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 my love 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.
Breaking News! New and improved versions of the maps available here!
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!
I would lie if I told you I immediately fell in love with The Dispossessed, however. I was quite young when I read it, probably around ten, too young for the mature themes to resonate with me. I struggled with it. I wanted to love it. The main character was a scientist, after all, and it had a map(!)! Still it took me two attempts, and more than two years to get through it. Perhaps because I read it so slowly, I never realised how much it affected me. At least I think it affected me; many years later, when I re-read it in English, I recognised too many of my own values in the book for it to be a coincidence. I’ve never managed to work out why I turned into a socialist, but I’m fairly sure that The Dispossessed pushed me toward anarchism (which is, of course, a kind of socialism). It is now one of my favourite books, not mainly because of its political content (though I hold that in highest esteem), but because of its profound intellectual honesty and literary merit [1]. It is also, I think, the book I’ve most often recommended others to read.
So, naturally, when a friend of mine said that he was in the works of getting a new edition published in Swedish, I was overjoyed. Also to be included, we hope, is The Day Before the Revolution, which has been out of print in Sweden even longer than The Dispossessed. I further suggested that we should try to include new maps. Not because we dislike the old ones, but precisely because we (or I, at least) love them: the maps also deserve an honest translation, not just the change of a few labels.
I never assumed (and I still don’t) that I would draw the new maps, that honour will hopefully go to someone whose artistic talents are larger in relation to their engineering mindset. The engineer in me, however, wanted eagerly to get to work with the problem for two reasons: firstly, I was very curious to see what the familiar hemispheres would look like as a more conventional map; second, there is a “bug” in the map of Anarres where the two hemispheres don’t line up, which I hoped to fix. A comparison between the original and my versions can be found below.
Projections
Being a programmer rather than an artist, I set about writing a script in Python for going from azimuthal (two round hemispheres) to cylindrical map coordinates and back [2]. Here a choice had to be made, or rather an assumption:
What map projection had been used in making the original maps? There are several to choose from, and I had no way of knowing which one (if any) Le Guin had had in mind (or so I thought).
My first idea was to implement the crudest of them all, the orthographic projection, which is equivalent to the points on surface of the half-sphere being projected to the closest points on a plane bisecting it. It is the equivalence of what one would see if looking at a planet from a very long distance [3]. This was not only very easy to implement, but also seemed to fit the setting: this would be the view the Ekumen ships would see when approaching the planet. Unfortunately, as a map this projection is quite useless, and the results for the rectangular maps look less than convincing (see image below!). Therefore, I looked for alternatives, finding a couple of options. In the end I settled for the Lambert equal-area, equidistant, and stereographic azimuthal projections.
These were trickier to implement, mostly owing to the fact that I tried to be clever rather than straight-forward when writing the code [4]. For a short while I actually gave up, deciding that orthographic was probably the most appropriate anyway, but then, I rediscovered Le Guin’s original sketches of the planet Gethen (or “Winter”). The lines denoting the polar areas unambiguously told me, that at least whereas Gethen was concerned, orthographic was wrong: In the orthographic projection, all lines of constant latitude (or “parallels”) are parallel to the equator, but the polar regions on the map of Gethen were bent! This insight gave me the push I needed to get the thing right [2].
Rationalising aesthetic choices
Which projection you assume that the original maps were based on, makes a small but noticeable difference in the resulting rectangular map, as can be seen in the comparison above. Had I implemented but one of them, I might have been content, but since now I had more than one I had to chose between them.
It may be argued, that the choice should be made purely on aesthetic grounds, or that the difference between the projections is so small, that even if I were to pick the “wrong” one, the resulting rectangular map would be close enough (whatever that means). This may all be true, but it would not be honest, in my opinion. It would not be taking the task seriously. I would like to compare it to translating a poem, say Wilfred Owen‘s “Dulce et Decorum est”. Any translation is fundamentally, in the words of Gadamer [5], an interpretation, and therefore a highlighting. When translating Owen’s poem, the translator has to make a lot of tough choices. The equivalent of choosing the projection on purely aesthetic grounds, would perhaps be to give precedence to the meter and rhyme of the poem over other considerations. But “Dulce et Decorum est” is a very passionate account of the horrors and war (and of jingoism), and any translator that did not attempt to find words in Swedish with similar force would be doing the poem (and Owen) wrong. It would not be an honest attempt at translation. Similarly, by selecting a particular projection as the one I believe in, I make an implicit assumption of the intent of Le Guin, and (perhaps more importantly) of the fictional map-makers. Since I want to make an honest attempt, I have to make a choice which I can answer for: a choice that takes both reason and aesthetics into account.
Fortunately, aesthetics and plausibility converged this once [6]. Once more turning to the map of Gethen, it was evident that the polar regions were distorted terribly by the stereographic projection, which coincided with my impression that the continents looked a little bit bloated in this version. This left the equidistant and Lambert equal-area projections. As can bee seen in the comparison above, Lambert and stereographic are the farthest apart, whereas Lambert and equidistant are very close to one-another.
