Imaginary real places

Another good literary thread on Crooked Timber: John Holbo mentions the tendency of novelists writing about Africa to make up whole fictitious countries and massive shifts in geography, and postulates that you can't get away with doing this to the industrialized West any more. Dozens of people in the comments cite examples proving him wrong, and mentioning other fictional geographical dislocations.

I've seen some weird ones, often of the thinly-disguised-real-geography variety. John Updike set Roger's Version in a city that was obviously Boston/Cambridge with the serial numbers filed off, at a university that seemed to be a fusion of Harvard and MIT, but also explicitly mentioned Boston and Harvard as being someplace else. I think lots of mainstream authors do this kind of transparent roman à clef geography either as a way of disclaiming intent to defame somebody, or of disclaiming the desire to be held to absolute accuracy, or perhaps as a way of appearing to be doing such things as a coy insinuation that the story might be based on something real, much in the way that 19th century novelists would refer to the Baron N— or the year 18—.

Similarly, people on my friends list speak often of the cities of Los Santos and San Fierro.