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.

Atlas of Oddities, Part 1

Psst... hey... want to see some weird maps?  I've done this once before, and now I've got six more to share... this time including a few of my own creations.  But I realize that my blog posts tend to be loooong... so I'll split it up.  Just three maps here, and three to come later.

Back in the summer, I posted about my childhood obsession with UFO pulp magazines of the 1970s.  "Weird, wild stuff," to paraphrase Johnny Carson.  Looking back through them, I did find one interesting alt-history-ish map of an antediluvian world that hosted the lost continent of Atlantis, as well as... the land of Oz...?

Click on all these for bigger versions.

The article, from Ancient Astronauts Special (Summer 1978), was called "Atlantis Reawakened."  I can't quite find an author byline for the article, but the map contains an artist's signature on the lower left that I can't quite make out.  The story talked about Dogma, the doomed daughter of King Chronos of Poseidonis (also doomed).  Concerning the map itself, I'm a little scared to ask why northern Africa was called "Teutonia," but I'm fascinated by them placing the "Land of Canaan" up near Hudson Bay.  Still, calling Atlantis "Poseidonis" is quite poetic, don't you think?

An interesting bookend to the above is Jack Kirby's future world of Kamandi.  I didn't read those comics back in the 1970s... nor have I read them since... but they seem like a crazy ride:

On the heels of the success of the Planet of the Apes franchise, DC Comics was looking for a similar post-apocalyptic story with humans in the beleaguered minority.  But one simply doesn't give Jack Kirby the job of doing a knock-off story.  What he gave them was orders of magnitude weirder.  I wonder if this far-future world was an influence on the world of "Ooo" in Pendleton Ward's Adventure Time.

Speaking of DC comics, I clearly remember this map of Superman's home planet of Krypton from the comics of the Silver Age:

I simply do not accept any more recent revision of the planet Krypton that doesn't contain the Gold Volcano, the Jewel Mountains, or the Glass Forest.

Whoops, none of my own maps made it into this post.  Stay tuned!  :-)

Unexpected (Cartographic) Gift

A few posts ago, I brought up the fictional "Avalon Lost" setting that I've been pondering for the Homebrew '82 role-playing game rules variant.  I've been rolling that little pocket universe around in my head lately (for more, see posts numbered 13-18 in the long list here).  Being a very visual thinker, I've been wanting to be able to set down more about where things are happening, so of course that brings us back into the world of maps!  :-)

Also being probably too anal retentive about details, I realized that I wanted a way to plot out a map at an arbitrary zoom level.  Kind of like if I had Google Maps of Camelot and environs for my alternate-history year 560 AD.

As I was searching for the data that might let me do this, and starting to get depressed about how much work it would be, I discovered something exceedingly cool.  The program that I use pretty much every day for making scientific graphs and plots also happens to be used by a lot of geologists and geographers.  Turns out, they bundled some accurate world coastline and river data into the standard-issue version of the code.  Every day for the last 20 years, I've been logging into a system that can do what I wanted!

So... after writing about a page of code... I got this...

Clicketh if thou likest spam a lot

...which has a few problems, but overall ain't too shabby.  The PDF I made this from can be zoomed-in to something like 1-mile resolution.

So, if I ever finish volume 1 of Homebrew '82 (the generic rules for players), and also manage to churn out volume 2 (tips & tools for GMs), I now have something that would serve as the backbone of a super-duper set of maps for volume 3 (the setting guide for the "Avalon Lost" world).

Easy peasy!

(Above: sarcasm alert... there's soooo much going on in life right now, so I'll probably mark the time in decades before getting all that stuff done.  Still, I'm grateful to have an outlet to think & post about stuff like this that's disconnected from the "real world.")

Six Cartographic Detours

In looking through the last few topics on the D&D 30-day challenge, I find myself either shrugging my shoulders at things that don't apply to the version I grew up with, or scratching my head wondering how my answers would differ from what I already said in some of the earlier questions.  Thus, I've made the executive decision to declare the challenge over and done with, and replace it with something that I always found much more inspiring for my RPG adventures...

Maps!

Click (any of them) for bigger versions

I suppose one can't get around the need to start with Tolkien.  A lot of people talk about how he supposedly wrote The Lord of the Rings in order to weave a story around the fictional languages that he spent decades crafting.  But he also created a visual world, filled with forbidding mountains, murky forests, and eerie swamps.  He also envisioned how that world changed -- sometimes violently -- over thousands of years.

The map above (found on a forum thread) shows a spooky before-and-after overlay of what happened to the elven lands of Beleriand when it became collateral damage in an epic war between good and evil spirits.  Still, who knows what the future will hold?  The elf queen Galadriel once talked about what may happen when "...the lands that lie under the wave are lifted up again."

Closer to the modern age -- but still existing sideways in the land of imagination -- are the fictional cities of DC comics...

Don't worry about the thought balloon above; just have a squint at the details on that map.  Unlike the heroes of Marvel Comics, who tended to hang out in New York City -- where the writers lived -- the DC heroes often inhabited fictional cities of their own.  Everyone knows that Superman lives in Metropolis and Batman lives in Gotham City.  There were dozens of others, too.  To their credit, DC has artfully maintained the fiction that these places are not just silly pseudonyms for the Big Apple for many decades.

(Some writers took inspiration from other places... Superman's creators Siegel and Shuster modeled the Daily Planet building after a real newspaper tower in their home city of Toronto.)

The map above, from a 1978 newspaper strip, shows that shiny Metropolis is "really" just east of Dover, Delaware, and grim Gotham is just across the river near Fairfield Township, New Jersey.  Who knew?  :-)

Maybe we should move closer to "reality?"

Check out those purple and green regions.  I remember first seeing the above map in a historical atlas in my elementary school's library.  The idea that there once was a proposal to craft mid-western states called "Transylvania" and "Vandalia" blew my little mind.  Can you imagine TFC (Transylvanian Fried Chicken)?

Hmm, maybe that's all a bit too close to reality for fantastical role-playing.  How about if we zoom out by a few dozen orders of magnitude...

Cue the Alexander Courage theme song!  Above is a page from Franz Joseph's 1975 Star Fleet Technical Manual, which because of some strange licensing agreements didn't appear able to directly reference names like "Kirk" or "Spock" -- though "Enterprise" was snuck in there.  Subsequent generations of fandom and TV shows may have changed the details, but the above is how I always think about that universe.  That page also introduced me to some real history, too!  :-)

Another way to be blinded by science (fiction) is to sit too close to the Sun...

For a long time, astronomers believed Mercury was "tidally locked" like the Moon is in its orbit around the Earth.  They thought that there was a molten side that always faced the Sun, and a side that sat in eternal night.  In between the two was a region that you can see gave Rod Serling some great inspiration.  The above image is from the 1940s pulp adventures of Captain Future... I first saw it in an awesome book from the 1970s called An Atlas of Fantasy.

(FYI, Mercury isn't really tidally locked, but there are hundreds of planets around other stars that are!)

Lastly is probably one of the very first fantasy worlds I experienced through the magic of television...

I couldn't find an actual map of the Neighborhood of Make Believe, so I had to make do with this wide-angle photo of the original set.  You may not know a lot of things as a toddler growing up in the early 70s, but you know that the castle is on the left, the tree housing the owl and cat is in the middle, and the clock without hands is on the right.  Oh, and you also know that any museum that isn't also a giant merry-go-round is totally lame!  :-)