When I first started to read novels as a kid, many of my favorites were big, quest-driven, fantasy stories like The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Dragonlance Saga.
One of my favorite things about these stories were their use of maps. As a young reader, nothing quite kindled a sense of excitement and adventure like a map: Where are the characters going to travel and what adventures, opportunities, and weirdness are they going to find at each destination? And what are the other possibilities? What adventures are hiding out in the parts of the map unexplored by the text?
While Urbantasm isn’t a work of epic fantasy, or even fantasy, it does contain some elements of the quest-narrative: the story posits its own universe (chiefly the City of Akawe, Michigan) and over the course of the four books its characters will explore many of the nooks and crannies of this place.
I’d hoped for a map to accompany Urbantasm from the start; the story came with a map even before it was a novel! And one of the great joys of self-publishing is being able to commit enthusiastically to important extra-textual decisions.
With this in mind, I’m very proud to announce that each volume of Urbantasm will include a simplified map of the City of Akawe, but urbantasm.com will additionally feature a high-resolution and interactive map of the city. This online map will allow readers to explore the city’s neighborhoods, see pictures of their analogues in Flint, Michigan, and read excerpted bits of text. The map will evolve over time as each successive book is published and the characters have seen more and more of their city. In this sense, I hope, readers will be able to anticipate stories yet-to-be-told and invent stories untold and more fully visualize the fictive world of Urbantasm.
This map is designed by Sam Perkins-Harbin of Forge22 Design and will go live on Friday, December 22nd, 2017. Until then, here are some of my favorite maps from books I’ve read*. Post your own favorites in the comments!
Yoknapatawpha County from the Absalom! Absalom! by William Faulkner
The Kingdom of Wisdom from The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Jester
Earthsea from The Earthsea Cycle by Ursula LeGuin
Nehwon from the adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser by Fritz Leiber
Narnia from the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
The Four Corners of Civilization from the Kingkiller Chronicles by Patrick Rothfuss
Middle-Earth from The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
The continent of Ansalon from the Dragonlance Chronicles by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman
* I wanted to link “legit” sources for these maps; some of them are not the originals and many are low-rez. A quick Google search ought to fix that for you!