Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks (18 page)

When I was in the third grade, my friend Gerald and I were kings of twin monarchies called Oofer and Uffer. (I am now seeing those
names written down for the first time in twenty-five years.) I can still picture the maps we drew: Oofer is in orange crayon, Uffer green, and a long narrow strait of cerulean sea separates them, running from east to west. But
why
did we draw the maps? I haven’t the foggiest notion. In hopes of refreshing my memory, I pay a visit to Benjamin Salman, a Seattle eighth-grader who is, I imagine, what Austin Tappan Wright must have been like at fourteen.

Like Wright, Benjamin is the offspring of gifted parents: his father, Mark, is a concert pianist, and his mother, Sarah, is, quite literally, a rocket scientist. (She used to be an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she worked on the
Voyager
probes; now she teaches math at a nearby university.) Their living room is a pleasantly cluttered space full of antique furniture, musical instruments, stacks of books and
National Geographics
, and papier-mâché masks hung on the walls. Benjamin is crouched on the wooden floor in front of me, spreading out a grid of eighteen sheets of typing paper.

“This is Augusta, one of the largest cities in Alambia,” he tells me. “It is a complete, exhaustive map.” It’s a
Thomas Guide
of the imagination, with thousands of nonexistent streets, parks, and businesses meticulously laid out and labeled. “But this one”—he begins spreading out a map of his entire continent—“will never be finished.”

Benjamin’s own Islandia is actually a modified version of the real-world continent of Australia, moved northward and tilted at a rakish 30-degree angle, “for geographic diversity,” he explains in his offhand, slightly elevated way of talking. He’s sitting on the sofa now with his knees around his chin, occasionally chewing on a knuckle. “The actual contents—the geography, the history, the people—they’re all completely different.” When Benjamin talks about his world, his is not the enthusiastic chatter of the evangelist but the cool, knowledgeable tone of the expert. I wonder if that’s part of the appeal of documenting your own alternate world: the knowledge that, despite your tender years, you are the greatest living authority on some subject. More than that, in fact—that you are the unquestioned master of the entire realm. The godlike feeling of dominion that comes when children look at a map must be amplified when they know that the maps are entirely their creation, that they can erase cities, raise up volcanoes, and flood river deltas at will.
^*

The mean streets of downtown Augusta, hand-drawn by Benjamin Salman, the only person who’s ever been there

“Do you feel like you know your world as well as you know any real place?” I ask.

“Yes. Better! Because I made it up.”

Benjamin has been living in his world almost as long as he’s been living in ours. Even as a baby, he insisted on speaking a language of his own invention. “We just had to pretend we didn’t understand him, and then he’d answer us in English,” sighs Sarah. His country was born as a home for his childhood stuffed animals—Blue Roo the conductor, Day-Glo the inventor. The original residents are probably all in attics and thrift shops now, but their homeland has vastly expanded. It’s not just the hundreds of neat city and country maps stacked on a bookshelf: Benjamin’s Australia is a whole world. Whatever he’s currently learning about in his homeschool classes—the Cyrillic alphabet, colonial history, plate tectonics—gets incorporated into the fabric of his imaginary continent. During the 2008 election season, he became so fascinated with the political process that he filled notebooks with his own fictional districts and candidates and their vote totals.

“The Conservative Democratic Party’s presidential candidate has just resigned,” he announces abruptly, later, as we’re chatting over cheesecake. His update doesn’t sound like a creative decision he’s made but like a genuine news flash beamed in from another world. Time is passing there, just as it does here.

Do Benjamin’s parents worry about his unusual dual citizenship? I suspect their concern isn’t really their son but the possibility that outsiders (like me) will see him as weird. “It’s eccentric, but that’s okay,” says Sarah. “For us, it’s more interesting to have children who are”—she gestures vaguely—“whoever they are.” After all, Benjamin’s doing just fine. He’s an impossibly bright teenager with a wide array of interests—not just maps but history and science and old Marx Brothers movies and classical music. He wants to be a pianist like his dad when he grows up and has just finished composing his first symphony, which he wrote—and orchestrated for fifteen parts—almost entirely in his head, not noodling at the keyboard. (Benjamin has perfect pitch.)

