If you meet a person who reads novels, and who has mentioned to you that some of those novels include a map, consider mentioning to to that person that they can read a study about the question of why there are or are not maps in some novels. The study is:
“Castles, Battlefields, and Continents: A Dataset of Maps from Literature,” Axel Bax, David Mimno, and Matthew Wilkens, Anthology of Computers and the Humanities, vol. 3, 2025, pp. 297-311. The authors, at Cornell University, explain:
“Maps are not common in novels. It is not obvious that they are necessary at all. Yet maps do appear in some novels. Why and to what ends? To answer these questions, scholars need a large collection of novels that contain maps. We develop a computational system to identify maps from page images and apply it to a large historical corpus of fiction.”
[NOTE: If you yourself do not read novels, and you are not sure what a novel is, but you do not mind reading, you can read any of many people’s many attempts to explain what a novel is.]
[NOTE: If you do are not sure what a corpus is, you can go try to look that up on your own.]