Books I Read In March

Fiction

 'Chasing Embers' by James Bennett

Somehow I managed to get a review copy of this book, second hand. Consequently some of the issues like repetition of words may not have turned up in the finally published version of the book. It is not a bad book. It is the first in the Ben Garston series about the only dragon permitted to survive outside of a sleep following a deal between humans and various magical beings in 1215. At times it reminds me of the books by Cassandra Clare, especially the opening scenes in New York and Garston's questions about relations with a human. (Why do authors assume we all have an encyclopaedic knowledge of New York's districts, bridges, etc. in our heads?) Witches, fairies and knightly families turn up. Ben fortunately can morph into a human and or a kind of humanoid dragon, is very strong and armoured and can fly. Being given clothes half-way through the book which adjust to his changes does make him a little like a superhero. There are cliches, not just around New York but a confrontation smashing up the British Museum. The poor place is overused in fantasy stories.

Aside from Garston's hang-ups, the release of another older dragon in Somaliland breaks all the agreements between the different beings. Furthermore in turns out this dragon is being used as a portal to permit an evil priest/would-be god back into the world. The action goes from the USA to Britain to the Alps and on to Egypt. While as others have commentated, Bennett seems to throw absolutely everything from fantasy into the novel, there are reasonable set-piece scenes such as Garston escaping the witches in New York and battling the other dragon in the Alps. The climax at a power station south of Cairo, suffers from the same problems as some of these scenes in fantasy stories, that it drags on far too long. By the end of it, you are not really concerned who is trying to achieve what power or who has been defeated. Trimming down that section would have helped maintain the momentum of what was a fast-paced novel up until then. While Bennett uses mounds of tropes from fantasy, I am glad he tried some things a little different and brought in, carefully, myths from Egypt and Somaliland, to give a slightly different perspective. While I would not rush out to buy the next Garston book, if I saw it in my local charity shop, I would pick it up.

'Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates' by Tom Robbins

This is the prime reason why I have read so few books this month. It was 416 pages long in the edition I had but the print was so small that in a normal print it would probably be 2-300 pages longer; it certainly felt it. While I am often disappointed by what I read, there are few occasions when I really regret buying a book. I think 'Chimera' (1972) by John Barth and 'Ostland' (2013) by Tom Cain have been the two up until now that I would have put in that category. This book by Robbins has become the third. This was his seventh book at the time (2000), but I cannot really understand how he ever got published in the first place, let alone repeatedly. Robbins uses a sentence where a word would do. His writing is incredibly laboured with incessant feeble attempts to make humour. It is actually quite painful to read while he pfaffs around with silly narrative and diversions.

The title comes from a line by the French poet, Arthur Rimbaud and has some tangential relevance to the story. This book is about a CIA agent simply known as Switters who is blackmailed by his hacker grandmother in taking her aged parrot to the Amazon jungle in Peru. While there he is persuaded to meet with a tribal leader whose head has been distorted into a pyramid shape. This man then curses Switters that if he ever sets his feet on the ground again he will die instantly. Switters spends almost all the rest of the book in a wheelchair or on stilts. He is then sent by the CIA (in his wheelchair) to Syria to work with a Kurdish group. Returning from that mission he encounters a small group of nuns in a convent built around an oasis and aids them in seeing off intruders and trying to get their order reinstated. The book sounds ridiculous and lives up to that. It is a massive conceit by Robbins who seems to believe he is witty, even, perhaps funny.

These problems would be bad enough, but there is an unpleasant sexual element in there too. Switters who is in his mid-thirties obsesses over his teenaged step-sister. She is only 12 when he first sees her naked and while 16 by the time of the novel, he keeps wanting to have sex with her and effectively browbeats her into offering her virginity to him. He also lusts after any girl he encounters in South America and the Middle East, making this book really be about a paedophile. Later, in the convent, Switters falls for one of the nuns, ten years his senior. Through a miracle, despite having sex as a young woman, her hymen has regrown and she will only have anal sex with him. The willingness of these women to comply with such a misogynistic, paedophilic man for some unknown reason, stretches credulity to breaking point. Robbins finally tires of the whole project and abruptly ends it. The book looks interesting and has good reviews on the cover (though I should have suspected something was wrong when I saw one was written by Thomas Pynchon). However, I really feel dirtied by buying and reading this book. While I do not believe in censorship, I would certainly encourage you to stay away from anything by Robbins.

Non-Fiction

'Ten Days that Shook the World' by John Reed

I have been very poor in selecting what to read this month. While not as offensive as the Robbins book, I was very frustrated by this one too. Reed was an American Communist who was in Russia at the time of the revolutions of 1917. While he witnessed a great deal of what happened during the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks, his ardent support from them makes this a highly unreliable book. I bought it second hand when studying modern history more than thirty years ago and did not read the warnings on the cover about how poor it was. The book is useful in some respects. Reed identifies the multiple parties active in Petrograd [St. Petersburg] during 1917 and includes transcripts of speeches, various regulations that were passed, articles and propaganda from them. He hared around all the various locations of the different groups and later went to Tsarskoye Selo which the revolutionary forces opposed to the Bolshevik coup d'etat were able to briefly hold and to Moscow where the fighting between different factions was fiercer than in the capital, Petrograd.

What is so infuriating about this book is how Reed's zealotry blinds him even to things that he reports. Like the Bolsheviks himself, he lumps all of the other parties, no matter whether they were revolutionary parties like the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries (SRs) in with the Tsar and his military; landowners and other rich people. This is despite the fact that the Bolsheviks took the land reform policies of the SRs as their own and even saw value in continuing the education body that the coalition Provisional Government had established after the February/March revolution which had seen the removal of the Tsar. Thus, even these Socialist and revolutionary groups are portrayed as being traitors to the ordinary people, whereas in fact they had worked hard to try to sort out the situation in Russia for them.