I wonder if Benjamin’s Australia will survive adolescence into adulthood, the way Islandia did but Oofer and Uffer did not. Maybe his parents would be relieved, in a way, if the maps and ledgers and histories joined Blue Roo and Day-Glo in the attic, but I can’t help thinking it would be a tragic loss, almost like the fall of a real empire.

All that time and knowledge gone forever, without even ruins left to commemorate their passing.

Maps of fictional places are a peculiarity of childhood, but among adults, they’re a peculiarity of geek culture as well. Harry Potter’s Hogwarts and the starship
Enterprise
have been mapped in more detail than much of Africa, and many kinds of gaming rely on maps, from the beautifully elaborate maps of 1970s “bookcase” games to the quickly sketched dungeons of a fantasy role-playing campaign to the pixel art that maps computer games, both classic and modern.
^*
Even comic books aren’t immune: as a kid, I once came across an
Atlas of the DC Universe
in a bookstore and eagerly scooped it up, unable to believe that someone had finally combined my two great loves: (1) atlases and (2) he-men in long underwear punching each other. But I was ultimately disappointed by the book: Gotham City and Metropolis seemed more mythic to me somehow before I knew that they were officially located in New Jersey and Delaware, respectively. C’mon, DC Comics. Superman would never live in
Delaware
.

If most kids grow out of made-up maps around the time they discover girls,
^†
you might think that the prevalence of kiddie maps in geeky pastimes like these is just another sign of arrested development, like eating Hot Pockets and playing
Halo
all night even though you’re in your thirties. But fantasy map fans prefer to see a different connection to childhood: a way to recapture the innocence and awe of discovery.

“The hallmark of epic fantasy is immersion,” says the best-selling genre writer Brandon Sanderson. “That’s why I’ve always included maps in my books. I believe the map prepares your mind to experience the wonder, to say, ‘I am going to a new place.’ “

Brandon and I were college roommates a decade ago, and in most of my memories of him, he’s following one of his roommates around the apartment, reading aloud passages from his latest bulky fantasy manuscript, presumably part three of some eight-volume saga where all the characters had lengthy names full of apostrophes. At the time I was amused by Brandon’s antics, but hey, at least it was a pleasant surprise not to be the nerdiest guy in the apartment for a change.

Well, Brandon had the last laugh. In a shocking twist, the epics he’d been writing while working the graveyard shift at a local Best Western were actually, uh,
good
. He sold his sixth completed novel,
Elantris,
two years before graduating, and on the strength of that book and his follow-up trilogy,
Mistborn,
Brandon was chosen (“handpicked,” the accounts always say, as though he were a grape-fruit) by the author Robert Jordan’s widow to complete
The Wheel of Time,
the megaselling fantasy series that had been left unfinished at the time of Jordan’s 2007 death. His first
Wheel of Time
book, the twelfth installment in the series, debuted atop
The New York Times
’ best-seller list, knocking Dan Brown out of the number one spot.

A Japanese samurai sword, which Brandon was allowed to choose from Jordan’s immense personal collection of historical weaponry, hangs over the fireplace in his Utah basement, where we’re talking. Brandon and his wife have plans to remodel the basement into a stone medieval dungeon, complete with torch holders and maybe a mounted dragon head on the wall, but currently it’s just an empty bonus room with a navy blue beanbag chair the size of a Volkswagen Beetle sitting in the middle of it. This is where Brandon does most of his writing.

