October 2018 – Catherine Schaff-Stump

Fantastic History #17: The Elephant and Macaw Banner by Christopher Kastensmidt

My journey with Gerard Van Oost and Oludara has been five years longer than their fictional journey. Traveling back to 2010, I first met Christopher Kastensmidt, as we were both authors at a small press called Cats Curious. That same year, the first of these novelettes came out in Realms of Fantasy and was nominated for a Nebula. I was hooked.

Most of you know my twin infatuations with historical fiction and fantasy. Historical fiction AND fantasy are a combination I can’t resist, much like chocolate and peanut butter. One of my favorite authors is Alexandre Dumas, and Christopher Kastensmidt is a direct heir to him.

Kastensmidt has written a series of novelettes that span eight publishing years. The main characters, Gerard Van Oost and Oludara, capture the true spirit of early Brazil: itinerant hunters of folkloric monsters who set out to explore the wilds of the jungle in the early days of colonization, using their strength, skills, and wit. The two of them seem more than a match for anything they meet in the end, and their heroics are epic, considering they only two under the Elephant and Macaw banner.

Each novelette explores the beauty of the Brazilian landscape, explores Brazilian folklore, and reveals the texture and tapestry of the early settlers of Brazil. The research is painstaking; the content is woven together expertly. These novelettes are an immersive experience with characters you truly care about. Kastensmidt is committed to inclusivity in his series, and writes other cultures with care and grace.

Your entry point to these amazing adventures is now. Guardbridge Books is collecting the entirety of the series and is releasing it as a collection, which will be released on November 5th. To read more about the amazing journey Kastensmidt’s story has taken in Brazil, check out this entry in Fantastic History about Elephant and Macaw, as well as our Unreliable Narrators interview with the author.

Fantastic History #16: Creating Geomancy from the Ground Up–Beth Cato’s Blood of Earth Trilogy by Beth Cato

My Blood of Earth trilogy started with a single vague idea: the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, steampunk style. The only other certainty in my head was that it needed to also involve magic, but I needed to make the magic distinct from the healing powers in my novel The Clockwork Dagger, which was just starting to get offers from publishers at the time. My new project was intended to keep me occupied and somewhat more sane during the forthcoming months of existence under an agent-imposed gag order during contract negotiations. I couldn’t talk about The Clockwork Dagger in public until everything was official, but I could discuss my new book in the works. That project was soon titled Breath of Earth.

As I sat down to develop the concept, my first priority was figuring out how magic fit into this alternate history. Once I knew that, I needed to determine how that impacted my heroine. I began to ask an endless sequence of “What if” questions. What if she caused the earthquake somehow? What if something else did? What if the earthquake itself embodied magic?

I suddenly knew the kind of magic I was working with: geomancy. Not only was it a starkly different magic than in The Clockwork Dagger, but it was also a type that I hadn’t seen used much in fantasy fiction.

With geomancy in mind, I then had to look at the world I was building. If this was known magic–not a secret history kind of situation–how had it changed the world? Slowly, gradually, the pieces came together in my notes. Geomancy had a long history. The Romans used it–and even created airships! That painted a ridiculously cool picture in my mind. But with the fall of Rome, the technology was lost. But why? How?

I considered how materials might be necessary to practice geomancy, and that the loss of that resource could have contributed to the Dark Ages. I thought of the Final Fantasy role-playing game series, where I first fell in love with airships as a kid, and how crystals have important roles in various games.

I pieced elements together to form my own magic system within the context of my alt history. Geomancers were sensitive to earthquakes and other outflows of earth energy. They stored that energy as a fever. In an especially bad earthquake, the flow could kill them almost instantly. However, they could save themselves by breaking contact with the ground, or by having special crystals on hand, which I dubbed kermanite. Rome exhausted their original kermanite mines and soon thereafter collapsed as a civilization. In the 19th century, rapid technological developments occurred in America after kermanite was discovered in the California desert. Kermanite charged with earth energy can be used as a battery for everyday objects as well as new advances like airships, autocars, or tanks. That integrated the steampunk genre into the plot, right along with the magic.

That plot included a version of history where the American Civil War ended early due to an alliance between the Union and Japan. By 1906, that cooperation had been formalized as the Unified Pacific, a global superpower currently trying to complete its dominance of mainland China. This had major ripple effects on San Francisco with its high population of Chinese refugees.

Oh yes, and then there was my heroine, Ingrid Carmichael. Not only was she a woman of great geomantic skill–something thought to only be the domain of men–she was also a woman of color. Her understanding of geomancy has evolved with each book. In Breath of Earth, she endures the San Francisco Earthquake–which happens for more complicated reasons than mere plate tectonic action. The second book, Call of Fire, takes her to another geologically volatile region, the Pacific Northwest.

Of course, as a writer, I have to escalate the stakes, which is why the finale in the series, Roar of Sky, ventures to the Big Island of Hawaii to the Kilauea volcano. That book was just released on October 23rd.

