—Commander Chakotay, VOY, “Year of Hell”
Maps are not simply pictures or representations of reality. To map something requires both an author and a perceived audience, the people who will be using the map. To map something that exists in real space and real time also requires distortion and choice. One cannot transfer the three-dimensional earth onto a two-dimensional piece of paper, for example, or even miniaturize the dimensions of the earth into a usable globe, without necessarily misrepresenting the earth’s actual measurements. Moreover, real space is always in flux and cluttered with objects that would overcomplicate most maps of static space. Over the past few decades, especially with their increasing reliance on satellite technology, cartographers have been able to draw incredibly accurate maps, but they are still drawn from a particular perspective and are presented to the map’s viewers through an imperfect medium (be it paper, a globe, or a screen).
This has led some cartographic theorists to argue that the primary function of a map is, first and foremost, to propose a particular understanding of space to the viewer.3 Because maps require distortion, as noted in the previous paragraph, a cartographer must carefully decide what aspects of the map he or she will alter. This proposition can then be rejected or accepted (or hotly disputed!) by various map users. While it can be used to further scientific endeavors, aid in serious geographic study, and help us to understand the world around us, cartography is more a form of literature than a scientific undertaking. Cartography describes a mapmaker’s understanding of his or her space more than the space itself. A brief history of cartography’s development, especially in its relationship with astronomy and star charts, will make this clearer and help tease out the parallels between mapmaking and the Star Trek series.
The ancient Romans, Greeks, and Babylonians were among the first to begin creating maps. The mathematical calculations for measuring the earth and the star catalogues produced by Ptolemy of Alexandria (ca. 90–168) became, in fact, the most authoritative guides to mapping “the heavens” during the medieval and Renaissance periods. From the twelfth century onward, both Christian and Islamic cartographers used Ptolemaic astronomy to reinforce their respective belief systems.4 The ability to transform Ptolemy’s work into maps, however, eluded scholars until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The first example historians can point to of a modern star map—that is, a depiction of stars within a measurable coordinate framework—is included in a Vienna manuscript titled De Composicione Sphere Solide (ca. 1440).5 The first star map to actually be published was a 1515 print of “more than 1,000 stars of the constellations according to Ptolemy’s star catalogue” produced by Johann Stabius, Conrad Heinfogel, and Albrecht Durer.6 But how do these developments relate to maritime navigation—the type of astronomical observation Commander Chakotay refers to in the epigraph at the beginning of this section?
As Chakotay notes, seafaring explorers had been using the stars to navigate well before either the stars or the seas were mapped. By the fourteenth century, at the latest, these explorers were creating charts of the seas (known as “portolan charts”) from descriptive guides compiled in order to accumulate and summarize the “knowledge of generations of sailors.”7 Once combined with the mariner’s compass, early cartographers began drawing rhumb lines on their portolan charts. These lines had the ability to show a ship’s navigator the most advantageous straight-shot route from one point on the chart to another. The rhumb lines were crisscrossed in massive networks so that the navigator could set his ship’s heading relative to true north and follow one or more of the lines to a chosen location.8
By the sixteenth century, the German mathematician Gerardus Mercator had developed a method with which to formulaically depict rhumb lines onto two-dimensional surfaces with a great deal more accuracy than earlier portolan charts had done.9 This supported an expansion of European maritime exploration that eventually contributed to what most historians hail as the “Age of Discovery,” or the era in which Europeans encountered the majority of the earth’s geography. Combined with the advances in cartographic astronomy discussed above, humans could begin to not only comprehensively map the Earth but also the stars. By the late sixteenth century, the Dutch and other European nation-states had completed their Ptolemaic star maps and began charting the skies of the southern hemisphere—skies that Ptolemy had never seen.10 In doing so, these Europeans had the opportunity to create their own Eurocentric constellations with which they could complement their Eurocentric maps of the New World.
