Tag: fantasy maps

The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K. Le Guin

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Word for World is both an upcoming exhibition and an upcoming book exploring the maps of Ursula K. Le Guin—i.e., the maps she herself made for worlds like Earthsea.

When Ursula K. Le Guin started writing a new story, she would begin by drawing a map. The Word for World presents a selection of these images by the celebrated author, many of which have never been published before, to consider how her imaginary worlds enable us to re-envision our own.

Le Guin’s maps offer journeys of consciousness beyond conventional cartography, from the Rorschach-like archipelagos of Earthsea to the talismanic maps of Always Coming Home. Rather than remaining within known terrain, they open up paradigms of knowledge, exemplified by the map’s edges and how a map is read, made and re-made, together. The Word for World brings her maps together with poems, stories, interviews, recipes and essays by contributors from a variety of perspectives to enquire into the relationship between worlds and how they are represented and imagined. 

The exhibition runs from 10 October to 6 December at the Architectural Association Gallery in London. The book comes out from Spiral House in October. Preorder: Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop. Thanks to Zvi for the tip.

Previously: Limited Edition Earthsea Map Print Now Available.

Fantasy Mapmaking Tools

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

I’ve been making note of procedural fantasy map generators for a while now. These are tools that generate a map of an imaginary landscape, town or dungeon, mostly (but not necessarily exclusively) for the purposes of role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. The latest to come to my attention is Watabou’s Procgen Arcana, a set of free-to-use map generators by Oleg Dolya.

Meanwhile, for those who draw their fantasy maps digitally, but without a procedural map generator, there has been more than one project to extract symbols and signs from real old maps for use as stamps and brushes in, say, Illustrator or Photoshop. I mentioned David Stark’s library of map elements, taken from a 17th-century map, last year. The author K. M. Alexander (previously) has put together a number of brush sets based on old maps, allowing users to “create fantasy maps that can add a touch of historical authenticity to any project.” The latest is based on an 18th-century map of Bohemia. He also has packs of compass roses, sea monsters and other cartouches, as well as typefaces. Quite a lot of stuff, actually. Free for personal and commercial use.

I have notes on an article about fantasy maps in the digital age, in which I’d discuss the development of maps from entirely hand-drawn to digital to algorithmic. I’ve been meaning to write it since before the pandemic. I wonder if it’s all out of date by now. Possibly not.

Preserving the Maps of Karen Wynn Fonstad

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Wisconsin Public Radio takes up the story of fantasy cartographer Karen Wynn Fonstad (1945–2005), best known for her Atlas of Middle Earth and other fantasy-world atlases. “Fonstad passed away 20 years ago. Now, her husband and her son—both geographers themselves—have embarked on a new quest: to digitize her original maps and find an archive to house them.” Her son spent his spring break week getting as many of her maps as possible scanned at the Robinson Map Library, a task he described as barely scratching the surface.

This follows her belated obituary in the New York Times earlier this year (previously): she may be, finally, having a posthumous moment.

Kathleen Jennings Shows Us How She Draws a Fantasy Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
A series of sketches by Kathleen Jennings of what would become her map for The Wild Huntress by Emily Lloyd-Jones.
Kathleen Jennings

In addition to being an author in her own right, Kathleen Jennings is an illustrator who draws maps for other fantasy novels. For a recent work—The Wild Huntress by Emily Lloyd-Jones—she takes us behind the scenes, going step by step through the process to create the map. I always love posts like these (for previous examples, see How to Make a Fantasy Map; Mapping An Ember in the Ashes; Mapping The Drowning Eyes; Mapping the Dreamlands). I also love that she’s still working with ink on paper.

Karen Wynn Fonstad’s Belated NYT Obituary

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Karen Wynn Fonstad, the cartographer of fantasy worlds best known for her Atlas of Middle-earth, died in March 2005 aged 59. Nearly twenty years later, she gets a comprehensive obituary in the New York Times, replete with lots of examples of her mapmaking, as part of its Overlooked series, which gives belated obituaries to “remarkable people whose deaths […] went unreported in The Times.” Paywalled; workarounds via the usual suspects.