Reed's view is that anyone apart from the Bolsheviks (and when even that party began to split, just Lenin's faction of it) is complicit with the old regime. He sees conspiracies everywhere to a ridiculous degree. The maddest of these is his insistence that Russia went to war in 1914 so that it could be defeated and the Germans occupy large areas of the country. He believes that there were no genuine shortages despite the dysfunctional nature of Russia's agriculture and the exhaustion of peasants and of the transport system. No, for Reed, any shortages must be because everyone in Russia, aside from the Bolsheviks, was deliberately hoarding and sabotaging the country to starve and freeze the Russian people. Despite apparently supporting self-determination, any national groupings that appeared are condemned as simply tools of the landowners. He will not accept any other view than narrow Bolshevism interpreted by Lenin as legitimate.

Reed keeps on insisting that the Bolsheviks had some miraculous support right across Russia from the 'decent' working people. However, even the documents he includes shows how narrow their support and how unwilling so many even workers and soldiers were to support the Bolsheviks. Quite rightly after the partially successful coup in early November 1917, they accuse the Bolsheviks of stealing the revolution. Yet, for Reed, overnight things magically changed and with the Bolsheviks setting up their own government, things like crime abruptly stopped and people though cold and starving are marching around the city in ecstasy at the change which in fact did nothing to improve their circumstances. Support for the Bolsheviks largely stemmed from a wish to end the war, but as the Bolsheviks' revolutionary opponents highlighted, they continued the war and opened the gates to the Germans to occupy vast areas of the country.

People forget that Russia lost the First World War as was made clear by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Naively the Bolsheviks felt that somehow if they declared peace every other country was cease fighting and their workers would rise up. This delusion meant that rather than end the fighting Russia was plagued by wars, a civil war then a war against Poland, lasting into 1921. Reed had died of typhus in 1920 so missed how accurate many of the predictions of an enduring conflict he includes in his book, actually came true. He ridicules them but is really shown to be the fool.

The book does show how many people tried to prevent a civil war and to have a democratic or Socialist government deal with the country. Important examples are the powerful railway workers trade union which refused to move any soldiers going to fight any other Russians. The peasants too, neglected by the Bolsheviks sought a coalition government and to bring about measured reform. However, as they did throughout the Bolsheviks removed all these more sober representatives. What we see is a criminal clique establishing itself, referring to some fantasy of a workers' and later peasants' movement supporting them and shutting down anyone not whole heartedly supporting their very specific line.

It is galling to read how Reed perpetuated so many myths to the English-speaking world about the Bolshevik seizure of power. It is horrendous that those who genuinely sought to improve Russia and keep it from further years of war were outmanoeuvred through violence and terror, even before the civil war had properly begun. Reed ignoring the evidence he provides himself shows he was no genuine eyewitness, instead he just produced a piece of propaganda which is so pathetic as to invite ridicule. There are some useful details in this book if you are looking at the Bolshevik seizure of power, but the narrative around it, simply illustrates how a man can let himself be so led astray by fanaticism that he misrepresents even the information he might include in a book.

An Atlas of Imaginary Worlds 18: Distorted Maps of the Earth Providing Fantasy Worlds

As I noted back in April, it is surprising what can provide authors or gamers with potential fantasy worlds:  http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/an-atlas-of-imaginary-worlds-17.html

The one I am featuring today was actually a map from a pub showing where the wines they sold came from, well, perhaps on an alternate planet, because its resemblance to Earth is only in passing:

I have removed the wine details.  However, it shows a pretty different Earth.  Much of Europe is compressed, notably France and the Iberian Peninsula.  The British Isles have become a peninsula; Africa has shrunk a great deal and the Red Sea is far longer but there is really no Persian Gulf.  The Mediterranean is no longer closed meaning from ancient times reaching Asia by sea from Europe would have been common. Arabia is as large as India but Sri Lanka and Madagascar are missing.  The Mediterranean is open to the Atlantic and South America is a short distance from Spain, suggesting it would have been discovered sooner.  It is smaller and farther North than in our world.  North America, in contrast is farther away from Europe; Greenland is smaller. Novaya Zemlya is likely to only be as cold as Nova Scotia. The two Americas are separate, so the 'passage' to China, though narrow, is there,  Wildlife on South America developed differently to that of North America, until, in our world 3 million years ago.  In this world they remain separate, leading to big differences between the creatures in each.

Australia is even larger than in our world and closer to South-East Asia.  Indonesia is reduced to two large islands which would have provided easy stepping stones for people to reach Australia.  Possibly it would have been colonised by Indians or Chinese.  New Zealand is a single, large island off the coast of Australia and so is likely to have been colonised sooner and its wildlife is likely to have been far closer to that of Australia.  Japan is really a single island, farther South in our world.  The gap from Asia to North America is greater.  The greatest loss is of the entire Continent of Antarctica plus many of the Pacific Islands including most importantly, the Philippines.

Overall, this is a wetter Earth with smaller continents.  It is a world in which there would be greater diversity between the animals on different continents.  Despite the larger bodies of water, peoples are likely to have moved more easily from continent to continent with South America explored by Europeans in the Ancient or Medieval times.  Australasia is likely to have seen waves of migrants down the centuries.  The climate is likely to have been wetter and more moderate.  The Pacific would be a vast empty ocean probably only crossed between the Americas and Asia in modern times.

