Having somewhat narrowed my topic, I thought I'd share this amazing map not only because it's fascinating, but also to try and show you the exact moment in the history of speculative fiction on which I'll be focusing my thesis. The name of the artist who drew the map is Ward Shelley, and he drew it in 2009. I'd personally call it a History of Speculative Fiction, as it includes the incipient Fantasy and Horror genres in its focus on SF.
The History of Science Fiction
The main obstacle I've encountered so far in my research has been the fact that I'm interested in basically every genre, sub-genre, and title featured in this graphic, plus some. But having focused my project on early lunar travel narratives, I can orient myself on the map in the upper left corner near "Pre-Scientific Imagination" - some of the texts on my reading list appear there, such as Johannes Kepler's "Somnium," Francis Godwin's "The Man in the Moon," Cyrano de Bergerac's "Empires of the Moon," and Margaret Cavendish's "The Blazing World."
I find this map to be awesome not only because of the impressive graphic design (I wonder how many drafts it took the artist to produce the final image), but also because of the level of informational detail the graphic goes into. Some may find it overwhelming, and frankly, I'm among them, but I see this complexity as a positive thing, a testament to how organic a literary genre can be as it evolves over time and why genres as a phenomenon are worthy of study.
This map is very cool, and illustrates the power of visual display for capturing a lot of information. I love the way it reinforces the complexity of this story, showing an array of connection which linear text would really struggle to portray.
ReplyDeleteYou might also be interested in my colleague Mark Newman's maps in the 'WorldMapper' project.
http://www.worldmapper.org/index.html
They show the countries of the world distorted so that their areas represent other properties like population, wealth, etc., allowing you to see the world in new ways.