Talk:Book:The Discworld Mapp

Like the admirers of the Emperor's new clothes, no one seems to have remarked on the obvious deficiencies of The Discworld Mapp. Like the smartass kid in the story, I ask: why is The Streets of Ankh-Morpork so good, and the world Mapp so bad?
The Streets is amazingly detailed and I've never heard of or found a fault with it, but the Mapp doesn't come close. Lancre is a featured location in six books and mentioned elsewhere, but it can't be located accurately on the mapp, and where it seems most likely to be is nearly twice as far from Ankh-Morpork as the text tells us. Quirm appears to be much farther from Ankh-Morpork than we were told. Few locations can be determined more closely than the equivalent of "Vienna is somewhere in the middle of Europe". Omissions abound, too, but they don't matter very much when the included material is so weak. --Old Dickens 00:10, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

I can agree with this. It isn't easy to work out a scale, for one thing, save the more-or-less agreed starting point that the Disc is ten thousand miles in diameter (can't remember which book). And it all seems a little arbitrary and ill-worked-out in places. I do have a suspicion that to fit in everything which the books explicitly say should be in there, Howondaland (for instance) should be a lot bigger than it is. (This is even before adding the bits which are conjecture and speculation, however well-founded...)

Then there are the bits which seem to vary from book to book: for instance in Unseen Academicals, Sto Lat seems ridiculously close to Ankh-Morpork if a slow-moving horse-drawn bus, which is not in much of a hurry, can get there in a matter of two or three hours. (At a speed described as not much above walking pace? This makes Sto Lat fifteen - eighteen miles at most from A-M). Earlier books have left the impression that the closest Sto states are a bit further out than this. Again I forget the reference, but Buddy and the band's tour in the Sto plains comes to mind, the one where travelling between Ankh and the Sto cities involves quite a few overnight stays. Soul Music Anyone constructing a map out of contradictory references like this is, I think, going to run into trouble.

I wonder if the Discworld Mappe is meant to convey something of those almost-right mediaeval maps of our world, the ones we look at where we see the cartographer has got the basic shapes roughly right, but to modern eyes they're out of balance with each other? (so that Africa is ridiculously small - that Howondaland thing again - Asia a bit too large, India just a pimple rather than a peninsular, and the Americas barely hinted at...) Being on the flat, though, Discowrld cartographers will be spared all that tricky stuff about compensating for curvature and getting the projection right.

All those mediaeval maps have large empty spaces on them, give or take the odd Here be Draggonnes, so the logical assumption with hindsight is that they're a sort of first attempt at making shape of the world - but desperate for a redrafting...--AgProv 00:36, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Sto Lat has always been twenty miles from A-M. Did it really say two or three hours? I thought it was most of the night.
Howandaland and Klatch in general are too small; the Circle Sea is too big, on and on. --Old Dickens 00:46, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

To my mind I don't understand how there can be sea-trade between Genua and Ankh-Morpork. Out through the circle see, around Howondaland and Cape Terror and along more than a quarter of the circuference of the disc with a load of (unrefrigerated) SHRIMP? --Iron Hippo 10:10, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

Nobody said it was easy. (I think the Patrician was using a facetious example with the "pint of prawns". Shrimp actually arrive on the Sto Plains in short, sharp showers.) --Old Dickens 14:10, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

I think I've divined another problem with the Mappe (as well as the first ever quibble with The Streets of Ankh-Morpork). Especially in the early books, Terry was generating names for faraway countries as one-shot jokes or as background filler, without ever considering that one day some bright spark was going to ahve to come along and obsessively-compulsively draw a map that fitted them all in.

So of course, once named, they now exist, and have to be found places on the Mappe, despite the fact that Rehigreed, Vanglemesht, Chirm, Orohai, Ymitury, Kythia and so on, are hardly likely to be mentioned again and are just occupying valuable real estate that could perhaps better be taken up by other nations that have played a more active part in the canon. As time allows I've been trying to do a redraft - presumptuous, me, but I've kept it strictly canonical - which I hope addresses these problems. --AgProv 01:10, 12 November 2010 (CET)