I’ve asked a number of fellow authors this question over at the USA Today Happily Ever After blog today. My own answer was Anne McCaffrey’s Pern but hop on over to see what Yasmine Galenorn and Ilona Andrews and others said…

I’ve always thought one of the best scenes in the “Wizard of Oz” is that moment when Dorothy leaves her battered Kansas house and what has been a black and white movie suddenly turns gorgeous Technicolor. She’s in another world all right!

There’s something so enticing about the idea of walking around in a fictional world that calls to you. First I guess you need to decide if you’re going to become one of the actual characters or will you be a new person who fits nicely into a niche there. I want to be rider of a golden dragon and run a Weyr myself. I don’t want to BE Lessa or any of the other people Anne McCaffrey wrote. I suppose a third possibility is to still be you and just be a tourist in the fictional world. I think that might be somewhat challenging, especially if you had to keep wearing your blue and white gingham dress, like Dorothy did, or whatever you had on when you slipped into the new place.

A long time ago, way before the movie “Galaxy Quest” was a gleam in anyone’s eye, I read a Star Trek short story having fun with the actors going onto the set one day and finding out they were now playing their parts for real. The rest of Enterprise crew expected them to know what to do and how to fight a space battle and etc. It was a totally new concept to me at that point and I was enchanted by the possibilities. But I always wanted to be my own character in the fictional universe. (See, Mr. Spock had this half human sister….)

I enjoyed the way “Galaxy Quest” took the trope and a few more besides and twisted and spun things. Love that movie!

There’s a really old John Ritter movie called “Stay Tuned” where his character and the man’s wife (played by Pam Dawber) get sucked into a television after doing a deal with the Devil, and then have to get themselves out of a number of strange, dangerous television shows and back to the real world. That’s another take on this idea of visiting fictional worlds, although that one wasn’t much fun for the characters.

So what would would you visit and who would you choose to be?