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Worldcon panel: How much history?
Jun. 21st, 2010 05:26 pmMost people are familiar with George Santayana's observation "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" (often misquoted as "those who cannot learn from history..."). The motivation behind this panel was to explore the concept of historical knowledge, and how much a writer must have learned from history to be able to write credible historical fiction, credible pseudo-historical fiction that is based to some extent on real history (as in most fantasy novels), or credible future fiction (i.e., science fiction).
It's certainly true that some knowledge is necessary to do a credible job, and that more extensive knowledge helps you to understand what is possible or likely and why things turned out as they did. To which I coined the cautionary phrase for writers whose only knowledge of history is what they read in novels: "Those who know [historical fiction] are doomed to pastiche it." This should serve as a reminder that we should always go to primary sources wherever possible. Patrick O'Brian performed enormous amounts of historical research, including reading ship's logs and captain's diaries, to gain the knowledge that makes his Aubrey–Maturin stories a work of history as much as fiction.
History is about people and how they respond to their daily lives (the constants in their world), to change (things that disrupt those constants), and perhaps even to crisis (dramatic change). Like us, people from our past just tend to muddle through between the small personal crises and large national crises that make up history. The future is unlikely to be different. History is also about "process": things change or remain the same for a reason. To understand history is to understand human nature, and it's hard to imagine being a successful author without that understanding. Understanding history therefore provides insights into human nature that can't be gained in other ways: not through psychology (which is grounded in its modern sociocultural context) and not through cognitive science (which focuses on the meatware in our heads rather than on the society).
The accumulation of "historical forces" tends to make certain forms of change inevitable, and understanding these processes provides a powerful driver for plot and for how characters must respond to the plot. In the context of science fiction, those historical forces are typically incarnated as technology: think of how much global society changed with the invention of powerful tools for social exchanges, such as clipper ships and airplanes. This contrasts with the "Great Man" theory of history, which posits that important historical events are driven by great men (rarely women, since this is an old school of historical thought—at least 19th century, and it probably has even older roots). That's the root of all fantasy fiction and much science fiction, which tends to be based on one or a few powerful protagonists who alter their world.
In reality, history most probably combines various random mixtures of the historical forces (process) theory and the great man theory. As an example, millennia of advances in mathematics and the evolution of a society of plenty that allowed mathematicians to develop a profession rather than doing productive work (e.g., farming) was the prerequisite for the science of the 20th century; Einstein could not have done his work in the absence of such historical processes, but there was only one Einstein, and science would have been very different had he not been born.
History is also chaotic, in the modern sense of chaos theory: small changes can have enormous impacts. Imagine, for instance, if Alexander Fleming had simply thrown away the one culture dish in his collection that had been contaminated by a bread mould instead of examining it more closely: he would have failed to discover penicillin, thereby potentially delaying the modern science of antibiotics by decades.
Imagine, then, the inconceivable consequences of larger changes, such as wondering what if a historical figure (usually a "great man") had died instead of living or had lived instead of dying. For instance, it used to be popular to write stories about time travelers who go back in time to kill Hitler and spare the world the horrors of World War II. But a closer consideration reveals that such beliefs are nonsense: the accumulation of social changes that preceded World War II would almost certainly have led to war, and it could be speculated that had the Germans been led by someone more rational than Hitler, they wouldn't have made so many disastrous decisions (e.g., opening the Russian front). With their efforts better concentrated, they might even have defeated the Allies. Authors who write such "alternate history" historical fiction grapple with the problem of how to imagine the likely consequences of the changes they make. The farther in the past a change occurred, the more radical the effects would be on the present, as the changes ramify over time.
Understanding how and why people do things is crucial to any fiction, but doubly so for historical fiction, because the how and the why change, often radically. L.P. Hartley noted, in his novel The Go-Between that "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." Some things do indeed remain the same—which is why we can understand and empathize with people from ancient times—but others change dramatically. In Household Gods, Judith Tarr and Harry Turtledove illustrate this brilliantly. In the story, a modern American woman is transplanted into the body of a woman in 2nd century Rome, and has to deal with incredible culture shock. As one horrific example, she learns to her dismay that insisting her young children drink water instead of wine can have potentially fatal consequences; secure access to potable drinking water is a very modern concept.
