fantasy maps –

The Lascar’s Dagger: maps

Glenda Larke — Sun, 26 Jan 2014 20:21:00 +0000

This is a look at one of the preliminary versions of the maps for The Lascar’s Dagger, done — as usual — by Perdita Phillips, artist. (Take a look at her website here.)

To see the final expanded versions, you’ll have to buy the book…

Coming out March 15th 2014

Ready for pre-order!

Galaxy books.com.au (Australia)

Barnes & Noble (US)

Waterstones (UK)

Amazon.com (US)

Amazon.co.uk (UK

Amazon.com.au (Australia: ebook only)

Book depository (worldwide)

Fantasy Maps

Glenda Larke — Sat, 13 Jul 2013 19:04:00 +0000

Dr Perdita Phillips, who is a professional artist, pointed my way to the book below, which refers to one of my fantasy worlds, and the maps that Perdy did for the Isles of Glory trilogy. (She does all my maps.)

The book is:

Here Be Dragons

by Stefan Ekman

The back blurb says he “provides in-depth discussions of fantasy maps and how to read them” and “shows how fantasy settings deserve serious attention from both readers and critics”.

The Isles of Glory map is reproduced in his book as an example of something which is not all that common in fantasy mapmaking. In most fantasy books with maps, there is no unknown world to discover beyond the edges of the map. Sometimes there is only water; at other times the secondary world beyond the edges of the map is simply unknown and unexplored. What Ekman found interesting about the Isles of Glory is that the world beyond the Isles is actually the known world, while the Isles are the newly discovered world. The map makes this quite clear.

Ekman is intrigued by the idea that “Known and unknown are turned around here, the well-known residing off the map. Wherever the political, financial, and cultural centres are to be found in this secondary world, they belong in the regions beyond the map’s margin – the Isles of Glory, in the middle of the map, are part of the world’s periphery.”

It’s an interesting book, and an easy read. It’s also loaded with lots of examples. How common is it for fantasy novels to contain at least one map? Of the 200 novels in his sample, 34% contained one or more maps, the incidence being more than double that number if the world portrayed was not the one of the writer and reader, but of a world that we would not recognise — what he calls a secondary world.

The book is published by Wesleyan University Press ISBN 978-0-8195-7323-0

And here’s today’s totally unrelated photos, from the “primary world”:

Where our daily walk took us on Friday

The view from our front windows this morning

Now here’s a map for you…from The Last Stormlord

Glenda Larke — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 08:35:00 +0000

Just to tantalize while you wait for the book to hit the shops in Oz…

THE QUARTERN

Drawn by my niece (a professional artist, Dr Perdita Phillips.)

Working

Glenda Larke — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 20:46:00 +0000

Yeah, I might be dreaming of Tioman, but I am working. On a Sunday. Reading. Can reading a novel be work? Yep, when you’ve already read it umpteen times over the past few months. Hell, when you wrote the danged thing!

I am reading both book 1 and 2 again, before book 2 goes to copy edit, because editors have suggested a few brilliant improvements to make to the latter.

The trouble is this: when you add a line on page 22, it has this horrible habit of making nonsense of something on p44. So you alter that, only to find that now something on p65 seems repetitive. So you alter that. But then, that gives the plot a hiccup, if not real indigestion…and so it goes on. Which of course is why you sometimes scratch your head over something in the books you read, thinking to yourself, how the heck could the writer have written that twice and not noticed? Or whatever.

So I am reading book 1 (which is not to be altered as it is going or has gone to the printers already) to make sure that something I do in book 2’s tweaking doesn’t make nonsense of something in book 1. Got it?

Now all non-writers are still scratching their heads, still wondering why I have to re-read. How can an author possibly forget something they wrote if it is a part important enough to affect the plot? Believe me, they can. And do.

The cartography is to tantalize…the talented Perdy Phillips has produced a humdinger of a map, a tiny portion seen above, and it has gone to the design team at Harper Collins. Wow. I feel publication is really getting close.