Category: Maps
Plot territory: Future Junkyards
I was going to say that they seem to be everywhere these days but actually I can only think of three recent ones. But three is a lot right?
The junkyard in Becky Chamber’s A Closed and Common Orbit (reviewed here). The book has two interwoven stories one about an AI trying to live as an embodied being with help from her friends and the second story told in flashback about Jane – a cloned child who (along with other cloned children) works in a giant junkyard on an isolated planet.
The San Jose junkyard zone in Blade Runner 2049.
Without spoiling the plot Ryan Gosling visits this hi-tech scrap heap to interview the owner of an orphanage which turns out to be…a child slave labour workshop where kids recycle hi-tech junk. Given the timing of the film and Chamber’s book it is unlikely either cribbed from the other but the visuals in Blade Runner 2049 almost work as visuals for Chamber’s book.
Less focused on the horrors of child exploitation we’ve also had recently the giant intergalactic junkyard from Thor Ragnarok (review here):
Is it just me or do junkyards only exist on cloudy days?
The city in Borne isn’t technically a junkyard but it has similar tropes of gangs of scavangers making use of the remains of technology but with the twist that it is discarded bio-tech. I guess The Phantom Menace has the child-labour-junkyard trope but without the giant space junkyard.
As a piece of plot territory, the giant junkyard is one that is implictly science-fictional rather than fantasy or at least requires a society in which mass manufacture is a thing and hence the disposal of used goods is a thing. A junkyard can then become a place in which the fringes of society live but also a place where technology can be found.
A junkyard is also a place that hides in plain sight. They are by their nature visible but exist where people with wealth can ignore them. There is an in-built critique of capitalism (whether an author intends that or not) with an implication of the ugliness of waste. The inhabitants of the junkyard are also people being discarded by their society – the sfnal junkyard is rarely a day job but instead home to gangs or slaves or slave owning gangs.
There’s an implication of secrets, forgotten knowledge, death and also rebirth in the fictional junkyard – dead things coming back to life for good or ill. An alchemical theme to the junkyard.
Even More Plot Elements of Fantasy Maps
Following on from this and this and the other.
Big Islands
In Earthsea islands are large and numerous, in Lord of the Rings, on the other hand, islands barely appear and are small. In both cases they are locations and destinations and themselves contain terrain.
In Tolkien’s wider work, Númenor is the most notable island – a version of Atlantis, which itself gives us a classic inspiration for islands in Western literature. Oceanic islands can be countries with their own terrain but cut off from surroundings. Le Guin depicts the islands of Earthsea more like medieval era city-states with a wider common culture but no central authority.
It is interesting to me that Tolkien, who draws on many aspects of Britain and Britishness in building Middle Earth, avoids the island quality of Britain. This despite a tendency to mythologize the insular quality of Britain in English propaganda-history both in high-culture (Shakespeare’s ‘sceptered isle’) and low-culture (‘fog in the channel, continent cut off’). George R.R. Martin’s Westeros does this by having it be an eratz England circa the War of the Roses (with Scotland being another place full of ice zombies). Westeros’s scale seems flexible but it’s primary plot role as an island is to be a container. Events are within Westeros (up to the Wall) or beyond (either over the wall or on another continent).
The point being – oceanic islands are treated as political units rather than as terrain.
Lakes
Really big lakes are no different than seas, so I’ll assume we aren’t talking about really big lakes. Tolkien puts islands and towns in lakes, Wolfe puts floating reed islands in a lake and lakes in general distinguish themselves from rivers plot wise by what they might contain.
Small lakes (and pools) maybe places of magic or sacredness. In Stephen Donaldson’s Covenant books, Glimmermere is a magical lake that even gets a magic sword thrown in it and later retrieved.
Small Islands (and other things, in lakes and rivers)
Laketown in The Hobbit is not quiet an island as such but effectively it is and rather like big islands, we have an island as a kind of political entity. People live on and next to lakes, so it makes sense to have islands in lakes as communities. Which in turn makes islands on which people don’t live somewhat mysterious. Deserted islands are spooky in the way a deserted structure is spooky.
Flipping back to island’s in oceans, A Wizard of Earthsea includes a section on an island so small that it is little more than a sandbar. There Ged encounters two castaways with a mysterious past which goes unresolved in that book but which provides a bridge to the sequel.
