gazetteer
of the
haunted worlds:
fictional auras of really mapped places
on the earth, the moon and mars

the Adirondacks, New York, USA:
While on a fishing holiday in the St Regis range of lakes in this mountain range, the narrator of Howard Fast's The Large Ant (Fantastic Universe, February 1960) sees an alien and instantaneously kills it in a fear-response, to his later consternation and regret.
...I keep trying to think back, to recreate the moment when I saw it standing at the foot of my bed in the fishing shack.  I keep trying to dig out of my memory a clear picture of what it looked like...    
The Adirondacks are the scene of a brief idyll snatched from the fight against the parasitic alien invaders from Titan in Heinlein's The Puppet Masters (1951).  Agent "Sam" Nivens introduces his new bride to his mountain cabin:
   ...I found her staring at the shack.  "Sweetheart, it's beautiful!"
   "You can't beat the Adirondacks," I agreed.  There was a slight haze with the sun low in the west, giving that wonderful, depth upon depth, stereo look.
   She glanced at it and said, "Yes, yes - but I didn't mean that.  I meant your - our cabin.  Let's go inside, right now."
   "Suits," I agreed, "but it's really just a simple shack."  Which it was - not even an indoor pool.  I had kept it that way; when I came up here I didn't want to feel that I had brought the city with me...       

Aeria:  See Sinus Sabaeus.
See also Syrtis Major, of which Aeria is the western boundary.
In Patrick Moore's Mission to Mars (1955), the first Martian expedition has crashed and transmits its position (p.29):
  'Yorke calling Woomera.  The "Hermes" has landed in latitude 10 north, longitude 310...  Our landing was faulty.  Rocket is damaged beyond repair...'
On p.32:  '...We know where they are; if the position they gave us is correct, the "Hermes" is lying in the desert of Aeria, some way from the borders of the vegetation tracts that we call the Syrtis Major and the Deltaton Sinus...'           

Aetheria:
The region in which the protagonist's plane crash-lands, leading to an accidental discovery of vital importance fauna, in Arthur C Clarke's 1951 novel The Sands of Mars.
   "There seem to be hills all around us: we were lucky to get down in one piece.  Good Lord - there's a cliff here on this side - another few metres and we'd have gone smack into it!"
   "Any idea where we are?" Gibson called to the pilot.
   This tactless remark earned him a very stony stare.
   "About 120 east, 20 north.  The storm can't have thrown us very far off course."
   "Then we're somewhere in the Aetheria," said Gibson, bending over the maps.  "Yes - there's a hilly region marked here.  Not much information about it."
   "It's the first time anyone's ever landed here - that's why.  This part of Mars is almost unexplored: it's been thoroughly mapped from the air, but that's all."  
[Note that you won't find Aetheria on the official map of Mars' albedo features by using the co-ordinates mentioned in the above extract.  Instead, the region is to be found at longitude 240.  In other words, it appears one must subtract the 120 from 360, which suggests to me that some time between the 1950s and about 1970 there was a switch away from E and W figures and to a single-measure 0-360 longitude; somewhat analogous to a change from a.m./p.m. to a 24-hour clock.]
In Lin Carter's The City Outside the World (1977), the region gets a mention (page 34):
   When they rode out of the Dragon Gate, they had headed due north, Ryker knew.  They were now in one of the talcum-soft desert regions called "Dustlands", an empty space on the map which the old Earth astronomers had filled in with the name Aetheria...  

Airy:
This crater is the location of the Martian Prime Meridian (selected as such by the Mariner 9 Geodesy/Cartography Group in 1972).  It is also where lies the hidden Martain Eden in the 1974 novel by Lin Carter, The Valley Where Time Stood Still, which is part of his tetralogy The Mysteries of Mars.  See the extract, A secret valley below a mist-layer on Mars, and the subsequent comment by Lone Wolf.

Alcyonius Nodus:
From Lin Carter's 1977 novel The City Outside the World, page 34:
...West, however, they would only have to ride three hundred miles or so to reach the low, rocky hills of Alcyonius Nodus.  There, at least, they could find shelter in the caves which the tides of ancient oceans had cut into the cluffs which had once been the coastline of an old continent.  And, perhaps, they could find food as well...
And on page 50:  ...The mesa of Alcyonius Nodus was as it had ever been, a barren tableland of dead, sterile rock.  And it had been thus for millions of years, surely, or anyway since the great oceans of prehistoric Mars began to dry up.  Once, perhaps, it had been a broad and fertile island, against whose cliffy shores the lost oceans had burst in shattering spray...    

the Alpine Valley:
Location of the lunar base of far-future Earth's corrupt Overseer, in The Fury Out of Time (1965), by Lloyd Biggle Jr.
   The moon base was enormous.  A gigantic dome pimpled with observation bubbles, it lay at the jagged edge of the Mare Imbrium, in the yawning mouth of the great Alpine Valley gorge.  At the other end of a connecting tube was a smaller dome, the landing dome, and the complex viewed from above gave the impression of a lopsided dumbbell.  Nearby were a number of lesser domes, surmounting a complex network of underground tunnels. 
   The base was enormous - and virtually empty.  At some time in the distant past it had been a thriving city, perhaps a crucial steppingstone in man's first awkward lurch toward the stars...

the lunar Alps:
In Poul Anderson's short story The Light (Galaxy, March 1957) the narrator, one of a crew of astronaunts who think they are first on the Moon, says:
...we landed at the foot of the Lunar Alps, not far from the crater Plato.  It was rugged country, but our gear had been designed for such a place...
...It was eerie.  I've been in deserts on Earth, but they don't blaze so bright, they aren't so absolutely dead, and the rocks aren't so huge and razor-cornered.  The southern horizon was hear; I thought I could see the surface curve away and tumble off into a foam of stars...    

Amarillo, Texas, USA:
Miss Perth, secretary to Dr Eric Sweetscent in Philip K Dick's Now Wait for Last Year (1966), came from this city to work in Tijuana.
...this time she had sprayed herself a shiny blue, inlaid with sparkling fragments that reflected the outer office's overhead lighting...  Miss Perth smiled at him engagingly, showing spotless ebony teeth, a chilling affectation which had migrated with her from Amarillo, Texas, a year ago...

Amazonis Planitia, Mars:  see Strymon.

Ambleside, Westmorland, England:
One of the Lake District's most extremely beautiful towns, which I have often visited.
Somewhat strangely, it is also the fictional location of a secret government computer (a hundred feet underground) in the sf novel The Doomsday Brain (1967) by Paul Tabori. 

the lunar Apennines:
In the opening chapter of Earthlight (1955) by Arthur C Clarke, the protagonist is travelling by monorail from Sinus Medii to Plato at a time when the long lunar night is approaching.  As the car emerges from behind a cliff his eyes are smitten by a sudden view of the mountain range whose summits are lit by the gradually setting Sun.
   ...There, marching across the sky in flaming glory, were the peaks of the Apennines, incandescent in the last rays of the hidden sun.  The abrupt explosion of light left Sadler almost blinded; he shielded his eyes from the glare, and waited until he could safely face it again.  When he looked once more the transformation was complete.  The stars, which until a moment ago had filled the sky, had vanished.  His contracted pupils could no longer see them: even the glowing Earth now seemed no more than a feeble patch of greenish luminosity.  The glare from the sunlit mountains...  had eclipsed all other sources of light.
   The peaks floated in the sky, fantastic pyramids of flame.  They seemed to have no more connection with the ground beneath them than do the clouds that gather above a sunset on Earth.  The line of shadow was so sharp, the lower slopes of the mountains so lost in utter darkness, that only the burning summits had any real existence...   

Aram:
This is a region of Mars mentioned in Lin Carter's The Valley Where Time Stood Still (1974): the protagonist, M'Cord, encounters the native Thaklar
    ...on the Martian equator, at the northernmost tip of the Aram Desert.
However, in seeking a picture to go with this entry I was faced with a problem: how to deduce from the text whether to go for an image of Aram Dorsum or for one of Aram Chaos.  Co-ordinates given online indicate that they are not far from each other, east of Margaritifer Sinus (this agrees with the text in the story) and in Arabia Terra.  But what decided me was to learn online that Aram Dorsum is an alternative, newer term for Oxia Palus - which is mentioned elsewhere in the book!  So the Aram Desert is a different stage on M'Cord's journey; hence, Aram Chaos it is, not Aram Dorsum.

Archimedes (crater):
See the extract from Ray Cummings' Brigands of the Moon (1930).
In Arthur C Clarke's The Secret (This Week, 11th August 1963), a top journalist is invited to the Moon, where from a politically embarrassed Medical Division he eventually hears the explosive secret of lunar longevity:
   When he had landed at Archimedes Spaceport, the Chief Administrator had been obviously glad to see him, and had shown a personal interest in his tour.  Transportation, accommotation, and official guide were all arranged.  U.N.S.A. trusted him, for his stories had always been accurate, his attitude friendly.  Yet the tour had gone sour; he did not know why, but he was going to find out.
   He reached for the phone and said: "Operator?  Please get me the Police Department.  I want to speak to the Inspector General..."        
Stranded spaceman Hansen, in H B Fyfe's Moonwalk (Space Science Fiction, November 1952), on his trek to reach safety, has to climb the crater's outer ringwall:
   He was faced by a forty-five degree slope.  If he could negotiate it for about thirty feet, he would reach another ramp.  He looked down, and wondered if it would be easier to slide down to a lower terrace which would eventually lead higher than his present position.
   "No time," he said dazedly.
   He began to scrabble his way up the incline, not one too difficult to climb on Luna.  The sun-powered rock [sic - should be sun-powdered?] flaked off beneath his hands, elbows, knees and feet.  He slid back about as fast as he climbed...        

the Aristarchus Plateau - see Schröter's Valley.

Aristillus (crater):
Stranded astronaut Paul Hansen, in H B Fyfe's Moonwalk (Space Science Fiction, November 1952) is trying to trek to safety across the Mare Imbrium.
   He saw that he was standing on higher ground lighter than usual, and tinted pale yellow.  Remembering passing several areas, he slowly realized that they must be rays from Aristillus, traces of vaporized minerals blown out across the surrounding territory when the crater had been formed.  It meant, for what it might be worth, that he was getting near Archimedes.  Some of the rays of Aristillus reached the larger crater...   

Auburn, California, USA:
This is where Clark Ashton Smith lived most of his life.
The town features in the opening of his story The Root of Ampoi (The Arkham Sampler, Spring 1949; Tales of Science and Sorcery, 1964):
A circus had arrived in Auburn.  The siding at the station was crowded with long lines of cars from which issued a medley of exotic howls, growls, snarls and trumpetings...
...And then I saw the giant, who was slightly more than eight feet tall and magnificently built, with no sign of the disproportion which often attends gigantism...    

Aurorae Sinus:
The site of the larger of the two colonies in Arthur C Clarke's 1951 novel, The Sands of Mars, this is where the protagonist lands on the Red Planet.
   Gibson first glimpsed the settlement as a tiny white patch on the horizon, against the dark background of the Aurorae Sinus.  The pilot swung the ship round in a great whistling arc to the south, losing altitude and shedding his surplus speed.  As the rocket banked, Gibson had a momentary picture of half a dozen large, circular domes, clustered closely together.  Then the ground was rushing up to meet him, there was a series of gentle bumps, and the machine rolled slowly to a standstill.
   He was on Mars.  He had reached what to ancient man had been a moving red light among the stars, what to the men of only a century ago had been a mysterious and utterly unattainable world - and what was now the frontier of the human race.  

the Bahamas:
...The route I had charted through the channel north of Great Abaco Island turned out to be a sloping ridge of black mud from which a salty ocean breeze blew an odor of broken drains.  It was dawn before I found a clear passage north of Great Bahama, now a mountain range on a new subcontinent, a series of green peaks raised above rolling plains of stinking gray sands, shining in the ominous dawn.  Far away on my port beam I saw shapes resting on the former sea bottom: the rusted hulks of drowned steamers, the gaunt ribs of wooden sailing vessels, sunk long ago...       - Keith Laumer, Catastrophe Planet (1966), p.83

Bailly (crater):
From R W Mackleworth's Starflight 3000 (1972):
   "I'm standing on the edge of the Bailly Crater: the southern wall."  He pointed to the southeast.  "Milcon have their fortress in the Doerful Mountains.  In the old days this was called the Third Quadrant.  I come from an island called Riphaen in the Mare Nubium."
   Hart looked irritated.  "These names are known to everyone."
   Boldre laughed at him.  "But how many know they were given long before this planet was inhabitable?  How many know it was barren and airless - a dead world until some genius on Earth bred an organism that could break down rock to form an atmosphere?"
   Hart nodded slowly.  "That's little enough but sufficient for Milcon."
   The threat was clear...  

the Banda Sea:
Clark Ashton Smith's The Letter From Mohaun Los (Wonder Stories, August 1932; see the Fictional Dates page for the years 1940 and 1941) is a novella whose title refers to a missive which has been sent to Earth from a far world and is found floating in the Banda Sea "between Celebes and the Spice Islands".

Barnet, Hertfordshire, England:
Fugitives from the invading Martians crowd the area in H G Wells' The War of the Worlds (1898).
   ...The main road was a boiling stream of people, a torrent of human beings rushing northward, one pressing on another.  A great bank of dust, white and luminous in the blaze of the sun, made everything within twenty feet of the ground grey and indistinct, and was perpetually renewed by the hurrying feet of a dense crowd of horses and men and women on foot, and by the wheels of vehicles of every description.
   "Way!" my brother heard voices crying.  "Make way!"
   It was like riding into the smoke of a fire to approach the meeting-point of the lane and road; the crowd roared like a fire, and the dust was hot and pungent.  And, indeed, a little way up the road a villa was burning and sending rolling masses of black smoke across the road to add to the confusion...    

Barrow-in-Furness, Lancashire, England:
The mind of Ray Jerome, in an alien body on Mercury, meeting another transferred Terran, in Bob Shaw's Fire Pattern (1984):
   "Name's Joe Thwaite," the stranger said.  "Spinster of this parish for the last eleven years, but before that resident in the beautiful township of Barrow-in-Furness."
   "Barrow-in-Furness?"  Jerome began to feel lost.  "Isn't that in England?"
   "Certainly is.  Best town in the whole ruddy country."
   Jerome was still adrift between two worlds.  "But you don't have an English accent."
   "And you don't have an American one.  Not any more."  Thwaite produced a gnomish grin.  "Accents are mainly a matter of muscle development, and you've got Dorrinian speech centres now..."  

Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA:
Amid earthquake and ruin the dying sailor relates his return from a disastrous Antarctic expedition in Keith Laumer's Catastrophe Planet (1966):
   "I made landfall south of Baton Rouge in four days.  Played it cagy, brought her into a bayou mouth at night, kept out of sight behind flooded-out houses.  Left the boat hidden and got into town.  Tried to get a message off to a contact in Washington, but no luck.  Chaos in the town.  Famine was beginning to pinch them.  All the refugees from the coast and from the fault areas further west.  Air like a foundry, soot everywhere, and more tremors every day..."   

Beatrice, Nebraska, USA:
In Keith Laumer's classic invasion-novel The House in November (1969), the protagonist awakes from a trance to find that all the other inhabitants of his home town are mentally in thrall.  
   ...Gillian shrank away from him as he came down the steps.  "Jeff, you look sick.  You're having some kind of attack.  Lie down, and I'll call Dr. Everet - "
   "I've never felt better in my life - "  Mallory started and broke off abruptly.  Through the window on the landing he saw the familiar street, clear of fog now, the big, old-fashioned houses, steep-gabled, the leafless trees above them.  But beyond, where the steeple of the Methodist church should have been, a tower rose up and up into the morning sky.  It was big, his engineer's eye told him: hundreds of feet in diameter, and so tall that its flaring top was lost in the high haze.  The material was pale green, glassy, translucent.  An incredible structure, sprung up overnight like an enchanted mushroom.
   "Gill - what is it?"
   "The Star Tower, of course."  She stared into his face.  Her eyes had a glazed, remote look...

Beatty, Nevada, USA:
Inventor Courtney Edwards, who shrinks spectacularly in Submicroscopic by S P Meek (Amazing Stories, August 1931), is looking for a place in which to do his work:
...one day while flying from Salt Lake City to San Francisco, I passed over a verdant little valley hidden in the almost inaccessible crags of the Timpahute range in southern Nevada.  I abandoned my trip temporarily and landed at Beatty to make inquiries.  Not a person could I find who had ever heard of my hidden valley.  Even the old desert rats professed ignorance of its location and laughed at me when I told them that I had seen flowing water and deciduous trees in the barren stretches of the Timpahutes...        

Belfast, County Antrim, Northern Ireland, UK:
Roland Crane, pursuing clues about the mysterious Map Country, comes to Belfast in the second chapter of Kenneth Bulmer's Land Beyond the Map (1965).
   ...Though he tramped the fascinating alleyways of Smithfield, amid the noise and bustle, penetrating into the quieter, dusty and time-corroded sections, and turned over so many tattered books - all guide books - that he wondered how anyone ever found their way about without them, he did not turn up a guide book with a torn map in the back.  Correction - he turned up many guide books with ripped and frail maps in the back; but that warning zephyr he knew would creep up his spine when he found the right one did not happen...    

Bellingham, Washington State, USA:
Secret construction site and eventual launch site of the nuclear-bomb-powered spaceship Michael, in Niven and Pournelle's alien-invasion epic Footfall (1985).  When the reader is introduced to the area,
   ...It was a bright clear spring day, with brilliant sunshine, the kind of day that made it worth while living through Bellingham's rainy seasons.  The snow-covered peaks of Mount Baker and the Twin Sisters stood magnificently above the foothills to the east.  The view was impressive even to a native; it was enough to have Angelenos gawking.  They stood near the old Bellingham city hall, a red brick castle complete with towers and Chuckanut granite, and alternately looked out across the bay to the San Juan Islands, then back to the mountains...  

Berkeley, California, USA:
From Seedling of Mars by Clark Ashton Smith (Wonder Stories Quarterly, Fall 1931, as The Planet Entity):
It was in the fall of 1947, three days prior to the annual football game between Stanford and the University of California, that the strange visitor from outer space landed in the middle of the huge stadium at Berkeley where the game was to be held.
   Descending with peculiar deliberation, it was seen and pointed out by multitudes of people in the towns that border on San Francisco Bay...

Big Sur, California, USA:
On the run from the State, from the mob and from a lab-grown monster, Travis Cornell and the genetically-engineered genius-dog "Einstein" hide out in sparsely populated countryside, at the start of part two of Watchers (1987) by Dean R Koontz.
   ...Travis and Einstein went for a walk across the grassy hills and through the woods behind the house they had bought in the beautiful California coastal region called Big Sur.
   On the treeless hills, the autumn sun warmed the stones and cast scattered cloud shadows.  The breeze off the Pacific drew a whisper from the dry golden grass.  In the sun, the air was mild, neither hot nor cool.  Travis was comfortable in jeans and a long-sleeved shirt.
   He carried a Mossberg short-barreled pistol-grip pump-action 12-gauge shotgun.  He always carried it on his walks.  If he ever encountered someone who asked about it, he intended to tell them he was hunting rattlesnakes...    

Birmingham, England:
Chapter eleven of Dan Morgan's The Uninhibited (1961) - in which most of the characters are undercover agents from an extrasolar planet - begins:
Birmingham was alive with the brisk impersonality of a big city in the early morning.  The air that flowed through the open windows of the car had a chill which caught at the nostrils.  Keenan's mind was crisp and alert with the expectancy of danger, despite the long night drive.  He might be entering the very heart of the enemy's activity and he could not afford to relax for a  moment...     

Bolton, Lancashire, England:
Mathematician Lucas Hutchman, on the run, looking for a place to hide, decides against the Lake District:
...It would be better to lose himself in a population centre and - if he did not want to arrive conspicuously in the dead of night - to pick one fairly near at hand.  He pulled off the highway and consulted a road map.
   The nearest town of any size was Bolton which, to Hutchman's mind, was the epitome of the traditionally humdrum life of provincial England...
- from Bob Shaw's The Peace Machine (1971, 1985).

Bridgeport, Wisconsin, USA:
Man of destiny Asher Sutton, travelling back in time from the year 7990, heads for this town as it was in 1977, to close a cause-and-effect loop in a war to preserve freedom for the galaxy in Clifford Simak's Time And Again (1951):
Bridgeport dreamed in its rock-hemmed niche alongside the swiftly flowing river.  The summer sun beat down into the pocket between the tree-mantled cliffs with a fierceness that seemed to squeeze the last hope of life and energy out of everything...  out of the weather-beaten houses, out of the dust that lay along the street, out of leaf-wilted scrub and bush and beaten rows of flowers.
   The railroad tracks curved around a bluff and entered the town, then curved around another bluff and were gone again, and for the short space of this arc out of somewhere into nowhere they shone in the sun with the burnished sharpness of a whetted knife.  Between the tracks and river the railroad station drowsed...      

Brindisi, Apulia, Italy:
Chapter 1 of the final novel in the Starwolf trilogy, World of the Starwolves (1968) by Edmond Hamilton, shows us the old star-captain John Dilullo in what he thinks is retirement.
   ...He sat on the browned, sun-warmed grass on the side of the low hill, hunched with his knees drawn up, looking in his gray coverall like an old rock set in the slope.  And Dilullo's face had something rock-like in it too, a roughly carved face of harsh planes, his hair graying at the edges.
   He looked down at the streets and buildings of Brindisi, at the cape and the mole and the little islands, with beyond them the blue Adriatic shimmering in the hot Italian sun.  He knew the old city very well, but it had changed since he had hurried through it as a boy on his way to school.
   Working and studying, to get to be a starman, he thought.  And what did the stars give me when I got to them?  Danger and worry and sweat, and when I went out to them once too often I came back to find that everybody and everything I had was gone...   

Bromley, Kent, England (Bromley is now part of Greater London):
162 High Street, Brolmely, was the birthplace of H G Wells, 21st September 1866.

Buffalo, New York, USA:
At the start of the rather mind-boggling novel Dinosaur Beach (1971) by Keith Laumer, "Time-sweeper" agent Ravel is living happily in this city in 1936, when he starts to remember who he really is and that he must leave on a mission to save reality.
   It was a pleasant summer evening.  We were sitting on the porch swing, Lisa and I, watching the last of the pink fade out of the sky and listening to Fred Hunnicut pushing a lawn mower over his weed crop next door.  A cricket in the woodwork started up his fiddle, sounding businesslike and full of energy.  A car rattled by, its weak yellow headlights pushing shadows along the brick street and reflecting in the foliage of the sycamores that arched over the pavement.  Somewhere a radio sang about harbor lights.
   A pleasant evening, a pleasant place.  I hated to leave it...    

Bullialdus:
For a reference in William F Temple's Shoot at the Moon (1966) see Mare Nubium.

