It ’s another installment of Entropist , a sci - fi culture column by futurist design maven Geoff Manaugh , author ofBLDG BLOG . The British leg of Penguin Books late premiere a new web site called – a bit lamely – We separate Stories . The canonical estimation is that six author will tell six stories over a time period of six hebdomad . More interesting , however , is the fact that story # 1 , “ The 21 Steps ” by Charles Cumming , was told using Google Maps . So unite this same strategy with today ’s urban sci - fi , add a few more cities – and you ’ve fuck off a way to map out science fiction across the satellite . Could there someday be a Google Maps of Sci - Fi ?
In Charles Cumming ’s story , inspired by John Buchan ’s old novelThe 39 Steps , we follow a man , watching from above , in an omniscient artificial satellite view .
Someone is chase his movements through London , as well as his tripper in the south and north across the country . At one point , for illustration , our teller fire up up on a beach , shy of where he is or what the appointment might even be .
A loose bit of newspaper came cartwheeling along the sand and wrap itself around my ramification . I picked it up and looked at the escort . Two days had passed since I had arrived in Edinburgh .
The newspaper was the Evening News . So I was still in Scotland .
If the story is about a man being tracked and followed , then it is also narrate in a means that allows us to cover and follow , chatter onward through function of the man ’s experience .
But what are the possibilities for science fiction ?
What seems immediately obvious , of course , is that the bulk of the music genre would be unmappable , so to speak , for no other reason than setting — the locations are all off - reality or ship - throttle or on the surface of some other moon , dimension , or planet . But that ’s exactly where part of the challenge would be .
For the moment , let ’s take San Francisco . You and your friends dwell in San Francisco and you write a whole new chronological succession of tarradiddle set somewhere in that peninsular urban center . There are trips through Chinatown and out to old , moldy firm in Outer Sunset ; there are sojourn to gene labs and venture Das Kapital firms across the Bay ; you go into empty skyscraper at Nox and you regain strange basements , where black machines and cant of over - heating system grueling effort whir quietly into the nighttime … doing something — and that ’s the job . Nobody recognise , and you have to forecast it out .
But then you map all this . You put your story into Google Maps , and it ’s like cartographically annotate the tale line .
It ’s not like this has never been done before , of course — but soon enough you ’ve got a young map of your city . It ’s not score by tourist website or sites of historical grandness .
It ’s a metropolis re - mapped accord to the science fiction that direct stead within it .
finally , as a reader , you could even pick only those tale specify along your morn bus route and show those , and only those , for two weeks ; then move on to a different neighborhood ; then add your own . You could have synergistic urban textbook , like something designed byarea / code , growing and changing , like an urban sci - fi wiki made from aery maps .
You move between chapter , between books – as if choosing the geography of your favorite stories might be , in and of itself , an human action of publishing .
And then you notice the unreasoning spots in the city , those spaces that , from a literary standpoint , have nothing occurring in them yet . So you compose , and you total them to the map , or to any mathematical function – or you make a new map — or whatever . What ’s important is that this sub - literary genre of urban sci - fi maps continues to grow .
It extends far beyond San Francisco , then , to become a working database of every city and landscape on earth . you may reel around the planet and choose your sci - fi by geography . Going to Warsaw next month ? Well , the postdate stories include a scene set in your hotel … Indeed , in your very hotel way . And you’re able to add to them .
Even the poles of the satellite are include , with their mystifying government research science laboratory and their fissures of frappe and their weird , conspirative game lines waiting to befall . you could go into the cold withDan Simmons , say , and track that ship ’s musical passage by satellite .
Or maybe all of that is a bit tinny . Maybe that sound too much like the rootage of D&D , replayed all over again in an era of orbiter mapping . Or it fathom like some risky dot - com fantasy , where handheld gadget will give us access to things we ’ve never have before , an ability to voyage the metropolis afresh and … thus do something or other to raise a ship’s company ’s blood line prices .
So countenance ’s pull in back a bit , quick , and re-start the melodic theme – and say : well , then , alternatively , allow ’s modernise a raw overlay for Google Maps and populate it entirely with case from science fiction . Books , films , song lyrics .
For example , the “ unstable ” street that look and go away in China Miéville ’s short write up “ report of Certain event in London ” are suddenly available for mapping ; you’re able to succeed their high-risk routes , and even be after 24-hour interval trips around them , hike up through the nonexistent side street of the city .
Or you go to Google Maps one day , because you ’re planning a trip to Japan or to San Francisco , and you select “ Satellite ” view – and then on “ William Gibson , ” a unexampled visual image option . It ’s contribute to you by a partnership between Putnam and Google Maps . So you tap “ William Gibson ” and a whole informational layer ofGibsoniandetail appears . Gibson name this street , and this bridge , and this hotel elbow room – and here it is on a map for you to follow .
Within six months , you could penetrate on “ Alfred Hitchcock , ” “ Ray Bradbury , ” and “ H.P. Lovecraft ” to see how their picture show and stories map out out . It ’s the becoming - literary of Google Maps .
After all , you could do the same thing for TV and film – we ’re not limited to books .
This , you pick up , is where the UFO was excavated inQuatermass and the Pit , or where the rage computer virus broke out in 28 Days afterwards , or where Dracula ’s tomb was supposedly find in the absurd film Blade : Trinity .
The Google Maps Guide to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom . The Google Maps Guide to the Fiction of J.G. Ballard .
In fact , I ’m cue of those awesome world maps fromJudge Dredd .
Now , though , the idea is that we ’d key all that hooey into Google Maps , or into Google Earth , or into whatever , and we ’d add some more details – and , before long enough , you could find , say , the offshore prison house from John Woo’sFace / Off , perfectly located right there on the map . Or you may zoom in and follow the future four - part division of England in Rupert Thomson ’s under - appreciated novelDivided Kingdom . Or , for that matter , you could even map out the sign and it surround landscape painting from the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre .
It does n’t weigh what you map , in other word ; what matters is plainly that we explore , even just casually , the literary / sci - fi potential of online mapping . Why ? Because it sounds fun . And if you do n’t think it sounds playfulness , do n’t do it .
But everyone loves function . How else could they get away with publishing things likeThe Maps of Tolkien ’s Middle Earthor evenThe Atlas of Middle Earth ? Because multitude like maps .
Or how about dashboard navigation system in cars ? Here , Tor Books could team up up with Cadillac to give you a brand new driving experience : you ’re in New York , drive a Cadillac , and so you hit the “ Urban Sci - Fi ” navigational option on the splashboard sieve – and you immediately find yourself driving through the futuristic literature of New York , with primal situation mapped or flagged . It ’s science fiction as a new template for urban touristry . You ’re follow the natural process of I Am Legend , or hound out the flood line and tidal wave from The Day After Tomorrow .
In other words , permit ’s do for skill fabrication what those maps do for J.R.R. Tolkien .
Let ’s produce Google Maps of Sci - Fi .
Google MapsSan Francisco
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