The Dreamer’s Atlas is what we’d decided to call it. After all, that was what it was going to be. A creation to bring wonder back to cartography.
You see, over the course of our studies, we had come to believe that even more important than the differences between art and science in cartography were the similarities between them. We’d debated the ideas endlessly, the same way that every student and scholar in our field constantly did—but for us, we weren’t trying to figure out which aspect was more important. Our goal was not for one side to win over the other. It was for both sides to win. To marry the two concepts irrevocably, to show that one could not exist without the other.
It started with Tam and Daniel, as I said. We’d all been brainstorming for years already over what our next big project would be—our first after graduating with our Ph.D.s. It had to be something incredible, something that would catch the attention of not only the academic world, but the greater outside world as well. We wanted to make something that would remind people of the wonder and power of maps, rather than just their dry utility.
We were in Tam and Daniel’s off-campus apartment that night, going through our old articles, searching for inspiration, when Daniel began laughing.
“Remember this?” he asked. He turned the paper he was holding toward the rest of us. It was the very first essay he’d written at the University of Wisconsin. The one about fantasy maps in books.
“You kept it?” Tam chuckled, taking it from him.
He smiled. “It’s how we met.”
“That is so adorable. Tell me you’re that sentimental too, Francis,” I cooed at him, teasing, and we all laughed.
“I wonder what Narnia would look like if it was a real real place,” Daniel said. “Like New York.”
“Or what New York would look like as Narnia,” Tam replied.
We all laughed again, but I could already see the first flickers of curiosity in their eyes.
It didn’t take long for the idea to take shape, or for them to tell us about it.
“The Dreamer’s Atlas,” Tam said a few weeks later, all of us gathered back in their living room again, wineglasses in hand.
The grand idea was an atlas. A collection of maps, both of real places and of imagined ones, but reversed. She and Daniel had come up with a list of books, fantasy novels famous for the beautiful maps created just for them—Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings; Le Guin’s Earthsea series; Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia books; Dragt’s De brief voor de koning, The Letter for the King; Pratchett’s Discworld novels—and another list of maps from our real world, famous for their cartographic significance. We would painstakingly research all of them, studying them from historical, scientific, and artistic angles, and then redraw them in the opposite style. Our recreations of the fantasy maps would be rigidly detailed and precise, and our recreations of the realistic maps would be embellished, expanded, and dreamlike, like their fictional cousins. Once complete, we planned to publish it in one giant volume. Readers would open it, expecting the same old type of atlas, but instead, they’d find previously familiar lands rendered in a completely unexpected manner, opening their imaginations to an entirely new way of looking at maps.
The idea was thrilling to us. A manifestation of the exact conversation that had consumed us for the entirety of our education and a perfect use of all of our talents. Daniel and Bear would research the novels and their invented maps’ cartographers, Francis and Eve would research the historical pieces, Tam and I would lead the drawing of the recreations—she’d tackle the fantastical recreations of real places, and I the realistic ones of imaginary places—and Wally would supervise it all, organizing the data, tracking every measurement and line, ensuring complete accuracy and faithfulness to the originals, like he always did.
We were all convinced of the idea within the hour—except, surprisingly, for Wally.