THE TARTARIAN DANGER --- BOOK FOUR: WORLD BEYOND MAP

BEYOND THE EDGE OF THE KNOWN WORLD The Wizard spread an old map across the laboratory table. It was beautiful. Rivers curled through continents. Mountain ranges rose like wrinkles across faded paper. Kingdoms occupied territories whose names had long since changed. Coastlines wandered between accuracy and imagination. And in the less certain waters, the cartographer had occasionally placed a sea monster. The Wizard smiled. Apparently, when the old mapmakers did not know what was somewhere, they occasionally drew something with teeth. Modern civilization had developed more sophisticated methods. It usually wrote: DATA UNAVAILABLE. The Wizard was not entirely certain which approach was more honest. He looked again at the map. This was where Book Four of The Tartarian Danger would begin. >WHAT BOOK ONE ASKED Book One began with Tartaria itself. Old maps. Magnificent buildings. Buried windows. World's fairs. Mud floods. Burned cities. Melted stone. Giant trees. Giants. Dragons. Fairies. Ant People. Inner Earth. The Younger Dryas. Ancient floods. Civilizational resets. The Wizard had deliberately refused to begin with either belief or ridicule. Instead, he had established a rule: When two explanations are separated by an ocean, the first thing to do is not pick a shore. The first thing to do is build a boat. Some claims survived investigation better than others. Some became ordinary history viewed from an unfamiliar angle. Some remained legitimate mysteries. Some became interesting hypotheses. Others could not presently survive the Evidence Meter. But Book One established the central principle of the entire series: Wonder does not need protection from measurement. Wonder needs instruments. The Wizard would neither dismiss the strange merely because it was strange nor accept it merely because it was exciting. He would investigate it.