Category: alternate history

Fantastic History #13: An Interview with Kate Heartfield

Cath: Almost everything I’ve ever read of yours has some aspect of history coupled with fantasy. What do you find attractive about blending historical and fantastic fiction?

Kate: I remember walking through the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City for the first time when I was a teenager and experiencing a kind of frisson I’ve noticed many times since: I was feeling deliciously creeped out by the oldness of the things around me. There’s an uncanny quality to the past, or maybe to our awareness of the past. The pavement under my feet both is, and is not, the same street that bore the footsteps of people long dead. That duality feels inherently fantastical to me. So it feels like a natural fit. Real history is so very weird and sometimes the best way to illuminate that is to hold it up against something that’s obviously invented.

Cath: Much of high fantasy is considered to be about medieval Europe. Yet, your works “The Course of True Love” and “Armed in Her Fashion” much more accurately portray what the medieval period is documented to be like historically. Do you have a historical background in this time frame? What helped you to get this tone and accuracy?

Kate: I’m not a historian, but I am a journalist by trade, so I suppose my instinct is always to go to the source. Both of those books were inspired by other works. The Course of True Love was an homage to Shakespeare, so I reread the plays and tried to imagine what Shakespeare would write if he were reincarnated as me. (This made sense in my head, I swear.) Armed in Her Fashion was inspired by a 16th century painting by Pieter Bruegel and by the kinds of stories people were telling in 14th century Europe: stories like the bizarrely legalistic Reynard the Fox cycle, for example, or legends about revenants and sea snakes. The Middle Ages and the Renaissance were full of fascinating notions, technologies and stories, many of which haven’t been fully mined in medieval-inspired fantasy.

Cath: Can you talk a little bit about your game The Road to Canterbury? What are the objectives of the game? How much does it borrow from Chaucer?

Kate: The Road to Canterbury is a text-based game you can play on your computer or phone; it’s interactive fiction, which means you make choices as you read to determine the path of the character. That character is a weaver in London in 1375, who goes on pilgrimage with a civil servant and occasional poet named Geoffrey Chaucer. I had fun with the fact that in 1375, Chaucer’s wife, Philippa de Roet, is arguably a more important person than her husband, and she’s the one who drives much of the story. It’s a game about politics, economics and the role of the individual in history, but there’s a lot of just plain fun medieval stuff: I actually coded a version of the medieval dice game Hazard, for example. And there is a lot of story-telling, naturally. There are many references to Chaucer’s work, but the story in my game is its own thing, and many of the characters bear only a passing similarity to the characters in The Canterbury Tales. My editors at Choice of Games made writing the game a wonderful experience.

Cath: Both Alice Payne Arrives and its sequel are set in many time frames. I want to focus on Alice as a highway robber. Why did you choose to set her part of this story in 1788 and make her a robber? What are good places to learn about how to portray highway”men”?

Kate: The germ for this story had nothing to do with time travel and little to do with any particular period: I was struck by the idea of a highwaywoman leading a double life, who has to solve the mystery of a murder or disappearance to throw the local authorities off her scent. I suppose I liked the idea of the same person being both criminal and investigator. I still have my notes, in which I considered the 1580s, the 1640s, the 1810s, and several different countries. In the end I settled on England in the 1780s because it allowed me to create a very recognizable “highwayman” and because I had read a lot about real English highwaywomen in my initial research. I talked about some of those real-world examples in a recent Twitter thread.

Cath: Alice and Jane are together in these books. Can you discuss how you used history to both bolster and impede their relationship?

Kate: In the draft of the second Alice Payne book, there’s a cameo appearance by two elderly lesbians who are inspired by the real-life “Ladies of Llangollen”, Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, who lived happily together in the late 18th century. The sculptor Anne Damer was another example I drew on of a probably-queer woman in 18th century England; Emma Donoghue’s novel Life Mask is about her. There are many such examples, and they suggest to me that two women in love could be fairly open about their relationship in certain circles and with certain friends; on the other hand, the dangers were real. This is all background to the relationship in Alice Payne Arrives, though, rather than foreground. Jane and Alice are together, they’re in love, and they’re having perilous time-travel adventures.

Cath: Alice’s backstory is an interesting one. What can you tell us about Jamaica in the 18th century?

