Last week I promised that this week I would begin presenting alternatives to our tired, misogynistic, colonialist mapping system, and show you some new maps that might accompany bold new visions in the speculative fiction genre. I’m renegging on that promise as I find I still have to do some theoretical groundwork.

It’s helpful to consider a map as being made up of two vital components: the map form (the cartographic decisions such as linework, typography, scale, projection and overall ‘feel’) and the map content (what the map is about, the data themselves). Thinking like this about maps allows us to imagine quite different ways of altering a map’s message, which is a combination of its form and content. We can, for example, introduce innovative content (such as last week’s 1989 Fear Map of UC Campus) and display it using traditional means. Or, we could come up with a new map form, where we vary some parameter of the traditional approach to mapping (such as the map projection), but slap traditional data sets on top of it. Or we could do both – that is, altering both the map form and content to create something entirely new.

There are a few examples of these about and I will showcase some over the next few weeks. In each case I will give a little detail of their history and how they might be used (or how I have used them).

Here’s this concept expressed in the form of a simple matrix. (I came up with this concept as part of my Master’s thesis in 1987.) I use the blurry categories of traditional and innovative to express the notions of ‘in service to the patriarchal/colonialist hegemony’ (traditional) and ‘something different’ (innovative). Sorry if those sound rather banal.

It’s a useful tool to interrogate / deconstruct cartography. Which box does a particular map fit into, we ask? Is the map form traditional? Whose interests does that tradition serve? What about the content? And – harder – what kinds of spatial data do NOT lend themselves to traditional mapping? Why not? What new forms could we create to showcase that data? It’s only in this way that we can come to a new, more inclusive cartography.

Examples next week, I promise.

As I listened to each of the four powerful female speakers at the Climate Strike rally today, I began thinking about the Australian Speculative Fiction scene. These thoughts are partly formed and I’d be happy to hear what others think.

It’s been known in educational circles for some time (at least since the 1970s) that girls do better than boys in English at school. (Yes, it’s a generalisation. On average, girls test higher.) So we would expect that, from the 1980s at least, the preponderance of novels would be written by women using their advantage. Yet, until recently, this has not been so. Until recently males dominated the bookshelves, the libraries, review column inches and awards.

Why?

We males, I believe, rose above our level of ability on the tide of patriarchy. We didn’t have to be as good. We didn’t have to put in as much effort. And because of patriarchy we had more leisure time: while women did the chores and raised the kids, we tinkered on our typewriters. Then an industry favourable to male authors took our work and gave us what we believed was our due.

Now I believe the tide is beginning to turn. Patriarchy is receding from its high-water mark. We are seeing more women on Australian fantasy and science fiction bookshelves, dominating shortlists and awards*. And now, as the tide goes out, previous male success is revealed to have been bolstered by privilege. We men are unprepared for the incredible talent of women, both young and old, who can no longer be kept out. The playing field is as yet by no means level, but already men are falling behind because We. Just. Haven’t. Learned. To. Do. The. Hard. Yards. Women, well, women know all about the hard yards. Time for us to learn from them.

*for example, in the last 12 years of Australia’s Aurealist Award we’ve had eight female and four male winners of the Best Fantay novel, with sixteen male and 54 female-authored works shortlisted.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to feature Australian waterfalls; specifically those on the eastern escarpment south of Sydney. I’ve already shown you Tianjara Falls, and today we’ll look at Tuross Falls.

Tuross Falls is the closest escarpment fall to Canberra, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to get to. It’s to the east of Cooma, along the Numeralla / Countegany / Badja Road (the road name changes), and then along Badja Forest Road and Tuross Falls Road. The last of these is particularly rough: opinions differ as to whether it’s suitable for two wheel drive vehicles, and I’m here to tell you it’s not. My son Iain and I bashed our Ford Focus pretty badly getting up one particular hill, and I suspect this contributed to a hefty bill some months later to repair both back rims. Sorry Kylie. Take a four wheel drive vehicle.

