Planetfall

Summary

Gentle readers, I have just wrapped up a fun side project that will be of great interest to a very small number of you. The result of one of the most technically demanding efforts of my career, I am very pleased to share it with you. Click to have a look at a detailed version. Contact me if you’re interested in a physical copy. Most of you will wonder what this place is, but I hope that, for a few of you, the names clicked into place in your memory. This is the planet Chiron, the setting (and one of the main characters) of Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri—a computer game from 1999 that has a cult following; I count myself among the cult. I could go on about the game—which is deep and thought-provoking and has a remarkably beautiful and carefully considered visual language—but I’m here to talk about the map. This project pushed my skills into some new places, so even if you don’t care about the game, I think it’s worth talking about the technical details behind it. But first, before we get in to those details, I want to mention something that this project helped teach me about the difference between real and fictional maps. Recently, after I’d told someone I was a cartographer, they asked if I mapped real or fictional places. To an outsider, it’s reasonable to put those two things on equal footing. But, to me, they felt like entirely different things. Other than the map above, I stick almost exclusively to the real world, and I observe this to be true for the majority of my colleagues. As I was grappling with this person’s question, I realized that this split might be because fantasy maps require a different (but overlapping) skill set than real maps. If a fantasy or sci-fi author asked me to construct a map for them, I would need to sit down and draw something new from scratch. I’m not trained to work that way. All of my experience centers on manipulating and styling geographic data, not on creating that geographic data. Some mappers can, and do, handle both fictional and...