Parallel genres

We continue a comparison with science fiction.

You’d think that science fiction and historical fiction wouldn’t have much in common.  One is speculative by nature, exploring places and situations that have never been, and might never be; the other is very tightly constrained by what actually was.  But on investigating, we find a number of parallels between them.

Last week we pointed out one such parallel: in each, there is a subgenre transplanting current situations and attitudes to a very different place and time.  We think part of the attraction of, say, a film noir private detective in first-century Rome or a society of robots is the simple incongruity of it, the obvious out-of-placeness.  But of course there’s more, things like comments on society then, now and in the future, and holding up assumptions to the light to examine them.  These are things that good literature does.

Each genre has a structure set out for it: in the one case, history as it happened; in the other, science as we know it.  In each case, departure from the structure is almost inevitable, but the more distant the more perilous.

We could pair the strictest historical fiction with the strictest science fiction.  In the first, the only departure might be characters who never actually lived, or places that never actually existed, but strongly resembled those that did.  In the latter we place stories about (say) Moon bases using technology now at hand or in sight.

In a second category we place historical fiction in which the characters are fictional but have a strong influence on important bits of history.  Dumas’ The Three Musketeers and its sequels show four French swordsmen shaping the course of French and English history.  With this we pair science fiction postulating something we cannot yet do, but can’t really rule out.  Maybe someday one could Terraform Mars using the power from fusion reactors.

In a third category we place historical fiction that uses historical figures as its primary characters, telling much more about their thoughts and actions than the record could possibly warrant.  We pair this with science fiction postulating inventions that would violate a bit of science as we currently know it, something like an artificial gravity generator.  The challenge here is to do it convincingly.  As one example, we think Kipling carries it off in “A Priest in Spite of Himself” for historical fiction; any good novel with starships does it for science fiction.

We could also pair historical novels set in distant times and places about which little is known (though that’s becoming more difficult) with stories set so far in the future that little can be ruled out.

One last category is a melding of the two genres: the alternative history story.  This combines the speculative nature of science fiction with the attention to historical detail of historical fiction.  It’s easy enough to do superficially: what if Meade had lost at Gettysburg?  What if Gore had won in 2000?  But tracing out the causes and consequences to do it properly is not easy.  In that, it’s like any interdisciplinary work.