A Library of 17th-Century Map Elements, Useful for Fantasy and Game Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

David Stark extracted elements from a 1688 map of part of Germany to create a library of tree, hill and town signs that he thought entirely appropriate for use as map assets for a role-playing game. I look at them and see fantasy map design elements. In 2019 I noted the similarities between 16th-century maps and modern fantasy map design. Also, digitally created fantasy maps often feature clone-stamped hill signs; you could do worse than clone-stamp these if you were whipping a fantasy map up. At least there’s more than one kind of hill sign to clone-stamp: there are, in fact, 159 hills and 26 mountains—more than 400 tiny images in all, and it’s interesting that David has separate categories for towns and cities, and for hills and mountains. [via]

The ‘River Sins’ of Fantasy Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Author K. M. Alexander has some thoughts about rivers on fantasy maps, and the mistakes authors make with rivers when drawing those maps.

When it comes to rivers, I’ve noticed that quite a few fantasy writers don’t understand the basics. While their intent is noble, I’ve seen plenty of examples of authors struggling with the underlying science of rivers and river systems. I sympathize. These are mistakes I have made myself. Early on, in one of my first projects, I made a mess with the waterways in my fantasy world. Mistakes like these—I like to jokingly call them “river sins”—might go unnoticed at first, but when they are noticed, they can draw a reader out of the story or setting. It wasn’t until I later learned more about the behavior of these ecosystems that I was able to hone in on my worldbuilding, and the end result was something much more interesting and complex. The cool got cooler.

Previously: ‘The Perplexing River Systems of Middle-earth’.

One Map to Rule Them All: Fantasy Map Design Elements in ArcGIS Pro

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Screenshot of John Nelson's One Map to Rule Them All ArcGIS Pro map style to a map of the Mediterranean area.

John Nelson’s One Style to Rule Them All is an ArcGIS Pro map style that applies fantasy map design elements to real-world geographic data. It does something similar to his earlier (2018) map style, My Precious (described here) only differently and with fewer assets (and 1/60th the download size). John has examples and links to a four-part video tutorial at this ArcGIS Blog post.

Previously: Maps Middle-earth Style: By Hand and by ArcGIS.

Limited Edition Earthsea Map Print Now Available

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Original map of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin

A limited edition print of Ursula K. Le Guin’s map of Earthsea has just been released. “Starting with a high resolution photographic image of Le Guin’s original, the team digitally cleaned or reinforced each line and letter, separating each color in the drawing as a layer, to make the maps as legible as the original and to avoid the artifacts of a typical CMYK process.” The cost is $150 for the black-and-white version and $300 for the colour version, with only 50 and 250 copies of each being printed, respectively. (I suspect you shouldn’t dither too long if you’re interested.) Proceeds go to the Pacific Northwest College of Art and the Freedom to Read Foundation. [Tor.com]

‘Pseudo-Anachronistic’ Elements in Fantasy

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

This blog post from independent roleplaying games creator Periapt Games looks at the phenomenon of what’s called “pseudo-anachronistic elements” in fantasy fiction (and fantasy roleplaying games): technologies that have no business existing in the era being portrayed. Of course maps are mentioned, and at length—otherwise why would I mention it here? “Despite being ubiquitous in the modern day, reading a top-down map or even understanding what a map means is a learned skill, and not trivially so. Don’t expect pre-industrial people to be able to purchase a map, read one, or know what one is.” This is precisely what I was trying to say in my 2019 Tor.com article, “Fantasy Maps Don’t Belong in the Hands of Fantasy Characters”; it’s gratifying to see someone else making the same argument.

Previously: Fantasy Maps Don’t Belong in the Hands of Fantasy Characters.

Edney on Sleigh’s Anciente Mappe of Fairyland

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Bernard Sleigh, An Anciente Mappe of Fairyland (1917)
Bernard Sleigh, “An anciente mappe of Fairyland: newly discovered and set forth,” ca. 1917. Map illustration, 147 × 39 cm. Norman B. Leventhal Map Center, Boston Public Library.