Seeing this map reminded me of the map for the tabletop game, now an online game too, 'Warhammer'.  It was a distortion of Earth.  Now that the game is going to be reborn with a new set-up, it seemed a good time to look at what they have had for the past thirty years or so

Unlike the one above, Antarctica (Southern Chaos Wastes) is huge even compared to our world.  Given it reaches so far North some parts of it might be tropical, or at least temperate.  North America (The New World) and South America (Lusatia) are more strongly connected and the Galapagos Islands have become a huge archipelago; the Falkland Islands are larger too and there is an island off South America.  Once again Europe has shrunk an the Mediterranean is open to the Atlantic.  Arabia (Araby) has ended up in West Africa and the Urals stretch into North Africa (South Lands).  India (Ind) has withered but Sri Lanka and especially Thailand-Malaya have grown. From there it is only Indonesia is missing and there is a reduced Philippines.  Japan (Nippon) is farther South a broader central island with only small islands around it.  Britain (Albion) is a single large island, but colder than in our world, more on a par with Iceland on our planet.  

There are large islands (Elf Kingdoms) across the Atlantic.  In subsequent maps at least one of these is portrayed like the classic views of Atlantis.  These islands would have made trans-Atlantic travel far easier, though South America is more remote from Europe.  In the game it has been settled by reptile aliens who have a kingdom similar to the Aztecs but with more advanced technology and enslaving humans.  The Dark Lands are interesting and seem to equate to Afghanistan-Iran in our world with a gulf and a number of islands.  There is a suggestion that the Northern Steppes connect to the New World and Ramalia and the Northern Chaos Wastes provide another connection.  Thus, it is possible to circumnavigate the planet overland even if it is through Arctic lands.

This would be a drier planet with more land mass and a smaller Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans.  Crossing the world by land or sea in pre-modern times would be easier.  However, there are likely to be greater swings in temperature between summer and winter for much of the planet.  The drier climate might mean large deserts.  With the huge mountain range in Eurafasia there might be vast lakes not shown on this map that would moderate the climate in that region.  Though for most of the world animals and people could move around overland there are isolated islands on which different plants and animals might have developed.  Given how far North the Southern Chaos Wastes stretch it would be expected that they would have diverse plants and animals different from other continents, even setting aside the chaos aspects.

These two examples show that we can simply take the world we know and make it fantastical.  In the 'Warhammer' case this has been the basis of a very successful game franchise for three decades.

Atlas of Imaginary Worlds 15: The Continents of Seanchan

Being busy working on e-books, I have rather been neglecting this blog.  I have been pleased to find that Blogger has stopped insisting that I use the interface that they introduced earlier in the year and which proved incredibly hard to use compared to the traditional one.  There is a warning that I see whenever I log in that they will introduce a new one.  Hopefully that is not simply the same one as appeared before, but something with better functionality rather than being simply new, which these days always seems to be considered by providers as 'better' even though that is often not the case.

Anyway, I came across another map of a fantasy world and so I thought I would put it up here and take a look at it in the way that I used to.  I think it was stimulated by me watching the movie 'John Carter' based on the Barsoom novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs.  I have featured maps from there before.  I was also looking for some new wallpaper for my laptop and ended up digging out the Elric world map, which in terms of artistic merit is still one of my favourites.

This images is of the continents of Seanchan which feature in a 14-book fantasy series called 'The Wheel of Time' with the first book published in 1990, six years after the first author, James Oliver Rigney, Jr. (1948-2007) under the pseudonym Robert Jordan.  Under a number of pseudonym's Rigney wrote westerns, historical novels and in the 1980s a series of Conan the Barbarian novels, which may explain his interest in vast continents in fantasy.  After Rigney's death the Wheel of Time novels have been continued with the final three novels being written by Brandon Sanderson (born 1975), a fan of the original series.  Sanderson has had success in his own right producing fantasy and children's fiction.  Though Rigney was an Episcopalian, taking high communion a number of times per week and a Fremason and Sanderson is a Mormon, the Wheel of Time stories which consist of classic fantasy with magic elements, epic quests and a whole host of characters, are influenced more by Eastern philosophies, with references to the cyclical nature of history as found in Chinese perspectives and the circular nature of things as seen in Buddhism.  The wheel and circles feature heavily in the iconography of the series.  There are also Zoroastrian references to the duality of nature, though it is apparent many English-speaking readers see this in Christian terms as God and the Devil; though personally it reminds me both of Catharism and Michael Moorcock's concepts of Law and Chaos in many of his fantasy novels.

Being such a sprawling series, Wheel of Time has led to its own wiki from which I have drawn the following:

Seanchan is the name of the landmass located across the Aryth Ocean to the west of the Westlands, and across the Morenal Ocean to the east of Shara. It is also the name of the Empire that occupies most of the landmass and its offshore islands, and also of the people who inhabit it.

The Seanchan home continent almost girdles the world from pole to pole and is considerably larger than the continent consisting of the Westlands, Aiel Waste, Great Blight and Shara. The nearest parts of Seanchan to the Westlands are located more than 5,000 miles across the Aryth Ocean, a journey of some months even by the fastest ships and contributing to the lack of communication between the two continents for most of recorded history.

Seanchan is split into two landmasses, divided by a long dividing channel. There are four large islands located off the coast of the continent, and three small ones within the dividing channel.

The northern landmass

The northern landmass is the smaller of the two. The northern-most part of the landmass consists of the Lesser Blight, which is a corrupted landscape similar to the Great Blight north of the Westlands. Considering its latitude, it is possible that this corrupted landscape extends across the entire world, even below the waves. Although the Lesser Blight is not as hostile nor as dangerous as the Great Blight, it is still considered the most dangerous part of the Seanchan continent.

South of the Lesser Blight are the Mountains of Dhoom [this seems rather derivative, almost comic in its title]. These are considered to be an extension of the mountains of the same name in the Westlands, and it is possible that the mountains completely encircle the Blight and even continue beneath the waves, as they tumble into the sea in the same confused morass of islands and cliffs as in the Westlands.

