# Novels With Maps of Imaginary Places **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Tags:** books-writing-myths\ **Created:** [August 13, 2022, 3:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/novels-with-maps-of-imaginary-places/969583 "2022-08-13T03:05:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Dr\_Paprika](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dr_paprika/32/3042_2.png) [@Dr\_Paprika](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr_Paprika)\ **Post date:** [August 13, 2022, 3:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/novels-with-maps-of-imaginary-places/969583/1 "2022-08-13T03:05:14Z")
Heard an amusing comedian talking about fantasy novels and series. “They always lose me at the map. It’s good to know that between one imaginary town and an imaginary city, there is a squiggly little road.” Obviously LOTR had maps. And it does seem to be a thing in a lot of novels and some adaptations. But it is a bit odd. There are not a lot of non-fantasy/sci-if books that have them… Winnie the Pooh? Watership Down? Some war novels? 1. How did this come to be a thing? Was LOTR first? 2. What other books contain maps, outside of the obvious genres? 3. Are these ever useful? 4. Anything else to say about it? ---
**Author:** ![kitap](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/b9e5f3/32.png) [@kitap](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kitap)\ **Post date:** [August 13, 2022, 3:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/novels-with-maps-of-imaginary-places/969583/2 "2022-08-13T03:21:03Z")
I’ve seen mysteries with maps. I had a copy of Carter Dickson’s **AGraveyard to Let** that did. ---
**Author:** ![N9IWP](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/n9iwp/32/3154_2.png) [@N9IWP](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/N9IWP)\ **Post date:** [August 13, 2022, 3:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/novels-with-maps-of-imaginary-places/969583/3 "2022-08-13T03:22:12Z")
I LOVE maps in general, and particularly in novels. I know there is a map of Oz, but I couldn’t find it in the actual books (a NOT thorough search) Some Bibles have maps. > **[Fantasy cartography](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_cartography)** > > Fantasy cartography, fictional map-making, or geofiction is a type of map design that visually presents an imaginary world or concept, or represents a real-world geography in a fantastic style. Fantasy cartography usually manifests from worldbuilding and often corresponds to narratives within the fantasy and science fiction genres. Stefan Ekman says that, "a \[regular\] map re-presents what is already there; a fictional map is often primary – to create the map means, largely, to create the world Brian ---
**Author:** ![digs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/digs/32/14889_2.png) [@digs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/digs)\ **Post date:** [August 13, 2022, 3:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/novels-with-maps-of-imaginary-places/969583/4 "2022-08-13T03:23:33Z")
If you really enjoy a book/series with interesting geography, the maps really help. Some of the later [Deryni](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deryni_novels) books (fun series by Katherine Kurtz) are more understandable if you see that “Oh, I get why the king is trying to play nice with that country, because they control the access to that northern bay for shipping.” Oh, who am I kidding… maps are cool. So any book with a map is automatically cooler. Heck, I’d include a hand-drawn map of Chicago in _The Time Traveler’s Wife…_ (and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off!) Hey, wait, didn’t _Devil In The White City_ have a map of old-time Chicago? ---
**Author:** ![Jophiel](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jophiel/32/66_2.png) [@Jophiel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jophiel)\ **Post date:** [August 13, 2022, 4:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/novels-with-maps-of-imaginary-places/969583/5 "2022-08-13T04:06:56Z")
Metro 2033 includes a [modified map](https://i.redd.it/x7c6i3c7k3s41.jpg) of the Moscow metro system which is helpful since nearly the entire novel takes place in said metro system. It’s not essential for reading the book but, if you want to get a sense of context for what connects to what and how to get from A to B (which is a major theme in the novel) then it’s useful. Googling around suggests 1885’s [King Solomon’s Mines](https://i.stack.imgur.com/h4Gul.png) or 1883’s [Treasure Island](https://i.stack.imgur.com/rw6Hd.jpg) as the first fictional novel to include a map. Robert E Howard drew a “[Map of the Hyborian Age](https://i.stack.imgur.com/WG6v0.jpg)” in 1932 to go along with Conan which might be closest to the traditional “modern” fantasy book map. ---
**Author:** ![susan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/susan/32/17537_2.png) [@susan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/susan)\ **Post date:** [August 13, 2022, 4:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/novels-with-maps-of-imaginary-places/969583/6 "2022-08-13T04:12:33Z")
The first genre I thought of was mysteries–maps, and sometimes blueprints or schematics of buildings, abandoned farmsteads, haunted chainsaw warehouses, and the like. ---
