Showing posts with label cognitive mapping. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cognitive mapping. Show all posts

23 December 2007

DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC MAPS?

It is obvious that in fiction-writing cognitive mapping plays an essential role. From the 1884 novel by Edward A. Abbot, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, which is literally about the dimensionality of space; to Mark Twain's placed-based works, set in California, Europe, or the American South; and Philip K. Dick's dystopian sci-fi novels and short stories (e.g., "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", which was made into the film Blade Runner)--all fiction, like history, must take place some place, even if the place is an entirely fictional landscape. Robert Louis Stevenson claimed that before writing his novel he drew a map of Treasure Island so that he could visualize the plot. Mississippian Eudora Welty said, in "The Writer's Craft," that, "One place comprehended can make us understand other places better. A sense of space [and place] gives equilibrium, a sense of direction" (my insertion). Spatiality is, as are the essentialities of matter and time, one of the attributes of the physical Universe.