Muta Valley

This is a map I’ve just finished drawing for my upcoming novel, Silent Sorrow (IFWG, May 2020), which is now with the editor.

Muta Valley is a map drawn years ago by a child (albeit a precocious child) of his home environment. Normally the map of the bucolic home valley comes at the beginning of a quest fantasy, but in Silent Sorrow the protagonist does the journey in reverse, forced to travel back to his hated childhood as everything is stripped from him.

He returns to his abandoned homestead and rediscovers his first cartographic work. As he studies the map content he realises that the narrative he’s fashioned for himself of being driven out of the valley because no one understood him might be somewhat self-serving. It’s possible some of the blame might be his.

This is another example of map as artefact. It contains essential plot and character information, dovetailing with the narrative. The form of the map is just as important as the content: I worked hard with the typography to suggest a young child pushing himself to the limit of his fine motor skills in his quest to understand his environment.

The nearest academic equivalent to this sort of map is the Mental Map tradition of the 1970s and 80s, where it was established that people who are asked to draw a freeform map exaggerate the size and importance of their home area. I do hope Remezov realises this and doesn’t rely on it for navigational purposes…

* It’s Tuesday here in Australia but maybe Monday where you are so I win.