/lit/ - Literature

>>6892223
I fucking love maps. I'd rather have one than not, though of course the lack of a map is hardly a dealbreaker.

Shitty maps can be a good way to determine how shitty the books will be. Of course even great stories don't usually have perfect maps. For example, Tolkien's square mountains of Mordor look far from natural, as do Gurm's square-shaped continents in asoiaf. But as for Tolkien, he gets massive bonus points from drawing his maps himself.

But I have noticed a correlation between shitty maps and not-so-great books.

Take pic related, from Lawrence's Broken Empire. It's supposed to be Europe in the future. But even though it should be easy to draw from real world model, it still manages to be shit imo.

>all the nations are roughly the same size, no bigger or smaller countries anywhere
>the names are drawn from real world areas where the author knows such names (Normandy, Roma etc) but the rest lack consistency (English names like Red March in southern Europe, weird fantasy names like Mayar)
>In Africa there's just two bigger countries, not relevant so author didn't bother to divide them to small parts like Europe
>didn't even include Finland or the rest of Northern Europe though there's parts of Africa which are not relevant, so fuck this shit
>no mountains or other distinguishable landmarks except where the story takes place

All in all I'd rate the map 1/5. I read the two first parts of the trilogy and they were maybe 1-2/5 from what I remember.