Caernarfon, Wales:
In the memorable third chapter of Edmond Hamilton's The Closed Worlds (1968), second volume of the Starwolf trilogy, interstellar outlaw Morgan Chane, exiled from the pirate world Varna, returns incognito to his ancestral town on Earth:
   Chane walked the streets of the old town, narrow ways, with old buildings, that slanted down towards the sea.  The day was dark with great clouds and a mist and spume blew in from the ocean; the worn stones under his feet were wet and glistening.  The wind was raw and boisterous, muttering of coming gales.
   He liked this place.  It was almost as grim and harsh as Varna.  And he liked the people, though they had looked at him with neither any particular friendship nor hostility.  He suddenly realized that it was their voices he liked.  They talked in a queer, lilting way, just the way his father had talked, and he remembered that his father had called it the "singsong".
   There did not seem to be very much in this small place of Carnarvon, except a big hulking wreck of a castle down by the sea, so he went that way.  The place was ancient and battered but had a sort of grandeur under the stormy sky.  There was an old man in a uniform coat at the gate who sold tickets.  Chane bought a ticket and started in...
   ..."And so you came from America?  Of course, that was where David went, long ago.  Is it a good job you have there?"
   "I'm not there very much," Chane said.  "I've worked in starships for a long time."
   He thought how Dilullo would react to that discreet description of a Starwolf's profession, and smiled a little...       

Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England:
Much of Fred Hoyle's 1985 novel Comet Halley is set in the university and town.
...It was a Saturday afternoon in late October, one of those unforgettable Cambridge afternoons with a cloudless sky that make you feel there should be a smell of wood-smoke over the whole town.  The undergraduates were "up" for a brand new academic year, undergraduates young enough to feel the whole world opening out before them.  It was an afternoon with sounds travelling in the crisp air, so that even as far away as the Cavendish Laboratory you could hear sporadic roars from the large crowd assembled at the University rugby ground in Grange Road...    

Canfield, Ohio, USA:
Leigh Brackett's post-disaster novel The Long Tomorrow (1955) opens at Canfield (or what's left of it - cities now being forbidden):
Len Colter sat in the shade under the wall of the horse barn, eating pone and sweep butter and contemplating a sin.  He was fourteen years old, and he had lived all of them on the farm at Piper's Run, where opportunities for real sinning were comfortably few.  But now Piper's Run was more than thirty miles away, and he was having a look at the world, bright with distractions and gaudy with possibilities.  He was at the Canfield Fair...   

Carlton House Terrace, London, England:
In the opening chapter of Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle's cosmic disaster novel Inferno (1973), in which (spoiler alert) the galactic centre becomes a quasar and the radiation fries most of the Earth's mid-latitudes, the Scottish hero is about to be given the job in Australia which leads to the terrible discovery.
...dinner over, he set off walking again, out along Shaftesbury Avenue, Piccadilly Circus, Lower Regent Street, into Carlton House Terrace.  At No.6 he pressed the 'night porter' button, announced himself into a small microphone and opened the door as soon as the electrically operated lock came free.
   He slept like a log in the countryside, especially out of doors, but sleep never came easily in big cities and he wondered how he would fare tonight.  The Royal Society, here in Carlton House Terrace, was commendably far from the heavy traffic.  Even so he could hear a general outside hum...    

Casius, Mars:
Telescopic albedo feature at 40 degrees North and 100 degrees East, named by Schiaparelli.
From p51 of Lin Carter's The City Outside the World (1977):
   They rode west, then north awhile until the mighty wall of the great plateau darkened the horizon to the north.  Reaching the foot of the plateau, they skirted it, riding west until sundown, and slept that night in the mouth of one of the innumerable ravines into which the cliffs of Casius were cloven.
   The following day they caught their first glimpse of the broad Nilosyrtis.  Once this canal had been a mighty river, perhaps, flowing down into the lowlands from the mountainous heights of Casius, and watering the Old City which stood at the northern extremity of that huge peninsula now called Syrtis Major...      

Cebrenia:
Centred on 50 degrees North, 150 degrees East, this area is mentioned in chapter 4 of the volume in Lin Carter's Mysteries of Mars series called The City Outside the World (1977).
The protagonist Ryker, while in Aetheria, reflects that:
   ...Due east was an even broader expanse of powdery desert called Cebrenia, which stretched on for twelve hundred miles or so before the mesalike bulk of Propontis rose to block the way...

Central Park, New York City, USA:
After a global pandemic has wiped out most of humanity, Isherwood Williams wanders across the USA looking for other survivors, in George R Stewart's Earth Abides (1949).  The passages in italics are reflections either by the protagonist (who is a geographer) or by the author.
   An island within an island, the green oblong of the Park will remain.  It has open soil where the rain penetrates.  The sun shines upon it.  In the first season the grass grows tall; the seeds fall from the trees and buses, the birds bring in more seeds.  Give it two seasons, three seasons, and the eager saplings are sprouting.  Give it twenty years, and it is a jungle of second growth with each tree straining upward to gain light above its fellows, and the hardy natives, fast-growing ash and maple, crowding out the soft exotics which man once planted there.  You hardly see the bridle path any more; leaf-litter lies thick on the narrow roads.  Give it a hundred years, and you walk in full-grown forest, scarcely knowing that man was ever there except where the stone arch still spans the under-pass, making a strange cave.  The doe walks in the woods, and the wild-cat leaps upon the rabbit, and the bass jumps in the lake...   
         [see also Manhattan]

Chequers, Buckinghamshire, England:
In a confused situation of unexplained news blackout from America and imexplicably strange signals from elsewhere, the narrator of Fred Hoyle's October the First is Too Late (1966) is at first treated with suspicion on his arrival in Britain with a group of scientists from the observatories in Hawaii.
We were taken to what was obviously the headquarters of some intelligence unit.  Men in uniform, men in civilian clothes, were walking around in a strained, taut way.  The American officers were quickly separated from the rest of us.  In fact only John and myself and the Australian crew were in civvies.  We were shown into rough sleeping quarters.  John took this without comment.  With a grin he said to me, "They'll soo change their tune."
   The following morning, after an unappetizing breakfast, two officers came...  We were taken to a waiting car...
   The car headed out into west London.  It kept on into the country for an hour or thereabouts.  At last we turned in at the gates of a pretty flossy place.  The house was vaguely familiar.
  "Chequers," grinned John.  "I told you they'd change their tune."
   We were received courteously by the Prime Minister himself.  There were a number of other guests, quite a mob of them.  The Prime Minister introduced us round...      

Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, England:
The narrator of John Wyndham's alien-contact novel Chocky (1968), David Gore, is a man with few close relatives, who marries one Mary Bosworth, from a family so numerous that "...I had a feeling of being engulfed".  He moves with his new wife after their honeymoon to
   ...a small house in Cheshunt - a strategic position for easy contact with most elements of the Bosworth ganglion...    

Cheyenne, Wyoming, USA:
Currently a state capital, this city will undergo a further rise in status in the future described by Philip K Dick's Now Wait For Last Year (1966), in which Earth, in the year 2055, is at war with an arthropodal species from the Proxima Centauri system:
   ...On Terra at the UN capital city, Cheyenne, Wyoming, in addition to those in POW camps, there existed a herd of captured, defanged reegs, maintained on public exhibition by the Terran military establishment.  Citizens could file past and gawk and ponder at length the meaning of these exoskeletoned beings with six extremities in all, capable of progressing linearly at a great rate on either two or four legs.  The reegs had no audible vocal apparatus; they communicated beewise by elaborate, dancelike weavings of their sensory stalks...     
In the same author's The Penultimate Truth (1964), a novel about a huge political deception in which most of the population are fooled into remaining underground because they are made to think World War Three is still raging, Nicholas St James nevertheless emerges on to the surface and, after narrowly escaping death at the hands of hostile "leadies" (robots), finds refuge in the ruins of Cheyenne.
   ...From the mangled, badly distributed chunks that once had been high buildings, streets, the intricate, strong structures of a major city, four men rose to intercept Nicholas St James.  "How come," the first of them said, and all were bearded, ragged, but evidently healthy, "no leadies detected you?"
   Utterly weary, Nicholas stood for a time and then he seated himself on a broken stone, fished futilely in his coat pocket for a cigarette...     

Chicago, Illinois, USA:
Poul Anderson in Mirkheim (1977) gives us a 26th-century view of Chicago:
   Seen from an activated transparency in Nicholas van Rijn's penthouse atop the Winged Cross, Chicago Integrate was a godland of spires, towers, many-colored walls, crystalline vitryl, gracefully curving trafficways, flickering emblems, here and there a stretch of trees and greensward, the sky and the lake as aglitter with movement as the ground itself...    
Back in the Twentieth Century, a pilot named Morlake in A E van Vogt's The Earth Killers (Super Science Stories, April 1949) is test-flying a new plane when he encounters a nuclear bomb making a vertical descent towards Chicago in the year 1979.  With a much more jaundiced view of the city than van Rijn's, Morlake nevertheless tries to divert the bomb, willing to sacrifice his own life: 
   ...Plans too fleeting to be comprehended multiplied and coalesced.  Impersonal plans involving death for his body.  Impersonal, because the city below was not his city.  No one in it knew about him or cared about him, not even a secondary girl friend.  He hated the place.  Windy, dirty, wretched, miserable, hot in summer, cold in winter...      

Chichen Itza, Yucatan, Mexico:
The mystery of this Mayan site is woven into the Lovecraft-inspired novel The Philosopher's Stone (1969) by Colin Wilson. 
   ...no power of adaptation.  They stayed in their cities until the land that fed them was exhausted: then there was no alternative to a mass migration.
   This was not the whole explanation.  There was something more sinister here.  Why was the social structure so rigid?  Why was the priesthood so dominant?  Behind Maya civilization lay the conception of the Great Secret, a mystery symbolized by the enormous heads of serpents in their temples.  The priests held a secret that was so terrifying that the world might be destroyed if it was ever revealed.  It was the priests who had ordered the mass migration.  And they believed they were under orders from Someone Else...    

Chiswick, Hounslow, London, England:
In John Christopher's climate-change novel The World In Winter (1962) an African nation, intending to lay claim to frozen Britain, sends an expedition which explores the Thames area.
   ...They found human life again at Chiswick.  At first there were odd figures on the banks of the frozen river, some retreating, as the Hovercraft approached, into the hinterland of buildings, others - bolder or more curious - staring and gesticulating...
   ...By Chiswick Bridge the activity was greater and more purposive.  A mob that had gathered on the left bank spilled out on to the bridge itself...  They shook their fists and howled inaudible curses.  Some stooped down and rummaged in the snow, looking for stones which they threw at the Hovercraft.
   Abonitu said, smiling:  "The natives seem unfriendly..."  

Clavius (crater):
Location of the hiding-place chosen for a scientific discovery in The Key (Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1966) by Isaac Asimov.
   Urth said solemnly, "I would suggest you search the shaded rim of Clavius, at that point where the Earth is nearest the zenith..."
The crater provides an important location in Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968):
Clavius, a hundred-and-fifty miles in diameter, is the second largest crater on the visible face of the Moon, and lies in the centre of the Southern Highlands.  It is very old; ages of vulcanism and bombardment from space have scarred its walls and pock-marked its floor.  But since the last era of crater-formation, when the debris from the asteroid belt was still battering the inner planets, it had known peace for half a billion years.
   Now there were new, strange stirrings on and below its surface, for here Man was establishing his first permanent bridgehead on the Moon.  Clavius Base could, in an emergency, be entirely self-supporting...    
A different slant on the area's administrative side is given by the same author in his shipping-disaster novel A Fall of Moondust (1961).  Chapter 7 begins:
In Clavius City, Chief Administrator Olsen and Tourist Commissioner Davis had just finished conferring with the Legal Department.  It had not been a cheerful occasion; much of the time had been discussing the waivers of responsibility which the missing tourists had signed before they boarded Selene...

Copais:
Harl Vincent in Lost City of Mars (Astounding Stories, February 1934) refers to a city Copais, whereas on old maps of Mars it was a lake (Copais Lacus) and nowadays it is a "swamp" (Copais Palus):
SPRINGING up, as if in actual miniature reproduction, was one of the canal cities of Mars. There was a section of dryland territory on the one side of moonlit Canal Pyramus, the spires and minarets and glistening nickel-cobalt roadways of the city on the other. Lights of many ronsals, the vehicles whose elongated bodies were supported a few feet above the roads by the energies with which they were charged, could be discerned plainly. The traffic was that of mid-evening, proceeding at a leisurely pace.
   “It’s Copais!” breathed Coler. “Right!” said Kal.

Copán, Honduras:
In Edmond Hamilton's novella Lords of the Morning (Thrilling Wonder Stories, August 1952) archaeologist Ed Martin, investigating Maya ruins, undergoes involuntary mental time-travel whereby his mind is transferred to the body of one Pedro Yanez, sixteenth-century conquistador.
...Copan, that mightiest of old Mayan cities, lost and forgotten for centuries with the Empire that had built it.  So long lost and so well forgotten, that Martin had not credited Stephen's account of an expedition under one Hernando de Chaves that attacked a rich and living Copan early in the Sixteenth Century.
   Now he would know.  He was marching with Hernando de Chaves... The sun was hot, and he was trapped in alien flesh...    

Copernicus:  
For a reference in William F Temple's Shoot at the Moon (1966) see Mare Nubium.
In James P Hogan's Inherit the Stars (1977), a fifty-thousand-year-old humanoid corpse is discovered in a cave near the base named "Copernicus Three".

Crater Mountain, California, USA:
I am assuming that "Crater Ridge" is a ridge on Crater Mountain.  The location, specified as "among the Sierras", seems to fit the reference in Clark Ashton Smith's The City of the Singing Flame (1931).
   I had gone for a walk on Crater Ridge, which lies a mile or less to the north of my cabin near Summit.  Though differing markedly in its character from the usual landscapes round about, it is one of my favorite places.  It is exceptionally bare and desolate, with little more in the way of vegetation than mountain sunflowers, wild currant-bushes, and a few sturdy, wind-warped pines and supple tamaracks.
   Geologists deny it a volcanic origin; yet its outcroppings of rough nodular stone and enormous rubble-heaps have all the air of scoriac remains - at least, to my non-scientific eye.  They look like the slag and refuse of Cyclopean furnaces, poured out in pre-human years, to cool and harden into shapes of limitless grotesquerie...    

Crete:
Earthquakes, eruptions and changes in sea-level have transformed the geography of the Mediterranean across which Mal Irish pursues Ricia's kidnappers in Keith Laumer's Catastrophe Planet (1966):
...At sunset I reached a swampy stretch on the far side of which the island of Crete was a dim line of light.  I found a sheltered stretch of former beach under a line of giant weed-covered rocks, pulled the car over and slept until dawn.
   The Cretan shore was rocky, dry, parched, a landscape in Hell under the garish colors of sunrise seen through smoke...    

Culloden Moor, Inverness-shire, Scotland:
After a lapse of years the Highlander physicist-hero of Inferno (1973), a cosmic-disaster novel by Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle, pays his third visit to the historic site - shortly before the unexpected calamity which renders most of Earth uninhabitable - and is appalled by what he sees.
   ...It came as an intense shock to find the battlefield grown over by woodland.  Cameron parked the car some two hundred yards back from the memorial cairn.  Leaving Madeleine there he walked to the clan graves.  At least the graves had been left in open ground.  He stood for a while.  Then walking away to the trees a black fury seized him.  This was the final indignity.  Not content with cruelty and persecution.  Not content with stealing the land, not content with evictions, not content with an endless draining of vigour from the Highlands, they must even obliterate the very ground on which men had fought and died.  Obliterated by mean trees, not even dignified trees of good quality.  Obliterated by the very poorest quality trees.  What was it but part of a determined degradation of the old culture by these unremitting creatures to the south?
   "May the wrath of God strike you some time," Cameron muttered....
   (In this book, italics mean that the words are spoken in Gaelic.)

Dallas, Texas, USA:
...A brand-new six-megahorse job, it rode high and smooth on a two-foot air cushion.  It was too bad about the broken hatch lock, but back in Dallas I hadn't had time to look around for the owner.  The self-appointed vigilantes who called themselves the National Guard had developed a bad habit of shooting first and checking for explanations later.  True, I had been doing a little informal shopping in a sporting goods store - but the owner would not have cared.  He and most of the rest of the city had left for points north...   
                                     - Keith Laumer, Catastrophe Planet (1966), p.7

Damascus, Syria:
Dazed by the horror of the news of an unexplained nuclear attack on this city, mathematician Lucas Hutchman decides upon his dangerous anti-weapons gamble in Bob Shaw's The Peace Machine (1971, 1985).
   "Vicky," he said, almost guiltily.  "Something has happened.  I just heard a news flash on the television.  They say Damascus has been wiped out by a hydrogen bomb."
   "How awful."  Vicky turned, her hands full of diced cheese, and nodded towards a glass-fronted cupboard.  "How ghastly.  Be a darling and reach me down the small casserole..."   

Death Valley, California, USA:
In D F Jones' Colossus (1966), Death Valley is the site of a nuclear explosion perpetrated by the despotic supercomputer as a punishment for disobedience.
   Blake's head lolled to one side, yet in his eyes Forbin saw intelligence struggling with unspeakable horror and fear.  He swallowed, gasped for air. 
   "The missile team - Death Valley - missile, missile exploded in its silo - I don't know, know any..."       

De Soto, Wisconsin, USA:
The place is featured in Clifford Simak's The Visitors (1979), chapter 53, by which stage in the story people are rushing to help themselves to free gifts (such as cars) grown by the alien visitors, plant-based organisms with fantastic powers of replication.
The South Dakotan who had nursed his dilapidated car for more than five hundred miles, the machine rattling and banging, coughing and gasping, every wheeze threatening to be its last, pulled into the small town of De Soto, a wide place in the road hemmed in between bluff and river.  He tried to find a place to park, but there was no place left in the town to park.  The one long street was jammed with cars and people, and there seemed to be much angry shouting and running about, and the frightening, sobering thought crossed his mind that possibly all the people here had also come for cars...  

Deltaton Sinus:
From Patrick Moore's 1955 rescue-mission novel Mission to Mars, p120: 
  ...Just about the time of sunset, they began to meet with isolated patches of the mossy vegetation, while in the distance they could just make out a more extensive area of greenness.
   Mellor pointed.  "See that?  It's the beginning of the dark area that astronomers call the Deltaton Sinus.  Frankly I'm glad to see it, because it shows me that we're just about where I thought we were...
The rescuers want to find the wreck of the Hermes, the first rocket to reach Mars, from which, some months before, a fragmentary radio message had been received on Earth (see the entry for Aeria).
I have been unable to find a picture to go with this entry for Deltaton Sinus, but Patrick Moore (1923-2012) was a famous expert on Mars and knew what he was talking about, so the feature must exist in cartographic history.  Readers are welcome to help research the issue and find me a picture!  Page 77-8 gives a clue, confirming that the rescuers have landed in Aeria, without being certain of the whereabouts of their goal.
   Struck by a sudden thought, he reached for the map of Mars that lay on the chart table.  On it Mellor had marked their estimated position, latitude 5 north longitude 320 - on the desert between the vegetation tracts of Deltaton Sinus and Sinus Sabaeus...       

Denali, Alaska, USA:
[officially "Mt McKinley" until August 2015]
The threat of an approaching anti-matter body threatening to destroy the Earth is first discovered from here in John D Clark's Minus Planet (Astounding Stories, April 1937):   
   ...It was on January 15, 2156, that the astrophysicist, Dr. James Carter, had the first glimpse of light - literally.  He was working on the new five-hundred-inch reflector of the Mt. McKinley observatory at the time, and noticed a darkening of his photographic plate from the spectrometer focused on Polaris...  a uniform darkening over the whole spectral range...

Denver, Colorado, USA:

Detroit, Michigan, USA:
The city suffers a mysterious fate during the chaotic outbreak of temporal/probability shufflings in Murray Leinster's Sidewise in Time (Astounding Stories, June 1934):
   We still do not understand what happened to Detroit.  It was upon an oscillating segment of earth.  It vanished from our time, and it returned to our time.  But its inhabitants did not come back with it.  The city was empty - deserted as if the hundreds of thousands of human beings who lived in it had simply evaporated into the air.  There have been some few signs of struggle seen, but they may have been the result of panic.  The city of Detroit returned to its own space and time untouched, unharmed, unlooted, and undisturbed.  But no living thing, not even a domestic animal or a caged bird, was in it when it came back.  We do not understand it at all...        

Deucalionis Regio:
From Lin Carter's Martian "lost race" novel The Valley Where Time Stood Still (1974), p.22:
   ...What in the world did Thaklar hope to find in that part of the country?  The plateau was a dead wilderness of sterile rock, cleft asunder by a thousand canyons and ravines; Deucalionis was a curved tongue of dustland that extended into the highlands between two plateaux.  Seventy million years ago it had been a bay, perhaps, or a river delta, cut deep into a continental coast.  Now it was nothing: dead rock, scoured with sand, where few wild beasts roamed...   

the Doerfel Mountains (=Montes Doerfel):
From R W Mackleworth's Starflight 3000 (1972), in which the Moon has acquired a proto-atmosphere:
   Lower on the slope he spotted a movement.
   He edged away to the southeast, into the foothills of the Doerfuls.  It was not the right direction but it skirted the dangers of the crater and its red mist.  He had no wish to die before his time...    

Dover, Kent, England:
   Bond concentrated on his driving as he coasted down into Dover.  He kept left and was soon climbing out of the town again past the wonderful cardboard castle.
   There was a patch of low cloud on top of the hill and a spit of rain on his windshield.  There was a cold breeze coming in from the sea...           
       - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955)

Edmonton, Alberta, Canada:
Some time in the early 36th century, the mad poet Navarth is hoping that he and his young ward may escape the attention of arch-villain Viole Falushe, in Jack Vance's The Palace of Love (1967):
   ...When the girl was sixteen, they lived in Edmonton, Canada, the goal of hordes of pilgrims who came to gaze upon the Sacred Shin.  Navarth reckoned that here, among the interminable festivals, processions and sacerdotal rites, they might well live unnoticed.
   But Navarth was wrong.  Viole Falushe by some means knew his whereabouts.  One night the telescreen lit up to show a tall figure standing against a flashing blue background which obscured his features...      
After some rather chilling dialogue, in which the Demon Prince reproves Navarth for failing to "educate" the girl with the proper preconditioned receptivity, Falushe ends with:
   "But now you know what I expect.  I hope you will repair your neglect."~
   The screen went dead.  Navarth in a fury of frustration and resentment went striding out along the Great Nave, that avenue extending from the Plaza of Beatitudes to the Temple of the Shin.  But the press of pilgrims irked him, and he took refuge in a teahouse...      
  

the Embankment, London, England:
In the first of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's adventures starring the egomaniacal Professor Challenger, The Lost World (1912), Challenger and his rival, Professor Summerlee, spend much time feuding with each other.  The narrator recounts:
   ...Last night Challenger said that he never cared to walk on the Thames Embankment and look up the river, as it was always sad to see one's own eventual goal.  He is convinced, of course, that he is destined for Westminster Abbey.  Summerlee retorted, however, with a sour smile, by saying that he understood that Millbank Prison had been pulled down.  Challenger's conceit is too colossal to allow him to be really annoyed.  He only smiled in his beard and repeated "Really ! really !" in the pitying tone one would use to a child....   

Eratosthenes:
As well as the fictional, this site is intended to cover the non-fictional Old Solar System, which is to say the old ideas of what was really there; yet compared with the coverage of the fictional, I've hardly dealt directly with the non-fictional at all.  Of course by implication, as story-writers have been inspired by what is now out-of-date science, I have explored that science to a fair degree; but not explicitly enough for my liking.  Still, here's an exception, regarding the 35-mile-wide crater Eratosthenes.
From Wikipedia:
From 1910 to the 1920s, William H. Pickering noted dark patches in the crater that varied in a regular manner over each lunar day. He first put forward the speculative idea that these patches appeared to migrate across the surface, suggestive of vegetation. Pickering believed that the Moon had a thicker atmosphere and reported seeing climatic variations such as frost and snow, leading him to refer to the crater as the "Gardens of Eratosthenes". Later his views would change, and he would come to believe that the vegetation was instead "swarms of animal life", which he often referred to as swarms of insects, or "lunar insects". The scientific community did not share his enthusiasm for these ideas, but they received a degree of attention in the popular press of the time primarily due to Pickering's reputation.    

