Another way of coming to understand Atlas Altera is by coming to understand how it slowly unravelled as a passion project of sorts.  I call myself Telamon Tabulicus out of convenience. I live a great life in Vancouver, but for the longest time, I have also had this weird hobby of making fictional maps, mostly by redrawing the borders of the real world. I mostly did this alone, in my spare time, and I did not connect with others online. 

My hobby started with the same premise as most cartography-obsessed youth do at a young age: historical what ifs. Not that I want to judge others, but reflecting on this now, I see that in those days, I was under a spell. I thought in terms of states and empires, and I employed the vainglory logic of outdated statecraft. Although alternate history enthusiasts are interested in the “underdogs” of history, they almost always use the logic of conquest and "lost glory.” Most of my early maps were Eurocentric, and I think partly this was informed by the things I learned in school.

One day, while envisioning a larger and lasting German New Guinea territory, my perspective shifted. Here I was trying to surface a viable alternate history scenario in a land where there is this immense cultural diversity, which, unlike where I am in the Pacific Northwest, hasn't even undergone as much erasure as done by states like Canada and the United States. So if I were to dream, why fantasize over more colonialism? More importantly, why dream for more similarity?

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I think this shift partly has to do with the fact that I started to go down rabbit holes on Wikipedia, leading me to amazing but obscure topics in anthropology, ethnobotany, and linguistics. I realized any fantasy or science fiction work ever produced was limited by what the authors could imagine, and their imaginations could only ever build from what they could know. In short, their worlds grew from all the ingenuity humanity has ever produced. The worlds of Frank Herbert, J.R.R. Tolkein, and George R.R. Martin draw from things as obscure as the initiation rites of the Sateré-Mawé of the Amazon to the grand mythologies buried in Anglo-Saxony philology.  

Slowly, I started to collect on my maps the buried histories and peoples and lands that I encountered in my readings. It was a sobering journey of discovery, both inspirational and disheartening. I was learning and relearning about our world, and in the process, I realized most of what I was learning about was either hovering or on its way to the past tense. I realized that we live in an uninspired world. Our backdrop has become uninspiring. It seems everywhere is a Georgia, a Springfield, and a Newport—recycled geographies of the colonial and now neoliberal imagination. Soon there will be no more difference to encounter.

Instead of giving up my hobby when pursuing my B.A. and then my M.A., I took on a more critical lens. I began to read academic articles outside my fields of specialization, especially for cutting-edge topics. My knowledge broadened, in a sense, while others were beginning to hone their interests. And I realize now that my maps—and all the notes I took to keep track of my development—is basically a diary of my discoveries, a convoluted memento device for retracing what I have encountered, from one new and unexpected learning after another.

It’s been ten or eleven years since I started making the maps that would grow into Altera. During the onset of the pandemic, I tried to wrap up this hobby and take a stab at new interests. I also had a real-life experience of true discovery when I unexpectedly saw the comet Neowise in the night sky on a camping trip in Desolation Sound. This factored into my motivations for printing my maps, but I’m not sure I can articulate why. I tidied up my work and got my main two world maps printed to mount on walls. That was an ordeal in itself, but the end result stunned not just myself, but my friends, family, and even the printer and framer. My partner encouraged me to share my project online, and that came to be the beginning of Atlas Altera as a formal project. 

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—T.T., Vancouver, 2022.