Four years. That’s how long I’ve been working on these maps. My first “commit” to the git-repository that set me on this journey, a tool for calculating and performing projections from one projection to another, was on December 31st 2012 [0], but I remember that I started working on the code in October or November. Any way — Four years! A lot can happen in four years. I’ve changed jobs twice, and am now working with maps as part of my work as a software developer. This is not something that I would have expected, but it is welcome, and I really do feel that what I’ve learned by mapping Tau Ceti has helped me with my work. Thinking about the balance of aesthetics and information content, the merits and drawbacks of different projections — these are important considerations for what I do today. I’m still an amateur in the field, but an amateur with some confidence built from experience, and who knows something of what questions to ask, even if I don’t have the answers. Four years is also the time that Dr Grijndvar has been away on an extended expedition across the Atlantic, but he returned safe and sound yesterday — welcome home, dear friend!
So what have I learnt, and what have I done all this time? Before getting to that, I would like to start with my usual advice to the reader, that this text is very long and mostly written for my own sake: should you wish to skip directly to the maps, then please do so – no hard feelings! I have also compiled a list of the tools I have used at the end of this article, which may be of interest to some – all are free (as in free speech) and open source, and available for anyone to download and use.
A quick recap
In 2012 a friend enlightened me as to an effort by a small independent Swedish publisher, of which he was a member of the publishing committee, to republish “The Dispossessed” in Swedish. Since this is a very important work for me personally, I wanted to help out in any way I could, and one thing I suggested was that we should make some new maps. The originals of the Swedish edition maps were long lost, there were some cartographic mistakes in them, and I also felt that they could be made to look better with some work. I never assumed that I would be the one to make the maps (though maybe I did hope for it, if I am to be honest). Being more of an engineer than an artist (or so I tell myself) I wanted to make some ground work to help whoever would do the actual work. I wrote the program for reprojecting the original maps, then I set about making sketches and some animations. I’ve written about that at great length before, here (main body of work – a love letter of sorts to maps in general, and Ursula K. Le Guin in particular) and here (animations of the planets).
And then I thought I was done. I did go back a few times to tweak the maps, and I made an attempt at making a “modern style map”, an attempt which I would rather try to forget. Work etc. got in the way for both me and my friend, and the publisher running mostly on volunteer efforts meant that the publishing was delayed. Then, this summer, I decided I needed a project to sustain me through the summer holidays (unfortunately I don’t handle spare time very well…), and decided to kick-start it again by scanning, OCR:ing and proofreading the manuscript. Which I did, and which, owing to my obsessive-compulsive streak, took more time than perhaps it should, but the result was probably made better from it and I enjoyed it tremendously so I won’t complain (see the Tools section below for information about the programs I used). All in all I’ve calculated that during the proof reading process I read the whole book no less than four times, some passages more times. This might have turned into a nightmare, but it was in fact very rewarding and made me appreciate the work even more since it let me see patterns that had previously slipped by unnoticed. I also realised that I wanted to get back into making the maps again – no one had stepped up to do it, and I felt more confident about my abilities now. (Actually, it may be the other way around: I wanted to make the maps, but for that to seem worthwhile the book republishing needed to get back on track, so I had to help out with that first. Structured procrastination at it’s best, if true!) One of these read-throughs was entirely for finding geographic clues in the work, in order to make sure that my maps were as honest a representation as I could make them (you can find my notes on the geography below: [1]).
Continents and coasts
My first step was to get the continents and coasts in place. I had actually started this back in 2014, when I was unemployed for a period, but I was never happy with the results, and then I lost myself in work for two years.
Coming back to it, I was mostly happy with the layout of the continents (I tweaked the Rolny peninsula a bit, since the geographic notes in the book indicate that it is mostly sand and I had drawn it more like the Norwegian coast than the Danish), but I had to find a way of making the coasts stick out. What I wanted was to find a way of illuminating the coasts which was not mere embellishment, but also carried some information. I love fantasy maps, but I also feel that they leave something to be wished when it comes to lessons from real cartography. In particular, since “The Dispossessed” is a work of science fiction, I thought it important to impose some cartographic rigour. My compromise was to use the technique of lines indicating shallower water extending from the coasts, and to let those lines be in the direction of the circles of longitude (also called “parallels”) to give an indication of the projection used (azimuthal equidistant projection).
