Getting old things right

We note some similarities between genres: SF and HF.

A few days ago one of our correspondents made an unhappy observation on a work of historical fiction.  It seems there were too many anachronisms and incompatible historical references mixed up together, so the whole effect misfired.

We haven’t seen the work in question, so we won’t comment on it directly.  But we have noted that there is a danger in another genre, Science Fiction, if the author doesn’t get the science right.  Historical fiction should be much more constrained.  After all, an SF writer can postulate some discovery or invention that we just haven’t found yet, while history is as it is.  One cannot introduce a six-shot revolver into an eighteenth-century duel.  Less obviously, a duke outranks a count, in court ceremony and elsewhere.  And for those who are truly well-informed, the proper depiction of horses and horse-drawn vehicles is essential.

Indeed, there is a minor industry scrutinizing the details of novels of the naval history of the Napoleonic Wars.  If an author were so misinformed as to make an egregious mistake there is no doubt that he or she would be promptly told, “Dear Sir, please note that no ship of the third rate in the Royal Navy in 1795 would ever have been under the command of a midshipman, barring the sudden demise of all senior officers, of which there were several.  Yrs sincerely,” and references given if necessary.  And yet even within this highly restrictive envelope both C. S. Forester and Patrick O’Brien (to mention only the leaders) were able to produce a whole series of diverse and entertaining novels.  Indeed, each series has its own character.  The Hornblower novels were informed by the recent experience of the Second World War, hard and pitiless, and important characters can die.  The Aubrey and Maturin series has some of the cloak-and-dagger work of the Cold War, and more wide-ranging adventures showing off peculiarities of character.

We note, however, that it’s not only the technology and organization of a period that needs to ring true.  We’ve read a few novels that transplant the 20th-century US private eye into first-century Rome or twelfth-century England.  The costumes, society and technology are all fine.  The problem is, no one in ancient or Medieval times would think like that.  Following clues to establish guilt is a process that an Aristotelian or Scholastic simply wouldn’t understand, nor understand the reason for.

In the same way, we’ve read some science fiction works in which peculiarities of the present are projected into the future, sometimes incongruously.  These are easiest to see in works written a couple of decades or more ago, in which current concerns or conflicts (now forgotten or unimportant) were duplicated in the far future.

There is nothing actually wrong in writing like this.  These are popular books and have their own value.  Indeed, the incongruity of the present-in-the-past and the present-in-the-future can be a useful theme to work from.  Perhaps it’s best to mark them off as a sub-genre, not to be confused with strict historical fiction or predictive science fiction.