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Historical Fiction is Righter than History Books

Posted by Bob on June 21st, 2005 under How Things Work


If you read a really good piece of historical fiction, you get the story straight and true.

If you read Mary Stewart’s best-selling series on Merlin the Magician, you will see that she has a huge introduction saying exactly where the fiction is, and at the end a long explanation and the sources.

Mary Stewart has to satisfy an infinitely harder audience than a professional historian does. She is facing millions of readers, and at least a hundred thousand of them are history fanatics. Every word she says is going to be scrutinized by people who LOVE history, who read history all the time, the more obscure the better.

And all of them use the internet, which connects them to even more fanatical history buffs. No historian has to deal with anything remotely similar to this. A few other historians read his stuff to quote it or to disagree with it.

Either way, it doesn’t matter. If someone disagrees with him in a journal, he gets a quote in a journal and he gets to reply, which also adds to his resume: Publish or perish.

Notice it doesn’t say, “Publish something worthwhile or perish.” You just cite all your publications in your resume.

Long publications resume good.

Short publications resume bad.

Ugh. Beat chest.

And that REALLY is all there is to it. Just fill up pages with publication after publication. Nobody is going to read all that crap. And nobody is going to care if you were right or wrong.

Historical fiction is a whole ‘nother thing. They READ it. They read it over and over. They are fascinated by it.

And if you get something wrong, you’ll never live it down.

That is why I think so many of the really great writers of historical fiction are female, like Colleen McColloch who reads Greek and Latin fluently, knows all about Roman Law, and founded a Department of Neurophysiology at an Australian University in her real job as a doctor.

Margaret Mitchell, Inglis Fletcher, the list of female geniuses in historical fiction is long.

By the time you get half my age, you should know that men are the romantics, women are the Practical Side of the human race.

Which is why mostly male historians can play their games, while women write the real stuff, the stuff that is called historical fiction.

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  1. #1 by Elizabeth on 06/22/2005 - 1:17 pm

    Colleen McCullough is, unfortunately, no longer with us. She had gotten to Caesar’s assassination before her death. I had loved that series. She may have written a three book series about Flavian Rome under a pseudonym about 25 years ago (“Damion Hunter”), which was excellent.

    Some other terrific writers of historical fiction are Elizabeth Peters (Amelia Peabody series), Anne Perry, Sharan Newman, Sandra Merkle Riley (four books, the latest of which, for some reason, is only available in German) and Diana Gabaldon.

  2. #2 by Peter on 06/22/2005 - 1:59 pm

    The clever part is how they plagiarize without plagiarizing. If you’ve read one, you’ve read them all.

  3. #3 by Peter on 06/22/2005 - 2:01 pm

    Hurray for womanhood!

  4. #4 by Peter on 06/22/2005 - 6:26 pm

    My comment about plagiarizing of course referred to the academics, not to lady novelists.

  5. #5 by Elizabeth on 06/23/2005 - 1:13 pm

    It’s Judith Merkle Riley, not Sandra Merkle Riley.
    I don’t know what I was thinking.

    Wonderful books! There are only five or six, but she does have a day job.

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