The summer after eighth grade, when Brandon first fell in love with the genre that would eventually pay for his house, maps were a big part of that love. “I started to look and make sure a book had a map,” he remembers. “That was one of the measures of whether it was
going to be a good book or not, in my little brain. When I first read
Lord of the Rings,
I thought, ‘Oho, he knows what he’s doing. A map
and
an appendix!’”

J. R. R. Tolkien single-handedly created the epic fantasy genre with his publication of
The Hobbit
in 1937 and then the
Lord of the Rings
trilogy in the 1950s.
Tolkien never read
Islandia,
but his own world, which he called Middle-earth, was just as meticulously constructed. He drew upon his day job as an Oxford philology professor to create entire languages for his imaginary races, borrowing some Finnish here, some Welsh there. He designed their calendars and wrote their genealogies. And of course, he drew maps.

Many earlier authors had dabbled in fantastic events and settings, but Tolkien’s books were the ones that created a whole new “Fantasy” aisle in the bookstore, one lined with those florid painted covers of dragons and wizards that make Yes album covers look tasteful and restrained by comparison. Why was he so influential? Tolkien’s readers were less captivated by his plotting or his characters (which were memorable but, as Tolkien freely admitted, largely lifted from the Anglo-Saxon myths he so loved) than with the bold stroke of his world building, the fait accompli of Middle-earth, already there, as if it had always existed. Other books typically followed familiar characters from “the fields we know” into fairylands, whether through a rabbit hole, a wardrobe, or a chalk sidewalk drawing, but, says Brandon, “
Lord of the Rings
did something very different. It said, ‘No, we’re not going to transition you into it. We’re going to
start you off
in a completely new world where nothing can be taken for granted.’”

Fantasy readers like that abrupt drop into the deep end and the learning curve it takes to keep up. They’re not hurrying through the book the way you’d power through a thriller from an airport bookstore. They’re taking time to study the rules, to pore over the odd names and arcane histories. Just like Benjamin Salman, they enjoy the sense of being authorities in a whole new realm. “By the end of a big epic fantasy novel, you’ll have to become an
expert
in this world that doesn’t exist,” says Brandon. “It’s challenging.”

For this very reason, fantasy novels are the kind of reading that
comes closest to the way we look at maps. Reading text is a purely linear process. Look: you are reading this sentence. Now you are reading this one. The words from the line above are gone; you are only here, and the words from the line below don’t exist yet. But maps tell a different kind of story. In maps, our eyes are free to wander, spatially, the way they do when we study new surroundings in life.
^*
We can sense whole swaths of geography at once, see relationships, linger over interesting details. Fantasies are read a word at a time too, but less propulsively than any other genre. The author is less interested in pulling you through to an ending than in creating a texture, showing you around a new world.

As a kid, I considered C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books
^†
to be somehow lightweight, mere fairy tales compared to Tolkien’s books, and I realize now that maps were at least partly to blame. Elaborate maps were always to be found in front of Tolkien’s books, but my Narnia paperbacks had no maps. Mr. Tumnus’s forest in
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
was just a bunch of trees, but Bilbo’s forest was Mirkwood, between the mighty Anduin River and the wastes of Rhovanion in the east. One forest was just in a story, but the other was in a
place
.
^‡

It’s the importance of place to the genre, not just slavish imitation of Tolkien, that explains why today’s fantasy authors still make sure maps are front and center. David Eddings, one of epic fantasy’s most popular writers, went so far as to put maps on the
covers
of his books. (Eddings’s nation of Aloria was born the same way Stevenson created Treasure Island:
he doodled the map first
, and the map inspired
the adventure.
^*
) The maps are certainly functional too; many fantasy novels are episodic quests, and a map is an easy way to plot that course for a reader—it’s no accident that the word “plot” can refer to the contents of both a chart
and
a narrative. But Brandon’s tried hard to get away from the quest narrative in his own books, most of which take place in contained urban settings, yet he still makes sure his books have maps. His latest novel—the first volume in a projected ten-book series—is called
The Way of Kings,
and it includes no fewer than nine maps.