Kate: The history of Jamaica in the 18th century is amazing; I think it says something about the history we learn that I was well into middle age before I learned anything about the enslaved people who rose up for their freedom there more than once, and who formed lasting, sovereign communities within colonized Jamaica. Alice’s family life and upbringing was partly inspired by that of Dido Elizabeth Belle, who lived in late 18th century England and was the child of a white Englishman and an enslaved black woman in the British West Indies. Colonial efforts to define racial categories in service of slavery-based economics had to contend with a steady migration of people of colour from Jamaica to England, usually so they could be educated with their father’s families, and sometimes so they could apply for the privileges of whiteness on their return. Daniel Livesay’s book Children of Uncertain Fortune is a fascinating look at those families and at the social and political creation of race in that era. I didn’t want to write a book about that dynamic per se, as it is very much not my story to tell, as a white Canadian. But at the same time, it would be dishonest to write about 18th century England and have everyone be white; that just wasn’t how it was. So while the books are not really about Alice’s position in English society as a woman of colour, her Jamaican origin is definitely an important aspect of her life, especially when it comes to her complicated relationship with her father.

Cath: Having read your work set in the time frames we’ve discussed above, plus the writing you’ve done regarding Marie Antionette, I have to ask: do you have a favorite historical period? Do you have any other historical periods you would really like to write a story in?

Kate: I don’t have a favourite, really! I bounce around, when it comes to time. As for space, although many of my short stories are set in Canada at various points in history (and the Alice Payne books come to North America for some scenes) all my published novels and novellas so far are set mainly in Europe. That’s partly because that’s my own heritage, both in a literal sense (my dad emigrated from the UK) and in the sense that those are the stories that I have an itch to explore and subvert. But that’s not really by design and could change.

Cath: Tell us all about the release details for the Alice Payne books.

Kate: Alice Payne Arrives will be out in paperback and ebook from Tor.com Publishing on Nov. 6, 2018; it’s available to pre-order now. Alice Payne Rides will follow in March 2019. Each is a novella of about 30,000 words. Each book is written to stand on its own, but there is space for the story to continue, if readers respond to it. We’ll see.

Cath: Are you at liberty to talk about any of your future projects?

Kate: The other book I have written and sold is a full-length novel called The Humours of Grub Street. It’s coming in 2019 or 2020 from ChiZine Publications, which published Armed in Her Fashion. It’s set in London in 1703. I’m currently revising another 18th century novel, and I’m working on a second game for Choice of Games. That one is set in Renaissance Florence and will be out sometime in 2019, if all goes well. After that, well, I have some plans but they’re still in the delicate secret stage.

***

Kate Heartfield’s first novel, a historical fantasy called Armed in Her Fashion, was published by ChiZine Publications in 2018.
Tor.com will publish two time-travel novellas by Kate, beginning with Alice Payne Arrives in November, 2018. Her interactive novel for Choice of Games, The Road to Canterbury, was published in 2018. She’s working on another.Her short fiction has appeared in magazines including Strange Horizons, Lackington’s and Podcastle, and anthologies including Clockwork Canada and Monstrous Little Voices: New Tales from Shakespeare’s Fantasy World. Her stories “The Seven O’Clock Man” and “Not Valid for Spain” were longlisted for the Sunburst Award. Until 2015, Kate was the opinion editor for the Ottawa Citizen. She was shortlisted for Canada’s National Newspaper Award for editorial writing in 2015. She now teaches journalism at Carleton University and creative writing online for the Loft Literary Center. Her agent is Jennie Goloboy at the Donald Maass Literary Agency.

Fantastic History #12: An Interview with Stephanie Burgis

Stephanie Burgis writes historical fantasy, most notably the Kat Incorrigible and Harwood Spellbook series. She’s one of my favorite authors and a perfect author to spotlight on the Fantastic History blog.

Cath: Although not all of your novels are set in what might be called Austen-ian times, two series are. What is your attraction to this time frame, and why do you choose to write in it?

Steph: I imprinted HARD on Regency England as a kid when I fell in love with the novels of both Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer. They were both incredibly formative for me – but so were JRR Tolkien, Emma Bull, Ellen Kushner and Robin McKinley. So it’s probably natural that I just love mixing magic with Regency-style manners!

Cath: What do you think was your most challenging bit of research to find out about this time frame for your stories?

Steph: The hardest part with my Kat, Incorrigible trilogy (which was set in real 19th-century England, with magic added only in secret and on the sidelines), was figuring out all the small day-to-day details that don’t generally get mentioned in contemporary novels, like: how would my heroine actually go about lighting a candle in the middle of the night?

