The Alternate History Map That Ended Up In A History Textbook

Did you know an alternate history map got published in a history textbook? Watch this video to learn more.

Check out Andri/Kuusinen's Deviant Art profile: http://kuusinen.deviantart.com/

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Matt Mitrovich is the founder and editor of Alternate History Weekly Update, a blogger for Amazing Stories, a volunteer interviewer for SFFWorld and a Sidewise Awards for Alternate History judge. When not exploring alternate timelines he enjoys life with his beautiful wife Alana and prepares for the day when travel between parallel universes becomes a reality. You can follow him on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and YouTube. Learn how you can support his alternate history projects on Patreon.

Fantastic Maps and Where to Find Them

Guest post by Lynn Davis.

As a decently experienced cartographer with work featured on this site and elsewhere, I like to give advice to potential cartographers—both of alternate history and not—who seek to create high-quality maps using programs like Inkscape or Photoshop (if you are using GIS, well, that’s a talk for another day).

One of the toughest parts of starting out using these programs to design maps is finding of the most essential tools in a burgeoning cartographer’s toolkit: basemaps. That is, unless you are able to freehand a perfect map of the world to make a derivative map, particularly for alternate history purposes, you are going to need maps that already exist which you can trace over and change into a piece of art of your own making.

To help with this, I will present to all you cartographers the top 5 best map resources around the internet. With these sites, your library of basemaps will quickly grow and, hopefully, so too will your body of work.

#1. Wikimedia

From old atlases to modern user-made data, the maps available on Wikimedia are perhaps the most diverse of any source. Like the rest of Wikipedia’s foundation, the point of the map database is to give people an open and free database to use, and any aspiring cartographer would be advised to take advantage of this fact.

The biggest disadvantage is that, like much of the Wikimedia site, the database can be difficult to navigate, particularly if you are looking for specific kinds of maps or maps from specific artists. If you’re willing to put up with the layout, however, it’s one of the best and most diverse of the examples given and well worth your time.

The database is available here to access. Make sure to click around categories and don’t be afraid to use the main Wikipedia site to poke around as well.

#2. University of Texas at Austin Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection

Though just roughly 30% of the collection’s 250,000 maps are available online, the UT Austin map collection is an extremely valuable one. While Wikimedia and other sources tend to be a bit more random in what they choose to upload, due to problems of availability or varied sources, this map collection focuses more on specific atlases where each and every page is carefully cataloged and digitized for those who wish to view them.

The maps are available to directly download and in the public domain, which eases using them around the internet without having to worry too much about copyright. Most of the maps on here also tend to be clearer than those from the same atlas posted elsewhere. As a bonus, there are even some maps that I have simply not found elsewhere around the web, and for that alone it is extremely valuable.

Always continuing to grow as the collection receives money to digitize its records, this collection can be viewed here and is well worth checking out to find the basemap that is right for you.

#3. West Point Atlases

This source is one that is not only surprising, but also one that I have seen very few cartographers ever recommend, let alone use. Available as a courtesy of the United States Military Academy at West Point, the atlases available on their website to the public contain a wide array of subjects related to warfare, from ancient conflicts to the modern campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Naturally, being a military academy, it is hard to find maps not related to warfare; alternate history being what it is, however, that doesn’t tend to be a down side.

The one caveat I could give is that some of the maps, notably the larger-scale pages in the atlases, seem to be rather inaccurate and give a very simple idea of worldwide or continental political geography. That said, this drawback is more than made up for by the highly-detailed country and local maps available through the atlases that look like they have been pulled from the pages of official military atlases. Suffice to say, accuracy at the local level is extremely important to the military so you can count on these to be among the best you can find. In this way, they are perfect for maps of specific historical or alternate historical military campaigns that you may want to show.

To check out these atlases, follow the link here for more information.

