There’s a passage in Generosity: An Enchancement, Richard Powers’ novel about genetics and creative writing, that transports us to a prominent talk show from Chicago:

It’s less a show than a sovereign multinational charter. And its host is, by any measure, the most influential woman in the world. Her own story is a remarkable mix of motifs from American creative fiction, from Alger to Zelazny. Say only that she has grown from an impoverished, abused child into an adult who gives away more money than most industrialized nations. She has the power to create instant celebrities, sell hundreds of millions of books, make or break entire consumer industries, expose frauds, marshal mammoth relief efforts, and change the spoken language. All this by being tough, warm, vulnerable, and empathetic enough to get almost any other human being to disclose the most personal secrets on international television. If she didn’t exist, allegory would have to invent her.

Powers calls his daytime doyenne Oona, but we all know he’s talking about Oprah. Here we find our scientific-literary novelist in the fine, familiar predicament of engaging with an outside world where corporate global brands are king. Allegories of real folks are tacky things, but when you pen a Chicago novel about finding the genetic basis of happiness in the anaesthetized age of mass media, there’s no detour around the Oprah problem: you’re writing her into your damned book.

(I’m not sure how well it goes. Generosity is eminently likable, and its Clarke Award nomination earlier this year is one of many reasons why you should pay attention to the Clarke Awards, but there’s an overall sense of Richard Powers for Beginners about it next to the depth of his earlier work.)

Here in the telly-impervious literary fortress of Nick’s Café Canadien, we don’t pay much attention to Ms Winfrey. My impression of Oprah has never been terribly positive: as a consumerist behemoth that uncritically promotes junk science and bad medicine while throwing its financial weight behind the overweening cult of self-help, it has often come off to me as a malignant alien presence from another world. I’m reliably informed, however, that as of last week the twenty-five-year gravity well of The Oprah Winfrey Show has finally pocketed itself into its own precious singularity.

Days earlier, Jonathan Franzen delivered a commencement address at Kenyon College that has since appeared in The New York Times (best read alongside Edward Champion’s notes on the abridgment), the latest variation on Literary Man’s perpetual anxiety over technology’s commodification of human passions. Franzen’s argument—that the casual comforts of the Facebook “like” and the easy requital of our device relationships have inoculated us from experiencing true and hurtful love—came bundled with the delicious irony that we’ve come to expect from everything involving the reluctant superstar of American letters. Scarcely a month ago, The New Yorker ran a magisterial essay of his about scattering the ashes of David Foster Wallace on the island of Robinson Crusoe only to hold it hostage behind the paywall. “Like” The New Yorker on Facebook, said the ransom note—or else.

The timing may be coincidental, but the parallel—rather, the perpendicularity—isn’t lost on those of us who absorbed everything about the Winfrey-Franzen feud of 2001 with unhealthy fascination. Here’s the story: ten years ago, Oprah Winfrey selected Franzen’s outstanding novel The Corrections for the Book Club segment of her programme, something that even her most bitter critics have to admit has been a marvel for moving volumes of contemporary fiction. Shortly after, Franzen voiced his discomfort with being marketed under the Oprah sticker, leading Winfrey to rescind the book selection along with Franzen’s invitation to the show.

You can imagine the media frenzy. High-profile literary scuffles are like classical music riots: we don’t see enough of them these days, and when we do, it’s comical yet reassuring to discover that other people care about this stuff. And here we had, in one corner, an inspirational figure of tremendous accomplishment and national renown; in the other corner—well, Oprah Winfrey.

Naturally, Franzen found himself stuck with the unfortunate reputation of a highbrow snob, a characterization that seems utterly bizarre if you’ve read his work and are aware that he’s a straightforward, accessible, and completely absorbing entertainer with an immaculate ear for everyday turn-of-the-millennium speech. Winfrey named Freedom to her Book Club in 2010 and Franzen accepted, finally appearing on the show (footage here), but that hasn’t stopped the flap over The Corrections from dogging him everywhere he goes. Read some of the grumbly backlash to the Kenyon College address and you don’t have to scroll very far down to find a jab at the incident.

The Kenyon speech got me thinking, anyway. In light of Franzen’s output, particularly as an essayist, he really does seem at odds with the value system of The Oprah Winfrey Show. This is the same programme that was peddling buy-me-to-be-happy crap like The Secret, yes? Isn’t the pre-cooked panacea of “positive thinking” the very emblem of everything Franzen writes against? There’s a deep contradiction embedded in the Oprah enterprise: Winfrey’s brand is a front for packaged, sterilized inspiration designed to sedate a passive audience of the already powerless, but through the Book Club she makes an effort to cultivate her audience, and not merely in the sense of growing its ranks. (Daniel Kaszor puts it well: “I think my biggest issue with Oprah is that she strikes me as the kind of person who would be ashamed to watch Oprah,” he says.)

Ms Winfrey is undoubtedly clever enough to be in on her own game. One doesn’t blindly invite guests like Jonathan Franzen or bizarrely, Cormac McCarthy, whose Oprah interview is only rivalled in the annals of shattered reclusion by Thomas Pynchon’s Simpsons cameo. Yet these are precisely the writers for whom literature is a refuge from the cacophony of mass-cultural unreality, and who know better than most that embracing the depths of human misery rather than buying or drugging them away is the key to preserving our sense of self.

Despite our privileged first-world comforts, we need to reassert our right to be miserable, lonely saps. That’s the Franzen paradox: through solitude, we can recover empathy. In the long conversation about whether there is a place for literature in a culture saturated with disposable entertainment and projected façades of human contact—an anxiety we can trace back to Franzen’s Harper’s essay from 1996, David Foster Wallace’s meditation on television at its zenith in “E Unibus Pluram”, or most presciently in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451—the printed page is a conduit for recovering humanity, not for retreating away from it.

This is a major concern for Richard Powers, too. Compared to Franzen, Powers is more of a technological optimist (we’re talking about the fellow who dictates his novels into a tablet computer, remember), but he also considers the social effects with the warranted ambivalence. Russell Stone, the protagonist of Generosity, forms preconceptions of someone he hasn’t met based on her profile picture and upends a psychiatric diagnosis with a term he picked up on Wikipedia—and he’s far from the only one in the book to behave in accordance with how he’s wired. The novel centres on Russell’s incomprehension of someone who has every reason on paper to feel worse than he does, but doesn’t. Powers’ earlier novel Galatea 2.2 tackles the problem of humanity-via-fiction head-on, reimagining Alan Turing’s imitation game as an exercise in understanding literature.

Where the notion of the literary refuge runs into trouble is when we consider market dynamics—the production and promotion of books. The trick to understanding how literary values mesh with Oprah values may lie at this junction, I think: long-form reading provides an outlet from the commodified morass, but it’s sold and distributed as a commodity itself. It may be strange to think of a big cerebral novel as falling into the fiscal category of an entertainment product, but where accounting is concerned, publishing is publishing and books are merely books. In the end, everything gets the covers stripped and pulped.

This isn’t to say that Oprah’s Book Club is all about the money: the books have more to benefit from it than the show, and Winfrey’s taste is honestly not too shabby. But its project is to direct consumer behaviour, and the objects held up to the audience, as complex as they may be inside, are promoted as consumable remedies like anything else. Better literature than quack medicine, I’d say.

More worrisome is how market conditions may transform or limit, going forward, the kind of literature we see produced. We’ve all witnessed in the past x years (five, ten, thirty, pick your frame) how a market-driven, consumer-dictated approach to cultural production has driven popular cinema and music into the ground, while a good chunk of television has never gotten off the ground. If good books of richness, depth, and intelligence are sold on shallow terms, do we really get any closer to developing a culture of interpretive independence and nuanced thought? Or by selling the novel as a typical entertainment medium, are we just asking for it to be replaced?