Since the Harwood Spellbook series is set in an alternate history – in which magic is an accepted part of life – I don’t have to stick nearly as closely to the real-life details of British history. However, it’s led to a different major challenge, which is to extrapolate plausible world-building that stems from not only major use of magic but also MAJOR differences in the historical timeline and in the social structures of the nation. I’ve always been a history geek (I was reading British history books for fun when I was a teenager!), and I don’t just want to hand wave any of this – so I’ve really tried to come up with timelines and changes that seem possible to me.

Cath: I’d like to focus on your new series, as you have two novellas out, and a one soon on the way. The Harwood Spellbook is set in Angland, rather than England. Clearly, this is an alternate history. What is different about the universe of the Harwood Spellbook, as opposed to Jane Austen’s England? Could you give us some examples?

Steph: The first, major difference in the history of Angland is that, in this world, Boudicca actually succeeded in throwing out the Romans – because she married again, this time to a practicing magician. Her political savvy and leadership abilities combined with his magical skills to form a winning combination for a new nation – and together, they set the mould for gender roles in Angland from then onwards. In the 19th century, Angland is ruled by a group of women known as the Boudiccate, while Angland’s upper-class young men are all expected to become magicians after training, first at prep schools and then at the Great Library of Trinivantium.

Of course, I always enjoy writing characters who *don’t* fit neatly into their social structures, though! 🙂

Cath: In Snowspelled, we meet Cassandra Harwood, who is atypical because she is a female who practices magic in Angland. You allude many times that men are the more emotional sex, and therefore more suited to magic. In what other ways are gender roles different than we expect from our world in the Harwood Spellbook series?

Steph: Men are the one who can be “hopelessly compromised” if they’re seen kissing a woman to whom they aren’t married; women are considered “naturally” more hard-headed and practical (and thus unsuited to irrational magic, but perfectly suited to pragmatic governance); women are expected to issue marriage proposals, not men; at the end of a formal supper, men are required to stay at the table until they’re summoned to the parlour, so that the women can have a safe space to talk politics in private until they’re ready to deal with the gentlemen again for the rest of the evening. I had fun turning traditional Regency social rules topsy-turvy! 😉

Cath: Amy and Wrexham are fantastic leading characters, and both of these characters have had to work their way up to their positions. There is clearly room for capable people to move up the ladder, but not without struggle. At issue in both of their stories is the idea of marrying well, or who is suitable for whom. What does a good marriage mean in Angland, and why is it politically advantageous? Do your characters pay any price for marrying out of emotion?

Steph: A “good” marriage in Angland is one that will advance both partners’ careers and statuses in life. Any woman who wants to become a member of the Boudiccate is expected to marry a practicing magician; any ambitious magician will have his own status and prospects improved by marrying a political wife.

On the other hand, it’s considered perfectly acceptable for a woman who doesn’t plan to enter the Boudiccate and has no need for heirs of her own body to marry another woman instead of a man. It’s not a society without restrictive social rules – they’re just *differently* restrictive than real-life 19th-century English rules.

My characters, unfortunately for them, don’t fit neatly into any of these established patterns. Cassandra Harwood is Angland’s first woman magician, and in Volume II (Thornbound), she has to face some of the unjust but very real professional issues created by her marriage to another magician; her sister-in-law, Amy Harwood, married a man who refused to study magic, and was therefore denied her expected place in the Boudiccate; another romantic couple in the series, Miss Banks and Miss Fennell (who will get their own novella sometime in the next year or two!), are determined to work around the rules of Boudiccate membership by being the first-ever f/f politician/magician married couple.

Cath: Jonathan Harwood, Cassandra’s older brother, is discriminated against, discounted because he is a man who does not practice magic. More so than social position, gender roles and a failure of their expectations causes more difficulty in this book. In your next book, I understand you will be making more changes regarding how Anglish society views gender in your next novella. Can you talk about what’s going to happen and how that’s going to change?

Steph: Yes! Thornbound is where the political consequences of both Snowspelled and Spellswept really start to take shape. (Note: Spellswept is a prequel to Snowspelled, but it was published afterwards; there’s no need to read it before you read either of the other books, but I hope you’ll enjoy the others even more with that backstory filled out.) Now that Cassandra has finally shattered the rigid, age-old rule that only men can study magic, every politician can see the next big question coming: why can’t men enter politics, too? There are people (both men and women) who are excited about these oncoming social shifts, people who are absolutely terrified of them (on both sides), and people who are utterly furious – and Cassandra has to deal with sabotage on multiple fronts as she fights to establish her own radical new school.