#4. Alternate History Wiki

That is, the wiki site created specifically for alternatehistory.com and not to be confused with the independent alternate history wiki (yes, it’s confusing). This is a site that is simply not used as often as it should be. While admittedly even harder to navigate than the others, the AH wiki is a fine resource for maps that have been made or found by users of alternatehistory.com as part of a community-wide project assembled by the good people at the wiki.

Maps can include anything from the wonderfully-detailed “world-a” style pixel maps to larger, more complete blank maps that anyone can use. Taken from well over a decade of gathering from all across alternatehistory.com, this archive is one that is well worth using for anyone who wants to make specifically alternate history maps, as this site tends to cater toward it. However, it also provides a good amount of material for those who lean toward real life history and who want to make maps of their own.

It's a really fantastic resource that I, personally, would enjoy seeing get a bit more love from the cartographical community. You can find the map portion through here, though some searching around the site may be required to find exactly what you’re looking for.

#5 David Rumsey Map Collection

In many ways the Holy Grail of basemaps, the David Rumsey Map Collection is a cornucopia of maps for every possible or thinkable part of the world that were created anywhere from centuries ago to just a few decades beforehand. The collection has been painstakingly digitized over the course of two decades and resulted in a database of more than 71,000 maps of all sizes, shapes, and containing a wide variety of subjects.

Not only are the maps available for download in high quality image sizes, but they are also organized by artist, date published, and geographical location covered in the map that allows anyone looking for a specific kind of basemap for a specific map in mind to quickly find something that will suit them. This can range from a large-scale political map of the Holy Roman Empire to a travel map from the 1930s of the United States to a landform map of eastern China before the Second World War.

I would caution that, unlike the other sites, the Creative Commons license is a little more complicated, so it’d be a good idea to look that up before you dive in. That said, for those of us who seek to make the best maps we possibly can in Inkscape, Photoshop, GIMP, or other programs, this site is far and away the best I’ve used and I cannot recommend it enough. You can find the collection’s homepage here and from there dive right in.

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Lynn Davis is a cartographer and writer both of alternate history that can be found on her website, Toixstory.com, and has been featured around the internet. In addition she runs a tumblr, Facebook page, and is funded by generous donations to her Patreon.

Interview: Bruce Munro

Bruce Munro is someone I featured or given a honorable mention to on countless Map Mondays. His maps aren't just detailed and imaginative, they are also funny. He is perhaps one of the most influential alternate cartographers on AlternateHistory.com and I was very happy to ask him some questions:

Who is Bruce Munro?

Bruce Munro is a middle-aged person a bit shocked to find himself so thoroughly middle-aged, a man with too much education and too little regular career, an artistic dilettante and devoted bibliophile, someone with more books than dollars and more imagination than practical sense, more George Costanza than Rock Hudson by looks but more easygoing than either, a man who roots for the mad scientists and furnishes his brain with far more weird junk than Sherlock Holmes would have approved of.

What got you interested in alternate history?

It arises from my general interest in science fiction, encounters with early Turtledove works such as Agent of Byzantium and A Different Flesh, stimulated by Sliders (and my certainty that AH could do better than some of their crappy episodes) and the lists of alternate history novels and alternate history sites on Uchronia when it was still skatecity, and burst into full fervent fixation with my encounter with the soc.history.what-if Google group in the late 90s. (Alas, for it has fallen on hard times).

You are known for taking "implausible" fiction and creating your own realistic and highly-detailed scenario. What inspired you to make these?

That’s an old habit of mine – back in the early 80s I was already rewriting episodes of Justice League in my head (or was it Justice Friends?) to make them less lame and fancier, with more colorful detail, bigger giants, fancier machines, cooler uses of the character’s powers. I suppose I am a touch Annie Wilkes obsessive, too – I dislike a story with big logical holes in it or weak worldbuilding and I want to fix it. In some ways it also, I am afraid, plays to a weakness of mine – I fear failure in being genuinely original, so I find it easier to pimp out other people’s works than create something entirely my own.

When did you start creating alternate history maps?

