Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [56]
“The achievement of a plausible state is not so easy as it might appear,” wrote Gelett Burgess in 1902. Burgess was a humorist best remembered today for coining the word “blurb” and writing the poem “The Purple Cow,” but he was also an inveterate map geek. “There is nothing so difficult as to create, out of hand, an interesting coast line. Try and invent an irregular shore that shall be convincing, and you will see how much more cleverly Nature works than you.”
A video-game designer who moonlights as a fantasy mapmaker, Isaac probably has as much experience testing Burgess’s dictum as anyone in the world. A century later, coastlines are still hard. “You wind up doing this seizure thing with your hand, and it doesn’t work sometimes,” he tells me. Burgess’s solution was to spill water on his paper, pound it with his fist, and trace the resulting blotch. Isaac has developed his own tricks of the trade.
“It’s funny where I see maps now that I’m looking for them,” he says, pulling out his camera phone to show me his library of “found cartography.” “Ceiling textures. Clouds. Concrete spills in a road, those are good. They flow out in a way you might not expect.” A photo of a rust stain on a wall became an island in Brandon’s Mistborn series. An aerial view of a vast continent turns out to be a worn spot on a folding chair in a church basement. One picture looks remarkably like the Mediterranean, with verdant green hills and peninsulas surrounding a deep blue sea. It turns out to be guacamole stuck to the lid of a plastic tub. In my mind’s eye, I can picture Isaac at his kitchen counter, staring dumbfounded at his miniature discovery—like Balboa seeing the Pacific for the first time on that peak in Darien*—and then running for his camera. “Honey, don’t put that back in the fridge! Don’t put it back in the fridge!”
The Southern Islands of the Final Empire . . . and the rust stain that inspired them
Not every fantasy author feels as strongly about maps as Brandon does. Terry Pratchett includes a map page in every paperback of his popular Discworld series of comedy fantasy novels, but the map is always blank. A caption reads, “There are no maps. You can’t map a sense of humor.” It’s true that maps and texts make strange bedfellows sometimes. A map’s goal, after all, is to suggest stability and completeness, while literature is all about suggestion, nuance, not showing everything.
But that tension hasn’t stopped some of my favorite writers from doodling maps of their imaginary settings—and not just in the fantasy ghetto, I’m talking books without half-naked barbarian chicks on the cover here. William Faulkner drew his own maps of Yoknapatawpha County; Thomas Hardy sketched Wessex. Even writers who ostensibly create their worlds as philosophical exercises become inordinately fascinated with jots and tittles of cartography. Thomas More’s Utopia describes the title island in such detail that he’s clearly a closet world-building geek, the only canonized Catholic saint I can think of who was so inclined. The first edition even included an addendum on Utopia’s alphabet and, of course, a detailed map. Yes, an appendix and a map! Epic fantasy readers would be over the moon.
I wonder aloud to Brandon and Isaac if fantasy readers crave immersion as a form of escape because they’re dissatisfied in some way with real life. I guess I’ve wandered a little too close to suggesting that fantasy nerds are all hopeless misfits, and Brandon calls me on it. “Look, I love my life, and I love fantasy. I have no reason to escape my world,