Cath: And speaking of Jonathan, how hard is it to write a quiet character to convey the qualities of that character? (which you do brilliantly, by the way).

Steph: Aw, thank you for that! 🙂 Really, a character doesn’t need to be talkative to be expressive, as long as the few words he (or she) speaks are to the point and their actions speak to what they feels. In the case of Jonathan, I was also aided by the fact that I was writing about him through the lens of an extremely emotionally intelligent heroine, Amy, who is gifted at reading other people through their shifts in expression and other physical tells. (Which is, of course, extremely important in her political career!)

Cath: For writers who wish to write in this time frame, can you recommend any good books, websites, or other sources?

(strong>Steph: The best thing for writing about any historical period (IMO!) is to read contemporary diaries and letters from the period, along with biographies that give you an idea of the kinds of lives that real people led. I’ve read Jane Austen’s letters obsessively, because they’re far more conversational (of course!) than her novels. Back when I was writing my Kat, Incorrigible novels, I made a routine of spending 10 minutes at the beginning of each writing session just reading random Austen letters to put myself in the right mood! There are also countless biographies of Jane Austen and her family, Fanny Burney, and lots of other fascinating women from that time period.

Cath: Finally, when is your next Harwood Spellbook novella coming out, and where can readers find it?

Steph Thornbound (Volume II of The Harwood Spellbook) is coming out on January 7th in both ebook and paperback. I can’t wait! It isn’t available for preorder yet, but you can already add it on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35502203-thornbound

Spellswept (the prequel novella) will become available as a standalone ebook on October 30th, and preorder links should go up around September 30th at the latest. (However, you don’t have to wait to read it – you can buy it now as part of the anthology The Underwater Ballroom Society, which I co-edited with Tiffany Trent!)

And you can sign up to my newsletter to get advance excerpts of all of my books, occasional free tie-in short stories, AND the chance to win ARCs ahead of time.

***

Stephanie Burgis grew up in East Lansing, Michigan, but now lives in Wales with her husband and two sons, surrounded by mountains, castles and coffee shops. She is the author of four MG fantasy adventures, including The Dragon with a Chocolate Heart (Bloomsbury 2017) and the Kat, Incorrigible trilogy (published in the UK as The Unladylike Adventures of Kat Stephenson). She has also published two historical fantasy novels for adults, Masks and Shadows and Congress of Secrets (Pyr Books 2016) and nearly forty short stories for adults and teens in various magazines and anthologies. Her first book, A Most Improper Magick (a.k.a. Kat, Incorrigible in the US), won the 2011 Waverton Good Read Children’s Award for the Best Début Children’s Novel by a British Author.

Fantastic History #10: Come and Write with Me–When the Fiction Becomes the Source by Christopher Kastensmidt

Reading through the articles here at Fantastic History, I can relate. I’ve been working with The Elephant and Macaw Banner universe for twelve years now, and I’ve certainly faced every challenge mentioned here along the way: historical fidelity, anachronisms, researching in a foreign language and all the rest. The Elephant and Macaw Banner (let’s call it EAMB for short) is a series based on sixteenth-century Brazil: a period marking the beginning of European colonization and a massive clash of cultures along the coast.

Similar to what Tim Powers does in his works, I rigorously follow historical events, while at the same time mixing in the supernatural. In this case, my supernatural elements include creatures from Brazilian folklore and miraculous powers associated with pajés (native shamans) and religious characters (like Jesuit missionaries).

The Headless Mule, a well-known Brazilian myth (artist: SulaMoon)

About 90% of my research is in Portuguese, with the other 10% English and Spanish. The sixteenth-century is by far the least-documented period in Brazilian history. For one, Brazil had no printing press at the time (they were, in fact, illegal in the colony until the nineteenth century). That means that works from the period only got published if they somehow made it back to Europe—a rarity. There are about a dozen relatively reliable first-hand accounts from the period and not a lot of in-depth secondary works. While that has made my research a challenge, it has also created an interesting reverse effect, where the fiction itself has become a reference.

To support that conclusion, I’ll have to provide a little bit of history. The series has passed through multiple stages over the last twelve years, which I’ll try to summarize here.

