Listening to the train whistle blow, and thinking about steampunk at my desk this morning. Raconteur Press is running a steampunk anthology call which will open October 15, and we’d gotten a question about what we wanted to see in stories for that. Which led to the Three Moms of the Apocalypse sitting down and talking steam for an hour. It’s really interesting when you dive into it, the places you can go powered with the idea that steam generation – and more importantly, perhaps, containment – had reached a maturity of technological capacity. We posited that the Victorian ethos of exploration, unbounded curiosity, and wonderment at the wide world are all things that readers will desire in stories.
I’ve been reading non-fiction, as I often do when my writing well is dry (or nearly so). The seep of creativity through the walls of the well sometimes slow to a mere dribble, and I’ve found that filling my brain up with interesting books, in a somewhat random pattern, can aid in that process speeding up until I can draw a story out of the pit that is my brain. I didn’t intend, for instance, to be reading The Ghost Map and thinking about steampunk at the same time, but once I did, it turned the story of the early epidemiology investigation in very different directions in my mind. Then again, having been reading The 10,000 Year Explosion, and Sowell’s inestimable Conquests and Cultures, all in the same time-frame, has given me much fuel for the imagining.
That series of quotes alone evokes worlds, does it not? I haven’t got a feel, yet, for where this story is going, but it’s world is beginning to come alive for me, in the humanness and also the microbial soup of the world we all live in, whether we acknowledge it or not.
The worlds we build, the stories we spin, are drawn from ourselves and indelibly stamped by that process. Not in the sense of a Mary Sue, but the research we’ve done, deliberately or not. Talking at dinner last night with a friend and fellow author, I asked after a story under deadline. With humor, she replied that she’d fallen down the rabbit hole of research, looking for a specific sound. It’s only going to be a couple of lines, but finding the sound… I knew what she meant. I’ve been there. The story may come into inchoate form from imagination and previous research into interesting topics, but the details are carefully chipped from such searches that lead us into strange and wonderful places, for only a small part of the story itself.
Perhaps, other than the need to suss out the Paleolithic con man, the complexity of language was also driven by the need to tell more complex stories. After all, what is a con but a story misrepresented? Stories give us much value, and I weight escape from the cares of the world around us just as highly as the insights into human nature that a story well-told can limn forth clearly by analysis of the character’s actions and consequences thereafter.
Stories can explore the worlds that are, and have been, and never will be. We can tell stories with one foot in reality and another in the aether of the potential, to amuse and entertain and possibly pique the curiosity of those who read it. Science fiction has given us much science.
Mad Genius Club 
19 responses to “Evoke Worlds from Imagination and History”
I’ve wondered if the stories of elves and dwarves are the experiences of homo sapian and Neanderthal interactions. Neanderthal being the short stocky and a moths to the sapians, and h sapians being the fair and talkative elves to the Neanderthal?
Given Neanderthals were taller and bulkier than humans, more like tales of giants and ogres.
In Michael Scott Rohan’s Winter Of The World series, he had Neanderthals as slightly shorter than humans, excellent craftsmen and living in underground mountain cities.
(They had started living those cities to escape an earlier ice age.)
So they were the dwarves of human legend.
Oh, Rohan had elves (two types) that were altered humans (altered by a Forest Power). 😀
Huh. I actually though Neanderthals were shorter, but bulkier.
In Scandinavia, there are suspicions that some of the troll legends came from encounters with Neanderthal, or possibly later, still-nomadic groups. Herders and hunters have often been considered “uncanny” by settled peoples (see the Lapplanders/Sami and the other Scandinavians.)
I’ve read some cryptozoologists who argue that the stories about Grendel and his dam from Beowulf, and the jotuns and trolls from Norse legends, are actually based on real-life accounts of what they call the ‘True Giants’. AKA 10′-20′ tall hominids who were and still are supposed to be running around Scandinavia.
On the other hand they have ‘Neandertaloids’ living up in Nahanni, the Valley of the Headless Men, in western Canada. This stuff gets weird.
Oh, and didn’t Michael Crichton do a book about that?
Yep, Eaters of the Dead.
Better known as “The 13th Warrior.”
Snelson134, Paul Howard, thanks to both of you.
Read lots of history. Lots and lots and lots. Primary source is best — that is, historical document, not writings about history.
The point is not so much to steal stuff as to get a feel for what is essential and what is not. And what is absolutely essential and what is relatively so — in relationship to other factors.
Very true, however… don’t disdain reading fiction incorporating history. All the descriptions in the world about Regency Mail vs Post vs private carriages don’t convey the perils of travel nearly as well as good fiction waxing eloquent on the subject (as long as it’s accurate).
It’s the falsehoods I’ve seen spread from book to book that warn me off
What about fiction written in the era of research interest?
That’s primary source. You have to read between the lines but that’s the usual
Hence the need to also read the real thing. But the real thing won’t necessarily explain obvious stuff that has lost it’s obviousness.
Example: a generic casual term in the Regency for any sort of carriage seems to be “chaise” (from the French for “chair”, referring to a seat-on-wheels). Much as we would say “car” (or even, “a ride”), without specifics. (“One-horse shay” comes from this, too.)
But there are also specific English carriages referred to as “chaises”, so it is also a restricted technical term, depending on how it’s used.
The period histories don’t explain this — it’s just a common usage. But if you happen to read well-researched fiction, you will stumble upon an inconsistency of specificity that makes you look more closely at the usage, until you understand the multiple meanings/usages of the term.
This sort of alert is the kind of thing I find the (well-researched) fiction good for, as secondary research.
Compare early motor-car slang. “So, what sort’a buggy you driving now?” That uses carriage slang to refer to (potentially) a new-fangled vehicle. Think any reference works of the period would spell that usage out?
Along with the other references here, I’d like to recommend this one, which provides a world of insight into part of the Georgian/Regency economic & social culture.
https://amzn.to/46aVxAx
City of Beasts (Thomas Almeroth-Williams)
Yes, Mr. Genius Person, this is called “spontaneous order” and is how basically all of economics works, and has always worked. The fact that you find it astonishing and remarkable speaks poorly of your education in general, and your sniffiness about education and central planners in particular. If someone had centrally planned it, especially if it had been a bureaucrat or government official, London would never have been able to reach a population of two million and likely would have fallen apart in about half a year.
(Sorry, but the utter ignorance of our “educated” class combined with their absolutely unshakeable faith in their own superiority angers and depresses me by turns. The book may be very good, but the sheer ignorance that this quote exposes is terrifying.)