Most people can likely describe early modern maps of the Old and New Worlds. They typically include merpeople, giant fish, and scary-looking monsters. The edges of continents and various territories are crosshatched because the cartographer could not exactly pinpoint where the borders are. Many of these maps are saturated with religious symbols or images of national grandeur, depending on the author. By the seventeenth century, however, a distinct shift occurred in cartographic development from the ornate and beautifully decorated maps of the medieval, Renaissance, and early modern periods to what historians in cartography have identified as “Plain Style.”11
As the geographer Dalia Varanka notes, the Plain Style movement is not unique to cartography. In fact, its origins are bound up with the other changes in scientific study associated with seventeenth-century English theorists such as Francis Bacon and John Locke. According to such thinkers, when discussing topics where “truth and knowledge were concerned,” one ought to avoid “oratory, metaphors, emotive statements, and . . . symbolic or rhetorical style.”12 “Manliness,” in this way, began to be “contrasted to ornament and finery, which were considered feminine and juvenile, and morally wrong.”13 Plain Style—in both prose and cartography—sought objectivity, and in doing so unabashedly attempted to create (and draw) a world in which truth and masculinity were one and the same. Rather than impose God onto the map, these “enlightened” mapmakers would instead adopt their god’s entire perspective—a “god’s eye” view from nowhere that instilled within the onlooker a sense of objectivity, reality, and spatial certainty (a view that still exists today in the form of digitized weather maps, cloudless satellite images, and Google Earth).
In order to create increasingly scientific maps, cartographers needed to be able to more accurately pinpoint particular places on the Earth’s surface. This required an emphasis on the development of latitude and longitude. In seventeenth-century France, a cartographer named Jean Picard (a coincidence?) helped to accurately map a survey of his nation-state by triangulating his position in relation to the angle of the sun (latitude) and by observing the eclipses of Jupiter’s moons and then comparing them with tables showing the local time elsewhere in France (longitude). Picard’s meticulous surveying skills were indispensable to what eventually became the first comprehensive topographic map of any modern state.14
Longitude was particularly difficult to calculate while at sea. Maritime explorers, unable to accurately track Jupiter’s moons on an ever-bobbing ship, had a difficult time estimating where their ship was in relation to where they had come from or where they wanted to go. In an effort to establish their place on the sea, crewmen were forced to keep incredibly detailed readings of both their compass bearings and their speed. The most popular way of measuring maritime speed well into the eighteenth century was to use a logline. The logline consisted of a piece of wood attached to a ship with a rope. A sailor would drop the piece of wood into the water, wait for the line to go taut, and then pull it back in. This would be repeated throughout the voyage and timed with an hourglass. The amount of time each logline took to go taut was recorded in a book, usually referred to as a “log.”15 Our Star Trek captains and commanders owe a great deal, indeed, to their maritime predecessors. Where would they (and where would we) be without the “captain’s log”?
A History of Star Trek’s Cartography
Chekov: The area was first mapped by the famous Russian astronomer Ivan Berkov almost two hundred . . .
; Kirk: John Birck.
Chekov: Birck, sir? I don’t think so . . . I’m sure it was . . .
Spock: John Birck was the chief astronomer at the Royal Academy in Old Britain at the time.
Kirk: Is the rest of your history that faulty, ensign?
—TOS, “The Trouble with Tribbles”
Star Trek has its own history of cartography—a futuristic extension of our own. While maps are used in every version of Star Trek’s story line, they continue to change and develop over time. The origin of stellar cartography is somewhat murky, as is the use of early extraorbital mapping methods. Terms such as quadrant and sector are frequently used, but they are rarely explained in Star Trek. Moreover, these terms sometimes seem arbitrary, referring to both the four major quadrants (Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta) of the galaxy and smaller regions of outer space within those quadrants.16 While various cultures within the galaxy have their own mapping methods and maps, the United Federation of Planets adopts this quadrant-mapping style by the twenty-third century (TNG, “The Price”).
