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 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!

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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.

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I’ve always liked the autumn rains…

(Go here to read the story first, if you prefer not being spoiled!)

When I was in primary school, I remember that I always used to go outside on breaks on rainy days. I must have been around the age of nine, since that was the age at which I started reading SF, and my young imagination turned my rain-clothes into a space suit and the school yard to the surface of distant planet of torrential, icy rain. I was an explorer, protected only by the thin outer skin of the suit, a foreigner on a foreign world. I would just stand there, letting the droplets fall on my rain-coat, enjoying the feeling of almost, but not quite, getting wet.

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