Eridania:
...By the next day we had flown across the Scamander canal and were in the dustlands of Eridania.  It took us a whole day of steady travel to cross the broad bowl of yellow dust, and we were all restless and quarrelsome from being cooped up for so many endless hours in the narrow confines of the skimmer's cabin...  From the quest for the Treasure City recounted in The Man Who Loved Mars (1973), by Lin Carter.

Fastigium Aryn:
I haven't found a picture for this Martian feature.  The location is given as Latitude 10 degrees, Longitude 15, in the Gangale and Dudley-Flores list of "Proposed Additions to the Cartographic Database of Mars", which states that the name originated with Lowell.  I haven't been able to ascertain whether it is still in use at all but there are plenty of post-Lowell references online, one as late as 1970 (Observational Patrol of Mars in Support of Mariners Vl and Vl, by C F Capen)..
From Signboard of Space by Frederic Arnold Kummer, Jr (Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1939), describing an approach to the Red Planet:
   ...I am impressed by the similarity of certain curiously regular designs, formed by the canals, to other designs which I have previously noticed upon the Fastigium Aryn...   

Florin, Pennsylvania, USA:
In the invasion story Day of Succession by Theodore L Thomas (Astounding, August 1959), General Paul T Tredway, having dealt effectively with one alien lander at Terre Hill, disposes of the second in equally capable fashion:
   ...General Tredway had reasoned that when one object arrived, another might follow, and so he had ordered the trackers to look for it.  It hit twenty-five miles west of the first one, near Florin.  General Tredway and his men were on their way even before impact.  They arrived twenty minutes after it hit...    

Folkestone, Kent, England:
The cliff-top promenade known as the Leas is a scene made memorable by H G Wells in The New Accelerator (Strand Magazine, December 1901).
   ...I was proud to observe that I did not feel frightened - I suppose because there were two of us.  "Why shouldn't we go out?" I asked.
   "Why not?"
   "They'll see us."
   "Not they.  Goodness, no!  Why, we shall be going a thousand times faster than the quickest conjuring trick that was ever done..."
   Assuredly of all the strange experiences that I have ever had, or imagined, or read of other people having or imagining, that little raid I made with Gibberne on the Folkestone Leas, under the influence of the New Accelerator, was the strangest and maddest of all.  We went out by his gate into the road, and there we made a minute examination of the statuesque passing traffic...

Fredericksburg, Virginia, USA:
One of the locations affected by the shifting of time-paths in Murray Leinster's novella Sidewise in Time (Astounding Stories, June 1934):
 ...At half past eight a.m. on June 5, 1935, the inhabitants of Fredericksburg had felt a curious, unanimous dizziness.  It passed.  The sun shone brightly.  There seemed to be no noticeable change in any of the facts of everyday existence.  But within an hour the sleepy little town was buzzing with excitement.  The road to Washington - Route One on all road maps - ceased abruptly some three miles north.  A colossal, a gigantic forest had appeared magically to block the way...      

Gatwick Airport, Sussex, England:
In the climax of the third volume of Dan Morgan's "Minds" tetralogy, The Mind Trap, one telepath (the evil Henrietta) seeks to deceive and kidnap another (thrilled young Katie) to take her out of the country.  Katie narrates:
   ...First thing we went to the airline counter, where Henrietta got the tickets and they weighed her luggage.  I hadn't got any, of course, but she said that would be all right, and we'd be able to get some new clothes for me in Italy.  Me - Italian clothes!  I was beginning to feel like some kind of movie star.
    Afterwards we went upstairs and walked along the balcony until we came to this great big lounge place, filling with people sitting at tables eating and drinking, and all one side of the room was like one big window looking out over the airport.  Henrietta parked me at a table by this window and went over to the counter where they were serving drinks and stuff.  I just sat there, letting it all wash over me, pinching myself every few seconds to make sure I wasn't dreaming, and looking out at the planes sitting there on the tarmac, with baggage trolleys and fuel trucks scurrying here and there between them...  

Geneva, Switzerland:
The column of the Jet d'Eau still rose like a pearl-grey, feathery giant over the lake; the mountains stood sentinel in their uncompromising purity and the Old Town was still preserved on the hillside like a museum piece - but otherwise Geneva had become a vast city of sky-scrapers set in extravagant flower gardens.  Yet the city of Calvin was more than ever the centre of European political life and, since the Hyannis Agreement which divided the sessions of the United Nations between New York and Switzerland, the centre of world politics for at least six months in a year.  More than a century and a half had passed since the first Red Cross Convention had been signed, attempting to regulate the conduct of war.  Much had changed in these years; above all, the Convention had been repeatedly modified.  The more recent wars left few survivors; there were not many prisoners and even fewer wounded...  The so-called U.N. Balls - a series of dazzling social events - attracted the top thousand of the world every February.  Three times a year the Bernadette, Hammerskjold and Roosevelt Memorial Banquets brought the leading politicians, financiers and intellectuals of a hundred countries into the vast armoury of the Tower of Nations; and Amazonian, Texan or Arab millionaires paid fabulous bribes for invitations.  Half of Geneva consisted of hotels and apartment houses for the U.N. personnel...
                                                                   Paul Tabori, The Survivors (1964)
By contrast in City (1952) by Clifford D Simak, Geneva is cut off from the rest of the world by means of a force-field, this isolation being the deliberate act of one man, Jon Webster, who wants to leave the rest of the world free for the successor species, the intelligent Dogs.
   When he reached the street, he saw that the sky had changed.  A grey, metallic overcast had blotted out the sun and the city lay in twilight, only half relieved by the automatic street lights.  A faint breeze wafted at his cheek...     

Georgia, USA:
Mal Irish looks towards this state from his wanderings in Florida during the geological upheavals of Catastrophe Planet (1966) by Keith Laumer:
   ...Off to the north you could see a dull glow in the sky - a reflection from the red-hot lava that was building a new mountain range across Georgia...    
(Earlier in the story there is an incident in what's left of the Georgia town of "Greenleaf" - but this seems to be a fictional place; at any rate I haven't found any evidence for it online.)

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, USA:
In the alternate-history classic Bring the Jubilee (1953) by Ward Moore, the historian Hodge Backmaker, US citizen in the timeline in which the South won the War between the States, travels back in time to the battlefield of Gettysburg to check on some facts, and (spoiler) by his mere presence, without taking any action, involuntarily alters the outcome of the battle, turning it from a Confederate into a Union victory.
The battle also features in the haunting first chapter of Simak's Way Station (1963), which begins:
The noise was ended now.  The smoke drifted like thin, grey wisps of fog above the tortured earth and the shattered fences and the peach trees that had been whittled into toothpicks by the cannon fire.  For a moment silence, if not peace, fell upon those few square miles of ground where just a while before men had screamed and torn at one another in the frenzy of old hate and had contended in an ancient striving and then had fallen apart, exhausted...  

Gibraltar:
I sailed north during the night...  reached Gibraltar at dawn.  The famous rock was gone, and a new channel that I estimated at twenty miles wide stretched ahead into the open water of the Mediterranean.  A fifteen-knot current poured out through the strait...
                                                                Keith Laumer, Catastrophe Planet (1966)

Gijón, Spain:
This town on the Bay of Biscay is the scene of an alien attack from the Deeps in John Wyndham's The Kraken Wakes (1953):
...It was somewhere about ten-thirty in the evening when the sea-tanks came sliding up from the quietly lapping waters at Gijon, with not a sound to betray them until their metal bellies started to crunch up the stone ramps.  The few small boats that were already drawn up there they pushed aside or crushed as they came.  It was the cracking of the timbers that brought men out from the waterside posadas to investigate.
   They could make out little in the fog.  The first sea-tanks must have sent coelenterate bubbles wobbling into the air before the men realized what was happening, for presently all was cries, screams, and confusion...     

Glen Shiel, Scotland:
In Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle's disaster novel Inferno (1973), in which weather extremes make Earth uninhabitable after an explosion in the galactic core, some relief eventually returns to the survivors in northern latitudes, including Scotland.
   ...A vague light spread gradually across the eastern sky, the light of a late November morning...
   ...The light had not long come to Glen Shiel when Cameron stepped outside into the bitter air.  He walked to the lochside, his boots squeaking in very dry snow.  The sight which met his eyes as he gazed up the glen was appalling beyond all expectations.  So it must have been during the ice-age.  The Five Sisters range was plastered, bottom to top, with ice and snow.  So was Beinn Fhada and the mountains north of Morvich.  The loch itself was thick frozen.  It was a white world of intense desolation.  It was the white of a shroud.  Cameron found himself scarcely able to believe that the land it covered could ever come to life again.   

the Gobi Desert:
From Paul Tabori's The Doomsday Brain (1967):
   The city which Bruno Gatterer alias Master Brug built under the rocks of the Gobi Desert had a population of seven hundred.  But its extent and its production capacity were that of a large metropolis.  The answer to this seeming paradox was automation.  The seven hundred did little but tend the machines each of which did the work of a thousand or more...
   And now he was ready.  Ready to crown his life's work, to prove that he was Master Brug, the man whom the machines had made into a god and whose godhead was embodied in machines that were like men and men that had become machines...   
From Frederick Pohl's The Merchants' War (1984) which is set in a "sales-fearing" commercial dystopia run by advertising agencies, and in which the "hero", Tenn Tarb, is recruited to extend their sway:
   We wound up in the Gobi Desert...
   The place is technically known as the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, but everybody called it the Reservation.  It was where one of the last remaining batches of unconsolidated aboriginals lived, Uygurs and Hui and Kazak, the ones that never made the transition to the market society when the rest of China joined it.  There's civilization all around them.  There's RussCorp to the North, Indiastries South and all the China-Han complex at their gates.  But the Eager Weegers just sit there and do their own thing...    

Goose Island, Iowa, USA:
I haven't been able to find a picture of it but according to my online search it does really exist, not just in Clifford Simak's The Visitors (1979, 1980):
   "Visitors?  Visitors?  Oh, yes, now I know.  I've heard the name.  You mean those big black boxes folks say came out of the sky."
   "That's what I mean," said Jerry.  "You sound as if you saw one."
   "Over on Goose Island," said Quinn.  "That's the big island, plumb in the centre of the river valley, four or five miles downstream from here...  Just saw the tops of them, sticking out above the trees.  It was getting on towards evening and I didn't linger none..."  

Grosvenor Square, London, England:
In the second volume of Dan Morgan's tetralogy about a community of telepaths, working-class journalist Jerry Coleman has an appointment with his formidably posh mother-in-law:
   The Chalfont Hotel was located in a backwater off Grosvenor Square, a bastion of privilege in this age of the common man.  As such it was quite obviously home ground for Alison Humphreys.  Jerry Coleman wished he had insisted that they meet somewhere on his choosing, but the invitation had come as a surprise; apart from that, with Alison Humphreys he was infufficiently sure of himself to insist on anything.
   As the double glass doors of the lounge swung shut behind him with a contemptuous hiss he squared his shoulders beneath the rumpled brown corduroy jacket and tried to rid himself of the feeling that he was an illegal immigrant travelling on a false passport...    
                                                                                         The Several Minds (1969)

Gruithuisen's Lunar City, Mare Insularum:

Guernsey, Channel Islands:

Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, USA:
A third alien spacecraft lands here, shortly after the landings at Terre Hill and Florin which were dealt with summarily by the ruthless General Tredway in Day of Succession by Theodore L Thomas (Astounding, August 1959).  This time, Tredway isn't on the spot - he has been summoned to the White House to account for his actions.  His replacement, General Barnes, has been ordered to give the aliens a chance.  At the White House the President and other top people, including the disgraced Tredway, watch events on the TV screen.
   ...The familiar black at the bottom of the hatch came into view, followed closely by the top of the gleaming rose blossom.  General Tredway snapped his fingers, the sound cracking loud in the still room.  The men close to the set jumped and looked back at Tredway in annoyance.  It was plain that the general had announced in his own way the proper moment to fire.  Their eyes had hardly got back to the screen when it happened...    

Heraclides Promontory:  see Sinus Iridum.

Hesperia:
   ...The next day we flew north by northwest over a broad mossy zone crisscrossed by the darker belts of two minor canals, into the southern tip of Hesperia.  And by sundown we were nearly as far as we could get by flying.  The next morning we flew due north, feeling our way across the patchy moss-lands...
  - from The Man Who Loved Mars (1973), by Lin Carter, p.47.
(In actual fact Hesperia Planum is a lava plain, centred at 20 degrees South, 240 degrees West.)    

Hippalus (crater), Mare Humorum:
From R W Mackleworth's novel Starflight 3000, the first part of which is set on the Moon in a future when it has been given the chance to develop an atmosphere, hydrosphere and the beginnings of a biosphere:
   He noted the clouds and the light and pressed on faster.  In the late afternoon of a long day such storms were not uncommon, as the Earth exerted its pull with a special vengeance on the infant atmosphere.
   To his left he saw the shadowy heights guarding the crater Hippalus.  The crater opened onto the Mare Humorum like a tilted cup.  When the water began to respond to the Earth's pull, the cup would be full of torment; the sea would leap in fury, tearing into the rock walls, leaving the sea bed bare in places for a second or so.
   Suddenly he doubted if he dare take to the water before nightfall.  At night the seas might calm down between tides but he would have to sail blind, unless the Earthshine broke through the cloud...    

Hipparchus (crater):
From Earthlight by Arthur C Clarke: 
... The meal was tasty but unidentifiable. Like all food on the Moon, it would have been grown in the great hydroponic farms that sprawled their square kilometers of pressurized greenhouses along the equator.  The meat course was presumably synthetic: it might have been beef, but Sadler happened to know that the only cow on the Moon lived in luxury at the Hipparchus Zoo. This was the sort of useless information his diabolically retentive mind was always picking up and refusing to disgorge.    

Horsell Common, near Woking, Surrey, England:
Impact site of the first cylinder from Mars in the invasion described by H G Wells in The War of the Worlds (1898).
The tops of the pine-trees and the roofs of Horsell came out sharp and black against the western after-glow.  The Martians and their appliances were altogether invisible, save for that thin mast upon which their restless mirror wobbled...

Hyde Park, London, England:
COVID was a picnic compared to the global pandemic in Charles Eric Maine's 1962 novel  The Darkest of Nights - in which over half the population perishes, and rebellion and civil war break out over the government's contentious plans for shelters.
   Hyde Park, site of one of the first of the underground shelters, had acquired a distinctly military aspect.  Driving leisurely by, Clive saw barbed wire fencing patrolled by armed troops, and inside the wire were Nissen huts and armoured cars.  At the southern side of the park, near Knightsbridge, two tanks stood squatly on their caterpillar tracks, guns facing outwards across the wide road junction...  

Inverness, Scotland:
A threat to clan-chief Cameron's nascent post-disaster community in the West of Scotland arises in Inverness, in Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle's Inferno (1973):
   The temptation everywhere among the isolated pockets of humanity would be to live on existing stores of food, fuel and clothing.  Where the stores were largest the temptation would be stongest.  It could seem as if stocks might last for ever, but no stock or store would in fact last for ever.  Sooner or later people would be thrown onto their own resources, and the sooner the better.  Cameron had seen this plainly from the beginning.  He had seen that parasites, human parasites, would arise wherever stocks and stores were ample.
   This was exactly what happened in the Inverness region.  The resources of Inverness were much greater than those of the western valleys.  They were sufficient to maintain all survivors through the winter and early spring.  Stocks of petrol were the first to run short.  Restricted groups were soon in control of the remaining petrol.  The groups fought and preyed on each other until one emerged stronger and more dominant than the others...   

Iowa, USA:
...I stopped in a bar and looked at a newscast.  There was no news from Iowa, but when is there any news from Iowa?   
                                                   Robert A Heinlein, The Puppet Masters (1951)
See also Goose Island.

Isidis:
...My memory drifted back to my first landing on Mars, years and years ago.  When I was young and raw and green and idealistic.  I recalled how we had ridden down in a little, crowded, rattletrap satellite shuttle from Deimos Terminal, flying east across the Tharsis region to make planetfall at the debarkation camp in Isidis Regio.  I remembered how I had felt then when I first came out of the lock with the new arrivals, breathing hoarsely through the strange, ill-fitting respirators, waiting to pile on the long tractor train for an interminable, bumpy ride across the craterlets to Syrtis...   from The Man Who Loved Mars by Lin Carter (1973).

Isle of Wight, England:
Commandeered by the Colossus computer.
   "You want a site there?"
   "No.  I want the island.  There is a human population of one million five hundred and twenty-seven thousand.  They will have to be moved."
   "What!"  This shook Forbin right out of his scientific mood.  "You can't mean that - move over a million and a half people!  There must be some other site just as suitable!"
   Colossus ignored him.  "The island is 147 square miles in area, largely composed of chalk, a relatively good insulating material.  Much of it will be leveled down to bare rock..."
                                                              D F Jones, Colossus (1966)  
More optimistically, the Island figures as a redoubt against the vegetable scourge of the triffids:
   Clearly, the best self-maintaining defence line would be water.  To that end they had held a discussion on the various merits of various islands.  It had been chiefly climate that had decided them in favour of the Isle of Wight, despite some misgivings over the area that would have to be cleared...      
                                            John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids (1951), chapter 16

Joplin, Missouri, USA:
In the dramatic mixture of probability-world time-paths which the world undergoes in the classic novella by Murray Leinster, Sidewise in Time (Astounding Stories, June 1934), we are shown an ordinary start to a morning that is a prelude to fantastic events in Joplin:
   It was half past seven a.m. of June 5, 1935.  The city of Joplin, Missouri, awaked from a comfortable, summer-night sleep.  Dew glistened upon grass blades and leaves and the filmy webs of morning spiders glittered like diamond dust in the early sunshine.  In the most easternly suburb a high-school boy, yawning, came somnolently out of his house to mow the lawn before schooltime...
   ...And then a marked command, which was definitely not in the English language.
   Down the street of a suburb of Joplin, Missouri, on June 5, in the year of our Lord 1935, came a file of spear-armed, shield-bearing soldiers in the short, skirtlike togas of ancient Rome...  

Kansas City, Missouri, USA:
Robert A Heinlein (himself a Missourian) in his ultra-tense invasion-novel The Puppet Masters (published 1951; set in 2007) has his agent driving into the city to determine whether it has been taken over by the parasitic Masters, who like to control humans by riding their backs.  Chapter XVIII begins:
The city did not look right.  It did not have the right flavour, as if it were a clumsily directed play.  I tried to put my finger on the fault; it kept slipping away.
   Kansas City has many neighbourhoods made up of family units a century old or more.  Kids roll on lawns and householders sit on their front porches, just as their great-grandparents did.  If there are bomb shelters around, they do not show.  The queer old bulky houses, fitted together by guildsmen long since dead, make those neighbourhoods feel like enclaves of security.  I cruised through along such streets, dodging dogs and rubber balls and toddlers, and tried to get the feel of the place.  It was the slack of the day, time for a drink, for wwatering lawns, for neighbourly chatting.  I saw a woman bending over a flower bed.  She was wearing a sun suit and her back was bare; clearly she was not wearing a master, nor were the two kids with her.  What could be wrong?   
In If This Goes On - (Astounding 1940 (serialized); revised and expanded 1953 for inclusion in the Future History volume Revolt in 2100), Heinlein again brings the reader to this part of the country when his hero John Lyle, conspirator against the tyranny of the "Prophet", takes a transport rocket to KC.
   ...my stomach felt tight as we got off the ship in Kansas City.  I expected that gentle touch on the shoulder which is more frightening than a fist in the face.  But nothing happened...   

Karatepe, Turkey:
A Hittite fortress, Karatepe features in The Mind Parasites (1967), a novel by Colin Wilson related to Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, as the site of the protagonist's detection, by means of an electronic probe, of a giant buried city two miles beneath the surface.  At first the results are naturally disbelieved.
   When I opened my eyes, I saw Reich standing beside me, staring out across the river.  I looked at my watch, and sat up hastily.
   "Why on earth didn't you wake me?"
   He sat down on the ground beside me.  His manner struck me as subdued.
   "What is it?  Can't you trace the fault?"
   He looked at me thoughtfully.
   "There is no fault."    

Kepler:
See The Implicizer aimed at Blowups Happen.  Along with Copernicus, Kepler in Heinlein's Blowups Happen (Astounding, September 1940) is a secondary site of the ancient Lunarians' nuclear power plant network.  (The main site is the location of Tycho.)  The power plants all blow up together, ripping away the Moon's atmosphere and

Ketchum, Idaho, USA:
This is the home town of "Peter", twenty-third-century narrator of Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle's mysterious novel The Incandescent Ones (1977), which begins in Moscow and ends on Jupiter.
...Ketchum, I might say, small place that it is, is one of the largest collection points in the United States.  But, unlike Moscow, for sheep, not people.  It is also near to Sun Valley, which was important to my father, for he was a keen skier of a high-grade amateur class.  However, by the time I was fifteen he had to give me best on the slopes...  To the time of his disappearance, we often made mountain trips together...      

Kyiv, Ukraine:
A search for a lost and priceless Charter, which holds the key to rightful authority on her native Conservancy world, brings Wayness Tamm to various locations on Earth, in Jack Vance's Ecce and Old Earth (1991), volume 2 of the Cadwal Chronicles.
   ...Almost effervescent with hope, Wayness took herself far to the north and east, over mountains, lakes and rivers and finally down upon the great Altaic Steppe and the ancient city Kiev.
   The Funusti Museum occupied the grandiose precincts of the old Konevitsky Palace on Murom Hill, at the back of Kiev's Old Town.  Wayness took lodging at the Mazeppa Hotel...  Her rooms overlooked Prince Bogdan Yurevich Kolsky Square: a roughly pentagonal area paved with slabs of pink-gray granity.  On three sides, two cathedrals and a monastery, lovingly restored and perhaps reconstructed in the ancient style, held aloft dozens of onion-domes, gilded with gold foil, or painted red, blue, green, or in spiral stripes...    

Köln, North Rhine - Westphalia, Germany:
Ghyl Tarvoke, interstellar traveller, visits Old Earth on his quest for the truth behind a legend, in chapter 19 of Emphyrio (1969) by Jack Vance.
...Sitting with Jodel Heurisx at an outdoor café of old Cologne, Ghyl remarked upon the variety of people who walked past their table.
   "True enough," said Jodel Heurisx.  "Other cities on other planets are cosmopolitan enough, but Earth is a universe in itself."
   "I expected the people to seem old - sedate - wise.  Some do, of course.  But others - well, look at that man in the green suede.  His eyes glitter; he looks right and left as if he were seeing everything for the first time.  Of course, he might be an outworlder, like us."
   "No, he's an Earthman," said Jodel Heurisx.  "Don't ask me how I know; I couldn't tell you.  A matter of style: small signs that betray a man's background.  As for his air of restlessness, sociologists declare that material well-being and psychic stability vary in counter-proportion..."    