Countless “What if?” questions guided me from my initial concept and through about 300,000 words of text. The complex alt history felt as if it broke my brain more than once, but the end result is a complete trilogy that melds geomancy and history in some fun, fantastical new ways.

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Beth Cato hails from Hanford, California, but currently writes and bakes cookies in a lair west of Phoenix, Arizona. She shares the household with a hockey-loving husband, a numbers-obsessed son, and three feline overlords.

She’s the author of THE CLOCKWORK DAGGER (a 2015 Locus Award finalist for First Novel) and THE CLOCKWORK CROWN (an RT Reviewers’ Choice Finalist) from Harper Voyager. Her novella WINGS OF SORROW AND BONE was a 2016 Nebula nominee. Her new alt-history steampunk series began with BREATH OF EARTH and continues with CALL OF FIRE and ROAR OF SKY (out October 23rd, 2018).

Follow her at BethCato.com and on Twitter at @BethCato.

Fantastic History #15: Seven of my Favorite Research Books by Kate Heartfield

Seven of My Favorite Research Books

Like all writers of historical fantasy, I know that every book I write stands on a teetering tower of other books. Each book has its own particular (and sometimes incredibly specialized) stack of research material, and I am so grateful for libraries, librarians, and everyone who has helped make books and articles available online. I’m also grateful to the academics and the other writers of non-fiction whose work informs every story I write.

In my little writing room, I have books on military tactics, clothing, folklore, food, gender, machines, politics… plus, of course, the standard reference books, from dictionaries to bird guides. There are all the primary sources: my copy of the Malleus Maleficarum is particularly well used, as I write about witchcraft a fair bit.

But there are some less obvious books on my groaning shelves that I find myself consulting over and over. I thought I’d give you a short tour of a few of these from my shelves.

These are just a few of my personal favorites, and this is emphatically not a balanced, curated guide or definitive list for other writers. They skew European and North American, for one thing. But they’ve been useful or inspiring to me, and they demonstrate how the research for historical fantasy often ranges beyond a specific setting, era or set of characters.

1. Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing, by Melissa Mohr. Swearing can be tricky in historical fiction. Readers tend to trip on “bad” words, assuming they’re more recent than they generally are. Most swear words in English (and this book does focus on English) have been around for a very long time. That said, they didn’t necessarily carry the same heft that they do today, while other words (generally blasphemous ones) were more serious than they are now. Conveying the emotional and social significance of a bit of dialogue to a modern reader, while keeping true to the period, is a feat. Mohr’s book has been a great guide to those choppy waters.

2. A Dictionary of Chivalry by Grant Uden. I’ll be honest; the main reason I love this book is because I love this particular copy. It belonged to my late grandfather. And I adore how tricksy it is: The binding is a library discard of glaring plain orange, but inside, it’s full of gorgeous illustrations by Pauline Baynes. These days, I’m probably more likely to consult Google if I want to know what a “ricasso” is or what happened at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, so the dictionary tends to be a flipping-through, inspirational book rather than a pure reference guide.

3. Indigenous Writes: A Guide to First Nations, Métis & Inuit Issues in Canada, by Chelsea Vowel. My main settings so far have tended to be northern Europe (where my family’s from) and North America (where I was born and raised.) Intrinsic to the histories of both those regions is the colonization of Indigenous people. Vowel’s book is a wealth of information and analysis on matters that will (or should) pre-occupy writers of historical fantasy, from cultural appropriation to respectful terminology.

4. Herbs for the Medieval Household for Cooking, Healing and Divers Uses by Margaret B. Freeman. This is another gorgeously illustrated book; it was, in fact, printed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I do use this book for reference — if I want a poison or potion, for example — as it is full of references to primary sources. But it, too, is mainly for inspiration. The woodcuts that illustrate each entry are from 15th century sources themselves.

5. The World Guide to Gnomes, Fairies, Elves and Other Little People: A Compendium of International Fairy Folklore by Thomas Keightley. This one was originally published in 1828 as Fairy Mythology. Despite the title, I don’t really use this as a guide to the folklore itself, but rather as one window onto how that folklore evolved and spread, and how it informed the fantastic in the 19th century. (Keightley was a friend of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s family.)

6. The Art of Blacksmithing by Alex W. Bealer. Smiths tend to turn up in whatever I write, or their work does. (For example, a water-powered forge hammer plays a role in my novel Armed in Her Fashion.) Metal is very important to both the history and folklore of Europe, and this illustrated guide has helped me with everything from nails and horseshoes to swords.

7. Scourge: The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox by Jonathan B. Tucker. This one might seem an odd choice, but smallpox has loomed in a few of my books (especially the ones that haven’t come out yet, which are set in 18th century Europe.) It’s hard to overstate the effect that smallpox has had on the history of the world. Beyond that, the history of smallpox is a microcosm of the history of disease and of immunization in general, and the more recent history of how humanity has tried, failed, and occasionally succeeded to work together for a common goal.

