The books seem to be set in an alternate, "timeless" world with stylistic similarities to both the 19th century and the 1930s, though with contemporary, and seemingly anachronistic scientific knowledge. For instance, in The Hostile Hospital, the Baudelaire children send a message via Morse code on a telegraph, yet in the general store they are in, there is fiber-optic cable for sale. An "advanced computer" appears in The Austere Academy; this computer's exact functions are never stated, as its only use in the book is to show a picture of Count Olaf. In a companion book to the series, The Unauthorized Autobiography, the computer is said to be capable of advanced forgery. The setting of the world has been compared to Edward Scissorhands in that it is "suburban gothic". Although the film version sets the Baudelaires' mansion in the city of Boston, Massachusetts, real places rarely appear in the books, although some are mentioned. For example, in The Ersatz Elevator, a book in Jerome and Esmé Squalor's library was titled Trout, In France They're Out; there are also references to the fictional nobility of North American regions, specifically the Duchess of Winnipeg and the King of Arizona, perhaps allusions to the setting of Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slapstick, which features similar North American fictional nobility. Interestingly, Vonnegut's novel focuses on artificial family as the cure for loneliness and strife, which seems to also be the aim of the "artificial family" of V.F.D.
