Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [54]
If most kids grow out of made-up maps around the time they discover girls,† you might think that the prevalence of kiddie maps in geeky pastimes like these is just another sign of arrested development, like eating Hot Pockets and playing Halo all night even though you’re in your thirties. But fantasy map fans prefer to see a different connection to childhood: a way to recapture the innocence and awe of discovery.
“The hallmark of epic fantasy is immersion,” says the best-selling genre writer Brandon Sanderson. “That’s why I’ve always included maps in my books. I believe the map prepares your mind to experience the wonder, to say, ‘I am going to a new place.’ “
Brandon and I were college roommates a decade ago, and in most of my memories of him, he’s following one of his roommates around the apartment, reading aloud passages from his latest bulky fantasy manuscript, presumably part three of some eight-volume saga where all the characters had lengthy names full of apostrophes. At the time I was amused by Brandon’s antics, but hey, at least it was a pleasant surprise not to be the nerdiest guy in the apartment for a change.
Well, Brandon had the last laugh. In a shocking twist, the epics he’d been writing while working the graveyard shift at a local Best Western were actually, uh, good. He sold his sixth completed novel, Elantris, two years before graduating, and on the strength of that book and his follow-up trilogy, Mistborn, Brandon was chosen (“handpicked,” the accounts always say, as though he were a grape-fruit) by the author Robert Jordan’s widow to complete The Wheel of Time, the megaselling fantasy series that had been left unfinished at the time of Jordan’s 2007 death. His first Wheel of Time book, the twelfth installment in the series, debuted atop The New York Times’ best-seller list, knocking Dan Brown out of the number one spot.
A Japanese samurai sword, which Brandon was allowed to choose from Jordan’s immense personal collection of historical weaponry, hangs over the fireplace in his Utah basement, where we’re talking. Brandon and his wife have plans to remodel the basement into a stone medieval dungeon, complete with torch holders and maybe a mounted dragon head on the wall, but currently it’s just an empty bonus room with a navy blue beanbag chair the size of a Volkswagen Beetle sitting in the middle of it. This is where Brandon does most of his writing.
The summer after eighth grade, when Brandon first fell in love with the genre that would eventually pay for his house, maps were a big part of that love. “I started to look and make sure a book had a map,” he remembers. “That was one of the measures of whether it was going to be a good book or not, in my little brain. When I first read Lord of the Rings, I thought, ‘Oho, he knows what he’s doing. A map and an appendix!’”
J. R. R. Tolkien single-handedly created the epic fantasy genre with his publication of The Hobbit in 1937 and then the Lord of the Rings trilogy in the 1950s. Tolkien never read Islandia, but his own world, which he called Middle-earth, was just as meticulously constructed. He drew upon his day job as an Oxford philology professor to create entire languages for his imaginary races, borrowing some Finnish here, some Welsh there. He designed their calendars and wrote their genealogies. And of course, he drew maps.
Many earlier authors had dabbled in fantastic events and settings, but Tolkien’s books were the ones that created a whole new “Fantasy” aisle in the bookstore, one lined with those florid painted covers of dragons and wizards that make Yes album covers look tasteful and restrained by comparison. Why was he so influential? Tolkien’s readers were less captivated by his plotting or his characters (which were memorable but, as Tolkien freely admitted, largely lifted from the Anglo-Saxon myths he so loved) than with the bold