Maps in books

The eragon book aint that bad, ill admit i didnt have much else to read at the time but for a free book (school library) its not bad, better for younger audiences probably, but not bad. Shows someone put in effort. Even if it is similar to other plots you have seen its still better than fan fiction. Fan fiction takes very little (or no) imagination, you are just stealing someone elses characters, setting and everything and just writing (normally badly) about them doing something different. The number of harry potter fan fics about harry and malfoy liking each other, harry and hermione liking each other, or harry being gay (normally with snape, malfoy or occasionally voldemort) is rediculous. BE INVENTIVE!!!! fan fiction is only good as practice for people with little imagination. (can you tell i was arguing about this in maths today? maths sucks btw)

Also I never said I tried to publish books. I have tried writing them but I can never get beyond the first few chapters because my mind works faster than my pen (or my keyboard) so I end up thinking about what happens near the end of the book while still introducing the characters. If anybody has a solution to this please tell me and I mite try again (and probably fail, but hey). Meanwhile, I will work on my world.
 
Talan - think your being slighty harsh on Christopher Paolini. His age has nothing to do with it, but the books are clearly aimed at the young reader market and are not "hardcore" adult fantasy. However, I've never read one of his books (again because they are cleary aimed at a younger market) so can't comment of his writing skill.

To get back to the threads topic... I find maps of great use in fantasy books, I always find myself refering to them so I know where abouts action is happening in relation to other events in the book. What does annoyed me however, is under detailed maps.

To (again) highjack the thread, whats your opinion on appendixes – such as cast of characters, translations of languages, lists of lands/races etc.?
While I find them useful, in the case of the characters list I do find myself turning to the list everytime a new character is introduced - just to see what the short description is of them. It rarely contains any spoilers but still...
 
I'm still so surprised by the Six Duchies / Alaska map... WEIRD! How come I never heard about that before, and why did Robin do that? Why decide to flip Alaska upside down and use it for your books?!? It's so WEIRD! :confused: :p
 
Evil Agent said:
I'm still so surprised by the Six Duchies / Alaska map... WEIRD! How come I never heard about that before, and why did Robin do that? Why decide to flip Alaska upside down and use it for your books?!? It's so WEIRD! :confused: :p
Click to expand...

She's from Fairbanks, and seems to really love Alaska.
 
that would truly suck if you could sue someone for using a coastline of a similar shape to a real coastline. who would get the money? just stupid.
 
I rarely refer to the maps or appendices. A good writer should give a sense of geography from the writing, although if they don't i don't feel i'm missing much - at most i want to have a rough idea of how long a journey takes.

As for appendices, they are useful for very complicated books, but if they are basically dictionaries that explain the authors made up words i wonder why the author made up a word that could not be understood according to the context.
also, If you read WoT but still need a glossary in book 10 telling you what saidin is etc, then you must be very dense. :rolleyes:

Oh, i just remembered, books set in supposedly non-earthly fantasyland, but have a map of the real world with different names annoy me (i think Kushiel's Dart had one). If the setting is in our world future or past its acceptable, but if not then it confuses me. Is it relavent to the plot? does it have metaphysical significance? or was the author (or publisher) trying to be clever or just lazy? :confused:
 
Last edited:
Well I hope you realize I was joking about the Alaska Lawsuit thing! :p

But then again, the US simply paid about $10,000 cash to buy Alaska from the Russians... that seems a little strange today as well.
 
i agree with the saidin thing but with some of the other terms it mite be useful to someone who has read all the books ages ago and finds a word in the 11th that they need to look up cos they read it ages ago. You shouldnt need it if you read them one after the other but if u read the first ten then wait 12 months for the 11th reading countless books in between then it is understandable that you mite need some reminders. If you dont need the reminders then nobody is forcing you to read them so just ignore them, better to cater for everybody than to leave the people who like maps and appendicies out just cos sum ppl dont read em.

Alaska costs $10,000??? how much can i get for £300???
 
Hmm.. maybe about one month's rent in your own apartment? ;)

And yes, that's what Alaska cost the US, I think somewhere around 100 years ago.
 
I just knew that old time machine my grandad left me in his will would come in useful!
 
I really don't think about maps either way. I've looked at some and gotten a feeling of the size of the land and the terrain characters travel but the written word can accomplish that as well.

Speaking of maps though, I kinda wanna check and see if the Runelord books have maps. One thing that really turned me off the series was the distance people travelled in a day. I mean WTF, a character goes all the way from his homeland to the desert and back all in 2 days?

I just couldn't suspend my disbelief in that area for those books. Sure, I had no problem accepting the fact that people could give and wanted to give their attributes to their lords, but throw in some long distance trips in a ridiculusly short amount of time and I can't accept it!

Maps are "okay"
 
I managed to get through one book in the Runelords, that s**t was full of plot holes, and extremely bad dialogue.

Also, there's suppose to be around 20 countries or so in "The north," so, probably about the size of Europe.
 
Actually Robin Hobb is from Seattle along with a bunch of other fantasy writers. I like a good map that comes in some books although a lot are so inaccurate as to be useless ,such as the one in Riddlemaster of Hed or the ones in Jordans books.
 
For me, maps are a must. Take a look at my bookshelf. Not one of those books lacks a map (The Bible has 12!). I'm the kind of person that needs to see where places are on a map, or I get lost. If you told me that the character's village was a few miles north of a main city, which was on the coast of a large body of water, which was on the eastern part of this fantasy world, and not include a map, you'd loose me very fast.

Evil Agent, here's a map of the Lands of the Summer Sea (where Dany is)

http://amoka.net/eng/gal/maps/msusf.jpg
 
Whoa, thanks! Is that in any of the books at all? :confused:

Also, where's Braavos, and the Narrow Sea and all that....?
 
I'm not entirely sure it was in any of the books. But I'm pretty sure it's accurate.

As for Braavos and the narrow sea, they are between Westeros and the lands of the Summer sea. Here's one guy's impression of the world. You can find Braavos, the Stepstone and even Vaes Dortherak on it. This one could be very innacurate, so I don't garuntee it's authenticity.

EDIT: Link doesn't seem to work. I'll send you to the page before it.

http://www.westeros.org/Citadel/Miscellany/Maps00.html
 
I find the maps in books to helpful,annoying and just unnecessary at times. Sometimes the map maker and the author have different versions. I'll look at the map during reading, to be able to better picture the adventure, and I get lost or can't even read the map. Mainly because the map is poorly drawn or lettered than my inability to read it though I do have those moments as well.
 
Maps are ok before and after reading a book, but annoying during the reading.

They are ok before because they are interesting to look at, and they make the place more real. They are ok after because you can imagine the story set on the map.

When reading though if there is a map I find myself flipping back to it every time the locale changes and it interrupts the flow of my reading. Also the maps often don't really match the text in terms of putting terrain in the same place, and that it annoying too.

If I don't have a map then I make it up in my mind as I go along, and don't really feel that my reading experience is less because of it. If there is a map mostly what I remember is where the mismatches are.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Sponsors


We try to keep the forum as free of ads as possible, please consider supporting SFFWorld on Patreon


Your ad here.

Latest posts

Back
Top