The first two episodes of the latest Star Wars series, Ahsoka (which launched this week), focus on the struggle to acquire, unlock and interpret a map to an unknown destination. Sound familiar? It should: The Force Awakens did something awfully similar. Gizmodo’s James Whitbrook explores Star Wars’ apparent map obsession, and concludes it’s about knowledge, and how easily it’s lost. “And that’s it, really: maps are important in Star Wars because knowledge is power in Star Wars as much as a Death Star or the Force is. And specifically in the case of a long, long time ago, archival knowledge and history is incredibly vital to understanding why Star Wars is the way it is.”

Previously: Mapping Star Wars.

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.

Last month, MapLab’s Laura Bliss interviewed the Huntington’s curator of literary collections, Karla Nielsen, about the Huntington’s Mapping Fiction exhibition (previously).

The text of my article “Maps in Science Fiction” is now available online (previously).

Maps are a central part of our experience of the fantasy genre: “No Tour of Fantasyland is complete without one,” wrote Diana Wynne Jones in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland; fantasy maps “are only much noticed when they’re absent,” notes The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. It’s easy to forget that maps are also found in science fiction. They don’t turn up as frequently, nor are they expected to, and we don’t talk about them or think about them nearly as often. But they do exist. I’ve been writing about fantasy maps for years, and even I didn’t give science fiction maps the same consideration at least until 2014, when during a presentation about fantasy maps at Readercon, I had to extemporize in response to a question about science fiction maps. My off-the-cuff response led me to look into where and how maps are used in science fiction and from there to write this article on the subject.

This article took a while to come to fruition. I put out a call for examples of science fiction maps and pitched the idea to the NYRSF’s editor back in July 2014—and then life got thoroughly and fundamentally in the way. It was still thoroughly and fundamentally in the way when I finally, finally finished it and sent it off to NYRSF in the summer of 2020. Life was thoroughly and fundamentally in the way at their end, too—thanks, pandemic!—so it’s taken until now to see print at last. I’m glad it has: science fiction maps don’t get a fraction of the attention fantasy maps do, and I think I might have come up with some useful frameworks in this piece.

From the examples explored here, we can discern several functions science fiction maps can perform on behalf of both text and reader. Maps may have a thematic purpose as in the case of maps of Pern or Majipoor in that their style signals a science fantasy environment, the use of fantasy reading protocols, and a text of likely interest to fantasy readers. They may have a storytelling purpose as with the maps from Dune, the Steerswoman series, and the Mars trilogy: the maps separate the known from the unknown, the transformed from the untouched, the colonized from the indigenous. Or they may have a conceptual purpose by giving the reader a big-picture understanding of structures, solar systems, networks, or empires.

I will post the complete text of the article later. In the meantime, if the teasers above have left you unwilling to wait even a little bit, you can buy the NYRSF issue here; it costs just $2.99 in the usual electronic formats.

Update: You can read the article here.

(See also my in-progress list of fiction about maps.)

From a certain point of view, The Force Awakens is the story of how a rare and valuable map was kept out of the hands of an unscrupulous and extremely motivated collector. While a map served as the MacGuffin of Episode 7, maps of the Star Wars universe have been a thing for a while, at least in terms of supporting material.

According to this 2015 article on the Star Wars website about the history of maps of the Galaxy Far, Far Away, the first official map was produced in 1998. Since then the Star Wars galaxy’s map has been surprisingly consistent despite the addition of a huge amount of material (movies, TV shows, ancillary books and comics) and the canon shift that took place when Disney bought Lucasfilm: older maps—such as fan websites like Modi’s or W. R. van Hage’s, or the 2009 Star Wars: The Essential Atlas (updated with online appendices)—may not include planets that appear in later movies and TV shows (e.g., Jakku, Scarif or Lothal), but what does appear stays in the same place from map to map (i.e., Tatooine and Coruscant are in the same place). Jason Fry’s System Database keeps track of things.

The most up-to-date map I’ve been able to find is Henry Bernberg’s interactive Star Wars Galaxy Map, which has several advantages. Built using ArcGIS—he’s a GIS professional—and hosted using Carto, it has toggleable layers and is searchable (many maps online are simple images, which is tricky when you’re looking for a specific planet). It is, in other words, a useable map, which is a rare thing in science fiction and fantasy, and almost essential when dealing with an imaginary universe of Star Wars’ size.

