Great essay, and I haven’t quite finished, but I do see one problem. I have noticed that there are certain things that are so ingrained in modern people that even though they were absolutely not true in history, modern people have a very hard time realising that. They are so entrained in their own current mindset that they don’t see it when a book that is theoretically historical is very unreal in a given area.
Great point. That's the other side of it I just didn't have the bandwidth to explore: there are so-called "historical" things that people assume to be true, and so fantasy settings adopt those tropes as a way to make them FEEL realistic. Sometimes making something too realistic can actually make it FEEL unrealistic because it goes against people's expectations and then they notice the things they think are "wrong."
On the flip side of that though: an author can do something that's true-to-history but unusual-for-fiction, and it will give a sense of veracity AND unfamiliarity to a world at the same time.
I remember reading a first chapter presented for discussion by the author on a social platform. It wasn’t too bad - female elf protagonist hunting for evil dark werewolf antagonist through tribal lands. Okay. But, when elf loses her last arrow, picks a pebble from ground, fires the pebble from the bow and kills werewolf I stopped. I had stepped away from the narrative completely, and simply because it isn’t possible to fire a pebble from a bow that slings arrows. I know that because I am an archer, and the elf would know that because she is also an archer. I pointed this out in the discussion and was informed, pointedly, that this is fantasy fiction so anything is possible. Horse, water, thirsty.
I liked this, and being an amateur history buff myself, would like to read more fleshed out examples. One fantasy trope I've been thinking about a lot lately is the collapsed civilization. The cataclysms are always human-caused, like today's climate change and potential nuclear war. But in the past it was earthquakes and volcanoes and plagues, things with no moral dimension at all.
Poul Anderson wrote a classic essay called "On Thud and Blunder," where he pointed out lots of a-historical tropes in fantasy. It's online. I reference it here in this similar pet-peeve piece focused more on RPG mechanics, but getting a little bit into heroic media more generally.
Great piece. It's so hard to find that balance between "cool" and "realistic" what to incorporate into a world, what to focus on, what to ignore. I really enjoyed this essay and its got me thinking a lot about the setting in the world I'm creating. Thanks for sharing.
Loved the essay, Eric. Just some thoughts this brought to mind…
I think people overestimate how much we understand history. Our understanding is warped by propaganda and cultural misconceptions over and over again, adding endless layers of falsities.
Our history books are already anachronistic fantasies, really. To me, playing with those gaps in attested knowledge and the many layers of falsities is what makes historical fantasy so fun.
I love writing mythohistorical Iranian fiction because of historical inaccuracies, not in spite of them. Coming to a crossroads in which I have to choose to lean into or away from a historical misconception, or a western falsehood, or a trope that’s gotten away from itself, etc. is one of my favorite parts of the process!
Thanks, Keyon. I certainly thought of you among the cadre of historio-fantastical storytellers that could expand on this theme. The fun (and the difficulty) of historical study is that so much of the past is unknowable. We can still glean quite a lot, of course, lies and propaganda and biases notwithstanding. And every time I hear you speak about your settings it has me thinking "man I REALLY gotta read more of Keyon's stuff" :)
When I was a wee lad, say eleven or twelve, my parents sent me to a summer seminar at the library about how to learn. Was this a way to get me out of their hair for a few hours a day over the course of a week? Probably not, since my mom sat through it, too. I can't tell you much about what the guy who taught it said other than that the core of learning was connecting new stuff to old stuff. This short, pithy maxim stays with me to this day.
If your story isn't connecting what's happening in it to something that happened before or to something that people should already know then it's not going to lodge in someone's mind. They're going to forget your story, possibly while still in the process of reading it. Genre doesn't really matter, that's just the way the human mind learns. On the other hand if you ground it in history people already know (or at least think they know) they have a lot of points of connection that allow them to connect to and engage with your story!
I can see why that maxim stuck with you. It's a good way to think about it, and its very relevant to the ways that historical veracity (or lackthereof) can use or resist a person's biases and preconceptions when they show up to read.
