World of Derlavai
Most of the action in the series takes place on the main continent of Derlavai, located in the southern hemisphere on the unnamed planet it is on. There are also some lesser land masses and island chains mentioned in the story and on the map included in the novels. The planet also has the smaller continents of Siaulia and The Land of the Ice People.
There are only 12 independent countries: Algarve, Forthweg, Gyongyos, Jelgava, Sibiu, Kuusamo, Lagoas, Ortah, Unkerlant, Valmiera, Yanina, and Zuwayza. There are also three dependent territories (Bari, Grelz, and Rivaroli). Populations are for the most part homogeneous enough that a difference in hair color is easily enough to make one stand out. The vast majority of the members of a given Derlavaian ethnic group have the same hair and eye color combination.
All nations in the Darkness series are monarchies with the exception of Kuusamo, in which seven princes have a hereditary power-sharing arrangement. While by no means all absolute monarchies, in all of them kings (or princes in Kuusamo) seem to have the executive power. There are foreign ministers, but no prime ministers and no cabinets - a foreign minister evidently reporting directly to the King. None of the people have family names, even if they are members of the nobility. To the extent that monarchs are limited in their power, the limitation comes mainly from hereditary aristocracies which still maintain many privileges of feudal times.
The nations in the Darkness series do not have randomly-invented names for their people and locations. Rather, each nation has personal and geographical names taken from a real nation on Earth. Turtledove has, however, mixed up the attributes so that any given Derlavaian kingdom is not instantly recognizable as a cognate of the countries which took part in World War II. For example, Unkerlant has Germanic (German, Low German, and Frankish) place and personal names. Forthweg has a Germanic language, Old English. Similarly, the Algarvic nations all speak Latin-derived languages: Algarve speaks Italian, Lagoas has Portuguese, and Sibiu Romanian. Kaunian languages are based on modern Baltic languages - Lithuanian is Classical Kaunian and Latvian for Valmerian and Jelgavian.
Read more about this topic: The Darkness Series
Famous quotes containing the word world:
“... no other railroad station in the world manages so mysteriously to cloak with compassion the anguish of departure and the dubious ecstasies of return and arrival. Any waiting room in the world is filled with all this, and I have sat in many of them and accepted it, and I know from deliberate acquaintance that the whole human experience is more bearable at the Gare de Lyon in Paris than anywhere else.”
—M.F.K. Fisher (1908–1992)