From Calisota to Moosylvania, America has a lot of made-up states
This week’s entry: List of fictional U.S. states
What it’s about: Pennsyltucky. San Andreas. The State That Springfield Is In. The U.S. may have 50 states in real life (until we get our shit together and finally give Puerto Rico hurricane relief and fair representation), but there are at least that many fictional states. Movies, TV, video games, even law schools have invented their own fake states. (We assume they were all ushered into the Union in Smarch of nineteen-dickety-two.)
Biggest controversy: There are a couple of fake states with more legal problems than fictional New York when there were four Law & Order shows on at once. Several law schools hold mock trials and moot court arguments in a made-up state—Ames for Harvard Law; Reserve, for Case Western Reserve; Midlands for the American Mock Trial Association; Nazichussetts for Trump University. (Okay, we made up that last one; low-hanging fruit tastes all the sweeter!)
Strangest fact: Everyone seems to want Texas to be on its own again. Harry Turtledove’s Southern Victory alternate history series has the Confederates winning the Civil War, but Texas being split off into an independent republic after WWI. The 1980s alternate history novel Russian Amerika has the U.S. losing the Civil War and broken up into several independent states (for reasons Wikipedia doesn’t explain, the Confederacy remains intact apart from Texas, which becomes an independent republic). William Gibson and Bruce Stirling’s The Difference Engine has the U.K. force a breakup of the United States—guess which one gets to be its own republic? The TV series Jericho splits up the United States into three parts after a nuclear war—East, West, and Texas.