Chabon, of course, has come in for some scorn recently from Publisher's Weekly (In PW's review of his essay collection Maps And Legends) for being "bitter and defensive about his love for genre fiction such as mysteries and comic books. Serious writers, he says, cannot venture into these genres without losing credibility."

Without mentioning that mean review, we asked Chabon whether he feels he's faced any opprobrium for his love of science fiction and other genre fiction. He responded:

I don't actually feel like I've suffered from that that much... I'm coming at it now having proven myself, and I've established my credentials, and i don't get as much resistance as I might. But I certainly remember in my early 20s, I wanted to write SF of a kind back then. And I turned in a lot of these stories to the writers workshop at UC Irvine. I was met with, if not hostility then incomprehension. [People said things like] "I can't help you with that. I don't write science fiction. I don't read science fiction." That was part of what encouraged me to stop trying for a while and start doing something different... Part of what made me want to write [the novel] Mysteries Of Pittsburgh was I wanted to not waste my time with something [that couldn't get any meaningful feedback at Irvine]. I'm not really encountering that right now, but I certainly do see that other writers [encounter it]... And when HP Lovecraft was selected for the Library of America, so many of the reviews were supercilious, [with] raised eyebrows... A lot of the writers I most admire have suffered from it.

Other stuff Chabon addressed on Tuesday:

The status of his movies: Kavalier And Clay "is dead for now, nothing is happening, totally moribund, what we have here is a dead shark." The Yiddish Policemen's Union has had the "Coen brothers hired to write and direct and do all that... They have a reputation for working quickly and getting movies made, they don't have a reputation for getting a bunch of movies started and leaving them behind."

Why he rewrote Jewish history in Yiddish:

It's American history that I'm rewriting... I read about this at some point: Harold Ickes, father of the soon to be out-of-work Hillary [Clinton] adviser, [was] Secretary of the Interior in the Roosevelt Administration [and] was deeply concerned about the plight of the Jews. Since he was the Secretary of the Interior, he had this one thing he was in charge of, territories [including Alaska]. He had this plan of creating reservations [for the Jews]. You read about these little footnotes and might-have-beens ... and then I encountered this phrasebook called Say It In Yiddish. It says on the cover, "A Phrasebook for Travelers." [It's a] modern phrasebook dealing with all sorts of conveniences, dealing with travel agents and other things in Yiddish... [including some neologisms, like a new word for "downtown."] I just thought, "where would you go with this phrasebook? Where would you take a phrasebook like this?" The more I thought about it, the more I thought I would like to go there. I wish I could see it for myself.

Why is Yiddish Policemen's Union third person, present tense:

I wrote a 600 page version in first person past tense, [a] traditional Raymond Chandler version... I ended up with 600 pages of this loquacious Jew who wouldn't shut up and kept going off on tangents. He was a terrible detective narrator, he couldn't tell a story straight. "Just the facts" was not possible for him. I made the switch to third person, and that threw the whole novel open. I threw out that entire 600 page draft... I didn't want it to feel like a fairy land or a made-up place... I wanted it to feel like now, it's happening now... as soon as I switched to the present tense it felt more now. I felt more involved in what was happening, so maybe the readers would [as well].

Is it just a coincidence that Iranian president Ahmadjinedad said the Jews should go to Alaska, which is the backstory of Yiddish Policemen's Union?

Total coincidence... at the root of this outrageous statement and behind this novel [are the same idea]. What underlies the initial Ickes proposal [was] this idea that we need an empty place to put these people... Harold Ickes looked at his map and said there's 15,000, 20,000 natives living there, and 10,000 Europeans living in this vast territory [of Alaska], and he thought: great place to put these people nobody wants... The same kind of spatial logic is underlying what Ahmadjinedad is saying. He's trying to come up with what in his view is a rational inoffensive proposal: "You've got all this space up there, you love these people so much. Why don't you take them?" I don't think he's actually read this book.

In Yiddish, is the Hotel Zamenhof named after founder of Esperanto?

Yes. All the signage is in Esperanto... I imagine some pious soul, founder of the hotel, was an admirer of Esperanto... Zamenhof was originally a Yiddish speaker. Yiddish was originally called Jewish Esperanto [because it was a pan-European language.] It was a failed project. It was a failed utopia. It didn't work out, but it's still there. [That's] true of this place in my novel.

During the conference, Brady says two companies will be testing out their reality mining fu: Path Intelligence will be tracking people in sponsor sessions with their phones, and BlueBall will be tracking people with bluetooth. (OK how cool is it that there's something called BlueBall?) There will also be sessions on crowd simulation, virtual worlds, Eye-Fi (gadgets that know where you are), Earthscape's augmented reality display (with helicopter demo!), plus cool new world-mapping announcements from Google, Microsoft, Earthmine and Everyscape.

