I’m thrilled to announce that book two of the Terra Trilogy is now available in e-book and the print publication will be available in May.
In the years after the ‘Big One’ destroyed most of human civilization, a lone city perches precariously on the Pacific Northwest coast of North America.
When nomadic marauders attack the Independent city of Couver, seventeen-year-old Terra Vargas must choose: use her Cartos powers to protect her city, or rescue her mother from the marauders’ camp. But as her control over the earth power erodes, so does her ability to choose wisely.
Stay or go?
Either way, there will be a horrible price to pay.
Path through the rain forest on the Camino Inca, Peru (2011) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson
The ancient T.O. maps didn’t represent reality, but they did map the reality of the Christian spirit at the time. Portolan Charts gave a realistic representation of coastlines and the work of the Indian spy/cartographers, placed rivers on the maps well before aerial mapping existed.
One of the last bastions of ‘unmapped’ territory was the Amazon basin of Brazil. In 1799 Alexander von Humboldt, the son of a Prussian baron, spent five years travelling from Venezuela’s Orinoco river through the Amazon, collecting specimens and surveying. Afterwards he produced 33 volumes of maps and illustrations. That was the last mapping for over a hundred and fifty years except for the occasional scientific or rubber company exploration.
Until 1970.
That’s when the Brazilian government got the idea to construct a highway from the Atlantic Coast, across 5,000 kilometers (about 3,400 miles) of rainforest to the Peruvian border. The construction was a nightmare due to a dearth of maps. The rainforest had too many clouds and—gee, rain in a rainforest?—for aerial mapping to work. The result was construction following ground-based surveyors who were barely ahead of the bulldozers and this led to the construction having to cross the same river multiple times leading to enormous unforeseen costs.
Cloud Forest tree along Camino Inca, Peru (2011) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson
Enter the cartographers. In this case it was cartographers and the invention of side-looking radar (SLAR). SLAR is an improvement on the radar that helped safe Great Britain during the Battle of Britain. It’s the invention that allows radar to be shot out the side of an aircraft to take long horizontal pictures of the landscape. This technology can ‘see’ through clouds and trees to the landforms. With the help of computers, SLAR can provide accurate pictures of the rise and fall of the landscape.
The survey team with their aircraft arrived in Brazil on the summer of 1971. In just under a year SLAR mapped the Amazon in 32-kilometer-wide swaths which lead to the first detailed maps of the Amazon and an understanding that this huge territory wasn’t the previously-thought Amazon “basin”. Instead they found that only about 20% of the area was lowlands, with most of the landscape being hilly and mountainous.
This ‘sped up’ the construction of the highway which was completed in 2011 except for a single bridge in the Peruvian part of the road. But what has this meant for the area? For some, it replaces weeks of travel on dirt roads to a relatively short drive. For others it promises income from a potential huge influx of tourists. But what it also means is environmental degradation.
Brazil has a long history of environmental issues springing directly from road-building into this relatively delicate biosphere. Previous road building shows that almost 90% of deforestation lies within 50 kilometers of a road (about 23miles). Timber and mineral extraction are followed by hydroelectric dam development and the destruction this causes.
What’s disturbing is that the Amazon is truly the lungs of the world and cartography has provided the data needed to seriously damage those lungs. It places a different perspective on maps; one that undermines the beauty of what I’ve always thought and suggests the need for ethical standards that stand up to the push of corporate greed.
Path along the Yukon River. The quiet places like this are the ones lost in rampant development. (2010) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson
There are means to ameliorate the potential destructiveness of developments like the Transoceanic Highway or the construction of pipelines like the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline through British Columbia, but it requires people like cartographers, citizens, and government officials to demand agreements that protect the environment BEFORE, planning starts. Otherwise ‘progress’ can just as easily lead to widespread destruction like what is happening in the Amazon.
The new maps of the Amazon not only map progress, but also the destruction of a reality. Unlike the T.O. maps of the Christians that cemented the Christian spirit firmly in Jerusalem, these maps not only mark destruction of biodiversity, but they record the destruction of the spirit of the indigenous people.
Okay, I’m anachronism. It’s Easter Sunday and so I’m writing about faith—well, a little bit of faith—faith and maps.
