Oh the times, oh the behaviors. Or how true do you have to be to a culture or time period, compared to what readers think they know?
Some things we have to skip, because modern readers will hurl the book across the room unless you are really, really clear about sub-genre and audience. If you have a fantasy based on Tang Dynasty China [Daughter of the Pearl], or a fantasy setting using a non-European base culture, you cannot have the casual beatings of children and wives. Yes, it was common and accepted in those cultures, but unless you are writing for a BDSM audience, and make that explicit in the cover copy, characterization, et cetera, you can’t have the hero beat his wife. The casual brutality of Medieval and Early Modern Europe? Downplay unless you are writing historical fiction in such a way that readers expect it to be really realistic. Heck, even history books tend to downplay it. “Yet again, the apprentices rioted. According to municipal records, eighteen were killed, and a hundred forty injured, and the Jewish Quarter was badly damaged and looted.*” No mention of how many of those injuries turned lethal because of infection, or the horror of homes lost and businesses destroyed.
That’s not the Middle Ages that people know. We don’t get the smells of the pre-modern world (thanks be to $DEITY$), the violence, the harshness of life even for the pampered and sheltered. There are ways to include some of the brutality and grit, especially if your protagonist is in a field where that is part of his or her job (coroner, surgeon, watchman and thief-taker, what have you). But again, what expectations are your readers coming to the book with, and how well do you prepare them for what’s coming? It’s easier to err on the side of clean, tidy, and modern.
Even in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, depending on your setting, you’re going to have complications. Regency England or Napoleonic Europe? Oh, even worse, because readers who like those periods know in their bones what it’s supposed to be like. Heaven help the writer who goes for accuracy when the reader is 1000% sure of something else. As Karen, Sarah, Blake, and others point out, you have to balance technical details and correctness with readers’ ideas of the era. Go read Heyer, please. She set the pattern that the rest of us mostly follow. And she did her research.
Sci-fi? You have more freedom, depending on how fiction your science is. If you are going to scrap the laws of Newtonian physics, for example, you’d better do it well and explain it clearly within the story-world. Again, reader expectations are important. Play with genetics? Do a little digging. When I wrote Hubris, I read up on genetic modification as was known at the time of writing, and touched on a few things, then went off into the fiction part. The science was the cause, but the story was about other things. However, the science had to be plausible, as did the results**. The bulk of the book and the sequel are soft sci-fi/alien empire, not hard sci-fi.
Dorothy Grant ran into readers who anticipated that any empire would be the bad guys’ government, and the heroes would of course support a republic. Oops. Me, I kinda lean the other way, but that’s because of doing so much research on the Holy Roman Empire 2.0, so I’m an Odd. When she told me, I boggled, then went “duh” as she grinned at me. Star Wars. Readers were primed for an evil empire. Different background, different expectations.
TL;DR: make things clear for readers, temper accuracy with understanding of reader expectations, and don’t be surprised when someone takes things in a different way than you did. Find out why, if you can, and work with it, or be clearer if you have to. Or shrug and carry on, knowing that some readers will be surprised.
Image credit: Image by Antonios Ntoumas from Pixabay
*Not a true quote, but a gloss of several lectures, museum displays, and German-language history accounts of urban riots.
**Only one individual actually turned out the way the genetics people had hoped. Many generations later, and even he eventually developed a lethal medical condition, in part from the tinkering.
Mad Genius Club 
27 responses to “Oh Tempora, Oh Mores! – Alma T. C. Boykin”
From the point of view of the characters, it doesn’t smell. Any more than the modern world smells to modern people. You shouldn’t falsify point of view.
Depends on where and what season. There are accounts I have read complaining about the summer miasma, or the unusual bad smells in the city. So there’s “usual background,” “odd bad” and “unusual horrible.” I’ve also read sailors’ notes regarding smelling a port city before they could see it (not common, but a sign of trouble in the city.) So it varies with time, place, and situation.
Yes it does/did. The fact that the people living then took active steps to avoid the worst of the stench means that yes, they did in fact notice it. And the modern world has its own odors, many of which are the same as the medieval era, such as the smell of the sea or the fish market.
