Friday, November 18, 2016

Atlas of Oddities, Part Deux

Here's the sequel to the blockbuster prequel...  3 maps down, 3 to go.

In my 2013 April A-Z post on author Somtow Sucharitkul, I mentioned his alternate take on a Roman empire that conquered (or tried to conquer) the New World.  His original "Aquila" short stories were published in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine in the 1980s, then later packaged into novels.  However, the novels didn't contain this gem of a map from the April 1982 issue of Asimov's!

Click to Maximus... er, maximize

I had to dig through a few boxes to find this one, but once I realized it wasn't online anywhere (at least anywhere easily searchable), I was determined to rescue and digitize it.  The map credit at lower left reads "J. R. Odbert."  I think most of the Latin puns are taken right out of Somtow's story, but I wouldn't put it past a crafty cartographer to insert more.  As I remember, a lot of the story takes place in and around the city of Caesarea, which I think is sitting where Omaha, Nebraska ought to be.  This is not your paterfamilias' Terra Nova!

The last two maps are things I've drawn.

Several times on this blog I've waxed on about my love of David Zindell's awesome first novel Neverness and its sequels.  I even wrote a fannish Travel Guide to his intricate and uplifting constructed universe -- which I heartily recommend to anyone about to read the books for the first time.  No spoilers in there!  Much of the action takes place on the largest island on a chilly planet named Icefall.  Zindell didn't include a map of the place, but I did my best to piece together something that could help readers navigate around...


I think my MS Office art skillz have matured a bit since first making this in 2011, but it does the job.  I do need to note that the TV show Family Matters didn't exist when Zindell came up with the name of that southern-most mountain, but I wonder if he found it a minor source of embarrassment when writing the sequels...

Okay (gulp), the final map today is something I drew back in the 1980s.  When my friends and I played D&D, we took turns running the game, and we each took control of a continent on a larger world.  We blithely ignored the realities of such a setup, and each new adventure usually started with something like "As you're disembarking from the ship from Brian's continent, you see...."

Anyway, here's mine.  I did my best to enhance the image, but the original is very lightly-drawn pencil on notebook paper...


I suppose there's a symmetry between my "Ponténar" with the mythical "Poseidonis" that I talked about in the previous post.  I originally designed the coastlines by tracing over a map of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and imagined a whole Greek-themed Atlantis-ish empire in the southern part.  I eventually added some extra land up in the north, because my actual contour of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge just didn't have enough surface area for everything I wanted to squeeze in.

Unfortunately, I never got to tell the stories of many of the places on this map.  Invorum up north was a hidden stronghold of powerful wizards.  The unfortunate dwarfs of Felak-Gizan were enslaved by the Tachyran empire, and were soon going to get their revenge.  See that island in the bay between Tachyra and Yaxaan?  The volcano on that sucker was going to cause trouble for hundreds of miles around.

As I look at the place names in my map, I also see a litany of morphed names of people that meant a lot to me back then.  I'm not going to tell you who Meaghra, Rendin, Gyule, and Kalapis are named after, but each one gives me a lump in the throat.

Ah, well.  I think counter-factual maps like these are tempting vessels for us to pour in our weird, wild thoughts & dreams... and mix them up in ways that sometimes surprise even the mapmaker.

19 comments:

  1. Those are some great maps! That comic map of an apocalyptic future earth is pure gold. Instant Encounter Critical campaign right there :)

    The idea of Romans versus Indians is also pretty awesome! Directly made me think of ways to make this happen. I mean, let's say this could have happened. The Romans made it over there in force and established a colony. The first question to answer would be how nobody knows about that today, right? And that's where a great mystery could unfold: the Indians won and decided to destroy every evidence of the Romans ever being there and the Romans also decided to destroy every evidence that it ever happened. Why and how? That might be a great campaign waiting to happen (Call of Cthulhu, maybe?). Thanks for sharing :)

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    1. Thanks for stopping by! Great ideas about how it could've gone down. Alt-history with Romans in the New World has been an obession of mine in the past... see this old post for links to some other stories out there.

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  2. No doubt, I have mentioned my map fetish before. I'm especially impressed by your hand-drawn work. Wow! My D&D maps were always quite boxy. Yours is so elegant.

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    1. Thanks, but let me reiterate that it all started with tracing paper placed over a map of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge! :-)

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    2. Sure. Still impressed! I wouldn't even have thought to do that.

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    3. Now that I think of it, the what-if Romans in America thing coincided with my other thoughts that led to this map... what-if Atlantis was real?

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    4. I used to ponder that one, too. Ah, the escapist fantasies of youth...

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    5. Why do we have those escapist fantasies? I mean, beyond the obvious. It's like, we're hungry because they're such a thing as food. We're tired, because there's such a thing as sleep. Know what I'm saying?

      --The Countess.

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    6. So there's a Middle Earth shaped hole in our hearts? May be.

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    7. I'm sure there's an elf song about that.

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    8. Well played...

      Hey, am I only one who thought the tower in Rogue One with the lava flowing had a Mordor feel to it?

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    9. Aha, I see it, but didn't think of it at the time. I also didn't catch (until later online reading) that it was supposed to be on the same lava planet where that last battle with Obi-wan took place.

      Didn't some of those late-70s Star Wars spin-offs (like the comics, or Splinter in the Mind's Eye) mention that Vader had a huge, spooky castle?

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    10. No, Squid. That was my first thought upon seeing that image.

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  3. I am impressed, too. This post, overall, hums with the joy of digging up old treasure.

    --The Countess

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    1. Whenever I see that something cool isn't easily findable with Google, that gets me eager to dig it up, polish it as best I can, and add it to our digital akhasic records.

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  4. That was supposed to be a chuckling face ...

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