Anyway, thanks for taking the time to read my piece
Great little essay, impressive that you managed to get it out after such a busy week.
This really boils down to the fundamental requirement of telling good stories of any kind: an understanding of people. History provides an important avenue for building that understanding.
When it comes to world building, the most important thing is an understanding of society, which is basically just an understanding of people on a macro-level. Here history also helps.
I wanted to push back on a few things though:
"People Generally Believed In What They Said They Believed In" I understand the point you were making and actually agree with it, but I think the nature of belief, people's relationship with it, and how it does and has affected society is quite complex, and extends far beyond what they say or even necessarily what they think. I realise that's a little bit beside the point you were trying to make, but the heading you used kind of stuck out to me.
"Conflicts Are More Complex Than Hatred or Greed" I think most serious conflicts, especially large scale political conflicts where large groups of people are effectively coerced into killing each other by the rich and powerful minority, i.e. war, have a very strong component of hatred in them, atleast from the point of view of the average person whose being coerced. I agree that you can't make the entire conflict predicated on generic hate, that would be really boring and bland. But where this hatred arises from and how it's pushed onto the people and even wrapped into their identity is a very complex and interesting question.
Now to balance this out I just want to say that "The People In the Past Were Not Stupid" is a statement I strongly agree with, and I appreciate that you brought it up.
Also I'm looking forward to seeing where you go when you get a little bit more meta.
Thanks, Maximilian, as always, for your well-thought-out comments. For what it's worth on all three or four of my little maxims there: I'm arguing in favor of complexity and nuance over rote stereotypes. Certainly the nature of belief within even one individual is very complex, to say nothing of how that fractals outwards into society and then over time. My quip that people generally believed what they said they believed is meant primarily as a corrective against those who unthinkingly (and even unknowingly) carry a modern, secular ambivalence towards the spiritual dimension into non-modern settings. It's the ambivalence I'm trying to dispel. Even if the author doesn't care, most people in history did care, whatever that might look like (and it might look like any number of things). All I'm really trying to say is: it mattered to people, so if religion is present in fantasy, it ought to matter to people.
I was really just trying to again argue for complexity. There are as many reasons to go to war as there are individual humans, and I argue against lazy motivations. "We all hate all of them" is a little lazy. "The rich are greedy and everyone else is coerced," is also I think a little lazy. Now, put both of those together at the same time—but then add in genuine threats to a nation and people who want to become heroes—now you have a nuanced situation with a lot of different characters who will feel real. None of those "motivations" are necessarily at odds with one another and major conflicts have varying degrees of all those things, all operating alongside each other. I'm trying to say that the more an author understanding all those operating dynamics, the more complex, nuanced, rich, and "real" a fictional conflict between fictional people might seem.
Anyway, these are frankly much larger topics than I could have possibly done justice with a few paragraphs, and I want to thank you again for the comment and for spurring the conversation on in a deeper way
You've hit on a really important point about people applying modern, post-enlightenment world views into non-modern settings—in regards to religion and just about everything else. It's something you see a lot of in fantasy, and I can understand why. It's easier for a modern person to project a modern world view, and to be fair sometimes it's okay for them to do so. It really depends on the author's intention. I think too often though, fantasy writers are setting out to create some sort of non-modern world but project a modern world view on their characters almost sub-consciously, then you end up with things feeling a bit wonky and inconsistent.
Yeah the more depth you can give to a conflict the better. What you're pointing to of essentially giving every character their own motivation for taking part in a given conflict is really important. It makes the conflict feel more real and it makes the characters feel more real.
Also, "The rich are greedy and everyone else is coerced," is an accurate surface level analysis for a lot of political conflicts. But as you're getting at, it's never going to stop there. There's going to be layer's of depth to the conflict both behind and in front of the statement.
I’d like to request a citation on that, or at least a greater explanation of why you want to boil “at least half” of the conflict across a millennium of human history down to two simple emotions.
Great essay, and I haven’t quite finished, but I do see one problem. I have noticed that there are certain things that are so ingrained in modern people that even though they were absolutely not true in history, modern people have a very hard time realising that. They are so entrained in their own current mindset that they don’t see it when a book that is theoretically historical is very unreal in a given area.
