RURITANIA

   Imaginary countries are common in the literatures of the world, but only some can properly be called Ruritanian. In The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) by the UK writer Anthony Hope (1863-1933) a leisured and insouciant young Britisher of the 1890s travels on a whim, via Paris and Dresden, to thesmall, feudal, independent, German-speaking middle-European kingdom of Ruritania, located somewhere southeast of the latter city. Here, as afreelance commoner, he becomes embroiled in complex romantic intrigues involving swordplay, aristocratic flirtations, switches of identity, complicated dynastic politicking and threats to the monarchy; in the end, as from a dream, he returns to the West. (In the sequel, Rupert of Hentzau (1898), he goes back to Ruritania and dies.) Any tale containing a significant combination of these ingredients can be called Ruritanian. Only two elements are essential: the tale must provide a fairy-taleenclave located both within and beyond normal civilization; and it must be infused by an air of nostalgia - not dissimilar to that found in some lost-race novels (LOST WORLDS). This belatedness of the true Ruritania might seem to exclude it from sf, whose ideological posture usually precludes the advertising of nostalgic enclaves; but UTOPIAS and DYSTOPIAS often take an initial Ruritanian cast (which often turns sour); the palace-politics which govern many GALACTIC EMPIRES owe more to Hope than they do to Edward Gibbon (1737-1794); and many post- HOLOCAUST novels, especially those set in a USA balkanized into feuding principalities, are clearly Ruritanian. Moreover, SCIENCE-FANTASY tales regularly discover Ruritanias at the world's heart.However pervasive the influence ofRuritania may be throughout later genre fictions, it is rarely explicit. However, Edmond HAMILTON's The Star Kings (1949; vt Beyond the Moon 1950) and Robert A. HEINLEIN's Double Star (1956) are clear reworkings of the plot of The Prisoner of Zenda; and Avram DAVIDSON's The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy (coll of linked stories 1975; exp vt The Adventures ofDoctor Eszterhazy 1990) is set in an ALTERNATE-WORLD version of a Ruritanian 19th-century Europe.It could be argued that tales of this category, when set on a past or present Earth, should be called Ruritanian only if they are located somewhere along the mountainous border between Czechoslovakia and Poland, and that tales set in Balkan enclaves should becalled Graustarkian, after the otherwise very similar Graustark (1901) and its sequels Beverly of Graustark (1904) and The Prince of Graustark (1914) by the US writer George Barr McCutcheon (1866-1928); but this would be both pedantic and unproductive. The terms are nearly indistinguishable. When UK writers refer to Ruritania and their US counterparts to theslightly less well known Graustark, they are referring to the same state of mind.

   JC