Fantasy worlds have established maps. Science fictional worlds not so much: what maps exist of imaginary planets are often fan imaginings rather than “official” work. One exception is the planet Bajor, a key location in the TV series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Its map was created by DS9 writer Robert Hewitt Wolfe, who drew it on a white board in the show’s writer’s room, and maintained it over five seasons. Wolfe posted the map to Twitter last week.

By popular demand, here’s the map of Bajor I drew on a whiteboard for the #StarTrek #DS9 Writers Office. pic.twitter.com/6djaZHHzJL

— Robert Hewitt Wolfe (@writergeekrhw) July 31, 2019

Adam Whitehead, who runs the Atlas of Ice and Fire blog, has created a version of Wolfe’s map of Bajor; he also used Map to Globe to give us a spheroid version.

Previously: Mapping Star Trek.

The successor to the Only Fantasy Map You’ll Ever Need is the Only Star Map You’ll Need, a riff on maps of galactic empires and space-opera tropes that emerged from the discussion in this thread. It’s a few years old, but Boing Boing spotted it yesterday.

Previously: Mapping Star Trek.

Despite so many planets, stars, systems, and other locations that were mentioned and referenced to throughout the entire franchise’s run, we’ve never got an official and fully accurate map of the Trek universe. […] Hell, for all of the Star Wars EU’s faults, at least it managed to generate a universally accepted map! Star Trek on the other hand, despite being just as popular as Star Wars, cannot even figure out the sizes and positions of the Feds, the Romulans, and the Klingons in relation to one another!

WhiteDragon25 might be overstating things a bit: most of the maps have the Star Trek major powers in the same relative position (other empires like the Tholians are another matter). But the point remains. While original series canon assigned aliens to known nearby stars, and the shows occasionally used real locations (e.g. Wolf 359), episode writers did not start with a map and generally did not take spatial relationships into consideration, which no doubt has made the belated mapping process a bit more challenging.

In print form, the earliest map I’m aware of is Star Trek Maps (1980), which according to Memory Alpha was a pair of double-sided map posters accompanied by a fairly mathy booklet; of course, the Star Trek universe was a lot smaller then. Star Trek: Star Charts came out in 2002 and seems to be considered the most canonical of the maps in existence; it’s out of print now, though. Star Trek: Stellar Cartography (2013), a collection of ten 24″×36″ folded maps. (Note that I haven’t seen any of these maps.)

Online, Star Trek Dimension’s Cartography section has maps from the series as well as Christian Rühl’s Galactic Atlas. StarTrekMap.com, a fan site that appears to be based on Star Trek: Star Charts, uses an in-universe interface that functions well (scroll wheel zooming!) but is awfully small on large screens. Neither has been updated in years. The Star Trek Online game also has, as you might expect, a map.

From pirate maps leading to buried treasure to painstakingly-drawn maps of continents that never were, there are endless unlikely possibilities in the world of cartography. Send us your story of a rogue GPS taking a driver down non-existent roads, show us what lies in those unexplored territories labeled “here there be monsters,” give us haunted globes, star charts written in disappearing ink, and spiraling lines on crumbling parchment leading to the center of the labyrinth. As always, we want gorgeously-told tales, gripping characters, and unique worlds to explore. Genre doesn’t matter to us, along as your tale involves maps or cartography in some integral way.

Pays 5¢/word on publication, deadline February 1. I have had considerable difficulty in submitting to anthologies in the past (I write fiction very slowly; the story never quite gels in time for the deadline), but I really, really, really need to submit something to this.

Desde antiguo un enigmático astro llamado Argos siembra la atmósfera con una substancia muy especial. Sólo un pequeño grupo de sabios sabe cómo recolectar y emplear esa esencia de los cielos que permite la vida eterna. Pero en pleno auge de la Roma imperial, un desastre sacude a la hermandad de sabios. Desperdigados por el mundo y sin los conocimientos necesarios para mantener la inmortalidad, vagarán sin rumbo, condenados al olvido. Hasta que en el siglo XXI, una inquieta historiadora, Irene Abad, descubre un antiguo mapa que, sin saberlo, conduce hasta el peligroso secreto que los Hijos de Argos han perseguido durante dos milenios.

I wish I could say more about this, but I never studied Spanish and can barely navigate Spanish-language websites, much less read novels. El Viaje de Argos is available in ebook form via Amazon and iBooks.

