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.

An Atlas of Imaginary Worlds 4: The Earth Within

Whilst searching for maps of imaginary worlds on the internet I have come across many maps for places which people believed existed but no longer do, notably Atlantis, its rival Lemuria and Mu the equivalent in the Pacific. Another interest is in the theory that the Earth is actually hollow and that there is another world inside this one. This has been a popular theme for authors. Jules Verne wrote 'Journey to the Centre of the Earth' in 1864 and I have mentioned Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) Pellucidar series: 'At the Earth's Core' (1914), 'Pellucidar (1923) [both of these are available in full online], 'Tanar of Pellucidar' (1928), 'Tarzan at the Earth's Core' (1929), 'Back to the Stone Age' (1937), 'Land of Terror' (1944) and posthumously, 'Savage Pellucidar' (1963). More recently Rudy Rucker wrote 'The Hollow Earth' in 1990 which features a fictional expedition by Edgar Allen Poe to the South Pole in 1836 to discover entry into the Hollow Earth. There is a list of more than 20 hollow Earth books on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Hollow-Earth-Madness/lm/166ZTL24C1WYA

Though the Hollow Earth has been a popular idea for fiction for decades, I was intrigued to find that there were many who held it to be based on fact. There are a variety of religious groups of the internet who quote extensive biblical and other references which they feel point to a Hollow Earth. There was even an exploration planned for this year 26th June-9th July, organised by a man called Steve Currey. The plan was to travel to 84.4 N Latitude, 141 E Longitude and they had charted a Russian icebreaker 'Yamal' to take them there along with up to 100 people who applied at http://www.voyagehollowearth.com/ Unfortunately Currey died before the mission began and it was cancelled.

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries there have been reports of people travelling in the Polar regions discovering warm winds and other indications that there is a more temperate location up (or down) there. There is disagreement about what the worlds inside our Earth are like. A key difficulty for people is how it would be lit. One could envisage there may be deep underground caverns, possibly even with entrances at the North and South Poles as some believe (plus other entrances such as Mato Grosso in Brazil and Mount Epomeo in Italy even under the Egyptian pyramids) but they would be rather dark and bleak places, whereas most who believe in the Hollow Earth think there are rich, advanced civilizations down there. The Nazis believed in the theory of the inverted or hollow Earth, termed 'Hohlweltlehre'. The mission to Ruegen Island in April 1942 by Dr. Heinz Fischer was focused on the belief that we were actually on the inside of a concave world. Ironically Nazi Germany's developments in rockets would lead to disproof of that. There are myths of Nazi leaders (presumably led by Martin Borman who disappeared) escaping with 2000 scientists from Germany and Italy who were apparently missing at the end of the Second World War and up to 1 million other people into the interior of the world. This line has been followed in the story, 'Indiana Jones and the Hollow Earth' by Max McCoy (2003) which features Indiana and the Nazis racing to find a hidden civilization within the Earth.

There is a group called the International Society for the Complete Earth (ISCE) (http://www.hollow-earth.org/welcome.html) which was set up in 1977 by a former German Second World War submarine commander who, amongst other things, apparently, helped recover the Holy Lance in 1969 and assisted the Hartmann Expedition to Antarctica in 1979 to recover a treasure of Hitler's. The trouble with things on the internet is that this could be a real group (it claims 1000 members across 9 countries) or it could be entirely a spoof for a book or a movie or something, it is so difficult to tell. If it is not a spoof then it would be a great organisation to feature in some modern technology version of 'The Da Vinci Code'.

As I discussed with the inland sea of Australia, in an age when we know all about the World people remain keen to find out that there is more, something that has been overlooked, and certainly in the expectation of advanced civilizations, societies or models of society which are fairer or more decent than our own (or far less decent if they are made up of old Nazis) as an element of hope in our violent selfish world.

