Fantasy maps have a very specific style that is actually quite limiting. For an example of what would happen if all maps were subject to the same limitations as fantasy maps, have a look at what is described “a map of the United States à la Lord of the Rings”; it was posted to Reddit and edited there by divers hands. The version above had the gridlines removed and made more “antique.” It does look like the early Middle-earth maps done by Pauline Baynes and Christopher Tolkien. To match the movie maps, you’d have to replace all the text with overdone uncial calligraphy and Tengwar vowel marks, whereas maps in modern fantasy novels would lose the shading on the mountains and have all the text done in Lucida Calligraphy. Via io9.
Atlas of the Galilean Satellites
Paul Schenk’s Atlas of the Galilean Satellites (Cambridge University Press, 2010) collects all the imagery gathered by the Voyager and Galileo missions of the four major moons of Jupiter (Callisto, Ganymede, Europa and Io, all discovered by Galileo in 1610) and assembles them into global, quadrangle and area maps. But this heavy, 400-page tome begins with a confession. “This Atlas is not what it should be.” The failure of the high-gain antenna on the Galileo spacecraft meant that far less data could be transmitted back to Earth during its nearly eight-year mission than had been planned. Large tracts of the moons are mapped in low resolution; the fuzzy images yield little detail. But until another mission is sent—the Juno probe now en route to Jupiter will not be studying the moons—this is all there will be for the foreseeable future. For decades, in fact.
The Atlas of the Galilean Satellites therefore represents a treasure trove of all available imagery of these four moons. The further out you go, the less imagery there is: outermost Callisto gets 49 pages of plates, innermost Io, with all its interesting volcanoes, gets 89. Despite the inevitable blurry patches, there are some extraordinarily high-detail images here. One problem, though, is that the global maps are unlabelled; I found it difficult to place features that were labelled on the quadrangle, regional and detail maps in their global context. Also worth noting is that—and I suspect this is the norm for extraterrestrial mapping—these are not maps per se, but spacecraft imagery labelled and put on a map projection.
One issue that has been noted elsewhere—for example, in Emily Lakdawalla’s review last November—is that several copies of this book have been defective, with pages falling out. My own copy is fine, but seems a bit fragile. (UPDATE: Laying it open flat once was enough for several pages to come loose.) The signatures appear to be glued rather than sewn—a textbook example of the badly built British book—which is inexplicable given the size of the book and weight of the glossy paper, to say nothing of its cost. Because, at $165 (£95) list, this book is extremely expensive; ebook versions are just as exorbitant. Cheaper copies can be found elsewhere with a little digging: I got mine via AbeBooks for less than $30, shipping included. Honestly, given the risk of the book falling apart on you, that’s the way to go.
This atlas isn’t really aimed at beginners or people with a casual interest in the solar system. The price reflects that, as does its rather technical nature and organization. Those with a serious jones for the solar system will not be deterred by these or any other reservations.
Previously: Blogs and a Book About Maps of the Solar System’s Moons.
More Moon Maps
Chinese scientists have released a high-resolution map of the Moon based on images from the Chang’e 2 spacecraft; the maps are at a resolution of seven metres (MoonViews, Universe Today). Phil Stooke compares the Chang’e 2 images with those from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC). Meanwhile, and speaking of the LROC, Jeffrey Ambroziak is making 3D anaglyph maps based on LROC data; he’s launched a Kickstarter campaign to create a 3D digital map of the entire Moon.
An Ancient Map of the Mesopotamian World
I’ve encountered plenty of claims for something to be the “world’s oldest map” (most of which depend on how broad or narrow your definition of “map” is). One I wasn’t aware of until recently is this Mesopotamian map on a cuneiform tablet, which dates from between 700 and 500 BC, currently held by the British Museum. “The map is sometimes taken as a serious example of ancient geography, but although the places are shown in their approximately correct positions, the real purpose of the map is to explain the Babylonian view of the mythological world.” More at Visual Complexity. Via Cartophile.
For other claims to the world’s oldest map, see the following Map Room entries: Engraved Rock Is 14,000-Year-Old Map: Researchers; Candidates for the World’s Oldest Map; The Other World’s Oldest Map; The Western World’s Oldest Map.
Update, Feb. 20: John Padula points to this reconstruction.
