“A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.” – Frederik Pohl
My brother’s recent post on Impossible Maps (see it at https://thirdagethoughts.com/impossible-maps/) inspired me to make a loose map of the dominant highway in our area, Route 210. I believe 210 was built during WWII because bombs were being made at the Naval Ordnance Station at Indian Head and they needed a speedy way to deliver the bombs. The road was built straight for maximum efficiency without regard for what was already there – that’s why Livingston Road crosses 210 so many times. The family farm was also bisected during the construction because ‘have bombs must travel’. Today, people can only dream of efficient travel on Route 210. There is a popular facebook group for local commuters called ‘Nightmare on 210’ where people recant their commuting woes. The themes depicted on my map all come from this group of clever people who, apparently realizing you can either laugh or cry about a dystopian situation, have decided to laugh. And vent! And if you don’t drive nicely, they will take your picture and post it!
Just as Lona learned about Bitlife from her granddaughters (see her post), I learned something about current videogame culture from my granddaughters when they last visited us. They showed me how to play Pokémon Go. In the game, you wander around in the Real World, and you look for Poké-monsters. They’re invisible to the naked eye, so you use a special detector that visualizes them.
The “detector” is just an app on your smart phone, that uses the phone’s GPS to compare your location with a database of where the Pokémon are, and if one happens to be where your phone is pointing, it superimposes the image of the Poké-monster onto the image of your surroundings generated by the phone’s camera, thus:
It sounds to me like the creators of this game successfully mapped their Pokémon population data onto a map of the Real World at what is effectively a 1:1 scale.
There’s a lot going on in Pokémon Go, but the idea of a map with a 1:1 scale is what really caught my imagination. A life-size map, rendered at one mile to the mile, is the basis for apps and augmented reality glasses, but would have made almost no sense before digital data visualization was a thing. Lewis Carroll spoofed the whole idea of a 1:1 map in Sylvie and Bruno Concluded.
Lewis Carroll has another map spoof that I like even better, in his classic epic poem, The Hunting of the Snark. The subject map (reproduced above) was procured by the captain to aid in their hunting expedition.
If you’ve never heard Boris Karloff’s narration of The Hunting of the Snark in his very best Grinch voice, you really should. You can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhcE3zc7V-8
I’ll end by mentioning a couple of books that I liked, whose stories depend in part on their weird, maybe unmappable, topography.
The city & the city by China Miéville (2009) is a wonderful murder mystery that takes place in the the twin cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma, somewhere on an unnamed coastline in Eastern Europe. The two cities resemble West and East Berlin economically and politically, but they co-exist in exactly the same location.
This isn’t parallel-universe science fiction, it’s political fiction: the only reason the two very distinct cities can be at the same place at the same time is that their respective citizens agree (under some duress) to believe that they do. Pockets of one city abut pockets of the other, with many places “cross-hatched” so the area is simultaneously in both cities. It’s a great story that I heartily recommend, and I would love to see a map of the twin cities and their fractal shared border.
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (2010) reads like a historical adventure-romance of Napoleonic England, except that England has a long and now-dormant history of interactions with the land of fairies, that seems to be exploding into life again as the story progresses. I love the way the entire novel is peppered with footnotes and references to magical textbooks that manage to sound both officious and not quite sane at the same time.
The fairy lands can be reached from England on “fairy roads” that pop up at random throughout the countryside. I imagine a map of the setting of this story would have two planes, one (Faerie) hovering over the other (England). Occasionally gravity wells would form in the upper plane and spiral down to England like tornadoes, and terminate in a new fairy road. That’s how I visualize it anyway!