A website called Xenophillia has 5 pages of different evidence which proves that a Hollow Earth is impossible: http://www.xenophilia.com/zb0008.htm To me, putting aside issues of the density of the Earth and its structure, there seem basic logistical problems of civilizations inside Earth which appear to be as follows. Without sunlight there cannot be plants and so no food supply for animals or humans to live. I know molluscs can live at volcanic vents deep in the sea and there are blind cave fish but you would need a lot to sustain more than a handful of people for a long time. Authors have suggested that the magma inside the Earth would provide light like the sun, but it is not known to do so in any deep caves any humans have visited. Without plants there would be a lack of oxygen and any creatures would soon die from the carbon dioxide they would generate. I know there are supposed to be large vents but basically any settlement would have to be ground around these and then why not live on the surface where all of this stuff is so much easier? We are always discovering new species, they thought the coelacanth was extinct but then they caught one in 1938 again in 1952 off South Africa and in 1998 off Sumatra. Then in 2005 remains of the so-called 'hobbit' race alive in Indonesia up to 18,000 years ago, about 12,000 years after the Neanderthals and Homo Erectus had gone. So, I am not saying there are not mysteries to be discovered, but that the logistics of a hollow Earth just do not add up. The Earth is probably about 80% the size it was once it first gained a crust due to internal cooling. There is also evidence to suggest it has expanded and contracted throughout its history suggesting it is a ball of molten rock at least gradually cooling. Below are illustrations of different views of how people think a hollow Earth would work:

This model below comes from John C. Symmes (1780-1829) who, like Edmund Halley (1656-1742 - discoverer of Halley's Comet) envisaged a series of concentric spheres inside the Earth:

Photos from Apollo 8 and Apollo 16 suggest to some people that there is a big chip in the North Pole which opens into the interior. This certainly makes Earth look like a soft-boiled egg. There is also a map of where people think the entrance will be:

Our Selfish Society 2: Mobile Phone Abuse

This one was prompted by recent commentary I have heard about the use of mobile phones as they are called in the UK. I was very much in sympathy with it. As you can see, yesterday I already commented about the selfishness of using mobile phones while driving. Though 'hands free' kits are safer than holding the phone, research has shown that just talking on a phone tends to send the sight lines of even experienced drivers all over the place. I know that talking on a phone is no worse than having children screaming in the back, but it does tend to be more sustained and unlike listening to the radio or a CD or your MP3 player in the car, it needs you to pay attention in order to respond, attention you cannot give to the road or the traffic. Paying attention is very necessary to keep you alive on the UK's roads given how dangerously so many people habitually drive these days.

What about mobile phone use outside the car? Before I go further, I must say I have no problem with mobile phones, I have no problem with laptops and palmtops, with fancy watches or digital cameras, what I have a problem with is the selfish way that people use them. People can sing or whistle selfishly if they choose, it is not an issue of technology. However, I do think, that as many mobile phone advertisers suggest, mobile phones take the users into 'another world' and they become oblivious of where they actually are. Classic cases that all of you must have witnessed is someone sitting in a 'quiet carriage' on a train (I assume other countries have these) and the person is sitting right under a sign with the symbol of a mobile phone crossed out and they are busily chatting away, usually far louder than is necessary and certainly louder than you would normally talk on a train. There is a sense that it is a human right to be able to use your mobile phone, and conversely that no-one has the right to have some quiet even if they have deliberately gone into a specific place to get it.

I see people using mobile phones in libraries, often, in the case of teenagers, to talk to someone actually in the same building. The worse case I witnessed was back as early as the late 1990s when a librarian came over and asked the young man to stop using his phone and he started narrating what was happening to the person on the other end of the phone 'there's an old biddy getting lary with me...' he said, to quote. To translate, 'there is a middle-aged woman who is in a position of some authority but I do not respect who has asked me to comply with the regulations of this building, but I am too selfish to comply...'. Such attitudes again demonstrate the trend I noted yesterday - a supreme arrogance. These people believe that their, very petty concerns, trump any regulation or any comfort of anyone else on the planet. They do not exist in society, just (interestingly again as many mobile phone advertisers suggest in how they style their adverts) in a bubble of their own importance.