Labrador, Canada:
This is the province inhabited by the post-apocalypic population described in John Wyndham's 1955 novel The Chrysalids.
   The world... was generally thought to be a pretty big place, and probably round.  The civilized part of it - of which Waknuk was only a small district - was called Labrador.  This was thought to be the Old People's name for it, though that was not very certain.  Round most of Labrador there was a great deal of water called the sea... if you were to go three hundred miles or so east, north, or north-west you would come to it sooner or later.  But south-west or south, you wouldn't; you'd get to the Fringes and then the Badlands, which would kill you...  

Lacus Mortis:
An area crossed by ground "tractor" in a desperate journey from Plato Base to Farside, in an attempt to warn the Russian base of a danger that threatens everybody on the Moon, in Patrick Moore's Captives of the Moon (1960).  Appropriately enough the tractor encounters a near-lethal crevice.
"...It's a bit of a facer, isn't it?"
   "More than that," said the Colonel grimly, clambering out of the driving seat.  "I'm not generally superstitious, but I admit I wasn't looking forward to crossing the Lake of Death..."  

Lagos, Nigeria:
In the climate-change novel The World In Winter (1962) by John Christopher, the African nations enjoy a resurgence while Europe freezes to death.  A lounge bar in Lagos is decorated to drive the point home.
   ...The walls had been painted with continuous murals, a series of huge concave panels.  Around the bar they depicted snow and ice, from which projected broken fragments of masonry, towers, domes, pinnacles of brick and steel.  These scenes changed, as one's gaze continued in either direction from the bar, into seas at first iceberg-laden, then empty, then calm and silvered by the sun.  Past the seas... were the golden sands and palm-fringed shores of a warm and happy land...    

the Lake District, England:
Jerry Coleman, journalist, on his way to investigate a rumoured community of telepaths, has
...an odd feeling that, although he had never been within a hundred miles of the Lake District, the landscape was totally familiar.
   Normally he might have put this impression down to the restimulation of half-forgotten memories of photographs and films of the area that he had seen in the past; but this was something more than a general impression.  After they had passed through Kendal it became so strong that it could not be ignored.  Time and again as he came to a corner, or to the top of a hill, it was as if he knew with certainty what lay beyond, down to the smallest detail.  The view of a solitary farmhouse, the pattern of stone walls in a valley, crossing and recrossing with the jigsaw logic of some ancient rights of tenantry, a small church nestling against a clump of trees in the morning sunlight...
   It was just after eleven when they began to run down a hill into the village of Alsdale.  The feeling of familiarity was even stronger here; it was almost like coming home...  Jerry found himself recognising the front of each stone cottage like the face of an old friend; knowing that the board outside the village pub would bear a faded picture of Nelson's flagship and the name VICTORY; that just beyond it would be the village store and post office, its brown-painted facia bearing the name GARFORTH in faded cream capitals...    
                                                            - Dan Morgan, The Several Minds (1969)

Lake Success, California, USA:
In the comet-strike disaster novel Lucifer's Hammer (1977) by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, earthquakes cause the dam to collapse.
A bit later in the story, the area is a battleground between an organized group of survivors and the cannibalistic "New Brotherhood".
   When the sun was high, they saw them:  A hundred or more of the New Brotherhood had crossed during the night.  They were concentrated now on the old Lake Success bed, and the moved back towards the ruined bridge, sweeping aside the screen of Stronghold defenders.  The Brotherhood's mortars began to fire, forcing the defenders back up the valley and onto the ridges...   

Laplace Promontory:  see Sinus Iridum.

Lawrence, Kansas, USA:
In The Immortals by James E Gunn (1958, 1962) this city has taken over from Topeka as the state capital.
   ...They marched down the turnpike toward Lawrence...
      The governor's mansion was built on the top of an L-shaped hill that stood tall between two river valleys.  Once it had been the site of a great university, but taxes for supporting such institutions had been diverted into more vital channels.  Private contributions had dwindled as the demands of medical research and medical care had intensified.  Soon there was no interest in educational fripperies, and the university died.
      The governor had built his mansion there some seventy-five years ago when Topeka became unbearable.  Long before that it had become a lifetime office - and the governor would live forever.
      The state of Kansas was a barony...  The governor was a baron, and the mansion was his keep.  His vassals were the suburban squires; they were paid with immortality or its promise...
   ...The mansion rose, ziggurat fashion, in terraced steps.  On each rooftop was a hydroponic farm.  At the summit of the buildings was a glass penthouse; the noon sun turned it into silver.  On a mast towering above, a radar dish rotated...      

Leatherhead, Surrey, England:
The narrator in H G Wells' The War of the Worlds (1898) decides, in view of the Martian invasion, to borrow a horse and cart and take his wife to stay with relatives in Leatherhead.
   Leatherhead is about twelve miles from Maybury Hill.  The scene of hay was in the air through the lush meadows beyond Pyrford, and the hedges on either side were sweet and gay with multitudes of dog-roses. The heavy firing that had broken out while we were driving down Maybury Hill ceased as abruptly as it began, leaving the evening very peaceful and still.  We got to Leatherhead without misadventure about nine o'clock, and the horse had an hour's rest while I took supper with my cousins and commended my wife to their care.
   My wife was curiously silent throughout the drive, and seemed oppressed with forebodings of evil.  I talked to her reassuringly, pointing out that the Martians were tied to the pit by sheer heaviness, and, at the utmost, could but crawl a little out of it, but she answered only in monosyllables.  Had it not been for my promise to the innkeeper, she would, I think, have urged me to stay in Leatherhead that night.  Would that I had!
...but he feels honour bound to return the innkeeper's cart...

London, England:
In the hundredth century there won't be anything much left of its current self, according to Charles Eric Maine's The Man Who Owned the World (1961).
   The city was unrecognizable, of course.  In eight thousand years atomic bombardment, alternating with periods of rebuilding, had completely altered the geometry and appearance of the place; even the Thames, twisting and turning like a slender silver ribbon through areas of radioactive devastation, seemed to have changed its course at several points.  Central London was a wilderness of fused stone and leaning skeletal buildings, blackened and oxidized by nuclear heat flash...    
However, the picture is vastly different in Jack Vance's The Palace of Love (1967), third in his "Demon Princes" series.  In this unputdownable novel the protagonist Kirth Gersen, on the vengeful trail of killer and slaver Viole Falushe, goes to London in order (as part of his strategy) to buy control of "Cosmopolis" magazine.  The year is 3526 (1526 New Style), and despite the text's many clues about changes in infrastructure and technology, the old city has worn well:
   ...He rode to London by tube, and registered at the Royal Oak Hotel, a block off the Strand.  The season was early autumn; the sun shone through a high thin overcast.  Old London, permeated with the vapors of antiquity, shone like a fine gray pearl.
   Gersen's clothes were in the Alphanor style, fuller in cut and richer in color than the clothes of London.  On the Strand he went into a gentleman's outfitter, where he selected a fabric, then stripped to his underwear and was measured by photonic scanners.  Five minutes later he was delivered his new garments: black trousers, a jacket of dark brown and beige, a white blouse and black cravat.  Inconspicuous now, Gersen continued along the Strand...      
   ...Gersen dined at a restaurant which had maintained an unbroken tenancy for over seventeen hundred years.  The old oak beams, fumed and waxed, were as stout as ever; the plaster had recently been scraped of twenty layers of whitewash and refinished; a process which occurred every hundred years or so...        
From the comparatively near future we get a view of the metropolis in the 1973 novella by Barrington J Bayley, The Seed of Evil (New Writings in SF-23):
Twenty-second-century London was bowl-shaped.
   At the dead centre there still stood, as an archaic reminder, the old Houses of Parliament.  Around them the numerous government departments had extended their premises until they swallowed up the previous commercial areas for a considerable distance around, stretching along Tottenham Court Road to the North, along both arms of the river to East and West, and into Waterloo to the South.  The buildings were modest in dimensions, however, and mostly of a conservative twentieth-century style.  Beyond the centre the suburbs had elevated themselves progressively in a step-like version of the habitat mode, rising at the perimeter to just under a mile in height.  At close quarters the habitat suburbs, with their lack of any clear linear organisation, were like a three-dimensional jungle - especially since Londoners had rediscovered the pleasure of gardens.  From a distance they merged into a sparkling, curved surface and gave the city the impression of being a vast arena.  When the sun rose over the edge of the perimeter, the great bowl acted as a sun-trap; when it fell below it, illumination continued to filter through the myriad interstices and filled the interior with a panorama of light and shade...           

Lone Pine, Minnesota, USA:
A huge black box appears in the sky above Lone Pine, heralding the invasion described in Clifford Simak's The Visitors (1980).  According to Wikipedia the town does exist, though regrettably I have not found a picture to put here.
   Lone Pine, though not in Wisconsin, seems to be classic Simak country:
   ...Outside the shop, the two blocks of stores and business places in the town of Lone Pine drowsed in the late afternoon of an early autumn day.  A few cars were parked along the street.  Three dogs went through elaborate, formal canine recognition rites, three old friends meeting at the northwest corner of an intersection.  Stiffy Grant, tattered and disreputable man-about-town, sat on a nail keg outside the town's one hardware store, paying close attention to the smoking of a fairly decent-sized cigar stub that he had rescued from the gutter.  Sally, the waitress at the Pine Cafe, slowly swept the sidewalk in front of her place of employment, making the job last, reluctant to leave the warm autumn sunshine and go inside again...  

Long Island, New York, USA:
Earth's main spaceport is located on this island in The Impossible World by Eando Binder (Startling Stories, March 1939):
...Far to the west could be seen the spires of Manhattan, Earth's largest and busiest city, the beating heart of man's empire in the skies.  Closer, on Long Island itself, lay Tellus Space Port, with its gigantic drome and hangars and its wide-spread landing field.
   Great liners and freighters rocketed up and thundered down constantly.  The bull roars of their powerful engines could be heard as a steady low undertone, like the beating of an endless surf...      
Shorter, wittier and more sprightly is Edmond Hamilton's The Deconventionalizers (Thrilling Wonder Stories, Summer 19445) which suggests that some Martians will go to any lengths to destabilize Earth's culture.
The disaster that was to ruin modern civilization began when Jim Blake decided not to mow his lawn.
   Blake always mowed his lawn on Saturday afternoon.  Everyone in this neat little Long Island suburb did so.  It was as much a custom as going to church on Sunday.
   But on this particular June afternoon...      

Los Angeles, California, USA:
"...TV and radio transmission from your town called Los Angeles have ceased.  It is probable that the heat flash has ignited it..."   D F Jones, Colossus (1966)

Louisville, Kentucky, USA:
Len looked at the pleasant village strung out along the canal, and at the wide green plain beyond it, dotted with farmsteads and grazing cattle...  "That used to be a city, didn't it?"
   "A big one."
   "I remember now, it was named after the king of France.  Mr. Hostetter - "
   "Hm?"
   "Whatever happened to those countries - I mean, like France?"|
   "They're just about like us - the ones on the winning side.  Lord knows what happened to the ones that lost.  The whole world has jogged back to pretty much what it was when Louisville was this size before, and this canal was first dug..."  
                  From Leigh Brackett's post-disaster novel The Long Tomorrow (1955).

Lympne, Kent, England:
   Certainly if any one wants solitude, the place is Lympne.  It is in the clay part of Kent, and my bungalow stood on the edge of an old sea cliff and stared across the flats of Romney Marsh at the sea...  It was the big port of England in Roman times, Portus Lemanus, and now the sea is four miles away.  All down the steep hill are boulders and masses of Roman brickwork, and from it old Watling Street, still paved in places, starts like an arrow to the north...                                                   Thus H G Wells' narrator Bedford in The First Men in the Moon (1901) 

Lyon, Lyonnais, France:

the Malvern Hills, Worcestershire, England:
This beautiful area provides the peaceful opening scene in John Boland's 1955 thriller about weather used as warfare, White August, in which an unnamed enemy seeks to destroy Britain by a radioactive snowfall:
At seven o'clock on the evening of July 28th, the sun glared down from a cloudless sky.  Over the whole of the Worcestershire countryside its rays were still a burden after a day of almost intolerable heat.  On the slopes of the Malvern Hills gangs of weary, sweating men had extinguished the gorse fire, although smoke still rose straight from the ashes in many places.
   Three miles to the west of the hills the village of Sturridge was amost without movement; the only mad-made sounds a bumble of voices and the clinking of glasses that fliltered from the open windows of the Wheel Inn...    

Manaus, Amazonas, Brazil:
In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912) Professor Challenger meets the other members of the expedition at Manaus.
   "Is all ready for your journey?" he asked.
   "We can start to-morrow."
   "Then so you shall.  You need no chart of directions now, since you will have the inestimable advantage of my own guidance.  From the first I had determined that I would myself preside over your investigation.  The most elaborate charts would, as you will readily admit, be a poor substitute for my own intelligence and advice..."    

Manhattan, New York, USA:
One of the few survivors of a global pandemic, thoughtful loner Isherwood Williams travels through a USA largely emptied of humanity, and eventually reaches deserted New York City, in George R Stewart's 1949 classic Earth Abides.
...He swung north and at last crossed by the empty George Washington Bridge, and came to Manhattan.
   Stretched out between its rivers, the city will remain for a long time.  Stone and brick, concrete and asphalt, glass - time deals gently with them.  Water leaves black stains, moss shows green, a little grass springs up in the cracks.  (That is only the surface.)  A window-pane grows loose, vibrates, breaks in a gusty wind.  Lightning strikes, loosening the tiles of a cornice.  A wall leans, as footings yield in the long rains; after years have passed, it falls, scattering bricks across the street.  Frost works, and in the March thaw some flakes of stone scale off.  (It is all very slow.)  The rain washes quietly through the gutters into the storm-drains, and if the storm-drains clog, the rain runs still through the gutters into the river.  The snow piles deep in the long canyons, drifting at the street corners; no one disturbs it.  In the spring, it too runs off into the gutters.  As in the desert, a year is like an hour in the night; a century, like a day. 
   Indeed, the city is much like the desert.  From the asphalt-and-concrete-coated soil the rain runs off...  Here and there in a crack the subtle grass and the hardy weeds grow up a little, but no tree or vine or tall grass takes root...  after a while even the rats go away...  Only the flying creatures find there a refuge...  It will remain a long time, a very long time.                            [See also Central Park.]
The centrifugal force due to a speeding up of Earth's rotation described in Ronald M Sherin's disaster tale When the World Went Mad, set in 1938 (Amazing Stories Quarterly, Fall 1928), has a deleterious effect on Manhattan:
   On lower Broadway scenes of indescribable confusion were taking place.  As the solid mass of humanity swept forwrd, the steeple of Trinity Church was seen to be reeling drunkenly upon its base...  In the distance, the form of the Woolworth Building, giant of skyscrapers, could be discerned, its colossal tower writhing helplessly in the grip of the invisible destroyer...    
Manhattan has been transformed more peacefully in The Man Who Awoke (Wonder Stories, March 1933) by Laurence Manning, in which "sleeper" Norman Winters, having woken in 5000 AD, is taken on a flight above the site of old New York City.
...Beneath him then lay the narrow strip of Manhattan and the forest towered over everything else.
   "There are ruins beneath the trees," said the Forester, noting his interest.  "I have been there several times.  Our historians believe the people of ancient times who lived here must have been afraid of the open air, for they either lived beneath the ground or raised stone buildings which could be entered without going out-of-doors.  There are tunnels, which they used for roadways, running all beneath the ground in every direction..."         

Mare Chronium, Mars:
In Stanley Weinbaum's classic A Martian Odyssey (Wonder Stories, July 1934) Mare Chronium (longitude about 180, latitude 60 South) is where the narrator is about to meet the bird-like Martian, Tweel.
   "...I found an easy place, and down I went.  Mare Chronium was just the same sort of place as this - crazy leafless plants and a bunch of crawlers; I gave it a glance and hauled out my sleeping bag.  Up to that time, you know, I hadn't seen anything worth worrying about on this half-dead world - nothing dangerous, that is..."   
Note: I have had some trouble ascertaining online whether it is Mare Chronium or Mare Chromium.  I prefer the sound of ChroNium, and today (14.5.2024) was happy at last to find a Mars map (https://britastro.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/mars_2005dp_labeled-Damian-map-2.jpg) which spells it that way, despite the many online references with the other name.

Mare Cimmerium:
The landing site of the Ares, the first spaceship to Mars, in Stanley Weinbaum's classic tale A Martian Odyssey (Wonder Stories, July 1934).
Note that on the map shown here Mare Cimmerium is renamed Terra Cimmeria.  I assume that this is because the International Astronomical Union decided that "mare" (= sea) was no longer an appropriate term, since we now know there are no seas on Mars, and hence all the maria are now termed "terrae" (lands).  (I also assume that the reason the IAU hasn't dared pursue the same policy with regard to our names of features on the Moon is simply that, despite their itch for literalness, they've have to accept that Mare Imbrium, Mare Serenitatis, etc, are too deeply embedded in our culture to be tampered with.)
In Lin Carter's The Man Who Loved Mars (1973) a lost Martian "Treasure City" is rumoured to lie in this region:
   ...I began idly questioning Keresny as to the site of the so-called Treasure City...  Scholars have spent twenty years striving to figure out the peculiar geographical notation employed by the Ancients and have come up with a rough but workable system.  The location revealed in the thought-record worked out to south latitude 27.11, east longitude 140.37.  That would place the city very deep in the Mare Cimmerium, about equidistant between the two dustlands of Hesperia and Eridania...    
   "...But an old plateau like the Cimmerium is dangerous.  Riddled with fumaroles that create sharp updrafts that could shatter your foils, knock you out of the air.  Down below most of the Maria are pockets of natural gas that leak steadily into the atmosphere under terrific pressure..."    
Over twelve thousand years in the future, the terrestrial Empire of Linn launches an invasion of Mars as described in chapter 7 of Empire of the Atom (1957) by A E van Vogt:
   ...Two hundred men per ship - that was the number carried by each transport of the first fleet to leave Earth.  Altogether there were five hundred ships.  Their destination was the great desert known as Mare Cimmerium.  A mile-wide canal cut through the edge of this desert, and for a hundred miles on either side of the canal the desert was forced by green vegetation that fed on the thousands of tiny tributary canals.  Oslin, one of the five improtant cities of the Martians was located in a great valley at a point where the canal curved like a winding river...         
In another van Vogt classic, The Weapon Shops of Isher (1951), Mare Cimmerium is referred to as a city (p.98):
   He explained his plan briefly.  The toad would accompany him as hostage.  They would go to the nearest airline base and fly to the city of Mare Cimmerium, at which point he would catch a regular liner for Earth.  "And if anything should go wrong," Cayle Clark concluded, "at least one person will die before I do."
   Nothing went wrong...        

Mare Crisium:
...the great walled plain, one of the finest on the Moon...  Three hundred miles in diameter - and almost completely surrounded by a ring of magnificent mountains, it had never been explored until we entered it in the late summer of 1996.
   Our expedition was a large one.  We had two heavy freighters which had flown our supplies and equipment from the main lunar base in the Mare Serenitatis, three hundred miles away...
                                Arthur C Clarke, The Sentinel (10 Story Fantasy, Spring 1951)

Mare Erythraeum:

See the page on Primordial Worlds for a reference to the Mare Erythraeum area, from a memorable sight-seeing trip in The Sands of Mars (1951) by Arthur C Clarke.

Mare Fecunditatis:
...She stepped to the window; scudding clouds had just uncovered the Moon.  It was three days old and Mare Fecunditatis - the roll of hair at the back of the Lady-in-the-Moon's head - was cleared by the Sunrise line.  Near the right-hand edge of that great, dark 'sea' was a tiny spot, visible only to their inner eyes - Luna City...
             Robert A Heinlein, It's Great To Be Back (Saturday Evening Post, 26 July 1947)
...He picked out the landmarks made familiar to him by a thousand photographs with nostalgic pleasure, as if he were returning to his own country.  McIntyre brought her slowly down as they came back around to the Earthward face, and prepared to land east of Mare Fecunditatis, about ten miles from Luna City...
             Robert A Heinlein, Requiem (Astounding, January 1940)
My own interpretation of the above two passages is that Luna City stands not on the plain of the Mare itself but just past the edge of it.

Mare Humboldtianum:
   Parrott pointed to the chart.  "We're crossing the Humboldt Sea.  That means we've covered a lot more than half the journey, and we've only got three or four hundred miles to go.  Notice the Earth?"
   Robin looked through the observation window.  He had been so busy and so tired that he had hardly glanced at the sky, but now he saw that the Earth had changed; it was a three-quarter disk, not half, and it was lower down.  "It's darned nearly on the horizon."  - from Patrick Moore's Captives of the Moon (1960).

Mare Imbrium: 

Mare Insularum:
For the highlands on the eastern border of this mare see the entry for Gruithuisen's Lunar City.

Mare Nubium:
Captain Brunel leads his crew of misfits on a strange expedition here in William F Temple's Shoot at the Moon (1966).
At 15.45 G.M.T. on June 21 the Endeavour made a perfect landing on the Mare Nubium.
...Bill Burton, in his book, praised the masterly landing...  but rather spoiled the effect by adding that I had mistaken the map reference.  That I'd touched down twenty miles from Bullialdus instead of the same distance from Copernicus, with which I had confused it.  He was tactful about it...    
From R W Mackleworth's Starflight 3000 (1972):
   In less than a day, a day with a few hundred hours and a dozen sleep periods, he would reach the shallow sea they called the Mare Nubium - a sea that was once a dusty plain.  Now it was a sea indeed though the water was only twenty feet in depth and in constant and violent movement for the most part...   

Mare Sirenum:
   ...A fast planetfall was of the essence, since every second of time between the moment we broke out of deep space and the moment we hit topsoil we were in constant danger of being noticed on somebody's radar...  The glide path took us curving across the midregions of the Mare Sirenum...
   The fabric began heating up till the hull would soon be a dull cherry-red.  The Sirenum went hissing by beneath us in a rusty-purplish blur, much too hazy for us to make out anything but the largest craters.  It was a shame we were going too fast to see the landscape, because this was very historic country.  The area we were passing over had been the first chunk of local real estate that we Earthmen had ever gotten a close-up look at, even if it had only been a passing glance.  I refer to the history-making Mariner IV fly-by, way back in 1965.  The tiny, unmanned craft had skimmed across this same part of the Sirenum with all cameras whirring...
Thus the narrator of Lin Carter's The Man Who Loved Mars (1973), which peculiarly juxtaposes OSS and realism, with a surgically modified Earthman able to breathe on Mars, native humans who are used to the place, and the above reference to factual space-Age observation.

Mare Undarum:
The site of one of the capapults used in the Lunar War of Independence (or Lunar Revolutionary War) of 2076, narrated in Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966); the site is mentioned on pages 228 and 241.  Mike the talking computer was a bit slow to deted Earth's attack on Lunar City -
   ...He would have been able to see it a few seconds sooner had he been looking eastward with new radar at Mare Undarum site...
(The narrator uses a form of heavily Russified English, hence the lack of the definite article.)

the Marius Hills:
This region, with its distinctive volcanic domes, would have been a likely destination for the cancelled Apollo 19 mission - see Lost Moon: Reconstructing the Missions of Apollos 18, 19, and 20 (Part 2).  The article says of the Hills, There is nothing else like them on the lunar surface; they represent a unique chapter in the Moon’s volcanic history.  From the Command Module in close orbit, they would have been eerily beautiful to behold.  For the moment, they must rest in the aura of might-have-been.