Here’s what Katherine Pratt Ewing has to say in her review of Kathryn Lofton’s Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon:

The association of Oprahfication with lack of depth is clearest in critiques of Oprah’s effects on the reading public. Lofton, like others, is skeptical of the interpretive approach to reading that Oprah encourages in her book club: she stresses that Oprah’s interpretations, which encourage readers to react emotionally to a book and relate its characters to their own lives, lack depth and reduce books to their ability to “return women to an Oprah way of life,” reiterating the core theme of Oprah-as-icon. [...] One could also draw a comparison with Sesame Street, which uses the idiom of commodities to “sell” reading to kids. Both Oprah and Sesame Street effectively reach and shape a self who always already inhabits a commodified world.

By integrating quality fiction into her audience’s existing way of life, the argument goes, Winfrey strips away the class-boundary stigma that isolates literature as a highbrow domain, cut off from everyday consumer society. Admirable enough, to be sure, but I think there’s a catch: some novels simply want to be apart. (Glenn Beck, who prefers to champion military thrillers for boys, doesn’t have this problem.) Ignoring for a moment the ocean of work-to-order books that are written to fill market needs and meet bottom lines, which entertain readers suitably enough and exist to be liked, not loved, it’s in the nature of the novel to resist its own commodity packaging.

I’m aware that I am cribbing from Franzen here:

The striking thing about all consumer products—and none more so than electronic devices and applications—is that they’re designed to be immensely likable. This is, in fact, the definition of a consumer product, in contrast to the product that is simply itself and whose makers aren’t fixated on your liking it. (I’m thinking here of jet engines, laboratory equipment, serious art and literature.)

The double nature of a book like The Corrections is that it functions equally well as a serious novel and as salable commodity entertainment—maybe even with a tilt towards the latter. In any case, this sheds some light on how we’ve since ended up with Jonathan Franzen, Ironic Celebrity.

It’s not just Oprah, either. Consider this: Lev Grossman, the former tech-gadget journalist who has somehow remained employed as the senior book critic at Time in spite of the trendspotting, early-adopter triteness that infects his cliché-ridden drivel—got Franzen on the cover of the magazine last August, making him the first novelist to sit inside the big red box since Stephen King in 2000 (for a story about King’s online strategy, not his books). The literary cover gallery tells a vivid story of the decline of novelists in American popular consciousness, but that’s neither here nor there. The point is that for all the welcome benefits of mass exposure, Time wasn’t doing Franzen’s reputation any services with its insipid, off-the-shelf, the-way-we-live-now hype.

The attitudes to literature on display could not be less compatible. Take a look at Grossman’s screed in The Wall Street Journal, “Good Novels Don’t Have to Be Hard Work”—still one of the most heinous acts of attempted criticism to grace a major publication in recent memory, in which the sentence “This is the future of fiction” is actually, earnestly said. Now compare it to Franzen’s post-Oprah essay on the subject of accessibility, “Mr. Difficult: William Gaddis and the Problem of Hard-to-Read Books”. Grossman opts for snap judgments, populist scapegoating, and bad history; Franzen makes a serious effort to sketch ideologies of the author-reader relationship. Yet look who’s connecting with the wider public.

It’s reassuring, at least, that some reluctant celebrities weather their own promotion and manage to keep their secret integrity intact. Don’t ask me how. Just ask DC Comics superhero Green Lantern, who spoke to Oprah Winfrey in 1988:

He does resemble Franzen, doesn’t he? I have this theory…

It is hard to imagine a world without maps.

Now stop—and diagram that sentence. Break its syntax apart. You can parse it in at least two valid and meaningful ways:

• It is hard | to imagine | a world without maps. The use of maps is so embedded in our daily lives, so essential to our normal functioning, that the idea of a pre-cartographic society is as alien as the thought of a pre-literate one. On top of this, our idea of what it means to be a mapped society is itself confined to our familiarized expectations of what maps are like. How did people get by without maps—or rather, without the sorts of maps we know and understand?

• It is hard | to imagine a world | without maps. Maps govern the way we think about space, and that extends to imaginary or hypothetical spaces. Without a graphic representation on paper or in our heads, our plans for things not yet built—homes, roads, electric circuits—may be cloudy and ambiguous. They may lack precision in the same way we have trouble with describing things that are outside our linguistic abilities. This is a negative definition of maps as a form of language: to be without a map is to be without language, and it impedes us from communicating ideas in the mind—to others, yes, but also to ourselves.

In both of these senses, maps of fictional places are remarkably challenging texts.

One of my chief interests in fiction, along with art in general, is how it presents itself as evidence of the way people receive the existing cultural data around them before they process it and spit it back out. (In literary criticism you will encounter words like allusion and intertextuality, but I think of them as subtypes of a broader cognitive activity.) When an author plans out a story’s setting in place, or when a reader attempts to reconstruct it from the words alone, the maps they produce tell us not only how they imagine the depicted geography, but also how they imagine the idea of maps. Furthermore, the author/audience distinction isn’t always sharp: some privileged readers, such as the illustrators at a publishing house or manuscript historians like Christopher Tolkien, participate in the interpretive stage as well as the official construction of the space for everyone else.

So when we open up a novel to find a map, we can think of the map as an act of narration. But what kind of narration? Is it reliable narration or a deliberate misdirection? Is it omniscient knowledge, a complete (or strategically obscured) presentation of the world as the author knows it? Or is the map available to the characters in the text? If it is, then who drew up the map, and how did they have access to the information used to compose it? If it isn’t, then through what resources do the characters orient themselves in their own world? And finally, does anyone even bother to think about these questions before they sit down to place their woodlands and forts?

In the post that follows, I am going to informally sketch out a theory of fictional maps, which is to say that I will put up a lot of pretty pictures from novels and talk about why they are neat. There is likely some academic work on this somewhere—I would be astonished if there weren’t—but I’m not aware of any, and certainly nothing that has accounted for modern critical approaches to the history of cartography. Map history and the comparative study of commercial genre literature are niches within niches as it stands, and my aim is to entwine them together.

Perspective

Let’s begin with something familiar.

Depending on how you look at it, this map is one of the following:

• The map that J.R.R. Tolkien drew up for The Hobbit, which appears in the endleaf of the original 1937 edition as well as most (if not all) of the English editions still in print today.
• A map drawn by the dwarvish king Thrór depicting the environs of Erebor, the Lonely Mountain. Elrond deciphers the runes in Chapter III (“A Short Rest”).
• A reproduction of Thrór’s map, copied and translated by the hobbit Bilbo Baggins.
• A reproduction of Bilbo’s copy of Thrór’s map, received and delivered by one J.R.R. Tolkien from There and Back Again, the first part of the discovered manuscript known as the Red Book of Westmarch.

The complexity of the document is that it serves as all of these things at once. As Tolkien’s map, which we recognize to be a fictitious construction along with the rest of the text, the map is a device to orient the reader in an imagined world. But if we dive inside the fiction, the map is also Tolkien’s way of reporting to his readers what Bilbo and Thorin were looking at—no different than if your copy of the book came bundled with a replica of Bilbo’s sword, Sting.

What’s more, in style and technique the map is fully believable as something put together by the dwarves (apart from the lettering in English, which we can think of as Bilbo’s translation if we wish to suspend disbelief). Notice that rather than being a high-fidelity communiqué of how Tolkien imagined Middle-Earth, the map is a minimalist sketch of the world according to the dwarves. The sparsely chosen landmarks appear in relative (not absolute) position, the illustrations are abstract, and the inscriptions allude to people and events that would have been known to Thrór. Scale doesn’t even enter into the equation. (Tolkien’s original draft, which I’ll say more about later on, was even sparser: aside from the runes and text, its only graphic elements were the Running River and a top-down outline of the Lonely Mountain.)

Not to be neglected, of course, is that the map also functions as a two-layered riddle. In The Hobbit, we learn that while the runes on the left (in red above) are directly visible—”five feet high the door and three may walk abreast,” they read—the runes in the centre only reveal themselves when Elrond holds the map up to the light of the moon. (This custom-made replica demonstrates the effect.) The moon-runes provide a further clue: “Stand by the grey stone when the thrush knocks, and the setting sun with the last light of Durin’s Day will shine upon the key-hole.”

