September 14, 2011 · 3:23 pm

mapping the obvious

SF Signal celebrated the mapping of invented landscapes by asking, “Which fantasy maps are your favourites ?” I enjoyed Matthew Cheney’s contribution. Most invented landscapes are so dull they wouldn’t detain you for a second from a 24 hour barefoot trudge between abandoned Welsh slate workings in the rain, carrying your ex-partner’s oil-fired Aga on your back (halfway through which you’ll discover that instead of OS OL17 you’ve inadvertently packed the groundplan to Harvey Nicholls’ perfume department).

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6 Responses to mapping the obvious

  1. CoreyHaim8myDog
    September 15, 2011 at 8:05 pm

    Everyone knows that Borges’ map from On Exactitude in Science is the best fantasy map ever.

  2. Rob
    September 15, 2011 at 11:32 pm

    “Well yeah, but how would they get it in the front of the book?”

    Much as JLB’s exact map is both the perfect Fantasy map and it’s perfect subversion, my vote would go to the Bellman’s Ocean Chart (http://bigthink.com/ideas/21143 – and I can’t help but think the attendant verses offer a useful summary of the whole SF Signal debate).

    Actually, the fantasy map I’d give my wooden leg to see would be a map of Melville’s ‘true places’…

  3. uzwi
    September 16, 2011 at 10:23 am

    A map of a pretend country is just a map of a pretend country. The maps of Borges & the Bellman aren’t those kinds of maps. They’re interactive philosophical games–whimsies–about the relationship of the representation to the represented. Their subject matter isn’t the non-place the non-map claims to represent: it’s the very mapness of maps (& groundness of the ground).

  4. mikealx
    September 16, 2011 at 5:57 pm

    I dislike maps in speculative fiction, because they imply objective, coherent, continuous worlds. I prefer fiction that inhabits topologies that are subjective, fragmentary and mutable. In a planar-map world, you can always get back home; in reality you never can, at least not to the same one.

  5. uzwi
    September 16, 2011 at 7:31 pm

    Home. The journey itself broke some kind of continuity necessary for you to use the word. It’s not just Penelope looking a little guilty & at the same time too pleased with herself; or all those suitors finishing their jack & coke & slinking off out the back. It’s not just the dwarf in the Macao silk suit & the shoulder holster. It’s that something put an edge between what you remembered & what was there when you got back. The story you told yourself to get you through the crap nights, the constant thankless struggle with the dumb shit crew, the whirlpools, the mad c*** with the one eye, the rocks that turned into kings, the kings who turned into junkies, all that singing & indifferent special effects, wasn’t quite enough. It’s the right house but it’s the wrong place. The distinctions are so subtle they’re fatal. Once you’ve noticed them it doesn’t even look like the same fucking country & the only thing to do is turn right around & leave. Maybe in another twenty years, you tell yourself, you’ll swing by again.

  6. mikealx
    September 20, 2011 at 11:16 pm

    So true!
    This discussion also reminded me of the end of Alasdair Gray’s “Lanark”:-
    “I started making maps when I was small showing place, resources, where the enemy and where love lay. I did not know time adds to land. Events drift continually down, effacing landmarks, raising the level, like snow. I have grown up. My maps are out of date. The land lies over me now. I cannot move. It is time to go. GOODBYE”