Is the past safer than the future?
From yesterday’s reviews and previous ones, readers of this blog might have noticed that I’ve binged on a few historical mysteries and thrillers lately. There are also a few on “Steve’s Bookshelf” too (Deaver’s Garden of Beasts, Follett’s Eye of the Needle, Boston Teran’s Gardens of Grief, and Edgardo Holzman’s Malena), a list of books I consider truly exceptional. The later reads could be considered companions of the bio of Churchill I’m slogging through, 1000+ pages describing the PM’s war years and those that followed. Like my character Castilblanco, I’m a history aficionado.
When I finished Schreiber’s Secret, I wondered two things. First, I wondered if I could write something like that. My muses (remember, they’re really banshees with tasers) were all over that. They had challenged me to write a YA novel, so I studied examples and read all sorts of advice on how to do that and, after about two years, wrote The Secret Lab, a sci-fi mystery for young adults and adults who are young at heart. Those muses then got on my case about writing a mystery—The Secret Lab didn’t count, so I wrote Teeter-Totter between Lust and Murder. Now they’re after me to write historical fiction.
Second, I wondered, is it safer to write about the past than the future? Stories set in the immediate future are a wee bit tricky. I started The Midas Bomb just before the huge financial crash in 2008, so it seemed safe to pick 2014 as the story’s time. That collapse occurred, of course, and we’re still feeling the aftermath, so now I’ll just have to say that the entire “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series” takes place on an alternate timeline. That’s OK because there’s a fictional, temporal continuum from The Midas Bomb all the way to Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand! and beyond.
The far future is a bit easier to write about. Hard sci-fi, not drivel like The Hunger Games, is often an extrapolation of current culture, science, and technology into the far future—the farther you go, the more you have to make up and the less certain you are about predictions. Anything goes, as long as it doesn’t contradict current knowledge too much. The exception is a time travel story, not schlock like The Time Traveler’s Wife (really a romance novel). Time travel is sci-fi because of far-out technology, but it’s also historical fiction, assuming the time traveler goes back in the past. In this case, the author has to make the science believable and report correctly on historical facts.
My knee-jerk answer was that it should be easier to write about the past. It has already happened, it’s immutable (excepting time travelers’ desires to change it), and all I have to do is not contradict historical facts. The latter is the crux of the matter. To depersonalize the discussion a bit, let’s take it out of the sci-fi context and consider Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code. This is a historical thriller that covers about two thousand years of history. Brown cherry-picked those historical events that made his story work—no problem there, because that’s expected. Any writer does that.
But like the Piltdown Man, some of Brown’s “facts” were hoaxes that he either fell for or ignored when writing the novel. Yes, the old boys in the Church hierarchy put women in their place by declaring the Magdalene a prostitute—she probably wasn’t—but there are so many stories about the Knights Templar that they might as well join Arthur and the story of the sword in the stone. Yet Brown started a fad that hasn’t abated—he has many copycats—and with two movies featuring his symbols expert from Harvard, he’s laughing all the way to the bank either way.
History isn’t immutable, whether ecclesiastical or paleontological. Is going far back into the past, filling in gaps in the historical record, any safer than going far into the future, extrapolating current cultures, science, and technology? Clancy asked about the difference between fiction and reality. He said fiction has to make sense. That goes for historical fiction and science fiction as well as fiction set in the present day. Maybe the author doesn’t get all the facts right, distorts past facts, and violates known science in futuristic stories, but if the story makes sense, does it matter?
I suspect that readers are less forgiving about historical fiction, especially fiction set in the 19th and 20th centuries where facts are abundant and not so mixed up with myth. I’m more forgiving of Brown than I would be of Deaver or Follett (to be fair, I couldn’t detect any errors in the last two’s stories). Maybe I shouldn’t be, but the farther back or forward in time one goes, the cloudier everything becomes, so Brown had a tougher job right from the start than Deaver and Follett. I already knew about the Gospels the Church hierarchy decided to leave out of the Bible, so Brown’s story was convincing enough for me to enjoy it. So getting it wrong really didn’t matter to me. (The story of the hoaxes came out after I read the book.)
Nevertheless, if I wrote a historical novel, I’d feel better if I were dealing with events in the 19th or 20th century. I’ve made mistakes in my writing as far as background material goes (I keep track, although I haven’t changed anything, which is easy to do with ebooks), but I like to keep them at a minimum, even though they provide a topic of discussion for my readers. So, that’s probably why I won’t write historical fiction as much as my muses want to tase me to do so. There are just too many chances to get it wrong, you screaming banshees. For now, I’ll stick to the present and future. But don’t hold me to that. Those muses might turn up the voltage on their tasers!
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In elibris libertas….