Another interesting partial misapprehension, seen most often in fantasy stories, is that travel wasn't all that dangerous in "medieval" times. Well it was, but not just because of impassable roads, bandits and brigands, and the specter of starvation because there was no McDonald's at every exit on the king's highway. It was also dangerous because most people lived their lives in a very circumscribed area (e.g., a village), and thereby gained immunity to all the local flora and fauna in the drinking water, not to mention the ones breathed in their face every day by their neighbors. The diseases in the next village or the next watershed were often sufficiently different that you risked life and limb just drinking the water or talking to someone who had survived the local variant of some innovative plague your own people had never encountered.
Though we often think of history as most important for fantasy writers (most fantasies being set in some recognizable variant of our past), science fiction authors must also be aware of history even when they focus on technology and its implications. As in my Einstein example, science and technology are rooted in the culture of their time and in the history that produced that culture (including its constraints and its intellectual and other tools). What science fiction brings to the literary table is the fact that science and technology are also forces that change human lives, and therefore change history. For example, put yourself momentarily in the (figurative) wooden shoes of the saboteurs, famously believed to have thrown their wooden shoes (sabots) into the gears to "clog" the machinery that was stealing their jobs. Or imagine how I would have to be creating this missive (handwritten, then laboriously copied for each of my readers by a stable of pet monks) before I could send it around the world (by pony express? by telegraph?) to my readers.
Consider the consequences of a typical fictional trope: high mortality rates. Although there's a stereotype that everyone died young in earlier times, that's an oversimplification. Child mortality rates were as high in the medieval and later West as they are now in the "third world"—high enough, in fact, that parents often did not name their children for a week or more, just to be sure their child survived. And death rates for women in childbirth occurred at horrific rates; it's sobering to think that in some historical periods, sex (and thus, inevitably, pregnancy) could be considered a potential death sentence for the mother. (Elizabeth Bear deals with this poignantly in describing the romance between William Shakespeare and his wife Anne in her "Promethean Age" tales. And illnesses of middle and old age that are now eminently treatable certainly killed many people who now survive to a ripe old age. Yet historical figures often lived into their 60s or later (Aristotle being one example), particularly before living in cities became the norm. It's easy to understand intellectually why a career as an officer in the British navy of the Napoleonic era seemed attractive, despite a horrific rate of death and crippling injury: nobody expected to live forever, and at least there was a chance of riches. (And, what with pressgangs, one didn't always have a choice.) But read Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey–Maturin series of stories and you'll get a very different emotional feel for the thought processes inspired by that social environment.
One interesting aspect of human psychology is how we tend to ignore the common, simple, familiar things of our lives, and most strongly remember the extraordinary things that stand out from this background. This poses a particularly challenge for writers of historical fiction, because it's necessary to find a way to reveal these details in a way that doesn't involve long expository dumps. In the science fiction community, there's even a phrase for this: "As you know, Jim..." It's used to criticize an author who pauses a story to explain, at length, things that all the characters in the story already know, and would never remark upon. Don't ignore the "furniture" of your story, but neither should you dwell on it.
The harder task is to put yourself sufficiently well into the minds of your characters, within their proper historical milieu, that you understand their unexamined cultural assumptions. Ask yourself what things are assumed (left unspoken) by your characters, and experiment to see whether those things might lead to interesting character insights or plot developments—or that might prevent certain plot developments that would be obvious to a modern reader but not to your character. In my novel Chords, I had some fun with this notion. As one example, Bram, leading a body of troops, muses on the usefulness of siege engines for attacking cities, but then opines that they would never be useful for warfare in the field. How could he, resident of a pseudo-medieval world, possibly imagine the changes that would be wrought by gunpowder?
