For the first time ever, my online book club is reading fiction. I think it was the hard grind of a meticulously footnoted book on the history of Roman Britain that wore them down. In any case, they decided that a historical novel would be more palatable and might spur more interesting discussion, so we’re reading Gillian Bradshaw’s Island of Ghosts, which is one of my favorite books. It deals with that time Marcus Aurelius sent a few thousand Sarmatians to Britain, so it’s set nicely in the middle of the Roman period there, and…
Re-reading it just after reading a professional historian’s take on the period reminds me of one way novelists have it harder than historians. The historian gets to bracket everything with endless uncertainty bars. “It’s said that Marcus Aurelius exiled the conquered Sarmatians to Britain, but we have only one source for this and he’s not all that reliable; on the other hand, archaeologists claim to have dug up a Sarmatian corpse in Britain; on the other other hand…”
The novelist doesn’t get to hide behind this or any other ambiguity. We have to decide which way it was and make it plausible. Here’s the first of a long series of questions: Did the Romans swear some conquered Sarmatians into their army and send them to Britain? Yes – we may have a novel here. No – go back and think of a new story.
And it all flows on from there. Did they keep their own weapons and armor? Who commanded them, Romans or their own people? How did they communicate – if the Sarmatian narrator speaks Latin, you’ve got to figure out where he learned it. What was Dubris (Dover) like in the second century A.D.? Did they travel with their wagons or leave them behind?
And that’s just the first chapter. The necessary decisions flow on and on as you try to give the reader a feeling for what life was like, what constraints the characters suffered, what they accepted as normal. Oh, it’s not all, or even mostly, needed for plot purposes. But it is needed for building the world you want your reader to live in. Yes, you can get away with being vague on some issues. But avoid all of them, and your Sarmatians in Island of Ghosts will be nothing more than, well, ghosts.
Now tell me how science fiction writers have it even harder, filling in the details of an unknowable future.
Mad Genius Club 
9 responses to “Types of ambiguity”
And for both the historical and the sci-fi story, whichever way you go can be shown wrong by further evidence, or by scientific breakthroughs. And that’s assuming you haven’t missed information that already exists.
One of the things I enjoyed about Person Scott Card’s ‘Worthing Saga’ was he did both what people though had happened, and what actually had happened.
That segment of things everyone believed but were wrong, and believably wrong was a fascinating cap to the story.
I also recently read through a trio of short ‘how a spy thinks’ books, and what struck me was just how much of it is based on managing risks from incomplete information. There’s even one example the author uses where I’m pretty sure he’s misunderstood the motivations of the people involved as well. And to do people fully, a fiction author kind of needs to capture that too. It is a ew brain screw.
Oh, no. Now I want to re-read Island of Ghosts. It’s been long enough I remember no details, but I do remember it was a really good read.
As for how hard SF writers have it. Well. You don’t have to look up street names, the locations of buildings, the phases of the moon, all sorts of stuff. You get to make those mundane details up. It’s awesome.
You still have to get all that scienc stuff down. That’s harder.
That sounds like the plot of 2004’s King Arthur.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0349683/
To be nit-picky, Island of Ghosts is more about setting the precondition for that version of King Arthur… a couple of centuries early.
The hypothesis that Sarmatians provided the basis for King Arthur and possibly for most of the Round Table myth is quite popular. I haven’t looked at the arguments in detail.
King Arthur, like Robin Hood, is a wonderful stew of elements thrown together by an army of cooks going to all the earlier pots for a ladlefull and then adding whatever seems to be missing from the cook’s tastes. You can always decide not to dine from any particular pot.🥘
This is why I like high fantasy. I make it all up!
(But I still need to know enough history to be plausible. And many things are not obvious. The Industrial Revolution turned on pistons, which turned on precision boring, which turned on artillery and the need to standardize.)
The one thing I remember with any degree of clarity about Island of Ghosts is the narrator’s quiet awe at the Roman supply going brrrt and spitting out equipment in Britain for his group sourced from halfway across the empire.