As I’ve said, I like maps and will continue to use them. Though many people are turning more and more to GPS systems in their vehicles, I still have my trusty book of street maps of the metropolitan area where I live. When I pull out my yellowing, dog-eared map book I’m reminded of the volumes of Portolan charts of old, that were the predecessors of the Mercator projection I spoke of HERE.
Portolan charts were mariner charts, used by sailors to navigate the Mediterranean and then the coasts of Africa and Asia. The earliest existing portolan chart dates from 1290, but records as early as 1270 talk of a captain pulling out charts to convince a frightened king that their ship really could reach land during a terrible storm. Portolan charts have distinctive features, most noticeably the rhumb lines and compass roses that gave sailors bearings to set their sailing headings. These rhumb lines set out the four cardinal directions and the principle wind directions (North, Northeast, East, Southeast, South, Southwest, West and Northwest) as well as the eight half-winds (NNE, ENE, etc.) Portolan maps also had detailed, careful place names along the coast, color coding of places to show importance, and standard ways of showing rocks and shoals, while overemphasizing bays and headlands—all important information for sailors trying to reach safe harbor. This is very different from the predecessor of the Portolan, the medieval mappamundi , which generally had East at the top, and Jerusalem at the centre without any detail. The mappamundi were there to represent a way of thinking for the faithful; all they really needed to know was the location of Jerusalem in relation to where they lived. By contrast, the portolan set out in detail the way to make your way in the world.
Yes, there were issues with the portolan charts. They used a rough scale, but had none of the accuracy the Mercator Projection provided. Still, they served their purpose.
No one knows who made the first portolan chart, but researchers have shown that those we know about were copied, some by tracing (they can tell by small pinpricks left in the vellum, and some by simple eyeballing). Portolan charts were also generally written on vellum—sheep or calf skin prepared in such a way that the narrow end of the beast (toward the neck) could fit the narrowing of the Mediterranean. The vellum could handle the rigors of sailing better than paper could and vellum could role up for easy storage or could be made into volumes of portolan charts. Of course, because they had different makers, different parts of the world were drawn using different scales which made it a challenge to draw up larger maps of the world.
But portolan fell out of use with the advent of the Mercator Projection because, while the portolan charts were good for the Mediterranean and coastal shorelines, they were not as good for great sea voyages where the Mercator Projection provided relatively easy ways to chart a route from places like South Africa to New York.
So the beautiful, utilitarian portolan chart fell out of use, just like my map book has fallen out of favor in comparison to those tiny black box GPS units and smart phones that help gadget users to get from point A to point B. To me, it feels like civilization has taken a great leap forward by stepping back. No longer are we worried about great sea voyages (Mercator maps), or even the details of where such and such a place sits along the coast in relation to where we are (Portolan charts). Now we simply input our destination and trust the GPS to tell us which headings to take, much like medieval civilization trusted their priests to tell them how to live in relation to Jerusalem. Which makes me wonder whether we might have stepped right back to the days of the mappamundi, where our sense of direction is directly related to our faith—but today it’s our faith in technology.
The Easter Procession in Cuzco, Peru. Flower petals are thrown whihc have, over time, stained the Christ figure black. (2010) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson
Cover Reveal: TERRA Infirma, Book 2 in the Terra Trilogy
I’m thrilled to be able to post the cover of the sequel to TERRA Incognita. Again the fantastic artistry of Cristina Otero provides the model of Terra coming apart from her power. The book will be available April 2012.
A wonderful fromage tree at Angkor ruins (2008) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson
As I said way back when I started blogging about maps, some of my favorite early memories are of looking at maps with my family as we started out on some adventure, or as I fantasized about places around the world that I wanted to see. I guess that experience made me a map fan. In reaction to my blog about whether maps should be in books, a few blog readers reminded me that they also like to read maps and in particular find satisfaction in maps contained in books because those maps offer the opportunity to better understand the relationship and distances between places written about in the book. The readers enjoyed following along with the characters as they moved across the landscape.
This enjoyment with following voyages isn’t limited to readers. I recently lost an afternoon playing with the Facebook Cities I’ve Visited app. I think Facebook and Tripadvisor are on to something there – the need to record and understand just where we’ve been in relation to where we are right now.
