The Mythcreant Podcast 564 – Historical Fantasy Worldbuilding
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: At any point, does somebody scoff at the idea that there might be, like, a unicorn? Does somebody be, like, “What, you think that just because dragons are real, that other creatures are real? Shh. This is not a fiction. This is real life.”
Oren: I don’t remember. It’s been a while since I’ve read the nine books. There might be something in there where someone does that, but if so, it did not stick in my memory. There are some creatures that are like kind of pushing the limit of what a dragon is. There’s a giant sea serpent that hangs out near Japan, and it’s huge and it’s scaly and reptilian, but it doesn’t really have functional wings. So, like, is that a dragon? But, like, yeah, pretty much everything is draconic. There aren’t any griffins or manticores as far as I could find.
Chris: That is the key: If you only want one kind of magical creature, don’t mention anything else.
Oren: Yeah, it’s going to feel kind of pretentious if you’re like, “You thought there were unicorns? Silly!”
Chris: Or just like kind of mean. Fantasy writers like other stuff. It just kind of feels like a weird personal dig if you’re like, “Ha ha ha, you wanted unicorns!” And it’s like, “Well, of course I wanted unicorns. I’m a fantasy reader reading this fantasy book.” Sometimes what happens is the writer writes a setting that only has one thing in it, and then they get questioned by their readers and people they talk to, and they feel like they have to put an answer in their story, and that’s how they end up in that situation. It might not be because they’re scoffing.
Oren: Sometimes it’s supposed to be a joke. It’s not a joke I find very funny. But, you know, it’s like, “Ha! You thought vampires in this setting could turn into bats? Why would you think that? Are you stupid?” Turning into bats isn’t any more random than a lot of the other abilities vampires have. Why is that one unscientific?
Chris: Yeah, be careful. At some point in time you are going to have an ability that is just as unrealistic as a vampire turning into a bat. We don’t see a lot of alternate history urban fantasy. Usually the reason for using modern-day Earth setting is because you specifically want it to be familiar, and that would also motivate you to not have history diverge.
Oren: Imagine having to explain, like, “Here’s a modern-day-looking city and it’s got werewolves and mages.” And I got to explain all that. And then also I got to explain how this city is not part of the United States. It’s actually part of the breakaway micronation of New England. Because the Civil War went real weird. It’s like, “Okay, that’s a whole other thing I have to explain now.”
Chris: Feels like a theming problem where the story is not cohesive and the world is not cohesive anymore. Similar to, like, Carthage won, and also there are wizards, and those are completely separate reasons that history diverged in two different ways.
Oren: Wizards don’t even like Carthage. Why would they have anything to do with that? There are plenty of historical fantasy stories that have urban fantasy feelings. They use certain urban fantasy tropes, they have an urban fantasy aesthetic, but they aren’t actually set in the modern day. They’re set in a historical city, and sometimes the fantasy elements are used to help recreate some modern things that wouldn’t be there. Sometimes we don’t pay too much attention to that part of it, I’m not gonna say you couldn’t do it, but doing real-world fantasy stories with a big alternate history plot set in the present is already really weird. Urban fantasy or not, that’s just kind of unusual. You can go the other way, right? Because I’ve been complaining about stories that just have magic that’s been around forever and it didn’t change anything, but if you go the other direction and it’s like, “Oh, look, magic’s been around forever, everything’s different,” then you have to explain a whole lot, and it takes a while and it’s confusing, because you have this weird mix of real-world proper nouns and fantasy terms, and it takes a while to figure out what’s going on. I read this book called Cold Magic, and I first thought it was just a second-world fantasy setting, because it didn’t really seem to have anything in common with the real world. And it seemed like it was set in roughly 1700s-ish. But then they started using terms like Phoenician. That’s a real word. Hang on. And then I eventually found out it has this extremely complicated backstory of Carthage kind of winning the Punic War, and also huge magical natural disasters that made a bunch of people move around, and then also Carthage is destroyed later by a different magical thing. It was so complicated!
