![]() ![]() If the `80s and early `90s set a high watermark for unfolding poster maps in public places and getting beaten up for it, this had less to do with fantasy novels. I may have opened maps more often than was strictly necessary. And yet I always treated my expertise in nonexistent geography as a point of geek pride. Rifling through poster-sized maps studded with runes in public places was like catnip to bullies, of course. ![]() I remember well the feeling of unfolding the map of Middle Earth at the beach or on the train. There was a stigma to them, but also a snobbishness. 2.īooks with maps set you apart in the `80s, even among bookworms. Worlds you might actually want to visit as you run your finger over their maps come with oceans that lead the mind off the page. Generally speaking, if a fantasy world lacks islands and a clear coastline, do not go there. For instance: a surprising number of fantasy worlds contain vast landmasses in the east, but only an endless ocean to the west. The way coastlines, mountain ranges, and islands are arranged follows rules. Virtually all of them repeat certain features. What they don’t look like is the kinds of continents you would see when you crack open a volume of your favorite fantasy trilogy.įantasy maps are invented, but not all that inventive. ![]() The maps look like they could be real places - they have peninsulas, coves, inland seas. There is a twitter account, which tweets out randomly composed maps with fanciful names like The Lowlands of Reschtschluk and The Southern Archipelago of West Siastus. It’s curiously reminiscent of all of them. Those among us who came to Westeros by way of Hyperborea, Middle Earth, The Land, or Krynn, find something else in that map: an echo of all the other invented maps we’ve known. It’s the same map we swoop over: the representation we see of Westeros during the opening credits is what the characters possess and know. Cersei Lannister had it painted on her floor, Daenerys Targaryen circles a map table of Westeros before she sets out to conquer the real thing, and Jon Snow is moving little miniatures around on his map up north. This season alone we’ve seen characters stand on it, touch it, crouch over it. In a show that invites us to fetishize its map, the characters likewise are obsessed with visual representations of their world. The map appears in the title sequence of the HBO hit as a hat tip to our reading experience: the map is the first thing you encounter in a Game of Thrones novel, so why not open the TV show with the same visual? It’s a little call-back to a time before fantasy maps became a common trope. The map that opens every episode of Game of Thrones addresses the viewer as two persons at once: a resident of Westeros, and a reader of a fantasy novel. ![]() Nerds and non-nerds alike relish their weekly swoop across the map of Westeros in Game of Thrones’ gorgeous title sequence. Like so many things that once set adolescent geeks apart, reading maps for places that aren’t there has gone mainstream. The science fiction we read did without them, but any cover featuring a dragon, a many-turreted castle, or a woman in a leather bra suggested you’d find a map the moment you peeked inside the book. Maps were my entrée into geek life, and they remained the medium through which geekdom moved: beat-up paperbacks handed around between school friends, boxed sets at the local game store - we probably spent about as much time poring over maps as we did reading or dreaming up the stories that took place within the worlds they represented. This, I decided, had to be what grown-up reading looked like. An older cousin read The Lord of the Rings over the course of a hot summer when I was nine, and I watched in fascination as he traced the Fellowship’s progress across the foldout map that came with the book in those days. I spent my adolescence around maps of places that didn’t exist. Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science” In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars. “The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. Adrian Daub | Longreads | August 2017 | 20 minutes (5,033 words) 1. ![]()
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