Back in September I wrote about Lonely Planet’s curious new guidebook, Micronations: The Lonely Planet Guide to Home-Made Nations¸ by John Ryan, George Dunford, and Simon Sellars. This week over at Yahoo! Travel, Rolf caught up with John via email to learn more about the micronations of our world, and the necessary conditions a territory must posses to be a part of the gang.

“People define micronation in different ways. For some, it simply means small nations (either in area or population), such as Lichtenstein, the Vatican or Tuvalu. I’m interested in a more playful definition: nations that have been proclaimed as existing in the world, but not recognized as a real nation. Yet.”

What Rolf finds, however, is the book is less of a go-here, do-this guidebook and more of an investigation of the sometimes far-out founding fathers—a picking apart of the minds behind the quirky locales contained within its pages.

“President Baugh [of Molossia] has a wickedly funny sense of humor, and uses it to lampoon real countries while operating the most entertaining micronation in the book. He has a space program, a movie industry, a railway, the death penalty (for smoking), a national cuisine, and many other trappings of nationhood. To top it off, he dresses like a 1970s-era tin-pot dictator.”

These endeavors aren’t cheap, though, and like many “real” countries, the micronation relies on microtourism to generate the funds necessary to stay afloat, and fund the occasional space program.

To read the full interview, head over to Yahoo! Travel.

For more information about Micronations: The Lonely Planet Guide to Home-Made Nations ($14.99), visit LonelyPlanet.com.