When we think of fantasy maps we tend to think of Christopher Tolkien’s classic Middle Earth one (although I always liked the one in The Return of the King with all the contour lines), or the various maps of Westeros in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. You all know what I mean. Barker, though, said in 2022 that “I have no desire whatsoever to create a Middle Earth. None. I have a desire to create fifty Middle Earths, and draw the roads between them – and that’s a very different thing. I think that fantastic worlds can be smothering to the creative impulse.”1
To any reader of his fiction, this is self-evident. Barker almost never revisits a world that he has created. The exceptions – which I’ll look at first – are the children’s series Abarat and the dream sea Quiddity in The Great and Secret Show and Everville: and in each case – albeit in different ways – the world he describes on the return is not the same as it was the first time. To map a thing is to say that it is fixed, and Barker constantly resists such ossification.
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Interesting, I was enthralled with his work as a teen and this was one of the main reasons, he really had a knack for conjuring fantastic strange worlds to escape into and immersing you in them so well in his stories, you could tell he really enjoyed that part. I’ve been meaning to do some re-reads!
Yes he did it so sad he won’t finish a couple of series he started. One literally had a cliff hanger in sorts. Wonder we he even pass on the torch and let someone finish the Abarat?