Swamps
Swamps have a dual nature. Death and decay on the one hand and overly fecund on the other. The Dead Marshes in Lord of the Rings, literally contains dead bodies whereas other swamps and marshes and mangrove-like environments can contain an excess of insect life or harbor unusual creatures (e.g. the rodents of unusual size in the Fire Swamps of the Princess Bride).
Like forests, swamps are places where navigation is difficult and in which becoming lost is an active danger.
Wastes, wilderness, deserts and ’empty’ lands
The notion of wilderness is a politically charged one. The notion of land that cannot be settled and hence is empty is, to but it bluntly, a colonial lie. If it isn’t Antarctica, then people live there, if less densely than other places. However, the idea as a part of a fictional territory continues. Wilderness is empty AND the people who live there are dangerous AND it is a frontier.
To see the contradictions consider Tatooine. It is a desert, it is empty and yet it is where the Sand People (and Jawas I assume) live. Luke lives on what is a frontier farm that echoes Western settlement of empty-not-actually-empty lands in North America and Australia.
Like swamps and forests, wastelands are places in which becoming lost is an ever present danger. Exotic creatures may live in the desert but unlike swamps and forests the desert (or snowy wastes) are characterized by a lack of life. What joins old growth forest, swamps, deserts, and snowy wastes together as threatening places in which survival is at risk is they are not managed land (again in reality even this may not be true).
Swamps, sandy deserts and snowy wastes share a common feature that other wastelands do not necessarily share: the ground itself is treacherous and you may become pulled below it. Quicksand, mud, a crevasse covered by snow or sand all are dangers that subvert the idea of solid ground.
Journeys through the wastes are wearisome and psychologically and physically tiring for characters. Again, assuming the default for classic fantasy of European like people from towns or from farmed land. As such, the wastes are like the ocean and characters may survive by encountering people who know how to live in this different environment.
In The Farthest Shore, Le Guin uses an encounter like this using the open ocean outside of the archipelago as a kind of virtual desert for Ged – who, despite being from a sea-faring culture is beyond the terrain in which he can live.
I’m intentionally trying to avoid talking too much about ethnic stereotypes in fantasy literature with regard to terrain in these posts. Too big an issue to address properly at this point and better served with its own discussion. Much harder to avoid with sandy deserts as Western Orientalism brings its own baggage along to deserts and desert societies.
Jungle
Speaking of which…jungles. Forests but with swamp elements. Wet and fecund and dangerous and exotic. Again loaded with colonial baggage and assumptions about both emptiness, ‘untamed’ nature and ‘savagery’.
Fantasy Terrain and the Book of the New Sun
I’m wandering off on a tangent from this post. That post was mainly considering geographic elements as plot elements in Tolkien and Tolkienesque works. Having reached lakes and oceans my head went to Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. Now I haven’t read it in a long time, therefore beware of errors and misunderstandings on my part. Also, if you haven’t the books then there are sort of spoilers (in so far as it can have spoilers – arguably the specific events don’t matter). [Also: the auto-correct keeps changing “Urth” to “Ruth”. I think I got them all but if you see a reference to Ruth, I didn’t add a new character – it should say “Urth”.]
Arguably, the novels in The Book of the New Sun aren’t fantasy at all but science fiction. The setting is the far future and the story concerns alien intervention in the long-term future of Earth (or rather Urth). But let us not stand on ceremony or taxonomy today. For most intents and purposes this is a fantasy story about one man (with a very big sword) on a journey of discovery which involves some freaky monsters and technology that may as well be magic. It is also late enough in the evolution of sub-genres that Wolfe knew what he was doing when he deployed tropes and themes from both science fiction and heroic fantasy.
The story is also another good example of the deployment of terrain and geography to shape the plot and atmosphere of the story while being geographically plausible. Wolfe doesn’t invent a terrain though, instead, he borrows one wholesale.
It isn’t hard to recognise a chunk of South America in the books. Various clues point to the setting being in the Southern Hemisphere (warm jungles to the north for example). With only a little more thought the geography more-or-less matches a cross-section running from (plausibly) Buenos Aires* to Bolivia and Peru. Starting a huge sprawling city and that mouth of a great river, the story takes in grasslands, jungle, and huge mountains. There is a city that like La Paz clings to the sides of a steep valley, there are Incan like ruins and enormous mountains.
