Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [55]
Fantasy readers like that abrupt drop into the deep end and the learning curve it takes to keep up. They’re not hurrying through the book the way you’d power through a thriller from an airport bookstore. They’re taking time to study the rules, to pore over the odd names and arcane histories. Just like Benjamin Salman, they enjoy the sense of being authorities in a whole new realm. “By the end of a big epic fantasy novel, you’ll have to become an expert in this world that doesn’t exist,” says Brandon. “It’s challenging.”
For this very reason, fantasy novels are the kind of reading that comes closest to the way we look at maps. Reading text is a purely linear process. Look: you are reading this sentence. Now you are reading this one. The words from the line above are gone; you are only here, and the words from the line below don’t exist yet. But maps tell a different kind of story. In maps, our eyes are free to wander, spatially, the way they do when we study new surroundings in life.* We can sense whole swaths of geography at once, see relationships, linger over interesting details. Fantasies are read a word at a time too, but less propulsively than any other genre. The author is less interested in pulling you through to an ending than in creating a texture, showing you around a new world.
As a kid, I considered C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books† to be somehow lightweight, mere fairy tales compared to Tolkien’s books, and I realize now that maps were at least partly to blame. Elaborate maps were always to be found in front of Tolkien’s books, but my Narnia paperbacks had no maps. Mr. Tumnus’s forest in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was just a bunch of trees, but Bilbo’s forest was Mirkwood, between the mighty Anduin River and the wastes of Rhovanion in the east. One forest was just in a story, but the other was in a place.‡
It’s the importance of place to the genre, not just slavish imitation of Tolkien, that explains why today’s fantasy authors still make sure maps are front and center. David Eddings, one of epic fantasy’s most popular writers, went so far as to put maps on the covers of his books. (Eddings’s nation of Aloria was born the same way Stevenson created Treasure Island: he doodled the map first, and the map inspired the adventure.*) The maps are certainly functional too; many fantasy novels are episodic quests, and a map is an easy way to plot that course for a reader—it’s no accident that the word “plot” can refer to the contents of both a chart and a narrative. But Brandon’s tried hard to get away from the quest narrative in his own books, most of which take place in contained urban settings, yet he still makes sure his books have maps. His latest novel—the first volume in a projected ten-book series—is called The Way of Kings, and it includes no fewer than nine maps.
In fact, maps are so important to Brandon that he’s paid nine thousand dollars out of pocket to illustrate the book with full-page maps and other “ephemera.” Fantasy fans don’t just want maps that look as though they’ve been laid out digitally on a Mac. They want their maps to be artifacts from the other world, maintaining the illusion that it actually exists somewhere. The map in the front of The Hobbit wasn’t commissioned by a New York publisher; no, it’s the very same map the dwarves in the story use to find their way to the dragon’s lair. If you’re not inclined to believe in dwarves or dragons or their lairs, then burnt edges and water stains on the map can help suspend that disbelief.
Isaac Stewart is the local artist who produces Brandon’s maps,