I love maps. Just not in fantasy novels.
My favorite book as a kid was The Rand McNally Illustrated Atlas of the World. That book sparked a lifelong love of geography, and in my fantasy writing, the way geology, geography, climate, and ecology affect culture are the bases of worldbuilding. But I’m reluctant to include a map in my own work, even if readers are expecting it, even if not having one will put off readers.
My main issue is that fantasy maps make the world too knowable, too small, even when they only depict just one country or one continent of a larger world. They’re always too empty, too cursory, too constrained by the need to fit onto a 6” x 9” page (or across two pages) in black and white. They are often presented as an objective representation of the shape of a land and rarely impart anything that I can read like a literary text, as part of the text of the novel. They rarely say anything about the people or culture who produced the map or their reasons for doing so or what use such a map would have in-world. When they do, it’s often just an excuse to make a bad map. Most of the time, the maps in fantasy novels are just bad maps.
Fantasy maps often seem like an afterthought, another piece of packaging designed to tell the reader, “you’re reading a fantasy novel.” Sometimes it’s a shorthand for telling us what kind of fantasy novel you’re reading: this place is roughly Europe-shaped, this character is from the part that corresponds to France, while this other character is from the part that corresponds to Spain.
Perdido Street Station is one of my favorite fantasy novels and remains a wildly inventive one even 25 years after its publication, but the map at the front doesn’t have much to say beyond “this place is roughly London-shaped, so think about a really weird London as you read.” The fact that it’s a map of a city with railroads and not a continent with mountain ranges and forests does, I guess, tell us something about what kind of book to expect, but just the first chapter of the book does a better job of that than a pretty boring and mostly empty map.
Its sequel, The Scar, has no map at all. It would have been a worse book had it included one. The constant deluge of weird place names, bizarre creatures, and weird geography in the first 100 pages or so does a better job of establishing the world as a vast, dangerous, and unknown place than any map ever could. In the case of fantasy geography, a thousand words are worth far more than a picture.
So to me, there’s little value in a fantasy map beyond packaging. The cover art says “this is a fantasy novel,” the map at the front says “you’ve just opened a fantasy novel,” the pages of glossary and dramatis personae say “this is a very big fantasy novel,” the “1000 years ago” prologue says “this is a quite big and epic fantasy novel indeed.” If you don’t find any of that stuff, you might end up wondering what kind of fantasy novel this is anyway, or if it is even a fantasy novel at all.
I like maps that do something interesting with the convention, like the one in The Spear Cuts Through Water, which does everything I’m complaining that fantasy maps don’t do. Take a look at it and read what the author has to say about it here. You can read the map in the way you’d read a work of art, it says something about the culture that created it and our own relationship to maps, and it’s not just an attempt to represent the shape of the land. It doesn’t literalize the metaphor that a fantasy novel presents.
History is full of interestingly inaccurate maps for fantasy cartographers to consider. There’s the T-O map, a world map resembling the letter T inside of an O.
This map doesn’t attempt to accurately represent the shape of the continents. It’s meant to be read symbolically. Top is East; Asia is the landmass on top, Europe on the left, Africa on the right. Not very useful for navigation, but it certainly says something about the culture that created it: a perfectly round world divided neatly into three parts, a trinity of continents, with the Holy Land at the center, the perfect Creator reflected in His perfect creation.
Here’s a particularly fanciful T-O map from the mid-15th century, featuring Noah’s Ark on top of Mt. Ararat:
I love the Qing Dynasty-era maps like this one that serves of a record of the Kangxi Emperor’s tour through newly conquered lands:
That’s a detail of a much larger scroll. You can view the whole thing here. From The Met’s description of the piece:
Although Wang based his design on maps and woodblock prints — he never visited the mountain — he also connected specific sites with imaginary landscape passages inspired by classical precedents and employed a traditional “blue-and-green” palette to underscore the emperor’s beneficent rule.
These images lie somewhere between map and landscape painting. They are a representation of the land controlled by the Emperor and at the same time they serve to legitimize his rule. This is how I would like to see fantasy writers think about their maps, if their publishers insist they include one.
There is a tension in fantasy between absolutes and ambiguity, meaning and openness, strangeness and familiarity, mystery and revelation: the mystery of magic, the revelation of the magic system. Fantasy is a literature of mystery and the sublime, and the fantastic is killed when ambiguity is contorted into an intelligibility that leads us to believe that the representation is the thing. Whenever I read a fantasy novel that doesn’t have a map—The Etched City, for instance—I find myself asking, “what would knowing what the land is shaped like add to this experience?” The answer is always nothing.
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