Today is The Map Room’s 23rd anniversary. As a thank-you to paid members of my Patreon, whose generous support has enabled me to remove ads from The Map Room, and as an enticement to those who might think of joining, I’m presenting the slides and text of a presentation exploring the fantasy map style and its origins I gave at Scintillation, a Montréal science-fiction convention hosted by the author Jo Walton, in October 2019.

(Yes, this is the talk I offered during last year’s pledge drive, which target we didn’t quite meet; this time I decided to simply give the slides and text, rather than record a video of me delivering it—a task that in hindsight would have been a bit too overwhelming for me.)

This talk summarizes most of my thoughts on fantasy maps up to that point. If you’re curious about this talk but are unable to join the Patreon at a paid membership level, a lot of what I had to say can be found elsewhere. See in particular several of my articles on Reactor, plus this eponymous post on The Map Room and my review of Stefan Ekman’s Here Be Dragons, all of which are free to read.

If, on the other hand, you’re sufficiently intrigued to sign up for a paid membership to have a peek, one, that’s kind of what I was hoping for, and two, I hope you like it (and The Map Room) well enough to stick around as a supporter. Now that I’ve taken down the ads, support via Patreon is frankly what keeps the lights on around here; more supporters will enable me to make some upgrades looming on the horizon while still keeping things in the black. I’m grateful to everyone who’s decided to back this little project.

(As for the talk itself, it’s something I’d rather not share with a wider audience, at least not until I’ve given it a proper rewrite—what’s good enough for a small sf convention audience isn’t necessarily good enough for public distribution—so for now it’s staying behind a paywall.)