Chris: That reminds me of our conversation on post-apocalyptic fantasy, where there’s a bunch of books that just seem like other-world fantasy settings, and then you get this weird reveal that, no, actually it’s the future. Queen of the Tearling just seems like a typical other-world medieval -inspired fantasy setting, and then we suddenly learn that the main character has real-world books. Maybe that was people-fled Earth.
Oren: Yeah, it was scifi or something.
Chris: Sometimes it turns out it’s like planetary evacuation and colonization is supposed to be the backstory. Why? Why are we doing this?
Oren: With Cold Magic I definitely felt like this would have been easier if it was just a second-world fantasy story with some inspiration from various points in history. The weirdest one that I’ve read is The Devils. Everything’s different because of magic, but also, everything’s the same. Everything has a different name, but the dynamics are exactly the same. So it’s set in, like, late medieval period, you know, around crusading times. And there’s no Byzantine Empire because Rome was destroyed in the war with Carthage. This is another setting where Carthage won the Punic wars, interestingly. But there is instead the Empire of Troy, which fills exactly the same role. And then there’s like a different holy city with a Catholic-ish religion in Italy and it has a schism with the patriarch in Troy. And I’m just sitting here being like, “Am I losing my mind? What is going on?”
Chris: I wonder if some authors are just really intimidated by the idea of making changes. It reminds me of Kuang’s Babel. There is technically silver magic in the setting, but the setting is almost exactly the same as if magic didn’t exist. My theory was that maybe she just didn’t feel at liberty to change history, I don’t know, maybe because she wanted to make a point about colonialism, and if we changed history, then the point might be less relevant. Or maybe… She has this author’s note in the beginning of the book that’s really defensive about accuracy in her depiction of historical Oxford. Feels like really embattled with all these people saying, “My depiction is inaccurate. And yes, I, you know, took as little artistic license as I could to serve the story.” That sounds like she doesn’t feel like she has permission to change more of the setting because it won’t feel accurate anymore.
Oren: It’s weird for me to imagine the author who wrote Babel caring what anyone else thinks.
Chris: If she didn’t care, I don’t think she would have put that author’s note in the beginning.
Oren: That was weird, because on the one hand, I liked the author’s note because it had cool historical context, and I like that stuff. I like to hear what kind of research authors did and what changes they made. On the other hand, its bizarrely defensive nature, to me it felt less like someone who was embattled and more like someone who just likes to argue and wanted to preemptively argue with her critics. Which I get, I love to argue too, so fair enough. Maybe I misread the book. It’s just the book is so edgy. It’s so edgy and it’s so in your face about how edgy it is. It’s hard for me to imagine the author being like, “Oh, well, I can’t change anything because then people will be upset.”
Chris: Sometimes edginess offers a certain level of prestige. Like, I wish it didn’t, but I’ve definitely talked to many people who think that’s what makes a story good or profound, is just edginess and to shock people. Whereas being believed that your history is inaccurate… I mean, that could feel embarrassing.
Oren: That’s not going to get you on NPR or The New York Times or anything. It was so weird reading this where it’s like, okay, so in this setting, there’s this kind of silver-based translation magic that is powering the British Empire. And it’s like, how does that work? Well, pretty much the same way that the regular British Empire worked. It hasn’t done anything different. It’s just that we did like a Find and Replace, and instead of “coal,” we put “silver.”
Chris: Yeah, the Silver Industrial Revolution. We could even say the Silver Revolution. We had to also specify that it’s industrial. That was very odd because some of the things that we described, it feels like the silver would have the opposite effect as what we’re talking about.
Oren: We’re told that silver is putting people out of work in factories because it’s automation. But we’re also told that people are moving to the city to get jobs, like they did in the actual Industrial Revolution.
Chris: People are moving to the city to get jobs because there were factories that were offering jobs. So if silver is automating that and taking away from the jobs, why are people moving to the cities?
