Not the territory

[mrissa]

I know that there are some people out there who object strenuously to maps in fantasy novels. If you're among them, can you explain to me why? and whether it's an inherent objection or just an objection to things that are correlated but not causal?

Also -- and again, this is for people who object to maps in fantasy novels, so if you don't so object, don't worry about it unless you feel you have something particularly clarifying to say -- do you just dislike having them in the book, or do you feel that the author shouldn't make them at all?

Comments

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I object strenuously, but I do tend to roll my eyes upon seeing one. Mostly because they seem unnecessary--I can only think of one book where I flipped back to check out the map, and that wasn't a fantasy at all.

(I may also have used it in the George R.R. Martin books. Do those have maps? So possibly one and a half. I definitely do use the family info in the backs. But those are kind of a special case all around.)

I think it's maybe part that they hint towards, "I am writing this book about my roleplaying game!" and maybe part the feeling that if I need a map to follow the book, the author probably wasn't concerned about the things that I'm most likely to be concerned about. I realize this is biased and unfair of me, but there it is.

This is a just-dislike-them-in-books vote. If the book makes me happy, I couldn't care less if the author has, back home, a life-sized map made out of Silly String.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

"I bought a small Pacific Island and landscaped it to be a model of my fantasy nation at one-tenth size."

[dancinghorse.livejournal.com]

As an author who is forced by her editors (from every house) to put maps in whether I want to or not "because readers want them," all I can say is...

DON'T BLAME ME.

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

I'm probably not so much your target audience here but my objection to maps is quite simple: I forget about them. If I'm really enjoying reading a book, I get to the point that a) I"m not reading and b)it's not a book to me, and thus, does not have fronts or backs in which to have maps. If you make me stop reading to find the maps, I know darn well I'm reading, which is just going to get me annoyed with the author. So I want the book to stand on its own and explain to me where the characters are going without making it necessary that I stop reading and look at the map everytime they hit the road. It's a bonus, not a necessity!

[zalena.livejournal.com]

I like maps except in the following situations:

* it doesn't correlate with the author's descriptions. (The Prydain maps are maddeningly abstract.)

* it's geographically improbable. (I know this is a little nit-picky, but it drives me a little batty.)

I think it kind of falls in the same category as illustrations or cover art. If the map doesn't mesh with your picture of the place, it can cause some cognitive dissonance.

[merriehaskell.livejournal.com]

Exactly what zalena said. Sometimes the map is so impossible it makes me cringe.

[aranel.livejournal.com]

I am actually in favor of novels that include maps, because I enjoy maps as aesthetic objects. I prefer, however, that the story doesn't leave out bits of information such that the map becomes necessary for a reader to have a decent grasp on what is going on. Whatever knowledge of the geography is necessary, rather than edifying or amusing, should be deducible from the text of the book. Maps, like glossaries, extended lists of dramatis personae, appendices, &c., should be supplementary items for the obsessive fans of your book to pore over, not things they keep having to flip to in order to make sense of the story.

[columbina.livejournal.com]

Beat me to my reply in its entirety, both the part about not being dependent on them and about appreciation of the maps for their own aesthetics. (Tolkien's maps are legendarily gorgeous, for example.)

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Hold this thought; I have an answer, but it will not fit in this margin if I'm to be home for dinner.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Okay, Fermat.

[david-de-beer.livejournal.com]

I'm much too lazy to ever look at a map in a fantasy novel. If I can't follow the story in the narrative, a map is only going to confuse me more. Sort of like real life - I have a wondrous talent for getting lost anywhere. Luckily, I have an even more wondrous talent for un-losing myself from anywhere, anytime. I blame it on starting so many fantasy series in the middle rather than the beginning, totally f...k-up my spatial sense.

For me - I don't really care.
In general, I think it's better to have them than not. Many readers do seem to enjoy having the maps, to trace the epic journey of let's-save-the-world!. And usually those who don't care about maps, will just ignore it anyways.
Now, from a writer's pov, I'd say it's probably important to have a map -the author is the dead last person who should get confused about where the characters are.
This could be an interesting aspect to get a vote on somewhere - to map or not to map? I wasn't actually aware that so many people objected to their presence.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

If I recall correctly, one of the people on this friendslist has gotten really, really virulent anti-map responses to a map in his first novel. Before that, I had no idea, either. They were pretty neutral for me, except for the ones that were badly done, and even those couldn't ruin a wonderful novel for me.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

I realize you are asking the other side of the question, but I love maps in books. Of course, I grew up around the granddaddy of all, Middle Earth. I had a map of Middle Earth on the roof over my bed (I slept on the top bunk, so it was close), with a chart of the US Presidents on the wall. This may explain much about me.