The Seanchan Empire claims all parts of the continent south of the Mountains of Dhoom. The remainder of the northern landmass consists of three peninuslas which extend for several thousand miles southward from the mountains. These peninsulas are mountainous, with only a few major rivers being marked on maps. The largest cities on the northern landmass are Sohima, Imfaral, Asinbayar and, located at the southern-most tip of the landmass on the equator, Qirat.

The north was secured by the invading armies of Luthair Paendrag Mondwin early during the Conquest, who took Imfaral as their base of operations and first capital before they invaded the south. This suggests their invasion fleet landed on the north-eastern coast of the northern landmass. 

The dividing channel

The two subcontinents are divided by a channel or sea. This body of water opens onto the Morenal Ocean at Qirat in the west and proceeds eastwards before turning north for several thousand miles, opening onto the Aryth Ocean at roughly the latitude of the Aile Dashar. A large off-shoot of this channel forms a significant bay or gulf between the peninsulas on which Sohima and Imfaral are located. There are three islands in the channel where it swings northwards.

The southern landmass

The southern landmass is by far the larger of the two. It is located mostly within the southern hemisphere, but a huge peninsula extends north and east for several thousand miles into the northern. The imperial capital of Seandar is located on this landmass, roughly due west of the island of Tremalking. Seandar is located at the meeting-point of two substantial river networks.

The southern landmass proper is vast and is covered by mountains several times the length of the Spine of the World, lakes large enough to be called seas, rolling plains, deserts and immense rivers longer and wider than the Erinin or Manetherendrelle. The other major cities of the Empire located on the southern landmass are Kirendad, Anangore, Shon Kifar, Rampore, Tzura and Noren M'Shar. Several large islands lie off the coast, one of which is presumably Marendalar, site of the last major rebellion against the Crystal Throne. The island of Maram Kashor lies off the south-eastern coast of the southern landmass.

[A coda on the bottom of the entry shows up some of the challenges that authors face when creating a world and trying to fit lots of interesting land masses on it.]

According to the text of The World of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, the Seanchan continent stretches for 4,000 leagues (16,000 miles) from north to south and for some 1,500 leagues (6,000 miles) at its widest point east to west. However, the former figure is not actually possible since the world of the Wheel is our world [I am not really sure why the author assumes that this world is Earth, maybe I missed something in the back story] (since it exceeds the Earth's half-circumference of 12,000 miles). The accompanying map, although hardly of scientific quality, suggests more plausible figures of just over 10,000 miles from north to south and just over 5,000 miles from east to west at its widest point.

The names seem to mix Middle Eastern/Indian ones with Celtic ones, both popular sources for fantasy country names certainly since the late 1960s.

What I liked about this continent is that bar a couple of lakes, it seems to have avoided any major inland seas for a change.  It has also avoided archipelagoes.  Instead we have something that almost has vast fjords.  In part it reminds me of Baja Mexico and in the East it is reminiscent of the Great Lakes.  Overall, however it seems to be influenced by Scotland and this is heightened by the dividing channel.  The part of Scotland to the North-West of the Highland Boundary Fault originally was part of the North American continental plate whereas the land to the South-East of the line is from the European plate.  The fault has a series of lochs running across Scotland from South-West to North-East.  Bar a twist of geology, a chunk of Scotland could lie separated from the rest of it by a channel like the one shown in this map.  In some ways it is nice to see that fantasy novels with wonderful continents are still being produced even today.

An Atlas of Imaginary Worlds 7: Lands of Gulliver

I think I must be getting well into my middle-aged crisis, thinking of the saying 'After his child, the person a man most disappoints is himself'. I know that one day all fathers realise their children despise them, but before that time, they probably have come to hate themselves. So, to escape such sentiments I am busily burying myself away in my collecting maps of places that people have imagined. I thought that after all the stuff that some people on the internet believe is real, I would turn to some places which people all accept do not exist. I was also thinking about what I had written about Plato using Atlantis as a place he knew did not really exist but could act as a model for the kind of society he wanted and this brought me to Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) and his most famous work, 'Gulliver's Travels' [published as 'Vol. IV of the Author's Works Including Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts, by Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and Then a Captain of Several Ships'] (1726) which features a number of contrasting imaginary lands to make satirical points on contemporary society especially of Britain (at the time rulers of Ireland where Swift was from) and Europe more broadly as well as the long-titled explorers' accounts of the time. In turn, his character, Lemuel Gulliver travels to Lilliput where he is a giant (12 times larger than the people there), to Brobdingnag where is tiny (12 times smaller than the people there). There is satire on the reasons why people go to war (over which way to eat an egg) and about treatment of strangers: he gets better treated as a pet in Brobingnag than as a giant in Lilliput.

This map shows Sumatra in the North East and Van Diemen's Land (i.e. Tasmania) in the South, and as you can see, Australia which had only been partially mapped at the time is missing. Belfuscu was the rival to Lilliput which Gulliver seized the fleet of.

Brobdingnag is shown as being an peninsula of the West coast of North America. New Albion was a region of what is now northern California claimed for England in 1579 by Sir Francis Drake, putting Brobdingnag on the coast somewhere probably just into Oregon or the very northern part of California.

In the next book he goes to Laputa, a flying city where all the theoretical work, predominantly in linking music and geometry is not put to much good use, though they do bomb cities from the air. He is then lowered to Balnibarbi where people after having visited Laputa decided to reverse direction in science and the arts, especially agriculture and building, and have left the country a wasteland. On Glubbdubdrib Gulliver meets a man who can bring the dead back to life and he learns that many of the assumptions he made about history are wrong. In Luggnagg he meets a tyrranous king and immortal people called Struldbrugs who still age and so lose all their faculties though they cannot die.