Can't make it down today? Stop by the Where Fair tonight. Lots of demos and friendly fun.

Where 2.0 [conference schedule]

Here's a recent satellite photo of the same area of Mars, taken by NASA in 1998.

And here's another, more colorful depiction of the same area, created in the late 1870s.

Channelling Martian Maps [BilbliOdyssey]

In Charles Cumming's story, inspired by John Buchan's old novel The 39 Steps, we follow a man, watching from above, in an omniscient satellite view.

Someone is tracking his movements through London, as well as his trips south and north across the country. At one point, for instance, our narrator wakes up on a beach, unsure of where he is or what the date might even be.

A loose piece of newspaper came cartwheeling along the sand and wrapped itself around my legs. I picked it up and looked at the date. Two days had passed since I had arrived in Edinburgh.
The newspaper was the Evening News. So I was still in Scotland.

But what are the possibilities for science fiction?

What seems immediately obvious, of course, is that the majority of the genre would be unmappable, so to speak, for no other reason than setting — the locations are all off-world or ship-bound or on the surface of some other moon, dimension, or planet. But that's exactly where part of the challenge would be.

For the moment, let's take San Francisco. You and your friends live in San Francisco and you write a whole new sequence of stories set somewhere in that peninsular city. There are trips through Chinatown and out to old, moldy houses in Outer Sunset; there are visits to gene labs and venture capital firms across the Bay; you go into empty skyscrapers at night and you find strange basements, where black machines and banks of over-heating hard drives whir quietly into the night... doing something — and that's the problem. Nobody knows, and you have to figure it out.

But then you map all this. You put your story into Google Maps, and it's like cartographically footnoting the story line.

It's not like this has never been done before, of course — but soon enough you've got a new map of your city. It's not marked by tourist sites or sites of historical importance.

It's a city re-mapped according to the science fiction that takes place within it.

Eventually, as a reader, you could even pick only those stories set along your morning bus route and read those, and only those, for two weeks; then move on to a different neighborhood; then add your own. You could have interactive urban texts, like something designed by area/code, growing and changing, like an urban sci-fi wiki made from aerial maps.

You move between chapters, between books - as if choosing the geography of your favorite stories might be, in and of itself, an act of publishing.

And then you notice the blind spots in the city, those spaces that, from a literary standpoint, have nothing occurring in them yet. So you write, and you add them to the map, or to any map - or you make a new map — or whatever. What's important is that this sub-genre of urban sci-fi maps continues to grow.

It extends far beyond San Francisco, then, to become a working database of every city and landscape on earth. You can spin around the planet and choose your sci-fi by geography. Going to Warsaw next month? Well, the following stories include a scene set in your hotel... Indeed, in your very hotel room. And you can add to them.

Even the poles of the planet are included, with their mysterious government research labs and their fissures of ice and their weird, conspiratorial plot lines waiting to happen. You can go into the cold with Dan Simmons, say, and track that ship's passage by satellite.

Or maybe all of that is a bit cheesy. Maybe that sounds too much like the origins of D&D, replayed all over again in an era of satellite mapping. Or it sounds like some bad dot-com fantasy, where handheld devices will give us access to things we've never experience before, an ability to navigate the city anew and... thus do something or other to raise a company's stock prices.

So let's pull back a bit, quickly, and restart the idea - and say: well, then, instead, let's develop a new overlay for Google Maps and populate it entirely with events from science fiction. Books, films, song lyrics.

For instance, the "unstable" streets that appear and disappear in China Miéville's short story "Reports of Certain Events in London" are suddenly available for mapping; you can follow their speculative routes, and even plan day trips around them, hiking through the nonexistent side streets of the city.

Or you go to Google Maps one day, because you're planning a trip to Japan or to San Francisco, and you click on "Satellite" view - and then on "William Gibson," a new visualization option. It's brought to you by a partnership between Putnam and Google Maps. So you click on "William Gibson" and a whole informational layer of Gibsonian detail appears. Gibson mentioned this street, and this bridge, and this hotel room - and here it is on a map for you to follow.

Within six months, you can click on "Alfred Hitchcock," "Ray Bradbury," and "H.P. Lovecraft" to see how their films and stories map out. It's the becoming-literary of Google Maps.

After all, you could do the same thing for TV and film - we're not limited to books.

This, you learn, is where the UFO was excavated in Quatermass and the Pit, or where the rage virus broke out in 28 Days Later, or where Dracula's tomb was supposedly found in the absurd film Blade: Trinity.