There are still open sewers in many parts of the modern world, too. Fewer people who know what horse dung smells like, or what it means to smell of horse, sure. But if your character is one of those people, by all means use that.
I wouldn’t expect a historical OR future/sci-fi character to know what car exhaust smells like, but I’d certainly expect someone in New York City to notice it. Even if it’s just something like it blending together with all the smells of the city.
They wouldn’t characterize their world as “smelly” any more than we would characterize ours as “noisy.”
The fact that the people living now take active steps to avoid the worst of the racket means that yes, they do in fact notice it. But to have someone notice the noise of the modern world would require a particular noise, or else a change in environment that changes the noises.
People characterize the modern world as “noisy” almost constantly.
It’s a multi-genre cliche, from documentaries to philosophy to theology to romance novels and fiction.
There are multiple movements about ‘getting away’ from the ‘modern noise’ and learning to appreciate silence.
People go around *telling* people the world is noisy and they should step back from it. It’s not an omnipresent awareness.
…. no, again, folks already constantly talk about how noisy it is.
We are, point of fact, characterizing this as a noisy age.
Same way that we do, in fact, characterize a lot of chunks of life as stinking. (I’m not sure it’s possible to chat for five minutes about the mall without a rant about the various aroma-smelling places and their aura.)
Thus, it is objectively not falsifying a point of view, even if you don’t happen to share that point of view.
Constantly? Because I haven’t heard anyone talk of it in the last year. How often have you heard it?
I hear neighbors talk about it a few times a week, depending on the wind direction. And who is winding up their car or motorcycle on the straight stretch of road a mile or so from RedQuarters. It’s what you are used to vs. what you desire. That probably applies to a lot of settings, times, and cultures. Some things you do go ear or nose-blind to, others draw attention because of intensity or bad connotations (miasmas) or being unusual.
“Excess sound” is also a common complaint in some national parks, but that’s a different setting and different set of expectations. (Although I rolled my eyes at the guy in Banff complaining about the wind in the trees being too loud. He was serious, too.)
Since you’ve just implied you have, indeed, heard folks characterize the current time as “noisy,” just not in the last handful of months, your original complaint about falsifying a viewpoint has been dealt with; I feel no need to walk through your choice of media in the last year or honestly at any other stretch.
Actually I have no memory of it ever but of course can’t swear it too far back.
Also, I said nothing about media. I said talking about it.
Let’s leave this topic where it is for now, please. I think we’ve reached a bit of an impasse, and are at the point where talking in person is needed to make sure we are all on the same sheet of music.
Thanks! 🙂
One thing you can do if you want the pre-present setting without pre-present attitudes is to have said setting be the result of technological regression–forex, set your “regency romance” on a colony world that fell out of contact, was unable to maintain their tech base, and regressed to a pre-present societal organization/technological level.
Or you can go the C.S. Forester route and have your protagonist have present attitudes but he and everyone else around him thinks he’s an absolute weirdo.
At least one Star Wars knockoff – the Italian/Canadian Starcrash – went with a benevolent emperor (played by Christopher Plummer, either because he was part of the “film in Canada” perks included with the tax breaks, or because people mostly associated him with Token Good Austrian Captain Von Trapp). The main villain of the story was an evil baron rebelling against the emperor. It didn’t work out particularly well for the filmmakers IIRC, but I don’t know how much of that was bad script-writing and Christmas tree lights as star fields, and how much was the benevolent empire.
I tend to stick to secondary worlds precisely to have a little more flex, but it still means I need to keep checking back on the equivalent real-world setting to manage readers’ expectations and keep the technological development more or less straight. I tend not to beat the drum about Period Sexism very hard, partly because I don’t have interesting things to say about it, partly because Strong Woman effortlessly smacks around (verbally or physically) Blindly Chauvinistic Male just comes off as really lame and cheap in a lot of the fantasy novels I run across.
A few years back, a (IIRC) high school class was shown an old-time News Reel (the type shown in movie theaters) and cheered when the narrator said “The Rebels entered the city”.
The fun-and-games was that the News Reel was about the Spanish Civil War and the Rebels were Franco’s men.
