Inner Worlds III: Hexadot and D’rek, the explorers of imagined worlds
On communities, fun, and visiting a fictional universe
It’s the real people who visit imagined worlds that make them fascinating. In fiction, the readers bring a world to life when they start debating, piecing the puzzle together, dissecting the details. Digital worlds need people to explore and create their own stories, whether it’s Space Engine, Minecraft, or World of Warcraft.
I wanted to learn what makes it worthwhile to contribute to fictional universes. I visited communities centered around two worlds that lie at the the very foundation of this project and I talked to the people who breathe life into these worlds.
First was Space Engine, the interactive, procedurally generated planetarium. Its fans gather on Reddit, so I went to r/SpaceEngine and when I saw the first post by Hexadot, I immediately knew I found the right person. Her entries — with titles like Different World, The Sea of Purity, or Hellrise — are just pictures. But what pictures! They take you on a journey to the other end of the universe to witness what you could not see here on Earth.
Hexadot has two years of experience with Space Engine, but when she talks about it, she still seems as impressed by all there is to discover as if she was seeing it for the first time.
Wojtek Borowicz: Are you into astronomy? Do you gaze at the stars often, watch them through a telescope and so on?
Hexadot: My interest in astronomy — and at the same time, science fiction — started in childhood. I had a small astronomy book. I actually used to love reading encyclopedias in general, but this one felt special. It was probably because of the sense of discovery and wonder, learning about new places that operated by completely different laws, about comets, nebulas, other planets, faraway stars, and galaxies. But I’ve never had a telescope of my own, even though I always wanted to get one as a gift. And, sadly, since I live in the city, I’ve only had the opportunity to stargaze during the rare hiking trips with my family.
Is this how you got into Space Engine?
Hexadot: I’m not really sure. I simply can’t remember! I think I either saw it recommended on a social network or stumbled upon a comparison between a Space Engine screenshot and a real-life photo of the atmosphere.
How long have you been playing? And while we’re at it, is playing the right word? Do you think of Space Engine as a game?
For about two years. And, as you noted, I don’t really consider SE a game in its own right. In my opinion, a game requires either an attainable goal or mechanics that challenge the player. Space Engine lacks either, so I’d rather call it an interactive planetarium. I’ve seen it called Wallpaper Simulator 2016 and get where it’s coming from.
Also, I’ve heard that Space Engine’s developer has plans to make SE into a full-fledged MMORPG and I’m not really sure what to think about that. It would be hard to make an actual game out of it without losing the meditative charm.
What do you like the most about Space Engine?
The scope. No other game has made me feel the scale of the universe like this one did when I flew out of the Milky Way for the first time and saw the space filled with stars… only to realize that these are, in fact, galaxies. Millions of specks, each containing thousands of thousands of thousands of different stars. The first time I played SE I had the feeling that can only be described as awe at our insignificance.
You share pictures of stars and planets you’ve found with the community on Reddit. Why?
I’ve enjoyed art for my whole life, and been studying it more seriously for the last couple of years. Since Space Engine doesn’t have a gameplay per se, I made up my own — kind of a treasure hunt. One of SE’s primary goals for me now is to find the prettiest looking landscape or sight and to save it. It serves both as a new piece for the gallery I get inspiration from and as a memory of the places I visited. I post it on the Internet because it’s nice to share art with people and hear their response. It feels much better when you realize that other people got to experience the beauty they wouldn’t have seen otherwise.
Do you have your favorite places in Space Engine? Do you come back to them often?
The only place I return to is the Solar System, since I consider it a starting point. I don’t make bookmarks or write the coordinates down. I think there is something romantically sad about arriving to new places, staying for a while and leaving forever. And why tie yourself down to one place when you’ve got an entire universe to explore?
The second community I visited was Malazan Empire, a forum for fans of Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen. It was a homecoming of sorts — I have been a fan of Erikson for years, as well as an on and off member of the community. And all this time I have been in awe of Malazan Empire’s heavyweights, who dissected, analyzed, and debated every word written by Erikson and the Malazan world’s co-creator, Ian Cameron Esslemont.
I admired the community’s understanding of every story arc, the ability to catch bits of foreshadowing, to put together a character’s backstory from fragments scattered across ten novels. Reading some of their discussions, how they drilled into passages to uncover the hidden truths about this fictional universe, was like reading academic papers — except less formal and with more humor.
D’rek, one of the most active contributors, has more than 10,000 posts on the board. She has a PhD worth of knowledge about the Malazan universe. She’s led fan projects to create a map of the world, to put together a timeline of events, and to create a family tree for the books’ heroes. Ask D’rek about something related to the Malazan world or one of her projects and she unleashes a torrent of details, references, and explanations. She is a world-leading expert on a non-existent world.
Wojtek Borowicz: What got you into Malazan Book of the Fallen? How many times have you read it?
D’rek: Nothing particularly memorable, I just randomly decided to buy Gardens of the Moon at a bookstore one day, liked it and bought the rest. This was back in about 2004, just before Midnight Tides came out. I did re-reads from GotM to the present when The Bonehunters, Toll the Hounds and The Crippled God came out, and I’ve done one complete start-to-finish (including the novellas and all of Esslemont’s books) re-read of the series since then.
