Thirsty…

Another one from last year’s Pica pica challenge, this time the word was “gulps”. Not much to say about it, except that I am at least semi-fond of it…

A sonnet

In last year’s Pica pica challenge, one of the words was “heartquake”. It felt natural to write a sonnet on the topic. I dedicate it to Baron Faucon de la Santé, and of course to Sir Patrick.

Urras and Anarres, an addendum

I realised that using the script I had written to make the maps of Tau Ceti, it would be a simple matter to make an animation giving the illusion of a rotating planet. The orthographic azimuthal projection approximates this very well, and once one has access to the equirectangular map, there is nothing special about the two particular hemispheres used in the original maps — any meridian can be used as the centre meridian of the projection!

Edit: I have now added an animation of Gethen as well.

Poetry response to Skyman

Having read Skyman’s brilliant piece on borders, and seeing that most of the stuff published recently was his, I felt compelled to do something about that. Thus, this poem, which was written in a few hours this afternoon, and then not edited, so there are parts that I don’t really like, and I may go back and change these later. Anyway, here is a poem about borders:

Ursula K. Le Guin’s Tau Ceti, a planetary survey

Warning: Wall of Text!
This was supposed to be a post about some maps I’ve drawn, but it turned into a minor essay (featuring fifteen footnotes and two poems). This regularly happens when I set about describing my work (this paragraph is no exception). I am terrible at leaving unimportant details out of the picture. Since the readership of this blog is very limited, however, I have decided that it is all right this way. I wrote it mostly for myself anyway. If you don’t want to read about my love for maps, and for the works of Ursula K. Le Guin, feel free to jump to the maps, or got to Get Stuff where you will find more versions. (I also made some animations of the planets revolving which can be found in a follow-up post.) If, on the other hand, you are interested in the background to and process involved in the making of the maps, you are more than welcome to continue reading.

Fan-cartography

I’ve always loved maps.

I remember, that when I first discovered fantasy (through The Hobbit, as it were), for many years I held the opinion, that a map was a sure sign of a good novel. If there were ample appendices or a word-list for a made up foreign tongue, all the better! I have since realised that a map is not a sure sign that a book is worth my time, and that not all the appendices in the world could save a bad book from being bad read — I remember one fantasy heptology in particular, whose appendices were beyond most in ambition, but whose story soon dwindled from acceptable to dull, and in the end turned offensively stupid. But I still hold, that a mediocre book can be saved by an inspired map, and that a good map always makes a good book more memorable.

After The Hobbit, I read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (great appendices), Eddings (mediocre, but good maps) and the Earthsea trilogy by Le Guin (excellent and with excellent maps [0]). At some point I discovered Science Fiction, and started to prefer it to Fantasy, even though science fiction novels seem to be utterly devoid of maps. Until I discovered The Dispossessed. Science fiction, by an author I knew I liked, from having read The Word for World is Forest and the Earthsea books — with a map!

Finishes

My dear friend Dr Grijndvar recently shared a thoughtful piece on his view on death, exemplified by a touching account of his relationship with his paternal grandmother.

Inspired by this, I thought I would take his advice of thinking of those dead and gone, and share a short piece of poetry that I wrote as a part of the “word-challenge” I was engaged in with Pica pica this spring. The word under scrutiny this time was “finsihes,” and the result (at long last) was the short piece below. It may not be entirely obvious, but each verse relates to someone dead and missed in my life.

Boiling water in Oxford

Last year I visited Oxford for work for a total of about a month. This week actually marks the one year anniversary of the first of the three visits. Time flies.