Among my interests is an unhealthy fascination with worlds that have never existed, save in the imagination of an author and his or her readers. Some authors, J. R. R. Tolkien being a notable example, will helpfully provide cartographic aids to the unexplored territory of their minds; others make you wing it. I hate that. So sometimes I do my own mapmaking as I tramp through a tome of fantasy or science fiction. Here you will find (in time) a representative sample of these surveys. The following are currently available for your viewing pleasure.

—Brian Kunde.

E. R. Eddison’s Demonland. The author of the immortal The Worm Ouroboros and the Zimiamvian Trilogy plainly had a good idea of where he was going, his landscapes are well fleshed-out and busy with detail. But while he includes his map of Zimiamvia in the books it illustrates, he never published his cartographic vision of the world of the Worm. To repair in part this grievous omission, here is my take on the island of Demonland, one of the novel’s primary settings.

Robert E. Howard’s Thurian Age world. The Hyborian Age of Conan the Cimmerian, which in Howard’s imagination represents our prehistory, had a prehistory of its own, and the Thurian Age was it. While he mapped his Hyborian world he did not, to the best of my knowledge, do the same with the Thurian. Others have stepped into his cartographic shoes with greater or lesser success, with the latter prevailing, in my view. Here's my own attempt, based on scanty clues in his writings and augmented by reasonable inferences drawn therefrom. It consists of the World, the portion of the main (Thurian) continent hosting the Thurian nations, and detail maps of Valusia, Atlantis, and the Pictish Isles. These maps have suffered the ravages of time since their creation in 1976, and hence have in some instances been enhanced with the aid of the computer.

More to follow...