Oren: There was a reference to, like, “Oh, the Thames is actually clean in this timeline.” Okay, that’s different. That’s cool. But then they’re like, “Don’t swim in the Thames.” Like, okay, I mean, I get that you had to say that because it’s set in Britain, you have to say that. But also, that was, like, the one difference.
Chris: If anybody swims in the Thames, then somebody’s gonna DM Kuang and tell her that she’s got inaccurate Thames.
Oren: Oh, it does make one big difference towards the very end. Spoilers. The silver magic gives the British Empire a giant glowing weak spot, which, if you punch them there, they explode. Like, it’s nice that imperialism is so easy to defeat in this scenario. It does take them a painfully long time to think of this plan. They’re like, “We could capture the tower where all the silver magic is, and then we could demand that the empire be less evil.” How do you think that’s gonna work? And obviously it won’t. And then eventually they’re like, “Oh, I guess we could just blow it up. That’ll do it.”
Chris: No, as soon as we introduced these regional towers that power magic for huge swaths of England, I was like, “Okay, well, obviously we need to go and disrupt those towers.” And then, nope, the characters take forever to think of that.
Oren: That’s why it’s so funny that this book is so obsessed with the idea of how violence is necessary, and, like, that’s how you defeat imperialism, is through violence. Okay, sure. But like, you kind of gave yourself a cheat code here.
Chris: Not actually demonstrating that violence is the right answer.
Oren: It’s like if I wanted to make my story about how important democracy is and I invented a democracy crystal. It’s a magic democracy emitter.
Chris: That makes democracy work.
Oren: I guess, sure.
Chris: That doesn’t sound like democracy actually works, then.
Oren: That sounds like maybe I’m not confident in my argument when I do that. One way to do this that doesn’t get used that often as far as I can tell, but I really like it, is you just have magic be kind of recent, within a few decades.
Chris: Let’s say we applied this to Temeraire. That sounds like it would just be logistically difficult in that situation. I’m not saying this is a good idea. I think recent magic does have lots of advantages. Fantasy writers don’t usually want to use it.
Oren: The biggest problem that it has is that if magic is recent, then you can’t have a bunch of ancient magic traditions.
Chris: I’d be afraid that if we had recent dragons, they’d be like, the dragons are aliens that landed on Earth. And I’d be like, “No!”
Oren: Recently arrived dragons would be very hard to do what happens in Temeraire, right? You need a completely different explanation. That’s not the only way to include magic in a historical setting. You can also use books like A Master of Djinn. Magic returned, started in Egypt, so Egypt was the first to capitalize on it, and they used it to make a bunch of cool steampunk tech, which is why, a few decades later, Egypt is a rising power just before World War I. But, like, the world is still recognizable, right? You haven’t had this change ripple out through centuries.
Chris: I think the “magic returns” tactic is a really good tactic for this because then you could just be like, “When was magic last year?” “Oh, just a long time ago. Don’t worry about it.” Even Game of Thrones, when it brings back dragons, it’s like, “Okay, well, we have dragon eggs from the last time, so the dragons don’t have to spawn out of the ether. We have some remnants somewhere.” If it’s so long ago that it’s like prehistory, it does make it a little hard to say, “Oh, well, we have rituals that go that far back.” But again, it’s nothing that speculative fiction writers don’t do all the time. What was it? Dune Prophecy, where we’re like 10 million years ago?
Oren: Some absurdly long amount of time.
Chris: Speculative fiction writers always want to expand timelines into ridiculous extents. Like, no, you don’t understand. Human civilization changes so much faster than that.
Oren: Like in the Star Wars Andor show, where they brought out this statue. Like, this statue is 25,000 years old. That’s so old, man. You don’t know how old that is. In Master of Djinn, they have some ancient traditions by being like, “Yeah, there was magic around during, like, at some point when we had the ancient Egyptian gods. Maybe there was some magic then, so we can bring back worship of those gods as an old tradition.” Or you could have the idea that magic has been around, but it’s been hidden behind a masquerade. So you can have some masquerade magic traditions.