The waterfall itself is three-quarters of an hour on foot from the Cascades campground. (The Cascades are nice, but not spectacular.) The track is well marked and an interesting walk of medium difficulty. You emerge on to the escarpment at a lookout point facing upstream to where the waterfall tumbles out from a gorge into a deeply incised channel, typical of the waterfalls along the Australian east coast. And, like all these waterfalls, the experience depends on how carefully you’ve selected the time of your visit. You need to go a few days after decent rain in order to get a good flow over the fall. Don’t waste your time in autumn unless you’re certain of the rain; spring is probably best. But be careful of the road, as I imagine it would become impassable after a heavy downpour.

The single biggest drawback of this waterfall is one common to Australian escarpment falls: you are limited to one viewpoint, and that above the fall. I can only imagine how spectacular Tuross Falls would be from below. I believe we’re supposed to view these things from below, to enforce upon us the proper humility. Unfortunately, I haven’t yet come across an escarpment fall that allows you this luxury.

Nonetheless this is well worth a visit – a beautiful ribbon of water set in a huge broken landscape.

Another Monday, another map type. This time let’s have a go at thematic maps and see if they do any better than topographic or cadastral maps.

Thematic maps are maps showing a specific theme. You may know them from examples such as weather maps showing rainfall or wind, or road maps, or maps of population or sheep.

So, given a map can portray any theme with a spatial component, thematic maps look rather promising. Here’s one, originally drawn for the 1884-5 Berlin Conference by Arthur Silva White (this is an 1891 edition). The Berlin Conference was set up by Germany to shoehorn in on the latter stages of colonisation: all the other major European powers had their share of the world’s bounty, and Germany wanted theirs. The conference actually averted war between the colonial powers (though war eventually arrived in 1914) by divvying up northern Africa.

Have a close look at this thematic map, called ‘Comparative Value of African Lands.’ The red colour represents ‘areas of highest relative value to the European Powers’ while the blue areas depict the ‘area of highest resistance to Euroepan domination.’ This map, and others like it, were used to aid the division of northern Africa. And they are a teensy bit racist.

As Col. Thomas H. Holdich said in 1917, “The right of the white man to fill the earth and subdue it has always been unquestioned, because it is based on the principle that his dominance and lordship tend to the betterment of the world.” Alas, Holdich was president of the Royal Geographical Society at the time.

Yes, thematic maps can assume any form and portray any content we choose. But we humans so often choose to portray dreadful stuff like this. Nevertheless, unlike the topographic and cadastral map, where evil is baked in to the map form, the thematic map can be used for good. Here’s a map I drew in the late 1980s:

It was drawn in response to a number of attacks on women on the University of Canterbury campus. Students complained to the University council, who would do nothing other than suggest women kept themselves safe (sound familiar?). I collected data from 300 participants who identified places on a map of the university where they felt unsafe, aggregated the data and produced this thematic map of fear.

Upon presenting this to the University council, they immediately reversed their position and decided to do away with the landscaping that kept certain areas dark, and increased lighting around car parks. Yes, now we’d take a different approach, but back then it was definitely a step forward. Of course, the map contained nothing the students hadn’t already said to the council, but the map looked oh so scientific and so garnered the sort of respect emotional women with their feelings could not command. Grrr.

Thematic maps: some potential.

From next week I will discuss alternatives to standard mapping and provide some fantasy examples.

So what gets you writing?

Short answer is it depends on the payoff. If you’re writing for fun, then write while it’s fun. Why thrash yourself? Take a month off, let yourself out from under the pressure stone. Enjoy, enjoy! God knows there’s so little other reward in the occupation, you might as well enjoy it. You don’t have to be miserable to write well.

Different if you have a goal other than fun. Perhaps you want fame. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA I feel better now.

Or fortune. Good luck. If you’re really good, and you manage to tap into the zeitgeist or whatever, you might indeed make a fortune. The arrival of a huge windfall encourages some to continue, while others find it very demotivating. I guess we’d all like the opportunity to find out which we are.