The Google Maps Guide to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The Google Maps Guide to the Fiction of J.G. Ballard.

In fact, I'm reminded of those awesome world maps from Judge Dredd.

Now, though, the idea is that we'd key all that stuff into Google Maps, or into Google Earth, or into whatever, and we'd add some more details - and, soon enough, you could find, say, the offshore prison from John Woo's Face/Off, perfectly located right there on the map. Or you can zoom in and follow the future four-part division of England in Rupert Thomson's under-appreciated novel Divided Kingdom. Or, for that matter, you could even map out the house and it surrounding landscape from the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

It doesn't matter what you map, in other words; what matters is simply that we explore, even just casually, the literary/sci-fi potential of online mapping. Why? Because it sounds fun. And if you don't think it sounds fun, don't do it.

But everyone loves maps. How else could they get away with publishing things like The Maps of Tolkien's Middle Earth or even The Atlas of Middle Earth? Because people like maps.

Or how about dashboard navigation systems in cars? Here, Tor Books could team up with Cadillac to give you a brand new driving experience: you're in New York, driving a Cadillac, and so you hit the "Urban Sci-Fi" navigational option on the dashboard screen - and you immediately find yourself driving through the futuristic literature of New York, with key sites mapped or flagged. It's science fiction as a new template for urban tourism. You're following the action of I Am Legend, or tracing out the flood line and tidal wave from The Day After Tomorrow.

In other words, let's do for science fiction what those maps do for J.R.R. Tolkien.

Let's develop Google Maps of Sci-Fi.

Star Wars Galaxy Map [20/20 Filmsight]

This is a story that requires few words to tell. Here's a larger map of the region. UN Satellites Photograph Human Exodus [War and Health]

Sanderson hopes that pictures like this, and one of Tribeca below, will inspire people to consider how much impact they've had on the natural environment — and perhaps give them pause when they think about intervening in it further.

According to Treehugger's Bonnie Hulkower, who recently saw Sanderson give a talk about his work:

Sanderson has been working on the Mannahatta Project for the last decade. He first became fascinated with his adopted city after he accepted a position here with the Wildlife Conservation Society, and began to study old maps. One map in particular, an 18th-century British Headquarters map, fascinated him. The map, made for British officers defending the island, details the contours of the island's topography, swamp, and river locations. Sanderson has been using this British map, Randel's Farm Maps, and a GPS system to create his own contour map of what Manhattan looked like in 1609, when Henry Hudson and his crew sailed into New York Harbor and the island was inhabited only by the Lenape. He has been able to produce an expansive vision of Mannahatta's ecologic richness through a computer program he created, named "Muir webs," after the famous naturalist John Muir.

Sanderson is using his program to map what would have existed on each city block in Mannahatta 400 years ago. The program works through a process of matching animals to their habitats and vice-versa. By knowing that a certain animal species existed in an area of Manhattan and knowing what that animal ate, Sanderson can predict through the Muir webs program what plants or soils would have been there as well, or conversely can use knowledge of plants and soils to discover what animals would have found a habitat in any specific area.

Ecologist Maps Manhattan of 400 Years Ago [Treehugger]

Mapping Manhatta Slideshow [New Yorker]

Wild animals are the most likely bearers of the next plague — 60% of epidemics are from "zoonoses," diseases that jump from animals to humans living in close proximity. The more that human populations spread into previously-uninhabited areas, the more likely we are to rub up against some viruses that the local fauna are resistant to, while we are not.

According to the Earth Institute at Columbia University:

In the new study, researchers from four institutions analyzed 335 emerging diseases from 1940 to 2004, then converted the results into maps correlated with human population density, population changes, latitude, rainfall and wildlife biodiversity. They showed that disease emergences have roughly quadrupled over the past 50 years. Some 60% of the diseases traveled from animals to humans (such diseases are called zoonoses) and the majority of those came from wild creatures. With data corrected for lesser surveillance done in poorer countries, "hot spots" jump out in areas spanning sub-Saharan Africa, India and China; smaller spots appear in Europe, and North and South America.

"We are crowding wildlife into ever-smaller areas, and human population is increasing," said coauthor Marc Levy, a global-change expert at the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), an affiliate of Columbia University's Earth Institute. "The meeting of these two things is a recipe for something crossing over." The main sources are mammals. Some pathogens may be picked up by hunting or accidental contact; others, such as Malaysia's Nipah virus, go from wildlife to livestock, then to people. Humans have evolved no resistance to zoonoses, so the diseases can be extraordinarily lethal.

Scientists Make First Map of Emerging Disease Hotspots [Earth Institute]