Now that I think of it, there was a map, albeit a simple one, in the very first fantasy book I can recall reading: My Father's Dragon, which I read in 1st grade.

That having been said, I don't like maps that are extraneous to the action or are just there to look like LoTR. If the novel is set in Hereville and no one really goes anywhere, don't bother. But if there's a major trek and/or a need to visually explain why the characters went this way and not the other, then a map helps out a lot.

Of course, that's assuming the writer is staying true to geography and spacial concerns. This is not always the case.

[genevra.livejournal.com]

I like maps! I'm a visual person, so a picture of the land helps me. One series in particular is actually helped by having the maps - Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman series. Yes, she does a great job of telling you about the land and the terrain without you needing to look at the maps. But when the main character talks about making changes on her maps and details that aren't on her maps, I want to see what she's talking about!

[athenais.livejournal.com]

They seem superfluous to me. I never consult them. Even the Majipoor books with their two or three or four maps don't really seem necessary to me.

Love maps

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

I love maps in fantasy novels. I like being able to look at one and *see* where the characters are in relation to where they've been and where they are going. Of course, if they are not going anywhere it doesn't matter.

[voidmonster.livejournal.com]

I never paid a whole lot of attention to the maps in the books I've read that've had them. At the time it made me feel like 'ooh, thought went into this!'

Now that I'm older and have spent some time writing I realize exactly how worthless 'thought went into this' is if the thoughts weren't very good.

I haven't read anything with a map in it for ages. I think I'd put it back on the shelf if it did. What a map says to me is "oh, I'm so very proud of my worldbuilding" -- novels aren't good places for exercises in worldbuilding. Games are much better suited.

All that said, when I make my own stuff I put pretty obsessive levels of detail into that sort of stuff and then I cut out all the parts where the joins in the masonry show. No matter how pretty my maps are, I would never include them. I also wouldn't include my onomasticon, or my photographic research, or my scribbled diagrams of Mayan sentences or the little doodles I do to understand how a manufactured item that gets used for holding people's hair back works.

In short, I am not more impressed by food if the cook shows me the dirty dishes.

[rosefox]

novels aren't good places for exercises in worldbuilding

Um. Wouldn't this kind of do away with pretty much the entirety of F&SF?

[mamapduck.livejournal.com]

Pseudo-related: I love maps, but loathe pictures of characters.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Blerg, yes!

I am occasionally happily surprised by a cover or interior illustrations that depict people. But it's because I expect to so thoroughly loathe them.

As I am typing this, I start to wonder whether I have chosen the titles of several of my books to give a good solid start on what non-human thing to show. Fortress of Thorns, to start with....

[cissa.livejournal.com]

I tend to like maps. More if they're pretty- which for me means a hand-drawn look and not 3D modeling- and they do need to match the text. I don't find them necessary- meaning that if I need to keep checking the map to make sense of the narrative, I do not consider that a good thing- but I tend to either like them or find them neutral but innocuous.

I do think that the author having a map tends to be a good thing, since s/he is them less likely to make navigational mistakes. I'm sure I don't catch all of these, but I do catch some, and it's annoying.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

For me, a novel may or may not want to have a map, depending on its content. The Chalion novels, for instance, want to have maps, because they have a lot of plot-related travel and a very definite sense of place. (I deliberately picked these because as published they don't have maps.) To continue picking on Bujold, the Vorkosigan novels don't need maps, and if there were maps, I would kinda shrug and flip past them.

Maps that are geographically implausible make me want to stab someone with a fork, and this is more so if the story wanted a map. It kicks me out of the sub-creation.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

At least one of the Vorkosigan novels has a map-- it's a set of circles labeled 'Barrayar' and 'Beta' and such, connected by straight lines. Not terribly useful for me, but I am not a geography person.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I'm generally in favor of maps. I look at maps of the real world to figure out how things relate to each other, and find it frustrating if I can't do that in a fantasy world.

Sometimes maps have bad effects -- like making it obvious how geologically screwy the landscape is. Sometimes the maps are bad maps. These are both good, but I don't blame the maps for the first. For the second, sometimes no maps are better than bad maps.

[jenfullmoon.livejournal.com]

I think maps are a good idea. Even if it really sucks to try to read them in e-book.