Late in his journey, Severian finds himself at a huge inland lake high on a plateau that is indistinguishable from lake Titicaca down to communities on floating reed islands. Although oddly it is possibly the body of water in the novels that is the most straightforwardly a body of water. Elsewhere, the novel treats rivers and lakes as boundaries between earth and the heavens. ‘Heavens’ here working both in the sense of an afterlife but also in the sense of the realm of stars. The metaphor is taken literally by Severian who does not clearly distinguish between space travel and ocean voyages and further unlined by spaceships apparently resembling sailing ships (made clearer in the quasi-sequel Urth of the New Sun).
In the story, life/death is marked by an early event in which Severian nearly drowns in the river as a child (or maybe does drown). Later, in the story when he falls into an ornamental lake he rescues a young woman (Dorcas) who, from context and based on later events, is probably a revived corpse (and possibly his grandmother).
The cosmic aspects of bodies of water appear in encounters between Severian and being connected with the Undines – enormous cosmic beings whose role in events is unclear. They appear to be antagonists but on occasions appear to be helping Severian.
Looking at my last post on fantasy geography there are differences and similarities.
Mountains are not obstacles as such. This also fits with a different cultural perspective on mountains. Whereas Tolkien treats mountains as wilderness, the mountains in the Book of the New Sun contain aspects of civilisation. In a memorable section, Severian discovers the mausoleum/sanctuary of Typhon – a figure from a more assertive and aggressive period of Urth’s history. The location is deep in the mountains and is a literal pinnacle and a metaphorical pinnacle of technology.
Mountains could be just mountains but plot geography also means that mountains echo multiple tropes based on cultural preconceptions about different mountain ranges. Tolkien’s mountains are a British perspective on the European Alps – barriers that separate one country from the next. Wolfe draws on the Andes which were the home to an extensive civilisation that used the varying vertical climate to create an empire that could span north-to-south. The Himalayas have their own set of tropes and myths and cultural stereotypes based on everything from actual history to Orientalism and colonial distortions.
On the other hand, forests play a similar role to Tolkien’s forests in that they are a place of both danger and transformation. In particular, Severian changes in nature in forest/jungle encounters but forests are also used to indicate a change in other ways.
The life/death aspect of journey’s underground is less distinct and overshadowed by the more overt life/death aspect of rivers and lakes in the books. There are two (that I can recall) cases of a journey underground. The clearest one is in The Claw of Conciliator when Severian is tricked into entering a cave. Inside the cave are strange man-apes creatures, ruins and some other huge thing which we never see. Although there are revelations about the possible powers Severian has gained, there is an odd subversion here. Rather than being changed, the journey in the cave returns Severian back to the story and the events which sent him to the cave. In the same book, Severian later finds himself imprisoned in the royal palace The House Absolute, which exists mainly underground. Here, the life/death/rebirth elements play out in some ways more conventionally (in so far as the book can be said to do anything conventionally other than its sexism).
The books do not come with a map and despite being a story that layers puzzles on metaphors on lies on top of time paradoxes and theology, the geography and the physical journey are uncomplex and plausible. The setting has a city on a river near an ocean and inland there are more settlements and eventually mountains. To the north is a jungle and a war. The terrain changes with the story and with the journey. The journey itself is a huge loop physically (ignoring metaphorical and time-travelling loops of other kinds).
*[Although one notable map places the city of Nessus on the Pacific side of the Andes]
The Plot Elements of Fantasy Maps
There is a new good article on fantasy maps at The Map Room Blog: http://www.maproomblog.com/2017/09/the-territory-is-not-the-map/ The point being that much of the discussion of fantasy maps is not the map as such but rather the implausible territories that they depict. Fair point. However, I wanted to loop back to the post I made on the simplified Middle Earth map. A successful fantasy geography requires the terrain to shape the story and The Lord of the Rings does this well. It matters to the story whether the characters are in forests or towns/villages or mountains.
