Posts about history

Jul292011

Our Ancestors Were Us, but They Also Weren’t


“The past is a foreign country.” It’s a quote many of my History professors were fond of. What they meant of course is that the culture differences between us and say, the ancient Romans, are vast. Religious practices, sexual mores, familial relationships all might see familiar, but there’s a danger in ascribing modern perspectives to people who lived thousands or hundreds of years ago.

While accepting the differences, it’s also important to remember that they had the same minds, the same capacity for belief and treachery, love, and betrayal.

I’ve been a long time listener of Mike Duncan’s History of Rome podcast. It’s been a great way to remember details I’ve forgotten since my History degree and for filling in many blank spots. The audio book recommendations, couched in a plug for Audible.com, given at the start of each show have really rounded out my library. A recent fiction recommendation was the Silver Pigs by Lindsey Davis, a Roman noir novel.

Marcus Didius Falco literally collides with a fresh case in the Forum. The girl he saves from a pair of thugs knows far less than the full plot, but Falco is soon protecting the lady while avoiding his landlord, an aggressive Aedile, and his overbearing mother. Despite her innocence, the girl is tangled up in a crime whose reach crosses the Roman empire.

Davis does a fun job of weaving the ancient with more modern detective conventions. Falco has a big case to solve, and the job will take him from Rome’s seedier districts to the emperor’s palace and across the sea to Britain, a place he hoped to never see again.

Written in 1989, the Silver Pigs is a bit older, but you can do far worse in a detective story. There’s a bittersweet flavor to the ending that I really enjoyed, and if I happened to learn a bit about ancient history, well, that’s just a bonus.

Apr262011

The Pitfall of History


Your town, your family, your country: these all have a greater history than you’re aware of, than you can be aware of. Even the most learned scholar couldn’t uncover it all. Even in America, where our cities are striplings compared those of Europe, there is a far deeper past than what we can unearth. We see it in snapshots and glimpses, bits, really. The larger portrait of the past is simply lost to us. The present occupies its space, bumps up against it, paves it over. Recovering the past might be possible, but at the loss of the present and the history we’re currently writing together.

After thinking a lot about backstories, I turned my attention to fantastic history: the background of the worlds we write in, and I find it a bigger pitfall than even character backstory. There is so much background to a place, so much a writer could convey about the kingdom or empire where events are occurring. How much should they bring into a story? What’s the cut-off point for history and tangents? When we work at the epic level, the massive cycle spanning continents, dynasties, and centuries, the danger widens. So often a series can spin out of control. We end up spending hundreds of pages with characters the readers aren’t as invested in, merely because we can; and this sort of over-writing can keep a new author from publishing.

Older fantasy, like Tolkien, reads a lot like good history. Events transpire in the present, but the ancient past lurks around every corner. At some point fantasy became more action oriented, and I think this is a positive change in the genre. When comparing a more detailed book, like Tolkien, with a more action-oriented one, say Mistborn, there’s no doubt which one is more concerned with telling an entertaining story. Not that Tolkien isn’t entertaining, or even a page-turner, but the writing style is so far apart that you can almost consider them different genres. Both stories rely on some very ancient history to drive them, but only one is invested in sharing more of that history than is necessary to resolve its plot.

Maybe it’s a bit mercenary, but it seems that a modern book requires authors to use only the most essential elements of their worlds. Side trips into unnecessary characters, detail, and history aren’t given much real estate in the current publishing market. Hook your readers, keep the tension high, and move the story along with every chapter or you risk losing them. I cannot say if this shift is good or bad, but it is more apparent as I read more current books.

When you’re writing fantasy, in a world of your own making, you can easily become entranced with your creation. Unlike the real world, where the full history of any place is denied to posterity, you have the opportunity to dig as far back as you want. Each forest and island opens itself to you, and it has a story to tell. This history enriches the fictional world, but not necessarily the story you’re telling. The art lies in knowing what to reveal and what to hide. Your characters may be hiking through a wood which was the site of a crucial battle three thousand years ago, but unless the spirits of the dead soldiers are going to menace your heroes, or their discarded gear and burial mounds are going to provide compelling atmosphere, there’s little point in bringing in that history.

The further I examine genre fiction, and fantasy specifically, the more I develop a philosophy of balance. For so many of the elements I’ve written about, there is a golden mean, a right amount. They give your story flavor and your world heft, but you never want to overdo them. History is the same sort of element. Keep refining your craft until you’ve learned the exact dose.

Feb82011

The Lost Works of You and Me


When you get degrees in history and literature, there are some books you read over and over. I wrote paper after paper on Hamlet and King Lear, increasing my understanding each time, but probably no works crossed my path more often than the Iliad and the Odyssey. Homer came up often in both disciplines, always with a different emphasis, but still reliably and repeatedly. Along the way I learned that the main reason Homer remains with us is the sheer number of copies available to us, usually preserved in Egypt’s dry dry sand.

The lens of history can be terribly foggy. We have to make a lot of assumptions, and it’s important to note that archaeology is still a relatively young field. Early archaeologists did a lot of damage to sites and artifacts, some of which we’re still trying to sort out. My favorite example was Heinrich Schliemann’s dynamiting of Mycenae. He leveled the city’s entrance ramp and many structures in his rush to find the bits of gold that must have been brought from Troy.

