World in the Sky

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
There's nothing under these but more sky.

This is less a World Shapes, and more a series of world pieces. Landmasses, with or without internal seas, float suspended in an atmosphere. They can range in size to tiny "islands" to huge continents with vast civilizations.

Nearly impossible under physics resembling ours, worlds of this type are found exclusively in fantasy. What keeps them hovering? (Well, nothing - for them to be "hovering", there would have to be something under them to hover over, and that's a different trope.) Where does the gravity come from? What's keeping the atmosphere in place? Nobody knows, but maybe A Wizard Did It. Do not expect the outcome of falling off the side of one of these pieces to be properly explored.

Compare Shattered World, for broken worlds IN SPACE! and Floating Continent, which usually exists in a more normal world with people also living on the surface below. See also The Sky Is an Ocean, which is almost always used in worlds like these. Also, Ocean Punk, for an actual ocean, can sometimes be a Post-Apocalyptic Earth.

Examples of World in the Sky include:

Anime and Manga

  • Edolas from the Anima arc of Fairy Tail was an Earthlike land with an assortment of floating islands, including the one carrying the Eksheeds' homeland of Exteria, and another that the King used to store the Magnolia La'cryma.
  • The Mu world of RahXephon is not quite a World in the Sky: there's one landmass. However, that piece of land quickly got overcrowded, so the Mu built gigantic flying cities that allowed the vast majority of them to live anywhere over the vast ocean.

Comic Books

  • Eva Procorpio in Shakara lives in a floating villa on (?) the planet Terraqueouis, a world which seems to consist entirely of floating villas.
  • Marvel's Asgard was always depicted as a huge island floating in extradimensional space.

Films -- Animation

Films -- Live Action

  • It's implied in the 1980 film version of Flash Gordon that Ming's kingdom is actually a collection of floating continents in atmosphere. Near the end of the movie, Flash suggests escaping the Hawkmen's world by making parachutes and jumping down to Arborea, and Dr. Zarkov doesn't rule it out.

Literature

  • The novel The Shattered World (1984) by J. Michael Reaves is set entirely in a "world" consisting of floating islands (actually pieces of a former shattered planet) surrounded by a sphere of breathable air, each with its own ecosphere and some degree of (magically enhanced and directional) gravity. The islands are stabilized and kept from crashing into each other by magical rune stones created by the mages who originally saved mankind from being wiped out when the planet crumbled. The only way of crossing the void from one fragments to another is flying airships, since the void has no gravity, which means that fragments may float "upside down" over each other and vegetation can overgrow an island completely.
  • An unusual, real-physics variation occurs in Larry Niven's Integral Trees, set in the "smoke ring": The smoke ring is a toroidal cloud of gas and matter which orbits a very low-output neutron star, which in turn orbits a sun-like star in a binary configuration. It includes a ring of breathable atmosphere, in which reside a number of flying plants and animals, including some humans who've "gone native".
  • Arianus, from the first book of The Death Gate Cycle by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, is a series of continental islands floating at different levels. Apparently, they're made of a sort of coral filled with floaty gas.
  • The Edge Chronicles features a small city built on a floating rock, which in turn was anchored to a city built upon a far larger floating rock. Which had "gardens" of stones similar to it, that occasionally grew large enough to become less dense than air and float away into the sky. The floating city was kept from floating away via a combination of many huge anchors and a lump of impossibly dense material that was deposited by special lightning bolts and exploded extremely violently if broken in anything other than twilight and as such grains of it were incredibly valuable.
  • The Ellimist's world is stated to be this, in the Animorphs book The Ellimist Chronicles.
    • Or rather, it's caused and maintained by the Ellimist's people - the surface is too inhospitable to live on, so they live on chunks of crystal held aloft by their flying residents. Their names are more like addresses, they have strictly scheduled free-fly and rest time, and not much else about their culture (such as where they actually get food) is given much detail.
  • In The Culture, one of the character wants to build one of those, because it would cooler than the artificial worlds usually made by the Culture (which just show how blasé the Culture citizens can be: Ring Worlds and sapient spaceships with hundreds of millions of people living inside can be deemed boring). The Culture's technology would allow it to build such a world, except that it would be a lot of energy and matter lost on a whim.
  • Karl Schroeder's Virga series takes place inside a Hollow World filled with air, where people, ships, entire cities, and man-made miniature "suns" float around. To the inhabitants, their world is the sky, filled with islands of matter. Virga also inverts this trope, since technically, their sky is the world.
  • In the forgotten realms series The Empyrean Odyssey, a succubus attempts to escape mount celestia by falling off the side. She keeps falling through clouds until finally giving up, and it is implied you can fall forever and never reach ground. As soon as she starts flying up, she emerges from the clouds at the same place she entered them.