Roads, paths trails
These imply places where the story covers a greater distance. Travel is either uneventful or involves encounters with others. Leaving the path implies not only danger but a shift from the main objective. They are also (random encounters aside) boring but may also imply more personal conversation between characters. Outside of fantasy, a road trip has its own conventions and expectation of bonding between travellers.
Forests
Forests require finding a way through. As noted in the earlier post, in both The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, forests are transformative to characters. They can both be benign and threatening, magical and spooky. There is an implication of things being hidden – characters are hidden from pursuit but also things of power hidden among the trees (consider Merry and Pippin fleeing into Fangorn to escape the Uruk-Hai and encountering Treebeard).
Hills
Hills are minor obstacles, vantage points and places of note. They can be sanctuaries, objectives or scenes of battles. Weathertop is the definitive hill in Lord of the Rings but Bag End is also in/on a hill. People have built defensible settlements on hills for millennia.
Mountains
Are either major obstacles or really big hills 🙂 By “really big hills” I mean examples from Tolkien such as The Lonely Mountain, Minas Tirith and Mount Doom. These are singular locations that serve as objectives to be reached and which contain structures and may also be scenes of battle. Sets of mountains, on the other hand, are major obstacles that divide the terrain into different sections. They force characters to make decisions about the direction they need to take. In both The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, the Misty Mountains divide the terrain and the story.
Mountain passes
One way to deal with the obstacle of mountains is to find a way through and over. A mountain pass is a forced choice for characters and a physical challenge. I can’t recall an epic fantasy where the characters suffer altitude sickness but that alone could fell a mighty hero who isn’t properly acclimatised. Accidental death is a plausible danger as is a need for shelter.
Caves, and journeys underground
Caves are naturally spooky and comforting as shelter – natural houses but also possibly homes for various beasties. Journeys underground are something else. Western myth (and beyond Western myth) associates passage through an underworld with a spiritual journey of the soul. This evokes ideas such as the Christian hell but also pre-Christian underworlds (Hel’s realm, Hades’s realm), mystery cults (and Orpheus’s journey to the underworld) or pre-scientific notions about the journey of the Sun at night.
Like forests, a journey underground is transformative. In The Hobbit, Bilbo finds the one ring and encounters Gollum. In Lord of the Rings, Gandalf dies (ish) and the tone of the story changes. A journey underground naturally hits mythic resonances with death-and-rebirth transformations. A cave (even if it is just a shallow cave) is a potential gateway to a world within a world.
Rivers
Rivers are perhaps the most flexible geographic element of a fantasy terrain. They are minor obstacles (the require fording), they are locations (bridges and ford are specific places you need to get to), scenes of battle (a good place to stop an enemy), they are also major obstacles and divide the terrain into regions. Also, they are a means of transport and present more rapid transition from one location to the next. In The Hobbit, the barrel trip moves the story rapidly from Mirkwood to Laketown. In Lord of the Rings the trip down the Anduin is slower but shifts the characters from one level of the map to a different level. Consequently, rivers have a transformative quality for characters and story in a way not dissimilar to forest and journey’s underground but at the same time have road-trip elements as well including random encounters.
Oceans
Are the ultimate obstacle and often delineate the setting of the story. Where stories cross oceans, the ocean separates different kinds of territories (a good exception is Joe Abercrombie’s Half a King where the ocean is more like a highway for a Viking like people). Alternatively, an ocean is a setting for an archipelago of which the paradigmatic example is Earthsea and acts more like the default empty bits of other maps.
Ships and ocean journeys
Ships combine elements of both road-trips and towns. A ship is a location and a means of transport. Characters are placed together and the journey covers significant distance punctuated by conversation and random events. Tolkein only uses ship journey as bridges between life and after-life. Lord of the Rings has ships only in two places – Aragorn brings the dead spirits to relieve Gondor (but the ship journey is not itself depicted in detail) and at the end, Frodo leaves Middle-Earth from the Grey Havens by ship to journey to the undying lands. In the Silmarillion ships also play a role moving people from being closer or further away from the gods. The great ship-travelling civilisation of Numenor is one that lies halfway between the more earthly and the divine.
Islands, lakes, islands in lakes and other things
I’ll save for another time and I’ll need to branch out into other fantasy stories. 🙂