It's certainly acceptable to gloss over such things if your goal is to tell of adventures without the warts; not everyone wants to write (or read) a book as detailed as Household Gods. We must also remember that despite the indisputable horrors of living in ancient times (plagues, barbarian invaders, crop failures, and on and on) people found many ways to be happy. We shouldn't neglect that aspect in our writing.
It's certainly true that some knowledge is necessary to do a credible job, and that more extensive knowledge helps you to understand what is possible or likely and why things turned out as they did. To which I coined the cautionary phrase for writers whose only knowledge of history is what they read in novels: "Those who know [historical fiction] are doomed to pastiche it." This should serve as a reminder that we should always go to primary sources wherever possible. Patrick O'Brian performed enormous amounts of historical research, including reading ship's logs and captain's diaries, to gain the knowledge that makes his Aubrey–Maturin stories a work of history as much as fiction.
History is about people and how they respond to their daily lives (the constants in their world), to change (things that disrupt those constants), and perhaps even to crisis (dramatic change). Like us, people from our past just tend to muddle through between the small personal crises and large national crises that make up history. The future is unlikely to be different. History is also about "process": things change or remain the same for a reason. To understand history is to understand human nature, and it's hard to imagine being a successful author without that understanding. Understanding history therefore provides insights into human nature that can't be gained in other ways: not through psychology (which is grounded in its modern sociocultural context) and not through cognitive science (which focuses on the meatware in our heads rather than on the society).
The accumulation of "historical forces" tends to make certain forms of change inevitable, and understanding these processes provides a powerful driver for plot and for how characters must respond to the plot. In the context of science fiction, those historical forces are typically incarnated as technology: think of how much global society changed with the invention of powerful tools for social exchanges, such as clipper ships and airplanes. This contrasts with the "Great Man" theory of history, which posits that important historical events are driven by great men (rarely women, since this is an old school of historical thought—at least 19th century, and it probably has even older roots). That's the root of all fantasy fiction and much science fiction, which tends to be based on one or a few powerful protagonists who alter their world.
In reality, history most probably combines various random mixtures of the historical forces (process) theory and the great man theory. As an example, millennia of advances in mathematics and the evolution of a society of plenty that allowed mathematicians to develop a profession rather than doing productive work (e.g., farming) was the prerequisite for the science of the 20th century; Einstein could not have done his work in the absence of such historical processes, but there was only one Einstein, and science would have been very different had he not been born.
History is also chaotic, in the modern sense of chaos theory: small changes can have enormous impacts. Imagine, for instance, if Alexander Fleming had simply thrown away the one culture dish in his collection that had been contaminated by a bread mould instead of examining it more closely: he would have failed to discover penicillin, thereby potentially delaying the modern science of antibiotics by decades.
Imagine, then, the inconceivable consequences of larger changes, such as wondering what if a historical figure (usually a "great man") had died instead of living or had lived instead of dying. For instance, it used to be popular to write stories about time travelers who go back in time to kill Hitler and spare the world the horrors of World War II. But a closer consideration reveals that such beliefs are nonsense: the accumulation of social changes that preceded World War II would almost certainly have led to war, and it could be speculated that had the Germans been led by someone more rational than Hitler, they wouldn't have made so many disastrous decisions (e.g., opening the Russian front). With their efforts better concentrated, they might even have defeated the Allies. Authors who write such "alternate history" historical fiction grapple with the problem of how to imagine the likely consequences of the changes they make. The farther in the past a change occurred, the more radical the effects would be on the present, as the changes ramify over time.
Understanding how and why people do things is crucial to any fiction, but doubly so for historical fiction, because the how and the why change, often radically. L.P. Hartley noted, in his novel The Go-Between that "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." Some things do indeed remain the same—which is why we can understand and empathize with people from ancient times—but others change dramatically. In Household Gods, Judith Tarr and Harry Turtledove illustrate this brilliantly. In the story, a modern American woman is transplanted into the body of a woman in 2nd century Rome, and has to deal with incredible culture shock. As one horrific example, she learns to her dismay that insisting her young children drink water instead of wine can have potentially fatal consequences; secure access to potable drinking water is a very modern concept.