Phase One: Prose

I started work on the stories in late 2006. I read some 20 books before I wrote the first story, a number that would quickly surpass 200 as I made my way through the series. That first story was published in Realms of Fantasy in 2010, and after a Nebula nomination in 2011, the stories soon reached an international audience. They were published in several languages, including a series of pocket editions in Brazil.

To my surprise, the stories were quickly adopted in schools as an alternative method of introducing several cultural elements, including: folklore, slavery, colonization and others.

A school play based on A Parlous Battle Against the Capelobo, the second story in the series (school: E.E. B. Professora Erica Marques)

Phase Two: Adaptation

Parallel to the stories being launched, I began working on adaptations. The first of these, a graphic novel, came out in late 2014. Thanks to sponsorship through a government program, the graphic novel was donated to hundreds of public school libraries in the states of Sao Paulo, Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina.

A flashback to the Kingdom of Ketu, in modern-day Benin, from the graphic novel adaptation (artist: Carolina Mylius)

The graphic novel format is extremely accessible to young readers and helped the series reach an even greater audience. In 2015 alone, I participated in over 30 events and school visits in the states where the donations had taken place.

Phase Three: Interaction

In late 2017, I launched a table-top RPG based on the world of the stories. It was a success beyond my greatest expectations, selling out in just four months. Half of the copies went to public schools in eight states. The RPG gave me a chance to synthesize my (at the time) eleven years of research into an accessible and interactive format. I was able to present historical details such as measurements, currency and professions alongside statistics for fantastic creatures.

Pages from the RPG (art by Marcela Medeiros and Cássio Yoshiyaki)

Just seven months after launch, I know of dozens of schools which are already using the RPG in the classroom to teach students about folklore and sixteenth-century history. I receive almost weekly messages of people telling me how they’re studying history for the first time in their lives, so that they can create their own adventures in the setting.

The Elephant and Macaw Banner RPG in the classroom (school: Dom Walfrido Teixeira Vieira EEEP)

Phase Four: Community

The biggest surprise has been adoption by the community. The RPG is quickly becoming a reference in the area and has brought many readers back to the source material. It paved a clear path for people to tell their own stories in the world, in turn giving them a sense of ownership. That feeds back in a loop, with the community creating material for itself, thus expanding the universe and inspiring new creators. The fans are actively participating in every aspect of the future of this universe, providing feedback and ideas for future products. It has been a marvelous and humbling experience.

Examples of fan-written content for the EAMB RPG (content by Jan Piertezoon, Gustavo Tenório and Arthur Pinto de Andrade)

For those looking to know more about ABEA, the stories are available in individual editions at the moment on Amazon, but I recently signed a contract with Guardbridge Books (yeah!), and we’ll be replacing those with a definitive, revised edition in electronic and print formats. That edition will be launched at the World Fantasy Conference in November. Catherine’s Comment: !!!!

The stories are also available in Spanish, through Sportula, in Chinese, through Douban Read, and Portuguese, through Devir. The RPG should be out in English in 2019, and other products are on the way, such as a video game based on the RPG.

My thanks to Catherine and Fantastic History for the chance to publish this article. Congrats on the wonderful blog!

Fantastic History #9: Name Dropping by Kurt Wilcken

I think one of the first alternate history books I ever read was Poul Anderson’s Operation Chaos, set in a world where 20th century technology was based on a fusion of science and magic. There’s an intriguing passage at the very beginning where the narrator directly addresses the reader:

“You probably do not live in worlds radically foreign to ours, or communication would be impossible…You too must remember Galileo, Newton, Lavoisier, Watt; the chances are that you too are an American. But we have diverged at some point. Have you had an Einstein? And if you did, what did he think about after his early papers on Brownian movement and special relativity?”

That passage has always stuck in my imagination. Although Einstein never comes up again in the story, his mention here establishes a point of similarity between the fantasy world and ours: Einstein existed and was a significant figure in both. And at the same time, his mention suggests that there are differences too, and invites the reader to speculate on what those differences might be.

I will admit to doing a fair amount of “name dropping” in my own creative works–often little more than in-jokes for my own amusement and maybe of those who notice, but sometimes to offer, as Pooh-Bah says, “corroborative detail to give verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.”