I once visited a government office which had some kind of unobtrusive system that blocked mobile phone signals, causing lots of dismay to some visitors who looked like drug addicts cut off from their supply. I do not know if courts, churches, schools, libraries can invest in such equipment themselves. It would benefit everyone even the potential phone users who might actually pay attention to what is going on.

There is much other use of mobile phones, such as texting which is common and may seem anti-social but generally does not cause much harm. Though I acknowledge that many people texting are oblivious to what is around them so put themselves at risk, especially stepping off kerbs without looking and they do knock into others but are usually moving at such a slow speed as to be avoidable. The fact that people should into mobile phones as if they were a tin can tied to a piece of string or that phone technology has not advanced in the past 80 years, is also a curiosity but really only bad when combined with the phone misuse in places like trains and libraries noted above.

I have no desire to ban people breaking off midway through a conversation to answer their mobile phone even when they know the caller's number will be recorded on their phone in the way it was never done in the past with landline phones and also the person most likely leave a message. Doing that is simply rudeness though born from this feeling that the bubble the owner lives in is far more important than the rest of the Planet. People need to learn manners. They also need to learn that they are signalling to the person that they are talking to that that other person means less to them than a squeaking machine which is incredibly insulting.

The most offensive misuse of mobile phones, though, is their use in bullying. This is both in terms of texts, pictures and calls that threaten people and also of images recorded of people being bullied and attacked. Bullying by mobile phone is particularly invasive for one of the reasons I have outlined, it seems to reach right into the person's bubble. Usually with the worst bullies you can run to your bedroom and bolt the door but with phone bullying they get right in there providing no escape. For young people being without a mobile phone is to be socially dead and yet it makes them vulnerable to this additional, very intrusive form of attack.

As for filming or photographing attacks on people by phone, that is simply a criminal aspect. You might wonder why people would video themselves or their friends bullying or attacking someone and so providing evidence of their crime. Well, it happens, and increasingly they even post it on YouTube. Clearly it is part of the bravado of both young men and women, to show how tough they are and that they are 'in' in terms of youth culture. However, to me, it is scarily reminiscent of the photographs taken by SS and Gestapo units on extermination action during the Second World War. There were thousands of photographs taken of such people torturing and murdering people right through Poland, the Soviet Union and elsewhere, absolutely revelling in their barbarity. This aspect of the war was probably best expressed in a mainstream story in the movie 'Music Box' (1989) which features a lawyer uncovering such photos of a unit of the Arrow Cross, a Hungarian paramilitary unit which also carried out such atrocities during the Second World War. The author George Orwell (1903-1950) argued that the UK could never have a dictatorship of the kind that was experienced elsewhere in Europe, but from what I see of British people's willingness to behave in such similar ways, I doubt his view was accurate. The abuse of mobile phones, it seems, just highlights what an unhealthy, self-centred society the UK is today.

Our Selfish Society 1: Road Littering

There are probably so many selfish people in the world today that I could produce a blog just on that. I envisage a string of postings on such topics: selfishness has been increasing over the last few decades and certainly in the English-speaking world took a real boost in the 1980s, the 'greed is good' era. I drive 60-90 miles (96-144km) per day and on the road is where you see a great deal of selfish behaviour and a lot of bad, arrogant and ignorant behaviour too. There is something about getting in a car which seems to free people from the normal constraints of society and also make them feel they are back in historic times in which they have to fight for their name and challenge others to duels. I intend to do a posting just on the bad aspects of driving in the UK. However, today I am going to focus on just one element of selfish behaviour combined with driving: road littering.