Matthew Edney has a post on Bernard Sleigh’s Anciente Mappe of Fairyland, about which we have seen much already; Edney’s look is deeper and more analytical. “Of special interest to me is how, despite his overtly anti-modernist subject matter and style, Sleigh nonetheless gave structure and system to his fictive panorama by giving it the trappings of normative maps and of realistic imagery more generally.”

Previously: An Anciente Mappe of Fairyland; North of Nowhere: The Osher’s Fantasy Map Exhibition.

From Academieland to Zelda: Fictional Map Exhibition at Harvard

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

From Academieland to Zelda: Mapping the Fictional and Imaginary, an exhibition of fictional maps at Harvard University’s Pusey Library, runs until 3 November 2023. The Harvard Gazette (the university’s official press outlet) has a writeup. “Calling the exhibition ‘kind of a mishmash,’ curator Bonnie Burns, head of geospatial resources at the Harvard Map Collection, said that ‘within the exhibit you have maps that are kind of theoretical, like nursery rhymes and Fairyland maps. And then there’s a big chunk of maps of literature—Middle Earth to Narnia.’” Many familiar maps, old and new, in this exhibition, at least for those of us who’ve been studying this field.

An SF/Fantasy Map Roundup

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

In December Tor.com revealed the map for Martha Wells’s upcoming fantasy novel, Witch King, which comes out in May. The post includes both Rhys Davies’s map and Wells’s initial sketch: compare and contrast. Amazon (Canada/UK) | Bookshop

How often do Star Trek tie-in novels come with maps? John Jackson Miller’s Strange New Worlds novel, The High Country, which comes out today, includes maps of the low-technology world on which it is set; in Miller’s Twitter thread last month, he wondered whether his book was the first, but it turns out that a 2000 Deep Space Nine novel also had maps. Amazon (Canada/UK) | Bookshop

In my article about maps in science fiction I made reference to the maps in Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1993-1996 Mars trilogy. Mastodon user 65dBnoise decided those maps were “very few” and “very coarse” (he’s not wrong1) and made some higher resolution maps based on USGS topographical maps of Mars.

A New Map for The Wheel of Time

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Left: Thomas Canty’s map from The World of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time (1997); Right, Ellisa Mitchell’s map from Origins of the Wheel of Time (2022).

While researching his forthcoming book, Origins of the Wheel of Time (Tor, Nov 2022), Michael Livingston discovered that a map published in a 1997 guide to the Wheel of Time universe—which unlike the maps in the Robert Jordan novels showed the entire world—was, in the opinion of Jordan himself, wrong: according to notes Livingston discovered in the author’s archives, one continent was misnamed and another was too small (see above left). With the permission of the estate, Livingston worked with map artist Ellisa Mitchell—who drew the original map for The Eye of the World—to create a new map of the Wheel of Time world that reflected the author’s intent (see above right). Details, and closeup looks at the maps, at Livingston’s Tor.com article.

Mapping ‘The Spear Cuts Through Water’

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Map from Simon Jimenez's The Spear Cuts Through Water
Chris Panatier

At Tor.com, Simon Jimenez talks about the map that accompanies his upcoming epic fantasy novel, The Spear Cuts Through Water. It’s not a map that follows the default fantasy map design by any stretch. He starts with the map, drawn by Chris Panatier.

There is no compass rose for orientation, no place names, no handy scale for distance ratios so that a reader might be able to tell how far one location is from another. There are barely even locations. Even the perspective is different—not a bird’s eye view, but something closer and more intimate, for a better view of the imagery that leans away from literalism and more towards the metaphorical, and the eerie.

Because of all of these choices, it is not a particularly useful map. One would be hard-pressed to use it as a reference tool as they journeyed with the characters through the book. This is by intention.

Jimenez explains how he grappled with the idea of mapping, and of fantasy mapping, when decided whether, and how, to include a map in his book. Very insightful and worth reading (and I’m not just saying that because he name-checks me at the end).