Fictional country

A fictional country is a country that is made up for fictional stories, and does not exist in real life, or one that people believe in without proof. Sailors have always mistaken low clouds for land masses, and in later times this was given the name Dutch capes.^[1] Other fictional lands appear most commonly as settings or subjects of myth, literature, film, or video games. They may also be used for technical reasons in actual reality for use in the development of specifications, such as the fictional country of Bookland, which is used to allow European Article Number "country" codes 978 and 979 to be used for ISBNs assigned to books, and code 977 to be assigned for use for ISSN numbers on magazines and other periodicals. Also, the ISO 3166 country code "ZZ" is reserved as a fictional country code.^{[citation needed]}

Fictional countries appear commonly in stories of early science fiction (or scientific romance). Such countries supposedly form part of the normal Earth landscape, although not located in a normal atlas. Later similar tales often took place on fictional planets.^{[citation needed]}

In Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, the protagonist, Lemuel Gulliver, visited various strange places. Edgar Rice Burroughs placed the adventures of Tarzan in areas in Africa that, at the time, remained mostly unknown to the West and to the East. Isolated islands with strange creatures and/or customs enjoyed great popularity in these authors' times. By the 19th century, when Western explorers had surveyed most of the Earth's surface, this option was lost to Western culture. Thereafter, fictional utopian and dystopian societies tended to spring up on other planets or in space, whether in human colonies or in alien societies originating elsewhere. Fictional countries can also be used in stories set in a distant future, with other political borders than today.^{[citation needed]}

Superhero and secret agent comics and some thrillers also use fictional countries on Earth as backdrops. Most of these countries exist only for a single story, a TV-series episode or an issue of a comic book. There are notable exceptions where fictional countries appear as recurring plot elements, such as: Qumar and Equatorial Kundu (The West Wing); Latveria (Marvel Comics); and Qurac and Bialya (DC Comics).^{[citation needed]}