Great point. That's the other side of it I just didn't have the bandwidth to explore: there are so-called "historical" things that people assume to be true, and so fantasy settings adopt those tropes as a way to make them FEEL realistic. Sometimes making something too realistic can actually make it FEEL unrealistic because it goes against people's expectations and then they notice the things they think are "wrong."
On the flip side of that though: an author can do something that's true-to-history but unusual-for-fiction, and it will give a sense of veracity AND unfamiliarity to a world at the same time.
I remember reading a first chapter presented for discussion by the author on a social platform. It wasn’t too bad - female elf protagonist hunting for evil dark werewolf antagonist through tribal lands. Okay. But, when elf loses her last arrow, picks a pebble from ground, fires the pebble from the bow and kills werewolf I stopped. I had stepped away from the narrative completely, and simply because it isn’t possible to fire a pebble from a bow that slings arrows. I know that because I am an archer, and the elf would know that because she is also an archer. I pointed this out in the discussion and was informed, pointedly, that this is fantasy fiction so anything is possible. Horse, water, thirsty.
I liked this, and being an amateur history buff myself, would like to read more fleshed out examples. One fantasy trope I've been thinking about a lot lately is the collapsed civilization. The cataclysms are always human-caused, like today's climate change and potential nuclear war. But in the past it was earthquakes and volcanoes and plagues, things with no moral dimension at all.
Poul Anderson wrote a classic essay called "On Thud and Blunder," where he pointed out lots of a-historical tropes in fantasy. It's online. I reference it here in this similar pet-peeve piece focused more on RPG mechanics, but getting a little bit into heroic media more generally.
https://randallhayes.substack.com/p/i-hate-hit-points
Thanks, Randall. I’d love to tackle that topic sometime. Thanks for the suggestion.
Great piece. It's so hard to find that balance between "cool" and "realistic" what to incorporate into a world, what to focus on, what to ignore. I really enjoyed this essay and its got me thinking a lot about the setting in the world I'm creating. Thanks for sharing.
Great, Rob. Thanks for reading. It's exactly that kind of balance that I hope to get people thinking about and tackling intentionally.
Loved the essay, Eric. Just some thoughts this brought to mind…
I think people overestimate how much we understand history. Our understanding is warped by propaganda and cultural misconceptions over and over again, adding endless layers of falsities.
Our history books are already anachronistic fantasies, really. To me, playing with those gaps in attested knowledge and the many layers of falsities is what makes historical fantasy so fun.
I love writing mythohistorical Iranian fiction because of historical inaccuracies, not in spite of them. Coming to a crossroads in which I have to choose to lean into or away from a historical misconception, or a western falsehood, or a trope that’s gotten away from itself, etc. is one of my favorite parts of the process!
Thanks, Keyon. I certainly thought of you among the cadre of historio-fantastical storytellers that could expand on this theme. The fun (and the difficulty) of historical study is that so much of the past is unknowable. We can still glean quite a lot, of course, lies and propaganda and biases notwithstanding. And every time I hear you speak about your settings it has me thinking "man I REALLY gotta read more of Keyon's stuff" :)
You should read it, it's great.
When I was a wee lad, say eleven or twelve, my parents sent me to a summer seminar at the library about how to learn. Was this a way to get me out of their hair for a few hours a day over the course of a week? Probably not, since my mom sat through it, too. I can't tell you much about what the guy who taught it said other than that the core of learning was connecting new stuff to old stuff. This short, pithy maxim stays with me to this day.
If your story isn't connecting what's happening in it to something that happened before or to something that people should already know then it's not going to lodge in someone's mind. They're going to forget your story, possibly while still in the process of reading it. Genre doesn't really matter, that's just the way the human mind learns. On the other hand if you ground it in history people already know (or at least think they know) they have a lot of points of connection that allow them to connect to and engage with your story!