What prompted this was news today that according to the UK Highways Agency the amount of litter along the UK's roads has reached an all time high. It is the agency's job to clean it up and it is taking staff and funds away from road repairs. This is not the end of the problem. They have to employ more people to clear the litter from the road and from roadsides and this is a really hazardous occupation. Last year in one county, Hampshire in southern England, 2 of their staff were killed and 19 were injured, collecting litter along the roadsides. They put signs up well in advance of the litter clearing both in terms of days and in terms of distance on the road so everyone has fair warning. The litter collectors wear high visibility clothing, they keep to the verges not the road, and yet, people are still running them down.

They reckon you have a life expectancy of 10 minutes if you break down on a UK motorway. In the UK, unlike France, it is not compulsory to have high-visibility vests or warning triangles in your car, but many people do. Neither of these, however, seem to reduce your risk of being killed on a UK motorway. It does not matter if you are in the middle lane or on the hard shoulder you are still at risk from drivers in cars and lorries (trucks) drifting over the lanes. It is apparent people pay little attention to what is in front of them and do not slow down when they see a broken-down car or a litter collector; they literally get away with murder.

Litter throwing, and when I say throwing, that is exactly what I mean, not dropping, is in itself causing accidents. UK drivers, according to government reports, are no longer happy simply to drop cigarette butts out of the car window, they are actually throwing drinks cans and fast food packaging out of their windows and across lanes, causing cars to swerve.

Do these reckless drivers and passengers live in some bubble? Do they think they are only playing a game on their Playstation or their Xbox? Have they no thought of what their actions are causing? Have they no idea what it is like to have your car hit by a drinks can at 70 mph (112kph)? These are probably the same people, who despite the higher fines and stricter penalties introduced this year, are still driving one-handed with a mobile phone pressed to their ear. The number of people doing that, in my experience, has not dropped at all. These people are utterly selfish, they have no concerns for anything beyond their petty, exploitative lives. To them disposing of litter or taking a phone call is far more important than a person's life. How sick can you get?!

A car is a more dangerous weapon than a knife and in some cases than a gun. The penalties for using this weapon recklessly should be as high as if a knife or a gun was used. People should not just get 18 months imprisonment and a driving ban for a year, they should get 25 years. If they ran around the town, blindfolded, with a gun, firing off randomly and killed someone, that is what they would get, but somehow using a car so recklessly is seen as alright. It still ends someone's life, it does not matter what the actual weapon is. The only way we are going to change this lethal behaviour which wrecks so many lives is to impose proper penalties on dangerous drivers.

An Atlas of Imaginary Worlds 3: Islands and Archiepelagos

I am sitting here waiting for the Tolkien Police to turn up, but so far they have not shown. I guess they will come without warning, I will simply turn up one day and find that my blog has gone. To some degree they are working against the long-term interests of the Tolkien estate as now the impact of the movies is beginning to wane, sales of all things Tolkien will only be sustained by geeks and a rising generation of geeks, and these prosper in an environment of community and discussion and what I call 'train spottery', i.e. like train spotters, discussing the minutiae of their world. Choking them off will damage interest in Tolkien's works; as I have shown over the last couple of days, there are more than enough other worlds to become interested in.

Maybe I can escape the Tolkien lawyers by moving my blog into German. I have found the most comprehensive website for maps of places which do not exist, it is in German, though some of the maps on it are in French and English; there is also some text about the mission of the site available in English too. Check out: http://www.fantasy-atlas.org/ The contents are 'Inhalt' and they are listed by the authors of the books, so simply look by their surname. The navigation on the site is rather awkward as, if you open a map, certainly on my machine, there is no 'Back' and so you have to close the map and it dumps you back to the front page of the website rather than returning you to 'Inhalt'. There are things you will not find elsewhere such as a South Pole ('Sudpol') view of Arrakis. Looking through German authors there does seem to be this Northern Europe - North America focus (I will title this the NENA focus to save me having to write it out each time) still with big forests and icy wastelands at the top. Another site that has a range of maps from fantasy novels, though it does not seem to have been updated since 2005 is: http://thegraveyard.org/daelstorm/maps.php