Of course, historically Franco is mainly seen as the “Bad Guy” fighting against the Spanish Republic, but the students heard “Rebels” and thanks to Star Wars saw “Rebels as the Good Guys”. 😆
On the other hand, the Spanish Republic was highly Communist so the Rebels could be seen as the “Somewhat Better Side”. 😈
Yeah. That was one where you had “bad”, “worse,” “why-can’t-they-all-lose?” and “might-be-survivable.” Then the Big Dogs got involved and it went downhill.
Well, I still think Franco showed his “true colors” in how he arranged for what would happen after his death.
His successor became King and restored the Spanish Republic. I don’t believe that the Prince “fooled” Franco in any way.
“On the other hand, the Spanish Republic was highly Communist so the Rebels could be seen as the “Somewhat Better Side”.”
I’m not sure how accurate it is, but I’ve read several times how one of the bigger reasons why the Spanish Republicans lost was because the “help” Stalin sent them largely consisted of NKVD men who spent more time killing the ‘wrong’ sort of Communists than they did fighting the enemy.
I was also surprised to read that, apparently, J.R.R. Tolkien supported Franco. Or at least felt that he was the lesser evil.
George Orwell was more directly involved in the Spanish Civil War than most “lefties” because he actually joined an Anarchist Group fighting against Franco.
That group got purged by the Spanish Communists within the Republic Forces. Orwell survived and returned to England where he wrote about his experiences.
Meanwhile, Franco forces contained many groups (fascist and non-fascist) and Franco worked hard keeping all of the groups focused on defeating the Republic Forces.
So, it’s very possible that the in-fighting within the Republic Forces were a factor in Franco’s victor.
Oh, after his victory some of the fascist groups were causing some problems for Franco so when Hitler demanded that he provide Spanish forces in Hitler’s war against the Soviets, Franco send them to the “Russian Front” where they really impressed the German generals.
By the way, I hadn’t heard that about Tolkien but I suspect that it was more anti-Communist than pro-Franco.
Large parts of the Left decided that it was time for the Revolution. Orwell thought they had succeeded and never realized that would mean they were as illegitimate as Franco’s forces.
I suspect it was mostly anti-Communism on Tolkien’s part myself.
I also read about the Spanish troops in Russia, the Blue Division/Legion. They apparently got on very well with the local Russians in comparison to the Germans proper, and more than a few of them returned to Spain with Russian war brides.
I did a search on that and it was more to do with Tolkien’s Catholicism.
Socialism, especially Communism, was very anti-religion especially anti-Catholicism.
And Tolkien knew people who had contacts in Spain.
So he knew about what the Spanish socialists were doing in Spain.
Yup, there were hundreds of martyred Catholic nuns, monks, priests, laypeople, etc. who were literally doing nothing wrong, and who got murdered by the Spanish Communists out of hatred of the faith. So yeah, that made it kinda hard to support anybody but Franco, since at least Franco was stopping that nonsense.
Mind you, that doesn’t mean Franco was a little white lamb, either.
http://newsaints.faithweb.com/martyrs/MSPC.htm
I believe there were fairly largish numbers of Protestant martyrs in the Spanish CIvil War, too, but I don’t know much about their deeds and sufferings.
The Republican side in the Spanish civil war was quite nasty, and like some political factions today, were more interested in being in power (and punishing their enemies) than in having a true democratic Republic.
Nod.
And their definition of “enemies” included people “on their side” that weren’t “pure enough”.
Also those “internal” enemies were “more dangerous” than their official opponents.
One of the ways you can pull this off is keep the story going, then throw something in that reminds people that this isn’t Kansas anymore.
My favorite example is from the “Ciapais Cain” Warhammer 40K stories, namely the one where the main character was assigned to a boarding school after his retirement. He was talking about all the things that you would expect someone in charge of classes to talk about, then he threw in the line about a prison van driving by holding prisoners to be used for interrogation training and live-fire practice.
…and you realize that he doesn’t see anything wrong with this…
To me that’s the best way to handle such things. I remember a bit from an early Harry Turtledove novel, I think it was ‘Werenight’, where the main character and two companions arrive at a city and find a forest of the impaled around it. It smells nasty but that’s all they really notice about several hundred people dying slowly and horribly on impaling pikes.