PSA: Historical Writing

[mrissa]

If you are writing an historical story -- alternate history, secret history, straight-up historical, whatever -- please, please, please refrain from having your characters describe a current technology in clunky antiquated terms and then proclaim that sort of crazy thing impossible.

Please. Really. Maybe it was clever the first two times, but it passed into the realm of terminally lame well before I got to kindergarten.

(This means you, Harry Turtledove!)

Comments

[oracne.livejournal.com]

Yesssssssssssss.

[mmerriam.livejournal.com]

oh, yes, yes ,yes!

[songwind.livejournal.com]

People who spend there days telling elaborate lies about events they didn't see, then managing to sell their prevarications to hundreds of people? That'll never happen, that's crazy.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

People banging two rocks together? Impossible. One rock is all you need for smacking anything. These kids and their extravagant modern ways.

[songwind.livejournal.com]

That's a little further back in the historical novel closet than even Mr. Turtledove usually ventures. :)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Consider yourself lucky I didn't go back to mitosis.

[songwind.livejournal.com]

What's interesting to me is that of the three Harry Turtledove novels I have read, I don't remember him doing that at all. Of course, only one of them is actually a historical fiction.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Only one is actually...what? Harry Turtledove writes something besides alternate history? Really? Will wonders never cease.

This was prompted by a short story in the December Analog.

[songwind.livejournal.com]

"The World at War" is a series that is based loosely on WWII but takes place in a fantasy world.

The other one I read was Guns of the South. It was difficult for those characters to doubt the things that would happen because time-travelling white supremacists brought them along.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Heh. Yes, I suppose well-provisioned time-traveling white supremacists do throw a monkey-wrench in the whole thing.

[supergee.livejournal.com]

He writes historical novels under the transparent, or at last translucent, pseudonym of H.N. Turteltaub.

[supergee.livejournal.com]

at LEAST

[seagrit.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I guess I don't get this one. What about the people who thought that massive supercomputers the size of buildings were the way things would work in the future? They would have poo-pood the idea of the Mac mini, Palm Pilots, atomic computing, etc. It doesn't seem unrealistic to me to have characters be sceptical of where technology will go in the future. Maybe I'm missing the actual objection you have? Is it the "clunky and antiquated" or the "impossible" part, or something else?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Okay, but why would every single historical story feature someone who would come up with the general idea of a Palm Pilot in the first place?

Sure, if someone did happen to come up with "a screen of moving light pictures somehow imaged from real life but made into fictional constructs," a tenth century monk would pooh-pooh the idea. But having a character come up with that idea only to have another character pooh-pooh it is lame.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

Has Turtledove written any stories lately? My reaction to his recent ten-volume trilogies has been "Interesting setting; wonder if he's ever going to use it for a story?"

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I did not finish reading this short story to find out.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that would get pretty old.

As it happens, I'm very fond of H.N. Turteltaub's historical fiction set in Ancient Greece. Can't stand Turtledove's alternate histories.