In the process, I drew several versions of the twin planets, all of which can be downloaded under Get Stuff [7]. In the end, however, I wanted only one version of each planet, and eventually I managed to make a choice which I was happy with. First, however, let me give you a brief insight into the teleogenetic processes my mind typically cannot avoid:
The map of Anarres has no borders, but it has eight “directions” or regions: east, west, setting and rising, each with a north and south variety. This seems to resonate with the equidistant azimuthal projection, which places emphasis on direction and distances. The UN uses it in its flag, but with only one centre. Used for the two hemispheres, like in the book, puts an even stronger emphasis on unity in my view: there are two centres, two sides, but they are equal parts of one whole. The emphasis on distances further place the focus on the global rather than the local, and the preservation of (certain) angles makes it useful for long way communications and navigation. This all makes sense for Anarres.
The Lambert equal-area projection, on the other hand, places focus on area, which is useful for statistics and such. It compares regions, distorting distances and directions, thus emphasising the multitude of local conditions rather than the global whole. Encouraging envy, and the idea of the Other. Encouraging competition, rather than cooperation: “Are They better than Us?” With its focus on national land area and territory, this projection makes sense from a Urrasti perspective.
I am, of course, putting too much meaning into this choice, and other interpretations are possible, but I thought it fitting that the practical and political break between Anarres and Urras should be reflected in the construction of the maps as well. Finally I decided that the maps were likely constructed and drawn on Anarres, and therefore used equidistant projection for both.
Which finally brings us to…
The maps
Here are, finally, the maps. As mentioned above, there are alternative versions, available under Get Stuff, but these are my “official” interpretations. I am mostly happy with them, though if I ever draw these or other maps again, I think I will do a better job of it [8]. I am, for instance, very curious to see if I can make the mountains more interesting.
There are a few peculiarities, exaggerations that were part of my “highlighting.” Most notably, I am rather more fond of crinkly coasts than Le Guin [9]. Also, on two occasions I have happened to add “fictitious entries” — a common form of “copyright trap”, though these were not intended as such. The Swedish language versions of the maps have been updated where I deemed the previous mapmaker had made an error in the translation. Details on these alterations are given below.
Anarres
The most notable change in Anarres is the “bug fix” mentioned to above, that the East-West hemisphere didn’t quite line up with the Rising-Setting hemisphere. This was accomplished by rotating the Northern portion of the Rising-Setting hemisphere, while keeping the southern portion fixed. This was the largest liberty I took with the map, and I hope it was wasn’t inappropriate.
This aside, in my map I have made Drum Mountain and Round Valley stand out more, and I happened to dig a river were there previously was none. At least I think I did. On the original map, at least in the editions I own, there is a scribble under the text Peace-and-Plenty, that I somehow interpreted as a river when sketching my map. Rather than removing it, I decided to keep it. Why, after all, shouldn’t there be a river there, I thought [10].
I must say, by the way, that I really like the way Anarres has been divided into eight regions. It hadn’t occurred to me before I embarked on this project.
Urras
Though I enjoyed getting to know both planets closer, to my surprise, the map I most enjoyed translating was not Anarres but Urras. When drawing Urras, it struck me what a marvellously political statement it is.
What strikes me most when comparing the map of Urras, with the map of Anarres, is the borders. On Anarres there are none, and on Urras they’re everywhere. Even though only three nations are ever mentioned in the novel, from the map it is evident that Urras is still far away from evolving beyond the shackles of nation states. To me, the borders on Urras make a profound political statement, one that I didn’t recognise until I drew them myself: The borders are definitely human in origin rather than natural. It is not that the borders are often drawn counter to evident geographical features that make them so eerily artificial, but rather that they are sometimes drawn along rivers etc., and sometimes not. The borders illustrate with inspiring clarity the undignified arbitrariness of borders [11]. To highlight this, I gave the borders a red tint.
The only addition I have happened to make to Urras, was that I accidentally founded a city (there was a spot of dirt or something on the map there). As with the river on Anarres, I decided to let it be, at least in the rectangular version of the map. It wouldn’t seem fair to evict any of the fictitious inhabitants. Since I don’t know the name of the city, however, I decided against including it in the azimuthal projection. This is because this version is intended to be in black and white, and then the city would look like a misprint (which it probably was, originally). The alternative would be to name it, but it feels overly presumptuous to claim that right. If Le Guin would tell me the name of the city, however, I would be be very happy to include it (though not, I’m sure, as happy as the inhabitants)!
To conclude
To Learn, to Create, to Tell.
I always seem to come back to that: Learn, create, tell. It’s not a bad motto.