Tabletop Games

  • Warhammer 40,000 has an entire planet of floating islands, some about the size of a pebble, others entire cities. Of course, these Islands are floating in orbit around a black hole, so yeah...
  • Multiple floating islands provide the name of the Tabletop Games Skyrealms of Jorune.
  • Dungeons & Dragons, of course, had to have some of those, too.
    • Sufficient numbers of floating continents turn up in the Mystara setting to suggest this trope, both in outer-world Floating Ar (A Wizard Did It) and orbiting the inner sun of the Hollow World (The Immortals Did It). Subverted in the former case, as the people of Ar still depend on resources from the land or sea beneath them.
    • Planescape
      • Elemental Plane of Air is mostly, indeed, Air, so the rare floating bits of land are highly valuable. Falling isn't so much an issue due the plane's "subjective gravity" trait, which allows visitors to choose which way is "down" for them at any time.
      • The Astral Plane can have shades of this too, in areas where enough of matter is present. Which is at least as rare as on Air, it's not called "silver void" for nothing.
      • The outer layer of Ysgard consists of continents floating atop immense rivers of earth flowing forever through an endless skyscape.
      • Acheron layers are huge floating cubes, often made less boring by armies camping on different faces and waging endless war on each other. The cubes rarely collide.
    • Spelljammer has "air-based worlds" as possible setting (along with the classical earth planets, fire suns and water worlds), which have no solid ground as one big body "below", but can include islands floating in specific layers (e.g. Coliar in Realmspace). Also, world shape variants include "cluster", in which case it's a cloud of rocks that may have no atmosphere, common atmosphere or each individual rock may or may not have its own. Shattered Worlds generally become cluster earth worlds.
    • The Ravenloft game setting is a patchwork world, but not freely navigable via flight. It consists of chunks of landscape—the Core, Clusters, and Islands—adrift in a directionless zone of supernatural Mists. Each piece of landscape has its own gravity and own climate, and appears to have its own sky and horizons, but travel too far, dig too deep, or fly too high and you'll still wind up at the Misty Border.
      • One of the domains, Aerie, is actually a Floating Continent of the conventional sort as well.
  • Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies for PDQ# takes place within a dome thousands of miles across, filled with floating islands ranging from near-continents with their own seas to tiny islets. There's also a region called the Sky of Stones filled with floating boulders.
  • Sundered Skies setting for Savage Worlds, from Triple Ace Games team. Post Apocalyptic Fantasy — as a Shattered World, it got many ruins on less inhabited islands. Sky islands move, sometimes against the strong winds, and since there's skyship trade, there are Sky Pirates, etc.
  • In Urza's Saga from Magic: The Gathering we find Serra's realm where angels rule over peasants who can't travel from one farmland to an other. Seen in this card.

