Essays

Legacy Blog Punditry on Divers Subjects

The Map Room

• Naming the Gulf (2025)
• The Spherical Cow Projection (2021)
• The Territory Is Not the Map (2017)
• The Peters Map Is Fighting the Last War (2017)
• OpenStreetMap at the Crossroads (2016)
• All Online Maps Suck (2013)

Patreon

• The Boy Who Couldn’t Get Lost (2025)
• Blogonomics (2025)

Published Articles

• Maps in Science Fiction. The New York Review of Science Fiction 356 (Feb 2022), pp. 23-27.
• Celebrating Christopher Tolkien’s Cartographic Legacy. Tor.com (now Reactor), 22 Jan 2020.
• Where Do Fantasy Maps Come From? Tor.com (now Reactor), 23 Sep 2019.
• An Exercise in Telling: Sylvain Neuvel’s Themis Files. AE, 10 Jul 2019.
• Fantasy Maps Don’t Belong in the Hands of Fantasy Characters. Tor.com (now Reactor), 28 May 2019.
• What Does a Fantasy Map Look Like? Tor.com (now Reactor), 19 Mar 2019.
• A Literary Love Letter to Maps: The Writer’s Map. Tor.com (now Reactor), 26 Nov 2018.
• The Dúnedain and the Deep Blue Sea: On Númenórean Navigation. Tor.com (now Reactor), 7 Nov 2018. Reprinted as “Navigating Middle-earth Before the Bending of the Seas,” Tor.com (now Reactor), 16 Aug 2022.
• God and the Machines: The Short Fiction of Peter Watts. AE, 25 May 2015. Reprinted as “Dieu et les machines: les nouvelles de Peter Watts,” afterword to Au-delà du gouffre by Peter Watts (Le Bélial’, 2016), pp. 463-467; translated by Erwann Perchoc.
• Here Be Blank Spaces: Vaguely Medieval Fantasy Maps. The New York Review of Science Fiction 300 (Aug 2013), pp. 14-16.
• How Snake Keepers Should React to the Python Tragedy. The Ottawa Citizen, 8 Aug 2013.