This map is rather confused, but not too bad given the catography of the early 18th century. It puts Japan South rather than East and North East of Korea (here shown as 'Lesso') and the Japanese northern island of Hokkaido has been merged into mainland, unless the large island of Sakhalin which is North of Japan has been mixed up with the Korean peninsula.

Gulliver then goes to Japan with a Dutch ship and this bit of the book, though not actually based on any experience by Swift actually reflects on Japan of the time. The Dutch are shown as being compelled to stamp on a crucifix to demonstrate they are not trying to introduce Christianity to Japan. The Jesuits had been closely linked to the Spanish and Portuguese who had come to the Japan in the 16th century and had contributed to the instability of the country, partly through supplying guns and because as Catholic powers had sought the expulsion of the Protestant Dutch from Japan and the Jesuits also wanted the removal of their Catholic rivals, the Franciscans. Christianity was banned in Japan in 1587 and all Jesuits expelled. In 1614 all foreign priests were expelled, all churches in Japan destroyed and all Japanese converts had to renounce their faith. To prove they had done this they had to stamp on a crucifix. This was repeated in 1616 with military action against those who resisted. Foreign books and travel abroad were banned in 1633 and from 1635 onwards on the Dutch were allowed to stay with one small base on the island of Deshima, and to be allowed this they had to give up all show of Christianity. It is a Dutchman who tries to get Gulliver to stamp on the crucifix when he has been exempted from this by the Japanese authorities. Thus, this bit is far less satiricial and more reflective of East Asian geo-politics of the time. It may also reflect Anglo-Dutch relations as England had had a Dutch King William of Orange 1688-1702; he was renowned for his fighting in Ireland (notably the Battle of the Boyne) and a love-hate relationship with the Dutch who had been both economic and military rivals in preceding decades. Before turning to writing full-time, Swift had been a clergyman.

Gulliver's last voyage is to the Country of the Houyhnhnms who are intelligent, talking horses who walk on two legs (similar to the pigs at the end of 'Animal Farm') while humans in the land are reduced to barbaric Yahoos.

Throughout the journeys Gulliver becomes increasingly bitter and rather depressed about the state of humanity. This may reflect the increasingly bad treatment he receives from the different crews who ship him around in each of the books, though in each location he meets at least one decent human. He is thought to have become mad by the end (something Swift was suspected of himself at times). In 'Gulliver's Travels' you see lots of discussion of the time, such as the use and application of science in an era of discovery, and its comparison with religion. In addition there is the whole 'nurture vs. nature' debate about human behaviour and whether the world is likely to become more civilised or more barbaric in what was a very turbulent time, often termed the Age of Enlightenment. Cook's voyages around the Pacific only occurred 1768-1779 and whilst there had been people crossing the region since the age of Magellan and Drake, it was still pretty much uncharted as was the West coast of North America and so ideal for locating the imaginary countries Swift puts in the books. Note that he travels on Portuguese and Dutch ships, these two countries and to a lesser extent Spain, being dominant Western imperial powers in Asia at the time.

These maps are produced by the contemporary illustrator Kim Coles, see the imwithsully blog on this site: http://www.blogger.com/profile/30768636

This map shows the Country of the Houyhnhnms as due South of South Africa.

A partial contemporary of Swift's was the German satirist Johann Andreas Schnebelin. No-one seems to know when he was born but he died in 1706. He published a book in 1694 called (which if I translate correctly) 'Maps explaining the Miracle Lands of the Utopias'. From this comes a continent around the land of Schlaraffenland. It is an idyllic world with good food and other luxuries easily available; there is a land of alcohol, an island of tobacco, a Great Empire of the Stomach, lands of games, the miserly, sluggardly, spendthrifty, the young, the old, the fools and of swearing amongst others. Schlaffen means 'to weaken' and given that there are the 'Unknown Countries of the Pious' on the edge of the map, the suggestion is that this an allegorical one and that these lands are what lead you away from piety. The best known map of these lands was produced by Johann Baptist Homann in 1716:

This probably shows more imagination than you find in the bulk of fantasy maps produced these days. Note the presence of not one but two inland seas! What also struck me was the style of this map which reminded me greatly of John Speed (1551/2-1629) a leading English cartographer responsible for maps of all sorts of places but probably best known are his map of England and Wales and of individual English and Welsh counties which you will find on the walls of middle class households across the UK. I include some examples below. They easily fit the style of fantasy maps, though they were accurate in their day. The ones shown are England & Wales as a whole, Buckinghamshire, Brecon (which is now part of the county of Powys), Anglesey (now Ynys Mon county) and the Isle of Man. The Isle of Man looks rather distended in this map. It is quite a bizarre place even now. It is a tax haven, it claims to have the oldest continuous parliament in the world, it has an annual motorcycle race on public roads which habitually kills people (riders and spectators), homosexuality is illegal on the island but corporal punishment is not and cats from the island naturally have no tails.

An Atlas of Imaginary Worlds 6: Atlantis and Lemuria/Mu

It is funny to think that I really only got led down this route of seeking out imaginary maps, initially by looking up counter-factual history images and then finding out about how people are trying to censor things on the internet. I think it has also revealed a kind of geek side to me as well, now going round looking for images and comparing different maps. One thing that has struck me, especially with all the Hollow Earth stuff, is that there are maps of places from stories, like Narnia or Middle Earth, ones that are related to fantasy computer games or role-playing games (whether on paper or 'live action' - some of these will feature in a future posting) and then there are maps of places that some people feel are equally as fantastical and yet other people believe they show real places or at least ones that actually once existed. The most prominent of these are Atlantis and Lemuria (also known as Mu). Searching for maps of such places is complicated by the fact that authors, notably of the Conan stories, and role-players, often put these continents on their own fantasy maps. However, as with the Hollow Earth, there are numerous websites of people who believe that there were these continents on our world at some stage, that they have numerous incidences of historical evidence to back them up and that these lands were inhabited by advanced races that have now died out or gone somewhere else.