As preparation for drawing these coast-lines (pun intended) I first created a graticule to use as guide. In the end I thought they looked good enough that I decided to keep them, as a way of separating land from water, thereby in part negating the use of the coast-lines to indicate East-West direction, but so it goes. I opted for a grid where each of the eight regions of Anarres is divided into a 12 by 12 grid, as a nod to the duodecimal system being used on Anarres. This was meant to be a clue to the reader that the maps were drawn on Anarres, not on Urras where the decimal system is in favour. It is also a nod to Le Guin’s book “The Wind’s Twelve Quarters”, the short-story collection in which I first read “The Day Before the Revolution” (the story of Laia Asieo Odo on the day before the Odonian revolution, set 170 years before “The Dispossessed”). Before getting on with the more taxing work, I also took the time to make a frame showing the compass direction from the centre of each hemisphere, and to draw the borders on Urras.
My initial thought was to draw the coast-lines by hand, but that quickly became to tedious: I find it very difficult to judge something as good enough, and quickly realised that I would be endlessly tweaking the lines if I were to do it by hand. Time for engineering again! Instead I opted for a semi-automated photographic analogy: I made an overlay of the parallels with a certain interval, and made an overlay of the continents as well. By merging these two templates “out of focus”, and applying a threshold I could get lines only near to the coasts and with sufficient uniformity to satisfy my demands. This technique is similar to what can be done with photographic plates, and I found inspiration for it in Erwin Raisz fantastic book “Principles of Cartography” [2]. I made this happen using GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program; see tools below), which also allowed me to add some noise in order to make them just a little bit irregular, making the lines look more alive [3]. Then I imported the result to Inkscape (a vector based graphics program, see tools below) and traced the bitmap into a vector format to put below the continents. It looked good almost immediately, which was very encouraging.
Mountains
Drawing the mountains was what I was most worried about. I had spend a lot of time researching how to represent the mountains and had come across Erwin Raisz “trachographic symbols” as an attractive synthesis between aesthetics and information. Trachographic maps show “the ruggedness of the terrain without regard for its genesis”, as opposed to physiographic or landform maps that use a variety of symbols to represent geological history as well as relief and slope [2]. The trachographic method limits itself to a small set of symbols for different height and slope categories, and let the width and height of the symbols give extra information within the categories. While a landform map would have been very impressive (Raisz excelled at this, his “Landforms of the United States” is a true work of art, look it up!), I opted for the simpler trachographic map for three reasons:
- While there are some indications in the books, any landform map would be very speculative,
- Landform maps work better at medium- or large-scale maps, and can look too cluttered for small-scale maps such as these,
- I didn’t think I could pull off a landform map with my skills and experience
Of course, I didn’t really know the trachography of Urras or Anarres either, except that Southwest Anarres has no high mountains, but I improvised: in GIMP I created a mock-up height map, which I fed into an algorithm that calculated mean ruggedness and height for the areas where there were mountains and placed appropriate place-holder symbols there. The result was a template which I used as a layer in Krita (a really excellent drawing program, see tools below). On top of this I drew mountains in Raisz style. The results were then imported to Inkscape and converted to vector layers. I think I would do a better job of it if I did it again, particularly with regard to the placement of the mountains, which is a bit off, but I was again pleasantly surprised by the result.
Names and labels
The final element to add was labels. I had found a very good article on how to place names on map, written by Eduard Imhof which I tried to follow rather strictly [4]. For the choice of typefaces I again turned to Raisz: for land regions I used a Roman font in small-caps (ADF Irianis), for seas I used the same font but italicized, for mountains I used a semi-Gothic font in all-caps (ADF Ikarius); and for cities I used a Lydian font (ADF Libris). All fonts are free (as in free speech) and open source. While I am mostly happy with the results, I have two areas where I think I could improve:
- Names of mountain ranges are hard to read.
- Just differentiating sea and land labels by italicizing the sea labels gives a slightly too subtle visual clue in my opinion. I should probably have used different typefaces for the two.
New locations
As I mentioned above, one of my read-throughs resulted in a small compendium of places and general geography of the twin planets. I also scoured the short story “The Day Before the Revolution” for details, since we hope to publish this in the same volume as “The Dispossessed”. This, naturally, inspired an urge in me to see if I could add the locations to the maps in a believable way, consistent with the text. This made the maps come alive more and made them feel more realistic to me, since real world maps are filled to the brim with information. It also gave me some exciting challenges to tackle when placing the labels. I can confidently say that I’m within 10000 km of all locations, since that is approximately half-way around Anarres [5], but I would like to think that I’m no more than 1000 km off in most cases. It was great fun trying to find out where the places were, and I think I make persuasive cases for their rough locations at least. That being said, the results should not be treated in any way as canonical! You can read my notes and speculations (mostly clearly separated) in the short paper “Notes on the Geography of Tau Ceti” [1].
Results
Finally, the maps!
