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Veronica Roth is out to change how you see the world. Literally. 

In her latest novel, adult dystopia Seek the Traitor's Son, Roth presents a vision of future Earth ravaged by a super-powerful (and supernatural) plague called the Fever, which decimates the population and, in some cases, brings part of that population back. But Roth's focus wasn't only one the citizens of that future Earth, it was on the actual geography they inhabit, a geography that many of our current, real-world Earthlings get wrong, thanks to a flawed map dating back to the 1500s.

Or as you may know it, the Mercator projection. 

"The Mercator projection is bullshit!" Roth told Popverse during a book tour interview, but that was hardly the first time the Divergent author has railed against what most people think of as the true size of each continent on the globe; as conveyed in the image below:

"The Mercator projection was created in 1569," Roth previously explained in a Threads post, "And it was useful for navigation, basically because of the straight lines. But the problem with the Mercator is how it distorts the sizes of land masses, particularly around the poles."

Roth pointed out that, despite what you see above, the entire country of Greenland could very nearly fit within the Continental United States. With errors like that in mind, Roth had a very specific idea of how to approach her future Earth in Seek the Traitor's Son, a map of which is included in every physical copy of the novel.

"I approached the map artist Virginia Allyn with a proposal," Roth told Popverse in our interview, "But I had very specific ideas of how the map should be presented. [...] Our projection is Earth as a circle, and you can see it from from a different angle. It completely plays with your brain because you don't recognize the shapes of the continents when they're rotated."

For proof of what Roth means, reader, just look to the header image of this article, where Allyn's vision of Roth's Earth is displayed.

"What I liked about it," Roth concluded, "Is that it makes it so that it could be entirely a fantasy world, or you can be a puzzle solver and read it as a dystopian reader and try and figure out what are the names you know of these places."

That's pretty cool, Veronica, and just a tad ironic that the Earth of your fictional dystopia is, in reality, more Earthly than the one in all of our heads.

Seek the Traitor's Son is available now in your favorite bookstore, and as an audiobook from Macmillan Audio. Fans of Roth's dystopian works can also check out the audiobook on Spotify, whose new Page Match feature allows for a seamless transition between audio and physical storytelling. Happy reading!

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