Imaginary Maps

When we think of fantasy maps we tend to think of Christopher Tolkien’s classic Middle Earth one (although I always liked the one in The Return of the King with all the contour lines), or the various maps of Westeros in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. You all know what I mean. Barker, though, said in 2022 that “I have no desire whatsoever to create a Middle Earth. None. I have a desire to create fifty Middle Earths, and draw the roads between them – and that’s a very different thing. I think that fantastic worlds can be smothering to the creative impulse.”1

To any reader of his fiction, this is self-evident. Barker almost never revisits a world that he has created. The exceptions – which I’ll look at first – are the children’s series Abarat and the dream sea Quiddity in The Great and Secret Show and Everville: and in each case – albeit in different ways – the world he describes on the return is not the same as it was the first time. To map a thing is to say that it is fixed, and Barker constantly resists such ossification.