November 2012 – The Map Room

Review: The Lands of Ice and Fire

Published on 29 November 20128 April 2018 by Jonathan Crowe

The Lands of Ice and Fire, which came out last month, is a collection of maps of the lands of George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series, executed by the fantasy cartographer Jonathan Roberts.

You should know what you’re getting when you buy this. It’s not an atlas. It’s not even a book. George himself describes it as “a book-shaped box containing a whole bunch of gorgeous, glossy, fold-out maps of Westeros, Essos, and the lands and seas from A Song of Ice and Fire.” There is no text other than on a single-page introduction.

Open the box and you see two sleeves containing six maps apiece. Each map is 24 by 30 inches, single sided, in full colour, and on glossy paper, the kind you can see your fingerprints on. As fantasy maps go, this is a lavish production—a long way from the two-colour atlases we’ve seen for other imaginary worlds. (Some Amazon reviewers have expressed concern about wear and tear from folding and unfolding the maps; bear that in mind.)

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Jeffrey Beebe’s Refractoria

Published on 28 November 201222 October 2017 by Jonathan Crowe

$Western Refractoria (detail), Jeffrey Beebe$
Jeffrey Beebe operates in the same space as Jerry Gretzinger or Austin Tappan Wright. “Over the last fifteen years, I have created the world of Refractoria, a comprehensive imagino-ordinary world that is equal parts autobiography and pure fantasy.” The design language is pure fantasy map, but he goes deeper than that: in addition to maps, he’s created heraldry and constellations, among many other things: the primary source materials of an imagined place whose history has not been written. Boing Boing, MetaFilter.

Let Maps to Others

Published on 28 November 201222 October 2017 by Jonathan Crowe

K. J. Parker’s “Let Maps to Others,” a novella published in Subterranean, deals with themes of interest to those of us interested in maps in fantasy fiction, though it’s not a map story per se. The story deals with the discovery of the country of Essecuivo three centuries prior by an explorer whose manuscript about it has been lost, and for which the coordinates are unknown. It’s narrated by an unnamed scholar of Essecuivo, whose actions regarding the lost manuscript lead to a duke mounting an expedition to find the place. A grand story that may end up on award ballots next year.

Nokia’s Here Maps App

Published on 20 November 201222 October 2017 by Jonathan Crowe

Earlier this month Nokia, the parent company of Navteq, announced its cross-platform mapping service, which they’re calling Here. To that end, its free iOS app, Here Maps, appeared in the App Store this week. I’ve poked around with it a little bit today and have some thoughts.

Those seeking a true alternative to Apple’s (or Google’s) maps will probably be disappointed. It’s a perfectly serviceable portal to the Nokia’s map platform, but there’s nothing to ooh or aah over. Nokia’s maps aren’t necessarily better; as with all map platforms—Google’s, Apple’s, OpenStreetMap’s and Nokia’s—whose is better varies from place to place. For my little village, for example, Nokia’s street data is a bit better than Apple’s, and it has more POIs; on the other hand, some of Nokia’s POIs are misplaced, and Apple has better, higher-resolution imagery for my area. Again, it depends on where you are.

I’m not a fan of Here Maps’s UI: it’s rather clunky and appears to be designed to be the same across all platforms, rather than using native iOS widgetry. It seems better matched to the iPhone/iPod touch than to the iPad, where the non-native popup windows swallow too much of the screen. The map tiles are bitmapped rather than vector images, and load more slowly than I’d expect. To be sure, there is an offline mode, and a few other features I haven’t explored yet—see Cult of Mac, Macworld and TUAW for more thorough looks at this app. My first impression is kind of meh: it’s good to have multiple map apps, but this one doesn’t really stand out. But it’s free, so it can’t hurt to try it.

The World Fantasy Map Panel

Published on 20 November 201222 October 2017 by Jonathan Crowe

Herewith my writeup of the “Maps and Fantasy Literature” panel at the World Fantasy Convention earlier this month in Richmond Hill, Ontario, based on fragmentary and cryptic notes and no doubt full of misrepresentations and misattributions. The panel took place on Sunday, November 4 at 10 a.m. Panellists were Robert Boyczuk, Laura Goodin, Matthew Johnson, Sara Simmons, Jo Walton, and Bill Willingham (who acted as moderator). The panel description:

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