Marlborough, Wiltshire, England:
Set in a future in which the Earth has undergone violent geological upheaval, John Christopher's Beyond the Burning Lands (1971) has a scene set in Marlborough where visitors find the inhabitants to be temperamentally influenced by their town's proximity to a barrier of volcanoes. 
   That night when they feasted us they unbent somewhat but not much.  Their eyes watched us and each other.  I thought I understood them better then, because though the Great Hall was hung with lamps they were scarcely wanted: so bright was the glow that came in at the windows.  The hills rose above the town and above the hills the sky was red, a heavy crimson from which now and then spouted gouts of orange flame.  Seeing this I realized that darkness, which they never truly knew, could be a comforting and friendly thing.  They lived their lives under this ominous light and it was small wonder they were soured by it.  And there were ugly sounds as well - distant foreboding rumblings as the earth growled in pain.    

Mauna Kea, Hawaii, USA:
..."Regulations.  Acclimatization.  It's nearly fourteen thousand feet at the top.  Pretty thin air...  It's not easy to do anything, even walk, until you get used to it."
   By the time they reached the clapboard barracks buildings she was ready to agree.
...There were half a dozen observatories on the lip of the volcano.  Richard parked the Jimmy in front of the NASA building.  It looked like an observatory in a Bugs Bunny cartoon: a square concrete building under a shiny metal dome.
   "Do I get to look through the telescope?" she asked.
   He didn't laugh.  Maybe he had answered that one too often.  "No one looks through telescopes anymore.  We just take pictures."  He led the way inside, through bare-walled corridors and down an iron stairway to a lounge furnished with chrome-steel office tables and chairs...       
                                         From Footfall (1985) by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.

Mauna Loa, Hawaii, USA:
   Her companion nodded and pointed toward the slopes off to their right.  "Mauna Loa.  They said it's terrible luck to take any of the lava home."
   "Who says?"
   "The Old Hawaiians, of course.  But a surprising number of tourists, too.  They take the stuff home, and later they mail it back."  He shrugged.  "Bad luck or no, so far as anyone knows, she - Mauna Loa is always she to the Old Ones - she's never taken a life."
                                          from Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (1985)

Megève, Haute-Savoie, France:
In the future history The Shape of Things to Come (1933) by H G Wells, this ski-resort town was where the World Council met to dissolve itself in 2059 - this act being the demonstration of the achieved lucidity of the human race; a witness to the complete solidarity of mankind in 2059, the disappearance of the last shadows of dislike and distrust between varied cults, races and language groups...  No further need, therefore, of a World Government.

Memphis, Tennessee, USA:
A few centuries in the deindustrial future, in John Michael Greer's 2014 novel Star's Reach, a "ruinman" - who makes his living from the excavation of material from our era - comes to "Memfis", which he finds is
   ...rich from the river trade, rich from the ships that come there from all over Mem Gaia's round belly, rich from the seafood out of Benroo Bay, rich from the farms and orchards, and...  good unstripped ruins from within reach of the Memfis ruinmen.  It's rich even compared to other rich towns in Meriga, and let's not even talk about what it looks like to a farmer's child like me from the Tenisi hill country...     

Miami, Florida, USA:
By the far-future days described by Cordwainer Smith in The Dead Lady of Clown Town (Galaxy, August 1964), just one place-name from Old Earth survives, in evolved form.
   Go back to An-fang, the Peace Square at An-fang, the Beginning Place at An-fang, where all things start.  Bright it was.  Red Square, dead square, clear square, under a yellow sun.
   This was Earth Original, Manhome itself, where Earthport thrusts its way up through hurricane clouds that are higher than the mountains.
   An-fang was near a city, the only living city with a pre-atomic name.  The lovely meaningless name was Meeya Meefla, where the lines of ancient roadways, untouched by a wheel for thousands of years, forever paralleled the warm, bright, clear beaches of the Old South East...    
Convulsions in Earth's crust in 1990 have left the city still in some sort of order the following year in Keith Laumer's 1966 thriller Catastrophe Planet:
   ...Early afternoon brought me into Miami.  The beach was wiped clean - a bare sandbar, but the city proper still gleamed white beside a shore stained black by pumice and scum oil, and heaped with the jetsam of a drowned continent.  Conditions were better here.  There had been no major quakes to judge from the still-standing towers of coral and chartreuse and turquoise; maybe their hurricane-proof construction had helped when the ground shook under them.  There was even a semblance of normal commerce.  Police were much in evidence, along with squads of nervous-looking Guard recruits weighed down with combat gear.  Lights were on in shops and restaurants, and the polyarcs along Biscayne were shedding their baleful light on an orderly traffic of cars, trucks and buses.  There were fewer people on the streets than in normal times, but that suited me...   

Mickle Fell, Yorkshire, England:
In the unique time-mixing novel by Fred Hoyle, October the First is Too Late (1966), the composer-narrator relates how his physicist friend John Sinclair inexplicably disappears for a while after they have been walking on Mickle Fell.  What seems like a bout of amnesia on the part of Sinclair turns out later in the book to have wider implications, part of a manipulation of the world by a super-intelligent cosmic power. 

Middletown, Ohio, USA:

The site of an advanced weapons research unit (at which Kenniston, the protagonist, secretly works), Middletown suffers a direct hit from a nuclear weapon in Edmond Hamilton's 1951 novel City At World's End.  The sky seems to split open but the town, amazingly, is not destroyed -
   He ought to be dead.  He thought it very probable that he was dying right now, which would explain the fading light and the ominous quiet...   He looked down Mill Street.  He expected to see pulverized buildings, smoking craters, fire and steam and devastation.  But what he was was more stunning than that, and in a strange way, more awful.
   He saw Middletown lying unchanged and peaceful in the sunlight.
The first few chapters tell how the bewildered townsfolk learn to fact the fact that their home has been catapulted through time into a far-future, moribund Earth, and that there is no going back; though eventually they also learn that the cold world can be revived...
See Life matching Art.

Millville, Wisconsin, USA:
   ...The town lay dusty and arrogant and smug beyond all telling and it sneered at me and I knew that I had been mistaken in not leaving it when I'd had the chance.  I had tried to live with it for very love of it, but I'd been blind to try.  I had known what all my friends had known, the ones who'd gone away, but I had closed my mind to that sure and certain knowledge: there was nothing left in Millville to make one stay around.  It was an old town and it was dying, as old things always die.  It was being strangled by the swift and easy roads that took customers to better shopping areas; it was dying with the decline of marginal agriculture, dying along with the little vacant hillside farms that no longer would support a family.  It was a place of genteel poverty and it had its share of musty quaintness, but it was dying just the same, albeit in the polite scent of lavender and impeccable good manners...  
   And then comes the amazing force-field around Millville!  All Flesh is Grass (1965), an unforgettable alien-contact tale by Clifford D Simak, is a novel to re-read every few years.  The town it describes seems so archetypal that I was recently surprised and delighted to find that it actually exists.  Not only that: it was the place where Simak was born, on 3rd August 1904.
However, it's darned difficult to find a photographic vista of Millville.  While searching, I found a possible reason for this: the population at the last count had shrunk to about 90 people!  Simak would not, perhaps, have been surprised. 
The town is mentioned in another great Simak novel, Way Station (1964), the title of which refers to a secret stop-over station for interstellar matter-transmission set up with alien help in rural America in 1866.  About a century later an Intelligence agent gets wind of the fact that something is going on, and seeks scientific advice:
   "All right, then," said Hardwicke, "let's start over once again and take it piece by piece.  You say you have this man..."
   "His name," said Lewis, "is Enoch Wallace.  Chronologically, he is one hundred and twenty-four years old.  He was born on a farm a few miles from the town of Millville in Wisconsin, April 12, 1840, and he is the only child of Jedediah and Amanda Wallace.  He enlisted among the first of them when Abe Lincoln called for volunteers..."    

Montana, USA:
My idea of this state came originally from reading Patrick Tilley's Fade-Out (1975), a novel of extraterrestrial visitation.  I read it in the late 1970s and ever since then a mention of Montana has conjured in my mind the image of an alien epiphany.  Somehow the locale is so appropriate:
   North of Miles City, the land is known as 'The Big Open'.  Bare, rolling, high plains country with as few trees as there are people.  For mile after mile on either side of the two-lane hog-backed highway, there is nothing but endless stretches of buffalo grass and sage.  Cattle country, scarred here and there by poisonous salt pans, and the intertwined, weathered clusters of gumbo and sandstone buttes that make up the eastern Montana badlands...  

Montes Recti - see the Straight Range.

Morbihan, Brittany, France:
A monstrous extraterrestrial peril haunts Chateauverne, a village in the department of Morbihan, in Eric Frank Russell's The Sin of Hyacinth Peuch - published in the collection Dark Tides (1962):
   ...To look at Chateauverne today you would find it difficult to believe that not so long ago its inhabitants feared to walk in darkness...
   Chateauverne is a cluster of terra-cotta-roofed houses hugging a cobbled square where Hyacinth Peuch, the local imbecile, slumbers among the hogs and chickens.  At one side rises the solemn-belled tower of the Eglise.  Next to it sits the hoary home of the Abbé and the general store of the Widow Martin.  At the opposite side, shading the seated cynics, is the long, low auberge of Jean-Pierre Boitavin, whose brother Baptiste was the fourth to be slaughtered before the rain came...

Mount Everest, China/Nepal border:

Mount McKinley, Alaska, USA: see Denali

Mount Whitney, California, USA:
The opening passage of Jack Vance's 1958 novel Slaves of the Klau describes the Terrestrial home of a visitor from space who is (culturally though not biologically) alien.  The home has been chosen for its remoteness and inaccessibility:
Markel, the Lekthwan, occupied a strange and beautiful dwelling on the highest crag of Mount Whitney, consisting of six domes, three minarets, and a wide terrace.  The domes were formed of almost clear crystal, the minarets were white porcelain-stuff, the surrounding terrace was blue glass, and in turn was surrounded by a rococo balustrade with blue and white spiral stanchions...         

Mount Wilson Observatory, California, USA:
Confirmation of the discovery of The Black Cloud - in the eponymous novel by Fred Hoyle (1957) - is achieved at Mount Wilson (though the original discovery plates were taken at Mount Palomar):
   "...as I couldn't see anything wrong with the plates, the obvious thing was to take some new pictures.  If a month made all that difference between Jensen's first plate and his second, then the effect should have been easily detectable in a week...  So I rushed up to Mount Wilson, bullied Harvey off the 60-inch, and spent the night photographing the edges of the cloud.  I've got a whole collection of new slides here...  Put them through one by one, Bert, and keep referring back to Jensen's plate of 7 January."
   There was almost dead silence for the next quarter of an hour, as the star fields on the edge of the cloud were carefully compared by the assembled astronomers.  At the end Barnett said:
   "I give up.  As far as I'm concerned there isn't a shadow of a doubt but that this cloud is travelling towards us."     

Naples, Italy:
...Another half day's run over shoal water brought me into Naples harbor, still solidly at sea level under a blanket of smoke through which the glare of Vesuvius was only a bright haze.  Wearing my respirator now, I tied up at three P.M. in darkness like an eclipse, within half an hour had sold my rig - no questions asked - to a quick-eyed man who looked like a Martian in an antique gas mask and the filthiest white suit on the planet.  The deal was not good, but I got what I needed - a fairly sound-looking late model Turino ground car.  I would have preferred to store the boat, but property not under armed guard was an ephemeral thing in Naples in the best of times...         Keith Laumer, Catastrophe Planet (1966), p.87

New York City, New York, USA  (and see also entries for Central Park and Manhattan):
Some key characters in Poul Anderson's eucatastrophic novel Brain Wave (1954), in which all neural impulses on Earth are abruptly boosted by the Solar System's exit from an "inhibitor field", witness the social and political transformations in their work-place in the city, consequent upon the sudden increase in human intelligence (while elsewhere, in the countryside, other characters experience the results of increases in animal intelligence too).  Already, in Chapter One,
...He noticed vaguely that the train was quieter than ordinarily.  People were less hurried and unmannerly, they seemed thoughtful.  He glanced at the newspapers, wondering with a gulp if it had started, but there was nothing really sensational - except maybe for that local bit about a dog, kept overnight in a basement, which had somehow opened the deep freeze, dragged the meat out to thaw, and been found happily gorged...
By Chapter Six, researcher Pete Corinth can see that the city is
...sliding swiftly towards disruption and death.|
   Only a few subways were running, an emergency system manned by those devoted enough to stay by a  job which had become altogether flat and distasteful.  The stations were hollow and dark, filthy with unswept litter, and the shrieking of wheels held a tormented loneliness.  Corinth walked to work, along dirty streets whose traffic had fallen to a reckless fragment of the old steady river...
In Chapter Ten he reflects:
...Big cities had no real economic justification.  He came from a small town, and he had always loved mountains and forests and sea.  Still, there was something about this brawling, overcrowded, hard, inhuman, magnificent city whose absence would leave an empty spot in the world to come...    
You get a more jaundiced view of the city in Frederick Pohl's The Merchants' War (1984):
   New York, New York.  What a wonderful town!  All my fretful annoyances were submerged...  Ten years didn't seem to have changed the tall buildings that disappeared into the gray, flaky air.  The cold, gray, flaky air.  It had gone winter again; there were patches of dirty snow in corners, and an occasional consumer furtively scooping them up to take home to avoid the freshwater tax.  After Venus, it was heaven!  I gawked like a Wichita tourist at the Big Apple.  I walked like one, too, bumping into scurrying pedestrians, and things worse than pedestrians.  My traffic skills were gone.  After the years on Venus I just wasn't used to civilized ways.  There was a twelve-pusher pedibus here, three cabs competing for one gap in the flow there, pedestrians leaping desperately between the vehicles all over...  

Nilosyrtis:
Listed according to Wiki as a real feature, "a region just north of Syrtis Major Planum on Mars, at approximately 23°N, 76°E and an elevation of −0.5 km. It marks a region of transition (a "crustal dichotomy") between southern highland and northern lowland terrain, and consists of isolated peaks and mesas."
Lin Carter in slyly pseudo-realistic mode brings this "canal" feature into The City Outside the World (1977), p.51:
   ...When Mars began to dry up as the free water vapor in its atmosphere escaped in ever-dwindling amounts into space, the crust of the planet had shrunk and cracked, forming a network of long, geometrical lesions in the surface.  Into these titanic ravines the shrinking oceans, or what was left of them, had drained...  Martian vegetation... had taken root along these fissures...
   It was these broad strips of fertile vegetation the Earth astronomers had mistaken for artificial waterways.  Only some of them, like Nilosyrtis, had once been the beds of primordial rivers, and only a very few showed any signs of having been engineered by human hands...
Earlier hints in the book suggest to me that perhaps Nilosyrtis is one of these rare ones because on page 37 it is referred to as the canal which had "served the old, abandoned city near whose ruins the modern colony of Syrtis Port was built" and on page 50 it is referred to as an "old waterway".  Suggestive.

Nodus Laocoöntis:
This place (its name means "Laocoön's Knot") is mentioned, with the Latin slightly shortened, in The City Outside the World (1977) by Lin Carter:
...Had they dared ride due south, they could have found water at Nodus Laocontis, the old canal which once served to irrigate the gardens of Yeolarn...
From the single reference I have found online (Journal of the British Astronomical Association, Vol. 96, NO.1/DEC, P. 8, 1985), it seems that the feature does really exist on old Mars maps.  It was first observed, according to the BAA Journal, by a Japanese astronomer, Tsuneo Saheki, on 8th January 1946, and had become much more prominent by 1948.  However, I have not been able to obtain either a picture or a set of co-ordinates.

North Pole, Earth:
   That very night, Curt had flown from the moon to Earth and had secretly visited the President, offering the service of his abilities in the war against interplanetary crime. 
   "I know you have no faith in me now," he had told the President, "but a time may come when you'll need me.  When that time comes, flash a signal flare from the North Pole.  I'll see it, and come."                   
                   Edmond Hamilton, Captain Future and the Space Emperor (1939, 1967).
Stid:  It's cute that Cap. Future is so self-confident, he can make this offer even before he's done anything.
Zendexor:  I wondered about that, myself.  I am, however, a more obedient reader than you are; if I'm told to be impressed, I'm impressed.  Usually.
   What does bother me a bit more, is the practicality of the idea.  At least one of the planeteering Futuremen must stay placed to keep an eye on Earth's North Pole at all times if the arrangement is to work...

Oahu, Hawaii, USA:
The scene of Edgar Rice Burroughs' farewell visit from his creation, John Carter of Barsoom, Warlord of Mars. 
From the Foreword to Llana of Gathol (1941, 1948):
Lanikai is a district, a beach, a Post Office, and a grocery store.  It lies on the windward shore of the Island of Oahu.  It is a long way from Mars.  Its waters are blue and beautiful and calm inside its coral reef, and the trade wind sighing through the fronds of its coconut palms at night might be the murmuring voices of the ghosts of the kings and chieftains who fished in its still waters long before the sea captains brought strange diseases or the missionaries brought mother-hubbards.
   Thoughts of the past, mere vague imaginings, were passing idly through my mind one night that I could not sleep and was sitting on the lanai watching the white maned chargers of the sea racing shoreward...
In addition to being marked by the visit from John Carter, Lanikai on Oahu is also where Burroughs receives the communication from his other planetary wanderer, Carson Napier, who telepathically relates the adventures on Amtor recounted in Escape on Venus (1946).
Historical note: in real life, Burroughs was living on Oahu in December 1941 and witnessed the attack on Pearl Harbour.

Olympus Mons:
...the vast complex of Martian buildings which had been built into the smooth, gently rising slopes of Olympus Mons.  I was able to gaze out of vast windows at the dust-lashed scene outside, thinking it must have been quite a problem to find window material that would not be hopelessly scored by the fiercely blown streams of dust that were hitting them.  I could not help reflecting on the paradox of a technology which was capable of erecting a planetary base of this kind and which yet permitted elementary defects, like bad plumbing and elevators that wouldn't work.  The buildings I knew to be anchored by piles driven deeply into the hard-frozen ice and volcanic ash which formed most of the uplifted structure of Olympus Mons...
This excerpt from Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle's The Incandescent Ones (1977) is included for the sake of completeness, though it is only marginally OSS, and that marginal inclusion is for the sake of the remarkable scene on Jupiter rather than this obviously RSS-style scene on Mars.  The name "Olympus Mons" in any case doesn't belong in an OSS tale; the traditional term, from telescopic observation, was Nix Olympica.

Ophir:
On the old pre-space-age albedo-features map of Mars, Ophir is at about longitude 65, latitude -10.  According to Wiki, Ophir Chasma is 4 degrees South, 72.5 West.
   ...Mission Control's preflight plan called for the establishment of a base colony on the plains north of Ophir Chasma, the enormous northern arm of Valles Marineris...  from the rather non-OSS work by Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars (1992), p.66.

Oxia Palus:
   ...M'Cord was heading for Oxia Palus.  There, at the junction of five minor canals, was a commo station.  It was untended, of course, only an emergency radio beacon, but M'Cord knew he could put a call through to Mareotis, where the People kept a sort of embassy and where the Colonial Administration maintained a combination trading post and first aid station.  A medic in a skimmer could be there in two days, three at the most, with one of the native Hndolanthi.  A Hndolanth is a kind of interpreter-cum-herald...   
    - from The Valley Where Time Stood Still, by Lin Carter (1974), one of his four "lost-race" novels with Martian settings.

the Ozarks, Missouri, USA:

Palomar Observatory, California, USA:
Knut Jensen, a young Norwegian astronomer on a two-year studentship, working in the Observatory offices on pairs of photographic plates by means of the "blink comparator" in a search for novae, makes an epochal discovery in Chapter One of Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud (1957).
   ...all in all there was quite a bit of work to do before he got through his pile of plates - work that was not a little tedious...
   He finished the first of the batch.  It turned out a finicking job.  Once again, every one of the "possibilities" resolved into an ordinary, known oscillator.  He would be glad when the job was done.  Better to be on the mountain at the end of a telescope than straining his eyes with this damned instrument, he thought, as he bent down to the eye-piece.  He pressed the switch and the second pair flashed up in the field of view.  An instant later Jensen was fumbling at the plates, pulling them out of their holders.  He took them over to the light, examined them for a long time, then replaced them in the "blinker" and switched on again.  In a rich star field was a large, almost exactly circular, dark patch.  But it was the ring of stars surrounding the patch that he found so astonishing.  There they all were, oscillating, blinking, all of them.  Why?  He could think of no satisfactory answer to the question, for he had never seen or heard of anything like this before...           

Paris, France:
The young outlaws fleeing the alien regime in John Christopher's The White Mountains (1967) approach the ruins of France's capital.
...I had never seen anything remotely like it before.  It stretched for miles, rising in hills and valleys.  The forest had invaded it - there was the tossing green of trees everywhere - but everywhere also were the grey and white and yellow bones of buildings.  The trees followed lines among them, like veins in some monstrous creature... 
   ...The trees followed the old streets, sprouting out of the black stone of which they had been built, and thrusting their tops up above the canyons formed by the buildings on either side...  

the Peak District, (mostly in) Derbyshire, England:
This area is the site of Glyn Weston's time-travel experiments, in Seeker of Tomorrow (Astounding Stories, July 1937) by Eric Frank Russell and Leslie J Johnson.
...I had set up my laboratory in the wilds of the Peak District of Derbyshire, in England, where work could be carried on with the minumum of interference.  From this laboratory I had dispatched into the unknown, presumably the future, a multitude of objects...  In no case could I bring back anything I had made to vanish.  Once gone, the subject was gone forever.  There was no way of discovering exactly where it had gone.  There was nothing but to take a risk and go myself...    

Peoria, Illinois, USA:
In Maker of Universes (1965) by Philip Jose Farmer, Peoria is where a "crescent" for an interdimensional gateway turns up in a pawnshop.  (Such gadgets are used by the tyrannical Lords of pocket universes for travel between one private cosmos and another.)
...How it had gotten there and what Lord had lost it on Earth would never be known.  Doubtless there were other crescents in obscure places on Earth...    

Petersfield, Hampshire, England:
In the post-disaster setting of John Christopher's The Prince In Waiting (1970), when geologic upheaval and magnetospheric change has led to widespread mutation, earthquakes and volcanism, a hierarchy of "Seers" and "Spirits" has prohibited the use of machinery by the masses.  Nevertheless the defenders of Petersfield, when attacked by the men of Winchester, take the dastardly step of using cannon, with deadly effect.  This does not deter the Prince of Winchester from leading his army onward against Petersfield's walls.
   It seemed hopeless.  They had to advance on foot with the machines, three of them, blasting down at them from above.  Even without these, scaling the walls would have seemed impossible.  Because of the risk of earthquakes they were of loose construction but they were steeply sloping and more than thirty feet high, manned by archers who could pick off the crawling attackers with ease.  One of the Captains had suggested making the attck at some other point where there might not be machines but my father refused...  

Peterson Field, Colorado, USA:
Scene of the launch of the first Moon flight, in Heinlein's The Man Who Sold The Moon (1950).

Phaethontis:
From Lin Carter's distinctive flavour-blending novel The Man Who Loved Mars (1973) which melds realism with retro OSS-style narrative:
   It seemed that only the Doctor and I had ever been on Mars before.  So we helped the other two accustom themselves to the use of their respirators.  Of the four of us, only I had ever undergone the Mishubi-Yakamoto treatments and could do without the artificial breathing boosters.
   We had come down just where the Doc had planned.  All about us, but tapering off due west, the canal extended like a four-foot-high miniature jungle.  Seen from above - it was to be hoped! - the Antoine d'Eauville ought to blend unobtrusively with the shrubbery.  Of course, to anyone crossing Phaethontis either afoot, on slidar, or by sand-tractor, it would stand out somewhat more prominently than a dozen sore thumbs, and that we could not help.  However, this was the edge of the Drylands, and nobody ever comes this far south, not even the People, for the very good reason that there is nothing here to attract them...    

