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Research pertaining to my latest novel, The Mapmaker.



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The Mapmaker

December, 1148; 543 AH: a small band of travellers gather on Marettimo, believed by some to be Homer's Ithaca, now a fortress island off the coast of Norman Sicily. Among them is leading intellectual luminary of Roger II’s court, Muhammad al-Idrisi, on his way to Bristol in England to complete his geographical grand treatise, Nuzhatul Mushtaq. Finding safe passage on Captain Ali’s futuristic vessel, al-Jaariya, Idrisi shares conversation and adventures with an extraordinary array of characters, some human, on a tumultuous voyage where the darkest encounters are not with sea monsters or storms, but with the desires and contradictions burning at the very heart of their expedition.

Books and Expeditions

Geographical Concepts

So I'm reading Geography VSI by John A Matthews and David T Herbert and trying to dig the core concepts of the discipline: space, place, and environment.

Space: where, and in relation to where else -- maps;
Place: somewhere with boundaries;
Environment: the natural environment;

...and also:

Time: change over time;
Process: rather than form;
Scale: local, regional, global.

Matthews & Herbert offer a whiff of the meaning surrounding these geographical concepts, but I'm aware of accessible academic texts devoted to exploring them in depth. Not sure of the road ahead beyond these 181 pages, though. So for now, just looking to build some basic lexis and taste the juice.

I hoof the idea of geography as a metaphor -- the investigative explorer and investigative exploration as a defining concept of human cultural evolution. We can each be geographers, members of geographical communities, with the world defined and united by humankind's exploration -- of our hearts and neighbourhoods, of peoples and planet, of the wider cosmos and universe.

A History of the Universe is my own personal expedition.

27 November 2009

Anthropocene

Matthews, J. & Herbert, D. (2008) Geography: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: OUP) - page 43

28 November 2009

Links

Royal Geographical Society

Physical geography
Human geography
Environmental geography
Geomatics
Regional geography

Cartography

 

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