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9781925377323

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A definitive account of a cultural mirage dreamt up by mapmakers over centuries. Like a cartographer of old, Avan Judd Stallard plots in fascinating detail the shifting sands of an imagined geography. Myth and science are intriguingly entangled in this panoramic history of the mapping of the world. Riddled with humour and insight, Antipodes is worthy of the cartographers and explorers whom the author both debunks and admires. -- Martin Thomas

This remarkable book is about an imaginary place: Terra Australis Incognita, the Unknown Southern Land. Avan Judd Stallard tells the story of a geographical obsession and how it developed in the Western imagination. He shows how imagined geography or cosmography and actual geography met and interacted, and just how long it took empirical fact to win out over wishful thinking. People wanted the southern continent to be there so badly that they simply bent and twisted the existing facts until they fitted in with the prevailing cosmography. It was drawn on maps as if it existed and merely needed to be found. Explorers went looking for it as if it were an established fact. This is an informative and entertaining mixture of geography, history and epistemology, at once academically rigorous and approachable. It is also about the history of ideas and how ideas interact with reality. It is lavishly illustrated with numerous wonderful and obscure maps, and will appeal to readers with an interest in geography and old maps, as much as those fascinated by the history of exploration and the great journeys of discovery. This book is a visual and intellectual feast. --Dave Martus, freelance writer and former bookseller

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Avan Judd Stallard is an historian, writer of fiction, and editor, based in Wimbledon, United Kingdom. As an historian he is concerned with both the messy detail of what happened in the past and with how scholars “create” history. Broad interests in philosophy, psychology, biological sciences, and philology are underpinned by an abiding curiosity about method and epistemology—how we get to knowledge and what we purport to do with it. Stallard sees great benefit in big picture history and the synthesis of existing corpuses of knowledge and is a proponent of greater consilience between the sciences and humanities. He lives with his wife, and dog Javier.

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