How Readers Use Fantasy Maps
It occurs to me that how readers use fantasy maps should be another line of inquiry for my science fiction and fantasy maps project. Take, for example, Donald Petersen’s comment on the Boing Boing post about Victoria Johnson’s map essay (posted here last week).
One of the few downsides to reading Game of Thrones for the first time on a 2nd generation Kindle was that it was inconvenient to flip to the map every now and then to reorient myself when the action moved to a new city or battlefield. Like books with lots of footnotes, I think I’ll do most of my map-heavy fantasy book reading on dead trees.
My father experienced the same thing reading A Dance with Dragons on the Kindle. The insight here may not be particularly profound, but it is useful: fantasy maps may be largely illustrative, but they’re also referred to when reading the text. They may be an intrinsic part of the reading process—at least as far as “fat fantasy books with maps” are concerned. (Will electronic versions of said books need to have their text georeferenced, so that you can push a “map” button at any point and be placed at the proper position on the map? I have to admit that that would be kind of cool.)
What do you think? How do you use maps when reading fantasy fiction?
‘The Maps We Wandered Into as Kids’
Over on The Awl, Victoria Johnson has an essay about maps of fictional places, which of course is relevant to my interests. Johnson has chosen some very unique and distinctive maps to discuss—Winnie-the-Pooh, The Phantom Toolbooth and The Princess Bride among them—rather than the sort of standard fantasy maps you get in standard fantasy (which, I suppose, aren’t worth discussing unless you like the fantasy world being mapped; certainly not as maps). Via Boing Boing (which sends a link in this direction).
Four Map Stories
I have not forgotten my Maps in Science Fiction and Fantasy project, though it’s lain fallow for a bit while I juggled other things. Here are a few short stories about maps that I’ve encountered over the past few months.
A Map of Rising Global Temperatures
This animated map from NASA (Flash-only, sorry) illustrates global temperatures since 1880: “reds indicate temperatures higher than the average during a baseline period of 1951-1980, while blues indicate lower temperatures than the baseline average.” News flash: the planet’s getting warmer. More information here.
Previously: Global Temperature Changes by Decade.
Personal Geographies
If you’re interested in maps as art, you probably already have copies of books like You Are Here and The Map as Art, excellent collections of map art curated by Katharine Harmon (if you don’t have these books and you’re interested, now you know; off you go). If, on the other hand, you’re a crafty sort and are interested in making art with maps—whether as raw material or as theme—then a new book by Jill K. Berry, Personal Geographies: Explorations in Mixed-Media Mapmaking, may be worth your attention.
Personal Geographies is a short guide to making maps about personal subjects using the techniques of mixed-media artwork. Let me unpack that a bit. Mixed media involves combining several different art forms: paint, pen and ink, photography, collage; different materials and textures. Berry, lists as supplies a number of different kinds of paper and cardstock; pencils, crayons and paints; adhesives; tools; and embellishments like ribbons.
These are the raw materials. Berry chooses as her theme so-called personal geographies, broken up into three chapters: maps of the self, in which the personal is mapped to pictures of the head, the hand, the heart or the body; maps of personal experiences, such as trips; and art pieces made from real and fictional maps. Each lavishly illustrated chapter gives sample projects with step-by-step instructions; each chapter also collects map projects from a number of different artists to show you what else might be possible.
I received an electronic review copy of this book.
Historical Atlas of Washington and Oregon
Last week I received in the mail a review copy of Derek Hayes’s latest book, the Historical Atlas of Washington and Oregon. Now, except for a day trip to Mount Baker in 1993, I haven’t so much as visited either state, so my review is not as informed as a local’s could be. What I can say is that this is the latest in a series of historical atlases by Hayes, whose previous works include historical atlases of North American railroads, California and the U.S. in general, among others. It’s an attractive and reasonably priced hardcover, densely packed with contemporary maps.
On that point: Hayes uses actual, contemporary maps to describe the period. This differs from what I usually expect from historical atlases, which use modern cartography to display historical information. I’m not entirely convinced of Hayes’s method: contemporary maps may not necessarily be accurate; and they’re frequently reproduced at a scale too small to be of any informative use; and the map needed to tell a story may not always be available. But when considered as a thematically and chronologically organized collection of antique maps, it works very well indeed, though I think several subjects, such as the period before European (or as Hayes puts it, “EuroAmerican”) contact, get short shrift.