Phoenicis Lacus:
In the December 1939 Thrilling Wonder Stories, and reprinted in the May 1950 Startling Stories (which is where I found it), the tale Signboard of Space by Frederic Arnold Kummer Jr. includes a view of the "Lake of the Phoenix" during an approach to the Red Planet.
   ...Dr Varian and I spent the day in the control room studying Mars through the telescope.  It makes a wonderful sight at present.  The Schiaparelli canals are amazingly clear and many new ones, invisible from Earth, are evident.  Also many more dark dots, the so-called oases.
   Today the Lacus Phoenicis was turned toward us, a tangle of geometrically straight lines at the joinings of which were dark spots of varying size.  I am impressed by the similarity of certain curiously regular designs, formed by the canals, to other designs which I have previously noticed upon the Fastigium Aryn...
   ...The presence of those lines and dots which are invisible from Terra seem to tie the whole complex jumble into a regular pattern, orderly, mathematical, unquestionably the work of intelligent beings...  

Piccadilly Circus, West End of London, England:
In chapter three ("The Groping City") of The Day of the Triffids (1951) by John Wyndham, the accidentally still-sighted narrator reaches this junction on the day when most of mankind has woken to find itself blind.
   ...Piccadilly Circus was the most populous place I had found so far.  It seemed crowded after the rest, though there were probably less than a hundred people there, all told.  Mostly they were wearing queer, ill-assorted clothes, and were prowling restlessly around as though still semi-dazed.  Occasionally a mishap would bring an outbirst of profanity and futile rage - rather alarming to hear because it was itself the product of fright, and childish in temper.  But with one exception there was little talk and little noise.  It seemed as though their blindness had shut people into themselves.
   The exception had found himself a position out on one of the traffic-islands.  He was a tall, elderly, gaunt man with a bush of wiry grey hair, and he was holding forth emphatically about repentance, the wrath to come, and the uncomfortable prospects for sinners.  Nobody was paying him any attention: for most of them the day of wrath had already arrived...    
Picadilly fares no better in another disaster novel, All Fool's Day (1966) by Edmund Cooper, in which insanity (caused by changing conditions in space) is the culprit:
   ...Greville drove skilfully round the overturned bus, zigzagged among the wrecked small cars and found a clear run through Cockspur Street and the Haymarket.
   Piccadilly Circus presented much the same kind of petrified desolation as Trafalgar Square, except that two massive army tanks blocked the entry to Regent Street, and Eros - the frail statue which had once seemed like an irresistible magnet for hundreds of thousands of Londoners - had been blown to glory.
   Piccadilly Circus had obviously been the scene of a pitched battle.  The carnage was heavier than in Trafalgar Square, and tattered remnants of uniforms still hung over the disorderly heaps of bones.  The front of the London Pavilion had been shot to pieces and so had Swan and Edgars.  The main entrance to the Piccadilly Tube Station was merely a pile of rubble; and large pieces of masonry lay scattered among the bones and wrecked cars that blocked the entrances to Piccadilly and Shaftesbury Avenue...  
To complete a trilogy of Piccadilly-related disturbances we can feast our eyes on the cover illustration by S Drigin for G R Malloch's Winged Terror - a tale serialised in Pearson's Magazine February-April 1931 and then reprinted as a whole in the short-lived pulp Fantasy (issue no. 2 of 3) in 1939.  I can't find any summary of the plot but we can deduce something from the picture:

Pico, Mare Imbrium
Two writers have associated this isolated lunar mountain with the theme of conflict. 
Mysterious alien domes - at first suspected to be Russian - appear in the Pico area in Hugh Walters' Blast Off At Woomera (1957).  In the sequel, The Domes of Pico (1958), the aliens threaten Earth with harmful radiation.
This same region is the scene of the climacteric Battle of Pico in Earthlight (1955), a novel set in the 22nd century, by Arthur C Clarke.

Pike's Peak, Colorado, USA:
The mountain used for the second Moon flight in Heinlein's The Man Who Sold The Moon (1950).
It was one of those glorious evenings so common in the Pikes Peak region after a day in which the sky has been well scrubbed by thunderstorms.  The track of the catapult crawled in a straight line up the face of the mountain, whole shoulders having been carved away to permit it...

Plato (crater), Mare Imbrium:
   On the ledge atop the ringwall of Plato, Hansen teetered and tried to maintain his balance by pressing a gauntleted hand against an outcropping of gray Lunar rock.  The thermal-eroded surface crumbled slightly beneath the metal-tipped mitten...  H B Fyfe, Moonwalk (Space Science Fiction, November 1952).
In the same story the author or the narrator has the following very interesting comment to make:
   ...For centuries, the floor of Plato had been reported by Earth observers to darken with the rising sun until at noon it was nearly black.  Occasionally, there were stories of misty clouds obscuring the surface, and of shifts in the pattern of light streaks and spots.
   One of the expedition's first assignments, therefore, had been the investigation of Plato, to check the unlikely possibility that there might be some primitive, airless form of life present...  
Now from one hard-science author to another: the crater is the site of the Lunar Observatory in Clarke's Earthlight (1955).
   The horizon was almost flat in all directions.  Though the Observatory was at the centre of the great walled plain of Plato, the mountain ring was hidden by the curve of the Moon.  It was a bleak and desolate prospect, without even a few hills to give it interest.  Only a dusty plain, studded here and there with blow-holes and craterlets - and the enigmatic works of man, straining at the stars and trying to wrest away their secrets.
In the same book we are given an idea of the crater's ring-wall:
   From space - or through a telescope on Earth - the walls of Plato look a formidable barrier when the slanting sunlight shows them to best advantage.  But in reality they are less than a kilometre high, and, if one chooses the correct route through the numerous passes, the journey out of the crater and into the Mare Imbrium presents no great difficulty...
...He eased the vehicle forward, gingerly skirting a vast talus slope where splintered rock had been accumulating for millennia.  Such slopes were extremely dangerous, for the slightest disturbance could often set them moving in slow, irresistible avalanches that would overwhelm everything before them.  For all his apparent recklessness, Jamieson took no real risks, and always gave such traps a wide berth...
Plato's wall also features in Captives of the Moon (1960), the first of Patrick Moore's five "Robin North" adventures, where on p.105-6 the crater wall is described as
   ...much less striking than Robin had expected; it looked like nothing more than a scattered row of hills...  
(In this novel the American lunar base is "slap in the middle" of Plato.)
However, in Poul Anderson's Mirkheim (1977), we get a more dramatic rendering of the ringwall at the end of the following description (set in the 26th century):
   It was close to Lunar midnight.  From the main room of the suite, the view through a transparency was awesome.  Buildings stood well apart and were not high.  They must stay below the forcefields which kept air in this bubble and the ozone layer beneath.  But between them were parks wherein the low gravity let trees soar and arch like the fountains, amidst fiercely colored great blossoms.  Lamps, on posts formed to resemble vines, glowed everywhere.  They did not haze view of the stark crater floor beyond the fields, of Plato's ringwall shouldering in cliffs and steeps over the near horizon...      
In The Lion of Comarre (Thrilling Wonder Stories, August 1949) by Arthur C Clarke, the crater is mentioned in passing:
   "Who wants to go to the stars, anyway?"
   The boy made an exclamation of annoyance and jumped off the diamond block in his excitement.
   "What a question to ask in this age!  A thousand years ago people were saying, 'Who wants to go to the Moon?'  Yes, I know it's unbelievable, but it's all there in the old books.  Nowadays the Moon's only forty-five minutes away, and people like Harn Jansen work on Earth and live in Plato City..."      
In Poul Anderson's The Light (Galaxy, March 1957), the astronauts who think they are first on the Moon climb the ring-wall of Plato:
...There was an easy slope at the spot we picked and a kind of pass on top, so we didn't have to climb the full height, which is a little under 4000 feet.
 - and make two discoveries inside the crater.  The second one is stupendous.  The first is merely amazing:
   When we reached the summit, we could look down on a lava plain sixty miles across; the farther side was hidden from us.  It seemed almost like polished black metal, crossed by the long shadow of the western ringwall.  The downward grade was steeper, its base lost in darkness, but it could also be negotiated. 
   My helmet, sticking into the direct sunlight, was a Dutch oven; my feet, in the shade, were frozen clods.  But I forgot all that when I saw the mist below me.
   Have you heard of it?  Astronomers have noticed it for a long time, what seemed to be clouds or - something - in some of the craters.  Plato is one.  I'd been hoping we'd solve the mystery this trip.  And there, curling in ragged streamers a quarter mile below me, was the fog!
   It boiled out of the murk, glowed like gold for a moment as it hit the light, and then it was gone, evaporated, but more came rolling up every minute...    
In Hugh Walters' Operation Columbus (1960) Chris Godfrey is about to become the first astronaut to land on the Moon, the chosen site being -
Plato!  Moving slowly, the great circular feature now came on the screen.  He knew that this famous crater, eighty miles in diameter and with rocky walls four thousand feet high, was thought to be the flattest part of the Moon's surface.  Yet even this was not sure, for often observers had seen mysterious changes on its floor.  It was generally agreed that Plato was one of those places on our satellite where a strange mist could sometimes be seen creeping across the ground.  Sometimes small marks could be seen within its walls.  At others, those same marks were invisible.  It looked darker than the rest of the Moon as it seemed to settle fairly in the centre of the screen...      

the Pocono Mountains, Pennsylvania, USA:
The trajectory of the alien spacecraft in Day of Succession by Theodore L Thomas (Astounding, August 1959) is specified as follows:
   ...The object came in low over the Pocono Mountains and crashed in south-eastern Pennsylvania two miles due west of Terre Hill...    

Porterville, California, USA:
George Christopher and his brother Ray drove down the highway towards Porterville.  Lake Success lay on their right, high banks rose to the top of the ridgeline on their left.  Rain fell steadily.  Already the lake had risen nearly to the bridge where the highway crossed.  Chunks of mud washed down from the ridge above and covered the road.  The big farm truck went through the mud patches without slowing.
   "Not much traffic," Ray said.
   "Not yet."  George drove grimly, his mouth a set line, his bull neck arched towards the steering wheel.  "But it won't be long.  All those people.  They'll come up the road looking for high ground - "
   "Most'll stop in Porterville," Ray said.  "It's a couple of hundred feet higher than the San Joaquin."
   "Was," George said.  "With those quakes you can't tell.  Land shifts, raises up and down.  Anyway, when the dam goes, Porterville goes.  They won't stay there..."
            From Lucifer's Hammer (1977), the comet-strike disaster-epic by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. 

Potsdam, Brandenburg, Germany:

Primrose Hill, London, England:
This is where H G Wells' narrator in The War of the Worlds (1898) finds unhoped-for relief from despair.
...I missed my way among the streets, and presently saw, down a long avenue, in the half-light of an early dawn, the curve of Primrose Hill.  On the summit, towering up to the fading stars, was a third Martian, erect and motionless like the others.
   An insane resolve possessed me.  I would die and end it.  And I would save myself even the trouble of killing myself.  I marched on recklessly towards this Titan, and then, as I drew nearer and the light grew, I saw that a multitude of black birds was circling and clustering about the hood.  At that my heart gave a bound, and I began running along the road...  

Princes Risborough, Buckinghamshire, England:
From Fred Hoyle's 1985 novel Comet Halley:
   "Where have we to get to?"
   "Princes Risborough."
   After examining a road atlas for a while, Frances Margaret eventually said, in something more like her usual firm style:
   "You know, if you designed a road system with the intention of making it difficult to get to Princes Risborough you couldn't make it worse.  I suppose that's why Prime Ministers live there."                             [see Chequers]

Princeton, New Jersey, USA:
In Frederick Pohl and C M Kornbluth's novel Wolfbane (1959), the planet Earth has suffered two centuries of being dragged into interstellar space, warmed inadequately by an atomically kindled Moon, while the human population is divided between the majority of biddable lethargic "Sheep" and the one-per-thousand minority of energetic, assertive "Wolves".  Glenn Tropile, a Wolf, fleeing from a death sentence passed upon him in Wheeling, West Virginia, finds refuge in Princeton, and notes the difference between the "Wolves" here and the "Sheep" of Wheeling:
   Tropile walked through the town in the evening light...
   There were other walkers in the street.  Their gait was not the economical shuffle with pendant arms.  They burned energy visibly.  They swung.  They strode.  It had been painted on his brain in earliest childhood that such walking was wrong, reprehensible, silly, debilitating.  It wasted calories.  These people did not look debilitated, and they didn't seem to mind wasting calories...    

Propontis:
See the entry on Cebrenia.

Providence, Rhode Island, USA:
This is H P Lovecraft's hometown; where he was born and where he is buried.  Though the house where he was born (at 454 Angell Street) was demolished in the 1960s, there are still many Lovecraft links in Providence.
From The Haunter of the Dark (Weird Tales, December 1936):
   Blake's study, a large southwest chamber, overlooked the front garden on one side, while its west windows - before one of which he had his desk - faced off from the brow of the hill and commanded a splendid view of the lower town's outspread roofs and of the mystical sunsets that flamed behind them.  On the far horizon were the open countryside's purple slopes.  Against these, some two miles away, rose the spectral hump of Federal Hill, bristling with huddled roofs and steeples whose remote outlines wavered mysteriously, taking fantastic forms as the smoke of the city swirled up and enmeshed them.  Blake had a curious sense that he was looking upon some unknown, ethereal world which might or might not vanish in dream if he ever tried to seek it out and enter it in person...       
References to Providence abound in Lovecraft's first masterpiece, The Call of Cthulhu (Weird Tales, February 1928) and his posthumously published novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (Weird Tales, May 1941 and July 1941).

Ptolemaeus (crater):
Site of the first moon-base, according to Timeliner (1955) by Charles Eric Maine.
I am going by what I wrote on the Fictional Dates page for 2029.  However, to my embarrassment, I have not been able to find the reference in the book itself, though there is a mention on page 47 of one of the base's inhabitants, Bill Kyle, getting himself killed when a fall on to a jagged needle of rock in the Ptolemaeus mountains punctured his space suit and sucked the air from his lungs before he could connect the emergency oxygen feed.
   Perhaps "the Ptolemaeus mountains" simply means the crater's ringwall.
The same choice of location for the same settlement occurs in Donald A Wollheim's 1959 novel The Secret of the Ninth Planet, which refers (p.8) to
   ...The U.S. Moon Base in the center of the Crater Ptolemaeus...    

Pymatuning Creek, Ohio, USA:
Kenneth Farrow, suspended-animation test subject for Operation Groundhog which was supposed to last a few months, wakes unexpectedly late in Edmond Hamilton's novella Planet of Exile (Space Travel, July 1958):
...Suppose the surprise atomic attack, so long feared, had struck while he was sleeping... who would know that he, Farrow, was sleeping here?
   ...he stumbled out of the dark, cold vault, frantic to prove to himself that it wasn't true...  stared out over the wide, shallow miles of Pymatuning Valley...
   And it was all gone.  All the valley as he remembered it, the roads and fields and farms and villages, the trucks and buses and cars, the distant smoke and tall buildings of Steel City.  All gone.
   A vast and unbroken forest rolled to the horizon, lonely under the advancing night...    

Quito, Ecuador:
This Andean city pays the penalty for its equatorial location in When the World Wend Mad by Ronald M Sherin (Amazing Stories Quarterly, Fall 1928), a disaster story in which a mad Russian scientist causes the Earth's rotation to accelerate.
   On the afternoon of September 27th, 1938, the city of Quito, Ecuador, was visited by a series of phenomena never paralleled in the history of the earth...
   ...The first warnings of what was to follow were so inappreciable in their effects as to cause but little anxiety.  In fact, the people's only sensation was one of strange exhilaration and vigor.  Even the heaviest labor could be done with an amazingly small amount of exertion...
   As time went by, however, this feeling of lightness grew less agreeable...  in all parts of the city tramcars were leaving the rails...      

Regent's Canal, London, England:
This is where the narrator of H G Wells' The War of the Worlds (1898) hears the sudden cessation of the Martians' cry.
...I came upon the Red Weed again, and found Regent's Canal a spongy mass of dark-red vegetation.
   Abruptly, as I crossed the bridge, the sound of 'Ulla, ulla, ulla' ceased.  It was, as it were, cut off.  The silence came like a thunder-clap.
   The dusky houses about me stood faint, and tall and dim; the trees towards the park were growing black.  All about me the Red Weed clambered among the ruins...  Night, the Mother of Fear and Mystery, was coming upon me...       

Regent's Park, London:
In Charles Eric Maine's pandemic-disaster novel The Darkest of Nights (1962), civil war breaks out as rebels fight the government responsible for setting up elite shelters.  Clive Brant has been mistaken for one of the rebels and is taken to a prison camp...
...established in a vast field in Regent's Park, just north of London's West End.
   The perimeter of the camp consisted of coiled barbed wire piled up to a height of eight feet or more.  Several trucks were disgorging their human freight, and the prisoners were being hustled were being hustled with kicks and blows to a narrow gap in the wire...

Reno, Nevada, USA:
This is where the reader is introduced to the "fake papoola" in Philip K Dick's rather complex 1964 novel The Simulacra.  Chapter 5 begins:
In the little building at the back of Jalopy Jungle Number Three, Al Miller sat with his feet up on the desk, smoking an Upmann cigar and watching passers-by, the sidewalk and people and stores of downtown Reno, Nevada.  Beyond the gleam of the new jalopies parked with flapping banners and streamers cascading from them he saw a shape waiting, hiding beneath the huge sign that spelled out LOONY LUKE.
   And he was not the only person to see the shape; along the sidewalk came a man and woman with a small boy trotting ahead of them, and the boy, with an exclamation, hopped up and down, gesturing excitedly.  "Hey, Dad, look!  You know what it is?  Look, it's the papoola."
   "By golly," the man said with a grin, "so it is.  Look, Marion, there's one of those Martian creatures..."    

Rigolet, Labrador, Canada:
It's not surprising that the name has been shortened to "Rigo" in John Wyndham's post-apocalypse novel The Chrysalids (1955), set thousands of years in the future, when Labrador is one of the few places on Earth where what we today might call normal, un-mutated people can live (though the book calls into doubt whether "normal" is a term that can still meaningfully be used).  One thing appears not to have changed: Rigo is still the capital of Labrador and the seat of executive authority.  However, the state doesn't seem to be very powerful or centralised, while the level of technology has not recovered anywhere near pre-disaster levels; the people of Labrador havesteam power but no electric power.
   ...it was not only small children who lived in nervous awareness of the Fringes people not so far away.  Their existence had become a dangerous nuisance and their depredations the cause of many representations to the Givernment in Rigo.
   For all the good the petitions did, they might never have been sent.  Indeed, with no one able to tell, over a stretch of five or six hundred miles, where the next attack would come, it is difficult to see what practical help would have been given...   

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil:

Russell Square, London, England:
The narrator in John Wyndham's post-disaster classic The Day of the Triffids (1951), as he takes the evening air, is wary of the deadly walking plants:
   Before I went into the Russell Square garden I looked it over carefully.  I had already begun to be suspicious of open spaces.  Sure enough I spotted one triffid.  It was in the north-west corner, standing perfectly still, but considerably taller than the bushes that surrounded it.  I went closer, and blew the top of it to bits with a single shot.  The noise in the silent Square could scarcely have been more alarming if I had let off a howitzer.  When I was sure that there were no others lurking I went into the garden and sat with my back against a tree.
   I stayed there perhaps twenty minutes.  The sun was low, and half the square was thrown into shadow.  Soon I would have to go in.  While there was light I could sustain myself; in the dark, things could steal quietly upon me.  Already I was on my way back to the primitive...    
Less apocalyptic is the way the Square figures in Dan Morgan's The Uninhibited (1961), a novel of secret interstellar influences.  Lockyer is an official of the undercover contingent from the planet Lessigia, here to prevent destabilising outbreaks of telepathic power among Earthlings.
   ...Lockyer lived in a street near Russell Square.  The cafes and provision shops of the busy little backwater had a continental air, in contrast with the defiant Britishness of its two public houses with the frosted glass and mahogany stained fronts...    

St. Louis, Missouri, USA:
The location of the provisional capital of the USA after the revolution which ousts the regime of the Prophet, in Robert A Heinlein's If This Goes On - (1940, 1953).
Temporary capital was set up at St Louis, for its central location...  We took over the Prophet's proctor base there, restoring to it its old name of Jefferson Barracks.  We took over the buildings of the University, too, and handed back to it the name of Washington.  Of the people no longer recalled the true significance of those names, they soon would and here was a good place to start...      
Over future centuries the city's name has undergone modification in Stanley G Weinbaum's Dawn of Flame (Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1939):
Three weeks in Selui had served to give Hull Tarvish an acquaintance with the place.  He no longer gaped at the sky-piercing ruins of the ancient city, and he was quite at home in the town that lay beside it...       
In Edmond Hamilton's Citadel of the Star Lords (Imagination, October 1956) an airman named Price, piloting a Beechcraft plane, does not yet know that he has been knocked sixty years into the future, from 1979 to 2039, by what he thinks must have been the start of World War Three, but is actually an attack from space. 
   ...The sun sprang up and it was day.  Far ahead the Mississippi gleamed.  Price sent the Beechcraft at full throttle, toward St. Louis.  He could not see any smoke from the great complex of city and industry that sprawled there over both banks of the river, and he could not see any bridges.  But St. Louis had to be there.
   It was.  But it had changed since he saw it last.  The high buildings were brought low, and the low buildings were mounds, shells covered with brush and fox-grape, and trees grew in the public streets and through the broken windows.  The river, vast and placid, was empty except for a floating log.  Obstructions along the shores might once have been docks, but were so no longer.  And there was a great stillness...      

Salisbury Plain, (mostly in) Wiltshire, England:
The first Mars expedition - organized and led by a private individual, millionaire adventurer Dale Curtance - takes off from this area, as narrated in John Wyndham's Stowaway to Mars (1935).  Chapter V, "Great Day", begins:
The few hardy souls who had elected to spend the night upon the open inhospitality of Salisbury Plain slept no later than dawn upon the morning of the twelfth of October, 1981, for it was with the first rays of sunlight that the influx which would last all day began.
   The hysterical ballyhoo timed to reach its climax upon this day had been sustained with an unsurpassed degree of journalistic art.  The birth of a son to Dale Curtance had given a fillip to interest at a convenient moment, and every newspaper reader in the country had become familiar with the, at present, somewhat dough-like features of Victor Curtance.  The announcement of the names of Dale's companions for the flight had caught three unknown men and one rather more familiar figure into an undying fulguration of publicity.  Every person who could reach a radio set had seen and heard a prince of the blood say: "I name this ship the Gloria Mundi.  May God guide her and bring safely back to us," and the film of the occasion had been shown at every cinema...     

