Is there a place in the real world that gave you the impression that it was ripped out of the pages of a Science Fiction or Fantasy story?

Alma Hromic Deckert
Oh, heavens, many, many, many.

The battlefield at Culloden is haunted by silence and whispering
voices.

There’s a pond in the deep woods below a certain hotel in Banff,
Canada, where I once went skating by myself surrounded by a string of fairy lights (and no I don’t know WHERE they were plugged in) and the full moon, and I was alone with the sky and the snow and the trees and the silence, and the fabric of time and space seemed thinner than chiffon and all I had to do was stretch out a hand and I’d be caressing faerie velvet.

Any old river well on the way to its ocean, but I confess to a special fondness for the Danube, on the shores of which i was born and spent my earliest childhood.

Castle ruins - places like Tintagel, or any number of tumbled Welsh keeps.

Gardens with albino peacocks in them (have you ever ever seen one? pure white, with only the “eyes” on the tail remaining that pure vivid dark “peacock” blue-green - they don’t look real, they look like someone kidnapped them from the Other World).

Capapdocia.

Mountains. Any tall snow-capped mountain. I whimper at mountains.

Deep woods, big trees, the cathedral-like grandeur of old-growth forest.

The black volcanic sand beaches of New Zealand, where pieces of bright mica glitter in the blue-black sands and screw with your sense of perspective until it feels like you’re walking on a night sky full of stars.

This is a beautiful world. There is no fantasy that has yet been
written which does not wind up suffering in comparison with SOME part of the real Earth.

Alma Alexander is the author of The Secrets of Jin-Shei and Changer of Days.

Steven Savile
I was in Northern France a few years back… visiting a medieval
village. It was quite beautiful. Walking through a field I passed the arch of a church doorframe - the entire church was gone, only the door’s arch remained, like some mystical portal. I was fascinated by it. I’m working on a novel at the moment in which that doorway features pretty heavily.

Steven Savile writes for Dr Who, and has written novels in Games Worskhop’s popular Warhammer series (Inheritance, Dominion & Retribution), and has a Celtic fantasy, Slaine: the Exile, due out this Christmas. He also co-edited Elemental: the Tsunami Relief Anthology for Tor.

Stephen Leigh

I felt that way when I took a trip to Ireland a few years back. I found myself strongly and immediately attracted to the green, mist-wrapped mountains and the rough coast — enough so that I placed that landscape into a series of fantasy novels. I believe there are many places in the ‘real world’ where we can get that strong sense of long history and habitation which is what I look for in fantasy worldbuilding.

As for science fiction, I’m tempted to point at the strange and bizarre life-forms that gather around the undersea hydrothermal ’smokeholes’ — here is life that is *not* as we know it: thriving at pressures that would crush us instantly, in a world where there is no sunlight, in temperatures far exceeding those we could survive. Seeing that makes me hopeful that life is indeed something that tends to arise in far more places and situations that we might have believed, and in many more ways that we can even imagine at this point.
Stephen Leigh is a writer of speculative fiction who blogs at the Intersection of Fiction and Reality.

Barbara A Denz

There are several.

The castles along the Danube (I think) in Germany — straight out of fantasy (or used constantly IN fantasy is more likely).

The streets of St Ives, England and Gamla Stan in Stockholm, Sweden and Bryggen in Bergen, Norway — straight out of fantasy or prime candidates for it.

Most glaciers and most volcanic fields feel like they’re straight out of science fiction.
Barbara’s website

Michael Merriam
On the north shore of Lake Superior, near where the state of Minnesota and Canada come together, there is a place where the modern world vanishes.

Get up before dawn. Go outside and step away from your cabin, until the last vestiges of civilization fall away among the brush and trees.

The roar of the surf of the great inland sea fills the air as it continues its relentless struggle, grinding down the shoreline inch by inch. The musky scent of wet vegetation mingles with the smells of fresh water and fish. Small creatures crash in the underbrush, their forms hidden in the darkness. To the east, the sun slowly rises over the waters. At first a reddish spot, it grows ever more brilliant, spreading red and gold fingers of light across the silver-blue water, burning away the morning mist.

You half expect for a fleet of tall, fantastical ships — their sails white, their hulls golden — to sail out of the dawn light, carrying armored warriors and creatures from mythology.

They don’t, of course, but for an instant in time in that place they could have, and that is the important thing.

Michael Merriam lives in Minneapolis, MN with his wife and an ordained cat. He has sold over a dozen science fiction and fantasy short stories.

Mike Allen

Once when my wife and I visited Ian Watson in England, he took us to a town called Bourton-on-the-Water, which contains a complete duplicate of itself in miniature, which contains a miniature duplicate of the miniature, and _that_ even holds another miniature duplicate (though not so detailed, as best I could tell). I’ve wanted to use it as a story setting ever since, but haven’t quite been able to connect the pieces. At least not yet.
Mike Allen is a a poet, fiction writer, editor, publisher and journalist who blogs at The Plasteel Spider Factory

Robyn Flemming
I’ve thought that about Page, Arizona, for a long time. I was
actually just there last week, and remarked to my traveling companions that the view coming in for a landing at the airport from over Lake Powell is like something on Mars. Lake Powell is an artificial reservoir, and consists of astonishingly blue water juxtaposed against red-orange canyon walls. Behind it, as you fly in, you can see the airport, the Navajo Generating Station (complete with eerie blinking lights on the chimneys) and a whole lot of desert. The effect is very unearthly.

Robyn Fleming (often known online as Revena) is an aspiring novelist, who also spends a lot of time critiquing the stuff that’s already out there. She writes critical essays about the portrayal of women in film for The Hathor Legacy, and posts internet memes and the occasional photo of her cats on her LiveJournal.

Matthew Cheney
Most places give me this sense. You should see New Hampshire during the busiest times of tourist season — it’s like a nice, quiet little planet is suddenly invaded by aliens with speedboats. Or Motorcycle Week — the state’s biggest event — it’s a carnival unlike any other I’ve encountered. I keep waiting for Neil Gaiman to revise American Gods to include Motorcycle Week. (Which I don’t say out of prejudice against bikers — I come from a family of bikers, and have a motorcycle license myself, though haven’t ridden in years.) I think anywhere I live and anywhere I visit will seem science fictional to me, because I have spent so much of my life with science fiction and fantasy as major parts of my psyche. It has nothing to do with any inherent qualities in a particular place, but rather with the lens through which I view the world. I interpret everything as if it is science fiction.
Matthew Cheney is a writer and teacher who blogs at The Mumpsimus.

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