Another interesting partial misapprehension, seen most often in fantasy stories, is that travel wasn't all that dangerous in "medieval" times. Well it was, but not just because of impassable roads, bandits and brigands, and the specter of starvation because there was no McDonald's at every exit on the king's highway. It was also dangerous because most people lived their lives in a very circumscribed area (e.g., a village), and thereby gained immunity to all the local flora and fauna in the drinking water, not to mention the ones breathed in their face every day by their neighbors. The diseases in the next village or the next watershed were often sufficiently different that you risked life and limb just drinking the water or talking to someone who had survived the local variant of some innovative plague your own people had never encountered.
Though we often think of history as most important for fantasy writers (most fantasies being set in some recognizable variant of our past), science fiction authors must also be aware of history even when they focus on technology and its implications. As in my Einstein example, science and technology are rooted in the culture of their time and in the history that produced that culture (including its constraints and its intellectual and other tools). What science fiction brings to the literary table is the fact that science and technology are also forces that change human lives, and therefore change history. For example, put yourself momentarily in the (figurative) wooden shoes of the saboteurs, famously believed to have thrown their wooden shoes (sabots) into the gears to "clog" the machinery that was stealing their jobs. Or imagine how I would have to be creating this missive (handwritten, then laboriously copied for each of my readers by a stable of pet monks) before I could send it around the world (by pony express? by telegraph?) to my readers.
Consider the consequences of a typical fictional trope: high mortality rates. Although there's a stereotype that everyone died young in earlier times, that's an oversimplification. Child mortality rates were as high in the medieval and later West as they are now in the "third world"—high enough, in fact, that parents often did not name their children for a week or more, just to be sure their child survived. And death rates for women in childbirth occurred at horrific rates; it's sobering to think that in some historical periods, sex (and thus, inevitably, pregnancy) could be considered a potential death sentence for the mother. (Elizabeth Bear deals with this poignantly in describing the romance between William Shakespeare and his wife Anne in her "Promethean Age" tales. And illnesses of middle and old age that are now eminently treatable certainly killed many people who now survive to a ripe old age. Yet historical figures often lived into their 60s or later (Aristotle being one example), particularly before living in cities became the norm. It's easy to understand intellectually why a career as an officer in the British navy of the Napoleonic era seemed attractive, despite a horrific rate of death and crippling injury: nobody expected to live forever, and at least there was a chance of riches. (And, what with pressgangs, one didn't always have a choice.) But read Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey–Maturin series of stories and you'll get a very different emotional feel for the thought processes inspired by that social environment.
One interesting aspect of human psychology is how we tend to ignore the common, simple, familiar things of our lives, and most strongly remember the extraordinary things that stand out from this background. This poses a particularly challenge for writers of historical fiction, because it's necessary to find a way to reveal these details in a way that doesn't involve long expository dumps. In the science fiction community, there's even a phrase for this: "As you know, Jim..." It's used to criticize an author who pauses a story to explain, at length, things that all the characters in the story already know, and would never remark upon. Don't ignore the "furniture" of your story, but neither should you dwell on it.
The harder task is to put yourself sufficiently well into the minds of your characters, within their proper historical milieu, that you understand their unexamined cultural assumptions. Ask yourself what things are assumed (left unspoken) by your characters, and experiment to see whether those things might lead to interesting character insights or plot developments—or that might prevent certain plot developments that would be obvious to a modern reader but not to your character. In my novel Chords, I had some fun with this notion. As one example, Bram, leading a body of troops, muses on the usefulness of siege engines for attacking cities, but then opines that they would never be useful for warfare in the field. How could he, resident of a pseudo-medieval world, possibly imagine the changes that would be wrought by gunpowder?
It's certainly acceptable to gloss over such things if your goal is to tell of adventures without the warts; not everyone wants to write (or read) a book as detailed as Household Gods. We must also remember that despite the indisputable horrors of living in ancient times (plagues, barbarian invaders, crop failures, and on and on) people found many ways to be happy. We shouldn't neglect that aspect in our writing.