After watching King Kong for the 455th time, Harlan Ellison wondered about the maps. After wondering, he wrote “Incognita, Inc.”
In hundreds of adventure movies, there’s always a map of some strange, lost land. In Muslim mythology it’s Kaf, the mountain range that circles the earth. In The Odyssey it was Ogygia, the island where Calypso kept Odysseus a captive. If you went looking for King Kong it was “2 south, 90 east, latitudes way west of Sumatra, southwest to Skull Island.” The Garden of Eden, Barsoom, Asgard and Midgard, Atlantis and Avalon, the Catacombs of Rome, Mount Olympus, Oz, Nepenthe, Lilliput, Islandia, Hy-Brasil, Lemuria. Did you never wonder where do these maps come from? Who makes these maps? By what arcane mappery do these cartographs come to be?
It’s a magic shoppe story. Behind a storefront that doesn’t call attention to itself is a shop that is skinny but impossibly long – so long that you can’t see the back wall. The walls you can see are covered with cubbyholes that contain rolled-up maps from centuries of map making. Abner Wonacott is in there, sitting on a tall stool at a slant-top desk, drawing a map that leads somewhere.
Love it.
The magic of the shop and of the map-making are threatened by a main character that has been sent by a corporation that has been paying Wanacott to make maps for 65 years. Maps no longer need to be made, you see, since we have satellites now that can produce accurate maps without a maker. Wanacott is no longer needed, and not-needed people need to be cut from payroll.
My mind wanders. Maps to mythic places are a metaphor for mankind’s brushes with the transcendent. They are mystical directions that point characters to things that are amazing yet true. They are communication from somewhere else to here, and the conduit is the mapmaker. What does a person bring to one of these maps? Like the inspired writer of scripture, a person brings himself to the map, and with him comes the transcendent.
This story doesn’t make me question the whether or not the satellites should exist. It makes me question the people who make decisions based on maximizing profit, how those decisions affect people. The direct opposite of transcendent, maybe. Not a new problem. It’s the bean-driven decision maker that can’t see the value of the mapmaker both in this story and in life. There is always going to be room for maps with dragons in the margins, even though satellites exist that are tuned to the inch.
“Incognita, Inc.” by Harlan Ellison, 2001, first published in the United Airlines inflight magazine Hemispheres, January 2001. I read it in the collection Can and Can’tankerous by Harlan Ellison from Subterranean Press.
This review was originally posted here on April 4, 2018.