**Author:** ![engineer\_comp\_geek](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/engineer_comp_geek/32/504_2.png) [@engineer\_comp\_geek](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/engineer_comp_geek)\ **Post date:** [August 13, 2022, 4:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/novels-with-maps-of-imaginary-places/969583/7 "2022-08-13T04:32:39Z")
> [@Dr\_Paprika](#): > > Was LOTR first? Not even close. Dante’s Inferno from the 14th century includes a map of Hell. @N9IWP beat me to the link, but the Wikipedia page on Fantasy Cartography also lists the flying island of Laputa from Gulliver’s Travels and a map of the island in Treasure Island. > [@N9IWP](#): > > I know there is a map of Oz, but I couldn’t find it in the actual books The picture lists the Tik Tok of Oz as its source, so I don’t think it was published in the original books. > [@Dr\_Paprika](#): > > Are these ever useful? I personally find them interesting. ---
**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\ **Post date:** [August 13, 2022, 4:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/novels-with-maps-of-imaginary-places/969583/8 "2022-08-13T04:45:46Z")
There are books which only _describe_ weird maps (I suppose with the intent that the effect will be greater if left to the reader’s imagination), e.g., _Vellum_: > [@](#): > > The coastline of a greater world lay before my eyes. It was a world where Antarctica was only the tip of a much larger southern continent. It was a world where Greenland was an island in a river’s mouth, where Baffin Bay on one side and the Greenland Sea on the other stretched north, fused as an enormous estuary. Asia and the Americas were mere… promontories, headlands on a Hyperborean expanse, and the Arctic “River” that divided them had its source far north and off the edge of the map. > > To east and west the story was the same, a whole new unfamiliar terrain; the western seaboard of America extended up well past Alaska, north and west, while Antarctica continued round and down; the eastern coast of China curved round to a gulf the size of the Baltic where the Bering Strait should be, another massive “river” running north from here. An entirely different landmass jutted in from the east, out at the far edge of – I wasn’t even sure if I should call it the Pacific now – the Eastern Pacific, perhaps, the Western being, on this map, an entirely different body of water. I turned another page. > > Again the scale moved out and, on this map, the world I knew could have taken up no more than a sixteenth of the area shown. The northeast coastline of that Greater Antarctica curved up to meet the strange land in the east, which itself carried on to meet the coast that curved around and down from China; pincered by its own Gibraltar Strait formed by the tip of South America, the bump of Antarctica, this _Eastern Pacific_ was no more than a landlocked sea here, like a larger Mediterranean, dwarfed by the lands surrounding it on three sides. Hyperborea to the north, I thought, the Subantarctic to the south, and an Orient beyond the farthest Orient we’ve ever known. > > Another page, and another, and the world I knew was only a minuscule part of an impossibly vast landscape. ---
**Author:** ![nearwildheaven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/90db22/32.png) [@nearwildheaven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nearwildheaven)\ **Post date:** [August 13, 2022, 4:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/novels-with-maps-of-imaginary-places/969583/9 "2022-08-13T04:49:29Z")
James Michener’s “Space” had a map of the U.S., which included the fictional Midwestern state of Fremont. ---
**Author:** ![CaveMike](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cavemike/32/16379_2.png) [@CaveMike](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CaveMike)\ **Post date:** [August 13, 2022, 6:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/novels-with-maps-of-imaginary-places/969583/10 "2022-08-13T06:58:39Z")
> [@Dr\_Paprika](#): > > Are these ever useful? Maybe I am a map person, but the map is one of my favorite parts of a fantasy book. It’s a pictograph table of contents. “I wonder when they get to this caves in these mountains?” I have “An Atlas of Fantasy” which is just what it sounds like – a collection of famous fantasy maps. I used to like going through the maps of books I had never read, like Oz, and seeing their worlds. > **[An Atlas of Fantasy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Atlas_of_Fantasy)** > > An Atlas of Fantasy, compiled by Jeremiah Benjamin Post, was originally published in 1973 by Mirage Press and revised for a 1979 edition by Ballantine Books. The 1979 edition dropped twelve maps from the first edition and added fourteen new ones. It also included an introduction by Lester del Rey. > To remain of manageable size, the Atlas excludes advertising maps, cartograms, most disproportionate maps, and alternate history ("might have been") maps, focusing instead on imaginary lands derived fr... ---
**Author:** ![Moonrise](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/moonrise/32/14764_2.png) [@Moonrise](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Moonrise)\ **Post date:** [August 13, 2022, 9:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/novels-with-maps-of-imaginary-places/969583/11 "2022-08-13T09:28:33Z")
There’s a very evocative map in **William Hope Hodgson** ’s _[The Night Land](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Land)_ (1912). It is a very singular novel set a particularly haunting world. I would not hesitate to call it one the most remarkable world-building exercise in speculative fiction but it is marred by an impossibly stilted writing style. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [August 13, 2022, 9:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/novels-with-maps-of-imaginary-places/969583/12 "2022-08-13T09:31:59Z")
Terry Pratchett put out entire books of maps with gazetteers for Discworld, and various parts of it (Lancre, Ankh-Morpork, Death’s Domain). They are wonderful. ---
