front cover of Imaginary Cities
Imaginary Cities
A Tour of Dream Cities, Nightmare Cities, and Everywhere in Between
Darran Anderson
University of Chicago Press, 2017
For as long as humans have gathered in cities, those cities have had their shining—or shadowy—counterparts. Imaginary cities, potential cities, future cities, perfect cities. It is as if the city itself, its inescapable gritty reality and elbow-to-elbow nature, demands we call into being some alternative, yearned-for better place.
 
This book is about those cities. It’s neither a history of grand plans nor a literary exploration of the utopian impulse, but rather something different, hybrid, idiosyncratic. It’s a magpie’s book, full of characters and incidents and ideas drawn from cities real and imagined around the globe and throughout history. Thomas More’s allegorical island shares space with Soviet mega-planning; Marco Polo links up with James Joyce’s meticulously imagined Dublin; the medieval land of Cockaigne meets the hopeful future of Star Trek. With Darran Anderson as our guide, we find common themes and recurring dreams, tied to the seemingly ineluctable problems of our actual cities, of poverty and exclusion and waste and destruction. And that’s where Imaginary Cities becomes more than a mere—if ecstatically entertaining—intellectual exercise: for, as Anderson says, “If a city can be imagined into being, it can be re-imagined.” Every architect, philosopher, artist, writer, planner, or citizen who dreams up an imaginary city offers lessons for our real ones; harnessing those flights of hopeful fancy can help us improve the streets where we live.
 
Though it shares DNA with books as disparate as Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities, there’s no other book quite like Imaginary Cities. After reading it, you’ll walk the streets of your city—real or imagined—with fresh eyes.
 
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Mindscapes
The Geographies of Imagined Worlds
Edited by George E. Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin
Southern Illinois University Press, 1989

Eighteen essays plus four examples from the ninth annual J. Lloyd Eaton Conference on Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature at the University of California, Riverside.

The concept of mindscape, Slusser and Rabkin explain, allows critics to focus on a single fundamental problem: "The constant need for a relation between mind and some being external to mind."

The essayists are Poul Anderson, Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, Ronald J. Heckelman, David Brin, Frank McConnell, George E. Slusser, James Romm, Jack G. Voller, Peter Fitting, Michael R. Collings, Pascal J. Thomas, Reinhart Lutz, Joseph D. Miller, Gary Westfahl, Bill Lee, Max P. Belin, William Lomax, and Donald M. Hassler.

The book concludes with four authors discussing examples of mindscape. The participants are Jean-Pierre Barricelli, Gregory Benford, Gary Kern, and David N. Samuelson.

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The Writer's Map
An Atlas of Imaginary Lands
Edited by Huw Lewis-Jones
University of Chicago Press, 2018
It’s one of the first things we discover as children, reading and drawing: Maps have a unique power to transport us to distant lands on wondrous travels. Put a map at the start of a book, and we know an adventure is going to follow. Displaying this truth with beautiful full-color illustrations, The Writer’s Map is an atlas of the journeys that our most creative storytellers have made throughout their lives. This magnificent collection encompasses not only the maps that appear in their books but also the many maps that have inspired them, the sketches that they used while writing, and others that simply sparked their curiosity.
 
Philip Pullman recounts the experience of drawing a map as he set out on one of his early novels, The Tin Princess. Miraphora Mina recalls the creative challenge of drawing up ”The Marauder’s Map” for the Harry Potter films. David Mitchell leads us to the Mappa Mundi by way of Cloud Atlas and his own sketch maps. Robert Macfarlane reflects on the cartophilia that has informed his evocative nature writing, which was set off by Robert Louis Stevenson and his map of Treasure Island. Joanne Harris tells of her fascination with Norse maps of the universe. Reif Larsen writes about our dependence on GPS and the impulse to map our experience. Daniel Reeve describes drawing maps and charts for The Hobbit film trilogy. This exquisitely crafted and illustrated atlas explores these and so many more of the maps writers create and are inspired by—some real, some imagined—in both words and images.
 
Amid a cornucopia of 167 full-color images, we find here maps of the world as envisaged in medieval times, as well as maps of adventure, sci-fi and fantasy, nursery rhymes, literary classics, and collectible comics. An enchanting visual and verbal journey, The Writer’s Map will be irresistible for lovers of maps, literature, and memories—and anyone prone to flights of the imagination.
 
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