Another website of interest which does not carry maps, but has articles about fantasy worlds is: http://www.strangewords.com/archive/contents.html It looks like it has stopped being updated and not all the pages work any longer, which is why I direct you to the archive as there are interesting articles about fantasy worlds and the themes they encompass and what they say about our own world. From the start of science fiction with people like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, a lot of the writing though superficially looking forward to the future of sideways into alternate places actually addresses a lot of contemporary issues, notably about power politics, the dangers and benefits of technology as well as personal crises and increasingly issues like sexuality and its relationship to society. On the Strange Worlds site it discusses how the genre handled things like Nazism and the Vietnam War.

Anyway, I am now ranging well off the point of what today's blog was to be about, though I always think it is worthwhile highlighting others on the internet doing interesting and useful things, especially if they are at potential risk from the 'Black Riders', the internet censors. People forget we are part of a 'web' and that the references back and forth across it are what make it stronger. We have little power in the face of multinational corporations and governments, but what power we can glean comes from knitting a community in cyberspace. It is a place for free speech and it is better to have a hundred people around you freely saying things you disagree with (you can always 'Back' away) than for the whole edifice to be brought down by censorship.

With that off my chest, I turn to the focus of today's maps. As noted, yesterday, much of the emphasis in fantasy from the 1910s onwards up to the 1960s and even today, has been worlds with huge continents and sweeping plains that allow epic stories. However, a couple of excellent authors looked for something different and this, I feel is reflected in the worlds they created. The first in Michael Moorcock (born 1939) who really defies categorisation as his more than 70 novels cover so many genres. In addition, characters from different series of his books start popping up in other worlds that he creates. He developed the concept of the 'multiverse' a common point of discussion of numerous parallel worlds. In his 'Nomad of the Time Streams' trilogy: 'The Warlord of the Air' (1971), 'The Land Leviathan' (1974) and 'The Steel Tsar' (1981) he explores a whole host of 'what if?' worlds. The book which made him famous, 'Behold the Man' (1969) most radically envisages that the man who was crucified at Golgotha in 33 AD was not Jesus the son of Joseph from Nazareth because he was a mentally retarded youth who cleaned the carpenter's workshop, but rather a Jewish American time-traveller from our times. This clearly questions the divinity of Christ (something not all Christians believe in) and what makes a religion whether it is God or belief.

Many of Moorcock's books also feature different manifestations of the 'Eternal Champion'. The most developed of these is Elric of Melniboné. He appears in 'Stormbringer' (1965; revised 1977), 'The Sleeping Sorceress' (1971; also known as 'The Vanishing Tower'), '

Elric of Melniboné' (1972), 'The Sailor on the Seas of Fate' (1976), 'The Weird of the White Wolf' (1977), 'The Bane of the Black Sword' (1977), 'Fortress of the Pearl' (1989), 'Revenge of the Rose' (1991), 'The Dreamthief's Daughter' (2001), 'The Skrayling Tree' (2003), 'The White Wolf's Son' (2005). Elric was intentionally the opposite of muscle-bound heroes like Conan. He was weak, anaemic, an albino and dependent on medicines and then a life-draining sword, to sustain him. He works in a world with Law and Chaos rather than Good and Evil (if you equate Law with good, remember regimes like that of the Soviet Union were very 'Lawful' in the strict way they ran their society and hippies can be seen as 'Chaotic' though not evil). He kills the love of his life, he betrays the Empire of which he was emperor, he makes pacts with demons and becomes weaker as the books progress. Clearly Moorcock was seeking to subvert the established fantasy conventions, though he continues to operate in an environment of magic, epic battles, castles and dragons.