My webcomic, Hannibal Tesla Adventure Magazine, is a pulp-era adventure set in an alternate version of 1935 where dirigibles and electric autogyros soar above the skyscrapers of Manhattan and where rockets travel to the moon and beyond. My main characters are Hannibal, a two-fisted scientist in the Doc Savage mold, and Ginger DuPree, a gutsy girl reporter following in the tradition of Lois Lane and Hildy Johnson from His Girl Friday. But I always wanted to give my readers the sense that there were other heroes in this world besides my main protagonists and that there were other adventures happening off-panel.

For this reason, I decided that in my world, Charles Lindbergh would be the first man to walk on the moon, in a rocket built by Charles Goddard. In one adventure where Ginger traveled into space to battle the Cat-Men from Mars, mention is made of “Lindbergh Base” located in Mare Tranquillitatis, (where Apollo 11 landed in our universe). And although this was largely a throw-away reference–like Einstein in the Operation Chaos passage, Lucky Lindy makes no other appearance in the story–the choice was appropriate. I found out in later research that Lindbergh was interested in rocketry, and after he gained celebrity and fortune crossing the Atlantic, he helped Goddard get financial support for his rocket experiments in the desert. You’d think I planned it that way.

These things don’t always work out that conveniently, though. In another story, I had Hannibal traveling into the Himalayas and looking up a Sherpa guide who has worked with him before. “Going to try for Everest again?” the guide asks him. I originally intended to have Hannibal laugh and say, “No, I thought I’d give Sir Edmund a shot at it this year.” But then I wondered, was Edmund Hillary a knight before he climbed Mount Everest, or was he knighted as a consequence of it? Looking the matter up, I found that the knighthood came afterwards; and that Hillary didn’t conquer Everest until 1953, nearly twenty years after my story takes place. With a sigh of regret, I cut the joke.

Sometimes the reference can grow beyond just a casual name-drop. The current story in my webcomic involves Hannibal’s father, the noted inventor Nikola Tesla, and in researching the man I found all sorts of factoids to work into my plot: the “Peace Ray” he tried to invent which he hoped to make war obsolete by disintegrating battleships; his device for operating ships by remote control; his ambitious plan to broadcast electricity like radio waves; the early computer built in the sub-basement of Grand Central Station designed to handle switching for subway cars. Some of these will just be bits of flavor, but some will become important plot points as the story progresses. And sometimes I don’t know myself which will be which.

And sometimes all these bits remain beneath the surface. For the “Cat-Men from Mars” story, the climax involved a battle in space between the invading Martian armada and a fleet of rockets from Earth. I thought it would be cool to have Brigadier General Billy Mitchell in command of the Earth defense fleet. In our timeline, Mitchell was an aviator who served as commander of the US Army’s Air Service in France during WWI. Both during and following the war, he was a vocal and determined advocate of air power, to the annoyance of his superiors, and was ultimately brought before a court-martial for insubordination. He was right about air power, but he was still found insubordinate. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor vindicated his theories and predictions, and today Billy Mitchell is regarded as the Father of the modern U.S. Air Force.

I decided that for my history, Mitchell played the game of military politics a little better and managed to avoid the court-martial. He still annoyed his superiors in the general staff, though, and so got shuffled off to the newly formed U.S. Army Space Corps following the Lindbergh moon landing, which was considered a position of little importance…until the Martians invaded the moon.

I had worked up a nice little backstory for Mitchell, but little came of it. By the time I got to that part of the story, I was nearing the climax and really wanted to finish things up. I didn’t want to impede the plot further by introducing a new character, so Billy Mitchell wound up appearing in only a single panel, and that one was so small that I couldn’t really draw a good likeness of him. In the end, the reader had no way of knowing that he was anyone significant, or that someday there would be a spaceport in Milwaukee named after him. But I did.

I suppose in that case my appropriation of a historical figure amounts to little more than an obscure and highly-indulgent in-joke. Still, I think that such name-dropping serves a valid purpose. It establishes points of similarity which anchor the fictional world to the real one, as well as benchmarks which give a sense of how they differ.

At least that’s my excuse.

***

In his secret identity, Kurt Wilcken is a Ninja Cartoonist. He attended Iowa State University, where he drew political cartoons for the Iowa State Daily and sold photocopied comics out of his backpack. He went on to write and draw comics for Innovation, Antarctic Press and Radio Comix. He has illustrated children’s books and occasionally blogs about subjects ranging from science fiction to comic books to weird Bible stories. He currently publishes a Pulp-Era adventure comic, HANNIBAL TESLA ADVENTURE MAGAZINE, on his website.

