In Game of Thrones, legends claim the 8,000 year-old, 700 ft (210 m) high Wall may have been built with the help of giants...
...a similar myth of origin adopted by some early locals who lacked the knowledge to explain the remains of Hadrian’s Wall.
The real-life wall, however, was actually 11 ft (3.5 m) high and built in 122 to protect Roman Britain from barbarians in the north.
Visits to the wall are said to have inspired George RR Martin to “write a story about the people guarding the end of the world.”
British MPs recently suggested “Hadrian’s Wall” may need to be built if Scotland leaves the UK over “Brexit” from the EU.
Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner was an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”...
...and featured a dystopian imagining of 2019 Los Angeles as a dark, polluted, and cramped vertical city layered by class.
It is thought the world was partial inspired by Kowloon Walled City, once the most densely populated place on the planet.
The Hong Kong city originated as a Chinese fort but became an ungoverned, self-built, high-rise slum during British rule.
Before being demolished in 1993, light rarely filtered down to the bottom levels, and streets were lit by florescent lights.
It is suggested that the coal furnaces and blackened air of his industrial childhood home inspired JRR Tolkien’s Mordor...
...a region of dying land thought to be formed by massive volcanic eruptions before being settled by Sauron, the Dark Lord.
It may have been Tolkien’s experience in World War I, though, that had a greater influence on the evil wasteland.
As part of the British reserve in the Battle of the Somme, he described the cratered no man’s land as an “animal horror.”
Some believe the ghastly proto-modern technology may have inspired his vision and characters such as the Ringwraiths.
The hostile desert environment of Arrakis in Frank Herbert’s Dune was envisioned after he visited the Oregon Dunes...
...where he imagined that the towering sand drifts could "swallow whole cities, lakes, rivers, highways.”
The 500-foot (150 m) high dunes are riddled with “devil’s stovepipes,” deep hidden holes formed by rotting buried forests.
Herbert’s interest in terraforming efforts to stop the dunes may have also inspired the Fremen who inhabited the planet...
...and his work is dedicated to "the people whose labors go beyond ideas [...] to the dry-land ecologists, wherever they may be.”
C.S. Lewis’s sprawling series, The Chronicles of Narnia, draws heavily from Celtic medieval mythology...
...and he has said that when creating the world, Ireland’s “Rostrevor, which overlooks Carlingford Lough” was his idea of Narnia.
Taking inspiration from his birth country, he also mentioned the Mourne Mountains stoked images of giants along the frontier...
...while he often expected to see “a march of dwarves” dashing quickly through the snow of County Down.
Despite the world of Narnia being distinctly Irish, the name actually comes from an Italian city picked randomly from an atlas.