What will future civilizations think of our society? Will they exhume our houses, libraries, and used bookstores then decide that Harry Potter was our national epic? Will they think we considered wizards and witches mythological figures like gods and mistake super-hero action figures for idols?

Will our literature become so digitized that it fades away as the hard drives slowly decay? Will there be anything left of us for future civilizations to study, or will archaeology itself be entirely digital as computer scientists try to figure out how to read our books by decoding binary language as we’ve struggled with Linear A? It’s a dire thought, the idea of everything we’ve committed to disk just fading away.

If I ever wrote a memoir it would be in winter. Winter makes me nostalgic. I’ve been looking online at book covers, movie trailers, and toys from my childhood. So much of what was important to us gets eroded. So much of what we consider immortal in our culture isn’t. I would love to think that the books I write will outlast me, that the books I have written but could not publish will be valued by someone later on; but I would guess that even when I do publish what will remain behind are the Dan Browns, J.K. Rowlings, and the Gideon Bibles. I’ve never written out of a desire for immortality, or with the idea that it would make me fabulously wealthy. I’m grateful to have the passion to do it and what I hope is a modest talent. That has to be enough for me today.

Jan252011

The Dark is Always Out There


We live in amazing times. The level of our technology, health, sanitation, and literacy are unmatched in recorded human development. Sometimes, especially in the wake of tragedy, it’s hard to remember that. The current popularity of post-apocalyptic fiction tells me that on some level, we know how fleeting the light of civilization is. As we stock up on canned goods, we know that a Dark Age is not very hard to achieve, and a little social or economic decline can go a long way.
When we think about the Dark Ages, most of us reflect on the European medieval period: castles, knights, and ladies in towers. Fantasy has traditionally drawn on these elements, to the point that they can be considered cliché. Books like the Silver Phoenix try to branch out, and take other periods as influence, yet I’m still drawn to the European Middle Ages, to reading about them and writing about them, perhaps because of the day to day struggle for survival in those times.

We know that the period after the Fall of Rome’s western half was disastrous. The light of literacy largely went out, leaving us with scant records of the period.

What we do know about the early Middle Ages is that they weren’t easy. No element of modern life, clean running water, proper shelter for wars or the elements, was widely available. The smell alone might bowl you over. Disease was rampant, misunderstood, and largely untreatable. Work was constant, leisure rare, and privacy largely unknown.

In fantasy we romanticize an age of struggle, where human life was short and cheap. I think on these details and shudder at the notion of living in such a world, and I find myself grateful for what we’ve achieved in our era. Our world remains flawed and violent, with tragedies , crime, and intense disagreements which in of themselves are a luxury. It gets me down from time to time, but I can easily turn on my faucet, watch the water spiral out, and thank what I believe in that I live when and where I do.

Mar262010

Fatal Footprints: Comments on Donovan Webster’s Aftermath

Getting a degree in History was one of the most edifying things I’ve done. Even the most boring of classes, taught by the most burned-out professor, gave me insight into something new. My history degree taught me to research, made me a better academic writer, a more critical thinker, and helped me see patterns in human progress.

In fantasy, we often write history. If you look at Tolkien, Martin, Brooks, or other authors in the epic style, they’re largely constructing a fictional history, often with a little inspiration from actual events. Our characters inhabit worlds filled with the ruins of former civilizations, which they explore, contend with, and struggle to understand. History informs us, shapes our cities and prejudices, and in some cases, gets us killed.

Aftermath: the Remnants of War is a journalistic travel-book, but Donovan Webster, is far from your average tourist. His purpose was to explore sites left affected by war. I first heard of the book through Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast, and I’m glad I took Carlin’s advice and ordered the book. While Carlin discusses Donovan’s account of the bodies and bones still scattered for miles by the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II, I found the discussion on Verdun’s shell-laden forest to be the most compelling. A first hand account of the topic, with the author handling the shells and following them to their eventual demolition, put me to work looking at maps of the two World Wars and the areas still affected by them, usually to the point of being off limits. Webster’s analysis of landmines, where they come from and who deploys them to infect their borders was bone-chilling. It is so easy for us to think of war as a fictional thing, to look at its glories and rewards, but to forget its detrius and the effects it has over the long term. We’ve left the century of the two world wars behind, but still it leaves a lethal legacy as shells work their way to the surface.

In fantasy, we work for realistic accounts of fantastic warfare: dragons swoop from the sky raining fire on infantry; spells are slung like so much artillery across magically-scarred battlefields; but it’s very easy to lose sight of the human aspect of these events. Books like Aftermath help me keep my grounding when I describe large-scale violence, and they help me remember that unlike my pen and paper creations, real war affects flesh and blood people, often for far longer than we ever intended.

I’m highly recommending this book to you. It has great stats to back up the well-written descriptions, and Donovan kept me riveted as he circled the globe. Any student of modern history should read this, as well as any world traveler, if only so you’ll know where to step.