure sympathy, with no apology.
2. You accept causation but no culpability. You regret that you inadvertently and unavoidably hurt someone, and wish you hadn't, but don't regret any of your actions. Eg. You're driving responsibly and someone chooses to step out a few feet ahead of your car. You feel awful, and the way you apologise is a lot more than a bystander would, but doesn't mean you think it was your fault, but does mean you feel a greater responsibility for causing it (either because that's how we're wired or because *often* if you cause something it's at least partly your fault).
3. You admit carelessness but not specific expectation to harm. If you were acting unthinkingly, and think you really shouldn't have been, but that you didn't deliberately harm them either, you were just more careless than you should be. Eg. if you repeatedly fail to remember to do something. You might feel legitimately apologetic, but not in the same way as if you'd deliberately harmed them.
4. You admit selfishness, you deliberately hurt someone because it got you something. Eg. you stole from them.
5. You admit malice, you deliberately hurt someone because you wanted to hurt them (although you might claim diminished responsibility, eg. if you bullied them but were too young to completely understand).

So most have some sympathy, depending how serious they are. And the last three have apology. But there are intermediate stages. (Eg. if you express sympathy because something bad happened to someone (1), you might also feel bad because you were better off than them in that way which is actually also like (2), in that your good fortune may make them feel worse, even though you couldn't have prevented that. And at some point between 3 and 4 deliberate and persistent carelessness becomes a complete disregard for someone.)

And I sometimes feel that while almost all of the time people know what sort of apology someone is actually talking about, sometimes this gets horribly distorted. For instance, in culture A it might be normal, if you knock into someone in the street, to apologise in the sense (2). But in culture B that might be interpreted as (3), and give the other person grounds to sue you.

Or you might try to offer sympathy to someone for something you've done, but get tongue tied explaining how you don't feel guilty, etc. And you normally can explain, but having the different ideas in your mind may make it easier to do so quickly and simply.