Geofictician Blog

My low-effort bragpost for this week was created around 6 years ago. It is a bit more dystopian than usual. For the most part, my geofictions are neither dystopian nor utopian – rather, they just represent an alternate reality which is much like our own, full of both good and bad. This was an effort to create something a bit darker. It’s a refugee camp, in a poorly-defined (quite incomplete) war-torn country with serious social problems and poverty and a negligent government. Perhaps somewhat inspired by Somalia or 1970’s southeast Asia.

The Irhoborin refugee camp is vast: it has a population of tens of thousands, all in these tents in grids with additional tens of thousands in improvised shacks between and among and surrounding the gridded tent areas. I actually wrote up a fairly detailed “lore” for this place, at one time, and have an archived copy of it here.

Here’s a screenshot of the location.

The link to the slippy map is here: https://opengeofiction.net/#map=15/-15.1153/146.7819&layers=B

My low-effort bragpost for this week is not the usual suspects, but rather a whole ‘nother planet: Rahet. I think I’ve written before about Rahet, but it’s been a few years, maybe.

Rahet is a “slippy map” planet, on the OSM platform, just like Ogieff (opengeofiction.net) or Arhet (arhet.rent-a-planet.com). For a long time, Rahet was languishing with a moribund render and no api server. But I recently got both up and running again such that it’s just as easy to edit and update the Rahet map as it is for those other planets. Unlike those other planets, though, Rahet is just mine – I haven’t opened it up to other mappers and I don’t intend to. It’s meant to be the setting for a sci-fi novel that I occasionally work on, started some 30 years ago. The map is pretty spare – filling a whole planet is of course utterly impossible.

Here’s a screenshot of the planet.

The link to the slippy map is here: https://rahet.rent-a-planet.com/#map=3/-12.04/-21.97&layers=R