I appreciated very much returning to Tau Ceti as a cartographer. I learnt new things about maps, about cartography and about The Dispossessed. First in researching the topic, then in when implementing, and finally when reflecting on it all in the writing of this text. True journey is return, and it seems the telling closes the circle. But the circle never quite closes, for a true journey — true reflection — changes the traveller, and the world is a different place afterwards.
For the sake of completeness, let me return to the beginning; to before the maps, to my first piece of “fan-writing.” Here is a song, which I imagined was one of many songs written by the Odonian movement. It is a song about the breaking-up from Urras, and the uncertain hope promised by Anarres. It is also in Swedish — please see that as an invitation to make a translation of your own!
“Ammaresti,” eller “Uppbrott från Urras” [14]
I.
Vi bröt upp från slaveriet,
från en värld av överflöd,
och hälsar dig nu, Frihet!
i ett land av svält och nöd.
Propertarianen skrattar —
säger “Detta blir er död!”
Hen vill ännu inte medge:
Ur gemenskap får vi stöd.
Ur gemenskap får vi stöd.Syster, broder,
kamrat och älskade vän!
Vi har väntat länge, men
nu skymtar gryningen.
Nu väntar friheten.II.
Vi bröt upp från slaveriet,
från en värld av våld och död:
under piskan från profiten
fick vi slåss för var bit bröd.
Vi marscherade mot segern;
av vårt blod blev stigen röd.
Kanske får vi svåra år, men
ur gemenskap får vi stöd.
Ur gemenskap får vi stöd.Syster, broder,
kamrat och älskade vän!
Vi har kämpat länge, men
nu strålar solen igen.
Nu väntar friheten.III.
Vi bröt upp från slaveriet,
från en värld av överflöd,
där det alla borde delat
blev till skit, men ej till bröd.
Utan packning ska vi vandra,
men i hjärtat finns en glöd.
Vi behöver blott varandra:
Ur gemenskap får vi stöd.
Ur gemenskap får vi stöd.Syster, broder,
kamrat och älskade vän!
Vi har vandrat länge, men
nu grönskar livet igen.
Nu väntar friheten.Nu väntar friheten.
* * *
Footnotes:
[0]: Le Guin has also written what is likely the ultimate book for those who share my love for the “extra curricular”: Always coming home. It is not a gem of a book, but a whole treasure chest. It is anthropological science fiction at its best, and the gorgeous illustration and maps aside, almost half of it as appendices, including songs (with score!), recipes and (joy of joys!) a dictionary for the language of the Kesh, the tribe which is the topic of most of the book. The original edition even came with a cassette with recordings of the songs. (The newer editions lack this, but they can be ordered separately over the internet.) Unfortunately it was never translated into Swedish, but there is a Danish edition. I lack the words to sufficiently describe the happiness I feel just at the fact that this book exists — that someone took the time to compile it — so I think I’ll stop.
[1]: The subtitle to The Dispossessed is “An ambiguous utopia”. It is precisely that. It never pretends to be a blue print, it always asks the reader to think for theirself, and most importantly: it does this without compromising the story. The story, structure and themes of the text always resonate beautifully, enhancing the work, rather than detracting from any part of it.
[2]: The code can be found here: It is free software, licensed under GPL 3.0 and can of course be be used for any maps, not just those from Le Guin’s books.
[3]: Actually infinitely far away, but a couple of hundred planetary radii is probably enough.
[4]: The first rule of optimisation is “Don’t!” It deserves being said again: [4].
[5]: Hans-Georg Gadamer: “Language as the medium of hermeneutical experience,” in Truth and Method
[6]: This was fortunate, since I hate making choices with a pathological passion…
[7]: I provide my renditions of the maps under CC:By-NC-SA-4.0 International, with the obvious addendum that Ursula K. Le Guin is understood as the sole copyright holder of the original maps. She should therefore be included in the attribution as the original creator.
[8]: Perhaps a map of the aforementioned planet Gethen, since Swedish versions of The Left Hand of Darkness lack a map. Very likely I will not, however, because the map by Milan Dubnicky is so fantastically gorgeous (even after an un-edited transformation to rectangular), that any version I could ever hope to produce would fall pathetically short. I sincerely hope any future Swedish edition will be able to secure the rights for reprinting that instead!
[9]: No doubt owing to my Norwegian heritage — I had near endless fun doing the all little fiddly bits in fjords!
[10]: An interesting side note is that in the Swedish version of Urras, there is a very prominent river in Thu, which is not present in the original map. I did not include it in my translation.
[11]:To quote my dear friend Dr Grijndvar [12]:
“Borders are something like an affront to human dignity.”
I don’t know, but I suspect that Le Guin may have had something similar in mind
when drawing Urras.
[12]: Quoting someone else… [13]
[13]: I’m an academic; can you tell?
[14]: The melody I imagine is similar to “Svarta Tupp/Los dos Gallos”, a song about the opposition to fascism in Franco’s Spain. Don’t feel limited by this, however — make up your own melody if you prefer!
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