Conservative commentator Ross Douthat has apparently written a young-adult fantasy novel, replete with the inevitable map, and Albert Burneko is here to tell us that it’s terrible. “For one thing, it is disgracefully unoriginal,” he says, pointing out all the ways it’s derivative. “Pull back and observe Douthat’s map more generally. There is no sense of place in it; its shape and features offer no suggestions about the societies they may have given rise to. There are no intriguing geographic or geological details that make you want to read on to see what goes on there. It tells no story. It is not the least bit interesting on its own. It is just a companion to a travel narrative.”

To be sure, Burneko is doing something I went into in my 2017 piece, “The Territory Is Not the Map”: he’s critiquing the fantasy geography, not the cartography. Conflating the map and the thing mapped is not new in fantasy maps. Nor, for that matter, is having a map for the sake of having a map.