Still, I cannot emphasize enough the wealth of cartography on display here (Seattle, Tacoma, Portland and the Pacific Northwest rail lines get particularly lavish treatment); this is the sort of thing that would do well as an iPad app or enhanced ebook, where you could zoom in to a full-scale reproduction of all these maps.
A New Lunar Topo Map
A new topographic map of the Moon from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter: “Today the LROC team releases Version 1 of the Wide Angle Camera (WAC) topographic map of the Moon. This amazing map shows you the ups and downs over nearly the entire Moon, at a scale of 100 meters across the surface, and 20 meters or better vertically.” Late last year lunar topo maps were released that were based on laser altimeter data; presumably the WAC data, based on stereo observations, is better. Image credit: NASA/
Maphead
Word first came in early 2009 that Jeopardy whiz Ken Jennings was writing a book “exploring the world of map nuts and geography obsessives.” That book, Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks, came out in September, and now I’ve had a chance to read it.
Maphead isn’t really (or just) a book about maps; rather, it’s a book about the people who obsess about matters geographical, including maps. The subject is pretty broadly defined. He begins straightforwardly enough. After a chapter on spatial awareness, Jennings looks at the scandal that erupted when a University of Miami professor discovered his students couldn’t locate anything on a map, and at map literacy in general. There’s a chapter on borders and placenames. But things really get cooking when Jennings turns to things people do. A chapter on map collecting. On maps of imaginary places. The National Geographic Bee. Roadgeeking. Geocaching. Even the Degree Confluence Project.
In its cheerful enthusiasm for all things map, Maphead reads a lot like Mike Parker’s Map Addict (which I reviewed in 2009). This is a good thing. Like Map Addict, Maphead covers a lot of what for me is very familiar ground: I sometimes felt like I was reading my own blog archives, which is something I felt while reading Map Addict. But then Jennings goes and finds something I didn’t know, like the fact that Borges’s “On Exactitude in Science” was not the only work to play with the idea of a 1:1 scale map: Lewis Carroll and Umberto Eco did it too. Ken Jennings has managed to pull off a minor miracle: a profoundly erudite, well-researched book, written in a breezy, accessible and downright witty manner that is invariably entertaining. A pleasant book that you should look at, if you have any interest in maps.
Hubris and the Times Comprehensive Atlas
When the publishers of the Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World announced that the newly released 13th edition showed that Greenland’s ice sheet had shrunk by 15 percent, climate scientists went ballistic. While Greenland’s ice is retreating, it’s not nearly by that much, and this is just the sort of error that encourages climate-change denialists.
How did Collins Geo allow this to happen? This is the question Mark Monmonier explores in a piece on the New Scientist website. Monmonier, the author of How to Lie with Maps and many other books, argues that hubris was behind the mistake: that the towering reputation of the Times Atlases led to overconfidence.
An explanation lies partly in Collins Geo’s apparent decision to produce the map in house. If that was the case, the firm might have avoided its embarrassment with the obvious quality-assurance step of sending page proofs to carefully chosen experts. Appropriate scientists seldom decline invitations to serve as reviewers. […]
It seems likely there was a belief that external review was unnecessary. Moreover, it seems that none of the publisher’s marketing mavens compared their provocative God’s-eye view with competing treatments on readily accessible scientific websites or Google Earth.
Hubris is not too strong a word to explain HarperCollins’s predicament. A press release promising “concrete evidence of how climate change is altering the face of the planet forever” invites critical scrutiny by mainstream climate scientists as well as the self-proclaimed sceptics who are ever eager to pounce on overreaching pronouncements by the former. In Atlasgate, the pro-warming community, which outnumbers naysayers by perhaps 50 to 1, wasted no time in trashing the HarperCollins map.
Previously: Map Books for Fall 2011.
Map Books for Fall 2011
Here are a few map-related books coming out this fall. They include books by a game show legend and a highly regarded artist, and an atlas that has already encountered more than its share of controversy.
The Farthing Party Map Panel
The Farthing Party map panel (see previous entry) came off surprisingly well. I was actually shocked to discover that what I thought were my controversial thoughts about maps were actually not that controversial: I knew it was going to be a good panel when both Lila and Emmet said in their opening remarks that they were opposed in principle to fantasy maps.