Chris: We had a masquerade for most of history, but then the masquerade has been lifted recently. And so now magic is everywhere. That’s a good combo. And then you can have your old rituals and what have you. What if you just want historical fantasy that is relatively low realism, you are not trying to sweat over every historical detail, the masquerade, of course, is a good way to do that. We have a previous episode on the Masquerade, which is this idea that magic is secret and most people don’t know about it, and it is just a technique for keeping the world the same. The key is that it’s usually unbelievable if you pay too much attention to it. You usually just don’t want to call attention to it and advise against making conflicts over the Masquerade, like where the hero really wants to tell their loved one they have magic, but they just can’t do it, it starts to provoke questions about the Masquerade. You don’t want to do that because you can’t answer them. And then the other thing we talked about, which is the scope of the story. If this is like a cozy, where we’re just like one coffee shop, one in, and we don’t really see a lot of the world, you’re raising less questions. Whereas if you talk about the current monarch or current politics or what wars are happening, or put in big historical events during the course of the story, that certainly cause a lot more attention to the state of the world.
Oren: A strange thing that is very common in a lot of historical fantasy that I’ve read, that doesn’t need to be, but it just seems to happen a lot, which is that when you’re creating a conflict in historical fantasy, there’s a tendency to only give one side magic. I’m not gonna say that never works, but it usually doesn’t.
Chris: I mean, do you want that side to steamroll everybody else?
Oren: Right, I mean, that’s the most immediate problem. If the magic is cool and fantasy-ish, chances are it’s pretty powerful. So that’s gonna create some balance issues.
Chris: Oren, what if I just give the other side guns?
Oren: I cast summon rifle level 5. Like, that was the problem in… gosh, I’ve forgotten the name of the story, but it was set during a quasi-real mill strike from the 1830s, and the strikers all had magic and the bosses didn’t. Amazingly, the strikers won.
Chris: Oh, jeez, I wonder how that happened.
Oren: It was not hard. That’s one potential problem. But, like, it also creates a lot of believability issues in a lot of stories. Like, why has nobody on the other side started using magic? This was the problem in Babel, but reversed, where only the bad guys have magic. And it’s just weird. Why hasn’t anybody else tried to make this? Apparently it’s been around since at least the Roman Empire. All you need is a silver and some translators to get started. It doesn’t have a high entry cost.
Chris: Everybody else forgot.
Oren: They got lazy and they didn’t think about it. Real weird, you know, not what I would expect. Even more basic: it’s just kind of boring. Here we have the cool magic people, and then the other side is some guy.
Chris: In Babel, I originally thought that the reason we’re using silver as part of the magic system is to justify why only the wealthy could wield magic. Honestly, any material that is the only material that can be used for magic, if it’s scarce at all, it’s going to get expensive. But silver could be even more expensive. But then the book specifically says that China has a whole stockpile of silver. But they’re way outmatched by England. So at that point, silver has been eliminated as the reason why other people can’t use magic.
Oren: They could still be outmatched. British magic could be more powerful. In real life, the Chinese had guns during that time period; they just weren’t as good.
Chris: We could have magic that just wasn’t as good because they don’t have the same amount of institutions to churn out translation words that power the magic.
Oren: Instead, it’s just like only England seems to have magic and maybe the rest of Europe. That’s harder to say.
Chris: Since this is a historical setting, this is not as big of a deal. But it’s just silver with two words on it. There’s no reason another person can’t copy those words. Even if England has Oxford, which is much better at creating these translation words to power your magic, it would be fairly simple for other people to spy on them and just copy them.
Oren: Well, we are now going to copy something that I’ve seen from many other podcasts, which is that we are going to end the episode because it’s over now.
Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[closing song]This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening and closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.