Fantastic History #1: What’s Different and Who Knows About It? by Kate Heartfield

Chopping books into finer and finer categories of sub-genre should never become a dogmatic exercise. But sometimes it can be helpful, as writers and as readers, to have a sense of a book’s internal logic. When I sit down to start planning a new historical fantasy, I ask myself: What’s different about the world, and who knows about it?

There’s something askew about the world I’m writing about, or it wouldn’t be speculative fiction. It’s our world, but different.
Next question: Who knows about this?

Option 1: Secret history. Only certain people know about the existence of magic or the supernatural element. It is not reported in the newspapers. World events unfold largely as they did in our own history. The fantastic element doesn’t change the course of our history, it explains it. The author’s invented plots happen behind closed doors, off the official record.

Option 2: Alternate history. Everyone knows about the fantastic element, whether it’s magic, or dragons, or sentient IKEA furniture. People talk about it at the breakfast table. The historical record is already different from our own, so anything’s possible.

An example of an alternate-history fantasy is The House of Shattered Wings by Aliette de Bodard, which posits a 20th-century Paris that has been ruined by a long magical war. An example of secret history is Hide Me Among the Graves by Tim Powers, in which the existence of vampire-like creatures explains real events in the lives of the Pre-Raphaelite poets and artists of the 19th century.

You can have alternate history that isn’t fantasy. Alternate history answers the question, what if? What if the dodo never went extinct? What if Berlin was never divided? One great example of alternate history that doesn’t contain any supernatural elements is The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon, which considers what would have happened if the United States had provided land in Alaska for Jewish refugees during the Second World War. All the laws of physics still apply, in this kind of alternate history. The only speculative element there is at a meta-level, in the positing of a different timeline.

You can also have secret history that isn’t fantasy. In fact, most or all of what gets shelved as “historical fiction” falls into this category. All the big, documented events are unchanged, but the behind-the-scenes conversations may be invented, and to some extent, the characters and their motivations are the product of the writer’s imagination. If a minor plot point deviates from history, it’s for reasons of artistic license, not speculative world-building. Hilary Mantel’s brilliant book Wolf Hall is an example of secret history without fantastic elements. It tells the story of Thomas Cromwell and the court of Henry VIII.

I write both kinds of historical fantasy.

My first novel, Armed in Her Fashion, is coming out in May, 2018. It is very much an alternate history; early on, this line appears: “In the year of our Lord 1326, a woman drove the beast called Hell up to the surface of the Earth.”

My second novel, The Humours of Grub Street, is a secret history, scheduled for 2019 or 2020. It posits that real historical events in London in 1703 can be attributed to witchcraft, and that the true history has been kept secret.

Both approaches to historical fantasy—alternate and secret—have their appeal. Both explore the uncanny valley between the familiar and unfamiliar. In both cases, writers have to wrestle with how the supernatural affects the world. In alternate history, that often means applying the changes to the world itself. In secret history, that means coming up with reasons why the wider world hasn’t changed, despite the existence of the supernatural within it.

Alternate history reminds us how fragile history is. It illuminates the strangeness of real history by showing that our world might not be as different as we think. Take the magician Jonathan Strange’s rather fraught declaration (in Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell) that while a magician might be able to kill a man by magic, “a gentleman never could.” Even in a world where everything’s different, everything’s the same.

Secret history reminds us that the causes that move history are sometimes private and unseen. It illuminates the strangeness of history by showing that supernatural explanations are no weirder than real life: take, for example, Dante Gabriel Rossetti opening his wife’s grave to retrieve a book of poems, a real event that figures in Hide Me Among the Graves. Is it weirder to imagine that there was something supernatural going on, or that there wasn’t?

***

Kate Heartfield is a writer in Ottawa, Canada. Her first novel, a historical fantasy called Armed in Her Fashion, is coming from ChiZine Publications in May. Her interactive fiction based on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, The Road to Canterbury, is coming this spring from Choice of Games. She has two time-travel novellas on the way from Tor.com, and is the author of one novella in the collection Monstrous Little Voices: New Tales from Shakespeare’s Fantasy World, from Abaddon Books. Her short fiction has appeared in places such as Lackington’s, Strange Horizons and Podcastle. Website: heartfieldfiction.com. Twitter: @kateheartfield