JF Ptak Science Books Post 1776 [Part of the Series on Blank, Empty and Missing Things.]
Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726, amended 1735), or Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of several Ships, is a great work that spills over into many different categories, being a forerunner to the modern novel, a sort-of children’s book that was for adults, as prototype of science fiction story, and of course a brilliant satire. The satiric nature of the book is pervasive and extremely visible, but yet the whole thing works splendidly, exposing and investigating the nature of corruption (of mind/soul), perception, value, the naming of things, the nature of judgment, and, of course, the soul of political intrigue.
Everyone remembers the voyage of Gulliver to Lilliput, but there were other voyages as well, the book including: "A Voyage to Lilliput (May 4, 1699 — April 13, 1702)"; "A Voyage to Brobdingnag (June 20, 1702 — June 3, 1706)"; "A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Glubbdubdrib, Luggnagg and Japan (August 5, 1706 — April 16, 1710)" and "A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms (September 7, 1710 – December 5, 1715)". But what I’d like to concentrate on here is the emptiness of the space around the empty non-existent (sorry) islands of Lilliput and Blefusco, which I think fits as a subcategory in this blog’s continuing series of posts on empty and blank spaces. The islands are well away from just about everything, being unfindable only if you’re a youngish sea captain blown off course, far to the south of remote and removed Sumatra.
[Map of Atlantis, from Athanaseus Kircher's Mundus Subterraneus, 1669, with north situated at the bottom of the map, as indicated by the arrow. It is doubtful that anyone believed Atlantis could have been the size of half of the Atlantic Ocean, as we see above; but if we look at teh relation in size of Spain to Atlantis the possibility for that size grows brighter.]
Even maps of Atlantis seem to make that place less removed than Lilliput, and there's more detail to the interior of that island than Swift's almost-entirely blank pair. But Lilliput, as an imaginary place, looks particularly blank in a sea of blank, punctuated by two lonely little boats. There's just an awful lot of blank, white space in this map...
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