Imaginary cities

I've been reading Endless Things, the last volume of John Crowley's Ægypt series. Crowley always builds a world for his fiction, a world much larger and more complicated than the large and complicated image of that world presented on the page. Ægypt is about (among many other things) world-building, mostly world-building from the books read and lived in during childhood, supplemented with books read and half-read later in life, the hazy recollection of books described by others, and finally travel to the places of those books, insofar as they still exist or ever existed. It's about imaginary cities, even if those cities are real. ( Read more )