Getting from A to B

You can draw as big and magnificent a map as you like for a fantasy world, but at some point you have to consider one minor issue: how do people actually get around?

As I speed towards the countryside on a mighty metal serpent (well, the 9:47 from Paddington), I spare a thought for all the poor protagonists out there who have to set out on their epic quests without so much as a bus. But of course we got by for thousands of years with nothing but our legs and the legs of whatever creatures we could persuade to give us a lift, as is reflected in most fantasy. And while that works, it does require a little more thought to make your maps make sense.

Compared to someone on foot, horses are fast. Compared to a thousand-mile epic quest, horses are slow. It’s easy to forget, in this modern, hyper-connected world, that most places are actually a really long way apart. I’m off on a 3-hour train journey now – or alternatively a 2-day walk, and that’s with modern roads and infrastructure to speed me on my way. So when I’m drawing my little maps, and looking lovingly at the far more detailed maps of books like The Lord of the Rings or the Riftwar, I have to consider just how far apart these cities really are. We think nothing of a quick jaunt to a neighbouring town that might have been a week’s round trip, once.

Many books and fantasy works get this perfectly right. Half of The Lord of the Rings is literally about travelling from one place to another, and I’ve mentioned before how Feist makes sure to include some of the stops along the way as characters go from one end of Midkemia to the other. Sometimes, though, there are… shortcuts, taken. The last seasons of A Game of Thrones are notorious for teleporting characters across Westeros, and there are some awfully fast horses off-screen in The Last Kingdom.

And ultimately that’s because, unless you write it well, travelling can be boring. If there aren’t exciting plot points along the way, you’re just writing about people going from point A to point B. A quest is inherently a long journey with cool stuff happening along the way, but even Tolkien glosses over a lot of the actual walking in-between the interesting bits.

So what happens when you start adding in other means of transport? (Say, airships, or giant steel boats?) Well, first things first: obviously you can make your journeys quicker. No need to swim when you can take a ship; no need to sail when you can fly… if you can afford it. Because that’s point two: just because swifter and more convenient transport exists doesn’t mean you have to use it. Airships in The Boiling Seas are expensive and infrequent, for all that they’re far faster than lumbering metal sailing-ships – and some journeys are too short to justify any travel other than on foot. Just because you’ve got a huge map at your disposal doesn’t mean that your story has to cross a vast swathe of it. Sometimes it pays to do something a little smaller in scale.

I doubt I’ll be introducing railways to the Boiling Seas any time soon, though, for all that it’s perfectly possible with the technology I’ve already written. There are rails, there are engines, there’s a lot of metal… but as tempted as writing this sentence has made me, it’s rather difficult to build trains that cross over vast expanses of boiling seawater. Railways only really work when you’ve got a big network of them, after all, which took us thousands of years to build in the real world. Even though the ancient Greeks had physical rails in some of their mines, and also invented the steam engine, they never thought to put them together. (Which is a concept that I am constantly tempted to drop everything and start writing about…)

Just look at all those lines. Cheffin’s Map of the English and Scotch Railways, 1850

But that’s my point, really. Trains could exist on the Boiling Seas, but they wouldn’t be very useful because of all that water in the way – and I doubt I’d be able to resist making them constantly delayed and overcrowded. Airships are fast but I’ve made them expensive, and impractical in other ways that will be revealed in book 3, that mean they’re far from ubiquitous. Steelships are there, but they’re about as slow as it gets. For the most part, when it comes time for my protagonists to cross my map, they’re still on the reliable Shanks’ pony.

And that means that, for all that increased connectivity and ease of movement make our modern world feel that much smaller, they don’t have to do the same for your world. There are always ways to work in drawbacks and other considerations, and ways to write a long journey that make it just as interesting as what happens at either end. After all, just because you’re sitting on a train doesn’t mean you can’t admire the view.