When what you have is a hammer...

[ricardienne]

Everything's coming up nails, as it were.

"But you must know that memory maps -- maps of all kinds, really -- are inexact. They are only the best possible approximation. Think of them like books of history: the author will try to be as accurate as possible, but often he or she is relying on slim pieces of evidence, and there is as much art and interpretation as there is factual content. The best maps will show the cartologer's hand at work rather than conceal it, making plain the interpretative work and suggesting, even, other possible interpretations."

"Does that mean that people could create maps that distort what really happened? Maps that are made up?"

"They could indeed," Shadrack said gravely. "It is a serious crime to do so. But all honest mapmakers swear an oath to tell only the truth, and you must look for the mark of that oath when you examine a memory map." --S.E. Grove, The Glass Sentence (Viking 2014): 78.

The Glass Sentence is a YA/middle grade fantasy novel about an alternate universe where different regions of the world have been thrust into different historical periods (so the American colonies share a continent with roughly 1000 CE-era pre-Columbian America to the west and Ice-Age to the North; Europe is papal states but the British Isles are either pre-anthropocene or maybe post-apocalyptic, etc.). We pick up in Boston in 1891 CE, about 100 years after the Event that dislocated time. Sophia lives with her uncle, a master mapmaker and scholar of other place-times, since her explorer parents disappeared on an expedition. But the isolationist local politics are pretty clearly going to combine with some sort of complicated magic/time-dislocation angle pretty soon for adventures and dramatic intrigue. I just got to the point where Sophia's uncle shows her that maps can be more than paper -- in fact, they can be MAGIC.

One can poke holes in the premise ad infinitum (and believe me, I can't keep myself from doing it, though the book is okay at answering a lot my questions a few pages after they've occurred to me) but so far, it's shaping up to be quite fun.

Comments

[avanti-90.livejournal.com]

I recently read a sci-fi with a similar interesting premise - Time's Eye by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter. It definitely required some suspension of disbelief, but I was more than willing to grant it to a book that brought Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, the British Empire, australopithecines, buddhist monks, and NASA all together.

[ricardienne.livejournal.com]

This one is definitely leaning toward fantasy. But Time's Eye sounds like a lot of fun. I'll have to look for it.

[existentialgoat.livejournal.com]

OOH. That sounds like a lot of fun! I may need to read it now...

[ricardienne.livejournal.com]

I will let you know if it lives up to its promise...