Presented below are the finished English and Swedish language versions of the maps with my additional locations added. The English and Swedish language versions with and without the non-canonical locations can also be found under Get Stuff. The originals are SVG-files which are fairly large, but I endeavour to upload them as well in the future. Meanwhile, see the pictures below, or download the PDF versions of the maps to see them in their native scalable form. Share and enjoy, but responsibly, see licence: [6]!
Concluding remarks
As with most everything, I’m confident that I could do a better job of it if I did it again. In particular, I think I could make the mountains better, and perhaps improve on the lettering. I will probably have to tweak them a little to optimise them for printing, but over all I am extremely pleased with the results. I’m not done though, oh no:
- For Urras there were more names than I could fit on the map, so I want to make a detailed map of just A-Io where I can include them.
- I’ve also been toying with the idea of making city maps of Abbenay and Nio Essaia, since I think they would contrast in an interesting way.
- Furthermore, I want to make printable paper globes of the planets.
Fun times ahead! (:
Tools
All tools and resources used for this project are free (as in free speech) and open source. You can download them, modify them and redistribute them as long as you follow their respective licenses.
For OCR processing of the original manuscript i used:
- Unpaper to prepare the scanned images for the OCR program,
- Tesseract-OCR to process the prepared images into text files,
- a few scripts adapted from here to facilitate and automate manual steps (I’m happy to share the scripts).
For creating the maps I used
- Inkscape, a very competent vector graphics program (similar to InDesign or CorelDraw),
- GIMP, a very competent image manipulation program (similar to PhotoShop),
- Krita, a very competent drawing program.
I’ve used Inkscape and GIMP for many years. Krita was a new acquaintance, but one I was very happy to make – it is an excellent program. All three have their uses though, so I would say they complement each other nicely. If you add Scribus to the mix you have a toolbox which lets you do almost any kind of publishing imaginable.
The fonts I used were
from Arkandis Font Foundry.
References
[0]: First commit: https://gitlab.com/projekt-anarres/projekt-anarres/commit/db67c500dbf1f770c1c74080a85f459a5ad8e944
[1]: Skyman, Andreas. “Notes on the Geography of Tau Ceti”. Eintritt Verboten, 2016. (Full text)
[2]: Raisz, E. “Principles of Cartography”. McGraw-Hill, 1962
[3]: I originally wrote a plugin for GIMP to automate this, but in the end I performed most of the steps by hand. The code for the plugin is not online, but I would be happy to share it.
[4]: Imhof, E. “Positioning Names on Maps”. The American Cartographer, Vol. 2, No. 2, 1975, pp. 128-144
[5]: In [1] I use clues in the book to estimate the radius of Anarres to 2832 km, leading to a circumference of 17794 km. I further estimate the radius of Urras to 4247 km, yielding 26685 km in circumference. While very speculative, I think I make good – or at least amusing – cases for my estimates.
[6]: 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. Please note the Non-Commercial clause – licence for commercial use is not mine to give!
Hi, I’m using some of these images/comments in an academic setting. Do you have a preferred way of being cited? I’ll direct readers to the blog, of course, but if you’d like me to use a different name, let me know.
Hi Amelia, thank you for getting in touch. I’m still amazed when someone actually finds their way to this blog. If it is an academic context, I would appreciate if you use my full name: Andreas Skyman. I am also very curious as to what academic context this is, so if it is not inconvenient to you, please let me know how it goes, preferably by email to (mygivenname.myfamilyname)@fripost.org.
Dear skymandr – I hope you don’t mind that I’ve used one of your beautiful maps to highlight a new short story by Tim Lawrence on our online magazine Terra Two: An Ark for Off-World Survival. https://yorkstjohnterratwo.com/ At the end of Tim’s entry I’ve referenced your own site. If there’s something more I can do to give credit please let me know. Your maps are absolutely fabulous!
Thank you for your kind remarks. I’m deeply honoured that you want to use the maps.
I’m listening to the audiobook, and came across your maps. Thank you. They are a great resource when I don’t have the printed book with me
Thank you for your kind words. I’m happy that you had use for them!
Your maps of Urras and Annarres are perfect.
Many thanks for taking the time!
Many thanks for taking the time to say so!
[…] del mapa de Anarres, planeta-luna de la novela Los Desposeídos de Ursula K. Le Guin. Imagen por Eintritt Verboten bajo licencia CC:By-NC-SA-4.0 […]
Hello! I’d like to work with a tattoo artist and use these map designs as a base for a tattoo! Would this be permitted under your license? What kind of attribution or license fee would you like for that? Thanks!
Hi! Thank you for asking! I’m totally cool with that and I don’t want any kind of compensation. If anyone asks, please tell them where the design originated, but no need to put my name on your skin. 🙂