L. Penelope is the award-winning author of the Earthsinger Chronicles. The first book in the series, Song of Blood & Stone, was chosen as one of Time magazine’s top fantasy books of 2018. Equally left-and right-brained, she studied filmmaking and computer science in college and sometimes dreams in HTML. She lives in Maryland with her husband and furry dependents. Visit her at: http://www.lpenelope.com.
A story is a journey, both of the characters and the readers, and fantasy readers have long appreciated having a map to guide their way. Maps have been a part of human history for tens of thousands of years. Researchers have found evidence of them throughout the ancient world: from cave paintings depicting hunting areas, to town plans in Anatolia, to the Babylonian map of the world inscribed on a clay tablet.
With little desire or ability for true accuracy, these early mapmakers were artists expressing their vision of what they discovered around them, but other motivations were also at play. A king or leader could portray the land they ruled and thus exert control and help create a national identity. Greek and Roman civilizations advanced the artform, and the Roman Empire utilized maps for administrative purposes in managing their wide-ranging territory. While realism was desired by some, like Ptolemy who pioneered geography and also created the concept of longitude and latitude, for hundreds of years, maps were more concerned with storytelling. They advanced a specific narrative often of power or religion. In that way, maps are like all history—they include the bias of the creator, whether knowingly or unknowingly.
In the Imaginary Worlds podcast episode entitled “Fantasy Maps,” host Eric Molinsky states, “Maps are to the fantasy genre what science is to science fiction. The map is the thing that grounds you in the story and makes you believe this could be real.”
For writers to achieve a sense of verisimilitude in a secondary fantasy world requires careful crafting. Since a map is generally found at the beginning of a book, it sets the stage, helping the reader become familiar with an unfamiliar place and aiding them in sinking into this alternate world in which they’ll live for the next few hundred pages.
Many readers who enjoy maps flip back and forth from the chapter they’re reading to the map to slake their curiosity about where the characters are, where they’re going, and how long will it take to get there. Also, who or what might they encounter along the way?
Writers use maps for storytelling as well, in ways that go beyond merely tracking the location of the characters. Early on while writing my fantasy series, I needed a map for myself because I was dealing with a world that was large and expanding. I was creating a culture and a history of two lands in conflict that were separated by a magical border. I found it essential to know the geography as it informed so much about the plot and the way the characters interacted with one another.
The placement of the geological formations, mountains, rivers, lakes, oceans, cities and roads have real repercussions. Also, depending on the level of detail, maps can give clues to the level of technology represented. Are there train tracks? Runways and airports? Factories?
How were the borders formed? Are they a result of the topography (e.g., rivers and mountains) or were they arbitrarily drawn by a colonial power without knowledge or care of regional identities and the conflicts that would ensue? Are there natural resources that would put two nations or powers at odds? How did the populations arrive there and where did they come from?
One very popular recent series set in a secondary fantasy world includes an admirable amount of racial diversity, but on a relatively small continent with no mention in the text of how these distinct races evolved or migrated to their current locations so close together. Attention to details like this aid in making the world feel real and vibrant.
The perspective of the mapmaker is also fertile ground for storytelling and worldbuilding. Just as a writer must consider who is telling the story and to whom, a.k.a. narrative voice, the cartographer of the world’s map also has a voice which should be considered. Take, for example, the traditional world map that most of us who attended school before the 2000s are familiar with—the Mercator projection. To solve the problem of taking a round earth (let’s agree to live in a world where this is not controversial) and portraying it on a two-dimensional surface, in the 16th century, cartographer Gerardus Mercator devised a solution which massively distorted the relative sizes of the continents. On it, Greenland is shown as larger than South America and Antarctica dwarfs all other continents.
The walls of many schools in the United States were long adorned with maps that divided Eurasia on two different sides and shifted the equator with the effect of centering the American continents and the United States in particular. This, too, is storytelling. All biases are not nefarious in nature, some are born out of what’s viewed as a neat solution to a difficult problem, others are simply because of ego. What better way to portray American exceptionalism than literally centering the nation on the map of the entire world?
A writer can use these ways of creating story when designing a map to enhance or underscore parts of a narrative. Cartographer Priscilla Spencer in her maps of Alera for author Jim Butcher includes illustrations of creatures and archetypes in various locations which are designed to support very specific cultural stories about those places. Is there a deeper story to be told by the mapmaker’s eye, from their viewpoint, and with their biases toward one group or another?
A map is so much more than mere countries and cities and mountains; it’s also history and culture and economy and society. The art of cartography offers vast potential to portray a world and provide readers with an excellent way to dig deeper into a fictional place and return over and over again, long after they finish the book. Maps can be stories in and of themselves and add depth and layers of meaning, which will be there whether or not the writer or creator does so consciously.
So whether you create a map only for yourself while writing, or commission a cartographer to create one to include in the pages of the book, don’t underestimate their power and versatility. Readers who love them will thank you.
Copyright © 2020 by L. Penelope.