Video Games

  • Skies of Arcadia would be the most obvious example, although there are hints that it may not always have been that way. Though there is solid ground below, it's not habitable and no-one even knows it's there until events late in the game.
    • There are no hints that the world has ever been different, the world was the same way in ancient times. The planet and surface act somewhat like a gas giant with thinner atmosphere layers above and crushing pressure on the surface. Though why the planet appears blue from space is anyone's guess.
  • Ar tonelico. Ever since the Grathnode Inferia, the floating continent flocks of Sol Ciel, Metafalss and Sol Cluster (each preserved from destruction only by its central Server Tower) are the only habitable place in Ar Ciel, what with the Sea of Death below and the plasma Blastline above.
    • Metafalss isn't even a continent. The people are living on the mechanism that was supposed to build the Tower for temporary use. During the course of the game, they create an entirely new floating continent separate from the Tower because Metafalss was quite literally falling apart. The only tower that was actually designed from the start to live on was the First Tower, Sol Ciel.
  • The Emperors New Groove Playstation 2 game.
  • The SNES game Bahamut Lagoon takes place almost entirely on floating continents, called "lagoons".
  • Outland in World of Warcraft consists of the blasted shards of Draenor, home of the orcs and ogres, which now hang suspended in an interdimensional void. The Skywall and Firelands sections of the Elemental Plane, as seen in some dungeons, raids, and daily zones, give this idea as well.
  • The "border world" of Xen in the Half-Life series consists of strange islands floating through a nebulous void.
  • Samorost and Samorost 2 take place in a world like this except IN SPACE with very unusual islands/planets including ones that seem to made of giant driftwood. Machinarium takes place in the same world though seemingly on a much larger landmass (which also has a sky, unlike the ones from Samorost).
  • The Ray's Maze series of World Builder graphical adventure games includes a setting known as "The Void", which is made up of hunks of dirt and rock varying in size between a pebble and a large island floating in a breathable atmosphere. Presumably infinite in size, it appears as though it even rains there, and falling off whatever you're standing on is a common way to die. While flying between islands is pretty much unknown (the "jump doors" of the series are the primary means of transport), two prominent features of the setting are the Lost Technology left behind by the Precursors and the giant voidbeast.
  • The Shadow Shard of City of Heroes, a world shattered by a mad godlike being (it's implied that this world is an alternate version of Earth).
    • It's also implied that the entire Shadow Shard is really inside the mind of said "god" and that the non-human inhabitants are all fractions of his shattered psyche.
    • The much smaller realm of Ouroborous was made up of five or six floating rocks and a fancy base, all hovering over an endless sea.
  • The setting of Sacrifice features several floating islands in a vast void. This is only vaguely explained as "In the early days when the world was torn asunder terrible magical energies were released and blah blah blah blah blah..." And yes, it actually says the blahs.
  • The freeware game Skyrates, set in the land of Skytopia is entirely made of these.
  • The Age of Spire consists of giant floating mountains in orbit around what looks like a neutron star. The physics are sufficiently well-described to trigger massive fan speculation on exactly how it works.
    • Supplemental materials explain that when the core of the world became too magnetically active, the planet tore itself into pieces as the core pushed away the rest of the planet. Now the fragments' aggregate gravity pulling inward is in equilibrium with the magnetic push outward. Fortunately for Sirrus, the fragments also had enough gravitational mass to keep an atmosphere.
    • Narayan from Myst III: Exile also uses this concept, with lighter-than-air inflatable pods keeping chunks of vegetation afloat.
  • Septerra from Septerra Core. Its shape (and purpose) plays a part in the storyline.
  • Netstorm: Islands At War is set on Nimbus, a world of flying islands that the inhabitants maneuver to fight the occupants of other islands. Note that the islands themselves never move relative to each other during the actual game, they are just land on which you can build. They also can't be destroyed (but the things you build on them certainly can). Making scientific sense was not high on the agenda.
  • A twist in Pokémon Platinum: the Distortion World consists of floating islands, not all of which share the same gravitational orientation. At one point you get to Surf vertically between two islands.
  • Both the Rage Of Mages and Spellforce series use the "long ago there was a cataclysm that shattered the world into floating islands, but some great mage or other managed to prevent it from falling apart completely." Oddly enough, in both series this property of the world is more backstory than anything, as the locations look pretty much like you'd expect a typical fantasy world to look (forests, deserts, snow wastes, active volcanoes) and the characters are almost never confronted with "world's edge."
    • In Spellforce, at least, it's little more than a Hand Wave for why the game world is composed of a number of completely disparate maps that can only be reached via portals—the technical reason being that it uses Real Time Strategy style maps coupled with Role-Playing Game style backtracking, and this is what it ends up looking like.
  • The MMORTS Time of Defiance is built around this trope.
  • The PS 1 game Tail Concerto takes place on an archipelago of floating islands, surrounded by an impenetrable air reef (or "Airleaf", as the game misromanizes it, but then again, Atlus translations weren't always well-researched back then... if anything, they used to be Macekres).
  • Solatorobo takes place in the same universe as Tail Concerto, and also reveals that the floating islands are actually the remenants of a Post-Apocalyptic Earth
  • In Hoshigami: Ruining Blue Earth, the entire known world is a floating continent. And every time someone uses magic, it saps a little of the energy of the elemental spirits holding the continent up.
  • The Neverhood and other locations in the same universe float in a vast, mostly-empty blackness.
    • The Hall of Records actually explains why this is, but it's hard to get through because it's just so freaking long.
  • World 4 in Dragon Quest Monsters 2 is this trope.
  • Apparently Hotline Tetris leads to such a world.[please verify]
  • The Granstream Saga takes place on 4 floating islands (and a huge flying battleship), one for each element: Wind, Water, Fire, and Earth in that order.
  • Some of the planets in both Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Galaxy 2 appear to be floating in a blue sky with nothing below them. In fact, the Mushroom World (the Mario Bros.' home planet) is actually floating in a blue sky background in the second game's map of World 1!
    • That is, there are blue skies and clouds, and sometimes faint multitudes of stars, in all directions. In these regions of the universe, space itself resembles a surreal version of Earth's daytime sky, with planets, moons, asteroids, and sometimes even stars floating around in it. It is possibly the most literal image of this trope.
  • Bug!! has each level look like a series of huge Floating Platforms, and if you fell off any of them, you went splat.. in mid-air, as there was actually no ground below. Subverted as the entire level took place on a stage set, as Bug was a movie star
  • Baten Kaitos takes place on several islands floating above the Earth, which was tainted during the War of the Gods to the point where it became uninhabitable.
  • Wizard 101 is a mixture of this and Shattered World. It use to be a single world but fighting between the Titans broke it apart and the islands are currently held in orbit by magic.
  • The Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword features Skyloft and other floating islands inhabited by humans. The floating part is justified by the islands being put up there by a goddess who wanted to protect the humans and the Triforce while she and the other races of Hyrule fought land-bound Eldritch Abominations.
  • Minecraft's The End seems to qualify. It's a floating continent made of a type of white stone, with obsidian towers and is the home dimension of the Endermen.
  • Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure takes place in a world called Skylands: a giant cluster of floating islands that contain different game areas for the player to interact with, including several villages, castles, caverns and factories.

