History in fiction vs. historical fiction…
A.B. Carolan’s new young adult sci-fi mystery/thriller Origins (enough genres for you?) will contain a lot of history, from the dawn of human civilization to Argentina’s Dirty War (this book will be published some time in April if all goes as planned). Combining past and future is common in sci-fi. As a young lad, I read Chad Oliver’s The Winds of Time, for example, and it really impressed me.
Of course, the past often plays a role in fiction that isn’t sci-fi, maybe even more so. Son of Thunder, #2 in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series is loaded with history, from the time of Christ to the Renaissance and the near future. In fact, sci-fi or not, and unlike Son of Thunder, a novel can be set in the past completely, and it’s called historical fiction, an extremely nebulous categorization. Is Alex Gerlis’s The Best of Our Spies historical fiction or a spy story? (Spyfi addicts know the answer.) Can Son of Thunder be called historical fiction or is it just a mystery/thriller.
I could use this confusion to argue my point that genres are just key words one can use to describe a book, but my focus here is the following: When does history in fiction become historical fiction? Is there a natural boundary? And should writers care? Readers might be surprised to know that, contrary to perceived evidence in Origins and Son of Thunder, A.B. and I look more forward than backward. We want to question where human beings are going more than where they’ve been. While the past (and past settings) can be interesting, the claim that familiarization with past errors will help us avoid them in the future seems all too often false, primarily because our educational system focuses on past glories and not past problems and their solutions, or simply lies to students by creating a past that didn’t happen at all. (US states in the South, as well as autocratic governments around the world, like to do that in their textbooks, thus lying about a lot of things! And, as with you-know-who, people believe those lies because they’re all they hear and read.)
Black History Month deserves a lot of credit for bringing to our attention many Blacks who contributed a lot without getting credit for it. As an ex-scientist, I knew about a lot of Black scientists in history, and worked with them as well, but I just learned that one Black inventor, Granville T. Woods, had 60+ patents—Thomas Edison even tried to steal one but lost the case! (Imagine, a white guy stealing from a Black guy! Edison was an ass, of course—just ask Tesla.) But, for the most part, celebrations of Black history, Hispanic history, Irish history—ethnic histories in general—cater to human beings’ nostalgia about their past and ethnic origins. In spite of their database limitations, especially for Asians and Blacks, websites like ancestry.com can make a lot of money providing this service too, although their ties with Big Pharma are definitely suspect. (But maybe that’s just part of the general problem where, because of narcissism, people make their personal information public.)
History’s propensity for awarding the conquerors and oppressors, i.e. the winners and not the losers (I hope that works for the Big Loser, you-know-who) is a good justification for including history in fiction to at least make readers wonder, what’s the real story? Who knows? Maybe my attempt to add details about St. John’s life between the Crucifixion and the disciple’s death (his was a long life) will motivate some young reader to study archeology or Christian history, i.e. what really happened? (And put their own spin on it?)
But I don’t really put a lot of history in my books. I’m not out to rectify all those lies in those Texas textbooks either. Some of my stories have historical flashbacks, or even historical and parallel developments, as in Son of Thunder, but I don’t write historical fiction novels. I might read them (the spy stories of Gerlis come to mind, as well as those British-style mysteries set in the nineteenth century, or even those mysteries by June Trop set in ancient Cairo), but I don’t write them. My stories are set in the future, albeit sometimes the near future. (The Midas Bomb, when it first was published in 2010, was set in 2014, so clearly events overtook that “future” and made it into an alternate history!)
A Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse perhaps best exemplifies my style. Because of the Many Worlds Theory of Quantum Mechanics, physicist Gail and her techie Jeff’s time machine, which can only move forward in time (no paradoxes are possible), takes them sometimes into what can be considered parallel or alternate pasts on some of their time translations. Lessons are learned about our possible futures, though, because those parallel pasts provide perspective about where we might be going as well (and events we’ve been lucky to avoid!).
Should authors stop using historical settings in their novels? I’m the last person you should ask that, but I’ll still try to answer: Above all, fiction writers should write good stories, period, ones with powerful themes interwoven through the plots and great characters. Where authors’ imaginations take them should never be constrained by the consumers, the readers, or by agents, acquisition editors, and others who scream about marketability. And here I’ll end with a favorite quote from famous sci-fi author Robert Heinlein: “…maybe I should study the market and try like hell to tailor something which fits current styles. But…if I am to turn out work of fairly permanent value, my own taste…is what I must follow.”
***
Comments are always welcome.
Ebook sales. I only offer them via Smashwords in my email newsletter. You can sign up for the latter using my contact page at this website. This month the “evergreen books” in the “Clones & Mutants” series are all on sale: You meet the clones in my very first book Full Medical (2006, but now with a second ebook edition); you meet the mutants in Evil Agenda; and they combine forces in No Amber Waves of Grain. These ebooks are part of my extended “Future History”–which all contains the “Detectives Chen & Castiblanco” series and the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy Collectdion” plus several bridge books. All my ebooks have reasonable retail prices (even those published by small presses), but they’re a real bargain in these sales. (Subscribers to the newsletter just use the supplied promo codes.)
I can’t offer these sales on Amazon; I stopped exclusively publishing on Amazon years ago, which is their criterion. I wouldn’t offer them there anyway. That ravenous T-Rex of online marketing is no longer a friend of authors or readers, so much so that, as of March 1, no new books of mine will be offered for purchase on Amazon. This is my small blow to help bring down the T-Rex!
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
