Surprising Varieties of Historical Fiction
Historical fiction is a sprawling literary genre with stories that span the entire length of humanity’s time on Earth and spring from every culture, every civilization throughout the world. It comprises stories of invention, discovery, war, and devastation. It tells us of heroes and scientists; mystics and heretics; poets, painters, writers, and musicians; kings and rebels, builders and destroyers. It is through these stories that history comes alive. It is through them that we learn of the hopes and dreams; the compassion and empathy; the creativity and skullduggery of humanity in ways that academic history simply cannot deliver.
My first foray into historical fiction was my novel, “The Savage Apostle,” set in 17th century New England and recounting the events that led up to King Philp’s War, the most savage war per capita ever fought on American soil. The story is delivered to us through two protagonists—John Eliot, missionary to the Wampanoag people, and Metacom (Philip), a Wampanoag sachem. The events of that time were fascinating in themselves, but my emphasis was primarily in trying to get into the minds of my two disparate protagonists to better understand their beliefs and actions, and to speculate on what paths either, or both, could have taken to avoid the bloody conflict. It was through the stories of these two men and the conflict swirling around them that I came to realize how influential they were in establishing a template for relations between the American government and Native American nations that lasted for three centuries, disastrous relations that categorized indigenous populations as “other”—at best—or at worst, doomed to be exterminated. I would never have come to this deeper understanding of policies which are still playing out today between the U.S. government and Native American nations by simply reading academic history.
A deeper understanding of people, the choices they make in life, and how those choices are affected by the historical contexts in which they live was part of the inspiration for “The Bottle Conjuror.” Jack discovered the strange historical nugget about an 18th-century hoax in London that had the city’s elite believing a conjuror would disappear into a wine bottle right before their eyes. This odd event fascinated us. Jack and I began wondering about who was behind the hoax and how so many could be conned out of their money to attend a performance at which no conjuror ever appeared. We used some historical characters, such as the Duke of Montague, the Duke of Cumberland, and the bare-knuckles champion, Jack Broughton, to tell our story, but somehow—and I still don’t know how—we invented as our protagonist a crippled Romani conjuror and set an invented group of Romani assassins against him. Not only did we invent conjurors and murderers, but we also speculated on what would have happened if someone had been able to put themselves into a wine bottle. Magic and the supernatural ensued.
In other words, we turned a true historical event into an historical fantasy.
But historical fantasy is only one of several historical subgenres. Here are a few more:
Alternative history is a genre in which a different outcome for actual historical events is fictionalized. There have been several novels in this regard speculating on how history would have been changed had the Nazis won in WW II, or if the Confederates had defeated the Union. A recent, interesting approach to alternative history is Percival Everett’s, “James” in which the author transforms Mark Twain’s illiterate, stereotypical runaway slave, Jim, into an intelligent and literate man with a mission to bring his family out of slavery. This novel may be unique in that it alters a previous novel, “Huckleberry Finn,” with an ending quite different than Twain’s, yet still based on the history of slavery in the United States.
Some of the other historical fiction subgenres include paranormal novels, such as George Saunders’ “Lincoln in the Bardo,” mysteries like Umberto Ecco’s “The Name of the Rose,” westerns like Thomas Berger’s “Little Big Man,” sc-fi as in Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451,” and romance, as in Diana Gabaldon’s “Outlander.” And, of course, historical fantasy as exemplified in “The Bottle Conjuror.” All these subgenres still adhere to historical fiction principles by utilizing historical events or characters, or at least setting the narrative within an historical context.
The great thing about so many subgenres being available is that almost any work of fiction can be considered historical fiction, offering broader opportunities for writers to work in.
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