It’s kind of mind-boggling how much technology has changed our relationship with maps over the past decade. I remember when my mental approximation of geography was based either on (depending on the appropriate scale) globes with pastel continents on them, Mercator projections, or road atlases. While those primitive geospatial approximations still have utility in certain contexts — and retain a certain retro chic, of course — satellite imagery is pretty much the basis for every map we encounter in our daily lives. (Most of us never have the pleasure of turning the hefty pages of 6-foot-tall atlases). Since Google Maps isn’t exactly. . . aesthetic . . . most of the time (although it can be, if you browse it on a large enough screen) it’s nice to have things like this now and then:
It’s hypnotic, isn’t it? (via It’s Okay to Be Smart).
Of course there’s one area in which old-fashioned maps haven’t been supplanted by satellite imagery: maps of fictional lands. (Here are a few, including some of my favorites — the awesomely unrealistic maps of L. Frank Baum’s Oz — and here is a tumblr.)
I was completely obsessed with fantasy maps as a child; many an original fantasy saga of mine made it to the map stage, which of course required fairly well-developed history, politics, religion, climate, language, and culture (in one case I wrote a whole illustrated encyclopedia), then petered out as I put off the chore of writing a plot because it just seemed so much less rewarding. There’s actually a word for this activity – worldbuilding – which makes it sound much more respectable than what it was in my case: “I’m motivated more by visuals than by text and my attention span is way too short to write a whole trilogy.” I think my attraction to worldbuilding is hardly unusual among fantasyphiles.
Anyway, I will say no more about fictional maps because Nicholas Tam has written an absolutely wonderful essay on the topic, covering the worlds of Tolkien, Faulkner, Baum, Jordan, and many more.
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