To complicate things further, when the dwarves first lay out the map in Chapter I (“An Unexpected Party”), Tolkien makes an authorial interjection in the text:

“There is one point that you haven’t noticed,” said the wizard, “and that is the secret entrance. You see that rune on the West side, and the hand pointing to it from the other runes? That marks a hidden passage to the Lower Halls.” (Look at the map at the beginning of this book, and you will see there the runes in red.)

Not only that, but it will say this in the text whether your edition has the map printed in red and black or not! (Now that we’re in the age of paperback dominance, it’s unlikely that this is the case for you.)

So the multifaceted nature of the map isn’t limited to its plurality of authors, each at a different level of absorption into the fictional world; also in play is a plurality of potential readers. Tolkien’s real-world readers aren’t expected to go in knowing how to decipher the runes (though nowadays, you’d be surprised at how many of them do). But the further concealment of the moon-runes tells us that within the narrative, the mapmaker had a restricted audience in mind.

If the map is an act of narration, what kind of narration is it? We have a good system for answering this type of question with respect to prose. First, there is the distinction of person—first, second, or third—which is largely a question of using pronouns to position the narrator and reader in relation to the action. The concept of person doesn’t map neatly onto cartographic works, however, unless there are pronouns involved. A better apparatus for distinguishing between the possible authors of a fictional map is what literary scholars call levels of diegesis—a technical way of delineating whether something is outside the text, inside the text, or inside a text within the text.

At minimum we are always dealing with three layers of reality, though they are not always separate: the author, the narrator, and the characters. In non-fiction, for instance, we observe no distance between the author and the narrator, and we assume that the inhabit the same plane. In the most basic form of first-person narration, we assume that the narrator is among the reality of the characters, even if he or she is far removed from the action. If we think about maps in diegetic terms—if we ask whether the documents and their authors belong to the world in the book, or if they come from outside—we unlock two of the most powerful concepts for thinking about perspective: omniscience and reliability.

Diegesis

What’s the appeal of a fantasy map, anyway? I doubt too many would disagree when I assert that maps add to the sense of immersion. If they come directly from the author—keeping in mind the intermediaries of the publisher and illustrator, too—a map tells the reader that the creator of the fictional space has really thought this place out. Storytelling always happens in façades, but evidence of the author’s forethought fills out the setting’s illusion of depth.

If we see a map of an imaginary land, we feel like we know more about the place. Like any supplementary material—timelines, family trees—it satisfies our latent curiosities. Also present, I think, is an element of bowing to the world-builder’s authority: by looking at a map we don’t simply know more about the world—we know more about how the author imagined the world to be.

But here’s the trap: the attitude of wanting to know more about a world—and moreover, believing that a map can draw us closer to it—leads the audience to default to a certain passivity. To a certain extent this is the criticism that has always been made of illustration, cinema, or any kind of embellishment beyond mere words alone: that when something is imagined on our behalf, we are robbed of our duty to reconstruct the textual reality for ourselves.

It’s strange, for instance, that the Yoknapatawpha novels of William Faulkner are notorious for compelling readers to cobble the logic and action together from jumbled scraps of unreliable narration, but with the right edition in hand we get the geography delivered to us on a plate:

From the perspective of literary history, I very much admire Faulkner’s maps: as you can see from the University of Virginia’s collection of Faulkner manuscripts, his sketches were instrumental in developing the sense of overlaying his novels on top of each other like an eternal palimpsest. And I don’t have a problem with sitting back and letting a provided map do some of the work for me, myself. The real danger lies in the assumption that authors’ maps can do this for us at all.

Regardless of whether a map depicts a fictional or real-world space, we always have to ask ourselves whose knowledge the map represents. This notion is intuitive when we think of real-world maps, where we really never have access to an omniscient perspective that lies outside our own reality. All that we have to work with are the source materials and surveying techniques that are known to us, and the rest is speculation. Increasingly, scholars of cartography now recognize that maps embed our political dispositions and socio-economic practices like any other texts: even in the satellite-enabled age of Google Earth and GPS, we start out from inside the world and set specific agendas for what we wish to represent, and how. Only superficially are maps ever “objective” views of the land.

Fiction throws a serious wrench into the way we think about maps because of our familiarity with omniscient points of view. In narration, we typically think of omniscience in terms of the narrator’s godlike reach into the interior experience of the characters, but the notion also applies to whether the narrator has access to information that the people within the fictional world do not.

In the case of an extradiegetic map, a map explicitly outside the text that serves as a direct conduit from author to audience, we tend to assume that the information it communicates is a sort of objective truth. We don’t mind so much if the liberties taken with the style of illustration—the medium, the lettering, the colour—would not have been available to the people who inhabit the imagined setting; if anything, such extravagances add to the romance and mystique.

But with maps that purport to speak from within the tale—maps with here-be-dragons blanks that delimit what the people in the fiction perceive or care about—we run into the same paradox that authors who deal with far-flung places frequently encounter with language. The author feels a certain duty to communicate to the reader with maximal precision, but the higher the fidelity of the message, the more it draws on our present-day idioms and conventions, and the more it strains plausibility.

A truly plausible map is one that we could imagine being created with the techniques and materials available to the people within the world; one where we could see the world’s cartographers as having the inclination, purpose, and skill to create something that looks like the product in front of us. Thrór’s map in The Hobbit is a classic example. Jim Hawkins’ map in Treasure Island is another:

The depth soundings, the rendering of the coastline, the dated handwritten addenda, the note that this copy is a facsimile (thereby accounting for its tidy, finished look)—everything about this illustration plays the part of an authentic nautical chart.

Then again, Treasure Island has the benefit of being set in a recognizable culture and time period, and we have a historical point of reference by which to gauge its illusion of authenticity. This can’t be said of secondary-world fantasy, the stories that take place in lands that have little to no geographic relation to the planet Earth we know.

The fictional cartographer’s paradox of perspective is more apparent in a map like this:

This illustration comes from Star Wars spin-off novel Vector Prime. Published by Del Rey when they first acquired the license to the tie-in books, it was the first officially sanctioned map of the galaxy depicted in the merchandising empire that has grown out of the George Lucas films. It’s an attractive design: the simple spiral arms and the dashing lettering recall the retro-futuristic pulp-serial aesthetic that inspired the Star Wars series. (Far better, at any rate, than some of the soulless pseudo-3D charts that followed it.)

Yet you can see how its heart is in two places at once. It’s a two-dimensional printed work depicting a universe where there isn’t a shred of print anywhere to be found: Star Wars, you will remember, is famous for projecting any and all visual information into a hologram or wireframe schematic. There are no illusions here that this map originates from within the galaxy, as it clearly doesn’t. But the map also situates itself in a limited heroic point of view. It’s the world according to the protagonists, with its hyperspace trade routes and dotted-line expansion frontiers, its Unknown Regions and Wild Space—all of it condensed and flattened into the pancaked realities of the twentieth-century printed page.

In a way, the map’s abstraction of the galaxy reminds us that we are dealing with a comic-book reality, albeit a thoroughly developed one. It has the omniscient privilege of sitting outside the text, but instead of filling in the blanks it elides them with the flair of escape.

Materiality

As it turns out, the pragmatics of publication have a noticeable effect on the kinds of maps we see in fictional works.

If we return to our first example, Thrór’s map of the Lonely Mountain, notice the orientation. The Iron Hills to the east are somewhere up top; the spiders of Mirkwood out west are down at the bottom. Now, as readers receiving The Hobbit as a freestanding text divorced from history, it’s easy to come up with all sorts of justifications for why the map is east-side-up. We could say that it’s a cultural peculiarity of the dwarves. We could even say that it befits the direction of Bilbo’s quest, upwards being the way forwards. But if we delve into how the book ran its course from manuscript to first edition, a different story emerges.

Tolkien’s original concept for Thrór’s map was a page in portrait orientation, with north on top and south on the bottom as we would typically expect. As we know from Tolkien’s correspondence of January 1937, the plan was to have the map inserted into Chapter I at the point where Gandalf first shows it to Bilbo and Thorin. In the original unpublished map, the moon-runes were inscribed in reverse on the back of the page so the reader could reveal them by holding the map to the light, just as Elrond does in Chapter III of the novel. (I unfortunately don’t have a picture of Tolkien’s original manuscript map at hand, but it’s in the Bodleian Library at Oxford (MS. Tolkien drawings 33); I believe it also appears in The Annotated Hobbit.)

The orientation of the map was rotated into its present form when Tolkien’s publisher, George Allen & Unwin, refused to produce it in the form that Tolkien intended, primarily for reasons of cost. Thus the map was redrawn as an endleaf in landscape orientation, with the dimensions of two pages side by side.

Where the plot thickens is when you look at The Hobbit in translation. Here is Mikhail Belomlinsky’s map from the Russian edition of 1976:

The illustrations in the Soviet Hobbit have a very distinctive look; Gollum, in particular, is fantastic. As for the map, Frank Jacobs of Strange Maps has already written an excellent analysis of its Slavic character, which I will not repeat here.

One thing to notice, however, is the map’s use of space—specifically, its complete spread over the page. Rather than adhering strictly to the canonical geography of Middle-Earth, which was by then widely known (outside of Russia, anyhow) thanks to The Lord of the Rings, Belomlinsky tucked something interesting in every nook and cranny. Look at how Mirkwood and the Misty Mountains snake along with the rivers. Spanning the whole adventure from Hobbiton to Smaug, west to east, bottom to top, one almost forgets to catch that the directions on the compass rose are wrong.

Observe: с, в, ю, з—северо, восток, юго, запад—north, east, south, west. By preserving the orientation of Thrór’s map in the English edition but not adjusting the compass directions to match, we end up with an erroneous map where Hobbiton is to the south and the Lonely Mountain is to the north. Preposterous! Yet we arrived here at the first place because of a series of publishing decisions across multiple editions that determined if the map would be printed on one page or two.

Flipped cardinal directions are hardly unique to The Hobbit, mind you. For a very long time, maps of L. Frank Baum’s Oz had the Munchkins to the left and the Winkies to the right, despite how clear it was to every Oz reader that Dorothy landed on the Wicked Witch of the East and made her way westward to Winkie country:

If we think of fictional maps as a study in the medium constraining the message, where it gets interesting is when you consider the maps that exist as documents within the story. Publishing considerations have the power to shape the reality of the imaginary place. Thrór’s map in the narrative plane of The Hobbit is oriented east-side-up because Tolkien’s map had to be so.

Stepping inside the fiction, we may ponder if the material constraints on mapmaking play a part in the story. In the context of these imaginary worlds, is there any suggestion of how maps are produced, transported, and preserved? Does their content spring forth from an overriding purpose or utility? These are considerations that buttress the depth and plausibility of a map, much as how Tolkien’s meticulously crafted languages and folkloric songs carry the impression of a bottomless history—the sense that this world and its people weren’t born yesterday.

Indeed, one of the finest touches in the Peter Jackson films of The Lord of the Rings is the scene at the exact midpoint of The Two Towers: Faramír, having captured Frodo and Sam and returned to his refuge at the Window to the West, goes over a map with his lieutenants. It’s a minor but effective embellishment on the book that sums up the various troop movements on the board while providing a brief visual treat for the Tolkien enthusiasts—and rather than displaying the map as an animated overlay with voiceover narration, it’s presented as a thoroughly creased parchment over which Faramír runs his finger. The map isn’t any old god’s-eye-view: like a real-world map, it’s a strategic instrument on the field. As a study in condensing an immensely challenging work for the screen, this subtle directorial decision stands out as a masterstroke.

Verisimilitude

One crucial point to take away from what I’ve said thus far is this: the coherence of a map with respect to the fiction it represents is not necessarily the same as its realism or level of detail. As much as we may desire to imprint an author’s vision onto our own with the utmost fidelity, I do not believe this ought to be the aim of fantastic cartography. As anyone who has been following the brief history of computer animation would know, verisimilitude isn’t at all the same thing as immersive reality. It is not the case that maps draw us closer to a believable fictional space with greater topographical accuracy or ever more lifelike terrain.

Take, for example, the six-book series by William Horwood that begins with Duncton Wood. The Duncton books revolve around communities of moles that worship the ancient stone circles of Great Britain, and some of the moles are capable of inscribing things in writing with their claws. One of the characters, Mayweed, is a talented navigator who sketches a map that appears (in translation, of course) in the third volume, Duncton Found:

Now contrast the deliberate, playful simplicity of this map with the one below, which appears in the second Duncton trilogy:

The second map looks substantially more attractive at first, thanks to the naturalistic depiction of terrain features. Unlike the original sketch, it looks like the sort of work that only a professional illustrator could pull off, and so it has the air of being the more polished, artistic piece. But it is also indisputably drawn from a human’s overground point of view—odd for a series where the moles largely keep to their burrows and humans are barely present apart from the odd occasion where they zoom along in their “roaring owls” (automobiles). And we might be fine with taking it as an omniscient artistic rendering from the publishing house, but the claim in the caption—”Based on Mayweed’s map found in Seven Barrows”—so brazenly contradicts the perspective of the map that it only serves to throw us off.

So as readers, we may appreciate the second map of Moledom as the superior illustration purely in terms of artistic merit—but it’s not clear at all that this map is better suited for the books. To the contrary, it presents a greater impediment to our ability to suspend disbelief.

The gravitation towards realistic detail in maps is especially remarkable if you remember that maps are inherently abstractions. The whole point of a map—of any variety, not solely the geographical kind—is to pack the chaos of information into a selectively delimited and instrumentally efficient container. Short of the 1:1 scale maps of Lewis Carroll and Jorge Luis Borges, cartography is a form of compression.

In terms of utility, the value of going from abstractions back to high-fidelity detail lies in how distinguishing visible landmarks—coastlines, mountains, fortresses—is useful for navigation. Before the proliferation of contour lines and coloured heat maps as methods for representing elevation, solutions for shading peaks and valleys led to the maps we now look back to fondly as exquisite in their artistic finesse. Satellite photography, which offers the highest fidelity of realistic representation we can achieve, is an excellent general-purpose tool because for a clientèle as diffuse as Google Earth’s, one never knows which topographic peculiarity might be useful at any given time.

Contrast that with maps of imaginary places, which are like their real-world kin in that all of them are works of art, but differ in that not all of them have a targeted function beyond serving, somewhat vaguely, as guidance for the reader (and often the author, as architect and city planner). Beyond looking pretty, framing the action, and setting the scene, the stylistic decisions often seem to lack any functional rationale.

Have a gander at this:

This is Ellisa Mitchell’s much-admired painting of the lands of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time, which for some reason is held up by some as one of the gold standards of fantastic cartography. When the up-and-coming fantasy novelist Saladin Ahmed called on Internet artists to produce a map for his forthcoming book, one that would outstrip the “very serviceable, basic, black-and-white line map” that his publisher could provide and “move beyond utility”, Mitchell’s map was one of the exemplars he had in mind.

Now, it’s obvious why Mitchell’s map is well received. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to deduce that inveterate fantasy readers like Saladin Ahmed admire its colour and natural gradients, things you would never find in a mass-market paperback for reasons of cost alone. And embellishment for purely aesthetic reasons is certainly nothing new: back when printed atlases were engraved, colourists would fill in rivers and trace political borders on individual copies by hand. But look at how the version above compares to the black-and-white paperback map:

At first glance it seems like Mitchell’s painting is simply a more expensive and lovingly crafted reimagining of its monochrome counterpart. What it actually does, however, is emphasize topography at the expense of features that are more narratively functional, like political borders and roads. By foregrounding the terrain, the linear elements of the map recede.

(Doubly fascinating is that for all her good intentions, Mitchell unwittingly captures the trappings of the Robert Jordan series—indulgent top to bottom, muddled to the point of being unreadable, and plastered with a faux-medieval ethos that screams inauthenticity. I know, I know; I’m being much too harsh. Comparing the map to the books is incredibly unfair to the map.)

So here’s the question we should ask: why is it so attractive to conclude that the painted poster is the superior piece of work?

In part, this has to do with the realities of the mass-market fiction industry. Considering the practical limitations in the age of desktop publishing and (in many cases) direct-to-paperback, it’s uncommon that books will come with endpaper maps printed in multiple colours like the first edition of the The Hobbit. You’ll certainly never see historically accurate engravings in the mode of Treasure Island. In this environment, it isn’t altogether surprising that readers would treasure maps in other media for their relative rarity—even though in truth, maps for the flagship fantasy brands (particularly those adapted to film) are issued and sold en masse.

What this explanation doesn’t address, though, is why topography is the element that takes precedence to everything else in receiving what you might call the artistic treatment. In all probability, this is grounded in the desire for immersion; read any encomium for fantasy mapmaking and the first thing you’ll hear is that maps make the world more real. But realism is really just a code for saying that something is more in line with our embedded assumptions about what it means to perceive the world, and in the cultural value system we live in today—empirical, literal, photographic—it refers to the imagined experience of seeing the physical terrain with your own eyes.

Weltanschauung

The most striking thing about fantasy maps as a whole, especially the sort that dominates the industry of doorstopper mythopoeia that claims to be descended from J.R.R. Tolkien, is how rigidly they stick to convention. No matter how nice they look, structurally they reduce to orthogonal landmass drawings. Rarely, if ever, will you find visualizations of an imagined cosmology like the commonplace depictions of Midgard and Asgard wrapped around Yggdrasil in Norse mythology—and you would think high fantasy in secondary worlds is the genre that could use them most.

This is a problem that plagues much of the fantasy genre in its modern form, and why it has yet to fully escape the unfortunate stigma of juvenilia. The more you learn about history, and the more you are able to see through the anachronistic façades, the less imaginative conventional fantasy seems. We see this in action with language all the time: it’s almost expected these days to see gratuitous apostrophes as a desperate grab for an illusion of foreignness, not to mention unquestioning adherence to the “glottals ugly, labials pretty” phonetic valuation that Tolkien laboured to design. The same applies to maps.

(Ironically, children’s books are rather good at averting the implausibility trap, thanks to their embrace of figurative thinking. Witness the chart from The Phantom Tollbooth, featured at the top of this essay: like the novel it accompanies, it takes the abstractions of interior experience and projects them into real space.)

Indeed, as fantasy has entrenched itself in a self-propagating commercial set of norms, it has developed a reputation for being extremely conservative in form and politics. Jonathan McCalmont explained it well in his breakdown of the norms and values of “fat fantasy”: accessibility, immersion, and (less obviously) the safe escape of a reactionary aesthetics. All of this put together, along with the commercial considerations of how the publishing industry works, accounts for why a genre that benefits so much from cartography yields maps that are so extraordinarily literal.

For the commercial market, officially published maps are passive documents that serve as the easily readable evidence that the author thought things through. The maps embed our familiar expectations and unquestioned ideologies because the novels they accompany do the same. Perfectly content to assume that a map is the world, these fictions ignore the map as an instrument for grasping the world. Even if we step back from lofty cosmology and into functional lay-of-the-land geography, it is shocking how rarely fantasy maps explore the notion of the map as a visualization of a subjective and contingent worldview, a picture of an imaginary people’s collective weltanschauung.

Just to pluck one example out of thin air, in all of modern fantasy fiction, you will perhaps never find a map as fantastic as this:

The map contained in this 18th-century print by the Dutch publisher Pieter van der Aa is Giovanni Domenico Cassini’s Planisphere terrestre of 1696, which was meticulously assembled on the floor of the Paris Observatory from the most ambitious global survey of the time. (Working for Louis XIV assuredly had its benefits where funding was concerned.) The azimuthal projection centred around the North Pole looks warped to us today, accustomed as we are to the distortions we get from Mercator. But get past the initial unfamiliarity, and we can unpack all sorts of information from the structure of the map. We can see how it reveals its own construction in standard longitudinal slices, made possible by advances in astronomy and observational logistics; how the South Pole encircles the rim as the outer limit of human exploration.

Given the quiet proliferation of challenging fantastic fiction that is conscious of literary nuances in prose, one would hope that the cartography eventually catches up. Maps could do a lot more to dive into the perspective of an imagined land’s inhabitants, revealing how the people see their own world as well as their techniques and motivations for piecing that picture together. There is much room for subtlety in made-up maps, just as there is in lexicons, timelines, and family trees, and authors who do not feel bound to mainstream fat-fantasy conventions are in a unique position to explore the possibilities.

That said, it’s understandable why this hasn’t happened yet, and it has much to do with the specialization of labour along the pipeline of publication. With the rise of the e-book, prose content has become increasingly divorced from the totality of the book as an object, and authors are prose-module specialists more than ever.

One of the stories about Tolkien that has gotten a bit lost these days, I think, is the considerable control he exercised over his own work as a book designer who drew up his own cover art, runes and all. This isn’t to say that he had the visual talents of, say, William Blake, who remains the supreme English example of the all-in-wonder author/artist, but Tolkien’s relationship to his publisher is continuous with that tradition. This is the precondition that allowed a quirky thing like Thrór’s map of the Lonely Mountain to make it into the public sphere.

Outside of the vanity presses, this level of control is practically non-existent these days. Probably the best solution towards opening up the variety of maps we see is to develop the kind of author/artist collaboration for cartography that you see for graphic novels, where the writing doesn’t exercise any peculiar authority that confines the illustration to a secondary, supplemental role.

Authority

The question of authorship is a fascinating issue all to itself. Where exactly does a map (or indeed, an illustration of any sort) cross over from narration to interpretation? Is this solely a question of who is officially licensed to participate in the world-creation of an intellectual property? We can tear down the intentional fallacy all day from a theoretical point of view, and insist (quite reasonably) that the author has no better say than anyone else in the interpretation of the text; but in practical terms, reader communities who crave immersion derive their sense of a “canon” from officially sanctioned materials.

Consider this quandary: how would we mediate a discrepancy between Christopher Tolkien (who has privileged access to his father’s manuscripts and the legal authority of the Tolkien estate, and who delivered most of what we “know” about Middle-Earth in posthumous publications) and Barbara Strachey’s essential interpretive atlas, Journeys of Frodo? Do we rule in favour of the archival drafts, or do we side with the charts that are directly inferred from the final published text of The Lord of the Rings?

To return to what I said about omniscience early on, perhaps the demarcating factor that defines fictional cartography—what sets it apart from pictorial representations of real spaces—is the presence, however provisional, of the author as God. When we read non-fictional maps, we can perform a kind of analysis similar to what I’ve walked through here, looking at means of production, political agendas, and underlying worldviews; but it’s fairly unambiguous which plane of existence the cartographers reside upon.

Fictional maps introduce the complication of having, at minimum, two layers of authorship: the layer outside the text that has the power to dictate and reshape the world, and the layer that belongs to the reality of the world. It’s clear that the author is in the first and the characters are in the second, and that having the first speak for the second passes for a kind of ventriloquism or free indirect discourse. But these are not the only stakeholders in play. The “narrator” of the map, if it’s discernible as a separate voice, can belong to either layer or both. And once we introduce the other living participants—the readership and the publishing apparatus—determining who influences our perception of the fictional space becomes considerably trickier.

For one thing, it isn’t safe to take it for granted that immersion in a world means the same thing as immersion in the author’s mind, as if the goal of literature were some sort of telepathic telos of lossless communication. Among other problems, this attitude towards literary immersion as a matter of filling in the blanks has no way of dealing with deliberate ambiguity.

To see what I’m getting at, take a look at this:

This is the fold-out from The Discworld Mapp, a companion book to the Terry Pratchett series designed to the instructions of Pratchett and Stephen Briggs. It’s a fascinating map in view of what I’ve said thus far, not because of its superficial resemblance to the Cassini planisphere if you zoom out far enough, but because it achieves the look of an azimuthal projection via being a fiercely literal map in a two-dimensional rectangular coordinate system. Much of this, of course, is due to how the Discworld was conceived to be exactly that—a world where an azimuthal projection is a one-to-one circle-to-circle mapping, and therefore no transformation at all.

As far as companion publications go, The Discworld Mapp sounds par for the course—that is, until you look into how the map came into being. Stephen Briggs was a playwright who made a name for himself as an amateur Pratchett loremaster who adapted several books for the stage (and who, unlike Steve Vander Ark, knew better than to publish derivative works without legal sanction). When Briggs first decided to map the Discworld novels, beginning with The Streets of Ankh-Morpork, he did so with Pratchett’s support; but the project went against the author’s original insistence that Discworld was a fluid, aleatoric wander of the imagination that could not and should not be mapped.

Terry Pratchett’s opinion on cartography still appears on his official website:

There are no maps. You can’t map a sense of humor. Anyway, what is a fantasy map but a space beyond which There Be Dragons? On the Discworld we know There Be Dragons Everywhere. They might not all have scales and forked tongues, but they Be Here all right, grinning and jostling and trying to sell you souvenirs.

This is a very sensible position, and as much as I love cartography I am somewhat inclined to agree. There is something completely bounded about maps. We all know that the data they present is highly selective, as is also true for prose, with strategic omissions and gaps left for future exploration. Yet the boundedness of maps commits to an illusion of having reached a roughly finished state, as if everything inside has already been fixed and everything outside is still untouched and malleable.

From the perspective of someone involved in creating a world, particularly in a series that continues to emerge over time, a map intended to serve as an aid may also be a suffocating constraint. Mapmaking does not seem to permit carefully targeted ambiguity with the same flexibility as prose alone. With other forms of book illustration, one always gets the sense that the visual depictions could always be replaced or re-envisioned some other way. Maps exert a stronger form of authority: any improvements or revisions by readers or in future editions take place within the author’s borders as if they were immutable, objective truths.

It is a strange twist indeed that we are less liable to accept in fiction than in reality that cartography is a form of language: a medium for our perception of place, not to be confused with place itself. If there is a remedy for this, it may resemble the solution we developed for language, and take the form of self-conscious experimentation with maps as narrative voices—subjective, perspectival, and often unreliable. Literary writing deserves a literary map.

As for the alternative, let’s defer to what Lewis Carroll said in The Hunting of the Snark:

He had bought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be
A map they could all understand.

“What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?”
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply
“They are merely conventional signs!

“Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we’ve got our brave Bellman to thank”
(So the crew would protest) “that he’s bought us the best—
A perfect and absolute blank!”

Further reading

I am certainly not the first to gush over fantasy maps in the blog format. The most thorough look at fantastic cartography that I found while researching my post is “Beyond the Aryth Ocean”, a four-part series (1, 2, 3, 4) by Jason Denzel, who manages the biggest Robert Jordan community online and who therefore holds opinions that differ substantially from my own. He knows a lot of genre fiction I don’t, however, and his series on cartography is definitely worth a look.

Brian Sibley, who co-authored several map books with the eminent Tolkien painter John Howe, wrote a post about fictional maps with an inside perspective on the community of artists who work on these kinds of projects.

Of the dedicated cartography blogs on the Internet that cover fictional maps from time to time, two in particular stand out. The first is Frank Jacobs’ Strange Maps, which you probably know about already if you’ve followed some of the links in this essay or are interested enough in cartography to have made it this far down at all. (I also recommend the book.) The second is Jonathan Crowe’s The Map Room, which devotes equal attention to historical geography and modern surveying, and features an extensive subsection dedicated to imaginary places.

The Tumblr site entitled Fuck Yeah Fictional Maps really speaks for itself.

The Map History site maintained by Tony Campbell is an extremely comprehensive resource, mainly directed at serious scholars but certainly useful for enthusiasts of early maps.

For those of you with academic journal access through JSTOR, Imago Mundi is the history of cartography’s inexhaustible resource par excellence. The journal dates back to 1935, and skimming the tables of contents alone will give you a picture of how cartographic scholarship has developed over the past century.

Speaking of academic map history, one name to look out for when it comes to the literary turn in cartographic studies is J.B. Harley, best known for his collaboration with David Woodward on a compendious multivolume history of cartography that remains to be finished. (Harley and Woodward are both now deceased.)

Late in his career, Brian Harley became the radical subversive postcolonial deconstructionist of map historians, but he isn’t nearly as scary or loopy as that iconoclastic description makes him sound. In fact, the sort of critical theory that literary scholars overworked to the point of Sokalian fashionable nonsense seem positively fresh and sensible when applied to maps (see for yourself), and it’s rather puzzling that in the twenty-year history of the literary study of maps, fictional cartography has remained largely untouched.

When I was very young, I heard a legend about a Chinese muralist who painted the most vivid and lifelike dragons but refused to fill in their eyes, lest the dragons come alive and fly away. I tried to track it down four or five years ago for a fragment I was writing at the time, but on that occasion I never found it. Today it occurred to me to make another attempt, and for reasons of n-grammatic potentia that shall remain mysterious, Google was far more helpful this time around.

As with any old story, mutations abound, but the preponderance of them involve the painter Zhang Seng-You (張僧繇) from the period of the Southern and Northern Dynasties (420-589 AD). Depending on who’s telling the story, Zhang Seng-You is asked to fill in the eyes by a bystander, the abbot who commissioned the monastery mural, or the Emperor himself (who, in this case, must have been Emperor Wu of the Liang Dynasty). The ending is always the same: the painter finishes the eyes and the dragons bolt away from the mural in a flash of lightning and thunder.

The wonderful thing about fables is the discordance of what they say—typically a blunt moral lesson, delivered as the payload of a cruise-missile punch line like a Feghoot minus the funny—versus what they do, which is leave innumerable gaps for diverse interpretations to take root and flourish. Stories are not reducible to definite lessons. Fiction is a space for debate, and a fable is an open meadow for all and sundry to frolic. (“I don’t believe in stories with morals,” says the man with the childish fantasy of teaching Lolita in schools.)

So what can we make of the tale of the painted dragons?

Is it a statement of sumi-e aesthetics?

This story embodies the philosophy of Oriental sumi-e. The goal is not simply to reproduce the appearance of the subject, but to capture its soul. To paint a horse, the sumi-e artist must understand its temperament better than its muscles and bones. To paint a flower, there is no need to perfectly match its petals and colors, but it is essential to convey its liveliness and fragrance. Oriental sumi-e may be regarded as an earliest form of impressionistic art that captures the unseen.

Or is it about attention to detail? Here’s one reading of the story and the proverb it spawned:

The idiom 画龙点睛 “draw a dragon, put in pupils” could be translated “finishing touch” in English. In Chinese it describes a key or emphatic phrase to a speech or in writing to drive home a point, giving the work more power.

And here’s another:

Based on this fairy tale [...] the last touch in a masterpiece is the most important part of a drawing, or any other important business.

Here’s a take on the story as it pertains to the tradition of dotting the eyes of dragon boats. It differs from the others in attributing the dragon murals to the fourth-century painter Gu Kai-Zhi (顧愷之), who left them unfinished until Zhang Seng-You was asked to complete them a century later:

[Gu Kai-Zhi] had a strange habit of leaving the eyeballs out for several years after the rest of the painting was finished. When he was asked why, he said, “The most life-like strokes of a subtle portrait come from the eyes.” He was actually implying that even a single stroke should not be done casually.

Nowhere have I read an interpretation that captures the essence of what I always thought the story to mean. Only the last one above comes close to grasping the part of the tale I find most resonant: the artist’s reluctance to finish the eyes until ordered to do so by somebody else.

In English, there’s a motto that art is never finished, only abandoned. It’s attributed to Leonardo da Vinci—who wouldn’t have said it in English, of course—but good luck sourcing it. One imagines that Leonardo, who filled in the most iconic eyes in the history of western art, derived the expression himself from a nugget of wisdom that arrived in the Italian Peninsula by way of Marco Polo’s expeditions to the Orient. But the insight resonates with anxieties of creativity everywhere, no matter which culture you’re in, and I lean towards believing it cropped up in many places independently.

What is perfectionism, really, but the avoidance of declaring something finished? Leaving out the pupils of the dragons, the way I see it, captures like no other parable the reluctance to put the lid on something magnificent. Once you’re done—once you’ve published—you’ve released your monster into the wild where it no longer bows to your command. The desire to create something magnificent conflicts with the compulsion to retain control over every detail. If the dragon flies away, it’s no longer within your power to polish the scales.

This is the perfectionist’s paradox: what if the creative apotheosis is only attainable through the loss of control? Here we’re not too far from the thematic stomping grounds of the most visceral film of 2010:

In the age of digital media we’ve grown accustomed to perpetual self-editing. It’s easy to deceive ourselves into believing that with instantaneous editorial revision at our fingertips, we now have the freedom to publish first and ask questions later. For many, this is true, and it’s why they propel the Internet’s flux of content at a pace that is nothing short of torrential. But in the other direction, there flows a strange inhibitor. Many now fear that substantial blog content is drying up, squashed in the middlebrow sandwich between personal intimations in social networks and the impersonal platform of paid journalism (where long-form is already on life support).

We’ve discussed some of these matters before, but I think they are worth revisiting. The dwindling of journals like this one has nothing to do with the terror of public scrutiny. What the decline really comes from, I believe, is an anxiety of impermanence. Good content—the transcendent stuff that rises above the encroaching tides of what Philip K. Dick called kipple—has a reputation for sticking around. This is a reputation the Internet does not share. It’s not just because online content is liable to be edited or outright wiped: it’s also because the connectivity of hypertext inherently carries a poison pill of long-term decay. Links break with time, and their container vessels get dragged into the undertow regardless of their independent eloquence.

I have before me a draft box overstuffed with nearly painted dragons. Many of them will never take flight. They will die in captivity.

Don’t even ask about my offline albatross.

There was an essay in this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review about writers who abandoned their novels—beginning, as it should, with Michael Chabon’s Fountain City, which consumed a good five years of his life before he left it for Wonder Boys. And it’s worth remembering that the novelists in the essay—American titans like Chabon, Updike, and Harper Lee—had all already knocked something out of the park. Spare a thought for the failures-to-be who haven’t even made it that far; the roster must be endless.

If you think about it, it’s miraculous that anything of lasting power ever sees the light of day. I wonder sometimes if this is achievable without coercion, or if you really do require an external agent to flick the creative-inhibition switch to off. It takes a special force of will to abandon one’s baby on the river.

So whether it’s helpful or not, it’s worth remembering that even the best things in life aren’t finished. Like the serpents on the temple walls, they just get released.

You can find Naden’s writings online in the posthumously published The Complete Poetical Works of Constance Naden (1894), a volume that includes translations of Schiller and Goethe, among others. It seems as though she was something of a polymath.

My introduction to Naden’s work came by way of this audio podcast of a lecture delivered by John Holmes at the Royal Society, who spoke on Charles Darwin’s influence on the ideas and concerns of Victorian English poets. (This is the subject of Holmes’ recent book, Darwin’s Bards: British and American Poetry in the Age of Evolution.) In the lecture, Holmes speaks briefly on “Natural Selection”, a playful comic poem about a palaeontologist who is scientifically delighted to find that his beloved has been whisked away by an all-singing, all-dancing “idealess lad”. This poem belongs to a quartet entitled Evolutional Erotics (1887), in which Naden explores the collision of love and the scientific mind. Another poem in the set, “Scientific Wooing”, brings science into the register of high romance in a manner that might be construed as ironic (but then again, might not be):

At this I’ll aim, for this I’ll toil,
And this I’ll reach—I will, by Boyle,
By Avogadro, and by Davy!
When every science lends a trope
To feed my love, to fire my hope,
Her maiden pride must cry is “Peccavi!“

I’ll sing a deep Darwinian lay
Of little birds with plumage gay,
Who solved by courtship Life’s enigma;
I’ll teach her how the wild‐flowers love,
And why the trembling stamens move,
And how the anthers kiss the stigma.

I am reminded here of the tensor algebra pastoral from one of the great masterworks of science fiction, Stanislaw Lem’s The Cyberiad:

For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?

Cancel me not – for what then shall remain?
Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.

Many of Naden’s other poems are more subtle in their use of science, or at least not as liable to wink at the reader. “Solomon Redivivus”, from the same collection, imbues Solomon and Sheba with a fathomless sense of deep time by turning their story into a macroevolutionary tale, from amoeba to fish to highly developed mammal. Even this one feels a little forced, though, in our retrospective eyes—not unlike the sense we get when we read Cold War writing about atomic power, that this particular strand of science is so dominant, it is all anyone seems to talk about.

The best of Naden’s science poetry, of the selections I’ve read thus far, are to be found among the sonnets. Consider “The Nebular Theory”, which begins with a ruthless, particulate materiality, then bursts into the cosmological plane in line 9 with “raptures of keen torment”:

This is the genesis of Heaven and Earth.
In the beginning was a formless mist
Of atoms isolate, void of life; none wist
Aught of its neighbour atom, nor any mirth,
Nor woe, save its own vibrant pang of dearth;
Until a cosmic motion breathed and hissed
And blazed through the black silence; atoms kissed,
Clinging and clustering, with fierce throbs of birth,

And raptures of keen torment, such as stings
Demons who wed in Tophet; the night swarmed
With ringèd fiery clouds, in glowing gyres
Rotating: æons passed: the encircling rings
Split into satellites; the central fires
Froze into suns, and thus the world was formed.

Or “Poet and Botanist”, which reads like a statement of Naden’s thematic centre of gravity:

Fair are the bells of this bright‐flowering weed;
Nectar and pollen treasuries, where grope
Innocent thieves; the Poet lets them ope
And bloom, and wither, leaving fruit and seed
To ripen; but the Botanist will speed
To win the secret of the blossom’s hope,
And with his cruel knife and microscope
Reveal the embryo life, too early freed.

Yet the mild Poet can be ruthless too,
Crushing the tender leaves to work a spell
Of love or fame; the record of the bud
He will not seek, but only bids it tell
His thoughts, and render up its deepest hue
To tinge his verse as with his own heart’s blood.

The emphasis on the masculinity of Poet and Botanist alike is a curiosity worthy of an essay in itself. Constance Naden’s position as a highly educated woman who crossed both disciplines—one who sometimes masked her gender under the pseudonym “C. Arden” in her philosophical and scientific papers—is of intense interest to scholars of her work. Naden’s double identity figures heavily into this paper by Marion Thain, which offers a comprehensive look at how Naden’s concerns about science and poetry were informed by her materialist philosophy of “Hylo-Idealism” as well as the surrounding context of the Thomas Huxley/Matthew Arnold debate over the value of the classics. (Naden was educated at Mason Science College in Birmingham, where the Huxley/Arnold argument was ignited by Josiah Mason’s edict that the college he founded would not provide its students with “mere literary instruction and education.”)

In our time, the divorce of science from poetry has become so engrained in popular consciousness as a blind assumption (irrespective of the exceptions—and believe me, there are many) that Naden’s poems may stand out for conjoining them at all. I would say, however, that Naden’s poems are insightful because they take the closeness of science and poetry as a given, and seek to explore how that relationship works; sometimes sincerely, other times with a smirk. Science is part of our lexicon, after all, and to sidestep it is to restrict ourselves to a fraction of the palette available to us.

Link-dumping has never been an adequate stand-in for commentary of my own, and if you want to read what I read you are better off checking Twitter (the only circumstance where that is ever the case). Nevertheless, here is a slice of the pileup.

• Let’s lead this off with one of my great loves and frustrations in the world: science journalism. Begin with Martin Robbins’ incisive parody of sensationalist science reporting. Then read Ed Yong’s remarks on objectivity, neutrality, and whether journalists should take sides.

• “Our daughter isn’t a selfish brat; your son just hasn’t read Atlas Shrugged.”

• Witnessing the Twelfth of July festivities in Northern Ireland this year led me to this must-read piece of ethnomusicology, where Stephen Howe scrutinizes the musical identity of the loyalist marching bands (the ones with the “kick-the-Pope” drums).

• Ron Rosenbaum explains agnosticism. I have a few problems with how readily Rosenbaum buys and sets up the all-too-common straw man of the so-called New Atheism, but the article’s spirited defence of uncertainty and rejection of tribalist debate makes it worth a thorough look.

• This has been a bumper year for exciting stories in espionage. By now everyone has read about the KGB’s suburban infiltrants and forgotten them too, but that doesn’t make revisiting the coverage any less fun. So neighbourly were they, yet so incompetent! Just look at those complaints.

• When I was a wee lad I co-moderated a Tolkien-themed discussion board that was, in later years, overrun by home-schooled creationist kids. Someday they will grow up to be Republican senatorial candidate Christine O’Donnell, whose views about Arwen and Éowyn are oddly more informed than her views about anything and everything else.

• Popular Science gives us a look at the Pentagon’s $58-billion killer robots.

• Lisa Poisso interviews a Lutheran pastor who runs a World of Warcraft guild and who has a host of insightful things to say on faith and fantasy.
• Finally, I must share Patrick Barkham’s remembrance of class and culture at Cambridge University—more reflective of the undergraduate life than the relatively new postgraduate one, I think, but still relevant today.

Elsewhere:

• J.K. Rowling, writing in the capacity of a former single mother living on welfare, isn’t buying what David Cameron is selling. In a somewhat frivolous response, Toby Young leaps on the Tory nostalgia of the Harry Potter books, pointing to Hogwarts’ Etonian idyll while somehow neglecting to mention the conspicuously nuclear families; but anyone who paid attention to Rowling’s finer points (which doesn’t include Mr Young, I’m afraid) knows full well her politics aren’t what he thinks they are.

• Film editor Todd Miro savages Hollywood colour grading for taking us into a nightmare world of orange and teal.

• Roger Ebert articulates his controversial belief that video games can never be art—not for the first time, though it’s nice to finally see him elaborate on it in one place. I’m of the opinion that the entire semantic quagmire is easily evaded if we adopt an instrumental definition of art. Regardless of whether video games are even theoretically comparable to the great works of other media, our only way of getting at qualitative findings about creativity and beauty in game design is to borrow from the language of art, so we may as well consider them as such.

• While on the subject of aesthetics: over at Gödel’s Lost Letter, R.J. Lipton’s fantastic computing science blog, are some germinal sketches of how one might study great mathematical proofs as great art.

• The International Spy Museum briefs us on Josephine Baker, the actress-heroine of the French Resistance.

• Paul Wells visits the Canadian forces in Kandahar and reports on the shift in the tone and strategy of their counterinsurgency efforts. This is one of the best pieces of journalism I’ve read on the present state of the war in Afghanistan and I can’t recommend it enough.

• Strange Maps documents two wonderful specimens of literary cartography: back covers of mystery paperbacks, and a poster for a Shakespeare conference in France depicting a town that looks like the Bard.

And now for something completely different:

• Start with Michael Weingrad’s piece in The Jewish Review of Books about why there is no Jewish Narnia. Then proceed to Israeli sci-fi reviewer Abigail Nussbaum’s response and her survey of the conversation.

• My friend Stephen McCarthy, who is coaching Korean schoolchildren in the art of debate, writes about his cultural collision with corporal punishment.

• Anthony Gottlieb digests a survey of what philosophers believe. The data set covers English-speaking academia and skews heavily analytic, but I’m not one to complain.

• Not exactly “reading” per se, but it’s election time, and I can’t stop playing with The Guardian‘s lovely polling widget.

• Wikileaks is in the news again after releasing footage of American troops firing upon a Reuters photographer in Iraq. The BBC profiles who they are.

• John McWhorter parses Sarah Palin. Typically the way the print media scrubs audio quotations into coherent, well-formed sentences (or doesn’t) is a good indicator of media bias, but the thing about Palin is that it can’t be done.

• Julie Just asks where the parents have gone in fiction for young adults.

• What are marching bands playing these days? Shostakovich, that’s what.

• Dale Dougherty writes about the iPad and misses HyperCard. He’s not the only one.

• Cartoonist James Sturm leaves the Internet. I should do that too.

• In a review of Mass Effect II, Jonathan McCalmont calls out video games for their uncritical acceptance of racial essentialism.

• A 1969 letter from Buzz Aldrin to a radio enthusiast offers some insight into the Apollo 11 spacecraft’s low-budget insulation.

• Jonah Lehrer draws on studies about primates and social hierarchy to express some concerns about the compulsion to count one’s Twitter followers and Facebook friends. (People do that? I don’t, but I sure like to comb through my website stats.)

• Finally, courtesy of Daniel Mendelsohn, a review of Avatar that says most of what I wanted to say about Avatar—and for good measure, puts it all in the context of James Cameron’s entire career.

• Patricia Cohen takes a look at the preservation of writers’ rough notes and scrap paper in a digital age, in which we discover that even Salman Rushdie is none too magniloquent to scrawl, “I am doing this so that I can see how a whole page looks when it’s typed at this size and spacing.”

• Also in The New York Times: a special feature on politics and the modern science museum. I’m not convinced that the agendas underlying science exhibits were any less varied or complex a century ago, but as a look at where things stand today the article is well worth perusing.

• The National Arts Centre in Ottawa is commemorating the great Oscar Peterson with a statue to be unveiled 30 June. Please make a contribution.

• And while on the subject of jazz, Peter Hum criticizes the notion that musicians should contrive to make the genre culturally relevant—whatever that means. My preference, as always, is for art that strives for timeless resonance over fashionable gratification. That some things feel like one, and other things feel like the other, is not well understood and worthy of investigation.

• Turn up your speakers and read Jan Swafford’s article in Slate about performing classical piano repertoire on classical pianos, which is full of audio comparisons that will make you wonder if the homogenized ideal of the modern Steinway grand is really a good thing.

• The Guardian asks a wide selection of novelists for their writing tips, which have a way of telling us more about the authors than about writing. Some of my favourites: Geoff Dyer (“Don’t be one of those writers who sentence themselves to a lifetime of sucking up to Nabokov”), Anne Enright (“The first 12 years are the worst”), Philip Pullman (“My main rule is to say no to things like this, which tempt me away from my proper work”).

• Ben Goldacre shows us how regulating alternative folk medicine through requiring certification is no use at all when we don’t know what’s being certified.

• From The New York Times: Canadians shoot left, Americans shoot right. The article is about hockey players but I think there’s something bigger in this.

• Teresa Nielsen Hayden remarks on the imaginative poverty of failed authors who think suing J.K. Rowling for plagiarism is a good idea.

• Jonah Lehrer wonders if the direction of funding towards older scientists hinders us from tapping into the creativity of youth. Also read the followup on his Frontal Cortex blog.

• Civilization IV lead designer Soren Johnson talks about designing strategy games around our intuitions about probability (or lack thereof).

• Mark Chu-Carroll explains why computer simulations of biological phenomena will never replace animal testing.

• Joel Stickley’s explorations of bad writing by example finally catch on to my fatal flaw.

This week’s bag of links:

• In a rare sighting of the man behind Calvin and Hobbes, Cleveland newspaper The Plain Dealer interviews Bill Watterson fifteen years after the legendary comic strip ended its run.

• Peter Hum ruminates on the “ugly beauty” of avant-garde jazz.

• The big news coming out of Barack Obama’s 2011 budget was the abandonment of NASA’s plan for the resumption of manned spaceflight to the moon. SPACE.com has the analysis.

• Jonathan McCalmont, caught between the debate over high/low culture and his vehement dislike of the popular video game Bayonetta (“a game so dumb that it makes a weekend spent masturbating and sniffing glue seem like an animated discussion of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921)”), spun it all into a compelling essay on hypnotism and lowbrow art.

• This Charles Petersen piece in The New York Review of Books is one of the better histories you will find of where Facebook came from and how it has transformed, and offers a thorough look at the content-pushing pressures facing the social-network model of a nominally private Internet.

• Mark Sarvas identifies some common problems of debut novels from the perspective of a prize-committee veteran.

• In The Guardian, Darrel Ince implores scientists who rely on internally developed software to publish their source code.