**Author:** ![eburacum45](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eburacum45/32/8690_2.png) [@eburacum45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eburacum45)\ **Post date:** [August 13, 2022, 10:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/novels-with-maps-of-imaginary-places/969583/13 "2022-08-13T10:00:32Z")
The Bronte siblings (Anne, Charlotte, Emily and Branwell) wrote and illustrated an imaginary history of an imaginary world; the Empire of Angria, Glass Town and Gondal. > **[Gondal (fictional country)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gondal_(fictional_country))** > > Gondal is an imaginary world or paracosm created by Emily Brontë and Anne Brontë that is found in their juvenilia. Gondal is an island in the North Pacific, just north of the island Gaaldine. It included at least four kingdoms: Gondal, Angora, Exina and Alcona. The earliest surviving reference comes from a diary entry in 1834. None of the prose fiction now survives but poetry still exists, mostly in the form of a manuscript donated to the British Museum in 1933; as do diary entries and scraps o... One wonders what else might have been written if the siblings had not all died young. ---
**Author:** ![Dinsdale](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/97f17d/32.png) [@Dinsdale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dinsdale)\ **Post date:** [August 13, 2022, 12:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/novels-with-maps-of-imaginary-places/969583/14 "2022-08-13T12:22:01Z")
Trollope included maps of Barsetshire in his 6 Barsetshire novels. Written in 1850s-60s. As opposed to the comedian in the OP, I find it useful to be able to see approximately how much further it is to Plumstead Episcopi than to St Ewolds, and where Framley is in comparison. I also found it interesting as the series expands the geography in question over subsequent books, so you can see where the action in one novel takes place compared to the action in a previous one. He describes how long it takes to get from some places to others by foot or horse, so seeing the visual representation gives me a richer sense of how near/far various things were back in mid 19th century England. ---
**Author:** ![snowthx](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/snowthx/32/10660_2.png) [@snowthx](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/snowthx)\ **Post date:** [August 13, 2022, 1:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/novels-with-maps-of-imaginary-places/969583/15 "2022-08-13T13:04:17Z")
_Game of Thrones_ has one. It’s tacked onto the wall in my daughter’s room. ---
**Author:** ![hogarth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hogarth/32/1773_2.png) [@hogarth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hogarth)\ **Post date:** [August 13, 2022, 2:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/novels-with-maps-of-imaginary-places/969583/16 "2022-08-13T14:06:35Z")
> [@Dinsdale](#): > > Trollope included maps of Barsetshire in his 6 Barsetshire novels. Written in 1850s-60s. I don’t remember seeing any maps in the illustrated copies I downloaded from Project Gutenberg, but maybe it’s just those particular editions. It looks like a map of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex was included in at least one edition of his novels. [![](https://victorianweb.org/art/illustration/macbeth-raeburn/2.jpg) ](https://victorianweb.org/art/illustration/macbeth-raeburn/2.jpg) ---
**Author:** ![Qadgop\_the\_Mercotan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/qadgop_the_mercotan/32/83_2.png) [@Qadgop\_the\_Mercotan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Qadgop_the_Mercotan)\ **Post date:** [August 13, 2022, 2:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/novels-with-maps-of-imaginary-places/969583/17 "2022-08-13T14:19:45Z")
Are they useful? For me they are. Fonstad’s “Atlas of Middle Earth” was key to my grokking of **The Silmarillion**. I had both books on my lap at the same time, to cross reference what was going on in Sil. Correlating those fine maps with the text/topic made the book 3 x as enjoyable and comprehensible to me. ---
**Author:** ![Elmer\_J.Fudd](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/elmer_j.fudd/32/1211_2.png) [@Elmer\_J.Fudd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elmer_J.Fudd)\ **Post date:** [August 13, 2022, 2:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/novels-with-maps-of-imaginary-places/969583/18 "2022-08-13T14:21:46Z")
In general, I like to see a map at the beginning of a novel, just because I like maps in general. But I find it annoying when they are essential to following the story and reading is constantly interrupted by necessary revisits to the end papers to refer to a map. I loved Jack Chalker’s _Well World_ books but my main memory from reading them was the constant interruptions to study maps like this… [![](http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200309/074347153901.jpg) ](http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200309/074347153901.jpg) ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [August 13, 2022, 2:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/novels-with-maps-of-imaginary-places/969583/19 "2022-08-13T14:31:45Z")
> [@Elmer\_J.Fudd](#): > > But I find it annoying when they are essential to following the story and reading is constantly interrupted by necessary revisits to the end papers to refer to a map. It’s particularly hard to refer to a map while reading an e-book. ---
**Author:** ![Elmer\_J.Fudd](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/elmer_j.fudd/32/1211_2.png) [@Elmer\_J.Fudd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elmer_J.Fudd)\ **Post date:** [August 13, 2022, 2:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/novels-with-maps-of-imaginary-places/969583/20 "2022-08-13T14:33:34Z")
I hadn’t thought of that. That would be a nightmare. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/novels-with-maps-of-imaginary-places/969583.md?page=2)