I mentioned previously that I always carry a map when I travel and mark my journey down for my future enjoyment. As a writer, taken in conjunction with my journals, these maps always help me remember the places I’ve been or travelled through and provide a cartographic representation of terrain that my aging brain cells might have forgotten. But maps aren’t just used by me during my journeys. My family always hauls out the atlas and follows along as I wander. On my last trip, to Peru, a network of writer friends around North America followed along as I did sent in my blogs like an itinerant reporter. I suppose the satisfaction for them, was not only that they could follow along, but that they could also get a sense of the relationship of where I was to their location.
Shell seller on the west coast of Zanzibar (1994) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson
Because although maps represent a greater world, they are also are very egocentric creations. By this I mean that maps are drawn by the creator not necessarily to draw reality, but to draw their reality. Case in point is a lovely 1886 Imperial Federation Map if the World Showing the Extent of the British Empire which shows Britain at the centre of the map (much as the medieval T/O maps showed Jerusalem at the centre of the known world). The wonderful map uses the Meracator projection which nicely enlarges landmasses in the northern hemisphere (including Britain) and also includes mythic Atlas holding aloft the world which is straddled by lithesome Britannia who is surrounded and adored by the lesser ‘races’ (read colonies), all peering up at Britannia’s greatness. Not simply a map it seems, but also a satisfying cartographic representation of the way Brits at that time wanted to view the world and themselves.
To some degree I think the Cities I’ve Visited acts something like the 1886 map: although we aren’t placing ourselves above the world, it gives us comfort with our place in the world. We create our representation of the places we’ve touched and maybe that gives them more reality for us. Perhaps that satisfaction also includes a little reassurance of our place in the world?
So when I was done with Cities I’ve Visited, I was very satisfied that I’d trod so many places in the world, but also fairly embarrassed. I felt almost like I was competing with some cyber-other to show that my vision of the world was broader because I’d been more places. Was it really a competition? The App said the average person has visited 17 cities. I was at 247 and I stopped when I started to feel really stupid (not to mention that I’d wasted a good chunk of the afternoon).
Muscian at tombs above Jaisalmer, India (2000) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson
The whole experience reminded me of too many tourists I’ve laughed over who arrive at a place, leap out of the tour bus, take a photo and then leave to drive like mad to the next place and the next photo. That phenomena always put me in mind of a mission to collect places like notches on a belt – or like a dog leaving photographic spoor like doggie–do reminders of where they’ve been.
It makes me wonder if our egocentric need for maps is something like our need to collect, buy and own – as a means to quell our unquenchable need for satisfaction.
Rhumb Lines, Novel Writing and How to get from point A to Point B
Dhow in coastal waters off Zanzibar Island (1994) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson
As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m in the midst of a year of writing sequels. Actually it may take two or three years to get through all the sequels needed for my current novels. As I have already mentioned on this blog I’ve found writing my first sequel a bit of a challenge even though I knew where I was going. It seemed that I kept straying off course.
This puts me in mind of the challenges mariners had back before Gerard Mercator created his famous projection in 1569. A projection is a way of taking three dimensional landforms off of a globe and placing them onto a flat surface (a map) while retaining relative conformity of shape and relation between the landforms. What Mercator did was take meridians of latitude and longitude and make them all aim straight north-south or east-west creating 90 degree angles at each intersection. Sure it expanded the landforms closer to the poles, but it also gave mariners a means of plotting courses over long distances.
Picture this overlaid on top of a typical world map with latitude and longitude laid out.
You see, prior to Mercator, mariners shared two fears – bad weather and getting lost. (Actually I share their fears, the latter most particularly when I’m writing.) In the years before Mercator’s projection, mariners had generally confined their sailing to the Mediterranean and coastal waters. The transatlantic voyages to America were done by the stars, but there were no helpful portolano (mariners maps using compass roses to show sailing routes) of the great oceans. Mercator’s grid made sailing the open ocean as easy as sailing the coasts because it gave sailors a means to chart a straight line (a rhumb line) from Point A to Point B across the ocean. From this they could plan their headings and make their voyages.
Of course sailing the distance from Cape Town to New York is about as huge an endeavor as writing a novel (or a sequel) from page one to the end and neither route actually takes a straight line. Sailors travelling that distance recognized that they didn’t travel a flat earth, they travelled a globe and so they added to their calculations, the curve of a great circle that was the largest circle they could draw through a sphere and this route showed the actual shortest distance between two points. Sailors then chose their routes by drawing straight chart lines between the great circle and rhumb line that allowed them to approximate the great circle along the route.