You’re sort of a cartographer, piecing together information from the novels to draw maps of the world. And a genealogist, too. You complete family trees of characters living in that world. Why do you do that?
Because it’s fun!
I like puzzles and I like trying to solve mysteries. Piecing together a bunch of disparate references from a fantasy series is just another puzzle/mystery to be solved. Malazan ended up making a particularly good puzzle, since the “canvas” was large, but the books have lots of little references and asides just begging to be figured out. Most importantly, those puzzle pieces mostly all fit together nicely, presumably because Erikson and Esslemont had figured out so much of the world beforehand and kept track of the details they added.
A big part of the appeal was also that I got into the series while it was still only half-completed, so I had a lot of puzzle pieces with which to get started, but also a lot of anticipation for each next installment and the pieces it would deliver.
Plus, this was all happening at a phase in my life where I was having big grandiose debates about the books on the Malazan forums and making charts at school. Taking some of those “puzzles”, making charts out of the answers and posting them on the forums for everyone to reference seemed like the natural thing to do.
So that led to creating a Draconian Family Tree, then a Racial Tree (showing the intermixing and creation of sentient races), and finally a Gods and Goddesses Family Tree.
Then came the big one — trying to make a timeline of the whole series so far. That was a lot of fun and gave me an interesting new perspective to re-read the series with as I picked up any chronology-related clues. I kept updating it until Toll the Hounds came out, but eventually it became too unwieldy to fully maintain so it was left as is.
The world map project actually came several years later. I wanted to take on a new creative project, but wasn’t willing to go back to the timeline, and a forum debate about the positioning of a continent spurned me to try and throw together a quick draft of the world map with a different layout of Werthead’s ongoing-at-the-time world map project. That was fun, so I decided to go for the whole thing. Three more books in the series and nine more map versions later, and here we are.
How does it feel to be the leading specialist in geography and history of a fictional world?
It is frustrating, for two main reasons.
Firstly, because there is not a lot of information to be found. Erikson and Esslemont created more than a whole planet of geography and tens of thousands of years of history for it, but they’ve only had about five million words of narrative in which to insert that history and those geographic descriptions. Five million words is a drop in the oceans compared to the collective histories and sagas written by humans about our own planet.
If I wish to know more about the expansion of the Parthian Empire under Mithridates, I can go learn a lot about that subject easily and freely. If I want to know even more, I can spend time, effort, and money getting access to scholarly reports, talking to experts, etc. If there’s some question I really needed answered, I could found an archeology expedition to try and learn it.
If I wish to know more about the Jheck invasion of Stygg… well, I can’t. That information only exists in Erikson’s and Esslemont’s heads and they may never write any further details about it, ever.
Secondly, it is frustrating because there is no absolute truth to be found. Archaeology and history are full of unanswered questions. Who were the Sea People, really? Where was Troy and how does what really happened there compare to Homer’s epic? Did Akbar the Great decrease the taxes and social inequality for non-muslims because he was a benevolent and enlightened ruler, or was it a calculated policy simply meant to increase his absolute authority over the muslim scholars and increase his divine reputation?
We may not know the answers to these questions… we may never know, if the evidence is truly gone. We might think the answer is a simple fact, but have made a grossly incorrect assumption. But regardless of what we know or think we know, there is an absolute truth of what happened and why. In most cases we will probably never be capable of being 100% sure we know it, but the existence of that absolute truth gives even arm-chair archaeologists like myself something to desire and strive towards.
With a fictional world, there is no such guarantee. You can try to dig through the books or eagerly anticipate the next book hoping to find more details that will explain why an event happened or why a historical character acted a certain way, but not only might you not find an answer, there might not even be an answer. The only cause for things happening the way they did might simply be “because the author wanted it to happen that way”. That is absolutely necessary in a fiction narrative, of course — the author needs to shape their geography and history in whatever way is necessary to support the main story and the themes of their work. But unfortunately from the perspective of a reader exploring secondary details of the world, that possibility will always be waiting in the back of your mind every time you find a new detail that doesn’t seem to fit perfectly with the rest.
What’s so special about the Malazan universe that keeps you invested in exploring it?
Well… in most ways it isn’t special. Not really.
The Malazan universe is vast and has a great setup for exploration where its details are scattered around the series needing to be put together. But that’s not a unique concept, and I would be invested in exploring any universe with a similar structure.
That being said, clearly something captivated me about it more than most, as most of my graphing/mapping is just hand-drawn private projects that I don’t share, but in the Malazan case I shared it with the world. Chalk that up to the characters and themes demanding so much emotional investment, and the community being so welcoming.
Did you ever meet Steven Erikson in person? What’s his take on your maps and family trees?
Nope, I’ve never met him and as far as I know he’s never heard of any of my graphic projects, let alone seen them or commented on them.
Are there any other worlds where you spend so much time?
Yup! Lord of the Rings, Dresden Files, the Gentleman Bastard series, the Broken Empire, the Black Company, plus some anime and TV shows. Real-world-history-wise, it’s whatever catches my fancy at the time — some random examples would be Three Kingdoms China, the Mongol conquests, or Indian Ocean city-states. Obviously not all of that is cartography or fictional-history graphs, it can be all sorts of delving and graphical presentations — character relationship charts, food hierarchies… whatever feels interesting and worth presenting to me.
Liked that? Read other conversations about imagined universes at Inner Worlds.