During the early twenty-second century—an era before the Federation, described in the series Enterprise—United Earth is almost entirely dependent on its own maps of the galaxy. This proves to be somewhat frustrating as the crew of the Enterprise quickly discovers the importance of translating the mapped space of other species into terms that they can understand. When attempting to uncover the cause of a Xindi ship’s destruction, for example, Captain Jonathan Archer is forced to spend “half the night” working to “figure out how [the Xindi] map coordinates” so that he can track the ship’s course prior to its demise (ENT, “Extinction”). Having the knowledge of how other species map (or, that is, what they do not map) also comes in handy for the Enterprise, which readily exploits unmapped zones for hiding (see, for example, the region of Klach D’Kel Brakt in ENT, “The Augments”).
When actually projecting maps for study and exploration, the crew of the Enterprise (and presumably United Earth’s early stellar cartographers) prefer gridded maps, both as tools of navigation (ENT, “The Catwalk”) and detailed topographic study (ENT, “The Forge”). While the issue of mapping outer space is not explicitly dealt with in the twenty-third century, it can be assumed that gridded topographic maps are still the rage, as Captain Kirk and his crew encounter similar maps throughout the galaxy (see TOS, “A Taste of Armageddon”) and have access to a plethora of such maps in the library of the Enterprise’s computer (TOS, “The Cage”). The maps and methods used in these two time periods are largely recognizable to us as obvious futurist extensions of our contemporary understanding of cartography. Archer and Kirk make maps like we make maps—uninfluenced by radically different contexts and cultures. But this begins to change by the twenty-fourth century.
The three Star Trek series (The Next Generation, Voyager, and Deep Space Nine) that take place (barring any time travel) during the 2300s include much more on cartographic methods and production than their predecessors. In some ways, this seems unavoidable: borders and maps obviously matter more to the Federation as its members discover new cultures and races while colonizing and exploring outer space. Interacting with the ways these other groups map also has an impact on how the Federation draws its lines and territory. The voyages of Captain Picard’s USS Enterprise make this clear: they are almost always mapping something. In fact, mapping becomes so important by this time period that the discipline enjoys its own lab on the ship. By 2371, this initial stellar cartography lab is expanded into a massive, interactive mapping center (see Generations).
Even before this expansion, though, the small cartography lab is given a great deal of priority. In one episode of Next Generation (“Lessons”), Captain Picard is perturbed by a series of blackouts caused by the cartography department’s request for most nonessential power to be diverted to their lab. When he investigates, Picard not only discovers just how much energy it takes to “construct a mathematical model of an emerging star system” but is also smitten by one of the Enterprise’s brilliant and attractive stellar scientists—Lt. Nella Daren. When Picard encounters her, Daren is working on her project with a kind of globe. The globe itself is smooth, solid colored, and seemingly blank, but it is encompassed within a gridded dome spattered with small, starlike lights. Presumably, this is a tool for mapping stars—a tool (perhaps the first mapmaking tool within the Star Trek series) so futuristic that we are fairly unfamiliar with it. Unlike the maps of Enterprise and Star Trek, the interstellar maps made in this lab seem to be produced with fairly foreign technology. While Daren is eventually transferred from the Enterprise, the work of her cartography lab continues, playing an important role in several Next Generation episodes.
Also set in the twenty-fourth century, the Voyager and Deep Space Nine series offer two different examples of cartographic extremes. Voyager showcases an incredibly lost ship—transported seventy thousand light-years from Federation territory—deep in unknown and unmapped space. While their quest to get back home brings them into regular contact and interaction with the Borg, the crew of the Voyager is also exposed to many other cultures, some of which are a great deal less technologically savvy than the Federation. Nonetheless, maps are used as a universally explanatory tool. In the episode “Natural Law,” Commander Chakotay and Seven of Nine crash a shuttle on the planet Ledos while sightseeing. They quickly encounter and befriend a race of primitive humanoids, the Ventu, with whom they communicate on several occasions through hand-drawn maps traced in the dirt. As implausible as it might be to assume that (literally) alien cultures abstractly conceptualize space in the same way humans do (especially considering the anthropological evidence suggesting that this is not even the case among all humans), these instances of improvised mapmaking indicate a continued emphasis on self-orientation and cartography within the ranks of the Federation.17 In fact, the vast majority of the Voyager’s crew presumably took courses in stellar cartography at “the Academy” (VOY, “Lifesigns”). For explorers stuck in strange new space, mapmaking skills undoubtedly come in handy.
