Magic Portals

A new collection I have a story in is about to come out on June 10 – Magic Portals. The pre-order details (apart from Amazon which doesn’t do it that way) are at https://books2read.com/u/mZQXVp.

The story is The Cartomancer, for which I invented a new form of magic where a map of an imaginary place becomes a portal to that world.

Maps of unknown worlds have always fascinated me. Amongst my reference books I have J B Post’s Atlas of Fantasy, Stableford’s Dictionary of Science Fiction Places, the magisterial Dictionary of Imaginary Places by Alberto Manguel and Umberto Eco’s Book of Imaginary Lands. I also have a lot of books and maps showing the imaginary or lesser known parts of London and the UK. If you want to know where be monsters, look at the Herb Lester Occult London map or Marvellous Maps British Folklore and Superstition map.

I attempted to do a bit of creative historio-geography myself in a blend of essay and story on the Vanishing Countries of Middle Europe. The central thesis of countries being erased from the map as political boundaries change is not so far from reality if we look at the way Europe arbitrarily divided up Africa after the First World War, or the current situation with Russia claiming Urkraine is not a real country. It is not only history that is written by the winners, but also geography.