So to the map. Elric lives in the world of the Young Kingdoms (though regularly goes into other dimensions and alternate worlds). As you can see, this is another with a North and South continent (well in fact two northern continents) with sea in the middle, and you can compare this with Pern and Glorantha. Melniboné is an island as is its main rivals Pan Tang (I think the Young Kingdoms must be the only imaginary land to provide the name of a pop group, I know there is music associated with 'The Lord of the Rings' but the Tygers of Pan Tang - a heavy metal group formed in 1978 whose music is still available to buy and download, they do still seem to be recording). This means that battles are more likely to be seaborne. Elric does wander the world, but is more likely to go into alien dimensions than the epic rides across open plains. One noticeable thing about this map, drawn by William Church is the styling. It manages to combine clarity with a sense of the exotic. Many maps of imaginary places are either mundane or difficult to read, this is neither and really marks it out in this category:

The other author who broke conventions in writing fantasy, possibly because she was a woman, is Ursula Le Guin (born 1929) with her Earthsea tetralogy (quintology): 'A Wizard of Earthsea' (1968), 'The Tombs of Atuan' (1972), 'The Farthest Shore' (1974), 'Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea' (1990), 'The Other Wind' (2001) and the world of Earthsea has featured in many of her short stories from 1964 onwards. The books feature magic and much is around the School of Magic on the Island of Roke, which, I feel must have had at least some influence on J.K. Rowling's Hogwarts School in the Harry Potter cycle. However, despite the fantasy elements a lot of the focus is on human behaviour and relationships rather than epic battles of the old tradition. Again, this more human focus may be reflected in the world of Earthsea which is very fragmented into numerous islands. Le Guin has produced scores of novels, short stories and poetry collections and has done translations and non-fiction too. This is Earthsea or Hain as its inhabitants call it:

Now, just one little oddity to add in, that I stumbled across when making up this 'Atlas' which in fact is far from comprehensive and only scratches the surface of some of the better known fantasy worlds. This is Mongo as featured in the Flash Gordon series. This started as a comic strip series by Alex Raymond (1909-1956) in 1934 (it ran until 1993 and in some forms to 2003), 5 years after the successful Buck Rogers was launched (this ran to 1967). It also spawned movie serials in 1936, shown on British television as late as the 1980s. There was a movie in 1980 with Max von Sydow, Topol, Brian Blessed, Richard O'Brien and Timothy Dalton all over-acting to the hilt. There have been innumerable radio shows and novels and this year there are plans for a new 22-part television series. Mongo was a planet which moved around and threatend Earth when it came into our solar system. Its technology was more advanced than ours but it had a societal structure that seems to have been based on Imperial China, hence its ruler, the cruel Emperor Ming the Merciless (the real Ming dynasty ruled China 1368-1644). Some aspects and some of the costumes however seem to reflect the 19th century Central European flavour of Ruritania. The planet had different areas: sea, forest, desert, etc. and different species suited to the various realms, such as the Hawkmen and Lizardmen. I came across this map of the planet, which shows that islands in an imaginary world do not mean a more human perspective as Flash Gordon has all the muscle-bound, epic nature of a Conan, it is just it gives him a chance to work in a range of different environments.

An Atlas of Imaginary Worlds 2: Large continents and deserts

Now, aside from Middle Earth and Narnia most imaginary places have far less mapping. I have been unable to find a single map of Ruritania (though you can find a print font called Ruritania, very ornate) featured in Anthony Hope's 'A Prisoner of Zenda' (1894) and 'Rupert of Hentzau' (1898).

