That's the main thing. Otherwise, um, yeah, I may have overstated things a bit here (see my response to Ellen F., above.) but really I am not saying "nobody is allowed to write fiction about the past, or make stuff up about the past." I am saying "if you make stuff up about the past, you are very likely to cause historians to gnash our teeth and howl woefully." Sadly, the fear of upsetting historians is not much of a motivator for most writers.
And, you know, leaving aside great lit, I do enjoy some fictions about alternate pasts. I'm a big fan of one novel which starts by assuming the near-total destruction of the population of a continent: in Years of Rice and Salt, Kim Stanley Robinson kills off the Europeans shortly after the fall of Rome. But he thought very hard about what that would mean over a long timescale - he had to drag in reincarnation in order to do it - and he's about a zillion times smarter than your average writer-of-urban-fantasy, so.
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Date: 2009-05-12 01:21 pm (UTC)That's the main thing. Otherwise, um, yeah, I may have overstated things a bit here (see my response to Ellen F., above.) but really I am not saying "nobody is allowed to write fiction about the past, or make stuff up about the past." I am saying "if you make stuff up about the past, you are very likely to cause historians to gnash our teeth and howl woefully." Sadly, the fear of upsetting historians is not much of a motivator for most writers.
And, you know, leaving aside great lit, I do enjoy some fictions about alternate pasts. I'm a big fan of one novel which starts by assuming the near-total destruction of the population of a continent: in Years of Rice and Salt, Kim Stanley Robinson kills off the Europeans shortly after the fall of Rome. But he thought very hard about what that would mean over a long timescale - he had to drag in reincarnation in order to do it - and he's about a zillion times smarter than your average writer-of-urban-fantasy, so.
Enjoy that Ambien! Also, mwah!