Some of us will make something from professional sales, but it’s not likely to be a full-time income. Then comes the decision: do I continue to treat this as a hobby that occasionally coughs up pocket money, or do I try to make it a job? Handing out bookmarks, writing attention-grabbing blogs, increasing my writing volume in search of name recognition, attending cons and expos and a hundred other little things. Do I, in a word, hustle?

There are a few out there who enjoy the hustle but I’m not one of them. Couldn’t think of anything more demotivating. Each to their own, I guess. Well, I won’t hustle you, but there might be a little swish every now and again. You are reading my writing blog, after all. Be warned: at some point I’m going to try to sell you Silent Sorrow. Swish.

Welcome to the gig economy.

It gets more and more complex. Maybe we’ve been a success in the past. Sold half a million copies, won awards, garnered rave reviews, but the train left the station while you were stuck in the outhouse. Sort of happened to me, that did, getting sick and going through a separation when I should have been tending to my career. Oh well, I’m jogging after the train, not sprinting, not these days, but still doing things I love. Let’s see if I catch up.

In the end, what saves me is my self-knowledge. I WANT TO MAKE THINGS. That’s all I need.

Write because you enjoy telling stories. Write because you have something to say and an interesting way of saying it. And, for your sake and the sake of those who love you, go easy on yourself.

Though waterfalls appear to be permanent parts of the landscape, they are in fact ever-changing and ultimately short-lived features, constantly engineering their own demise. Waterfalls are formed when streams encounter a section of resistant rock (cap rock), while downstream, in softer rock, the stream is deepened more easily. A rapid or waterfall will form at the divide between the harder and softer rocks, and will immediately begin working upstream, undercutting the cap rock to cause overhangs and eventual collapse in a process known as headward erosion.

Downstream of the waterfall a plunge pool forms, eroded by the force of the waterfall and by rocks tumbling under the water, a process called corrasion. As the waterfall progresses upstream it leaves behind a lengthening steep-sided gorge. When the waterfall reaches the upstream end of the hard cap rock its geologically brief life is over, as the whole channel will cut down quickly through the softer rock.

A waterfall’s life-span, therefore, is determined largely by how much water flows down the stream and how hard and extensive the cap rock is.

Rainbow Falls, a lovely fall near Kerikeri in Northland, New Zealand, is a living example of this process. (I visited it many times during the two years I lived in Kerikeri, though we had our own waterfall on our property.) The annotated photograph illustrates erosion in action.

This material is adapted from Russell Kirkpatrick’s 2011 book, Walks to Waterfalls (David Bateman Ltd.).

A couple of weeks ago on Mapping Monday I argued that topographic maps were cultural artefacts designed by the military, encoded with colonialist and masculinist messages, and not at all the sort of things we should consider as material for fantasy maps (or for any maps, in my opinion).

So what alternatives are there? Not many, it turns out. Topographic maps are one of three types of modern maps upon which western society depends, and the other two types are equally flawed. Today we’ll look at cadastral maps.

Cadastral maps are graphical records of property boundaries. Originally recorded on paper, they have since been digitised, and contain details of land area and location of key survey points. Look at the detail recorded for the property in the red circle above. Our society depends upon this knowledge.

Cadastral maps are based on the notion that land is a commodity that can be bought and sold. Of course, many cultures do not see land this way, instead viewing the earth as a life-partner rather than a currency to be traded. Nevertheless, the idea of the cadastre has been exported around the globe as a lieutenant of capitalism, and western property rights are based upon it.

Whenever I think of the cadastre I see a butcher’s knife cutting up a carcass, red lines springing up on newly-dead flesh.

I think of the western grid of streets (north, south, east west) lowered on to indigenous spaces, imprisoning the land under its dead weight. Go to any town or city, large or small, built around the world during the colonial period, and see town plans dropped on the landscape with no regard for physical or cultural reality.

