Ursula K. Le Guin's Tau Ceti

[skymandr]

I made some maps of the twin planets Urras and Anarres from Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Dispossessed", meant for a future publication of the book in Swedish. The geographic features were defined in Le Guin's original maps and I have tried to stay faithful to those while still adding my own touch and interpretation. I've already written about them at great length at my blog [0] (where you can also read about their license), so I won't go into great detail about their construction here, however...

In brief summary, they were made using the azimuthal equidistant projection [1] in the style of Erwin Raisz' "trachographic method", and I consider them an homage to both Raisz and Le Guin. The maps below are versions I made where, after some intense but fun geographic detective work, scouring the book for geographic clues, I have tried to add (almost) all places mentioned in the book. The extra locations make the maps more realistic and interesting, I think, but will probably not be the published version since the placing of the locations are not canonical. The maps were made entirely using free and open source software - Inkscape and Gimp mainly, assisted by the excellent drawing program Krita and a few home-brew Python scripts for going between projections and similar. The fonts are also free and open source fonts from Arkandis Digital Foundry [2]. With the choices of iconography, layout, projection and fonts I tried to find a compromise between a fantasy and an SF look for the maps, but in hindsight I think they are probably closer to the former than the latter.

I will likely tweak them a bit in the future, but for all intents and purposes these are the final versions. All feedback welcome, however!

All in all, I am very pleased with the result, and I hope you will like them too!





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[0]: Lots of text about the process of their construction, projection considerations and sketches to be found at (in reverse chronological order):

• https://eintrittverboten.wordpress.c...i-cartography/ The final versions and lots of text.
• https://eintrittverboten.wordpress.c...s-an-addendum/ Animations of spinning "globes" using the orthographic projection [1]. Mostly for fun, though I want to try to make proper paper globes in the future.
• https://eintrittverboten.wordpress.c...netary-survey/ My first sketches. Mostly by hand and not very good. Lots of text on everything from hermeneutics to map projections and beyond.
• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ The license for these works is CC: BY-NC-SA, with additional clauses as stated in the links above.

[1]: http://www.map-projections.net/singl...uidistant-hemi An excellent resource for comparing projections!

[2]: https://arkandis.tuxfamily.org/ There are some really beautiful fonts here!