I can see why that maxim stuck with you. It's a good way to think about it, and its very relevant to the ways that historical veracity (or lackthereof) can use or resist a person's biases and preconceptions when they show up to read.
Anyway, thanks for taking the time to read my piece
Great little essay, impressive that you managed to get it out after such a busy week.
This really boils down to the fundamental requirement of telling good stories of any kind: an understanding of people. History provides an important avenue for building that understanding.
When it comes to world building, the most important thing is an understanding of society, which is basically just an understanding of people on a macro-level. Here history also helps.
I wanted to push back on a few things though:
"People Generally Believed In What They Said They Believed In" I understand the point you were making and actually agree with it, but I think the nature of belief, people's relationship with it, and how it does and has affected society is quite complex, and extends far beyond what they say or even necessarily what they think. I realise that's a little bit beside the point you were trying to make, but the heading you used kind of stuck out to me.
"Conflicts Are More Complex Than Hatred or Greed" I think most serious conflicts, especially large scale political conflicts where large groups of people are effectively coerced into killing each other by the rich and powerful minority, i.e. war, have a very strong component of hatred in them, atleast from the point of view of the average person whose being coerced. I agree that you can't make the entire conflict predicated on generic hate, that would be really boring and bland. But where this hatred arises from and how it's pushed onto the people and even wrapped into their identity is a very complex and interesting question.
Now to balance this out I just want to say that "The People In the Past Were Not Stupid" is a statement I strongly agree with, and I appreciate that you brought it up.
Also I'm looking forward to seeing where you go when you get a little bit more meta.
Thanks, Maximilian, as always, for your well-thought-out comments. For what it's worth on all three or four of my little maxims there: I'm arguing in favor of complexity and nuance over rote stereotypes. Certainly the nature of belief within even one individual is very complex, to say nothing of how that fractals outwards into society and then over time. My quip that people generally believed what they said they believed is meant primarily as a corrective against those who unthinkingly (and even unknowingly) carry a modern, secular ambivalence towards the spiritual dimension into non-modern settings. It's the ambivalence I'm trying to dispel. Even if the author doesn't care, most people in history did care, whatever that might look like (and it might look like any number of things). All I'm really trying to say is: it mattered to people, so if religion is present in fantasy, it ought to matter to people.
I was really just trying to again argue for complexity. There are as many reasons to go to war as there are individual humans, and I argue against lazy motivations. "We all hate all of them" is a little lazy. "The rich are greedy and everyone else is coerced," is also I think a little lazy. Now, put both of those together at the same time—but then add in genuine threats to a nation and people who want to become heroes—now you have a nuanced situation with a lot of different characters who will feel real. None of those "motivations" are necessarily at odds with one another and major conflicts have varying degrees of all those things, all operating alongside each other. I'm trying to say that the more an author understanding all those operating dynamics, the more complex, nuanced, rich, and "real" a fictional conflict between fictional people might seem.
Anyway, these are frankly much larger topics than I could have possibly done justice with a few paragraphs, and I want to thank you again for the comment and for spurring the conversation on in a deeper way
You've hit on a really important point about people applying modern, post-enlightenment world views into non-modern settings—in regards to religion and just about everything else. It's something you see a lot of in fantasy, and I can understand why. It's easier for a modern person to project a modern world view, and to be fair sometimes it's okay for them to do so. It really depends on the author's intention. I think too often though, fantasy writers are setting out to create some sort of non-modern world but project a modern world view on their characters almost sub-consciously, then you end up with things feeling a bit wonky and inconsistent.
Yeah the more depth you can give to a conflict the better. What you're pointing to of essentially giving every character their own motivation for taking part in a given conflict is really important. It makes the conflict feel more real and it makes the characters feel more real.
Also, "The rich are greedy and everyone else is coerced," is an accurate surface level analysis for a lot of political conflicts. But as you're getting at, it's never going to stop there. There's going to be layer's of depth to the conflict both behind and in front of the statement.
I’d like to request a citation on that, or at least a greater explanation of why you want to boil “at least half” of the conflict across a millennium of human history down to two simple emotions.