The location of these continents is disputed among even those who believe in them, but generally, because the ancient Greek philosopher wrote of Atlantis as being beyond the Pillars of Hercules (i.e. the Straits of Gibraltar) it is thought to have been somewhere in the mid-Atlantic Ocean, with varying interpretations of how close it was either to Africa or South America as you can see from maps below. Plato believed Atlantis had been destroyed 9000 years before his time (Plato lived in the 4th-3rd centuries BCE so this timescale fits with the end of the last Ice Age) and had been as big as Libya and 'Asia' (probably in the sense of Asia Minor) combined with influence stretching right through the Mediterranean to Egypt. Though his views of Atlantis as a continent disappearing (it is now felt to have existed covering what is Indonesia and the mainland of South-East Asia) his description of the culture is more like that of Santorini as I discuss below.

Spot how many inland seas appear in these maps. I am beginning to think that inland seas are to imaginary worlds as airships are to alternate history.

This one has North at the bottom of the map.  The convention of having North at the top (as opposed to the direction of Jerusalem) only came to Western Europe from 1400 onwards when Ptolemy's 'Geography' again became available as part of the Renaissance recovery of Classical works which had been maintained in Islamic libraries and universities after the fall of the Roman Empire.

The locating of Atlantis in the Black Sea:

I imagine seeing Atlantis here is because the Bosporus Straits can be likened to the Pillars of Hercules.

Despite the Asian location this is also thought to be Atlantis:

Another inland sea noted!

For Lemuria/Mu which is supposed to have been around at the same time and may have been a rival to Atlantis, it is generally shown as being in the Pacific with many of the islands North-East of Australia seen as being parts of it. James Churchward (1851-1936) writing in 1926 felt it was a continent which housed 64 million people and stretched from Hawaii to Fiji and to Easter Island. However, some feel it may have been smaller and located South of India, centring on what is now Sri Lanka. There are texts in both Hindu and Tamil writings talking of lost continents and from these people have derived Lemuria. Again it is supposed to have housed an advanced civilization, which begs the question, why did they not move to those continents which we have now? Why did they stay on two continents which for some reason have disappeared beneath the sea? What seems most likely is that writers in historic times were picking up on legends that had been transmitted orally about the end of the Ice Age and the great changes it had brought to the climate. Of course any lost civilization has to have been a golden one, what point is there in recounting the legend of a mundane place? In addition, unlike civilizations around you, no-one can disprove whatever you might say about a lost one.

Two phases of the Lemurian Empire:

Sea levels do fluctuate; 5 million years ago the Atlantic was lower and the Mediterranean a desert. They have continued to fluctuate in far more recent (in geological terms) In Roman times there was the flooding of the Zuider Zee which has been subsequently reclaimed as land. There was a land bridge linking Britain to France. Once the last ice age ended 12-14,000 years ago the sea levels rose across the world. Beneath the North Sea must be loads of remains of animals and human existence from that period that will probably never be found. So it is possible that large areas of land could now be beneath the sea.  A world with extra continents as large as the ones speculated upon in these maps would have been a far drier place, which is the fact during ice ages when far more water is held in ice sheets.  However, if the Atlantic or the Pacific oceans had been this full of land, let alone both, I believe the who climatic system of Earth would have differed greatly.  Having a planet which is predominantly water-covered is important for life.

In about 5600 BCE, the Black Sea which had been a freshwater, inland sea, something like the Caspian Sea is today, then the Mediterranean Sea which was some 130 metres higher and rising in level broke through. The break through is still apparent from the currents that flow throw the straits between the seas. The land around what is now the Crimea and the Sea of Azov, very fertile, was submerged, about 155,000 Km2 was inundated. The change in level of the seas at the time moved the East coast of North America back by 75-150 miles (120-240 Km). This geological event is the background for the Deluge or Great Flood which features in the Bible and in many other legends of the Middle Eastern region notably those of Gilgamesh of Babylonia.

As you can see from one of the diagrams above , people think 'Atlantis' might have existed somewhere on what is now the northern edge of the Black Sea and the Pillars of Hercules were rather the Dardanelles or Bosporus Straits rather than the Straits of Gibraltar.  The straits into the Black Sea were later the 'clashing rocks' in the myth of Jason and the Argonauts when Jason travelled to what is now northern Turkey to take back metal-working techniques as 'the Golden Fleece' (fleeces with their greasy hair were used to trap gold particles flowing down streams much in the way the American and Australian prospectors of the 19th century panned for gold).

Amazon Basin also as an inland sea.

One thing that should be noted is that we now know about plate techtonics which means that whilst areas of continents may go below or rise above sea levels and volcanic activity can lead to large areas of ground sliding (such as the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah both of which existed and slide into the Dead Sea on a surface made slick by seismic and volcanic activity) who could not lose a whole continent into the sea unless the Earth was basically cracking apart.

A possibly more feasible explanation for Atlantis rather than being a huge continent is what actually happened on the island of Santorini (also known as Thira or Thera) in 1640BCE. This seems to have supplied the model for the culture of Plato's Atlantis, if not the geography. We now know that Santorini was part of the rich Minoan civilization, most easily seen in the wonderful palaces of Crete remains of which are visible today. Santorini is built on a volcano which erupted very violently in 1640BC on a scale to rival Krakatau (also known as Krakatoa) in Indonesia in 1883. It threw so much debris into the atmosphere that it affected the sunsets in London. We have seen how much damage tsunamis can do, in 2004, to modern civilizations. From the remains of Santorini which is about a third of the size of the island as it was before the eruption, immense wealth has been discovered and remains of expensive houses that rivalled or probably excelled the Minoan settlements on Crete.