Tell you a story. The centre of Christchurch is just such a grid, based on the cardinal directions, a series of north/south/east/west streets inside the square Four Avenues. It’s interrupted by the Avon River in places, but the grid is clear. Swamps, rushes, lakes, urupa (grave sites) and sand dunes are all imprisoned under the grid.

Move forward to 2011 and the Christchurch earthquake. Most of the 185 deaths came from two building collapses, one due to poor architecture. The other, however, was found to have been built on an old stream bed feeding into the Avon River. The ground collapsed inwards towards the centre of the stream, taking the building with it. That is a steep price to be paid for impositional cartography, ignoring reality and imposing your own brand of ‘order’ on what you see as a moral wilderness. Of course it’s usually indigenous cultures who pay the price of such thinking, but we seldom hear their stories.

A story like this illustrates how fraught cartography is, yet our fantasy maps reflect none of this complexity – at least, not deliberately. Next week I’ll talk about the third common kind of western cartography, thematic maps, and ask if they’d be any better at the task of reflecting our desired values.

It is a belief held by most authors that there are two types of novelists: plotters and pantsers. A google search of these terms unearths dozens of writing advice sites explaining that writers either plot their novels in advance or just wing it, trusting their memory or serendipity to weave it all together at the end.

My first fantasy trilogy, Fire of Heaven, was meticulously plotted. I knew at what time of what day each character would be in a certain location. This allowed me to tell a complex story but it also straitjacketed my characters, as I could not allow them to veer off script. The result was a complex world but rather stiff characterisations.

In an attempt to break out of Plotter’s Jail I wrote my second trilogy (Husk / Broken Man) by the seat of my pants. I constructed half a dozen character sketches and set them off like wind-up toys to walk through half a million words to a destination of which I had only the haziest notion. This worked better, I think, but it also caused problems, to the extent that a secondary character went missing for a whole novel. I plain forgot about him.

I’ve decided to become a third type of writer. From now on I’m going to write in reverse. Rather than starting at the beginning and working through to the end by either plotting or pantsing, I’m going to start by writing a detailed account of the novel’s ending. Then I’ll sit down and work out what my characters need (what experiences, what moral attributes, what abilities, what relationships, what flaws) to make that ending work. After that I’ll work backwards through the story to give each character the things they need. In other words, before my characters get to make their metaphorical journey, I’ll travel that journey in reverse.

(Of course, this is just another form of plotting, just backwards. Shh.)

This idea comes from having just finished re-reading Lois McMaster Bujold’s body of work. She is the most awarded sci-fi and fantasy writer you’ve probably never heard of. This is because most of her books have never been sold into Australia or New Zealand. I’m not sure why no-one picked them up here, because her books are uniformly excellent, with The Curse of Chalion my favourite fantasy novel. She’s won four Hugo awards for best novel, one for best novella and two more for best series (The Vorkosigan series in 2017 and the Chalion series in 2018).

The climaxes of her novels are glorious intersections of moral dilemmas, weaknesses and strengths, abilities used in unexpected ways, worldbuilding suddenly made relevant and successes and failures of the human spirit. I began wondering how she manages time and again to make them feel so organic, so likely. Re-reading The Curse of Chalion gave me a clue: when her protagonist begins to see how the pattern of his life has shaped him into the man for the crisis, he wonders “How long have I been walking down this road?” The gods – and the author – have aimed him towards the novel’s climax, harvesting the physical, social, moral and spiritual lessons along the way to use at the end. Thus we have the satisfying conclusion where a protagonist overcomes his foe not through violence (come on, enough of the punching) but through cleverness and humility. And not just his own, but also the supporting characters who lend him timely advice, wisdom and moral support.

To get to the end, I’m going to start from the end and work my way back to the beginning. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Yay, another Waterfall Wednesday!

South Australia is an interesting and occasionally spectacular place, but a waterfall hotspot it is not. It has no permanent waterfalls  – zero, zilch, zip, nada, not a sausage. None. There are two reasons for this: 1) it is mostly flat, and 2) it’s mostly semi-arid. So you’re in Adelaide, it’s raining and you’re hankering for some sweet waterfall action. Where do you go? Try Morialta Falls (called Three Falls by the locals, in an attempt to show off their mathematical prowess).

