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By Root 910 0

his world, his is not the enthusiastic chatter of the evangelist but the cool, knowledgeable tone of the expert. I wonder if that’s part of the appeal of documenting your own alternate world: the knowledge that, despite your tender years, you are the greatest living authority on some subject. More than that, in fact—that you are the unquestioned master of the entire realm. The godlike feeling of dominion that comes when children look at a map must be amplified when they know that the maps are entirely their creation, that they can erase cities, raise up volcanoes, and flood river deltas at will.*

The mean streets of downtown Augusta, hand-drawn by Benjamin Salman, the only person who’s ever been there

“Do you feel like you know your world as well as you know any real place?” I ask.

“Yes. Better! Because I made it up.”

Benjamin has been living in his world almost as long as he’s been living in ours. Even as a baby, he insisted on speaking a language of his own invention. “We just had to pretend we didn’t understand him, and then he’d answer us in English,” sighs Sarah. His country was born as a home for his childhood stuffed animals—Blue Roo the conductor, Day-Glo the inventor. The original residents are probably all in attics and thrift shops now, but their homeland has vastly expanded. It’s not just the hundreds of neat city and country maps stacked on a bookshelf: Benjamin’s Australia is a whole world. Whatever he’s currently learning about in his homeschool classes—the Cyrillic alphabet, colonial history, plate tectonics—gets incorporated into the fabric of his imaginary continent. During the 2008 election season, he became so fascinated with the political process that he filled notebooks with his own fictional districts and candidates and their vote totals.

“The Conservative Democratic Party’s presidential candidate has just resigned,” he announces abruptly, later, as we’re chatting over cheesecake. His update doesn’t sound like a creative decision he’s made but like a genuine news flash beamed in from another world. Time is passing there, just as it does here.

Do Benjamin’s parents worry about his unusual dual citizenship? I suspect their concern isn’t really their son but the possibility that outsiders (like me) will see him as weird. “It’s eccentric, but that’s okay,” says Sarah. “For us, it’s more interesting to have children who are”—she gestures vaguely—“whoever they are.” After all, Benjamin’s doing just fine. He’s an impossibly bright teenager with a wide array of interests—not just maps but history and science and old Marx Brothers movies and classical music. He wants to be a pianist like his dad when he grows up and has just finished composing his first symphony, which he wrote—and orchestrated for fifteen parts—almost entirely in his head, not noodling at the keyboard. (Benjamin has perfect pitch.)

I wonder if Benjamin’s Australia will survive adolescence into adulthood, the way Islandia did but Oofer and Uffer did not. Maybe his parents would be relieved, in a way, if the maps and ledgers and histories joined Blue Roo and Day-Glo in the attic, but I can’t help thinking it would be a tragic loss, almost like the fall of a real empire.

All that time and knowledge gone forever, without even ruins left to commemorate their passing.

Maps of fictional places are a peculiarity of childhood, but among adults, they’re a peculiarity of geek culture as well. Harry Potter’s Hogwarts and the starship Enterprise have been mapped in more detail than much of Africa, and many kinds of gaming rely on maps, from the beautifully elaborate maps of 1970s “bookcase” games to the quickly sketched dungeons of a fantasy role-playing campaign to the pixel art that maps computer games, both classic and modern.* Even comic books aren’t immune: as a kid, I once came across an Atlas of the DC Universe in a bookstore and eagerly scooped it up, unable to believe that someone had finally combined my two great loves: (1) atlases and (2) he-men in long underwear punching each other. But I was ultimately disappointed by the book: