In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Marlow reminisces about growing up looking at maps with blank spaces on them and saying to himself “when I grow up I want to go there.” I can imagine that young Marlow staring down at those white spaces, and I can remember a time when, for me, how imagination would have filled in whatever existed in those places no one had been. I remember wandering in woods and imagining that I was the first person who had seen a certain tree, or discovered a certain clearing. I’ve often imagined the first human kneeling in the dust and trying to convey to someone the route to the next watering hole, or the dying elder trying to pass on the way to the best hunting grounds. Was that what led to the creation of maps? Was that the beginning that led to how important maps are to us today?

And they are important.

Think about it: We have street maps and mall maps and star maps and shipping routes. We have maps of geography, of economies, of demographics and age. Heck, we even have mind maps. All of them serve a similar purpose in conveying relationships between political entities, between populations and between ideas.

But the thing that I find most fascinating is that maps have not always been as they are today. Maps were once an art form used to convey more that the ‘reality’ they are used to present today. Once maps were used to present ideas. For example, although today we all accept north as the cardinal ‘north’ on our maps, early Christian maps placed the east at the top because that was supposed to be the direction to paradise, while many early maps from other cultures also had the east at the top, presumably because that was where the sun rose.

We’ve all seen the old maps where beyond the boundaries of known lands the mapmaker filled the empty spaces with figures of their imaginations: dragons, unicorns and men with no heads or with a single foot so large it could provided shade. But other cultures have waxed more creative in looking at those empty spaces. In Peru the Inca read the future in the blank spaces between the mapped stars. Those same gaps and spaces, they mirrored in their fortresses of empire in the Andes.

So maps fascinate me and fuel my imagination and thus arose the Cartos people who populate my fantasy novels. With the help of their maps they can rewrite all creation and fill those blank spaces with something beyond even my imagination. Marlow would have loved them.