Fun with Maps

Yesterday, I mentioned a couple of innovative uses of interactive mapping software.

Here are some other fun maps that people have pointed out to me.

The always fascinating website Strange Maps recently featured a "traverse map" of the Apollo 11 landing site on the moon. That's right: When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the lunar surface, they kicked up a little dust. Ad they didn't go far; the entire map is the size of a football field. Check it out:

Futurist design and architecture critic Geoff Manaugh recently posted a thought-provoking installment of his Entropist column, which he writes for the science fiction blog io9.

Entropist: Google Maps of Sci-Fi

Imagine that you're a San Francisco-based science fiction writer, Manaugh says.

You and your friends live in San Francisco and you write a whole new sequence of stories set somewhere in that peninsular city. There are trips through Chinatown and out to old, moldy houses in Outer Sunset; there are visits to gene labs and venture capital firms across the Bay; you go into empty skyscrapers at night and you find strange basements, where black machines and banks of over-heating hard drives whir quietly into the night... doing something — and that's the problem. Nobody knows, and you have to figure it out.

But then you map all this. You put your story into Google Maps, and it's like cartographically footnoting the story line.

It's not like this has never been done before, of course — but soon enough you've got a new map of your city. It's not marked by tourist sites or sites of historical importance.

It's a city re-mapped according to the science fiction that takes place within it.

Or if you aren't a writer, but a reader of science fiction, Manaugh suggests that you "develop a new overlay for Google Maps and populate it entirely with events from science fiction."

The idea is that we'd key all that stuff into Google Maps, or into Google Earth, or into whatever, and we'd add some more details - and, soon enough, you could find, say, the offshore prison from John Woo's "Face/Off," perfectly located right there on the map. Or you can zoom in and follow the future four-part division of England in Rupert Thomson's under-appreciated novel "Divided Kingdom." Or, for that matter, you could even map out the house and it surrounding landscape from the original "Texas Chainsaw Massacre."

Sounds good to me.

And who could forget the London Tube-style map of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth, which illustrated Erik Davis's September 2001 cover story about Tolkien fans in Wired Magazine?