Yet even those Federation officers assigned to one place are deeply interested in their star maps, which brings us to our other cartographic extreme: mapping conflict. In 1949 John K. Wright, the International Geographical Union president on the Committee of Cartography, was inspired by the events of World War II to observe that “modern war is the most powerful of all stimulants to human mobility.”18 Such military “stimulation” usually leads to a massive increase in the production of maps. Between 1941 and 1945, for example, the U.S. military created and disseminated over five million maps—a previously unfathomable number.19 It should come as no surprise then that while the Deep Space Nine starbase rarely directly participates in exploration, its involvement with territorial conflict and war drives its interest in borders and maps.
Indeed, it is during those episodes that emphasize peace talks or war strategy that the crew most regularly relies on its maps. Seemingly, the Federation’s most powerful enemy in Deep Space Nine, the Dominion, also uses—or at least understands—maps. During one round of peace negotiations, the Dominion offers a territorial compromise by showing its Federation counterparts maps of a disputed border “before” and “after” hostilities broke out (DS9, “Statistical Probabilities”). Similarly, typical stellar cartography maps are used for “strategic” purposes in several Deep Space Nine episodes (“A Time to Stand,” “When It Rains . . .” “The Storyteller”), as is the occasional hand-drawn map (“Rocks and Shoals”).
This should not lead us to believe that all mapping methods are the same, however. The Bajorans of the twenty-fourth century, for example, use a radically different method of cartography to map the topography of Bajor—a method seemingly difficult to translate for humans (DS9, “The Circle”). Nevertheless, there is clearly some common standard of stellar cartography by which, at the very least, Alpha Quadrant alliances (namely, the Federation and the Dominion) can present maps to one another.
These new maps and
approaches to cartography apply only to outer space in Star Trek, however. On a planet’s surface, the old “tried-and-true” technology of land surveying for building construction apparently still involves the same methods of triangulation and level measuring in the twenty-fourth century that we use today in the twenty-first century (TNG, “Silicon Avatar”). Besides this absence of change, we never really find out how contact with other humanoid species affects mapmaking on Earth and other M-class planets.
Über-mapping the Unimatrix: The Borg Shift
“Borg do not have families. They have unimatrixes.”
—Seven of Nine, VOY, “Someone to Watch over Me”
The most radical shift in Federation mapmaking occurs sometime between the years 2374 and 2378, while the USS Voyager is lost deep in the Delta Quadrant. Coming into contact with new cultures gives the Voyager crew a chance to share their hand-drawn-mapping techniques with less technologically advanced humanoids. On several occasions, however, the stellar cartographers aboard the Voyager seem to be absolutely flabbergasted by the kinds of advanced mapping producers and information they discover.
When the character Quinn, of the quasi-omniscient Q Continuum, temporarily joins the crew, Commander Chakotay is eager to assign him to the department of stellar cartography. As Captain Janeway notes, “We could shut down stellar cartography with all the knowledge he’d bring to the job” (VOY, “Death Wish”). By that same token, in 2372 a Voyager shuttle manages to reach the elusive warp ten velocity. In doing so, it theoretically reaches “infinite velocity,” and the shuttle potentially occupies “every point in the universe simultaneously.” This produces over five billion gigaquads of data, which is immediately sent to the stellar cartography department for analysis and incorporation into preexisting star charts and maps (VOY, “Threshold”).
Star Trek and History Page 26