Tall ship off Portuguese coast (2006) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson
This seems a lot like the process I use when I’m writing. I know where I start and I know where I want to finish (most of the time). The writing process then becomes one of deciding how far to travel from the rhumb line (the plot or the backbone) of the story, for it seems to me that novels have great circles, too. These are the themes you are writing about and you don’t want to allow your plots to take over, so that your story is nothing but plot, but neither do you want your subplots to take you so far out of your way that the story no longer fits within its themes. And that’s where sailing and writing diverge in their process. Sailors use the great circles and rhumb lines to plot their course and they follow it from Point A to Point B. A writer, on the other hand, will use them to plan their novel or their series of novels, but also to look behind and check whether they have wandered too far off course to get to their final destination. This is the challenge in sequels: viewing the second or third book as just one of the charted lines between the rhumb and the great circle, building its way to the ultimate end of the voyage.
Alentejo house wall, Portugal (2005) Photo (c) KarenAbrahamson
Yesterday I spent part of the afternoon mapping the layout for a community event I’m planning. I found myself confounded (for a bit) about the need for scale, because I needed to be able to estimate the amount of security fencing I needed. What struck me was that I didn’t actually need to make a map. Others could have determined the fencing needs through simple math. But for me, the answer to my fencing needs lay in graphic representation so that I could measure the length of fencing from visualizing the exact boundaries of everything. It raised the question for me of whether maps of fantasy worlds were always necessary.
Controlling the reader’s experience of imaginary places seems to me to be the main purpose of maps in fantasy books – to set hard boundaries around the reader’s imagination. Whether a map is actually necessary has been a topic of discussion among writers. I wonder if the debate about the inclusion of maps couldn’t learn something of benefit from looking at dialogue within the cartographic world.
You see, there are some pundits who suggest that professional and academic cartography is dying because it has become too cut off from the human experience and too insistent on rules and scales and design constraints, while the human need to map (or simply to talk about location) is under constant evolution. Think about some of the things mapped today. It’s not mountains and rivers and landscapes. In my non-writing life I’m dealing with maps of childhood vulnerability, community asset maps and maps of fast food restaurants placed near high schools.
Not exactly like the maps of the great explorers, which is why I question whether qualities like scale are necessary, or even possible or useful, for many types of maps including those in fantasies. The maps I’m dealing with in my non-writing life are helpful to because they help me express certain phenomena occurring in the community, but I didn’t have to do it with a map. I could have provided a chart or a list, just as the fantasy author can provide description. Was a map even necessary? Is it necessary in a fantasy?
In the past, most of my books have been without maps, instead painting the picture of place with my words. In my epic fantasy, however, (The Warden of Power) I felt that a map was necessary as I wrote the first volume of my epic so that I could ensure place names, etc., were used consistently in the manuscript and its sequels. Did I include the map in the book? Actually, no.
I think the reading experience should be one that transports the reader to a place that they and the writer create together, without a map setting boundaries around the reader’s experience. Let the reader read my words, their brain cells fire, and reinterpret the world in my fiction. It doesn’t matter that they might not imagine the world exactly like me. My words are code and the reader will interpret them from within the context of what matters to them. Isn’t that what
reading is all about? Creating a world in your head? Some of the most disappointing experiences I’ve ever had involved artists (or Hollywood) providing their interpretation of a book I love. Inevitably their attempt to place boundaries around a character or the landscape wasn’t consistent with what I had in my head.
Mapping, like other forms of communication, reflects a need to express, to create and to understand, but setting a map in a book – like setting rigid rules around mapping — it can stymie the imagination. This applies whether we’re creating new maps to express new ideas or situations, or creating a world in a reader’s mind. Mapping, like dreaming, is a human need. Must we, as writers, place boundaries on that need?
Vallon Drake continues her investigation into a dead girl where no girl should be. In a school with too many students with too much power, continuing the investigation might just lead to a second body: Vallon’s.
A Huaca, or sacred stone, in the landscape of the Peruvian Altiplano (2011) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson
Last night I received an article from my local Romance Writers of America chapter about world building for writers and how making a map of a location can help to create your story and your plot. I got thinking about this and how it relates to human history. In particular I got to thinking about how some anthropologists and historians have drawn a line in the sand (the 15th Century) about when true maps came into existence. (See my last post here.) But it got me wondering whether they were short-sighted in their definition.