Back in the 1990s. I first started with making Xerox copies of blank world maps obtained from the UNM bookstore, and drawing new worlds atop of them. I didn’t start doing digital maps until the 2000s, I think – my memory of these things is a bit iffy, and the oldest thing I have on my computer dates to 2005.

Many people have tried to imitate your style of map-making. How would you describe your style of map-making to someone who may not be familiar with it?

I prefer starting with a blank PNG map of the world, usually with existing national borders and sometimes rivers or states to act as guides so I know where things are, and gradually modifying them. I hand-draw lines with the map magnification at least 400%, erasing or modifying as I go, occasionally using patches from other maps or sometimes basemaps for a certain year created by others. I tend to provide a full color key of all important countries, and I add descriptive detail with a mass of notes. Said notes and country descriptions are often victims of my at times annoying sense of humor, although I understand there are people who like it. I often add autonomous regions, internal borders, etc. but I rarely do it for all countries since I find that not just time-consuming but overly fussy looking.

“Too talky” probably describes my maps as briefly as possible: they are often as much “travel guides” as maps.

Why do you think people like maps of alternate worlds?

I think people have varied reasons for enjoying alternate history maps. Some who are interested in history are very often conscious of how history depends on many often fine turning points, and no doubt enjoy the working out of things visually. Some are more appreciators of maps as art and creative efforts rather than as plausible historical speculation. Others have regrets about the way history turned out and how some countries have been screwed over by the course of history, and enjoy seeing a good Ireland Victorious or American Indian Nations or Surviving Ottoman Empire scenario portrayed. Others treat it more as an amusing form of fantasy that is still rooted in actual history.

What programs do you use to create your maps?

Basic Microsoft Paint. I keep telling myself I need to learn photoshop or gimp, but I have a peculiar aversion to taking up intellectual challenges which might make me feel stupid, and the user interface for Gimp baffled me so badly that I fled in terror two years ago and have yet to reexamine it.

Where can people go if they wanted you to commission a map from you?

If they don’t hang out on AlternateHistory.com, I hang out on Deviantart under the handle QuantumBranching.

Which of all the maps you have created do you consider your favorite?

My favorite? I have a number of ones I like, but it’s hard to pick just one. I do like the one I did for the GURPS Aeolus scenario, my French Canada wank, my map of Kamandi’s world, my map for Mumby’s “Broken America”, my cover of “Strong West Wind”… I’ll need to think about it to narrow it down.

Any other map makers you would like to recommend?

Iainfluff (unfortunately a lot of his stuff went bye-bye with Imageshack), Rvbomally, ToixStory, ReagentAH, SRegan, ImDeadPanda, 1Blomma, Sapiento, edthomasten, Laiqua-lasse and MarcosCeia. Less technically brilliant, but extremely productive and creative: RoyalPsycho and Silas-Coldwine.

(There are others I like, but I could just go on and on… )

Any other projects that you are working on now?

I am currently working on a map/scenario for the aftermath of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s Footfall SF novel. After that, I have a commission for a cover of one of the maps/scenarios on the alternate history wiki.

What books are you reading?

I am currently reading the retro-SF collection Old Venus, Alan Smale’s Romans-meet-tech-wanked native Americans AH Clash of Eagles, and a book by Simon Winchester called The Professor and the Madman, about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary and one of its major (and majorly odd) contributors.

Any advice for aspiring alternate cartographers?

My advice? Get some good books of historical geography (the Penguin atlas series is great for Europe, for the world the Times Concise Atlas and the Haywood Atlas are both useful, and if you can get a used copy of the old William Shepherd atlas there are some quite fine maps for the middle ages and early modern era), know your history, draw your lines one pixel thick (unless you are using a vector program where that doesn’t matter) find good basemaps (AH.com has some useful resources) and make sure to save your maps to the right format, or you’re in deep doody.

Interview: Rvbomally

For the next installment in my my interview series featuring my favorite alternate cartagraphers, I got a chance to talk with Rvbomally of AlternateHistory.com. He is the author of "Ad Astra Per Aspera", but I wanted to talk to him primarily for his map work. Check out what he had to say below:

Who is Rvbomally?