In terms of the nature of the worlds drawn, probably the most similar to that of Tolkien and Lewis is in the Conan the Cimmerian (aka Conan the Barbarian) stories (Conan was the name of four of the Dukes of Brittany in the Middle Ages) initially by Robert E. Howard (1906-1936). They are robust epic adventures of a barbarian warrior. There are over 50 novels and other stories written by a number of authors (including L. Sprague de Camp), so search the internet if you are interested. Anyway, these stories are set on the world of Hyboria (or Hyborea). It has large continents for lots of riding across. One fascination as you can see, has been by fans to map this world over our own. Many of the names of places in the world come from our own history such as Stygia (Hercules was supposed to have cleaned the Stygian stables), Aquilonia (is reminiscient of Aquitaine, a region of South-West France), Kush (as in the Hindu Kush), Asgard (which is where the gods lived in Norse myths), the Pictish Wilderness (the Picts occupied Scotland at the time of the Romans), Corinthia (Corinth was a leading city of Ancient Greece), Argos (was the name of Jason and the Argonauts ship and is now a retail store in the UK too), Shem (is a piece of text that powers golems in Jewish legends), Ophir (is a wealthy country mentioned in the Old Testament), Iranistan is pretty self-obvious, Vendhya (like the Vindhya Mountains in west-central India; Vindhya Pradesh was a state of India 1948-56), Khitai is like the name the Byzantines gave to China and so on.

These maps of Hyboria transpose our world and our Europe onto the main imaginary continent:

A more recent world is the one created for the online gaming environment World of Warcraft which started in 2001. It has three large continents: Kalimdor in the West, Northrend, not surprisingly in the North and the Eastern Kingdoms (Lordaeron, Khaz Modan and Azeroth) in the East, with an huge maelstrom apparently between them. There are no apparent archiepelagos but lots of large islands. The Eastern Kingdoms seem particularly well endowed with no less than three inland seas with islands in them. I imagine these locations allow 'zoning' of particularly tough creatures or missions in the game. This is the world that millions of people directly or indirectly are involved in, making it have as much impact, probably, as Middle Earth and Narnia.

This seems to be the 'Underground' map of the World of Warcraft showing its transport links. From what I gather there is a steampunk element and that continents are connected by both traditional sailing ships but also airships named Zeppelins (presumably in this world Zeppelin was a gnome technician or something) and people can also fly on large bats and manticores between certain towns.

Another a large single 'continent' is a place called the Isle of Lodoss. This started as records of role-playing games in Japan from 1986 onwards but under Ryo Mizuno has evolved into manga comics and fantasy novels by various authors under the sort of umbrella designation of 'Record of Lodoss War'. Given its background in 'Dungeons & Dragons' it is probably unsurprising that it has a similar outline to Hyboria. It is difficult to judge scale and given the title 'Isle' or 'Island' maybe this would be more accurate placed in the islands and archipelagos posting, but I will leave it here for now:

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950; the author of 'Tarzan') envisioned civilizations on planets in our solar system, notably Barsoom which was their version of Mars. Here are a couple of maps of what he envisoned its geography to be, the latter with an overlay of actual places on our Mars with their names in red compared to the Barsoomian blue ones. The books were serialised in comics shown by the first sate but then turned into novels which are the second dates I give for them: 'A Princess of Mars' (1912/1917), 'The Gods of Mars' (1913/1918), 'The Warlord of Mars' (1913-14/1919), 'Thuvia, Maid of Mars' (1916/1920), 'The Chessmen of Mars' (1922/1922), 'The Master Mind of Mars' (1927/1928), 'A Fighting Man of Mars' (1930/1931), 'Swords of Mars' (1934-5/1936), 'Synthetic Men of Mars' (1939/1940), 'Llana of Gathol' (1940/1948). Then John Coleman Burroughs took over: 'John Carter and the Giant of Mars' (1941/1964) and 'Skeleton Men of Jupiter' (1943 - no novel). Burroughs also produced a series set on Venus and there have been seven novels set in his Pellucidar, a land at beneath the Earth's crust, in line with the hollow Earth theories of the first half of the 20th century, including even a crossover with Tarzan going there. Burroughs also produced 'The Land that Time Forgot' (1918) and 'The People that Time Forgot' (also 1918) turned into movies in 1975 and 1977 respectively about an island inhabited by dinosaurs and cavepeople (very much like Arthur Conan Doyle's 'The Lost World' (1912) and more recently 'Dinotopia: A Land Apart From Time' by James Gurney (1992) and 19 sequels and other books set there by him and other authors that have followed).