The authors of this theory have said that prior to the 15th century while people might have made maps, they largely weren’t made for the same purpose of orienting the landscape like maps are used for today. They talked about how maps of older civilizations presented a cosmology, not a spatial map, or were used to show relationships, which could as easily be represented in text or the spoken word. This, they posited, means that earlier map-like creations are not true maps. Whether they are wrong or right is a matter of some debate.
Trail along the Camino Inca, the path to Machu Picchu (2011) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson
A case in point is Native American cartography. The literature about Native American maps is challenged by the fact that not only is it hard to find maps from pre-European contact (birch bark and leather just don’t stand up to five hundred years of colonization), but most of the records of native maps are colored by the perspectives of those who collected the map. The few maps that do exist require the reader to think of maps in more than one way. For example, records of a Virginian Algonquin map collected by John Smith in 1624 (while he was a prisoner), show a cosmological view of the world, but also a spatial linking of places. The map shows three concentric circles around a fire, with the first circle being a circle of meal representing the Algonquin Territory, the second being an inner circle of corn representing North America, and the third circle of corn representing the edge of the supposedly circular world. To try to understand John Smith’s origins from beyond North America, the Algonquin created a thatched stick island between circle two and three. Clearly this shows a sense of spatial distribution, even if it is not based on any scale a western European would use.
The ruins of Saqcsaywaman, Cusco, once part of the center of the Inca world. (2011) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson
Another interesting ‘map’ was a gesture used by a Native American Elder to describe the location of his town. The elder held his forefinger and thumb like a not-quite-closed-looped ‘okay’ symbol. The location of his town was between the unclosed tips of the finger and thumb, with Quebec, Montreal, New York, Boston and Halifax all located along the knuckles and joints of the rest of that looped finger set. This again clearly places the Native American town in relation to the major cities. So the question may not be whether Native American’s had maps, but whether they recorded their map information in a different way. Native American communities and living accommodations like the Navajo Hogan, the Pawnee earth lodge and even some longhouses could be said to be map-like in their structural symbolism of the concept of the sky dome or celestial vault providing shelter for a two dimensional geography with the four directions spreading out from a pivotal centre of the house. It might not be written on a piece of paper, but clearly there is a sense of direction and relationship to place within their sacred geography.
Finally, Petroglyphs, a primary source of pre-contact information about Native American culture, have also yielded examples of what could be maps, though there continues to be some debate. Some appear to show river routes and tributaries along with trails. Still other stone paintings appear to represent drive fences (fences used to drive prey animals into capture areas) complete with pictures of the animals that resided in the area.
Across the world we look for the sublime meaning of everything. Prayer flags, Tibetan area of Northern India, (2000) Photo (c) Karen Abrahamson
Which brings me back to the RWA article. It spoke about how, for a writer, a map can help you to give a greater sense of place to your writing. The writer will know where the towns and roads and lakes and mountains are in relationship to where the character is. But drawing a map can help the writer to also learn something beyond thethe lay of the land. A writer’s map can help you to understand what monsters live in what areas, what territory belongs to the enemy and what resources there are to harvest, along with your character’s place in the world. This leaves me to think the Native Americans understood modern (writerly) mapping better than the anthropologists and historians think they did, and that the modern writer’s map is based in something much deeper and perhaps more linked to the notion of a sacred human landscape. Both look for something more than just scaled lines on a page to find our way through either our imagination or the world.
Free Fiction this week is part one of Pretense for Murder.
A dead girl, an empty phone booth where one shouldn’t be and a school full of suspects with too many unusual powers.
When student, Vallon Drake discovers the dead body of a girl and a British phone booth standing outside the American Geological Survey Preparatory Academy, she knows someone with special power committed the murder. Heck, her school exists to teach students with the talent to rewrite the landscape as future special agents. But while Vallon wants to solve the crime, everyone else wants to cover it up. Trust Vallon to break the rules to take the investigation on—even when the cost of doing so might be her life.
In the years after the ‘Big One’ destroyed most of human civilization, a lone city perches precariously on the Pacific Northwest coast of North America.
