564 – Historical Fantasy Worldbuilding
Description
Sometimes, fantasy is actually history, and I’m not talking about the claim that Middle-earth is actually ancient Europe. The historical fantasy genre has a lot of potential, especially for weird nerds who won’t shut up about fun historical factoids, but it does have some challenges. You usually want something that’s recognizably historical, but you also want to account for the differences caused by magic. Or do you? Listen and find out!
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast, with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.
[opening song]
Oren: And welcome, everyone, to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Oren.
Chris: And I’m Chris.
Oren: So I’m working on a story where, back in the ancient past, 5,000 years ago, a meteor came down. It gave everyone the ability to bend reality at will. The story is set in the present and everything is the same, except that, instead of debating gun control, we are debating reality-bending control.
Chris: We don’t have reality-bending dinosaurs from the meteor that hit?
Oren: No, not from 5,000 years ago.
Chris: Good point. Very recent dinosaurs!
Oren: They’ve been hiding those dinos. 5,000 years ago is recent enough that we might have some reality-bending mammoths up on one of those Arctic islands in the north of Russia.
Chris: I love the idea that you have a masquerade in your setting where magic is secret, but also dinosaurs.
Oren: Also dinosaurs!
Chris: Is that really a bigger deal than hiding magic? I think it would probably be just as hard to hide magic as to hide dinosaurs.
Oren: Depends on the size of the dinosaur, I guess.
Chris: Yeah, it might be easier to hide dinosaurs if they’re like the little chicken-sized dinosaurs also known as chickens.
Oren: Babby non avian dinosaurs. So obviously, I recently wrote a post about how history might or might not change in historical fantasy, and that might be out by the time this podcast comes out. Who knows when our posts come out? Not me. If it is, you’ve already seen that, and if not, you have that to look forward to. But I wanted to talk about it in a casual discussion format, because I still have thoughts, and if those don’t, you know, get out somewhere for content consumption, I don’t know what I’m doing with my life.
Chris: Start talking in your sleep because you need to rant about this?
Oren: It’s called a snorecast, I’ll have you know.
Chris: I think it is interesting, when we’re talking about historical fantasy and what is the effect of magic, how similar it starts to feel to alternate history, which is its own subgenre of speculative fiction, because it’s almost like alternate history Plus.
Oren: I would say historical fantasy is almost by definition a kind of alternate history where one of the things that changed is that there’s magic now that’s generally not part of the historical timeline. There are some exceptions, right? Like, you can make a historical fantasy where you make everything self-contained, maybe it’s a masquerade, maybe the fantasy just happens in a very small area so it doesn’t really affect anything else, that’s all possible.
Chris: That’s the difference, right? Historical fantasy doesn’t have to get into all of that historical details if that’s not the goal, whereas alternate history, I think that there’s an expectation of higher realism. Because the point is that you have history diverging, there would naturally be more of a focus on that. Not that you can’t have that in historical fantasy too. I just think in alternate history that’s the point. And of course we don’t have magic to do the diverging, whereas in historical fantasy, you would definitely have magic be the reason why history is different.
Oren: No, historical fantasy where the south won the Civil War and unrelated, there are wizards.
Chris: Yeah, right? It just feels really random when you do that. Or you could just have dragons in the setting besides magic, something like that.
Oren: You can do the thing that we’ve seen several times, which is historical fantasy where magic is everywhere, it’s super well known and everyone uses it, but also everything is the same and nothing changed. I wish people wouldn’t do that. I don’t like that. It’s not something I’m a fan of. It just kind of makes me wish you were just doing normal historical fiction at that point, because at least I wouldn’t feel lied to. “Alright, here’s all this magic and everyone uses it everywhere.” It’s like, “Okay, wow, what’s the implications of that?” “None. Don’t ask about the implications. There aren’t any. We’re not doing that.”
Chris: I think people just want to have the aesthetics of the historical time period. They don’t want to have to do the whole figure out cause and effect. If you want castles and dragons, right? because we can have a whole conversation about how those fantasy elements actually change the setting, the problem is having castles and dragons is inherently a bit illogical. I mean, depending on the dragons, of course. But a lot of times we show dragons and they can just destroy castle walls as they fly by or something. And at that point, there’s no point in castles.
Oren: Your dragons don’t have to be Temeraire levels of dragon, where not only are dragons really big, but they work closely with humans and are in many cases basically human servants. Which does raise questions about: Why does anyone have big fixed fortifications? Because, as we see in the novels, dragons can just drop large rocks on them from way too high up to be shot at. And don’t worry about it, everything’s fine now.
Chris: It’s probably fairly likely, right? I don’t know if it would be everybody that you would get in a situation where you want the aesthetic coming from a certain time of history, but then you’re adding magic that would naturally outmode that aesthetic. It’s like the issue with people wanting characters to use swords in a setting where there’s modern guns; there’s not a lot of reason to use swords, but we just want swords, and so sometimes that could be an issue if you think about all of the effects that magic would realistically have.
Oren: I’m willing to grant some grace on this one. I’ll be magnanimous. Like, I get it. You know, the whole point of historical fantasy is that you want to be in a historical period. Being like, “Oh, well, you can’t, because your magic has been around and would have changed everything,” I get that that’s not a super workable approach, so I’m willing to meet authors halfway. And if they want to follow the Temeraire route, which is that everything is the same up until the story starts, and at that point, things can change because of how dragons work, I’ll accept that. I will be wondering, like, it’s a little weird that dragons being everywhere didn’t have any impact on the French Revolution or the life of this kind of obscure Corsican aristocrat who ends up becoming military dictator of France. A little weird that that all happened in the same way, but now that the story’s started, we have dragon airlifts and different colonized territories breaking away and battles that turned out in different ways. Yeah, cool. There we go. That’s what I want. See? That’s all I ask. It’s not unreasonable.
Chris: In the Temeraire series, is it just dragons? Is there anything else? Any other fantasy creatures? Any other kind of magic?
Oren: Just dragons.
Chris: Question two:
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