“The Map” by Gene Wolfe (Endangered Species [New York: Tor, 1989], 20-36) belongs to the universe of The Book of the New Sun (one of my favourite works) and features one of its secondary characters. A former torturer named Eata now captains a boat along the river Gyoll. He is hired by a man with a map seeking treasure in the dead parts of the great city Nessus. The Book of the New Sun belongs to the dying Earth genre, and Wolfe’s Urth is extremely old and layered; as such the map may no longer be reliable.

Those spidery streets might—or might not—be the very streets that stretched before him. That wandering line of blue might be a stream or canal, or Gyoll itself. The map presented an accumulation of detail, and yet it was detail of a sort that did nothing to confirm or deny location. He committed as much of it to memory as he could, all the while wondering what feature or turning might prove of value, what name of street or structure might have survived where there was no one left to recall it, what thing of masonry or metal might yet retain its former shape, if any did. For an instant it seemed to him that it was not the treasure that was lost, but he himself. (30-31)

In the event he has to be rescued; Eata seems to be of the opinion that maps are rather good at getting their owners into trouble, and not much else. The map, in this story, is a symbol of obsolescence.

“The Mappist” by Barry Lopez (Light Action in the Caribbean [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000], 146-162) is neither science fiction nor fantasy, but has genre appeal. Matthew Cheney (more on whom momentarily) considers it an homage to Borges; I’ll let him describe the story: “it tells of a narrator’s obsession with a pseudonymous author of remarkable travel guides and maps, works of such detail and care that they capture the ‘essence’ of whatever city they describe. The narrator eventually tracks down the creator of these works, the reclusive Corlis Benefideo, and visits him, viewing new maps Benefideo has created, maps of remarkable depth and brilliance.”

When he placed the next map in front of me, the summer distribution of Swainson’s hawks, and then slid in next to it a map showing the overlapping summer distribution of its main prey species, the Richardson ground squirrel, the precision and revelation were too much for me.

I turned to face him. “I’ve never seen anything that even approaches this, this”—my gesture across the surface of the table included everything. “It’s not just the information, or the execution—I mean, the technique is flawless, the water-coloring, your choice of scale—but it’s like the books, there’s so much more.”

“That’s the idea, don’t you think, Mister Trevino?” (159)

Benefideo is capable of mapping impossible things, but he claims it’s just a matter of hard work. “The Mappist” is a quest for “an elegant order [that] has disappeared” (161), but the maps are sui generis, the mapmaker unique.

“A Map of the Everywhere” by the aforementioned Matthew Cheney (Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing, Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss, eds. [Easthampton MA: Small Beer Press, 2007], 207-221; Kindle version; audio version) is a beautifully written story that evinces Beckett in its absurdism. Its rather feckless protagonist, Alfred, drifts from job to job until a strange trio sends him to see a cartographer.

“You must dig a hole to China,” one of the creatures whispered.

“I was digging for faith or direction,” Alfred replied. “I have no interest in China. I couldn’t even find it on a map.”

“Then you have need of a cartographer,” another of the creatures said. “I have known many cartographers.”

“They are a strange breed, cartographers,” another of the creatures said.

“They live in hovels and garrets,” another of the creatures said. “They seldom shave.” (210)

The cartographer Alfred ends up seeing is the questionably gendered Günther Lopez (whose name has to be a tip towards the author of “The Mappist”). Visiting the cartographer does not yield tangible results in the cartographic sense, but in the end, at last, Alfred does leave with a sense of direction, if not literal directions—and that seems to be what the cartographer stands in place of.

Finally, I want to mention “The Dala Horse,” a delightful story by Michael Swanwick (Tor.com, 13 July 2011) that isn’t about maps, but it does feature a talking map, as well as a walking, talking knapsack, both of which accompany a fleeing Swedish girl who is trying to find her grandmother’s house.

Carefully, so as not to tear, the map unfolded. Contour lines squirmed across its surface as it located itself. Blue stream-lines ran downhill. Black roads and stitched red trails went where they would. “We’re here,” said the map, placing a pinprick light at its center. “Where would you like to go?”

“To Far-Mor,” Linnea said. “She’s in Godastor.”

“That’s a long way. Do you know how to read maps?”

“No.”

“Then take the road to the right. Whenever you come across another road, take me out and I’ll tell you which way to go.”

It sounds like a fairy tale, but it isn’t; this is a tale in which technology is indistinguishable from magic, where “we taught things how to talk and think”; Swanwick’s map is a satnav in fantasy clothing.

Update: Since this post is getting a bit of attention, I should mention that these are only the map stories I’ve encountered most recently. See The Map Room’s Fiction About Maps category for earlier examples.