If Lud is NYC, where is Dis?

**Robert Gray** · March 30th, 2009

I recall him saying it "looked" like the GW bridge too. That isn't the same as being the GW bridge. If it had been, I'm sure Eddie Dean would have recognized it without fail and Lud being "New York" would have been a topic of conversation. If I were to go by the geography (and I do not have the books in front of me), I would guess that Roland chases the man in black across the great desert (fly over country) of the U.S. and hits the absolute worst of it as one would expect in our world. The land right before the mountains leading to the Pacific are hard. He goes across the desert, over the mountains, north along the beach for a long time. Eventually the beach comes to an end as he and his new Gunslingers enter forest enroute to the lands which will eventually lead them to Lud. While the geography of Roland's world no longer makes sense, I do not think it twisted them back to the east coast. I think it far more likely that Lud is some Northern Californian city or further inland to some Imperial version of a city in Nevada. It is difficult to tell really. There is no certainty that any of the geography matches the U.S. closely.

**wally wonder** · March 30th, 2009

toward the end of the waste lands (i think) there's that route map, lud on one end, candleton, rilea, the falls of the hounds, dasherville, and the last leg, to topeka. if you lay that on a map of the usa (and there's a certain amount of hubris doing so, no, akin to assuming the president is the antichrist, 'nother story, but only americans could be so arrogant to assume the antichrist would show up here) where was i, oh yeah, the route map.

lud kinda corresponds to las vegas, a fictionalized, another world las vegas, but kinda makes sense, given the stand, and that the good folk who knew how to work the machines went boom. candleton? dunno, grand forks maybe.

north of topeka we got sturgis, north dakota and ain't that a hoot, what with the harleys that roll into sturgis every year, i 'spose some of the locals would look at that as the coming of the wolves. but with everything twisted and lengthening, didn't roland say something about a certain distance taking him a looooong time to cross, as if the distance was increasing as he travelled?

good question, though. it's fun to speculate, shoot ideas off one another.

**Shasta** · March 31st, 2009

I think it's very important to realize that Roland's world is not our world. Just like the Topeka in DT4 is not our Topeka. Jake, Eddie, and Suzannah's world may not even be the same. There may be no equivalent cities in Roland's world because in his world many different things have happened. Maybe some sort of man-caused weather catastrophe happened and Hawaii is where Roland meets the man in black because that's where the new west coast is. (That would actually be pretty cool.)