Santorini sat at the crossroads between Greece, Asia Minor, the Levant and North Africa, particularly Egypt. It seems the Minoan civilization, a naval based empire, was centred there until it was literally blown to pieces in an eruption. Even those who escaped by boat may have been overtaken by the tsunami that followed the eruption and which brought sea water far inland on Crete (70 miles; 112Km away) damaging crops there and smashing their ships. The Minoans on Crete went into steady decay over the next decades as their capital was effectively gone, their trade routes disrupted, coastal fields infertile and a climate suffering colder weather due to the cloud of dust thrown into the atmosphere (think of a kind of 'nuclear winter' of the kind predicted in the case of even a limited nuclear war). This destruction of a rich, wealthy civilization seems to match what we 'know' about Atlantis.


There are other connections too. The city of Atlantis often portrayed as having a structure of concentric circles, well, Santorini even today has the partial outer ring of the caldera with islands in the centre. It is thought that at its height the bulk of the population lived on a flatter island in the centre of the caldera rather than on the outer rim where there are remains and that there was a break in the caldera rock allowing ships into the centre and providing a naturally very safe harbour in terms of both severe weather and any attack. It is difficult to know what pre-eruption Thera looked like because so much was changed though much debris settled back into the base of the caldera and that may have been roughly in the same place. Undersea contours ring out from this area. Traces of the pre-eruption island are in the South-East corner of Santorini and volcanic activity remains both on the Kameni Islands and there is the undersea Columbo volcano to the North-East too. However, there are some speculations below of how it may have appeared assuming that the caldera was in the area it is now and this gives an image which may fit Plato's description. The channel at the northern end is much deeper: 300m+ compared 100m-200m around the rim elsewhere.

Plato lived 427-347BCE, so 1250 years after the explosion at Santorini. He mixed up Santorini as it was reported in his time with Santorini as it had been before the explosion. Of course, sitting on a caldera it may have looked pretty similar with a flooded bowl shape with islands in it. It probably would have been a little more to the South-East of the current island as that is where the remains of that previous island remain. Certainly the economy of Santorini was very wealthy and sophisticated even when compared to the rich civilisation on Crete of which it was probably part, so it is easy to see why someone could easily envisage something like Atlantis out of those memories.


The time gap between the event and Plato writing about it is like me commenting today accurately on an event that occured in the early 8th century before the time of the Viking raids on England. There is no wonder he got some details wrong. The trouble is that people have focused on what he got wrong, i.e. the location of Atlantis in the Atlantic, rather than what he got right, was a recounting of geological changes when the ice age ended, something he got accurate in saying it had happened 9000 years before him and also he mixed in with it historic memory of a very rich and cultured civilization living in a unique setting. It is a perfect package for any writer looking to stimulate people's interest. Bear in mind Plato also wrote 'Republic' which outlined a 'utopian' world of social justice and without crime, so it is clear that Plato had an interested in such societies and Atlantis as somewhere already lost in the mists of time in his era provided an opportunity; the bulk of his writing on Atlantis is about its culture rather than its geography. It is very much like when people in the UK today refer to the Victorian period or the 1950s, they are not aiming for an accurate history of those times, rather using them as an example of how people should behave now which in theory carries more legitimacy than just saying 'this is what you should do because it is a good way to behave'. To some degree the modern believers in Atlantis with their emphasis on its peaceful existence, justice, etc. of the people of Atlantis, have it right, it was always a conceptual thing rather than an actual place.

As for Lemuria/Mu, off the coast of Okinawa and Yonaguni in Japan, since 1985, remains of eight ancient cities with terraced stone buildings and roads visible, have been found. Japan is renowned for earthquakes and volcanoes and the sites are thought to have been submerged around 8000 BCE (though some think it is closer to 10000 BCE), so at the time of civilizations of similar sophistication in the Indus valley (now in Pakistan) and Mesopotamia (now Iraq). They sit 20-33 metres beneath sea level.

To some degree the idea that these were somehow specially advanced or even alien cultures is patronising to our ancestors. You only have to think of the original Seven Wonders of the World to think what they could build basically for ornament let alone for practical purposes, though I guess the Lighthouse at Pharos fell into both categories. Thor Heyerdahl (1914-2002) in his voyages in boats built on the lines of ancient craft such as the Kon-Tiki which sailed 4,300 miles (6,880 Km) across the Pacific in 1947, the two papyrus Ra boats 1969-70 to sail between America and Morocco and back, and then in 1978, the Tigris, to prove that there was the possibility of links between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley. It also seems likely that there was some trade between Ancient Egypt and South American civilizations bringing tobacco and coca (as in cocaine rather than chocolate) to Egypt. None of this needed any technology beyond what we know people of the time had. There was no need for advanced races to help out, humans are that advanced race.

P.P. 06/10/2010: I have just watched a very convincing documentary in the 'Timewatch' series shown on BBC2, about Santorini/Thera and its relationship to Plato's portrayal of Atlantis.  Interestingly, from archaeological excavations on Santorini (which so far have unearthed 10,000m2 of city, but it is believed this may only be 1/30th of the total)  it has come to light that some of the detail that Plato includes in his descriptions of the city of Atlantis, notably the use of white, red and black stones in the architecture, have been uncovered in Santorini just as he described.  We also know from excavations on Crete that the Minoan civilisation there, which was in contact with the Theran one and shared a lot of common culture in terms of customs, dress, artwork and culture worshipped the auroch (a cattle that stood 2m tall at the shoulder, which is now extinct) and men performed ritualistic dancing with them; vaulting the auroch bulls.  Plato describes something similar happening on Santorini. 