Just some random guy on the Internet.

What got you interested in alternate history?

I was first introduced to the concept by the Dawn of Victory mod. At that point, I was far more interested in conventional science fiction, so the WWII powers in space was a new concept that really got me interested in the genre. I then found out about Timeline-191, which I then picked up and fell in love with. And the rest, they say, is history.

What inspired you to write "Ad Astra Per Aspera"?

No one thing inspired me to write AAPA, although Fallout, 1984, and Warhammer 40K are clear influences. AAPA is, in a way, the final evolution of my science fiction musings dating back to at least 2006. The setting back then was far different, involving space Texans attacking robots on Mars, of all things. It gradually evolved into a more conventional space opera, where the primary civilization was the Holy Dominion of Christendom, a galaxy-spanning theocratic empire that enslaves any aliens it encounters, at war with a communist insurgency.

When I found out about Warhammer 40K, I decided to do something different, so I decided to make a space Cold War story, while retaining some elements of the original "Dominionverse" story. The Dominion became the Coalition of Western Republics, which was pitted against a Sino-Soviet Collective that later became the Conseil. The Technocracies were added later as a neutral kingmaker. You could see some of this evolution in early draft maps I have since posted to my deviantArt account, and I plan on revisiting the first two incarnations of AAPA in a remake.

When did you start creating alternate history maps?

A long time ago! I'd say about 2008, possibly even earlier. Those initial maps were utter garbage; nonsensical recolors of the Wikipedia basemap. Of course, I got better.

What do you think people like about alternate history maps?

For me, it shows a radically different world at a glance. When I see different borders, and different alliances on a key, I start thinking about how different that world's history, culture, and politics must be from our own. It's a very efficient and very effective form of telling a worldbuilding-heavy story.

What software do you use to create maps?

For my oneshots, a combination of Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Paint. Photoshop isn't strictly necessary for the process, it just makes things like adding lots of text, choosing colors and outlining countries easier. All of my oneshots can be replicated on Paint alone. When I decide to get fancy, I use Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.

What is your favorite map that you ever created?

That's a tough one. I tend to adopt a favorite and then drop it. For example, right now I'm a big fan of my cover of Transparent Blue's "Last Living Souls". But my all time favorite would have to be my Union of American Federal Republics map. I love how it turned out!

[Editor's Note: And it was featured on Map Monday.]

Where can people go if they wanted you to commission a map from you?

Nowhere, unfortunately. I'm typically a busy guy, with only enough time to make maps for myself. I'm trying to get through a large list of maps I'd like to make at the moment. I'm still making maps for ideas I had back in 2013. If you like what you see, however, feel to give me a tip on patreon.

Any other map makers you would like to recommend?

Yes! B_Munro/QuantumBranching, ToixStory, RoyalPsycho, vongreif, zalesky, 1Blomma, and Silas-Coldwine are some of my favorites. Check them out!

Any other projects that you are working on now?

Aside from my Oneshot Scenarios, I'm working on "Space Cadet", another science fiction setting which is my attempt to take just about every genre of science fiction at once and stick it in a blender.

What books are you reading?

These days, nothing but boring textbooks and legal codes, unfortunately.

Any advice for aspiring alternate cartographers?

The best way to learn is by trying to imitate maps you like. Most of my progress has been made trying to replicate an aesthetic I see on a map thread, or even on a map in real life. I find that I never replicate the aesthetic perfectly, but I learn a lot in the process, and it helps me develop my own style. Oh, and tutorials are helpful.

Interview: Lynn Davis

Doing Map Mondays for more than a year now, I have to admire those alternate historians (who I usually refer to as "alternate cartographers") who have the patience and skill to create those wonderful and informative maps we find in timelines across the Internet. Wanting to learn more about this subset of our community, I decided to interview one of my favorite map makers: Lynn Davis. Check out our conversation below:

Who is Lynn Davis?