[wild-patience.livejournal.com]

I don't like maps in books, at least at the beginning, because it's just more pages to turn before you get to the story. (My husband, on the other hand, loves maps in books.) I wouldn't mind if they were at the end as a sort of appendix. Same with lists of characters and places -- they annoy me when they're at the beginning.

I also don't like prologues, but that's because too often they're stuffy and seem so unrelated to the main story that they are much more likely to make me put the book down than to keep reading it.

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

When there is a map, I refer to it constantly.

But-- yes, it's a 'things that are correlated' objection; a book with a map in it has a strong tendency to be a book with a lot of walking in it; I tend not to like books with lots of walking in them.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That's interesting, because the book I'm writing right now, that spurred me to ask this question, has one chapter of travel, and then the ending, where all of them who lived ran away and lived happily ever after had further difficulties in Canada the Liro Empire.

(My universal ending is, "And then all of them who lived ran away and lived happily ever after in Canada." When it isn't, "And then they found five bucks.")

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

It depends on the story. Most of the fantasies I like are stories where maps are irrelevent. Putting the map in the book suggests the map is important to the story, that the geography *matters*. The problem isn't the map itself, nor the author using it as a private reference to make sure all the characters are on the same side of the river when they confront each other. But if the map is in published in the book, it should say something other than, "I know how to draw neat maps." Kay's map showing Lower Corte and the surrounding territories felt like a map that belonged in that book.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

A recent example of a book that I liked a lot more with a map than I would have without it was sartorias' Inda. The novel deals with the navies of several countries which are never shown geographically, and trying to figure out the strategic situation without the map would have been a gigantic headache.

[jim0052.livejournal.com]

To me, a map says, "Reading this book will be a chore. The author has not done the work of describing setting properly and you will be required to pick up the slack by constantly interrupting your enjoyment of the story to consult and, in too many instances, struggle to make sense of the appended cartography." Consequently, to me a map also says: "Avoid this book."

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

I kind of agree with this. If I have to refer back to the map, it makes me aware that I am Reading A Book, instead of being involved with the story or the characters. If I see an appended map, it makes me think I'm going to need it.

And inline diagram (or part of a map) is much less likely to annoy me. I think it's the lack of page-flipping. It still knocks me out of the immersion, but not as badly as having to flip to the back of the book.

[lexiphanic.livejournal.com]

I had no idea maps in books caused such strong opinions! I had always assumed that most maps were included at the behest of a publisher as much as because the author wanted one. Personally, I like maps. Like genevra, I am a visually oriented person, and I can make sense of a map much faster than I can puzzle out spatial relationships from text. I think that the text should definitely be able to describe what's happening and where the action is without reference to a map, but for me a map is sort of background information that puts the whole thing in context and makes it easier to read.

I do think maps should not be the first thing in the book, as they tend to divulge a lot of the story before it gets going. I like the idea of them being in an appendix, where I can choose to go look at them, but they are not the first thing I see. When there is a map, I tend to study it to get the lay of the land before I get too far into the book, and sometimes I think that causes problems, especially if the main character does not have knowledge of the map in question at the beginning of the book.

I definitely agree that maps should only be included if they are relevant to the story, and really only if the visual format is more effective than the written one. I disagree that any setting/land can be adequately described by words alone, as words create different pictures for different people, and if an author wants to create the same picture for many people then a picture is often required. This may not be a problem; authors may not care if they create the same picture for many readers, in which case the map should definitely be left out. Above all, the map should *agree* with the text in every detail, or it's maddening and becomes an exercise in finding the errors more than reading the story.

I do giggle and lose respect for an author when a map is too obviously derivative of some real place. "Oh, here are the English, the French, the Germans and the Japanese, and they all live on Madagascar!" As DDB says, bad maps are not better than no maps.

Maps and Modality

[jymdyer.livejournal.com]

=v= People tend towards their best communications modality, and the top two are visual and verbal. People whose job is communications usually strive to reach both of these groups. So, lotsa dialogue for the verbals and maps and illos for the visuals.

Being of the visual persuasion myself, I love maps in fantasy novels. Heck, for regular novels I have been known to pull out an Atlas and follow along. I don't understand why anyone would oppose them; they could just ignore them. (I can understand why one would oppose illustrations, particularly those of the hack-for-hire nature that don't measure up to the pictures in your own head.)

P.S.: Another major modality is kinesthetic, so put a velvet cover on that book!

Re: Maps and Modality

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

This is really interesting, because I would have approached it the opposite way: I would have gone assuming that a visual person could fairly easily generate a (visual) map in their head, so that the ones in the book were more often for the non-visual person, who had to have somebody else do it in order to be able to work with it in their imagination.