It does seem now that we need look no further than Santorini for Atlantis.  It had a vast seaborne, economically very wealthy empire centred on a island on top of a volcano, that by Plato's time probably looked like the concentric-ringed settlement that he portrayed in his story and perhaps looked pretty similar before, given that it may have been in the crater of previous eruptions.  The volcanic eruption was vast, we now know, throwing up 60Km3 of ash compared to 6Km3 at Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE which covered Pompeii or the St. Helen's eruption in the USA in 1980 which threw up only 0.5 Km3.  The tidal wave that hit Crete ended the Minoan civilisation there over the following years.

This story of the loss of actual civilisations that were incredibly advanced for the Bronze Age (you only have to visit the Palace of Knossos on Crete to know that) is a fascinating one in itself.  Plato used a mix of fact and fiction to provide a homily about the demise of maritime-based economies that became too proud to warn the Greeks of his era about making the same mistakes especially in a region that even today is prone to earthquakes and has passive rather than inactive volcanoes such as on Nisyros.  It is annoying that rather than pursue the truth of the real Theran civilisation, people have spent years and probably millions of pounds fantasising about vast continents and in some cases searching for them.  Perhaps our world would seem less magical without Atlantis, but if this effort had gone into exploring Thera and other lost civilisations we would know a lot more about our real world.  I hope now that a line can be drawn under all these maps, however wonderful they might be.  They should be left to fiction and people should not try to make them appear fact.

An Atlas of Imaginary Worlds 5: Worlds Beside Our Own

Having span off into the world of the Hollow Earth, there remain a couple of worlds set on or rather beside the Earth we know that I thought were worth mentioning. The first comes from the movie 'Time Bandits' (1981). This was produced by former Beatle, George Harrison and written by Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam (who also directed it) who had been in the cult comedy 'Monty Python's Flying Circus' and in spin-off movies like 'Jabberwocky' (1977) and 'The Life of Brian' (1979 - which has gone from being condemned by Christian groups as ungodly, to now since even the early 1990s having clips used in children's history programmes about the Romans). Most of the 'Pythons' attended with Oxford or Cambridge university, one of them, Terry Jones, since 1984, has been writing books such as 'Chaucer's Knight' (1984) and producing programmes on medieval history and Palin has gone on to be a successful adventurous travel writer with books and programmes amongst others, 'Around the World in 80 Days' (1991), 'Pole to Pole' (1992), 'Sahara' (2002) and 'Full Circle' (2004) so their historical facts tend to be very solid as can be seen in their films).

Anyway, 'Time Bandits' is a popular blog topic. It is really a children's film about an English boy from 1981 called Kevin and 6 dwarfs who work for the 'Supreme Being' and have a map of flaws in the universe which allow them to jump through time and space on Earth. Portals open up for a limited amount of time, giving an urgency to their explorations as seen in this blurred image from the movie:

They are supposed to be repairing them, but use them to go round stealing treasure. The map they use is bigger than any one of them and I think some of the appeal of it, is its aesthetic. It looks as it should, cryptic and mystical, but practical too, though with potential for misinterpretation. Below are some images of the map as seen in the movie and now available to buy. The fact that people still want it 26 years later, suggests it has a pretty iconic status. Like a lot of Gilliam's work, notably 'Brazil' (1985), 'The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen' (1988), 'The Fisher King' (1991) and his abortive Don Quixote film, it is about preserving fantasy and excitement in a world obsessed with rationality, and especially in 'Time Bandits', consumerism. In Gilliam's view, it appears such ability to engage with the unreal is what keeps us free.

The map as seen in the movie:

This one was a similar map produced by the artist Jennifer Diane Reitz in the early 1980s. See: http://www.pasteldefender.com/news.html for more about her and her work, a lot of which falls into fantasy categories:

I had hoped to be able to find a Neverwhere map. 'Neverwhere' (1998) was by Neil Gaiman, the (graphic) based on a television series by him (and the comedian Lenny Henry) of the same name in 1996. It envisages a parallel world within London; London Below. All those mysterious doors you pass that no-one ever seems to open or those windowed spires on the top of Victorian buildings, actually go into this different world, inhabited both by tribes of homeless people and by fantastical creatures. All the places on the London undeground map relate to real things so an earl has a court at Earl's Court, there is a black smith at Hammersmith, there are black friars from Blackfriars (and the female vampires, the Velvets come in, as in The Velvet Underground) and there is an angel at Angel Islington and so on. I know there are lots of closed down stations on the London underground, but I suppose Gaiman's Neverwhere map would be the same as the London Underground one anyway. So I found some other unusual or faked underground railway maps, including one for the planet Gallifrey the home planet of the Doctor in the television series 'Doctor Who' (intermittently 1963- Now). The first is a map which shows the geographical rather than schematic map of the routes which usually is seen. Another one to look out for is 'The Great Bear' (1992) by Simon Patterson a conceptual map based on the traditional London Underground map outline:

The final one for now is a 'map' that seems to be all over the internet maybe influenced by the very speculative ones drawn by explorers in the 19th century, but certainly one which could provide a model for those seeking to create fantasy world maps now. Note both the inland sea and the northern mountains and wastelands:

On reflection, though, I think that this was not supposed to be satirical in the way it now seems to be portrayed, rather it was probably an aide-memoire for Victorian children to show them the generic elements of what they would find on a map. However, it would be tempting to write over the labels and use it as a fantasy world.