The science ficiton and fantasy author Michael Moorcock has said he was very influenced by Burroughs and once edited a Tarzan magazine. However, as we will see, Moorcock's world of the Young Kingdoms is in sharp contrast to the desert Barsoom. More in that category is the world of Arrakis, created by Frank Herbert (1920-1986) in the 'Dune' series. In his books (and as with other successful science fiction authors others have taken up his world after his death), 'Dune' (1986), 'Dune Messiah (1969), 'Children of Dune' (1976), 'God Emperor of Dune' (1981), 'Heretics of Dune' (1984) and 'Chapterhouse: Dune' (1985) he featured this desert world and much of the culture draws on Arabic and Islamic culture with words like Padishah (similar to the Turkish and Egyptian leaders called Pashas and the Persian/Iranian Shahs though it is portrayed as a dynastic name), Fedaykin (from the word Fedayeen for an elite guerilla fighter, which is coming back into use in current affairs, outside Herbert's worlds because of its use by Islamist fighters) and Sardaukar coming from Arabic language (though searching the internet these days you would have thought Herbert invented them himself), Zensunni (which combines Zen Buddhism with Sunni Islam).

It is quite refreshing to have a world not so shaped by North European-North American outlooks. There are a few other influences such as in the Landsraad (reminiscent of the German Landsrat parliament) and the rival Houses are rather like those of Renaissance Italy. Though there are masses of websites devoted to the Dune setting, few seem to run to maps, I suppose a huge desert does not open up many opportunities for the kind of rivers and mountains fantasy mapmakers love. This then is a map of the Arrakis, central to the Dune cycle; followed by the one from the board game produced by Avalon Hill in 1979 which is much more colourful:

In terms of availability (and you can tell when you have lots of fans because they will map your worlds for you), probably tied next with Howard et al and Hyboria, is Anne McCaffrey with Pern - her world of dragonriders which features in a whole series of novels by her and her son Todd: Dragonflight (1968), 'Dragonquest' (1970), 'Dragonsong' (1976), 'Dragonsinger' (1977), 'The White Dragon' (1978), 'Dragondrums' (1979), 'Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern' (1983), 'Nerillka's Story' (1986), 'Dragonsdawn' (1988), 'The Renegades of Pern' (1989), 'All the Weyrs of Pern' (1991), 'The Chronicles of Pern: First Fall' (1993), 'The Dolphins of Pern' (1994), 'Red Star Rising' (also known as 'Dragonseye', 1997), 'The Masterharper of Pern' (1998), 'The Skies of Pern' (2001), 'Dragon's Kin' (2003), 'Dragonsblood' (2005), 'Dragon Harper' (2007), 'After the Fall' (2008). There have been short stories and some of these books are anthologies. The stories mix science fiction of arrivals on a planet with fantasy elements of dragon riding. As you can see, McCaffrey's world has large continents but also sea and that moves us into the next category of world's which I will look at in the following posting.

The final one which seemed to me pretty much like Pern is Glorantha. This was the setting of the game 'Runequest' a fantasy role-playing game which was the second most popular after 'Dungeons & Dragons' and aimed to have a more distinctive culture from the reliance on elves, dwarfs, trolls and dragons. Note that Pern has its 'Passes' as eras and you can read about Middle Earth in its Third Age, well Glorantha was set in its Second Age, possibly to reflect that it was modelled on Bronze Age rather than Medieval culture, (which I guess could be seen as a continuation of the Iron Age in terms of metallurgy so the third age after the Stone and Bronze Ages) used in so many fantasy worlds. Like Pern there is a central sea and large continents North and South, but like the worlds seen in my next post it also has islands. The third map is a political one of the northern continent, Genertela.