Fantasy cartography

Fantasy cartography, fictional map-making, or geofiction is a type of map design that visually presents an imaginary world or concept, or represents a real-world geography in a fantastic style.

The increased popularity of geofiction and worldbuilding has led to and been supported by the emergence of design programs tailored to creative cartographers.

Often their maps were crafted as much as works of art as tools for navigating, incorporating imagery and symbolism from mythology, folklore and fantasy stories.

By the late fifteenth century, numerous illustrations inspired by Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy had been published based on descriptions from the text.

[16] In the latter half of the 16th century the Bible began to be printed with internal maps as a product of the Protestant movement and the Geneva reforms.

[17] Among the most popular of these map-accompanied fictional texts from the time are Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726)[18] and Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883).

In popular culture, the fantasy genre predominantly features maps and settings that emulate Earth, but with a sense of otherness.

It has been called the "literature of ideas", and it often explores the potential consequences of scientific, social, and technological innovations.

Unlike dark fiction, it provides a setting in which "all men are strong, all women beautiful, all life adventurous, and all problems simple".

[30] This means that adventures based in heroic fantasy are unlikely to mention any wider problems that cannot be fixed by a quest.

Steampunk is a subgenre of science fiction that incorporates retrofuturistic technology and aesthetics inspired by 19th-century industrial steam-powered machinery.

The apocalypse event may be climatic, such as runaway climate change; astronomical, such as an impact event; destructive, such as nuclear holocaust or resource depletion; medical, such as a pandemic, whether natural or human-caused; end time, such as the Last Judgment, Second Coming or Ragnarök; or more imaginative, such as a zombie apocalypse, cybernetic revolt, technological singularity, dysgenics or alien invasion.

These maps do not attempt to correspond to anything physically real but are instead meant to display an idea in a cartographic medium.

Sebastian Munster's Europa Regina is a good example of this – a map design that presents Europe as a majestic queen.

[40][41] In this program the fantasy 'Republic of Zendia' was created with its northern and central province 'Loreno' mapped as cartographic references used in these exercises.

[40][41] Although popularized in novels, fantasy maps are now created and presented across various media such as television shows,[42] movies,[43] video games,[44][45] and websites.

[21] This survey sought to answer common questions about the prevalence, features, and characteristics of fantasy cartography within the genre.