Web Comics

  • Kukuburi's flipside world has floating islands on the top and bottom (the mainland's equator is the gravity plane both "above" and "below"). Here's the first glimpse.
  • The universe of Tryslmaistan in Unicorn Jelly. The author's notes provide extensive explanation of how the local physics allow this.

Western Animation

  • The land of Atmos in Storm Hawks is one of these, with the different teras ranging in size from large enough for a big city to small enough for a farm or two. The extremely dangerous and uninhabitable solid ground below is known as the Wasteland.
  • Skyland takes place a couple centuries in the future when the world has been torn apart into floating "blocks" rotating around the Earth's previous core.
  • Code Lyoko: The four main sectors of Lyoko are composed of floating islands above the Digital Sea. The Mountain Sector, in particular, evokes this trope.
  • Such a setup, with floating islands in a limitless sky after a great catastrophe shattered the planet, and people traveling around with airships, exists in the French cartoon Dragon Hunters ("Chasseurs de dragons" 2004, German "Die Drachenjäger"). In this series, there's a definite "downward" direction, meaning you can fall off or jump off an island, and there are waterfalls. Populated fragments range in size from those sufficient for a house and small farm to those the size of a good-sized island, and even pebbles may float in the air over the surface of bigger landmasses. (It is never explained why some stones float and others don't, but hey, it looks cool.) Some populated fragments are tethered together with rope bridges. Uncommon in such settings, magic in Dragon Hunters is almost nonexistent, and where it exists it is part of the scenery, such as an enchanted fairy-tale spring or monsters breathing fire. The characters have clockwork and bamboo technology but no steam tech or magic items.
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/World_in_the_Sky?oldid=1983140"