San Bernardino, California, USA:
An incident is remembered by one of the main characters in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's Footfall (1985):
   ...It had happened several years before.  Wes Dawson, two-term Congressman, stuck on the transportation safety subcommittee, interviewing bikers.  He'd been young enough and new enough then to go out looking for information, rather than summoning the interested parties to Washington to testify to a committee.
   And in a San Bernardino bar, Wes Dawson had let a Hell's Angel get his goat, and took a swing at the bloated barbarian, and was about to get his head stomped in, which would have been bad, and in the newspapers, which would have been worse, when Hairy Red the Minstrel made a joke of the whole affair and hustled Wes out of the bar...     

San Francisco, California, USA:
A visit to a bookshop turns bad for Clark Ashton Smith's narrator in The Hunters From Beyond (Strange Tales, October 1932):
I have seldom been able to resist the allurement of a bookstore, particularly one that is well supplied with rare and exotic items.  Therefore I turned in at Toleman's to browse around for a few minutes.  I had come to San Francisco for one of my brief, biannual visits, and had started early that idle forenoon to an appointment with Cyprian Sincaul, the sculptor, a second or third cousin of mine, whom I had not seen for several years...
   The little shop was empty of customers.  Knowing my proclivities, the owner and his one assistant became tacitly non-attentive after a word of recognition, and left me to rummage at will among the curiously laden shelves.  Wedged in between other but less alluring titles, I found a de luxe edition of Goya's 'Proverbes'...
   It has always been incomprehensible to me that I did not shriek aloud with mindless, overmastering terror, when I happened to look up from the volume...  

the San Joaquin Valley, California, USA:
Isherwood Willias drives through shortly after the pandemic that has killed off most of mankind in Earth Abides (1949) by George R Stewart.
   He followed the Highway 99 south through the San Joaquin Valley.  Although he drove slowly, he made excellent mileage.  He did not have to slow down behind a truck, or to stop for traffic-lights (though most of them were still functioning), or to reduce speed for towns.  In fact, in spite of his apprehensions, he had to admit that driving Highway 99 under these conditions was much safer than driving it through thick and madly speeding traffic.
   He saw no man.  If he had searched through the towns, he might have found someone, but there was no use of it now.  A straggler here or there he might pick up at any time.  How he was searching to see whether some greater remnant might be left somewhere.
   The broad plain stretched away - vineyards, orchards, fields of melons, fields of cotton.  Perhaps a farmer's eye could have seen that already everything showed neglect, and the absence of the hand of man, but to Ish it all still looked the same...    

San Juan Capistrano, California, USA:
After the shattering nuclear attack on the USA at the start of The Earth Killers (Super Science Stories, April 1949) by A E van Vogt, the protagonist, a pilot named Morlake who while test-flying a new plane witnessed the bombing of Chicago, is suspected of involvement and becomes a fugitive from authority as he seeks those responsible.
   ...At dawn, on this third morning in the arroyo, Morlake made sure the radar screen was blank, and then flew in a great circle around the Capistrano radar station...  
   Later, some in officialdom begin to change their minds about the rogue pilot:
   "...our radar station at Capistrano saw the image of the enemy spaceship which was searching for Morlake, and so we had definite evidence that what he stated in his letter was correct.
   "When Capistrano saw it, the spaceship was about two hundred miles up.  They couldn't estimate the speed, but it was terrific."      

Santa Barbara, California, USA:
A genetically-engineered monstrosity lurks nearby in Watchers (1987), an sf/horror novel by Dean R Koontz, in which the 30-year-old heroine, Nora Devon, after a secluded upbringing by her repressive aunt Violet, has just begun to emerge into society.
   ...At the county courthouse she paused to admire the yellow blossoms of the yucca plants and the rich red bougainvillea that climbed the stucco wall and twined through the ornate wrought-iron grille over one of the tall windows.
   At the Santa Barbara Mission, built in 1815, she stood at the foot of the front steps and studied the handsome facade of the old church.  She explored the courtyard with its Sacred Garden and climbed the west bell tower.
   Gradually, she began to understand why, in some of the many books she had read, Santa Barbara had been called one of the most beautiful places on earth.  She had lived there nearly all her life, but because she had cowered in the Devon house with Violet and, on venturing out, had looked at little more than her own shoes, she was seeing the town for the first time.  It both charmed and thrilled her...    

Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA:
In Jack Williamson's Seetee Shock (1949, 1950) this is where the Treaty was signed that partitioned the Solar System - see the entry and quotation from the novel in the Fictional Dates timeline for 1987.

Santorini, Greece:
A comet-strike looms and a second doom for Thera/Santorini is imminent, in a scene from Niven and Pournelle's Lucifer's Hammer (1977):
   Dusk faded on the waters of the bay far below.  The bay was circular, surrounded by cliffs a thousand feet high, the caldera of a volcanic explosion that destroyed two thirds of the island, destroyed the Minoan Empire, created the legends of Atlantis.  Now a new black island, evil in appearance and barren, rose in the centre of the bay.  The Greeks called it the New Burnt Land, and the islands knew that some day it too would explode, as Thera had exploded so many times before.
   Fiery streaks reflected in the bay.  Something burned blue-white overhead.  In the est the golden glow faded, not to black, but to a strange curdled green-and-orange glow, a backdrop for the meteors.  Once again Phaeton drove the chariot of the sun...   

Saratoga Springs, New York, USA:
The team fighting the "Mind Parasites" is allowed by President Lloyd C. Melville to move to "US Rocket Base 91" at Saratoga Springs, for reasons of security.  See The Mind Parasites by Colin Wilson (1967).
...For the next two or three days, we spent most of the time in our hut, teaching our new pupils all we knew.  Our telepathic powers made this easy.  But we also came to recognize that we had overlooked one of the most important problems of phenomenology.  When you teach a man that he has been completely mistaken about his own nature all his life, it is as unsettling as suddenly giving him a million pounds...    

Savannah, Georgia, USA:
In Eric Frank Russell's 1955 thriller Three to Conquer, Wade Harper, the telepath employed by the Government to identify alien minds who have taken over human bodies, is chafing at his newly restricted life when he comes across a significant news item from Savannah.
   ...he had become fed up with being followed everywhere he went, finding G-men lounging at every street corner, occupying near-by tables in restaurants... 
   Monotony was broken, and faith in his purpose restored, when he arrived at the office early, spread the morning paper across his desk and found a news item tocked away at the bottom of a column inside.

Savannah, Ga.  A brief but bloody gun-battle too place near here at midnight when F.B.I. agents raided the Rankovic farm.  Two men were killed, four taken into custody.  Two more are believed to have escaped.  Declining to reveal the purpose of the raid, Area Director Stephen Maddox states that the F.B.I. acted upon direct orders from Washington.

   It was a most unusual report, in several respects.  For one thing, it had been played down; for another, the precise location was not stated...       

Schröter (crater), Mare Insularum:
For a site in the environs of Schröter W, see Gruithuisen's Lunar City.

Schröter's Valley:
Arthur C Clarke, writing about lunar plant life in his travelogue-of-the-future Journey By Earthlight - an essay to be found in his collection The Challenge of the Spaceship (1958) - discusses what he calls "Herodotus Valley", by which, so far as I can tell, he must mean Schroeter's (the crater Herodotus being 'next door').
...Most of the existing vegetation is found in the neighbourhood of the great lunar clefts, such as the Herodotus Valley, for traces of carbon dioxide, water vapour and sulphur dioxide occasionally gush out of these fissures - sometimes producing short-lived mists which are visible from Earth.  These precious gases are eagerly trapped by the slender, cactuslike plants...    
The Valley, and the Aristarchus Plateau more generally, were planned destinations for the Apollo 18 mission before it was cancelled; see Lost Moon: Reconstructing the Missions of Apollos 18, 19, and 20 (Part 1).

Scotland Yard, Victoria Embankment, London, England:
James Bond reflects on his appointment with Assistant Commissioner Vallance of the Metropolitan Police, in Moonraker (1955):
   The courtyards and cul-de-sacs of the Yard had reminded him as usual of a prison without roofs.  The overhead strip lighting in the cold corridor took the colour out of the cheeks of the police sergeant who asked his business and watched him sign the apple-green chit.  It did the same for the face of the constable who led him up the short steps and along the bleak passage between the rows of anonymous doors to the waiting-room.
   A quiet, middle-aged woman with the resigned eyes of someone who had seen everything came in and said the Assistant Commissioner would be free in five minutes...  

Sheen, Surrey, England [Sheen is now in the London borough of Richmond on Thames]:
A confusing place to research because it is more often called "East Sheen" and yet I can't find a "West Sheen".  Historically it was the site of Richard II's palace which he destroyed in 1394 out of grief for the death of his wife.  In fiction it is where the narrator is part-buried and trapped by the impact of the 5th Martian cylinder in Wells' The War of the Worlds (1898).  Twenty-seven pages of the story are devoted to the tense period that follows, which includes proximity to the Handling Machine...  Finally he emerges:
   I hesitated for some time, and then in a gust of desperate resolution and with a heart that throbbed violently, I scrambled to the top of the mound in which I had been buried so long.
   I looked about again.  To the northward, no Martian was visible. 
   When I had last seen this part of Sheen in the daylight, it had been a straggling street of comfortable white and red houses, interspersed with abundant shady trees.  Now I stood on a mound of smashed brickwork, clay and gravel, over which spread a multitude of red cactus-shaped plants, knee-high, without a solitary terrestrial growth to dispute their footing...  

Shepperton, Surrey, England:
The village suffered much damage in Book 1, Chapter 12 of The War of the Worlds (1898) by H G Wells.  Defenders score a rare hit against a Martian Fighting Machine, but then:
   The decapitated colossus reeled like a drunken giant; but it did not fall over.  It recovered its balance by a miracle, and, no longer heeding its steps, and with the camera that fired the Heat-Ray now rigidly upheld, it reeled swiftly upon Shepperton.  The living intelligence, the Martian within the hood, was slain and splashed to the four winds of heaven, and the thing was now but a mere intricate device of metal whirling to destruction.  It drove along in a straight line, incapable of guidance.  It struck the tower of Shepperton Church, smashing it down as the impact of a battering-ram might have done, swerved aside, blundered on, and collapsed with a tremendous impact into the river out of my sight...      

Siberia:    
This huge region figures strongly though indirectly (no scenes are actually set there) in the post-nuclear-holocaust novel Twilight World (1981) by Poul Anderson.  Siberia "...set itself up as independent when the old Russian government vanished.  Not being too badly hurt, and having a certain amount of industry, an energetic population, and plenty of natural resources, it came back fast - as fast as we, if not more so.  It's annexed Manchuria, you can see, and Mongolia and Korea; Japan is its puppet, as are several of the North Chinese states.  We don't know a great deal about it, international communication is still pretty slim, but it's a hardboiled outfit, and its Khan - well, you can learn about that later on..."    

the Sierra Nevada, California, USA:
Scene of the visitation by beings from a higher dimension who need an infusion of earthier reality, in the haunting tale The Light From Beyond by Clark Ashton Smith (Wonder Stories, April 1933):
...I had decided to spend a whole year in the high Sierras.  On the shore of a tiny sapphire tarn, in a valley sheltered by hemlocks and granite crags, I had built a rough cabin and had stocked it plentifully with provisions, books, and the materials of my art.  For the time being, I was independent of a world whose charms and enchantments were, to say the least, no longer irresistible.
   The region possessed, however, other allurements than those of seclusion.  Everywhere, in the stark mountain masses and pinnacles, the juniper-studded cliffs, the glacier-moulded sheets of rock, there was a mingling of grandeur and grotesquery...    

Silver City, Idaho, USA:
From Sinister Barrier (1939) by Eric Frank Russell:
   Silver City was gone; the area it once had occupied was now an enormous scar on the face of Idaho, a five-miles-wide wound dotted with wreckage through which crept, crawled and limped a pathetically small number of survivors...    

Sinus Iridum:
...As they rolled past the headland, the mighty northern wall of the Sinus Iridum - the Bay of Rainbows - swept into view.  Aeons ago the Sinus Iridum had been a complete ring mountain - one of the largest walled plains on the Moon.  But the cataclysm which had formed the Sea of Rains had destroyed the whole of the southern wall, so that only a semicircular bay is now left.  Across that bay Promontory Laplace and Promontory Heraclides stare at each other, dreaming of the day when they were linked by mountains...
   Wheeler was very quiet as the tractor rolled past the great cliffs, which stood like a line of titans full-face towards the Earth.  The green light splashing down their flanks revealed every detail of the terraced walls...
                                                              Arthur C Clarke, Earthlight (1955)

Sinus Medii:
Location of Central City, metropolis of the lunar colony, in Arthur C Clarke's Earthlight (1955).
...The cluster of great domes began to hump themselves over the horizon.  A beacon light burned on the summit of each, but otherwise they were darkened and gave no sign of life.  Some, Sadler knew, could be made transparent when desired.  All were opaque now, conserving their heat against the lunar night.
   The monocab entered a long tunnel at the base of one of the domes.  Sadler had a glimpse of great doors closing behind them - then another set, and yet another.  They're taking no chances, he thought to himself...

Sinus Meridiani:
This is the general region in which Mars' Eden lies, in The Valley where Time Stood Still (1974) by Lin Carter.
...Comparing the old silver plate to CA survey charts he had seen, M'Cord realized that if the Valley existed at all, which was probably the case, it was deep in the very center of a region the Earthmen knew as Meridiani Sinus, which lay due west of the Sabaeus... [p100; see Airy]
And on p.127:
...In the brilliant dry clarity of the thin air, from his height, you could see the entirety of the Meridiani Mesa and a dim, blurred glimpse of the dustlands that ringed it on three sides.  This must be one of the highest elevations on the planet, thought M'Cord.  He was sweating again: whatever the mystery of Ophar was, they were about to get their first glimpse of it...    

Sinus Roris  
The "Bay of Dew", a northern extension of the Oceanus Procellarum, is the location of the fictional dust-bowl called the "Sea of Thirst" in Arthur C Clarke's A Fall of Moondust (1961).
...Selene surged forward.  For the first time there was a real sensation of speed.  The boat's wake became longer and more disturbed as the spinning fans bit fiercely into the dust.  Now the dust itself was being tossed up on either side in great ghostly plumes; from a distance, Selene would have looked like a snowplough driving its way across a winter landscape, beneath a frosty moon.  But those grey, slowly-collapsing parabolas were not snow, and the lamp that lit their trajectory was the planet Earth.
   The passengers relaxed, enjoying the smooth, almost silent ride...   

Sinus Sabaeus:
Home of the detective (a seven-foot biped of vaguely stork-like appearance) in The Martian Crown Jewels by Poul Anderson.
...The city lay gray and quiet; the sun was slipping westward over the farmlands of Sinus Sabaeus and the desert of the Aeria; he could just make out the rumble of a treadmill cart passing beneath the windows - and he sat here with a story which could blow the Solar System apart!
   His hands, gloved against the chill, twisted together.  "Yes, it's confidential, all right.  If you can solve this case, you can just about name your own fee."  The gleam in Syaloch's eyes made him regret that, but he stumbled on...  
The same area is, in Lin Carter's The Valley Where Time Stood Still (1974), lent a different feel:
   "...As you probably know, preliminary surveys have indicated that the Sabaeus Sinus Plateau is possibly the oldest, continuously-exposed land-surface on Mars.  It was above water even when there were oceans here, millions of years ago.  It has probably been surface land as far back as there was surface land - since the planet was formed, in other words...  Well, not to digress further: we parted company with the geologists at Sigeus and came here by slidar with native bearers.  I - we - wished to check forstnand the rumors that laid the site of the legendary "first city", Ygnarh, somewhere in this region..." (p.73)  [Lin Carter has obviously absorbed his Clark Ashton Smith!  Ygnarh is the Martian city in Vulthoom.]
   On page 107 we are given another chunk of impressions, making much of the formation's smoothness:
   ...Once, long ago, this had been a peninsula which thrust deeply out between the equatorial ocean and a long, land-locked bay.  Even then, perhaps, it had been level land with few hills, if any, to mar its regularity.  When the oceans shrank and dried to salty puddles, what had been a peninsula became a mighty barrier of rock thrusting up some hundreds of feet above the dead sea bottoms.  Whatever topsoil had once covered the rocky surface of the peninsula had long since crumbled to dust and been blown away to mingle with the talcum-fine dust of the dead ocean's floor...  
See also the reference in the entry for Deltaton Sinus, from the first of the five Mars novels by Patrick Moore, Mission to Mars (1955).

Sloane Square, Chelsea, London, England:
On the way to Blades Club for an encounter at cards with the vulgar and sinister Hugo Drax, James Bond glimpses a curious portent in the heavens.  From chapter III of Moonraker (1955) by Ian Fleming:
   Startled at the great crimson words, Bond pulled in to the curb, got out of the car and crossed to the other side of the street to get a bigger view of the big skysign.
   Ah!  That was it.  Some of the letters had been hidden by a neighbouring building.  It was only one of these Shell advertisements.  'SUMMER SHELL IS HERE' was what it said.
   Bond smiled to himself and walked back to his car and drove on.
   When he had first seen the sign, half-hidden by the building, great crimson letters across the evening sky had flashed a different message.
   They had said:  'HELL IS HERE... HELL IS HERE... HELL IS HERE.'  

Sofia, Bulgaria:
In The Doomsday Brain (1967) by Paul Tabori, the Hunters on the track of evil mastermind Bruno Gatterer follow a trail that leads here.
Outside the mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov the two sentries stood like wax figures.  Their uniforms were straight from the heyday of Viennese operetta with a lot of braid, polished top-boots, feathered caps; more than somewhat incongruous in the capital of a Socialist Peoples' Republic.  They stood without any visible movement, their rifles at rest, probably self-hypnotised into lifeless rigidity.    The tomb was guarded by two such "living statues" day and night, twenty-four hours a day, in rain and shine, frost or heat wave.  Old Georgi who had won world fame when he stood up to the bullying of Hermann Goering at the Reichstag fire trial - and got away with it - died in Russia, rather unexpectedly; perhaps his Russian comrades slightly hastened his demise for his was a brand of National Communism which Stalin did not relish.  However, his body was carried in state on the shoulders of the leaders of International Marxist-Leninism and in due course returned to Bulgaria - to provide the central piece of the mausoleum which the two sentries guarded with such perfect imitation of garden sculpture... 

Stockholm, Sweden:
From Keith Laumer's Worlds of the Imperium (1962):
   He had been following me all day.
   At first I thought it was coincidence when I noticed the man on the bus from Bromma, then studying theatre announcements in the hotel lobby while I registered, and half an hour later sitting three tables away sipping coffee while I ate a hearty dinner.
   I had discarded the coincidence theory a long time ago.  Five hours had passed and he was still with me as I walked through the Old Town, medieval Stockholm still preserved on an island in the middle of the city.  I had walked past shabby windows crammed with copper pots, ornate silver, dueling pistols, and worn cavalry sabres; they were all very quaint in the afternoon sun, but grim reminders of a ruder day of violence after midnight...    

Stonehenge, Wiltshire, England:
This site resonates in many tales.
The time-traveller Malcolm Lockridge has a hand in founding the monument, as described in Poul Anderson's The Corridors of Time (1965):
   ...meanwhile he made alliance - with the axmakers of Langdale Pike, the settlers along the Thames, even the dour downland farmers, whom he persuaded that manslaughter was not pleasing to the gods.  Now today they spoke of erecting a great temple on Salisbury Plain, as the sign and seal of their confederation...
The time-viewing mental pioneer Howard Lester in Colin Wilson's The Philosopher's Stone (1969) approaches the stone circle from the present and finds it disturbing:
   The sensations were so strong when we pulled up opposite Stonehenge that I let Littleway buy the tickets, while I crossed the road towards the stones.  It was a quite indescribable sensation.  If I were trying to represent it in a film, I should use a curious, menacing vibration.  But that would be to simplify it.  In a sense, it was more like a smell, picked up by some inner sense, a smell of time...
For the narrator of Keith Laumer's A Trace of Memory (1963) - playing sidekick to the mysterious "Foster" - a more violent surprise awaits during a night visit to a hollow close to the site of the stones:
   The surface of the ground before us seemed to tremble, then heave.  Foster snapped on his flashlight.  The earth at the bottom of the hollow rose, cracked open.  A boiling mass of luminescence churned, and a globe of light separated itself, rose, bumbling along the face of the weathered stone...    
What the technophobic population have learned to call the "Stones of the Sanctuary" in John Christopher's post-disaster novel The Prince in Waiting (1970) turn out to have a hidden base of secret technologists beneath them:
...They stood like jagged teeth on the skyline; tiny but, being miles away still, having the promise of enormity.  The promise or the threat...  There had been vague thoughts of the High Seers, of Seances, but nothing concrete, nothing, really, that meant anything.  Those distant pillars were real, and foreboding.  They were surrounded by empty downland, cropped only by rabbits.  No man would go near, no shepherd graze his flocks in their shadow.  It was the place of the High Seers, dread and holy, and that dread touched me, making me want to turn back to the world of men...  

the Straight Range (= Montes Recti):
Two astronomers from Plato Observatory decide during their free time to go exploring by turbine-driven lunar tractor, in Earthlight (1955) by Arthur C Clarke:
   For the next three hours they crawled along the flanks of the Teneriffe Mountains, then struck out across the plain to the Straight Range, that lonely, isolated band of mountains like a faint echo of the mighty Alps.  Jamieson drove now with a steady concentration; he was going into new territory and could take no chances...   

Strymon canal, Mars:
The opening scene in Red Planet (1949), by Robert A Heinlein, is set in a colony in this area.
   ...Buildings had not even view windows, any more than a modern building in New York has.  The surrounding desert, while beautiful, is monotonous.  South Colony was in an area granted by the Martians, just north of the ancient city of Charax - there is no need to give the Martian name since an Earthman can't pronounce it - and between the legs of the double canal Strymon.  Again we follow colonial custom in using the name assigned by the immortal Dr Percival Lowell...  
[Note: Strymon, though non-existent, is locatable in, or somewhat west of, Amazonis Planitia (see Linking Lowell's Mars with the standard map).] 
[Later note: or maybe much further west than Amazonis, if you have to subtract the old longitude from 360 rather than use it directly - see note after "Aetheria".  Anyhow, I'll leave the picture for the entry as it is, since I quite like its canal-like appearance.]

Sussex, England:
See Locations for The Day of the Triffids.

Swindon, Wiltshire, England:
In a narrative which doubtless expresses the author's own humorous disdain for the Research Council bureaucracy, fictional professor Isaac Newton (a Devon man, unlike the Lincolnshire sage of the seventeenth century) tries to find his way on page 158 of Fred Hoyle's alien-contact novel Comet Halley (1985):
...It was an awkward cross-country drive from Cambridge to Swindon where the Research Councils were located, having moved there from central London a few years previously.  The awkwardness of the cross-country route was eclipsed, however, by the difficulty which Isaac Newton experienced in finding North Star Avenue in Swindon itself.  Somebody told him to make for a place which rejoiced under the name of the Oasis, but the instruction he received only contrived to get him on the wrong side of the railway, so that although he ended up only a couple of hundred yards from his destination, he could find no way to get his car across the lines.  In some irritation he managed to park the car, and then cross the lines by a footbridge, only to find himself among a number of large buildings with a style of architecture that reminded him of an artist's impression of ancient Mesopotamia...     

