Historical “fiction” is far more ACCURATE than regular history books. I have learned this through reading hundreds or thousands of both. Once again, as I keep repeating and I hope you HEAR, this goes back to the one question you must always ask yourself:

Why was this information PRODUCED?

History books are produced to satisfy academics and were trained by them. I read along and hit error after error routinely in regular history books. But I have long since stopped trying to correct them because they are not errors anyone reading these books CARES about.

For example, one book discussed Viking ships. It stated that, “surprisingly enough,” the only thing that could be “traced to the Middle East” was one type of sail used. The sail could not be “traced” at all. But the writer and his readers all took it for granted that if anything existed in the Middle East and in Northern Europe, it was invented in the Middle East.

Historical fiction writers have a hard life. Their books are not being read by those who look on the New York Times Best Seller and Sophistication List. They are being read by several hundred thousand history NUTS. If you think I’m just being funny, you miss my point, which is CRITICAL.

A writer of historical fiction who is sloppy pays for it, big time. He gets a thousand letter from PAYING CUSTOMERS a lot of other historical fiction writers would love to have asking “How do you TRACE a particular sail to the Middle East from the remains of a Viking ship?”

The very idea would fascinate his readers Can you REALLY trace a Viking ship to Middle Eastern design? HOW? And they would NOT react well to his admitting it was pure horseshit.

The question would never occur to a fashionable history reader. He assumes everything was invented in the Middle East. Mommy Professor told him so. That is why he says it is “surprising” that only this part of the ship was like Middle Eastern ones.

Hey, Bozo! Both the Viking ships and Middle Eastern ships had a BOTTOM, too! Did they built boats with no bottoms until the Christian missionaries got there?

This is part of the gigantic framework of assumptions every college graduate is trained in.

Seriously, to say that early Germanic people INVENTED things is what HITLER said. No one would put this in plain English outside this blog, but the fact is that the “sophisticated” history writer, subconsciously, sees something anti-Semitic in that assertion.

So only the writer of historical fiction will have to send out a thousand disclaimers of his Middle East nonsense no one would have questioned a Mommy Professor historian about.

Every successful historical fiction has lengthy disclaimers about what is and what isn’t true in his book. “History” books only cite the Mommy Professors they get the Truth from.

Before Vatican II many in the Catholic freely predicted that all Protestants were going to Hell. No one minded. But if they said JEWS were damned, all Hell, pardon the expression, would have busted loose. Even trying to convert Jews to Christianity is an act of PC anti-Semitism.

In William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich he declared that nothing important was invented in the Third Reich because the Jews weren’t there. It sold millions of copies and was on the bookshelf out in sight in every Mommy Professor household.

Who but a Nazi would question this statement?

My family used to talk about how Hitler seemed to be talking on the radio twenty four hours a day. His voice had none of the identifiable scratch that records and wire recorders had, so the word was that he was being kept awake twenty-four hours a day with drugs.

That was how well known the German invention of the TAPE recorder was.

Both the Autobahn and the VW, for which Hitler himself gave the original bug design, were developed in Nazi Germany. Dr. Werner von Braun probably think his team invented some stuff, and when the V-1s first hit London, I doubt the Brits said, “Oh, God, it’s the same old thing again.”

The German jets and the first version of a Stealth bomber were a bit new in 1944. In fact, it was not until the 1980 election campaign that the public learned about the “first” Stealth bomber INVENTED, presumably, by Jewish-Americans.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich was required buying for any Mommy Professor product who wanted to be “with it.” Some of them probably READ a lot of it. But the line about no Nazi inventions is still there.

Who but a NAZI would correct it?

Well, as a matter of fact, if it had been historical fiction, several THOUSAND readers would have demanded to know where he GOT that crap.

By contrast you are not going to see many historical fiction books on people’s shelves that they have not READ. Only us historical fiction freaks HEAR of them, much less BUY them.

And we read each word. And we FASCINATED by history. A writer of historical fiction is performing in front of a TOUGH audience.

“Historians” write for manikins