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Kate Heartfield’s first novel was Armed in Her Fashion (CZP 2018). She is the author of two time-travel novellas coming soon from Tor.com Publishing, beginning with Alice Payne Arrives in November 2018. Her interactive novel The Road to Canterbury was published by Choice of Games in 2018. Kate is a former journalist in Ottawa, Canada. Her website is kateheartfield.com and she is on Twitter as @kateheartfield.

Fantastic History #14: Masterpiece Theater by Catherine Schaff-Stump

About a month or so ago, I was hanging out with the other Unreliable Narrators, and we were interviewing Gail Carriger. Gail Carriger is the author of a great many books that take place in a peculiar place readers like to call her Parasol-verse, and at some point in the interview, Gail mentioned she liked her books to seem historical in the sense of Masterpiece Theater—not exactly authentic, but somewhat historical.

And I thought, yes, this is what I do. I try to create the mood of a historical novel. Oh, don’t get me wrong. I do a lot of research. I have a book that is a canal-by-canal photo album of Venice, which talks about when each building went up. I read general histories, look at old maps, try to dig into what kind of police force was in Gibraltar in the 19th century. I do the research things.

I also realize I am a 21st-century American woman, and there are many things I will get wrong. I will make many stylized choices a reader might not appreciate as accurate. I simply can’t make one hundred percent historically accurate choices because I am a creature of my time, AND I am writing fiction. Woah is me, but my first hope is to be entertaining, and I cannot escape who I am, where I am, or what my culture tells me to think.

In this regard, I think, Gail Carriger has it right.

Now, lest I am wrong, and I think I am, given the crazy popularity of, say Downton Abby, you might not be familiar with IPT’s Masterpiece Theater, which showcases a great many historical dramas, largely British, based on great(ish) works of British literature, or scripts meant to emulate the great works of British literature. Masterpiece is not the only avenue for these shows, as my third copy of A&E’s 1995 Pride and Prejudice attests to, but it is a handy shorthand for a certain kind of costume drama that recreates, within certain cultural standards, literary drama. I am a fan, and I should point out why I prefer writing with a certain entertainment flair, rather than historical accuracy.

I write fantasy: Not only am I writing historical stories, but I am writing fantasy stories. Even in the realms of alternate history or secret history, there is some amount of fudging the facts, or making assumptions. With fantasy, I am directly inserting the impossible (Egyptian gods banished for their presumption; trolls that traveled to the U.S. with immigrants; post Napoleonic French sorcerers.) into existing history. Accuracy is impossible when parts of your world are made up, although you can try to make your impossible seem plausible within the constraints of history.

Historical recreation sometimes makes for stiff drama: Not always. History can be pretty amazing. But sometimes what actually happened isn’t the most dramatic, as Hollywood reminds us with all of its movies based on true events, sometimes loosely. Adding pizzazz, angst, and drama serve the purpose of a story or novel, to entertain and involve us, the readers and viewers, in the human struggle of a story.

The look is the thing: One need only take a look at Gene Kelly’s version of The Three Musketeers and compare it to the 1993 The Three Musketeers to see what I’m talking about. Yes, we interpret history once again through the lens of our time. Lady deWinter’s crazy 1948 hair with jaunty hat, versus Lady deWinter’s low key long hair, unornamented in 1993, show what’s stylish in each time frame, not in the time Alexandre Dumas is setting the story. Sometimes we are closer to accurate, and sometimes we are way off base, but we do try to get a look we like that evokes the time of our historical drama.

I have to take my modern audience into account: This last one? Well, would you really want to read a story where people acted with past biases and prejudices rather than focused on entertainment? Some of the tensions and predilections of the past make for interesting drama, like The Crown’s revelation that Edward, Elizabeth’s uncle who gave up the throne for Wallace Simpson, thought Hitler was kind of all right. But others make modern viewers cry foul. In Downton Abby, how would we have felt if Sibyl and Thomas didn’t get to make their “unsuitable” match? Modern viewers were rooting for them! So yes, we tinker as dramatists to good effect.

Right now I am about to embark upon the third Klaereon Scroll book, and it will involve two characters from other countries: India and Martinique. I will be doing research into those countries, but I will borrow what works and modify what doesn’t in the tradition of all good historical novelists. So the overall effect might not be scholarly, but if you would pick it up after seeing it on public television, and if the costumes are good, well, my work is done.

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Cath Schaff-Stump writes speculative fiction for children and adults, everything from humor to horror. Her YA Gothic fantasy The Vessel of Ra is available from Curiosity Quills. Catherine lives and works in Iowa with her husband. During the day, she teaches English to non-native speakers at a local community college. Other recent fiction has been published by Paper Golem Press, Daydreams Dandelion Press, and in The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk. Catherine is a co-host on the writing and geek-life fan podcast Unreliable Narrators. You can find her online at Facebook, Goodreads, Amazon, @cathschaffstump, cathschaffstump.com, and unreliablenarrators.net