Syrtis Major:
According to Wikipedia this was "the first documented surface feature of another planet. It was discovered by Christiaan Huygens, who included it in a drawing of Mars in 1659."  A venerable record!  Syrtis, I thought, meant "bog", which would make the feature a "big bog", but looking up the word online I find it means "quicksand".  (I must have been misled by Milton's "boggy Syrtis" traversed by Satan in Paradise Lost.)
   "Syrtis Major" is such an old appellation and the feature itself so prominent, it's not surprising it tends to be a default choice amongst sf writers who seek the name of a location on Mars.  Master of the Asteroid (Wonder Stories, October 1932) by Clark Ashton Smith. is a classic early tale of interplanetary exploration which on its first page states that  ...in 1980, a dozen voyages had been made to Mars, and a rocket base had been established in Syrtis Major, with a small permanent colony of terrestrials, all of whom were trained scientists as well as men of uncommon hardihood and physical stamina...        
   The name of the feature gets into the name of the story in Poul Anderson's Duel on Syrtis (Planet Stories, March 1951).  Riordan, a ruthless Terran hunter who wishes to "bag a Martian", is watched by his intended target, Kreega, who 
   ...sat in a cave, looking down past a tortured wilderness of sand and bush and wind-carved rock, miles in the thin clear air to the glitter of metal where the rocket lay.  The man was a tiny speck in the huge barren landscape, a lonely insect crawling under the deep-blue sky...  Weak pallid sunlight spilled over rocks tawny and ocherous and rust-red, over the low dusty thorn-bushes and the gnarled little trees and the sand that blew faintly between them.  Equatorial Mars!    
Syrtis Major is the location of the colony-cities Lowell and Pickering in Patrick Moore's series of five juvenile Mars adventures.  To quote from the fourth of them, Peril on Mars (1958), page 25:
...there was the V-shaped dark area still called by its old name of Syrtis Major, and he could even make out the tiny cluster of specks whch marked the man-made city of Lowell.  The second city, Pickering, was smaller, but after a time he found that too...
For a while I was confused by an apparent contradiction between this and the statement in the final volume, Raiders of Mars (1959), page 82:
...he could even see the dot which marked Lowell Base, lying on the edge of the desert which astronomers had named Aeria...
I hoped that this would be resolved by a bit of research which would show that Aeria is just next to Syrtis Major, and thus that "on the edge of" just implies "on the edge of Syrtis Major, close to Aeria".  And lo and behold my wish was granted when I found an Encyclopedia Britannica reference online which refers to Aeria as the "western boundary" of Syrtis Major.  Since I possess a Mars globe I should not have had to go to such trouble, but sadly the globe is not as helpful as it should be as regards names, although topographically it's excellent.
   Edmond Hamilton as far as I can recall in his numerous Mars tales uses no real geographical name other than Syrtis (though of course he invents plenty of native Martian names).  For example in Planet of Exile (Space Travel, July 1958):
...reddish desert dropped gently away, a panorama of infinite desolation in all directions except one.  In the direction...  lay a vast bowl of pale green.  He knew it was Syrtis oasis, and he saw that it was almost completely occupied by endless streets of very Earthly-looking buildings... an oddly terrestrial city to find here in an oasis of desert Mars...    
See also Casius.

Tampa, Florida, USA:
The state's outline has changed drastically in Keith Laumer's Catastrophe Planet (1966):
   Tampa was a reeking ruin, a seaport town miles from the sea, surrounded by a bog of grey mud left high and dry by the freakish withdrawal of the Gulf...    

Tarzana, California, USA:
From Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's invasion-epic Footfall (1985):
Tarzana didn't have electricity.  Ken Dutton and his guests stayed outdoors.  Light came from the bellies of the clouds, reflected from wherever the Los Angeles and San Fernando Valleys still had electricity.  Occasionally a guest would go inside, feeling his way through the darkness toward the flickering light from the bathroom.  At the next Stone Soup party there would probably be no candles at all...   

Teneriffe Mountains:
From Earthlight (1955) by Arthur C Clarke:
   They came to a halt on a high escarpment overlooking the plain.  Directly ahead, notching the horizon, was the pyramidal summit of Pico.  Towards the right, sinking down into the north-east, were the more rugged peaks of the Teneriffe Mountains.  Very few of those peaks had ever been climbed, largely because no one had so far bothered to attempt it.  The brilliant earthlight made them appear an uncanny blue-green, constrasting strangely with their appearance by day, when they would be bleached into raw whites and blacks by the merciless sun...    

Terre Haute, Indiana, USA:
Birthplace of Paul Janus Finnegan, alias Kickaha - see Philip Jose Farmer's World of the Tiers series.

Terre Hill, Pennsylvania, USA:
The first of the alien spacecraft in Theodore L Thomas' Day of Succession (Astounding, August 1959) -
   ...crashed in south-eastern Pennsylvania two miles due west of Terre Hill.
   The object still glowed a dull red, and the fire of the smashed house still smouldered when General Tredway arrived with the troops.  He threw a cordon around it and made a swift investigation...  

Theobalds Road, Holborn, London, England:
The scene of a crisis-briefing in Hugh Walters' The Last Disaster (1978), in which the Moon leaves its orbit and begins to spiral inward towards the Earth.
...Security for the London meeting was unobtrusive but effective.  The gathering was held in the former Air Ministry Building in Theobalds Road...
[Personal note: during 1980-87 I worked in this area; every morning I walked down Theobalds Road to turn into Bedford Row for the Printing Federation.]

Thoana Palus:
...Yeolarn is the northernmost of the Earth colonies, and sits smack on the 250th Meridian in the center of the Thoana Palus...    - from Lin Carter's The City Outside the World (1977). 
Online a source tells me the location of the feature is at 256 degrees West, 35 North.

Thoth-Nepenthes:
268 degrees west, 8 north.  One of the few so-called Martian "canals" that correspond to actual dark features on the planet. 
From Lin Carter's The Man Who Loved Mars (1973), p.45:
   I began idly questioning Keresny as to the site of the so-called Treasure City.  The ancient thought record he had found up at Thoth-Nepenthes had given the site with particular detail.  Scholars have spent twenty years striving to figure out the peculiar geographical notation employed by the Ancients and have come up with a rough but workable system...    

Thyle II:
This is the region where Dick Jervis crash-lands one of the auxiliary rockets in which he had set out from the parent ship Ares to photograph some of the landscape of Mars, as narrated in A Martian Odyssey by Stanley Weinbaum (Wonder Stories, July 1934).  Those were the days when you could believe in exploration worthy of the name:
   "...I started losing altitude right away, and suddenly there I was with a thump right in the middle of Thyle!  ... the bump flattened the landing-gear and busted off the under-jets...  I had my choice of waiting to be picked up or trying to walk back - eight hundred miles... I chose to walk...  Just as much chance of being picked up, and it kept me busy."
   "We'd have found you," said Harrison.
   "No doubt.  Anyway, I rigged up a harness from some seat straps, and put the water tank on my back, took a cartridge belt and revolver, and some iron rations, and started out..."

  

Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico:
Much of Philip K Dick's Now Wait For Last Year (1966) takes place in this city in the year 2055.  Tijuana Fur & Dye was established as the receiving plant for furs created by exploiting the capacity for mimicry of the "Martian print amoeba".  It had broken the natural fur market.  Then war intervened.
   As soon as hostilities with the reegs had begun, Tijuana Fur & Die had converted from the luxury trade of ersatz fur production to war work...  Supernaturally accurate duplication of rocketship master syndromes, the ruling monad Lazy Brown Dog, was fatalistically natural for the type of operation which TF&D represented; conversion had been painless and rapid...  

Tirana, Albania:
From Paul Tabori's The Doomsday Brain (1967):
There were only three people who got off the small Rumanian plane at Tirana, the overgrown village that called itself the capital of the Albanian Peoples' Republic.  The other passengers, continuing to Bucharest, were guarded by a platoon of soldiers with automatic rifles at the ready as if their very presence on the tarmac might threaten the security of Enver Hoxha's country...   

Topeka, Kansas, USA:
Birthplace (in 2093) of Gil Hamilton - see The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton (1976), by Larry Niven.

Trafalgar Square, London, England:
In the version of 1990s London portrayed by Dan Morgan in The Country of the Mind (1975), in which airborne cabs fly about the capital,
   Nelson's Column loomed briefly in the right hand window as the cab dropped out of the traffic pattern and made a neat landing on a rooftop terminal at the south-east corner of Trafalgar Square.  He paid the driver and took an elevator down to the pedestrian level...
In John Wyndham's The Kraken Wakes (1953), when London begins to drown because the aliens colonising the deep oceans are melting the ice cap to enlarge their domain, the flood line at one point lay across Trafalgar Square (p.221).

Triesnecker  
The crater and the rilles of that name are in the Sinus Medii.  The area gets a mention in Earthlight, the 1955 novel by Arthur C Clarke.  The protagonist, counter-espionage agent Sadler, is riding the monorail back from Hyginus Cleft to Central City.
   He rode the spur-line back to Central City, over the incredibly broken terrain past Triesnecker.  For almost all the journey the monorail track was accompanied by the pylons passing their loaded buckets out from Hyginus, and the empty ones back...

Trieste, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Italy:
Some thousands of years hence, Wayness Tamm, the lovable investigator who is the heroine of Jack Vance's Ecce and Old Earth (1991), comes to Trieste at one stage of her search for the missing Charter of the planet Cadwal.
   ...Wayness unfolded the map and after a puzzled glance or two decided that she was holding it upside down.  She turned it about, but nothing was clarified; she had evidently been holding it correctly in the first place...
   ...Wayness climbed into the cab and was whirled away through Old Trieste: a city of unique character, built half on a narrow apron of land under the stony hills and half on piles driven into the Adriatic.  Canals of dark water flowed everywhere, washing the foundations of the tall narrow houses...      

Trivium Charontis:
Means "Crossroads of Charon".  Latitude 19.7, longitude 162.
In The Sands of Mars (1951) by Arthur C Clarke, this is the location of the smaller of the two Mars settlements, Port Schiaparelli.
   The second city of Mars held less than a thousand people, living under two domes on a long, narrow plateau.  This had been the site of the original landing on Mars, and so the position of the city was really an historical accident.  Not until some years later, when the planet's resources began to be better known, was it decided to move the colony's centre of gravity to Lowell and not to expand Schiaparelli any further.
   The little city was in many respects an exact replica of its larger and more modern rival.  Its speciality was light engineering, geological - or rather areological - research, and the exploration of the surrounding regions...   

Tycho (crater):
This place is quite heavy with literary associations.
It's the scene of Trouble with Tycho (1961) by Clifford D Simak., in which prospectors come up against a strange form of life.
You stand up on the rim and look down and there is Tycho, spread out like a map before you, wild and savage, raw and cold and hard, like the entryway to hell...
This same crater is also the birthplace and home of Captain Future, whose parents, Roger and Elaine Newton, fled there to escape the villain, Victor Corvo.
...Upon the moon, beneath the surface of Tycho crater, they built their underground home.  There a son was soon born to the man and woman - a red-haired baby boy they named Curtis...                                   
                  Edmond Hamilton, Captain Future and the Space Emperor (1939, 1967).
Tycho crater is also "the site of the buried Luna City" in Isaac Asimov's The Singing Bell (Fantasy and Science Fiction, January 1955).
The "Tycho Magnetic Anomaly" in Arthur C Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) - both the book and the concurrent movie - is strong magnetism which turns out to be caused by the alien monolith buried beneath the crater's floor.
In Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966), Tycho Under is one of the more vulnerable lunar settlements,
                      a big natural bubble cave...  roof only metres thick...  would not take much of a bomb to crack Tycho Under.    
In the same author's Blowups Happen (Astounding, September 1940) the crater's location is the site of the ancient Lunarians' main power plant, which blows up in the nuclear disaster that ends life on the Moon.  See The Implicizer aimed at Blowups Happen.
Murray Leinster in Keyhole (Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1951) has Tycho as the site of the first successful lunar base:
   It wasn't until the tenth expedition of four ships established a base in Tycho crater that men had any assurance of being able to land on the Moon and get away again.  Even then the staff of the station felt as if it were under permanent siege... 
The source of the danger: living moon-creatures!
One of the more advanced Moon-men who figure in The Lunar Pit by Myer Krulfeld (Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1940) enlightens his captive from Earth in the following dialogue regarding the crater's most renowned feature:
   "Sun motors!" Corliss exclaimed.  "Is that what makes the mysterious 'rays' around Tycho?"
   "Yes, the so-called rays are merely long, curved mirrors which direct the sun's rays upon pipes at their foci, filled with water.  The water turns into superheated steam which runs the motors in the crater."    
In Wolfbane (1959) by Frederick Pohl and C M Kornbluth, in which Earth has been stolen from the Solar System and is being dragged through interstellar space, Tycho is the surface point where the re-kindling occurs whereby the moon's five-year cycle as Earth's artificial sun recommences.  Living on subsistence leve, most of Earth's citizens are lethargic "sheep" with only one in a thousand being an assertive "wolf".
   "Citizen, the art of living is the substitution of unimportant, answerable questions for important, unanswerable ones.  Come, let us appreciate the new-born Sun."
   He turned to the window, where the spark of blue-white flame in what had once been the crater of Tycho was beginning to spread across the charred moon...        

Ulverston, Lancashire, England:
[note: Ulverston is in Lancashire-beyond-the-sands, that region of Lancashire which after 1974 was put into "Cumbria", for those who take notice of such impertinences.  I've been a few times to this fine old town.]
"...There I was... sat there in The Globe in Ulverston, downing a pint of Hartley's best...  Used to take the bus through to Ulverston every Thursday, 'cause it's market day and the pubs stay open right through...  Next thing I knew I was awakening up in this very room...  just where you are now..."
Thus a character named Thwaites tells Ray Jerome, protagonist of Bob Shaw's 1984 novel Fire Pattern, of his sudden translation into a body on Mercury.

Vallis Alpes - see under Alpine Valley

Vermont, USA:
The state is the setting for The Whisperer in Darkness (Weird Tales, August 1931), the fine science-fictional horror novella by H P Lovecraft.
   The quaint, sightly village of Newfane, reached in less than an hour, was our last link with that world which man can definitely call his own by virtue of conquest and complete occupancy.  After than we cast off all allegiance to immediate, tangible, and time-touched things, and entered a fantastic world of hushed unreality in which the narrow, ribbon-like road rose and fell and curved with an almost sentient and purposeful caprice amidst the tenantless green peaks and half-deserted valleys.  Except for the sound of the motor, and the faint stir of the few lonely farms we passed at infrequent intervals, the only thing that reached my ears was the gurgling, insidious trickle of strange waters from numberless hidden fountains in the shadowy woods...         

Versailles, France:
A summit meeting - soon to be interrupted by grave news - is held in the Palace in chapter 68 of Fred Hoyle's alien-contact novel Comet Halley (1985).
   The day before the Summit they explored the Palace itself, with a view to checking that all arrangements were in order.  So far as they seating arrangements were concerned they'd no complaints, as they discovered that they had been placed a mere five paces to the right of the spot where Queen Victoria had sat on the evening of 25 August 1855, on the occasion of a supper party given in her honour by Napoleon III.  But on all other matters there seemed ample cause for disquiet, for the overwhelming reason that the Theatre of the Palace of Versailles was just about the most awkward place in which to hold a summit meeting of modern proportions.  This was amply demonstrated by the army of technicians now struggling with the acoustics...  Wires trailed everywhere, and threading their way among them were men with cigarettes hanging from their lips, moving backwards and forwards without discernible purpose...    

Viborg, Denmark:
Kentuckian anthropologist Malcolm Lockridge, caught up in a time-war, comes to Viborg in the 1530s in the company of a girl from the far further past, in The Corridors of Time (1965) by Poul Anderson.
   In awe, the Neolithic girl asked, "Is the Knossos they tell of as great as that?"
   Despite weariness and unease, Lockridge had to grin.  To his eyes, sixteenth-century Viborg was like the crossroads town where his parents used to shop.  Much prettier, though, especially after two days of heathland.  And it promised snugness, now when the last sunlight speared through rainclouds rising blue-black on a wind that flapped his cloak and wistled of winter.
   Past the lake, he glimpsed through an oak grove (the beeches had still not driven the king tree out of Denmark) the warm brick hue of an abandoned monastery.  Hard by, the city walls retained some green in the grass that covered their lower embankments.  The same tinge was given by moss to such of the high-peaked thatch roofs as he could see.  Spare and graceful, the cathedral's twin towers reached for heaven.
   "I think Knossos may be a little bigger," he said.    

Washington, D.C., USA:
Congressman Wes Dawson is euphoric as he contemplates being allowed into space to meet the alien vessel which is approaching Earth, in Footfall (1985) by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.
   Wes strolled quickly through the Federal Triangle and along Independence Avenue.  He'd done that often, but he still tended to gawk at the great public buildings along the way.  It was all there.  Government granite, magnificent buildings in the old classic style, built to last back when America had craftsmen able to compete with the great builders of old Greece and Rome...    

Westminster, Middlesex, England:
The political nerve-centre of Britain has become extremely security-conscious in the 1990s, in Dan Morgan's The Country of the Mind (1975).
   The twenty-metre high grey walls of the Westminster Citadel enclosed a rectangular area bounded on the north by Trafalgar Square and Northumberland Avenue, and on the south by Horseferry Road.  Its western border cut through part fo what had once been St.James's Park, and on the east the wall followed the line of the river bank, from the Victoria Embankment to Millbank.  A fortress enclave within the city, it contained most of the institutions of government including the new Houses of Parliament and all the major ministries, as well as living accommodation for four thousand people.  Another five thousand Civil Servants of various grades commuted daily from other parts of the city, entering the Citadel through one of the four gates...

Weybridge, Surrey, England:
Suffered in the Martian invasion described by H G Wells.
   Further on towards Weybridge, just over the bridge, there were a number of men in white fatigue jackets throwing up a long rampart, and more guns behind.
   "It's bows and arrows against the lightning, anyhow," said the artilleryman.  "They 'aven't seen that fire-beam yet..."                   The War of the Worlds (1898).

Wheeling, West Virginia, USA:
Chapter One of Pohl and Kornbluth's classic 1959 novel Wolfbane opens in this town, in the early 23rd century, when for the past two hundred years Earth has been stolen from the Solar System and is being dragged through interstellar space by the intruding planet which is now its binary.  Wheeling is mostly populated by "sheep" - meek people who comprise the majority of what's left of humanity; who shuffle through life on a minimum-calorie diet... though an occasional "wolf" shows up.

Whitehall, London, England:
From the climate-warfare novel White August (1955) by John Boland:
...The Prime Minister had also decided on new quarters for himself.  A bedroom and study had been fitted out for him, just off the War Room, one hundred and forty feet below street level in Whitehall.  His study opened directly off the huge map room, whose walls were covered by gigantic maps of every country and every sea and ocean in the world.  On the opposite side of the map room a steel lined door led to the communications room...
   ...Warburton returned to the map room and walked round the gigantic plotting-table.  The table, fifty feet by forty feet, had an outline of the British Isles upon its glass surface.  This was the room from which the Battle of the Atlantic had been fought in World War II.  Now it was destined to be the nerve-centre of a new, more deadly struggle...

Winchester, Hampshire, England:
Luke Perry is the headstrong heir-apparent to his father who rules the town in the post-disaster novel The Prince in Waiting (1970), volume one of a trilogy.  Author John Christopher, in narrating Luke's story, allows us snapshots of Winchester in that future era.
   Winter ended at last in a thaw accompanied by rain-storms which made the river flood its banks; the waters rose at one point to lap against the block of stone in the High Street which still carried the broken legs of what had been a statue - of a great Prince of ancient times, it was said...  
In the same novel, what are presumably the remains of the Cathedral are described simply as The Ruins.
[Personal note: I saw the Alfred statue and visited the Cathedral when looking around Winchester in the late 1980s, on the occasion of an unsuccessful job-application.]
The same author, in his climate-disaster novel The World in Winter (1962), briefly describes the town as the Nigerian expedition passes through:
   ...The squadron pushed on in the afternoon, north-east in the direction of London.  They followed the Itchen valley to Winchester, where they saw the first signs of human life in England.  Figures moved across the snow at the edge of the town.  They fled to the cover of the buildings when Mutalli diverted the squadron towards them...    

Woking, Surrey, England:
This is where the first Martian invasion-cylinder landed in H G Wells' The War of the Worlds (1898).  For the immediate scene of the landing see Horsell Common.  But the scene where the narrator first sees a Martian tripodal Fighting Machine, amid a storm of lightning, is Maybury Hill.  For pictures of that, see the online cycle guide which is illustrated with scenes as Wells would have known them.
   ...At first I regarded little but the road before me, and then abruptly my attention was arrested by something that was moving rapidly down the opposite slope of Maybury Hill.  At first I took it for the wet roof of a house, but one flash following another showed it to be in swift rolling movement.  It was an elusive vision - a moment bewildering darkness, and then in a flash like daylight, the red masses of the Orphanage near the crest of the hill, the green tops of the pine-trees, and this problematical object came out clear and sharp and bright.
   And this thing I saw!  How can I describe it?  A monstrous tripod, higher than many houses, striding over the young pine-trees, and smashing them aside in its career; a walking engine of glittering metal, striding now across the heather; articulate ropes of steel dangling from it, and the clattering tumult of its passage mingling with the riot of the thunder...   

Woomera, South Australia:
Launch site of the first manned space-rocket (a sub-orbital flight) in Hugh Walters' Blast Off At Woomera (1957) and of the first manned rocket (to Mars) in Rex Gordon's No Man Friday (1956).  See also The Old Space Program.

Xanthe:
In The Sands of Mars (1951) by Arthur C Clarke, this region of Mars is mentioned as a natural resource of magnesium for the colony:
   "...The best source of that's the old sea bed: there are some salt flats a hundred metres thick out in Xanthe and we just go and collect when we need it."  
Note: I've been trying, and failing, to find evidence to identify the "Xanthe" of the above quote with the "Xanthus" of Weinbaum's A Martian Odyssey - the place where the narrator meets the barrel-creatures.  "Xanthus", an old telescopic albedo feature, is given online as being at 45 South, 125 East; Xanthe Terra at 3 North, 312 East.  Not much relation.  It is tentatively identified as an "orange desert" on the second page of the story:
   "A hundred and fifty miles south," continued Jarvis imperturbably, "the surface changed to a sort of low plateau, nothing but desert and orang-tinted sand.  I figured that...  this grey plain we dropped on was really the Mare Cimmerium which would make my orange desert the region called Xanthus..."    

Xanthus:  
See: Xanthe

Yarborough, Lincolnshire, England:
In the second volume of Dan Morgan's tetralogy about a community of telepaths, a working-class journalist has problems with his post in-laws.
Jerry Coleman eased his foot off the accelerator, as he recognised the familiar, tree-lined avenue.  London Road was traditionally the 'better end' of Yarborough.  Most of the big houses that stood on either side of the highway behind tall hedges were forty or fifty years old, built in the days of cheap domestic labour and gracious living for the privileged few.  This was the secure, upper middle-class environment in which Sue had spent her childhood, and as such she was naturally at her ease here.  He, on the other hand, found the very sight of these houses an inhibiting influence.  In such surroundings his accent thickened, his limbs seemed to become automatically oversize, and he was once more the engine driver's son from the council houses on the wrong side of the gas works... 
                                                                                - The Several Minds (1969)

Zürich, Switzerland:
In Philip K Dick's Ubik (1969) Zürich is the location for the Beloved Brethren Moratorium, an institution whither you can go to visit your dear departed who are kept in transparent caskets, "encased in an effluvium of icy mist" in a state of "half-life", that's to say, of gradually dwindlling post-mortem consciousness.