My name is Lynn Zelda Davis, a 21 year-old Texan college student currently working on their bachelor's degree in English Education. That's right, folks, history and cartography are just a side hobby for my real, crazy passion: teaching! Other than that, I love to write, to read, and just about everything involving Christmas. My favorite things in life are my partner Chris, my maps, and sleep. Most people around the web know me as ToixStory (formerly known as PlatoonSgt).

What got you interested in alternate history?

Sometime around 2010 I started to wonder about the usual history scenarios, about what would have happened if the Nazis had won, if Texas was still independent, etc., and found AlternateHistory.com that same year, which only fueled my passion. At the same time, I was becoming more and more interested in history itself, devouring every book I could find on any part of history, which only fueled my desire for alternate history. This past year has seen it really ramp up in terms of research and study, but the passion has been there for a while now.

When did you start creating alternate history maps?

Technically, I got started around 2011, using simple Wikipedia basemaps and the world-a basemaps you see on AlternateHistory.com Map Threads. However, I was never really satisfied with them, because they always seemed so...stale. Lifeless. After a while, I gave up on them. Then, last year, I picked up the hobby again, not with maps made in Microsoft Paint but in Inkscape, using more detailed techniques to create the beautiful maps I had seen posted on deviantart and AH.com before. I wanted to have maps that told a story, that showed a whole world instead of just a plate imitation of it.

In a world where geography is at the bottom of the list for someone's favorite subject, why do you think people make maps of alternate worlds?

I would say because, on some level, all people wonder how things would have gone had the circumstances been different. Alternate history is simply quantifying those thoughts and putting them into a study of how you think things could have gone, and maps are simply an extension of that. Not to mention, maps are something just about everyone has been exposed to at one time or another, from atlases to Google Maps, so I think anyone interested in alternate history has thought, at one time or another, of what the maps for different worlds would look like.

What programs do you use to create your maps?

I started out with, and still primarily use, Inkscape. It's a very sleek, free vector-based program that allows you to use all sorts of tools and tricks to get a map looking just right. It's easily manipulable and fairly easy to learn. Lately, I've experiment with using GIMP to make a base for the map before doing the details in Inkscape. There are definitely some advantages of GIMP, though I'm probably going to start going back to Inkscape more and more.

Where can people go if they wanted you to commission a map from you?

My deviantart is definitely the best place. I have a journal of all commission prices and info here or you can e-mail me at lzeldadavis at gmail dot com and we can talk prices and such.

Any other map makers you would like to recommend?

Oh, wow, there's almost too many to list. 1Blomma is definitely one of my favorites and is a master at the craft. There's also a ton more, off the top of my head: martin23230, Fenn-O-Manic, Kurarun, Undevicesimus, Pischinovski, ImDeadPanda, Kuusinen, Sapiento, ReagentAH, RvBOMally, nanwe01, and iselander. All of them are on deviantart, and definitely worth checking out.

Any other projects that you are working on now?

For alternate history? Well, something like 6 maps that are in some stage of completion, a tutorial, and a whole map series—world map, regional maps, flags, etc.--and that's just the tip of the iceberg. I may go a little overboard. As far as other things, I've got a couple novel ideas in the mix that I might sit down and write one day (alternate history, naturally), but mostly I just like my maps. Definitely my favorite and most soothing hobby.

What books are you reading?

Just like with my maps, I move between books very rapidly, so I'm never reading just one. At the moment, I'm reading In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India, An Empire of Wealth, Leviathan Wakes and A Canticle for Leibowitz. Like I said, my mind wanders a bit.

Any advice for aspiring alternate cartographers?

The biggest piece of advice I can give is: be patient. Cartography, whether it's digital or physical, takes time to get right. It can feel like a pain to meticulously trace coastlines, rivers, borders, and the like, but it definitely pays off in the end and makes your map look much nicer. More than half my maps took more than 50 work hours to make, with a couple taking over 100 hours of work time. It can be tedious, but find a rhythm and stick with it and you'll be a master of the craft before you know it.