Morialta Falls comes down from the Adelaide Hills, and is on the edge of the city’s built-up area about 10km from the centre of town. It’s easy to get to, with a gentle walk bringing you to the lowest (and by far the best) fall. I warn you, it isn’t much more than a dribble unless it’s recently been raining! Knowing this, Kylie’s parents dragged me there one bleak morning, and we scrambled all over the area but found nothing better than the path to the first fall.

The sheer quartzite cliffs contrasted nicely with the fan of water, captured at 1/8th second on my hand held camera. I particularly enjoyed the orange and black cliffs with random outbreaks of olive-green bushes. The second fall isn’t much, though taking the steep path up to its base does give you another excellent vantage point of the First Fall. If you’re in Adelaide during winter or spring, go check them out.

Welcome to another edition of Monday Mapping!

I read something recently (I thought it was from Tor.com but I couldn’t find it there) about fantasy maps in novels. It was particularly critical of fantasy maps as artefacts. By “artefacts” the article meant “fantasy maps in novels that are from the culture and world the book is set in.”

That’s quite different to the standard novel fantasy map. You know the ones: Ye Olde Text, pointy witches’ hat mountains, not much real detail and lots of corny placenames. (If you want an example, google ‘Shannara four lands map’.) This sort of fantasy map is designed for the reader, not for the characters. It serves two purposes: 1) to allow you to track the action, and 2) to immerse you in the feel of the novel. In cartography theory-speak, purpose 1 is the content of the map, and purpose 2 is the form.

A map as artefact, however, purports to be drawn by someone from that world. Ideally it is one that comes to the protagonist’s hand. The ‘not Tor.com’ article suggested these should be avoided because historical maps look nothing like Ye Olde fantasy maps. Historical maps are very hard to read (thwarting purpose 1) and don’t reproduce well in a paperback (obscuring purpose 2). These are good points.

But the way around this problem is to design a secondary fantasy world where it is eminently reasonable for its cartographers to make legible maps at a paperback scale. The map then becomes a cornerstone of the worldbuilding, and its form and content help fulfil both purposes. By inventing a world that does not have to adhere to the dictates of historical cartography, the writer can use map artefacts to inform, mislead, deceive, or do whatever they like.

My latest series, The Book of Remezov (the first of which, Silent Sorrow, will be published by IFWG next year), contains twenty such map and map-related artefacts. The novel is set in a secondary world of extreme geological instability, which means geographers and cartographers are in constant demand for their skills and treated like rock stars. Stripped of their certainty, maps are drawn more tentatively than in earthbound cartography. Their content is also wildly different to the physical-based maps of our world.

The map accompanying this article is one example. Its clean style is a result of its maker’s personality – the titular Remezov, a young, arrogant and progressive scientific snob. Not for him the florid maps of the ornamentalists. Make things clean and clear. If the map is about travel times between towns, why even bother going through the drawn-out task of putting physical features on the map? They’re just going to change over time anyway.

Note that many of the artefacts in this novel are drawn by other cartographers, who have their own individual styles and are also influenced by the cartographic movement they subscribe to. Remezov is a constructionist. Along with pragmatists and modernists, he is part of a fresh scientific movement blowing away traditional cartography.

Science is relatively new in this world, and young Remezov one of its leading proponents. He hasn’t yet realised he could improve this map by drawing the length of each line to a time-distance scale. That’ll come, don’t be too hard on the lad.

It’s a true working document, smudged and tatty. Remezov put it together on the three-year journey all apprentice geographers have to make in order to become masters. He’s not afraid to show areas of insufficient information, either.

Each artefact not only illustrates part of the novel, it also contains information and clues useful in understanding what’s going on. I intend readers to view them as part of the text. It’s an experiment. It will be interesting to see how it all works out!